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

“Oh yeah,” said Charlie, feeling, indeed, a little stupid.

“OK, then!” said Stan, clapping his hands together. “Let’s make camp in this sinkhole overnight, and tomorrow we’ll hike out to the lava lake and make a portal to the Nether!”

And they did just that. Kat walked over to a pond in a grassy oasis nearby and filled her bucket with water, while Charlie and Stan used all the sand and dirt in their three combined inventories to make an inconspicuous sand house against the corner of the sinkhole. They quickly threw together a crafting table, a furnace and three beds with the wool made from the string of the cave Spiders.

They also made preparations for their impending quest. Charlie made torches out of the coal and wood he had found while mining, and he used the remaining coal to smelt the iron ore he found in the furnace. He used the resulting iron ingots to create two new iron chestplates for himself and Stan. Kat still had her leather tunic and cap.

After crafting the chestplates, there were three iron ingots left. Stan wanted a new axe, but Charlie said he needed one of the remaining ingots to combine with flint he had found underground. He had read in the book that the way to activate the Nether portal was to light the inside on fire, and to do that he would need to craft a tool known as flint and steel. After he created this, the two remaining ingots went to a new iron sword for Kat.

They had some leftover string and wood. These Charlie crafted into a chest and a new bow, which he gave to Stan along with twenty arrows that he had collected from Skeletons underground. The chest was filled with the group’s items that they would not be taking to the Nether: some dirt, a lot of cobblestone, the book, the contents of the chest from the mine shaft except for the bucket, and the Ender Chest. With all their necessities on them and all extras safely stored in the chest, the three players, the cat and the dog were all happy to go to bed.

As the wool mattress of the bed beneath him conformed to his body, Stan thought, for the first time, about the Griefer whom he had probably just killed beneath the desert. It was incredibly conflicting. Although Stan was quite happy that they now had a dangerous enemy off their tails, and he knew that they could not all walk away from that fight intact, Stan found his insides squirming with guilt when he remembered the agony of being crushed by the sand himself. Suffocating in that buried room must have been a dreadful way to die. Even if Stan had dismissed Mr A’s story about Avery007 as being completely untrue, Stan still felt as though Mr A did have an underlying reason for his hatred of lower-level players. And now that he was dead, they would never find out what that was.

Regardless of his guilt, Stan was too tired from the events of the day to dwell on it for long. It was only a matter of time before he succumbed to sleep.

It seemed like forever to Stan since they had had a really good night’s sleep, but it was a peaceful night, and Stan woke up to the crowing of a chicken, feeling refreshed and ready to tackle whatever the Nether had to offer.

They wasted no time leaving. They clipped their remaining potions to their belts, along with their weapons and arrows. Stan and Kat slung their bows over their shoulders. Kat and Charlie commanded their pets to sit and hide, as Charlie had read that Rex and Lemon would be unable to enter the Nether.

Before the clock even showed that the night was over, the trio was retracing their steps back towards the lava lake. They passed some burning mobs on the way there, but they were too preoccupied to pick up the materials. They reached the lava before the sun was high in the sky.

Stan was amazed. At a passing glance the body of molten lava had seemed like a lake, but now he could see that it expanded for kilometres, forming what could more appropriately be called a lava sea. Kat was equally amazed. Charlie, on the other hand, wasted no time placing the water from the bucket on the shore of the lava. Initially Stan was confused as to why the water from the bucket seemed to stay confined to one block on the shoreline. Wasn’t water supposed to flow? However, water then began to flow from this single source block, eventually spreading out into the lava and cooling a fair amount of it instantly into the black-as-night obsidian blocks. Ignoring the coal ore and stone rimming the lake, Charlie picked up the source block of water with the bucket. With the source gone, the water flowing from it quickly drained away. Wasting no time, he took his diamond pickaxe to the obsidian.

It was hard work. The sun was soon high in the sky, and the heat from the lava didn’t make it any easier for Charlie to continue hacking away at the black rock that seemed to resist all his efforts to break it. After ten minutes, the obsidian block finally broke, and Charlie snatched it before it could fall into the lava below. Charlie, relieved to have attained his first obsidian block, gritted his teeth and got to work on the second one.

Meanwhile, Kat and Stan stood poised at Charlie’s back, bows raised, ready to shoot down any attackers that ventured too close to them. It was boring, but Stan just kept the image of finally entering the Nether in mind, and he kept his poise, as did Kat.

Charlie was just collecting his ninth obsidian block when, without warning, the ground in front of Stan exploded. Stan was knocked back by the force of the blast, and he skidded along the black obsidian that Charlie had created, stopping just before the edge of the lava sea.

Kat had trained her bow on the cloud of dust and was ready to attack the first thing to rise from it, when a figure burst out of the hole in the ground. Before Kat could react, the figure threw a series of fire charges to the ground, thickening the smoke and setting the ground on fire. Kat tried to stare through the thick smoke to see who was attacking them, when an arrow flew through the smokescreen right at her.

It was too fast for her to dodge, but she ducked her head and the arrow snagged the leather of her cap, damaging the armour but leaving her unharmed. She sent arrows into the general direction of the attacker, and she was drawing another one when another figure ran out of the smoke. This was the first one whose features could clearly be seen. His blond hair was cut to his head, and he wore camo army trousers and a black tank top, with an eye patch covering one of his eyes. He held a diamond sword, and he was rushing straight towards Kat.

His attack was cut off by Stan, who had gotten up by now and swung his shovel at the player’s feet. As the attacker tripped, Stan yelled back to Charlie, who was about to help them, “We can handle this, Charlie! Finish the portal so we can get out of here!” At the same time, he sensed something to his right, and he turned and caught Kat’s eye.

“Stan, here! You need this more than I do!” she yelled, and she dodged an arrow while simultaneously throwing her sword in his direction. He responded by yelling, “Thanks!” and grabbing the sword just as the eye patch guy got back on his feet. Stan drew back and shot a couple of arrows at the player, which were effortlessly deflected, and when arrows became a futile effort he engaged the player with the sword.

Kat, meanwhile, could now see the player she was having a ranged arrow-battle with. He had dark skin and black hair, and he was wearing a leather tunic over Japanese samurai armour. The bow he was using was glowing just like hers – it had been enchanted. She had a feeling that the enchantment on a bow owned by someone who had attacked them without provocation would be considerably more evil than the Infinity enchantment on hers.

Charlie was vaguely aware of Stan’s sword flying out of his hand in his battle with Mr Tank Top, and of more and more arrows catching on Kat’s tunic in her arrow fight with Mr Samurai. He knew he had to finish the portal quickly. Charlie hastily placed the last three obsidian blocks into place atop the black obelisk and then jumped to the ground, pulling out the flint and the steel ring. He was about to light the portal when a figure burst out of the ground right behind him. He whipped around, pickaxe in hand, ready for a fight.