Quest for Justice (34 page)

C
harlie was looking around in satisfaction. Everywhere he turned, the members of the King's army were fleeing the courtyard, desperate to save their lives, as the Adorian forces took more and more of the vital command posts. The Adorians had as good as won, with Elementian corpses littering the ground and many more now being held unarmed at sword point in a makeshift holding camp that the Adorians had established on the battlefield.

As his men cheered at the sight of the retreating enemy forces, Charlie pulled an Ender Pearl from his inventory. “You guys stay here and watch for any stragglers! I'm gonna go help Stan!” cried Charlie. He held the orb firmly in his hand, and he had just thrown it up onto the bridge when he heard an explosion.

Charlie whipped around and saw in horror that the top of the tower on the right side had exploded in a burst of stone and fire, and then another detonation went off right below it. Charlie then found himself staring at stone. The Ender Pearl had taken effect, and he was now standing on the stone bridge of the castle. Charlie looked up and sprinted over to the edge of the broken bridge, looking down in shock as the explosions continued down until the castle tower ceased to exist, its base flooded by a lake of lava.

“Char . . . lie . . .”

Charlie, dreading what he would find when he turned to face the voice, looked toward the sound and saw, to his horror, the broken body of the Apothecary lying among a pile of loose stone, his items in a ring around him. As Charlie rushed toward him, realizing to his dismay that he was out of potions to heal the old player, Charlie wondered how it was possible that the Apothecary was still alive. Items scattered around a player was generally a sure sign of death.

“I'm here, Apothecary, I'm here . . .”

“Stan . . . King . . . there . . . ,” came the raspy voice, and then, in an almost imperceptible movement, the old player pointed a finger to the smoldering air where the tower had sat moments before. Then the finger dropped to the ground, and the old player let out one final breath.

Hoping that there was still a chance, Charlie placed the old player's body over his shoulder and walked to the edge of the bridge. He used the Ender Pearl to teleport back to ground level and left the medics to deal with the Apothecary. Immediately they pronounced him to be dead, and as if on cue, the body vanished the moment they gave this diagnosis.

Charlie didn't feel hurt. He didn't feel much of anything at that point. He had just looked over at the pillar of dust and smoke hanging in the air where the tower had stood, and he knew that Stan and King Kev were both dead. There
was no way either could have survived an explosion of that magnitude. Already they were saying that the Apothecary should have died instantly, and most likely Stan and the King had both already been wounded when the bombs went off. By the Apothecary's gesture, they were in the heart of the inferno.

Charlie began to assess the battle, logging his thoughts in a book he had on hand. They had won many great triumphs in the battle. Charlemagne, Geno, and Becca were dead, King Kev and Leonidas were thought to be dead, and the whereabouts of Caesar and Minotaurus were unknown. That meant five of their seven main targets were now most likely dead, and the other two, as enemies of the state, would assuredly be captured before long.

Besides this, of the approximately 150 Elementian fighters who had come into battle, half were dead, fifty were now being held as prisoners, and the remaining twenty-five or so had managed to escape. All in all, the offensive had been a huge success.

Except for the losses. Charlie now looked back on all who had been killed and wounded in the battle. About half their fighters had been killed as well, but of their leading officers, only four were of dire or uncertain fates besides the Apothecary.

Bob had suffered the worst of all. Although not dead, he
had taken a sword through the knee from Caesar, and he would never be able to walk again. This, it seemed to Charlie, was almost a crueler fate than death.

The only Adorian commander known to be dead was Sally. It was despicable. Charlie had seen her go down by a lucky strike in Minotaurus's initial charge. It had not been pretty, and it had not been easy, to know that the sarcastic and hard-talking but ultimately kind-hearted girl who had taught Kat and so many others in the way of the sword was now gone from Elementia forever. And when Stan found out . . .

If
Stan was still alive, that is. And the chances of that were one in a million. Charlie was sure that Stan had been in that tower with the King when it exploded, and if that was the truth then Charlie couldn't fathom any way that Stan could have survived. Had the explosion not destroyed him as it had the Apothecary, Stan would have had nothing but the prospect of hitting the ground at fatal speed. Even if by some remote chance he had hit the lava moat and not been instantly killed by fall damage, there had been a shortage of Potions of Fire Resistance, and Charlie knew that if Stan had indeed had none, he would have burned to death. All that in mind, it could be said with confidence that Stan had died.

That left the last high-ranking Adorian. Ever since she had engaged Becca, which was the last place that DZ had seen her, nobody had seen or heard from Kat. In searching the
bombed-out TNT trap, her items had not been found, and so there was no evidence suggesting that she had definitely died.

As Charlie finished writing the report, he saw the other Adorian commanders congregating around him: Jayden, Archie, G, DZ, Blackraven, the Mechanist, the mayor of Blackstone, Bill, and Ben, the last two of whom were carrying Bob between them. Avoiding looking into their hardened and despairingly pained faces, Charlie read off his report to the lot of them. Each of them grimaced and gave a heavy sigh upon the news of Stan's death, and Charlie could tell that, like himself, they were too numb and desensitized for the incomprehensible pain to hit them just yet. Then he read Kat's fate.

“Wait, you mean, we still haven't found Kat yet?” G asked, alarmed.

“Not yet,” replied Charlie. “We've got to—”

“Find her, that's what we've gotta do!” bellowed G. He looked very angry now. “If there's even a chance she's still alive, we've got to devote all our resources to finding her!”

Jayden, bags under his eyes and cuts across his war-beaten face, put a hand on his friend's shoulder. “G, we've got to wrap things up here, and then, trust me, we'll put everything we have into—”

“Shut up!” said G in a loud whisper, putting his hand up.
“Did you hear that?” he asked before anybody could retort. “Did you
hear
that?”

Despite the fact that many of the people in the circle, particularly Ben, wanted to yell at G to give it a rest, they listened, sympathetic to any desperation he had that might turn into the voice of his lost crush. However, in the silence, a hoarse voice did carry through the windless silence of the abandoned battlefield.

“Help . . . help . . .”

Charlie would have known that voice anywhere, and he could tell where it came from. He was second only to G in arriving at Becca's TNT trap, and it dawned on him that nobody had actually checked inside of the crater. Charlie watched in amazement as G mined through the blocks and alongside the ledge to where Kat lay on her side, her breathing shallow and raspy from being in the midst of Becca's endgame attack. G moved her head into his lap, and from his inventory produced a red potion of healing. He poured it down her throat, her eyes blinked open, and a smile spread across her face, which G returned with tears in his eyes.

“Maybe you should give those two some time alone,” came a voice from behind Charlie and the others.

Charlie couldn't believe it. The voice he heard was the one other in Elementia that he would always recognize, regardless. Only G and Kat, who were too busy reuniting, did
not join the others in turning around with looks on their faces indicative of the ghost they were now seeing return from the grave. But he was not a ghost. A red aura dancing around him, his armor gone and his clothes tattered and burned, and a diamond axe clutched in his hand, the triumphant, smirking form of Stan2012 walked out of the light of the now-setting sun.

A spontaneous burst of jubilation erupted from the leaders, and they rushed forward toward Stan. Charlie was the first to reach him, embracing Stan like a brother, and only then did he truly believe that his best friend was alive. DZ, Jayden, and Archie followed, tailed closely by Blackraven, the Mechanist, and the mayor of Blackstone. Even G, supporting the wounded Kat on his shoulder, managed to hobble over and join the group hug. Ben and Bill gave hoots and whoops of joy, while tears of happiness streamed down the face of the crippled brother still suspended between them.

“Guys . . . I still need to breathe . . .” Stan laughed from the center of his friends, and he laughed harder upon realizing that all the Adorian warriors on the surrounding plain were also cheering the fact that the hero who had slain King Kev had survived.

“Oh my God . . . you're alive!” were the first words that Charlie managed to stammer out. He was in a state of euphoria. “How is . . . is the . . . but . . . the King's dead, right?”

“Yeah, but it was the weirdest thing—I didn't kill him!” said Stan. “He stabbed himself right as the Apothecary and I . . . by the way, did the Apothecary . . .”

“No,” said Charlie, and Stan felt another dull blow to his stomach. He had known that the chances were second only to impossibility, but he had still hoped. He became aware that Charlie was following up on his statement.

“Did you say that the King killed himself? But why . . .”

“I don't know. I'm still trying to figure that out myself. I mean, he wasn't going to win anyway. He was really weak from fighting the Apothecary, and Avery, and me—”

“Avery?” Charlie cut him off, and there was a collective gasp and murmuring in the crowd that had now gathered around Stan. “Stan, what just happened up there on that bridge?”

Stan sighed, not eager to recount the deaths of two of his friends again, but he resigned himself to the wishes of the crowd. “Well, I used an Ender Pearl to get up onto the bridge, and the King was waiting for me. He was really exceptional with the sword, and he disarmed me, and then Mr. A showed up out of nowhere.”

There was another joint intake of breath. Stan saw several mouths, Kat's and Charlie's in particular, opening to interject, but not wanting to be interrupted, Stan continued.

“And he tells me that apparently he's the next incarnation
of Avery007 and that he had turned bitter from being killed twice. I know, Charlie, it sounds crazy, but trust me, he was telling the truth. Anyway, so Avery starts to fight King Kev and knocks him to the ground, but then the King draws a sword with Knockback on it and launches Avery in the air and shoots him, and the King turns back to me.

“He disarms me again and sets me on fire and throws me in the air a few times just out of spite—don't worry, Kat, I'm fine now—and then the Apothecary comes in and starts attacking the King and heals me, and together we drive the King back into that tower, and I'm about to kill him—”

Stan hesitated, a feeling of guilt worming its way up inside him. He pushed it aside and made the on-the-spot decision not to mention that he had hesitated in killing the King, for if he hadn't hesitated, he realized as his insides seemed to drop to his feet, the Apothecary might have lived.

“. . . when he gets this really crazed look on his face, he pulls a switch on the tower wall and stabs himself in the chest. That was when the tower exploded, and I guess it must have killed the Apothecary almost immediately. I would have been killed, too, if it weren't for my armor. Then I fell down into the lava, so I didn't take fall damage.”

“And how did you survive?!” burst out DZ, his face purple from the anticipation of waiting to ask the question. “Even if
the lava absorbed the fall damage, you would have burned to death anyway. You didn't have any Potions of Fire Resistance. We had a shortage!”

Stan gave a small smile. “But I
did
have a potion of Fire Resistance.” He turned to look at Kat and Charlie. “Do you two remember what the Apothecary gave us the first time he met us in that jungle?”

“Yeah,” replied Kat. “He let me enchant this bow,” she said, gesturing to the shimmering weapon strung across her back. “He gave Charlie his diamond pickaxe, he gave you the Ender Chest, and . . . ,” she said, comprehension showing to her face as it dawned on her, “he gave us each Potions of Healing and Fire Resistance.”

“Exactly,” replied Stan. “You used your Potion of Fire Resistance fighting RAT1 at the lava sea, Kat, and you used yours at the Blaze spawner, Charlie, but I never used mine. Actually, I had completely forgotten about it. It was just sitting there in my inventory the whole time.

“Just before I hit the lava, it dawned on me, and I drank the potion right on impact. I only got burned a little before the potion took effect,” he said, gesturing to his singed clothing. “Then, I was able to just swim out of the lava and walk over here.

“That being said,” replied Stan, and there was a sense of finality in his voice suggesting that the recounting of his
duel with the King and his castle was finished, “did I miss anything important?”

“You missed Charlie's report,” came the response from Blackraven, and Charlie immediately felt a pit open in his stomach. Of the four leaders of uncertain or mortal fates, two of them had been discovered to be alive and likely to make a full recovery. But the other two, and one in particular . . . Charlie couldn't see any way to break the news gently to Stan. He decided, though, that it would be best to give the general report first.

“Yes, well, the report, uh, er,” said Charlie at Stan's expectant glance. “Both sides had about a hundred and fifty fighters. Of those, about half of them died on both sides. On the Elementian side, though, only about twenty or so of them managed to escape, and we have about fifty that are being held captive.”