Herobrine's Message (25 page)

“Well done, MasterBronze!” Tess exclaimed, patting him on the shoulder, which made his skin crawl. “In honor of your loyalty to the Noctem Alliance and to me, I am promoting you to the rank of Corporal. You will, from now on, have the duty of being my assistant commander in the training program.”

“Thank you, ma'am,” G replied. He knew he ought to be thrilled at this promotion, which would allow him access to even more high-level secrets, but he still couldn't shake the feeling of total isolation now that Jayden was gone, and he was stuck with this Tess, this player who had total control over his life.

“Now, come with me, Corporal MasterBronze,” Tess continued, a grin crossing her face. “It's time to go and see your fellow trainees, and present their new second-in-command to them.”

G's stomach churned as he followed Tess down the hallway. She was talking to him so affectionately, like he were her prized show dog instead of another person. It made him feel powerless, degraded, and humiliated. G shuddered and wished that somehow, he still had Jayden to talk to.

“Charlie, please . . . let me take a turn, I can see how bad you're hurtin' . . .”

“Leonidas, for the last time, I am
fine
!” Charlie bellowed, whipping around to face him. “Stop interrupting me or we're never gonna get to Element City!”

“Okay, fine, calm down, man!” Leonidas cried out, raising his blocky hands defensively.

Charlie shot one last steely glare at him before turning back around, and continuing to hack away at the solid cave wall with his stone pickaxe. Leonidas stared at Charlie's back, illuminated by torchlight. He had been baffled by the hostility Charlie had been showing toward him. Since they had joined up with him and Stan, Leonidas had been pleasantly surprised by how quickly everybody had warmed up to him. Everybody, that was, except Charlie. And even as
Leonidas watched Charlie mining, it was clear that he was hurting. Every swing of the pickaxe brought another grunt of discomfort, and every step he took through the newly mined cave saw another limp.

Leonidas was the only one who even noticed Charlie's outburst, however. Commander Crunch was busy tunneling forward alongside Charlie, while Stan, Kat, and Cassandrix walked behind, talking among themselves. Stan put torches on the wall as they walked, and Rex trailed lazily behind Kat.

“I still can't believe that we're being forced to sneak into our own city,” Kat spat in disgust.

“Oh, I'm sorry, dear. Allow me to play you a sad song on the world's smallest violin,” Cassandrix replied, sticking her bloated lip out in mock sadness before reverting back to a scowl. “Kat, we're all down here together. There's no need to whine about what we're all feeling!”

“Shut up!” cried Kat, so loudly, that Stan cringed and raised his hands to his ears. “There's no need to be so obnoxious about it!”

“I'm sorry, what's that, Commander?” Cassandrix said loudly, looking over at Crunch, who was still firmly fixated on his digging. “I'm sorry, I can't hear you. There appears to be an infant who's crying because her feelings are hurt. I do wish the parents would take care of her.”

Kat turned red as a beet, and was about to retort when Stan forced his way between the two of them.

“Enough, you two!” he cried, indignantly glancing back and forth between them. “We're all stressed enough as it is in this stupid tunnel. We don't need your bickering making things worse!”

“She started it,” Kat mumbled, causing Cassandrix to roll her eyes and shrug with an arrogant sigh.

“I don't care
who
started it, I'm finishing it,” said Stan firmly, as he continued to walk forward between Kat and Cassandrix.
Man, I'm so glad to be back with everyone,
Stan thought to himself, trying to think as optimistically as possible.
I missed talking with everybody so much . . .

“Hey, Charlie!” Kat hollered right next to Stan's ear, causing him to cringe again. “Are we past the wall yet?”

“If my calculations are correct,” Charlie replied, trying to keep his breathing steady as he winced with the effort of mining, “we passed underneath the wall a little while ago, and we should be underneath the Merchants District of Element City by now.”

“Hey, did you hear that, everybody?” Stan asked, looking around the mine at all his friends. “We're back in Element City! Welcome home, guys!”

There were lackluster murmurs of assent around the mine as Charlie and Commander Crunch tunneled into a
sizable natural cave. Stan sighed. He knew that they had to get to Element City as quickly as possible, and the fate of all of Minecraft might lie in their hands. But that didn't change the fact that they had been walking for three straight days with no sleep, and everybody was worn out.

“Okay,” he said, finally letting his inner exhaustion come forward. “Maybe we should take a break for a little while and rest.”

As soon as Stan said this, the entire group collapsed onto the ground, letting the fatigue of weeks of trekking with almost no rest finally hit them. Stan lay down as well, not even caring that the stone-block floor below him was uncomfortable. Rex curled up at his feet, and Stan was just about to doze off when he suddenly had a startling realization.

“Hey, guys, we can't all go to sleep yet,” he mumbled, forcing himself to sit up. “Somebody has to stand guard.”

“I'll take care of it,” Leonidas said, grabbing a ledge on the cave wall and pulling himself to his feet.

“NO!” Charlie cried, causing everybody to snap up right as Charlie jumped, wincing as his bad leg hit the ground. “Get back to sleep, Leonidas. I'm standing guard.”

“Come on, Charlie!” exclaimed Leonidas, looking concerned. “You've been mining all day. You really ought to take a rest!'

“What's that supposed to mean, huh?” Charlie demanded
accusatorily. “Are you saying you don't think I can do it?”

“No, I . . .”

“Then shut up and sit back down!” Charlie spat out bitterly. “I don't recall asking for your help!”

Leonidas stared at Charlie, amazed at the harshness in his voice. After a moment, Leonidas lay back down and, with an uncomfortable glance at Charlie, rolled over to face the wall. Stan was outraged, and was about to chastise Charlie for his harshness when, without warning, an explosion erupted in the wall beside them, showering the entire group with dust.

Within seconds, all six players and the wolf were on their feet again, weapons drawn, glancing into the misshapen hole in the cave wall. A shadowy form appeared in the smoke, and as the dust settled, a row of figures came into view. The form of Creeper Khan, with Arachnia, Enderchick, Lord Marrow, and Zomboy standing directly behind him.

There was a moment of silence. Stan and his friends stared at the mobhunters, transfixed in horror that they had been discovered. Meanwhile, the members of ELM stared back, their eyes alight with joyous amazement.

“Fancy seeing you here, Stan,” Arachnia hissed with a grin, stepping forward to the front of the group.

“How did you find us?” Stan demanded as he uncomfortably forced himself to look into Arachnia's eight red eyes.

“Lucky break, I guess,” she replied with a grin. “We were just about to set some traps for you guys down here. We didn't expect you to get back here so quickly.”

“We've been walking nonstop,” Stan replied slowly, trying to buy time as he wildly thought of how they could escape from these bounty hunters. “We wanted to make it back to Element City as fast as possible.”

“Aw, poor tragic you,” Arachnia sneered. “You tried so hard, and got so far . . . but in the end, it doesn't even matter.”

“Haha! I ged id!” Zomboy shouted. “Because dose are da words to a song! And you used dem in . . .”

“Shut up, Zomboy,” Arachnia said offhandedly.

“Okay,” he replied meekly, looking to the ground.

“Well, congrats to you,” Stan said, still desperate for more time. “You finally managed to catch up to us. Now what?”

“Well, you're going to come with us, Stan,” Arachnia replied in a disturbingly sweet-sounding voice that made Stan's skin crawl. “Lord Tenebris is most anxious to see you. And as for your friends, well, they're of no use to anybody anymore, so they will be disposed of.”

“Well, I'm sorry, Arachnia,” Stan retorted, keeping his voice pleasant and conversational as he realized that there was no escape, and they would have to fight. “But I'm afraid that I can't let you do that.”

And before the mobhunter could respond, Stan leaped
forward and locked his axe against the glowing diamond sword that Arachnia had pulled out, and the two of them began to duel. Immediately, the players who had been standing behind the two leaders leaped into action. Kat lunged toward Enderchick with Rex at her heels, Cassandrix and Creeper Khan struck at each other simultaneously, and Commander Crunch rushed in to help Cassandrix. Lord Marrow and Leonidas both released a barrage of arrows at each other, while Zomboy lunged at the nearest target, Charlie.

Charlie feinted backward to avoid the giant stone axe that the oversized player slammed into the ground, leaving cracks in the stone blocks of the cave floor. As he moved, Charlie felt a sharp pain in his foot, and it nearly gave out, but he managed to stay on his feet, cringing in pain. Charlie glanced up at Zomboy, who was raising his axe and preparing for another attack.
He's not very fast,
Charlie noted to himself, and
he's taking way too long between attacks. He must be a heavy fighter.

Charlie became aware of explosions going off behind Zomboy as Creeper Khan started to use his pyrokinetic powers and Lord Marrow fired off explosive arrows, but Charlie forced himself to focus on his own fight. Zomboy continued to walk toward Charlie, swinging his giant stone axe from side to side, forcing Charlie back down the cave toward the way they had come. Charlie saw multiple openings in the
attack that would allow him to counter, but each time he was about to strike, the pain in his leg flared up again, and he was forced to fall back to avoid another attack.

Finally, after a frustrating minute of dodging, Zomboy launched a particularly powerful downward axe strike, which Charlie sidestepped. The axe blade shattered the stone block beneath it in a shower of sparks and became lodged in the ground, forcing Zomboy to struggle to pull it out. Seeing his chance, Charlie launched himself forward off his good leg, and sunk his stone pickaxe directly into Zomboy's chest. The giant mobhunter winced and staggered backward, axe still in hand, before collapsing to the ground with a massive thud.

Charlie took a deep breath, and let it out as he looked down at the massive body of his defeated adversary. He was infuriated with himself. That giant thug was so unskilled that it should have been an effortless kill, but his leg had made it much more difficult than it had to be. A dark thought crossed Charlie's mind. What if he came face to face with a skilled opponent? Not somebody like Leonidas in their fight in the forest . . . someone who actually wanted to hurt him? Charlie shuddered as his mind clouded with these thoughts, and he began to walk back toward the fight, past the body of Zomboy, determined to prove himself.

What Charlie hadn't expected was for Zomboy's axe to fly up off the ground and directly at him.

Charlie managed to pull his backup pickaxe out of his inventory to block the attack, but the impact of the oversized stone axe on his weapon still sent him flying across the cave. He hit the wall with a smack, landing hard on the stone-block floor, right on his bad leg. Charlie let out a holler of pain and clutched his damaged limb in agony, glancing up through his teary eyes to figure out what had just happened.

Zomboy was back on his feet. His stone axe was held firmly in his right hand, Charlie's pickaxe was still lodged in his chest, and he was staring at Charlie with a grin, no sign of pain on his face at all.

Charlie was perplexed, not sure how it was that Zomboy was still alive, until it hit him. Zomboy was part of the assassin team, and, according to what Stan had told him, each member of their team seemed to be modded to have some sort of special ability. Charlie realized that this player must be modded to have extra HP, and be able to take a ton of punishment before he died.

As the giant beast of a player lumbered toward Charlie, he prepared to kick off the wall, and get out of the way of the incoming attack. Zomboy began to raise his axe over his head as Charlie kicked off the wall, only to have his knee buckle under the pressure. Charlie hardly noticed, though; he was too focused on the axe raised over Zomboy's head.

Just as the blow was about to fall, an arrow flew from
deep in the cave and lodged itself into Zomboy's skull, right between his eyes. The giant player gave a yelp of pain, and then proceeded to look down the tunnel toward the source of the arrow, not dead from the blow (somehow) but most certainly angry.

“Hey!” he bellowed down the mine, his eyebrows, with an arrow sticking out between them, knitted in fury. “Wads da big idea?”

Charlie glanced down the cave, and his face lit up in amazement and relief. There, standing in the mouth of the cave, was Sirus, bow raised, and an army of twenty players, all armed with stone weapons, standing behind him.

“Charge!” the crazed redstone mechanic bellowed.

The entire mass of players barreled through the cave, sending arrows and flying weapons at Zomboy. Sensing that he was overwhelmed, the massive mobhunter turned, the attacks simply sinking into his back to no effect. With his axe in hand, he dashed down the cave and back toward his comrades.

As the wave of freed hostages continued to rush past Charlie, Sirus stopped to help him to his feet. “Hey, Charlie, man, long time no see, how're you doing?”

“I'm . . . fine,” Charlie replied. He couldn't believe his eyes. From what he had heard, Sirus had perished in the Battle for Elementia. “I . . . I'm
really
glad to see you. But . . . I thought you . . .”