The Complete Elementia Chronicles: Quest for Justice; The New Order; The Dusk of Hope; Herobrine’s Message. Sean Wolfe Fay
Charlie broke through.
Light flooded through the hole. As Charlie punched more wood planks around the first one, Stan could see that they had entered a network of tunnels, which appeared to be supported with fence posts. Train tracks ran across the ground, but they weren’t complete. Torches were on the wall, and there were chests against the wall to their right.
Charlie jumped up through the hole and examined the fence post supports. Stan followed and looked down at the tracks. He wondered if he could craft a train to run on them. Then he heard Kat yell.
“Hey guys, check this out!”
They walked over to her, and she started pulling things out of the chest she had just opened.
“Excellent!” she exclaimed, pulling two iron ingots out of the chest. “I can make a new sword out of these! Oh man, there’s tons of stuff!” said Kat. She pulled out a handful of white seeds. “These look like pumpkin seeds. They could come in handy at some point. But what’s this?” She pulled out a handful of chalky blue stones.
“I think that’s lapis lazuli,” said Charlie. “It’s used to make blue dyes.”
“Not particularly helpful,” said Kat, but she pocketed it anyway. She continued pulling things out of the chest. “There are also three pieces of bread in here … and a bucket … what kind of seed is this?” She pulled out the bread and a handful of black seeds.
“Melon seeds,” said Charlie.
“How do you know all this stuff?” asked Kat, impressed.
“I read that book at night before it got burned up back in the forest. I know about lots of stuff. For example, we are currently in an abandoned mine shaft. Nobody dug this. It was here before any players knew about it. Anyway, anything else good in this chest?”
“Just this,” she said and pulled out a handful of red dust. “Redstone dust, right?”
“Yeah … hey, let me see those gold ingots.” She handed them to him. He punched four wooden planks off the wall and quickly constructed them into a crafting table. He laid the gold ingots and redstone out on the table, and moments later he had made a new clock. The face showed that it was about noon above ground.
“All right, so I guess we should look around this mine shaft,” said Charlie, pocketing the clock.
“Good idea,” said Kat, drawing her sword. “Maybe there’ll be some more chests down here.”
“Or maybe,” said Charlie, “the King decided to put his secret stash somewhere in here. From what I understand, these things are pretty hard to navigate.”
“Uh, guys?”
Kat and Charlie turned. In the excitement of finding the chest, they had forgotten about Stan. He had followed the train tracks down the corridor, and now seemed to be looking down another corridor that branched off at a right angle.
“You guys might want to check this out,” he said slowly.
Kat walked over to him, followed by Charlie and the animals. The hallway in front of Stan was completely blocked off by thick Spider webs, stretching from floor to ceiling. The webbing continued down the hallway as far as the eye could see.
“What do you make of this, Charlie?” asked Stan, looking uncertainly at Charlie for an answer. Charlie was shaking his head, apparently at a loss. Kat, on the other hand, stepped forwards and slashed at the cobwebs with her sword.
“Kat!” cried Stan, pulling her back.
“What? There’s gotta be something that way, right?” she snapped, yanking herself out of Stan’s grip and continuing to slash the strings in front of her.
“But what if there’s a trap? There could be anything down that hallway. We can barely see three blocks in front of us,” said Charlie, and it was true that, with the cobwebs and lack of torches down the hall, visibility was very limited.
“Do I look like I care?” said Kat, still hacking through the cobwebs. Followed by Rex, she continued on to the point where she was out of sight of the boys, and they could only hear her voice. “I’m sick of all this hiding from the King. I want to find this stash. And if I get in a fight, then so be it. I’d personally prefer a straight fight to all this—aaaaaugh!”
Kat’s anguished scream reverberated around the walls of the mine shaft, making it seem three times louder than it actually was. Stan sprinted into the darkness towards his friend, weaving through the path Kat had hacked through the Spider webs. Stan heard a pained whimper as he approached where he judged Kat to be. He pulled back his shovel and swung it, baseball style, as it connected to the Spider that was digging its teeth into Kat’s chest as she lay unconscious on the stone floor, with Rex lying lifeless beside her.
As the Spider fell down onto the floor, Stan noticed in the low light that it was small, only about two thirds the size of a normal Spider. It had the same red eyes, but it appeared to be blue. He only noticed it for a moment, though, before another one came barreling out of the darkness, straight towards him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Charlie kneeling down, tending to Kat, so he batted the Spider back with his shovel as he had the first one. This one landed on its feet, and he had to hit it a few more times before it finally succumbed to death.
More Spiders kept coming, and their numbers were increasing. Stan wondered what was happening. Hostile mobs did not attack like this. There were a variety of them, and they didn’t spawn this frequently, even in such low light.
Then, slowly, as he batted down more and more Spiders, with Charlie now fighting at his side, he noticed a faint glow in the distance. He dodged a Spider and stepped close. What he saw was a black cage, one block in size. Every now and then, a small glow of fire would burst from the cage, and Stan could see a miniature Spider, blue like the ones he was fighting, spinning inside. Immediately after each burst of fire, another Spider would appear, which Stan would hastily beat down.
Stan realized that this thing was spawning swarms of Spiders, and if he didn’t destroy it soon, they would have a serious problem on their hands. Then he saw Kat’s stone sword lying on the ground, and he knew what had to be done. Without thinking, he snatched up the sword, cut aside two of the Spiders, and, with all his strength, thrust the sword into the heart of the cage, impaling the miniature arachnid inside.
There was a burst of light. Fire flew from the cage, and there was a loud shrieking noise, like thousands of Spiders being murdered at the same time. Then, the cage was silent. The fire within it had died, and no more monsters were being spawned from it. Stan picked up his shovel, cast aside the remains of the ruined sword, and turned back to Charlie, who was just puncturing the body of the last Spider with his diamond pickaxe.
“Good thinking, man,” heaved Charlie, wiping the sweat from his brow.
“Thanks,” replied Stan, and he looked down at Kat, who now appeared to be shivering in a puddle of her own vomit. “Is she going to be all right?”
“Yeah, but it’ll take a while,” said Charlie gravely. “Those things were Cave Spiders. They didn’t do much damage to her, thanks to you, but they poisoned her. The poison will make her throw up anything in her system. I was stupid and tried to feed her one of her potions, but she just threw it back up. Her system will rid itself of the poison eventually. We just need to give it time. When she wakes up, she’ll be very weak and very hungry.”
“Man, I’m so glad you read that book,” chuckled Stan. Then he had a thought. “Oh God, you didn’t get poisoned, did you?”
“I doubt it,” he replied. “None of those Spiders even touched me. You?”
“I don’t think so,” said Stan in relief. “That’s good. Even with the bread we got from that chest, we only have six loaves left, and I think that at least two of those are going to Kat when she wakes up.”
Indeed, after a while the unconscious Kat woke up, and the first words out of her mouth were incoherent grumbling, asking for food.