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

“Whoo-whee! This oughta be fun, right, Stan?” said the blond archer. Stan poked his head over the wall to see what Bob was talking about. What he saw made his stomach fall out.

He had seen these mobs before. On a stormy day, en route to Element City, he had fought a great battle against one of these creatures. Could these possibly be the same mobs as the one that he had fought with his friends in that terrible battle? But there was no mistaking the pink, rotting skin, the brown loincloths, the golden swords …

It had managed to take down Charlie, Kat and Rex, and it was only because of the lightning-charged Creeper that Stan had managed to defeat it. And that was just one.

But now, Stan was staring into a plain, a wide-open stretch of flat land with lava on both sides. And roaming around this wide-open space was an entire herd of about fifty sword-wielding Zombie Pigmen.

Stan drew back the arrow without thinking. All he knew was that he wanted to get this massive fight over with, and with as little sword fighting as possible. He let the arrow fly, right as Bob cried out, “Stan, no!”

The arrow went right through the hollow eye socket of the nearest Pigman, which fell to the ground. The others around it looked down at their fallen comrade, and in one motion all their eyes locked on Stan. The entire herd of Pigmen surged forwards in a swarm towards Stan and Bob.

“Man, those things are neutral!” cried Bob as he downed another one of the Pigmen with an arrow. “If you don’t attack them, they won’t attack you!”

“What do you mean?” asked Stan as he pulled out his shovel and knocked one that had almost reached the top of the rise back down the plain. “In the Overworld one attacked me!”

“Well I don’t know why that was, but right now we’ve got a serious problem on our hands!” He clubbed a Pigman with his bow, and it flew backwards and landed in the middle of the herd that was now climbing the rise. “Get back, get back!” Bob continued to yell as he walked backwards and fired arrows into the throng.

Stan and Bob ran back down towards the others, and Bob yelled, “Zombie Pigmen, incoming!” When the other two Nether Boys looked at Bob in confusion, he said, “Stan shot one of ’em.”

Kat and Charlie looked at Stan in horror. Remembering the one from the Overworld, he said, “There’s, like, fifty of them coming now! Prepare yourselves, this is gonna be one big fight!”

The Zombie Pigmen started to stream over the rise. Stan, Kat, Charlie and Ben raced in to battle the herd. Bill and Bob stayed back and started attacking with their respective weapons.

The fighting was intense. Ben was an expert at disarming the rotting pig-warriors and then cutting them out of existence. Kat, on the other hand, required a lot more effort to defeat the Pigmen than he did, being unfamiliar with the sows’ fighting techniques. Charlie had adopted a unique strategy. He had used his pickaxe to swiftly hack a ditch in the brittle Netherrack ground, and when the Zombie Pigmen stumbled into the ditch in pursuit of him, Charlie drove his pickaxe into the monsters. Stan meanwhile adopted the timeless Zombie-fighting strategy of beating them into submission with a shovel.

By far, the ones doing the most damage were Bill and Bob. Bob’s arrows downed pig after pig after pig, and Bill had adopted an unusual strategy of catching the Pigmen on his fishing hook from afar and casting them deep into the lava sea. They didn’t burn, but instead they just swam around aimlessly in the molten lava, not interested in the fighting anymore.

It took a while, but the seemingly endless supply of Zombie Pigmen finally trickled down and eventually stopped when Kat decapitated the last one. Bob went to check whether the coast was clear. It was, and the six players walked across the plain and soon came to the house of the Nether Boys at the base of a steep Netherrack hill. The house was entirely covered in Netherrack, so it blended into the environment in such a way that you would have to know the house was there to see it. The inside was made entirely of cobblestone, which, for Stan at least, was a sight for sore eyes. It was the first of the familiar block that he had seen since entering the nightmarish Nether.

They saw a crafting table, a furnace and some chests. Other than that the house was completely empty. Stan asked why they had so few possessions after living here so long.

“We were banished here, don’t you remember, kid?” said Bill, slinging his fishing rod over his back. “And besides, if you try to sleep in a bed in the Nether, the bed will explode.”

“OK.” Stan didn’t even bother questioning it. He was so past wondering about the many breaches in the laws of physics in this wonderful, dangerous game called Minecraft.

“So to get your Blaze Rods,” said Bob, sitting on the cobblestone floor and leaning against the wall, “we’re going to have to get to the Blaze spawner in the Nether Fortress.”

“Yeah, the Apothecary mentioned something about the Nether Fortress,” said Kat, chiselling her initials into the cobblestone wall with her sword’s point. “What exactly is the Nether Fortress?”

“It’s a maze made out of dark red brick that’s incredibly dangerous to navigate,” replied Ben. “Luckily, we happened to live right near the closest Nether Fortress, and even luckier is the fact that we’ve done a little exploring and it shouldn’t take too long to get to the Blaze spawner. We’d better be prepared, though. Once we enter that room we’re going to be up against a never-ending swarm of Blazes, and those things are a nightmare to kill.”

“What makes them so hard to kill?” asked Charlie.

“Well, for one, they can fly,” said Bill. “And for two they have the annoying tendency to spam fireballs at you. When the three of us first made it into the Blaze spawner room, we barely made it out alive. Great fun, really, but we didn’t even try to fight them.”

“Mind you,” interjected Bill, “we’ve had a lot more experience fighting Ghasts since then, and we could probably figure out a winning strategy for killing Blazes, but we should still be careful.”

“The Nether Fortress is very close to this location,” said Ben. “We actually chose to build our house here in case we ever wanted to explore it some more. We have a few times. It’s awesome to explore that giant labyrinth. Anyway, it’s right up this hill outside.” He exited the house and started up the hill, followed by the other five.

It was quite a sheer hill – more like a cliff face, really. At one point, another Ghast tried to blast them off the cliff side, but Ben managed to kill it with deflected fireballs, and they kept climbing.

“Oh man, why is it so hot in the Nether?” said Kat, gritting her teeth as she wiped the sweat from her brow. She was closely followed by Charlie and then Stan.

“Well … I’m guessing … the fireballs and … the lava sea may … have something to do … with it,” panted Stan as he dragged his shovel behind him. “And who are you … to complain? You’re … wearing shorts … and a T-shirt!”

“And also you’re … not wearing … one of these wicked heavy … iron chestplates!” gasped Charlie. Kat glanced down quickly at her neon-pink shorts and then again at the light tunic over her orange T-shirt. She blushed in embarrassment and did not speak again for the rest of the climb.

At the top of the Netherrack cliff, there was a monster standing by that tried to attack them. It was a large cube of magma of various shades of dark red, and had glowing yellow eyes that opened up like a spring as it leaped forwards to attack Ben. He calmly identified it as a Magma Cube and sliced it in two with his sword. Stan was totally caught off guard when the two halves of the monster morphed into two smaller Magma Cubes. One of them caught him unaware as it tackled him, and he would have been knocked back down the cliff had Bill not caught the strap of Stan’s chestplate with his fishing rod. Ben kept killing the Magma Cubes, and the pieces of the dead ones kept reanimating. They were easy kills, though, and soon all of them were dead, leaving a pasty orange substance on the ground that Bob pocketed for later use.