Quest for Justice (17 page)

“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.

S
tan 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 forward in a swarm toward 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 backward 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 backward and fired arrows into the throng.

Stan and Bob ran back down toward 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.”

“Okay.” 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, chiseling 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 it into the Blaze spawner room, we barely made it out alive. Great fun, really, but we didn't even try to fight them.”

“Mind you,” interjected Bill, “we've had a lot more experience fighting Ghasts since then, and we could probably figure out a winning strategy for killing Blazes, but we should still be careful.”

“The Nether Fortress is very close to this location,” said Ben. “We actually chose to build our house here in case we ever wanted to explore it some more. We have a few times. It's awesome to explore that giant labyrinth. Anyway, it's right up this hill outside.” He exited the house and started up the hill, followed by the other five.

It was quite a sheer hill—more like a cliff face, really. At one point, another Ghast tried to blast them off the cliff side, but Ben managed to kill it with deflected fireballs, and they kept climbing.

“Oh man, why is it so hot in the Nether?” said Kat, gritting her teeth as she wiped the sweat from her brow. She was closely followed by Charlie and then Stan.

“Well . . . I'm guessing . . . the fireballs and . . . the lava sea may . . . have something to do . . . with it,” panted Stan as he dragged his shovel behind him. “And who are you . . . to complain? You're . . . wearing shorts . . . and a T-shirt!”

“And also you're . . . not wearing . . . one of these wicked heavy . . . iron chestplates!” gasped Charlie. Kat glanced down quickly at her neon-pink shorts and then again at the light tunic over her orange T-shirt. She blushed in embarrassment and did not speak again for the rest of the climb.

At the top of the Netherrack cliff, there was a monster standing by that tried to attack them. It was a large cube of magma of various shades of dark red, and had glowing
yellow eyes that opened up like a spring as it leaped forward to attack Ben. He calmly identified it as a Magma Cube and sliced it in two with his sword. Stan was totally caught off guard when the two halves of the monster morphed into two smaller Magma Cubes. One of them caught him unaware as it tackled him, and he would have been knocked back down the cliff had Bill not caught the strap of Stan's chestplate with his fishing rod. Ben kept killing the Magma Cubes, and the pieces of the dead ones kept reanimating. They were easy kills, though, and soon all of them were dead, leaving a pasty orange substance on the ground that Bob pocketed for later use.

“Magma cream,” he pointed out. “You use it to make Potions of Fire Resistance.”

Now that the Magma Cube was good and dead, the players turned their attention to the structure in front of them. It was composed entirely of dark crimson bricks, and there were stairs that led up to a tunnel made out of the bricks, which had torches lining the walls. The tunnel went straight into the side of another Netherrack cliff. There were no distinct architectural features of the building. In fact, Stan was surprised to see that the exterior looked very plain.

“Those torches weren't put there naturally,” said Ben. “We put those up the last time we visited this place. If we follow them, it should lead us straight to the Blaze spawner room.”

They walked into the corridor. Stan was pleased to realize that it was slightly cooler within these brick halls. He followed the Nether Boys as they took turn after turn, following the torches. Slowly, Stan began to realize just how big the complex was. There were windows in the sides of the corridors, and more often than not there was nothing to see out of them except for Netherrack. However, now and then he could see that they were suspended over the lava sea, and a few times he saw magnificent lava falls flowing from the ceiling of the Nether and into the lava sea. Stan realized that he might well die during the fight with these monsters, so he took the time walking down the corridors to appreciate just how beautiful the landscape of Minecraft was.

After going down endless corridors and through a few rooms with staircases and small farms of some type of seed that Stan guessed was the Nether wart the Apothecary had told him about, they finally arrived at a corridor that was not lit with torches. At the end of this corridor, Stan could see a block with a yellow figure revolving within a black cage, very similar to the block that spawned Cave Spiders in the abandoned mine shaft. He knew that they had reached the Blaze spawner.

“So, what's our strategy?” asked Charlie eagerly.

“Personally, I say we should just go in there and beat the things to death before they get a chance to attack us,” said
Kat, pulling her sword from her waist.

“Not so fast, sister,” said Bill. “Those spawners can set up to three of those things on you at a time. As much fun as it would be to just charge in there and beat the Blaze Rods right out of them, I think we have to think this one through a little more. Anyone have any ideas?”

There was silence for a moment. Then much to Stan's surprise, Charlie spoke up and said, “How about I drink my Potion of Fire Resistance and draw their fire, while Bob, Kat, and Stan shoot them down?”

“Nice thinking, bro,” said Bob. “Be careful, though. Even if you don't catch on fire, the Blazes can still do melee attacks and the fireballs still damage you.”

Charlie agreed to be careful, and they got ready to execute their plan. Charlie gave all of his things to Kat to hold, and Ben and Bill hid behind Bob, Kat, and Stan, all of whom had their arrows notched, ready to fire.

“Wait, I'm almost out of arrows,” Stan said. “Do you have any extras, Bob?”

“Sure,” he said, and he handed half his arrows to Stan.

With everything ready, Charlie swigged his fire resistance potion, and he charged into the Blaze spawner room.

Charlie could see that the room was jutting out of the side of a Netherrack mountain, and that the walls were completely composed of fences. In the center of the room,
the black cage gave off some fire particles, and the yellow figure within started spinning rapidly. Before Charlie could study the little figure any closer, a full-sized Blaze appeared right above the spawner. Charlie couldn't help but stare. It was the most bizarre thing he had ever seen.

The head of the Blaze was a yellow cube flecked with orange, and it had beady eyes that were locked on to him. The head was on top of a column of smoke, which had a lot of yellow rods orbiting around it. The entire thing was engulfed in flames. Charlie was just getting over how zany the entire composition looked when the Blaze opened its mouth and three fireballs shot out.

Charlie rolled to the side. The three fireballs hit the walls in three great puffs of flame. The Blaze's head rotated and fixated on Charlie again, and it rose into the air and shot out three more fireballs. Charlie dodged again, and before the Blaze could take another shot, three arrows flew out of the corridor and impaled the Blaze's head. The blaze fell to the ground, extinguished, with only an orange stick remaining, which Charlie snatched up. He barely had time to examine the Blaze Rod when two more Blazes appeared, and six more fireballs flew toward him. One of the Blazes fell from three more arrows, but it didn't drop a rod. The other one fell seconds later, and the rod fell to the ground. Charlie was too preoccupied with the four more Blazes in the room to pick up the rod at that moment.

Back in the corridor, the archers were shooting arrows as fast as they could, but the spawners were creating new enemies faster than they could shoot them down. Bill sat solemnly against the wall. He knew there was nothing that a fishing rod could do in such a closed-off space. Ben, on the other hand, stood rigid behind the archers, sword gripped in his hand. Like the other Nether Boys, he was a pretty easy-going guy, but if there was one thing he hated, it was to be left out of a fight.

“He must've collected enough rods by now! Let's go in there and destroy the spawner!” He made to go down the corridor, but Bill pulled him back.

“No, Ben, not yet,” Bill said calmly. “You can go in there when it's time, but right now nobody has a chance of surviving in there besides Charlie.”

“Do you see a better time on the horizon?” Ben asked in exasperation.

Indeed, back in the spawner room, Charlie did not see the fight ending well at all. There were now eight Blazes circling around the room, with the spawner creating them at a rate of two spawned for every one shot down. He had more than enough Blaze Rods to craft the twelve Blaze Powder units required. He sincerely wished that they would hurry up and direct their fire toward the spawner before the potion wore off. He had already been hit by numerous fireballs.

Charlie was momentarily distracted by a shout from down the corridor. He turned to see what it was, and in that second he was knocked to the ground by a fireball to the back of his head. Dazed, he wondered whether or not the potion was still working, when the crimson-clad figure of Ben burst into the room, turned his sword to the side, and thrust it through the bars of the cage. There was a hissing noise, and the little Blaze inside the cage ceased to exist. Ben dodged the fireballs of the remaining Blazes, and Charlie watched in awe as he took out three of the flying creatures with one well-timed sword slash, not getting hit once. The archers shot down the rest of the Blazes a moment later, and as if on cue, the red aura around Charlie's body that distinguished him as fire-resistant evaporated, leaving him vulnerable once more.