by Matt Forbeck
Archie tested the door. In her anger, Yumi had let go of the knob, and it turned freely. He opened the door and stepped out of the house.
“Don’t do this, Yumi,” he told her as he came to her side. “I won’t let you do this. Not for me.”
She turned to him, tears glittering in her wide eyes. “No, Archie,” she said softly. “Don’t you do this. Stay here with me. Be safe. Stay.”
He shook his head. “Salah is right.”
“Salah’s a jerk.”
Archie chuckled despite the dark moment, as did several people in the crowd. “But he’s right about that hero. He’ll come back for me, and he might well tear this place down to get to me. We can’t let that happen.” He gazed deep into her eyes. “I can’t let that happen.”
“What are you going to do?” Yumi’s voice cracked a bit as she came to the realization that this was an argument she wasn’t going to win.
“Leave,” Archie said. “Now.”
INTERLUDE
“Are you out of your mind?” one of the heroes asked as they dropped Karl to the ground on a hilltop overlooking the village they’d had to drag him out of. “You could have killed those Villagers!”
“Yeah?” Karl said as he sprang to his feet and dusted himself off. “So what?”
He glared at the other four heroes. He didn’t know their names or, really, much of anything else about them. They’d told him at one point, he was pretty sure, but the information hadn’t lodged in his brain—mostly because he couldn’t be bothered to care about it. He just called them by nicknames he’d come up with for them instead.
From Karl’s point of view, other heroes were just people who competed with him for resources. If they got to the emeralds and artifacts and all the other cool stuff the world had to offer before him, that meant there was less for him. He hadn’t come to this forsaken world to make friends. He’d come here to make it his playground—and maybe to conquer a bit of it while he was at it—and he didn’t care what the other heroes thought about that.
“They’re Villagers!” said Stache, who wore a magnificent bit of facial hair that was impossible to forget. “They’re innocent! Defenseless! And mostly harmless!”
“Innocent? Ha!” Karl’s voice dripped with scorn. “You think those little runts wouldn’t do the same thing to us given half a chance? The only reason they don’t is that they’re too weak!”
“That’s an awful way to think about this place and the people who call it home,” said Scarface, who bore the mark of a nasty cut on their forehead. “They’re not bullies. They’re good souls, and we ought to respect that.”
Karl couldn’t help snorting at that. “We’re heroes. Don’t you get that? We’re better than them on every level. We don’t need to respect them. They just need to get out of our way.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to hurt them,” said Red, who had crimson hair.
Karl never could stand talking to them. They were always so condescending, going on and on about “obligations” and “doing the right thing.” So boring.
And so beside the point.
“You seem to be forgetting that the little rat down there punched me!” He pointed at his stomach for emphasis.
“I don’t see anything wrong with you,” said Pinky, who had bright pink hair, as they hid their mouth behind a hand.
“Healed rather nicely,” said Stache, who almost managed to not roll their eyes.
“I do take pride in my potions,” Scarface said with a wry chuckle.
“No harm, no foul,” Red said while repressing a laugh.
Karl scowled at them all as they faced him in the moonlight. “Laugh it up! Sure, it didn’t hurt, but that’s not the point. That little guy attacked me!”
Pinky sighed, clearly already tired of the conversation. “Still, that’s hardly a good reason to defeat a Villager much less threaten to lay an entire village to waste.”
Karl stared at them in disbelief. “You just let the things out there attack you? Don’t I have a right to defend myself?”
“You weren’t being too friendly with them, as I recall,” said Stache. “Seems to me like they were maybe just defending themselves from you.”
Karl grunted as if he’d been expecting just that sort of response. “You’re really going to side with them? Against a fellow hero, no less. I guess I shouldn’t let that surprise me so much.”
Scarface lit a torch to see the rest of them by. “What are you trying to say?”
Karl pointed back at the village. A crowd of people with torches were dispersing from the edge of the place. The Villagers were returning to their homes. Whatever had gone on there after the heroes had left was done.
“I’m saying you’re soft and your priorities are messed up. You care more about them than me.”
Red screwed up their face, disgusted at the implications of what Karl had said. “Just because they grew up here doesn’t mean they’re beneath us. Actually, it means we should respect them more.”
“How do you figure that?” Karl stuck out his chin.
“They belong here. We’re just visitors. Guests, if you will.”
Karl blew a raspberry at that thought. “They live in one of the richest lands around, and they don’t have any idea how to use it. Doesn’t that seem like a waste?”
“It’s not our home,” Pinky said. “It’s theirs. If they want to ‘waste’ it, whatever that means, that’s their business.”
“We discovered this place! It’s ours to explore!”
“You think we found this place?” Stache shook their head. “The Villagers and Illagers were here long before us. If anyone found it, it was them.”
Karl moved toward the edge of the torchlight. “But that’s just it! It’s such an amazing place. So much to see. So much to do. And they just live here! They just farm! How ridiculous is that?”
“They seem to like it that way,” Scarface said. “It seems like the least we can do is leave them to their farming.”
Karl groaned in disbelief. “You’ve borrowed their houses, just like me. You’ve eaten their food! Slept in their beds! You like to act like you’re saints, but you’re no better than me!”
Red shrugged. “None of the rest of us have tried to attack a Villager.”
“That wasn’t a Villager!” Karl’s eyes grew wide with his frustration. “That was an Illager! They attack us all the time! Don’t I have the right to defend myself?”
“Of course, you do,” Pinky said in a serene voice. “All we’re saying is that you shouldn’t have to. Not in a village.”
“That little thing wasn’t going to hurt you,” Stache said with a sad shake of their head. “It’s kind of odd it was even there in the first place, but if the Villagers took it in, what’s the harm?”
Karl pointed at his stomach once again. “It punched me!”
“Look,” Scarface said. “We’re not getting anywhere with this. And I don’t want to have a fight break out here too.” They looked straight at Karl. “If you think you’re better than the locals, then start acting like that’s true. Be the bigger person here. Let it go.”
Karl rubbed the place where the Illager had struck him. It hadn’t hurt him at all—except for his pride. He wasn’t about to forget the humiliation anytime soon.
Karl was used to getting banged up. As a hero, he faced and fought all sorts of dangerous creatures: creepers, guardians, golems, zombie pigmen, blazes, ghasts, and endermen. Some of them had hurt him awfully bad, beating, bashing, cutting, slashing, and even burning him within inches of his life. But none of them had embarrassed him as much as that little Illager had—and in front of the other heroes!
It was one thing to take on a mob in battle. When you did that, you expected trouble. The risk was part of your calculations. You balanced the possible rewards against the actual harm you mig
ht suffer.
That runt’s useless little punch, though, had shaken Karl to his core. Even if it hadn’t hurt, the fact that he’d been attacked in a place where he’d felt so safe bothered him. In a village, a place where—until that point—he’d felt invulnerable.
That meant that even a village might not be safe for him anymore. And if that was true, then there was no place in this land where he could relax and feel like nothing could harm him.
That thought made him shiver from head to toe.
“Forget it,” Karl said to the others, who had started to set up camp by posting torches around the hilltop. “Maybe you can ignore something like that, but I can’t.”
“You cannot go hunting for that sad little wretch,” Red said. “Leave him alone.”
“And why should I do that?” Karl asked, angry and perplexed. “Someone does something like that to a hero, then I need to teach him a lesson.”
“What good would that do?” Stache said. “You’d defeat him, right? Can’t learn much of a lesson after that.”
“I want to make an example out of him. Let the Villagers know what they can expect if any of them tries to hurt one of us!”
Stache cocked their head at Karl. “Has any of them ever tried to hurt any of us before?”
“That’s not the point!” Karl protested. “They might now that they’ve seen someone attack us.”
Scarface laughed as they stretched out on the open ground to rest. “They already know we get attacked. Every last one of us has hauled our beaten bodies into that place at one point or another, just to scrounge up a meal or some medicine.”
“Well, sure,” Karl said. “But that was because something else had hurt us. And usually something we were protecting them from!”
“So they know we can be hurt. This is not news to anyone.”
“But till today, no one ever tried to make that happen in a village. And now that it’s happened?” Karl let his question hang there in silence, waiting for any of the others to answer. No one took his bait.
“They’re going to line up to take their shots at us!” Karl shouted. His voice echoed out into the darkness. In the distant village, a lone straggler still strolling in the central square cocked their head and looked back at the strange noise echoing in the night.
“You think it’s bad having to deal with all the mobs?” Karl said in a low voice to the others. “At least you can see them coming. Most of them are afraid of the light. They don’t go for you in your beds when you’re sleeping at night. They don’t step up and attack you while you’re talking to someone else.
“When you let Illagers infiltrate villages like that? All bets are off. Those last safe places we thought we had? They’re gone. Forever. We’ll spend every moment there wondering when one of them is going to sneak up on us in our sleep and put an end to us.”
“You’re being ridiculous,” Red said. “That little guy wasn’t a real threat to you. If you’d just left him alone, none of this would have ever happened.”
“Hey.” Pinky had taken up the first watch—as was the custom—on the edge of the hilltop. They were standing just beyond the ring of torches, to help preserve their night vision, and they were pointing at something in the distance, moving off to the east. “Isn’t that him?”
The other heroes—including Karl—all joined Pinky at their position and peered into the night. Sure enough, there on the edge of the Squid Coast, edging toward the Soggy Swamp, a person was trudging northward. They were moving slowly and were hard to pick out in the night, but it was certainly someone.
“You really think that’s him?” asked Stache.
“Who else could it be?” said Scarface. “Not too many people desperate enough to be roaming around by themselves in the middle of the night. It’s dangerous out there.”
“Only one way to find out.” Karl drew his sword. “Let’s go get him.”
“What? No!” Red yelped in surprise and frustration. “Did nothing we said get through that thick head of yours? He’s no threat to you or anyone else!”
Karl dismissed the complaint with a “Whatever,” and then headed out into the darkness. He didn’t get ten steps from the camp before Stache and Scarface raced after him and stopped him.
“You can’t do this,” Stache told him. “We won’t let you.”
“I don’t recall you being my boss,” Karl said as he shrugged off their hands. Still, he didn’t start stomping off into the darkness again.
“It’s not worth your time,” Scarface said. “Are you really going to wander off into the night and try tracking that little Illager down? The mobs will take care of him for you.”
Karl frowned. Maybe Scarface was right. It was a long way to the Soggy Swamp from their campsite on the edge of the Creeper Woods, and the hike would be filled with mobs of all sorts. They’d be just as eager to kill him as they would the Illager.
“Maybe we should go after him,” Stache said, now unsure too. “He’s probably going to need saving.” They looked at Karl. “We’d leave you here though.”
“You’re going to save him? You realize that if you’d found him anywhere else, you’d just put a quick end to him, no questions asked.” Karl folded his arms across his chest. “Either way, if you’re going after that little mob, then I’m coming too. That’s the right thing to do. It’s not safe for any of us, right?”
He knew he wasn’t fooling anyone.
“We’ll never find him in the dark,” Scarface said. “It’s one thing to spot him from a high vantage point like our campsite, but once we get down into the woods or the swamp, we won’t be able to see him. On top of that, we don’t know where he’s going.”
“It’s insane that he’s even out there alone right now,” Stache said. “The Villagers must have kicked him out.”
Scarface shuddered at the thought. “They must have been furious with him. It’s tantamount to a death sentence. They had to have known that.”
“Good riddance,” Karl said, not bothering to hide his relief. “At least he won’t attack anyone else.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Archie had no idea where he was going. He just knew where he was no longer welcome. He couldn’t return to the village, and he couldn’t go back to his tribe’s camp. Other than that, the world stood open to him.
Of course, it was night, which meant the mobs were out and looking for fresh prey. Someone like him—a small person traveling alone at night, without weapons or armor—made for a perfect target for such creatures. It made him wonder exactly when his luck might run out and he would find himself their next victim.
Archie shivered from both fear and the cold as he made his way through the darkness. He’d never learned to navigate by the stars, so without the sun in the sky, he had no idea in which direction he was headed. He only knew that he had to leave the village behind.
He already missed the safety of the village. The torches that warned the mobs away. The walls of the homes that kept the mobs out. The iron golems that served to protect all who behaved within their borders.
He’d felt safer there than he ever had among the Illagers. With the exception of Salah, no one there had picked on him. Some of them, like Yumi, had actually become friends with him. Until then, he’d never had a real friend, and he found that he instantly missed it.
Still, he clung to hope. When he’d been kicked out of the tribe, he’d thought he was dead for sure. He’d been shocked when he’d survived his first night on his own. And that had led him to the village, which had been comparatively wonderful.
Now that he’d lost that, he was still better off than when he’d left the tribe. He was relatively unharmed. He’d eaten well and rested up over the past couple weeks. He wasn’t happy to have been forced out of the village, but he was more ready to face the darkness now than he had been beforehand.
Any mobs he r
an into weren’t going to care about that though. They would just tear him apart.
To keep that from happening, he kept as quiet as he could. He didn’t need to attract any trouble. That would probably find him on its own just fine.
A few times, he thought he heard something from high up in the Creeper Woods, and once, he even managed to spot lights flickering way up there. He wondered who might be so brave as to be camping in such a remote and mob-ridden place, and then he thought better of it. It occurred to him that it might be the heroes who’d gotten him ejected from the village. And if it wasn’t them there was a good chance it was someone even worse.
Archie had never expected to be treated well in the village. He had Yumi to thank for that. He could only look upon that time as a fluke now, a brief moment of brightness in an otherwise miserable life.
He had no hopes of finding another village. He only wanted to survive. He just had no real idea about how to manage that.
But the next morning came, and he was still alive.
Archie tried to keep moving for a bit longer, until the sun rose fully into the sky, but that was all he could manage. His feet hurt too much, and he was simply too tired to march on.
He made it to the top of a low hill and shaded his eyes with his hand as he scouted around, looking for any kinds of threats that might accidentally stumble upon him. The sun might solve the problem of the mobs while it was up, but it wouldn’t do him any good against Villagers, Illagers, or—worst of all—heroes who might find him.
Archie believed himself to be utterly alone. His eyes drooping and legs aching, he found himself a patch of deep grass underneath the shade of some tall trees. There he curled up and went to sleep.
The sun was high in the sky when he finally awakened once again. He stood up and stretched his arms and discovered that a group of giant spiders were crawling up the slope to the south of him. They didn’t look too hungry at the moment, but he didn’t want to test that out.