Stat Slap 9: The Crabbening

Isabelle did not start the Crabbening. She's just the one who has to stop it. Oglo — her least favorite kobold, her most persistent nemesis, the guy who made her do warmup stretches during combat training and she has never forgiven him — has seized control of Beaubinte's most important systemic resource by doing the one thing nobody saw coming: riding a giant crab. It's working. Somehow it's working. Now Isabelle is stranded in an alternate reality version of Thres, the city where this whole nightmare started, Tahsi Junior is missing, her zombie army is forty-eight hours out, and the Great Builder — the god-tier entity who might just be running this whole broken simulation — is watching from somewhere above the code like a developer who finally noticed one of their NPCs has been committing war crimes for nine books. She does not have a plan. She has forty-eight hours, a crab problem, and a deeply personal grudge. Same difference.