Quest for Justice (3 page)

T
he trees around the pathway had been cleared out, so there was light shining down on the two players as they walked down the road to the village. There were no monsters on the path, but they spotted a few in the woods. Zombies seemed to be the most common, as they were all over the place, but the players noticed a few others, too. Charlie pointed out, deep in the woods, what appeared to be a Zombie but thinner and less substantial, and Stan could have sworn that, from what he could see in the dim light, it was holding a bow and had a quiver of arrows on its back. Once, when Stan looked up into the trees at the sides of the road, he saw a flash of bloodred eyes contemplating him from one of the higher limbs. None of these mysterious creatures, thankfully, pursued the players.

“We'd better hurry and get to that village,” said Charlie, looking nervous. “I don't want to be out here when it gets dark enough for those things to come out and hunt.”

Stan nodded in agreement, but things did not go well from that point on. The path became less clear as they went deeper into the woods, and a few times they found themselves accidentally straying onto side trails that led to dead ends. One of these paths turned
out to have a Zombie at the end of it. Stan and Charlie barely managed to outrun it before it lost interest in them.

The sky began to turn a shade of beautiful pink, but the two players were unable to appreciate it as they made their way back onto the main road after their fifth detour and saw no sign of a village when they looked ahead.

“I think we'd better make a shelter for the night,” said Stan. “We'd better make a wall two blocks high so that we have at least some type of barrier that the monsters won't be able to get over easily.”

“You're right,” said Charlie. “I'll go get some dirt blocks. You try to get some wood from these trees. Meet back here once you've got the stuff.”

Stan nodded and the two set off in opposite directions.

Gathering the dirt was faster than Charlie had expected; after being hit a few times the blocks of dirt came loose, ready to be picked up and added to Charlie's inventory. He had amassed a whole stack of dirt blocks by the time he went back to meet Stan.

Stan did not have nearly as easy a time; he had to punch the sections of the tree trunks over and over to get them to break off. It hurt, too. “What . . . I . . . wouldn't . . . do . . . for . . . a . . . chain . . . saw . . .” Stan growled through gritted teeth as he punched the tree trunks, leaving the leaves suspended in midair. Stan was quickly realizing that Minecraft didn't
always follow the laws of physics.

After about an hour the players met back on the road, and by the time night had fallen they had constructed a small rectangular box out of dirt and wood, two blocks high on all sides, with no roof. They ate their first pieces of bread, and then hunkered down in their fort.

“Brace yourself,” said Stan. “The attacks should start any minute now.” Charlie gulped and pulled out his sword.

But to their surprise, nothing happened for quite some time. They just sat in their shelter, hoping no monsters would show. They popped their heads up over the wall every now and then to make sure that there was nothing, and in fact, nothing was what they saw every time. When the half-moon was at its highest point in the sky, Stan was about to say that there were no monsters around, and that they should just break camp and continue, when an arrow whizzed past him, grazing his shirtsleeve.

“Incoming!” he yelled to Charlie as a firestorm of arrows began to fly over their heads. Charlie ducked. He looked through a small gap in the wall and saw about four animated Skeletons, all standing at a distance from their shelter and raining arrows down on them. He stared at them, but he jumped back from the hole a second later as his view was obscured by the head of a Zombie.

“Zombies!” Charlie yelled to Stan. “And Skeletons, too!
There's a ton of them, and”—he looked through a few other cracks in the sides of their shelter—“they're swarming the wall!”

He was right. From all sides, the four Skeletons were firing arrows at the players, and about six Zombies were forming a rabble around their fort, trying to walk straight through the wall. But the horror didn't stop there.

“Tssssskeeeeh!”

Something large had fallen down from the trees and landed right behind a cowering Stan. Without thinking, Stan whipped around and slashed his sword as hard as he could. He made contact; the monster was knocked back and he sliced at it many more times before it finally died. Then he got his first good look at it, and his heart gave a terrified jolt.

Stan was staring at the dead body of the largest Spider he had ever seen. It had a whole mess of glowing red eyes on its head; the rest of its hairy body was dark gray. Stan knew then that this was what he had seen up in the trees during the day. The Spider's body vanished, leaving a thread of fine string in its place.

More Spiders began dropping from the trees. “Charlie! Help me!” cried Stan as he tried to beat back the horde of Spiders with his wooden sword. Charlie yelled in horror as he saw the Spiders rushing his friend, and he used his sword to get the attention of a few of the monsters that had focused
on Stan. In the midst of the attack, Stan managed to cut away the tree limb above them that the Spiders were climbing along to drop into their shelter, effectively cutting off the flow of arachnids from above.

“We won't have to worry about them anymore,” sighed Stan.

However, he turned out to be quite wrong. The Spiders were able to climb over their wall to attack them. The players resigned themselves to the fact that they would have to battle the Spiders all night long, and they put their backs to each other and drew their swords.

It was a long, hard night; the supply of Spiders was seemingly endless, and the players couldn't lift their heads up too high thanks to the barrage of arrows flying overhead. Miraculously, neither of the players lost any health that first night. The Spiders attacked them, but Stan and Charlie managed to keep the giant bugs at bay and killed them with wild, frenzied sword slashes.

After a few hours, the sky began to turn pink and then blue. The storm of arrows ceased. Spiders stopped climbing the walls. The players were safe.

“That,” mumbled Charlie wearily, “was a very long night.” He slid back against the wall.

“Yeah, I wanna sleep, too, but we have to go,” said Stan through a poorly stifled yawn. “We have to make it to the
Adorian Village before nightfall, or we'll have to put up with all those Spiders again.”

“You're right. I guess we should go.” Charlie stood up, but then he screeched and quickly crouched back down.

“What is it?” asked Stan.

“Don't look over the wall. Just don't,” whimpered Charlie. He sounded petrified.

Stan looked over the wall. What he saw made his stomach flip.

The road ahead of them was covered with Spiders. They were everywhere, crawling around and getting into fights with one another. There were no Zombies or Skeletons left, but there were so many Spiders that Stan's knees failed him and he sank down next to Charlie.

“Why aren't they dead?” asked Stan. “I thought that monsters burned in the sunlight.”

“Well, apparently the Spiders don't. What do we do? Fight them all?” Charlie looked at their wooden swords. They were covered with Spider guts from the previous night, but through the gore Charlie could see that they didn't have much more left in them. A few more hits and the swords would break apart.

“No, that's a bad idea,” said Stan. Then something occurred to him. “Hey, Charlie, if these Spiders are still here, then why aren't they climbing over the wall to attack us like they did last night?”

Charlie thought about it. “That's a fair point. Do you think that Spiders only attack at night?”

Stan knew what he had to do. “I guess there's only one way to find out.” He started to walk toward the wall.

“Hey, where are you going?” yelled Charlie.

“I'm going to see if these Spiders are going to attack me if I'm outside the wall.”

“But what if they do?”

“Then I'm dead.”

“Dude, no you can't. . . .”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“Well . . . um . . .”

“I didn't think so.” Stan began to climb over the wall again.

“Wait,” said Charlie. He handed Stan his sword. “Take this,” he said. “Yours is about to break, and if you have to fight off all those Spiders, you'll need a sword.”

“Thanks. Wish me luck,” said Stan with a nervous catch in his voice, and he jumped over the wall and closed his eyes.

Nothing happened. Stan opened his eyes. The Spiders were still minding their own business, as if Stan had never scaled the wall. As Stan tiptoed tentatively among the Spiders, none of them even acknowledged his existence. He did this as hastily as he could, not wanting to take any chances, and
he didn't stop until he came to a portion of the road not littered with Spiders.

“It's okay, Charlie, they're not hostile. You can come over now.”

Charlie was petrified, and his blocky hands were shaking as he collected the string from the dead Spiders within their fort (perhaps they would find a use for it later), scaled the wall, and sprinted through the pack of Spiders to join his friend.

“Well,” Charlie said with a sigh. “I'm glad that's over.”

Stan nodded. “Amen to that . . . hey, look!”

He walked over to a pile of bones and arrows. He picked up one of the bones.

“One of those Skeletons must have dropped this when it burned up in the sunlight.” He handed the bone to Charlie. “Do you think it could be useful?”

“Check the book,” Charlie replied, now examining the arrows. “Look up bones and arrows in there.”

Stan opened the book to the Items section and read aloud:

Stan closed the book. “Looks like the bones will come in handy if we run into a wolf. And we'd better get a bow so we can use these arrows.”

Charlie agreed, and the two broke their shelter down, saving the materials for later use. They began walking back down the path, en route for the Adorian Village, with plenty of daylight and the prospect of a day of smooth sailing ahead of them. They had just stopped to eat their last pieces of bread when something jumped out of the woods.

It was a player holding a sword, made out of what looked like stone, pointing right at Stan's heart.

T
his player had the same body as Stan and Charlie, but Stan could tell by the appearance of this player that she was a girl. She had blond hair that extended beyond her blocky head to create a ponytail behind her. She was wearing a leather tunic, neon-pink shorts, and blue shoes.

Stan then thought,
Why am I thinking this? She's pointing a sword at my chest!

“Give me all your materials,” said the girl in a monotone, “or your friend gets a blade through his chest.”

Charlie, who had been paralyzed with fear up until now, quickly scrambled to get out all their materials. He laid them on the ground: his own damaged wooden sword, a piece of bread, a pile of dirt, a piece of rotten flesh, a bone, five arrows, some wood, and a whole mess of Spider string. The girl looked at them with a distasteful eye.

“I should have known. You two don't have anything good, do you.” It was a statement, not a question.

“I don't know. I have . . . this!” And Stan, who had remained perfectly still up until this time, suddenly whipped out his wooden sword. Taking advantage of the girl's diverted focus, he cut her across the chest, knocking her backward. She fell to the ground and cringed; the cut had not actually hurt, but the leather armor on her
chest had fallen off, revealing an orange T-shirt with a heart in the middle that was the same neon-pink as her shorts.

Stan stood over her, his wooden sword now pointed at her, and Charlie quickly joined him, his quivering hand pointing his sword at her also. Stan, sounding much braver than he felt, said, “I wouldn't try anything if I were you. There's two of us and only one of you.”

She pulled herself up and, to Stan's surprise, looked almost bored as she said, “Don't worry, I'm not gonna try. There's no point. Killing you two, which I could easily do, would accomplish nothing. You're just a couple of noobs. Let me know if you decide to attack me or let me go or whatever. I'll just sit here.” And with that, she sat on a nearby tree stump, put her hands behind her head, crossed her legs, and closed her eyes as if she were lounging on a beach chair by the sea rather than being held at sword point. Stan felt himself flush.

“How do you know that we're new at this?” asked Charlie defiantly, his hand still shaking as he pointed his sword toward her heart.

“Yeah, what if we're, like, complete masters at this game who are just carrying around bad stuff to fool people like you?” spat Stan bitterly.

She opened her eyes and looked at Stan.

“Well, one, you're on the road to the Adorian Village, which is for players under level five. And two, any smart player would
carry around any weapons he had for self-defense, now that the King passed that new law.” She closed her eyes again.

“What new law?” wondered Charlie.

She opened her eyes again. “And three, only noobs don't know about the law that bans you from this server after you die once, instead of just losing all your stuff and going back to the spawn point like you usually do in Minecraft.” She closed her eyes again.

“Hang on a second,” said Stan. “If you aren't new, then why are you carrying around a stone sword? If I had to guess, I'd say stone is pretty common around here.”

She opened her eyes and a bitter look came over her face. “Oh, that. It's, like, the stupidest thing
ever
. I was on this server called Johnstantinople once—run by a guy named John, go figure—and I was doing really well. I found an abandoned NPC village with an iron sword and a bunch of apples in the forge chest, and I was going around killing monsters, when this Griefer came up from behind me and killed me! I went back to the spawn point, I killed a bunch of Creepers, and I got sand and crafted a ton of TNT, and I traded a golden apple for some fire charges that this guy got from the Nether, and I griefed the house of the guy who killed me by blowing up his house! Unfortunately, turns out that that guy was John, who ran the server, and he banned me.

“It is so unfair! So now I had to join
this
stupid server, and
there's no NPC villages anywhere, so I had to kill this sleeping guy, take this lame stone sword, and . . . you're not following anything I'm saying, are you.”

Again, it was a statement, not a question, and again it was true. The boys stood there with a look of bewilderment on their faces; they had not followed any of her rant from the mention of PCD towns or whatever she said. They were utterly confused, so the girl just got up and walked away.

“Hey! Where do you think you're going?” yelled Charlie.

“I'm going to find some people with stuff that I actually want,” she replied, heading for the woods.

“Wait up!” Stan yelled, walking after her. “Why don't you come with us?”

She whipped back around to face him. “WHAT?” she and Charlie yelled at the same time.

“You can't be serious, Stan. She just tried to kill us!”

“You expect me to come with you noobs?”

“She'll turn on us as soon as we fall asleep!”

“If you think I'll protect you, then you've got another think coming!”

“SHUT UP!” yelled Stan, so loudly that both Charlie and the girl did.

Turning to the girl, Stan said, “Look, if you attack people who have better weapons than you, then you're going to get slaughtered. Come with us to the Adorian Village. They'll help you
get a new iron sword, and then we can go our separate ways.”

The girl thought about it while Charlie stammered weak protests, which Stan ignored.

“Fine,” said the girl. “I'll come with you, but
just
until we get to the Adorian Village. After that, I'm going to leave you two to fend for yourselves.”

“Good,” said Stan. Charlie looked at him incredulously, but he could see that Stan had made up his mind, and he doubted that he could change it.

“Come on,” said Stan. “The path leads this way.” He started walking down the path and the others followed.

“By the way, my name's KitKat783,” said the girl. “But you can call me Kat.”

“My name's Stan, and this is Charlie,” said Stan, gesturing to Charlie, who feebly raised a blocky hand. With no further words, Stan walked off, followed by the smirking Kat and the scowling Charlie.

They walked along the path in silence. Stan was followed by Kat, with Charlie taking up the rear. “I don't trust her behind my back,” he'd whispered to Stan. They kept walking until about noon, when Stan spotted something on the side of the road. He pointed it out to the others. It appeared to be a large hole in the ground, lined by stone, with darkness inside that extended deep underground. He noticed black specs on a
few of the stones that he could see.

“That's a mine!” cried Kat excitedly. “There are minerals inside it if you mine them out! Let's go in there!”

“Are you crazy?” snapped Charlie, still upset that Kat had come with them. “It's all dark in there. There's bound to be monsters.”

“Eh, don't be a baby,” smirked Kat. “See that black stuff?” She gestured to one of the stones flecked with black. “That's coal ore. We can make torches out of the coal to see in the dark and ward off the monsters at night. Besides, even if there are monsters in there, we can fight them off. We've all got swords. We're all big boys here, except for me, and ironically, I'm probably the least scared to go in there.”

Nobody argued with her. Stan was a little unnerved at the prospect of heading into a dark mine after the episode with the Spiders. He did need to make a new weapon soon, though, and it would be nice to have a sword made out of stone rather than wood, though he had no idea how to make one. He also wondered what other kinds of minerals were in there. His desires and curiosity overpowered his fear, and he said, “All right, Kat. I'll go into the mine.”

“I don't care what either of you say, I'm not going in there,” Charlie retorted. “I remember the Spiders. I'm going to stay right here, thank you very much.” And with that he walked to the middle of the path, plopped down a piece of
wood from his inventory, crossed his arms over his chest, and stared at Stan and Kat defiantly.

“Fine,” said Stan. “You stay out here. See if you can find any more food; we're almost out. Kat and I will grab some coal and stone and stuff.” And with that, Stan turned and walked toward the mine.

“Hold on,” Kat said, and she threw him something that he caught and examined: a pickaxe made of stone. She held up an identical one.

“It hurts your hand and takes forever to punch through rock, and you don't get anything from it. You'd be best to mine stuff with a pickaxe.”

Feeling a little bit stupid for his ignorance, Stan set into the mine, pickaxe in hand, tailed closely by Kat.

His first stop was the coal ore he'd seen. He took his pickaxe and mined a good-sized lump of coal in a matter of minutes. He saw that the coal ran in a vein, and before long he had collected about ten lumps of it. He brought them over to Kat, who was hacking away at a stone wall.

“Good,” she said. “Let me see those.” He handed her the lumps. She pulled some sticks from her inventory and fastened them to the coal to make torches. Each lump of coal yielded four torches, so they had forty in all.

“Now we can go deeper into the mine, where there isn't any natural light,” she explained. They ventured farther,
placing torches along the wall as they went. Stan noticed that the torches ignited the second that Kat attached them to the wall, with no matches or lighter or anything.
Strange
. . .

“Hey, look over here!” Stan ran over to a spot on the ground flecked with black. “More coal! I'm going to dig this out,” he said. “Could you get me some stone for a new sword? And get some for Charlie, too.”

“Whatever,” she said. She started hacking into the wall at a new location, gathering up tremendous amounts of stone chunks. Stan dug into the coal vein. He was about to dig into the eighth piece of coal when Kat said, “Hey, Stan! Come check this out!”

Stan walked over to her. She had made quite a dent in the wall, and she was staring at a block that was different from the stone all around her. This block was flecked with little spots that looked similar to the coal ore, but were light brown instead of black. Kat stepped back.

“I've never seen that before. Do you think it could be gold?”

“It might be. Hang on, put a torch up,” Stan said. Kat obliged. Stan pulled out his book and turned to the section on blocks. He found a page describing gold ore and showed it to Kat.

“No,” she said. “It doesn't match the color. Gold ore has yellow flecks; these flecks are tan. Check out the other pages.”

Stan turned to the previous page. He held that illustration up for Kat.

“That's it!” she exclaimed. “What is it?”

Stan read from the book.

Stan looked up.

“Do you know what an Iron Ingot is?” he asked.

Kat shrugged her shoulders. “Look it up,” she said.

He did.

Of this entire passage, one small section caught Kat's attention.

“Iron sword?” she exclaimed. “So if I smelt this stuff, whatever that means, I can get an iron sword?”

“Apparently,” said Stan.

“Sweet!” shouted Kat gleefully, and she began hacking away at the wall of ore. The two players hacked at the wall and managed to get out four blocks of iron ore before they hit stone again.

“Let's look around here. Maybe there'll be some more!” She was about to take her pickaxe to the adjacent section of the wall when she heard a bloodcurdling cry echoing from the top of the cave.

“Aaaaauuuuughhhh! Stan! Heeelllllpppp!”

“Come on!” Stan shouted to Kat, and the two raced up the mine and into the light.

After Kat and Stan had vanished into the mine, Charlie stood up and walked around, a scowl on his face.

Stupid girl
, he thought, looking around and spying a patch of wheat next to a sign that said “Take what you need, but replant.”
Why should she get to be in our group? She nearly killed us! What does Stan see in her?
It was true, he thought as he harvested the wheat, that the girl did seem to know her way with a sword.
Ah, what am I talking about? I don't
know
that. I didn't see her actually fight! For all I know, she's never killed anything in her life. I'm ditching her first chance I get, the arrogant brat
.

And now look what she's done
, he thought as he began to break the leaf blocks on the trees. He had read in Stan's book that every now and then an apple would drop from a leaf block if you broke it.
She's gone with him into a mine, delaying us from getting to the Adorian Vill— Wait a second
, he thought, not noticing the apple dropping from the block he had just broken.

What if it's a trap? What if she's just lured Stan down there to kill him, and she's going to come back and finish me off? I have to go find them!
He quickly picked up his sword and was about to dash into the mine to save his friend when something stopped him.