The Complete Elementia Chronicles: Quest for Justice; The New Order; The Dusk of Hope; Herobrine’s Message. Sean Wolfe Fay
and with two swift strokes of the weapon Stan cut the sides of the damaged iron armour and pulled it off. Charlie took a deep breath. Stan noticed that the iron helmet was dented beyond repair, too. He pulled it off and threw the useless thing aside. Charlie gave a sigh of relief.
Kat yanked one of the red potions off Charlie’s belt, popped the cork, and poured the potion into his mouth. He swallowed and sat up.
“Charlie!” Kat hugged him as Stan exclaimed, “Thank God you’re OK, man! Geez, you seem to get beat up a lot, don’t you?”
Charlie gave a weak smile as Kat let him go. “Hey,” he said in a strained voice, “it isn’t the first time I’ve been beaten up, and I think we all know that it won’t be the last.” They all chuckled. “And I remembered reading about that thing in the book. It was called an Enderman. It has really powerful physical attacks and the ability to teleport, and it gets provoked when you look at it.”
“Well, it certainly was powerful,” said Kat. “It made you lose your armour and one of your healing potions. And you lost your axe, Stan.”
In the excitement of Charlie’s recovery, Stan had momentarily forgotten about his axe. He sighed in disappointment.
“Man, why do you have such a hard time holding on to your weapons?” commented Kat. “What is this, the third one you’ve lost now?”
Stan counted on his hand. “There was the one the Zombie Pigman destroyed, the one that I left back at the house, this one … yep, this is the third. Where am I supposed to get a new weapon in the middle of the desert?”
As if on cue, there was a pained grunting sound behind them. They all turned around to see a lone Zombie burning to death in the sunlight. When this Zombie fell, there was the usual rotten flesh, but Stan saw a glint as well. They walked over to the corpse and saw that the Zombie had dropped an unused iron shovel, which he must have had in his inventory when he died. Stan fed the flesh to Rex and picked up the shovel.
“Well, it’s no axe, but it’ll have to do,” said Stan as he gripped the shovel like a baseball bat.
“Well, the centre of the desert should be to the southeast, if I remember correctly,” said Charlie as he pulled out his compass. “Let’s go.” And he led the trio out into the desert.
It was a long, boring walk. The desert was incredibly flat, and they passed nothing except a few cactuses and the occasional pond here and there. There were a few Creepers roaming around that tried to chase them, but they backed off when Lemon hissed at them. It turned out that the explosive creatures really were scared of cats.
When the three players arrived at what Charlie judged to be the approximate centre of the desert, they found a small cave opening in the side of a sandstone hill. Charlie pulled out his diamond pickaxe, and with one last glance at the sun, Stan and Kat followed Charlie down into the unknown mines.
Geno looked down in satisfaction as the sound of explosions reverberated out of the ground. Geno was his full tag, not just his nickname. He wore torn camo trousers, a biker’s jacket with tattoos and an eye patch over his left eye. On his jacket was a badge with the name of his team, RAT1, written on it in black letters. He was smiling down into the small hole. If there had been any life down there, it was gone now.
The explosions stopped, and a few moments later a head of black hair and olive skin, topped by an iron helmet, popped out of the ground.
“Find anything, Becca?” Geno asked in his brutal voice.
“Nah, there’s nothing down there,” replied Becca as she pulled herself out of the hole. It was now plain to see that she was wearing a full set of iron armour. “I didn’t see any items scattered. They must’ve known we were coming.”
“Gee, it couldn’t have been that fire that you set on the trees, could it, you idiot?” spat Geno.
“Don’t you call me an idiot, you moron,” growled Becca.
“Oh, well then let’s go right now!” yelled Geno, the vein in his temple popping, as he drew his diamond sword.
“Bring it!” yelled Becca, drawing the iron sword from her side. The two charged towards each other and were about to start fighting when two arrows glanced off their armour and stopped them in their tracks.
“Hey! We don’t need no fightin’, kids, all right? We’ve got a job to do here,” yelled the archer, a black player with a samurai armour skin covered by a leather tunic. “And for the record, Geno, it was me that started that fire last night, ’K? It was an accident. I used my fire bow instead of my powerful one by mistake. So shut up, or ya both get an arrow through the head.”
Geno and Becca lowered their weapons. As well as they could fight with swords, they knew that Leonidas could kill them in a second if he wanted to. They had never seen him miss with a bow.
“Whatever, Leo,” said Geno, sheathing his sword. “But tell Little Miss Bomb-Happy here to not immediately destroy every non-block she sees.”
“Oh, come on though, it’s so fun,” squealed Becca. It was true. She was RAT1’s resident demolition expert, a job she took very seriously.
“Hey!” yelled Leonidas, so loud that the other two shut up instantly. “If y’all remember, this is exactly how the last mission started out, with y’all foolin’ like noobs! We fail one more time, the King is gonna hang our heads on his wall. So come on! If there’s nothing in their old house, let’s go out into the jungle and look for ’em there.”
And with that, he pulled an arrow into position and shot something he sensed moving up in the tree. He walked over to the corpse that had fallen to earth and saw that it was nothing important, just an ocelot with items to collect. He walked into the jungle, and Geno and Becca followed, swords still in hands.
As they scanned the trees for clues, Becca growled under her breath, “Stan2012, where are you?”
I miss my axe, thought Stan as he plowed through the dirt with his shovel. He’d had to fight off several monsters so far in the darkness, and he felt awkward and clumsy beating a Spider to death with a shovel. He would have much preferred the smooth decapitation that the axe would have given him.
He punched through another block of dirt and stopped. A sheer cliff face was in front of him. He had dug through to the side of an underground ravine. Kat took the lead. She had found an abandoned underground house a while back with nothing inside except a chest containing a stack of torches. She placed the torches on the wall, illuminating the path ahead, keeping her bow held tight in her other hand. A few times a Zombie lumbered along the cliff face towards her, and once a few arrows sunk into her tunic from a Skeleton across the ravine. All of these attacks saw the monster silenced by her infinite supply of arrows.
At the end of the chasm, Kat put up the last of the torches, and Charlie pulled out the compass.
“We should be near the centre of the desert,” he said excitedly. “If there is a secret stash, it should be around here.”
And with that Charlie pulled out his diamond pickaxe and began tunnelling into the wall. He went three blocks in, and his pickaxe struck wood.
“What the …” he exclaimed as he dislodged the diamond pick from the wood and saw that he’d hit a wooden plank. “What’s a manmade block doing this far underground?”
“Maybe it’s the entrance to the stash room!” Stan exclaimed excitedly.
“Maybe …” said Kat. “But you’d think that the King, guarding his most precious supplies, would guard the stash with something you can’t punch through.”
“Well,