Quest for Justice (15 page)

I
t was afternoon, and Stan had never thought that he would be as grateful for the sight of the blocky clouds in the blue sky as he was at that moment. He took deep breaths of the fresh air, amazed that, after all that had happened in the past day underground, he was still alive.

Then he remembered his friends; they were nowhere to be found. Stan was about to panic when he heard a barking behind him. He turned and saw Rex trotting around in the sand next to him. Stan was puzzled.
How did the dog get out?
Then he remembered that the dog was able to teleport to wherever Kat was. So if the dog had teleported aboveground, that could only mean that . . .

Sure enough, at that moment he heard a fist punching through sand, and Kat surfaced, breathing heavily from the effort. She looked at Stan.

“Don't ever let me hear you complaining about that shovel again!” she panted, down on her hands and knees trying to catch her breath. “It let you tunnel up way faster than this useless thing!” She held up the stone pickaxe.

Stan was about to reply when Lemon appeared in front of him, followed seconds later by Charlie's diamond pickaxe punching its way out of the ground.
Unlike Kat, though, Charlie wasn't breathing heavily at all.

“Nice going, Charlie,” spat Kat.

“Yeah, honestly man, of all the places on that wall that you could have hit, why the button that destroyed the place?”

“Nice to see you, too,” Charlie sighed, wiping the excess sand off his clothes. “And you should be thanking me. For one, I probably trapped Mr. A down there, too. I don't think he'll manage to get out of this one alive. He was already pretty weak from Stan's shovel attack. And for two, I managed to grab this!”

He pulled out a book from his inventory. The title read
The Nether and the End: How to Get There
.

Kat's jaw dropped, and Stan asked in amazement, “Charlie! Where'd you get that?”

“Oh, I saw it on the bookshelf next to that button and thought that it might come in handy,” he said smugly. He stood up. “Now we can figure out our next move.”

They agreed to find some shade from the hot desert sun while they planned this next move. They looked around and saw that they were in the middle of a sinkhole that must have been created when the sand fell down and buried Avery's base. They walked over and sat against the edge of the sinkhole that provided shade from the sun. Charlie opened the book to the chapter entitled “Entering the End” and read aloud.

“To enter the End, one will, before all else, require twelve Eyes of Ender.” He looked up at his friends. “Does anybody know what those are?”

Neither of them did. Charlie found a glossary of Nether and End items in the back of the book and looked up the Eye of Ender. The picture showed an orb, green-gray in color, which resembled the eye of a cat. The crafting recipe for it included one Ender Peal and one Blaze Powder. None of them knew what those were either, so Charlie opened the book first to the Ender Pearl.

“An Ender Pearl is most readily obtained by the killing of an Enderman,” Charlie read.

“Wait, an Enderman?” said Kat. “Isn't that the thing that almost killed you this morning?”

Charlie sighed. “Yeah, it is. And it looks like we're gonna have to kill twelve of them if we want to get to the End.”

Stan gulped. He remembered the Enderman's overwhelming power well, and he wasn't eager to face one again. “What about Blaze Powder?” he asked quickly. “How do we get that?”

Charlie turned the page and found what he was looking for. “Blaze Powder is a substance that is crafted from a Blaze Rod. The Blaze Rod can only be obtained by killing a Blaze, a creature indigenous to . . . the Nether,” said Charlie, his stomach lurching. After all he had heard about the Nether, he
was not eager to go there.

“So, if we want to get to the End,” said Stan, piecing it together, “then we have to kill a bunch of Endermen, and we also have to go to the Nether and find these Blaze things?”

“Oh yeah!” cried Kat, pumping her fist in the air. “Road trip to the Nether!”

“Wait,” said Charlie quickly. “Not so fast. Who says that we have to go the Nether first?”

“Well, do you want to fight the Enderman again?” asked Kat. “Whatever's in the Nether, it can't be worse than something that can teleport and tries to kill you if you just look at it.”

“Not to mention,” added Stan, “that the King's forces are definitely still looking for us, and they're going to comb the entire Overworld before they start looking in other dimensions.”

Charlie tried to think of another argument of why they should not go to the Nether, but he couldn't. He did agree with the reasoning of both of his cohorts. “Okay,” said Charlie, resigning himself. “I guess our next move is to go to the Nether.”

As Charlie flipped through the book to figure out the way to enter the dimension, Kat kept on doing fist pumps and jumping around like a hyperactive puppy. She was obviously very excited to explore the place. Stan felt nervous, but he
too had a growing sense of exhilaration. He was very much anticipating, with potent curiosity, the exploration of the new dimension, whatever it might hold.

“Okay, apparently to enter the Nether we're going to have to build a portal,” said Charlie, referring to the book. “It has to be five blocks high, four blocks wide, hollow in the center, and made out of obsidian. From what I understand, obsidian is created when running water hits stagnant lava. It's almost indestructible, and it can only be mined with a diamond pickaxe.”

“We passed an entire lake of lava on the way here, remember?” said Stan.

“Oh yeah, I remember that!” agreed Kat.

“Okay, so we have stagnant lava,” said Charlie. “But how are we going to get a flow of running water across it?”

“Are you stupid, Charlie?” said Kat with a laugh. “I found a bucket down in the mine shaft!”

“Oh yeah,” said Charlie, feeling, indeed, a little stupid.

“Okay, then!” said Stan, clapping his hands together. “Let's make camp in this sinkhole overnight, and tomorrow we'll hike out to the lava lake and make a portal to the Nether!”

And they did just that. Kat walked over to a pond in a grassy oasis nearby and filled her bucket with water, while Charlie and Stan used all the sand and dirt in their three combined inventories to make an inconspicuous sand house against the
corner of the sinkhole. They quickly threw together a crafting table, a furnace, and three beds with the wool made from the string of the cave Spiders.

They also made preparations for their impending quest. Charlie made torches out of the coal and wood he had found while mining, and he used the remaining coal to smelt the iron ore he found in the furnace. He used the resulting iron ingots to create two new iron chestplates for himself and Stan. Kat still had her leather tunic and cap.

After crafting the chestplates, there were three iron ingots left. Stan wanted a new axe, but Charlie said he needed one of the remaining ingots to combine with flint he had found underground. He had read in the book that the way to activate the Nether portal was to light the inside on fire, and to do that he would need to craft a tool known as flint and steel. After he created this, the two remaining ingots went to a new iron sword for Kat.

They had some leftover string and wood. These Charlie crafted into a chest and a new bow, which he gave to Stan along with twenty arrows that he had collected from Skeletons underground. The chest was filled with the group's items that they would not be taking to the Nether: some dirt, a lot of cobblestone, the book, the contents of the chest from the mine shaft except for the bucket, and the Ender Chest. With all their necessities on them and all extras safely stored in the
chest, the three players, the cat, and the dog were all happy to go to bed.

As the wool mattress of the bed beneath him conformed to his body, Stan thought, for the first time, about the Griefer whom he had probably just killed beneath the desert. It was incredibly conflicting. Although Stan was quite happy that they now had a dangerous enemy off their tails, and he knew that they could not all walk away from that fight intact, Stan found his insides squirming with guilt when he remembered the agony of being crushed by the sand himself. Suffocating in that buried room must have been a dreadful way to die. Even if Stan had dismissed Mr. A's story about Avery007 as being completely untrue, Stan still felt as though Mr. A did have an underlying reason for his hatred of lower-level players. And now that he was dead, they would never find out what that was.

Regardless of his guilt, Stan was too tired from the events of the day to dwell on it for long. It was only a matter of time before he succumbed to sleep.

It seemed like forever to Stan since they had had a really good night's sleep, but it was a peaceful night, and Stan woke up to the crowing of a chicken, feeling refreshed and ready to tackle whatever the Nether had to offer.

They wasted no time leaving. They clipped their remaining
potions to their belts, along with their weapons and arrows. Stan and Kat slung their bows over their shoulders. Kat and Charlie commanded their pets to sit and hide, as Charlie had read that Rex and Lemon would be unable to enter the Nether.

Before the clock even showed that the night was over, the trio was retracing their steps back toward the lava lake. They passed some burning mobs on the way there, but they were too preoccupied to pick up the materials. They reached the lava before the sun was high in the sky.

Stan was amazed. At a passing glance the body of molten lava had seemed like a lake, but now he could see that it expanded for kilometers, forming what could more appropriately be called a lava sea. Kat was equally amazed. Charlie, on the other hand, wasted no time placing the water from the bucket on the shore of the lava. Initially Stan was confused as to why the water from the bucket seemed to stay confined to one block on the shoreline. Wasn't water supposed to flow? However, water then began to flow from this single source block, eventually spreading out into the lava and cooling a fair amount of it instantly into the black-as-night obsidian blocks. Ignoring the coal ore and stone rimming the lake, Charlie picked up the source block of water with the bucket. With the source gone, the water flowing from it quickly drained away. Wasting no time, he took his diamond pickaxe to the obsidian.

It was hard work. The sun was soon high in the sky, and the heat from the lava didn't make it any easier for Charlie to continue hacking away at the black rock that seemed to resist all his efforts to break it. After ten minutes, the obsidian block finally broke, and Charlie snatched it before it could fall into the lava below. Charlie, relieved to have attained his first obsidian block, gritted his teeth and got to work on the second one.

Meanwhile, Kat and Stan stood poised at Charlie's back, bows raised, ready to shoot down any attackers that ventured too close to them. It was boring, but Stan just kept the image of finally entering the Nether in mind, and he kept his poise, as did Kat.

Charlie was just collecting his ninth obsidian block when, without warning, the ground in front of Stan exploded. Stan was knocked back by the force of the blast, and he skidded along the black obsidian that Charlie had created, stopping just before the edge of the lava sea.

Kat had trained her bow on the cloud of dust and was ready to attack the first thing to rise from it, when a figure burst out of the hole in the ground. Before Kat could react, the figure threw a series of fire charges to the ground, thickening the smoke and setting the ground on fire. Kat tried to stare through the thick smoke to see who was attacking them, when an arrow flew through the smokescreen right at her.

It was too fast for her to dodge, but she ducked her head and the arrow snagged the leather of her cap, damaging the armor but leaving her unharmed. She sent arrows into the general direction of the attacker, and she was drawing another one when another figure ran out of the smoke. This was the first one whose features could clearly be seen. His blond hair was cut to his head, and he wore camo army pants and a black tank top, with an eye patch covering one of his eyes. He held a diamond sword, and he was rushing straight toward Kat.

His attack was cut off by Stan, who had gotten up by now and swung his shovel at the player's feet. As the attacker tripped, Stan yelled back to Charlie, who was about to come help them, “We can handle this, Charlie! Finish the portal so we can get out of here!” At the same time, he sensed something to his right, and he turned and caught Kat's eye.

“Stan, here! You need this more than I do!” she yelled, and she dodged an arrow while simultaneously throwing her sword in his direction. He responded by yelling, “Thanks!” and grabbing the sword just as the eye patch guy got back on his feet. Stan drew back and shot a couple of arrows at the player, which were effortlessly deflected, and when arrows became a futile effort he engaged the player with the sword.

Kat, meanwhile, could now see the player she was having a ranged arrow-battle with. He had dark skin and black hair,
and he was wearing a leather tunic over Japanese samurai armor. The bow he was using was glowing just like hers—it had been enchanted. She had a feeling that the enchantment on a bow owned by someone who had attacked them without provocation would be considerably more evil than the Infinity enchantment on hers.

Charlie was vaguely aware of Stan's sword flying out of his hand in his battle with Mr. Tank Top, and of more and more arrows catching on Kat's tunic in her arrow fight with Mr. Samurai. He knew he had to finish the portal quickly. Charlie hastily placed the last three obsidian blocks into place atop the black obelisk and then jumped to the ground, pulling out the flint and the steel ring. He was about to light the portal when a figure burst out of the ground right behind him. He whipped around, pickaxe in hand, ready for a fight.