The Complete Elementia Chronicles: Quest for Justice; The New Order; The Dusk of Hope; Herobrine’s Message. Sean Wolfe Fay
can’t fix the portal until we’re ready to leave, or else the King’s forces will be able to get in to follow us and we’ll all be screwed.”
“Well, it ain’t gonna matter one way or another,” said Bill. “You’re in the Nether now, kids. Water will evaporate the instant it leaves the bucket, so there’s no way to make obsidian here.”
Stan’s heart sunk. How were they going to get out now?
“Still, I think that we may be able to help you out. It just so happens that we have one block of obsidian back at our house,” said Ben. “We’ll make a deal with you. We’ll give you the obsidian block so you can fix the portal. You let us use your portal to get out of the Nether, and in exchange, we’ll help you get your Blaze Rods.”
“Sounds good,” said Stan, and he looked at Charlie and Kat for confirmation.
Both nodded and smiled, and Kat said, “You’ve got yourself a deal.”
“So where exactly are we supposed to find these … Blazes?” said Charlie, remembering that Blaze Rods were dropped by this type of enemy.
“We’ll talk about getting your Blaze Rods when we get back to our house,” said Ben.
He jumped into the hole that he and the other two had made in the wall, and the six players followed the tunnel. It went down for a good while, and when they came out they were at the level of the lava sea. They began walking across the open plain of red-and-black speckled stone, which Bob told Stan was called Netherrack. At the edge of the plain was a small rise, and before they crossed over it, Bill raised a hand.
“Hold up. We should check to see if there are any monsters on the edge of this rise. Bob, Stan, you two go and check. Shoot down any hostile mobs that you see, and then we’ll go on. The house is just over this plain.”
Stan pulled out his bow and walked with Bob over to the rise. Bob poked his head over and looked at the plain. His eyes widened.
“Whoo-whee! This oughta be fun, right, Stan?” said the blond archer. Stan poked his head over the wall to see what Bob was talking about. What he saw made his stomach fall out.
He had seen these mobs before. On a stormy day, en route to Element City, he had fought a great battle against one of these creatures. Could these possibly be the same mobs as the one that he had fought with his friends in that terrible battle? But there was no mistaking the pink, rotting skin, the brown loincloths, the golden swords …
It had managed to take down Charlie, Kat and Rex, and it was only because of the lightning-charged Creeper that Stan had managed to defeat it. And that was just one.
But now, Stan was staring into a plain, a wide-open stretch of flat land with lava on both sides. And roaming around this wide-open space was an entire herd of about fifty sword-wielding Zombie Pigmen.
Stan drew back the arrow without thinking. All he knew was that he wanted to get this massive fight over with, and with as little sword fighting as possible. He let the arrow fly, right as Bob cried out, “Stan, no!”
The arrow went right through the hollow eye socket of the nearest Pigman, which fell to the ground. The others around it looked down at their fallen comrade, and in one motion all their eyes locked on Stan. The entire herd of Pigmen surged forwards in a swarm towards Stan and Bob.
“Man, those things are neutral!” cried Bob as he downed another one of the Pigmen with an arrow. “If you don’t attack them, they won’t attack you!”
“What do you mean?” asked Stan as he pulled out his shovel and knocked one that had almost reached the top of the rise back down the plain. “In the Overworld one attacked me!”
“Well I don’t know why that was, but right now we’ve got a serious problem on our hands!” He clubbed a Pigman with his bow, and it flew backwards and landed in the middle of the herd that was now climbing the rise. “Get back, get back!” Bob continued to yell as he walked backwards and fired arrows into the throng.
Stan and Bob ran back down towards the others, and Bob yelled, “Zombie Pigmen, incoming!” When the other two Nether Boys looked at Bob in confusion, he said, “Stan shot one of ’em.”
Kat and Charlie looked at Stan in horror. Remembering the one from the Overworld, he said, “There’s, like, fifty of them coming now! Prepare yourselves, this is gonna be one big fight!”
The Zombie Pigmen started to stream over the rise. Stan, Kat, Charlie and Ben raced in to battle the herd. Bill and Bob stayed back and started attacking with their respective weapons.
The fighting was intense. Ben was an expert at disarming the rotting pig-warriors and then cutting them out of existence. Kat, on the other hand, required a lot more effort to defeat the Pigmen than he did, being unfamiliar with the sows’ fighting techniques. Charlie had adopted a unique strategy. He had used his pickaxe to swiftly hack a ditch in the brittle Netherrack ground, and when the Zombie Pigmen stumbled into the ditch in pursuit of him, Charlie drove his pickaxe into the monsters. Stan meanwhile adopted the timeless Zombie-fighting strategy of beating them into submission with a shovel.
By far, the ones doing the most damage were Bill and Bob. Bob’s arrows downed pig after pig after pig, and Bill had adopted an unusual strategy of catching the Pigmen on his fishing hook from afar and casting them deep into the lava sea. They didn’t burn, but instead they just swam around aimlessly in the molten lava, not interested in the fighting anymore.
It took a while, but the seemingly endless supply of Zombie Pigmen finally trickled down and eventually stopped when Kat decapitated the last one. Bob went to check whether the coast was clear. It was, and the six players walked across the plain and soon came to the house of the Nether Boys at the base of a steep Netherrack hill. The house was entirely covered in Netherrack, so it blended into the environment in such a way that you would have to know the house was there to see it. The inside was made entirely of cobblestone, which, for Stan at least, was a sight for sore eyes. It was the first of the familiar block that he had seen since entering the nightmarish Nether.
They saw a crafting table, a furnace and some chests. Other than that the house was completely empty. Stan asked why they had so few possessions after living here so long.
“We were banished here, don’t you remember, kid?” said Bill, slinging his fishing rod over his back. “And besides, if you try to sleep in a bed in the Nether, the bed will explode.”
“OK.” Stan didn’t even bother questioning it. He was so past wondering about the many breaches in the laws of physics in this wonderful, dangerous game called Minecraft.
“So to get your Blaze Rods,” said Bob, sitting on the cobblestone floor and leaning against the wall, “we’re going to have to get to the Blaze spawner in the Nether Fortress.”
“Yeah, the Apothecary mentioned something about the Nether Fortress,” said Kat, chiselling her initials into the cobblestone wall with her sword’s point. “What exactly is the Nether Fortress?”
“It’s a maze made out of dark red brick that’s incredibly dangerous to navigate,” replied Ben. “Luckily, we happened to live right near the closest Nether Fortress, and even luckier is the fact that we’ve done a little exploring and it shouldn’t take too long to get to the Blaze spawner. We’d better be prepared, though. Once we enter that room we’re going to be up against a never-ending swarm of Blazes, and those things are a nightmare to kill.”
“What makes them so hard to kill?” asked Charlie.
“Well, for one, they can fly,” said Bill. “And for two they have the annoying tendency to spam fireballs at you. When the three of us first made