Sean Wolfe - The Complete Elementia Chronicles - Quest for Justice; The New Order; The Dusk of Hope; Herobrine’s Message

All four warriors attacked at the same time. Mr A thrust his sword at Charlie’s heart. Charlie threw his pickaxe at Mr A’s head. Stan swung his shovel’s blade towards the front of Mr A’s stomach. Kat fired an arrow aimed at a chink in Mr A’s chestplate. The arrow missed and knocked the sword to the side, causing it to strike Stan’s iron chestplate, which shattered on impact. The pickaxe missed its mark and embedded itself in the wall, and the shovel flew up and knocked Mr A’s helmet off.

Stan and Charlie scrambled to recover their weapons. Stan could see that Mr A was dizzied by the blow to the head, while he himself felt like he was about to throw up from the blow to his stomach. Still he snatched up his shovel and ran back in to engage Mr A, but he stopped short when he saw that Mr A was already taking heavy fire from Kat. Her never-ending supply of arrows flew out of her bow rapid fire, glancing off the diamond of Mr A’s armour and knocking him backwards into the wall.

“Hey guys! I think we may have a problem here!” Stan heard Charlie yell. He turned towards Charlie and saw that his diamond pickaxe had hit a button on the wall next to a bookshelf. Simultaneously, he heard a rumbling coming from above him. Seconds later, the roof exploded and sand blocks fell down into the room, burying the entire underground bunker in a vortex of darkness and coarse, grainy earth.

Stan found himself buried. He couldn’t judge which way was up or down, and he couldn’t breathe inside the coarse blocks. He slowly realized that he still had his shovel in his hand. He came to his senses and punched around with it, finally figuring out which way was up. He dug up quickly, and just when he thought he couldn’t hold his breath any longer, he punched his way into the fresh air.

It was afternoon, and Stan had never thought that he would be as grateful for the sight of the blocky clouds in the blue sky as he was at that moment. He took deep breaths of the fresh air, amazed that, after all that had happened in the past day underground, he was still alive.

Then he remembered his friends; they were nowhere to be found. Stan was about to panic when he heard a barking behind him. He turned and saw Rex trotting around in the sand next to him. Stan was puzzled. How did the dog get out? Then he remembered that the dog was able to teleport to wherever Kat was. So if the dog had teleported aboveground, that could only mean that …

Sure enough, at that moment he heard a fist punching through sand, and Kat surfaced, breathing heavily from the effort. She looked at Stan.

“Don’t ever let me hear you complaining about that shovel again!” she panted, down on her hands and knees trying to catch her breath. “It let you tunnel up way faster than this useless thing!” She held up the stone pickaxe.

Stan was about to reply when Lemon appeared in front of him, followed seconds later by Charlie’s diamond pickaxe punching its way out of the ground. Unlike Kat, though, Charlie wasn’t breathing heavily at all.

“Nice going, Charlie,” spat Kat.

“Yeah, honestly man, of all the places on that wall that you could have hit, why the button that destroyed the place?”

“Nice to see you, too,” Charlie sighed, wiping the excess sand off his clothes. “And you should be thanking me. For one, I probably trapped Mr A down there, too. I don’t think he’ll manage to get out of this one alive. He was already pretty weak from Stan’s shovel attack. And for two, I managed to grab this!”

He pulled out a book from his inventory. The title read The Nether and the End: How to Get There .

Kat’s jaw dropped, and Stan asked in amazement, “Charlie! Where’d you get that?”

“Oh, I saw it on the bookshelf next to that button and thought that it might come in handy,” he said smugly. He stood up. “Now we can figure out our next move.”

They agreed to find some shade from the hot desert sun while they planned this next move. They looked around and saw that they were in the middle of a sinkhole that must have been created when the sand fell down and buried Avery’s base. They walked over and sat against the edge of the sinkhole that provided shade from the sun. Charlie opened the book to the chapter entitled ‘Entering the End’ and read aloud.

“To enter the End, one will, before all else, require twelve Eyes of Ender.” He looked up at his friends. “Does anybody know what those are?”

Neither of them did. Charlie found a glossary of Nether and End items in the back of the book and looked up the Eye of Ender. The picture showed an orb, green-grey in colour, which resembled the eye of a cat. The crafting recipe for it included one Ender Peal and one Blaze Powder. None of them knew what those were either, so Charlie opened the book first to the Ender Pearl.

“An Ender Pearl is most readily obtained by the killing of an Enderman,” Charlie read.

“Wait, an Enderman?” said Kat. “Isn’t that the thing that almost killed you this morning?”

Charlie sighed. “Yeah, it is. And it looks like we’re gonna have to kill twelve of them if we want to get to the End.”

Stan gulped. He remembered the Enderman’s overwhelming power well, and he wasn’t eager to face one again. “What about Blaze Powder?” he asked quickly. “How do we get that?”

Charlie turned the page and found what he was looking for. “Blaze Powder is a substance that is crafted from a Blaze Rod. The Blaze Rod can only be obtained by killing a Blaze, a creature indigenous to … the Nether,” said Charlie, his stomach lurching. After all he had heard about the Nether, he was not eager to go there.

“So, if we want to get to the End,” said Stan, piecing it together, “then we have to kill a bunch of Endermen, and we also have to go to the Nether and find these Blaze things?”

“Oh yeah!” cried Kat, pumping her fist in the air. “Road trip to the Nether!”

“Wait,” said Charlie quickly. “Not so fast. Who says that we have to go the Nether first?”

“Well, do you want to fight the Enderman again?” asked Kat. “Whatever’s in the Nether, it can’t be worse than something that can teleport and tries to kill you if you just look at it.”

“Not to mention,” added Stan, “that the King’s forces are definitely still looking for us, and they’re going to comb the entire Overworld before they start looking in other dimensions.”

Charlie tried to think of another argument of why they should not go to the Nether, but he couldn’t. He did agree with the reasoning of both of his cohorts. “OK,” said Charlie, resigning himself. “I guess our next move is to go to the Nether.”

As Charlie flipped through the book to figure out the way to enter the dimension, Kat kept on doing fist pumps and jumping around like a hyperactive puppy. She was obviously very excited to explore the place. Stan felt nervous, but he too had a growing sense of exhilaration. He was very much anticipating, with potent curiosity, the exploration of the new dimension, whatever it might hold.

“OK, apparently to enter the Nether we’re going to have to build a portal,” said Charlie, referring to the book. “It has to be five blocks high, four blocks wide, hollow in the centre, and made out of obsidian. From what I understand, obsidian is created when running water hits stagnant lava. It’s almost indestructible, and it can only be mined with a diamond pickaxe.”

“We passed an entire lake of lava on the way here, remember?” said Stan.

“Oh yeah, I remember that!” agreed Kat.

“OK, so we have stagnant lava,” said Charlie. “But how are we going to get a flow of running water across it?”

“Are you stupid, Charlie?” said Kat with a laugh. “I found a bucket down in the mine shaft!”