by Matt Forbeck
Archie looked up at Yumi, his eyes pleading with her, begging her not to be one of the Villagers they dragged away to work in the Fiery Forge. “Please,” he said. “Come with me.”
She blinked away tears of confusion and rage and shook her head. “I just can’t believe this. I can’t believe you would do this!”
“I had to,” Archie said. “The situation demands it. You should be able to see that.”
He reached for her again, but she pulled away. That’s when Archie heard a familiar voice holler something at him. He couldn’t understand the words, but the tone clearly meant, “Hey you!”
He spun about and spotted the hero there—Smacker—storming at him with his iron sword raised and ready.
Archie’s heart sank. If one hero was here, that meant there could be others, and if that was the case, the Illager raid was doomed.
Still, he had to try. He patted the redstone golem on the leg to get its attention and then pointed straight at Smacker. “Get him!”
The gigantic golem brought up its massive fists and began swinging them at Smacker. The hero, for his part, seemed absolutely delighted to be attacked. He grinned widely and crowed loudly and swung his sword about with reckless and amazing abandon.
Yumi grabbed Archie by the shoulder. “You need to stop this!”
“I’m not going without you. This town is doomed—the people will soon be mine—and I don’t want you doomed with it.”
She goggled at him in dismay. “You’re an idiot! After all I did for you? I brought you into my home! I treated you like a friend!”
A large thump cut her off, and Archie spun around to see that Smacker had lopped an arm off of the redstone golem. The creature kept on fighting as best it could, but it was clearly losing the battle. It just wasn’t fast enough to keep up with someone as strong and agile as the hero.
“Stop it!” Archie shouted at Smacker. “Leave it alone!”
Yumi knelt down next to Archie and spoke straight into his face. “You led an attack on this town? And you expect us to just let you destroy the place?”
“He ruined my life!” Archie said. “He needs to stop! I’m going to make him stop!”
You need to bring the others to fight him.
Archie knew what the Orb meant. If he could get the other redstone golems here, they might have a chance against the hero. They were probably still busy fighting the iron golems that watched over the town, but even so, he needed them here. If they could beat Smacker, they could still win.
Archie wished he’d done what he’d wanted and stayed at Highblock Keep until the Fiery Forge had created a full-on army of redstone golems for him. Then no hero could have stopped him. It was too late for that now though.
Far too late.
Archie pulled away from Yumi’s grasp and stumbled toward the center of town, moving wide around the battle between Smacker and the redstone golem as he did. “You traitor!” Yumi shouted after him. “You’d better run!”
With a clap on the back of her iron golem, she sent it lumbering after Archie. As it chased after him, she wiped the tears from her face.
Archie thought if he ran as fast as he could, he might be able to find at least one of the other redstone golems and get it to team up against Smacker. He didn’t get far, though, before he realized something was terribly wrong. The central part of the village wasn’t filled with Illagers stampeding through the place, like he’d expected.
Well, it did have that, but not just that.
In some places, the Illagers were busy attacking the Villagers as hard as they could, but in others, they’d stopped and turned to battle a new and unexpected force of skeletons and husks.
Archie stared at the scene for a moment, too stunned to understand how his planned victory had come to this. What could have possibly caused it to fall so terribly apart? He raised his staff to defend himself against any incoming Undead, but they all seemed too busy to notice him.
He realized that the Undead mobs hadn’t come from nowhere. They couldn’t just have stumbled upon the battle by accident. They must have followed the Illagers all the way from the Desert Temple to the village.
That meant that someone was controlling the Undead mobs—maybe even purposefully keeping them out of the Orb’s reach. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to restrain themselves for the entire journey. They would have attacked the Illagers at some point along the way.
Instead, they had remained hidden from the sun during the day, and they had tracked the Illagers all the way here, moving only by night. They had been patient and cunning, and they had waited until the Illagers began their attack on the village before they made their move. They had held off until the worst possible moment—and now they were here, trying to destroy everything in sight.
We need to leave.
Archie hated to admit it, but the Orb was right.
“Stop fighting!” Archie shouted at his Illagers—and the redstone golems if they could hear him. “The battle here is over!”
He could tell right away that there was no way for the Illagers to defeat the iron golems, the hero, and the Undead mobs. Plus the necromancer that had to be hiding somewhere on the edge of town. They’d lost the element of surprise now, and the Undead had taken that edge instead. They were doomed if they remained.
The only option—much as he hated to admit it—was to retreat.
Thord was sure to use this against him. He’d paint Archie as a coward, someone who turned and ran the first moment things went against him. No matter what, though, Archie couldn’t stand to watch his people get destroyed. They needed to try again another day.
Otherwise, they were sure to lose everything today.
“Listen to him!” Yumi shouted out to her own people. She’d appeared behind Archie with her iron golem at her side. They might have chased the little Illager here to attack him, but the shocking sight of the Undead raging through the place had stopped her cold, just like it had him. “Don’t bother with the Illagers anymore! Focus on the mobs!”
Everyone but the Undead stared at both Archie and Yumi for an instant, entirely confused.
“Leave them alone!” Archie said to the Illagers. “Let their iron golems fight the Undead!”
“You have to be kidding!” Thord shouted in disbelief as he emerged from the fray. He cut down a husk lurching after him as he stalked toward Archie. “We can’t leave now! We’re winning!”
“There are too many of them!” Archie said as fiercely as he could manage. “We’ll all die!”
His commanding tone wasn’t enough. Thord had never wanted to listen to him in the first place, and now that he had an excuse he was going to ignore Archie entirely. “Fine!” he shouted at Archie in defiance. “You run! I’ll stay here and fight beside my Illagers!”
Archie opened his mouth to protest, but before he could speak, an arrow caught him in the back.
You are hurt!
Surprised at the pain that shot through his body, he turned to Yumi to say something, but nothing came out. He just wanted to ask for her help. Together they could take out the Undead, he knew.
But then another arrow caught him in the chest, and he discovered he couldn’t breathe. No matter how hard he tried to suck in enough air, he felt like he was leaking the entire time.
Hold on. I will preserve you.
Archie did the best he could. He clawed at Yumi, who grabbed him by the arms and tried to keep him on his feet.
He felt his knees buckle beneath him as darkness began to curl around the edges of his vision. It pressed in harder by the second until all he could see was a long tunnel that seemed to go on forever, ending in the Orb of Dominance, which still hovered on the end of his staff.
“I hate to say it, but you deserved that,” Yumi said as she laid Archie’s lifeless body on the ground.
Those w
ere the last words he heard before everything faded away.
INTERLUDE
Karl had been sleeping in some Villager’s house—he didn’t really know which one—when he heard the alarm bells start to ring. He’d just taken the closest home when he barged into the village that evening, and when he got to the door of the place, he wasn’t at all sure where he was. He only knew that there was some kind of emergency, which he figured would be all kinds of fun.
What he found when he burst out of the home, his sword already spearing from his fist, did not disappoint him. A band of Illagers had invaded the village in the middle of the night, raiding and pillaging. That was just the kind of thing a hero like him needed to break up the boredom.
To top it off, the Illagers had brought a trio of redstone golems with them. Even better!
Karl hadn’t seen redstone golems before. He’d fought an iron golem once, though, in a village where he’d apparently overstayed his welcome. He still didn’t understand how the people there could have been so ungrateful for his help that they’d finally sent their metal-bodied guard after him to kick him out.
He would have left that village without a scuffle if they’d just been straight with him and asked him to. The fact that they only spoke their silly pidgin language that he didn’t understand a word of may have gotten in the way of their ability to even attempt that, but he didn’t care. It was just rude.
That’s why he’d taken that iron golem apart with his sword, danced on the leftover pieces, and then never looked back.
The people here seemed to tolerate him a lot better. At least they’d never sent one of their iron golems out to deal with him. And now they’d somehow even managed to deliver him some prime entertainment for the evening!
Karl charged straight toward the first of the redstone golems he spotted. He cut down an Illager or two along the way, but they didn’t really concern him. The Villagers could likely avoid them for the moment, and he could mop them up after he’d personally dealt with the massive mobs instead.
Karl pointed at the redstone golem and bellowed, “You are mine!” With that, he cranked his sword high up over his head, sprinted toward the creature, and brought his blade down with all his might. The two-handed blow lopped off the mob’s right arm, and it thumped on the ground as heavy as a felled husk.
Karl hooted with delight and set to dismantling the rest of the redstone golem, limb by limb. While he went at it, he noticed a squirrelly little Illager watching him at work.
The tiny guy looked familiar, like Karl had seen him before. That didn’t seem too likely though. Most Illagers Karl ran across wound up never bothering anyone else again.
Plus, this one was holding a staff with a bright Orb hovering over the top of it like it was held there by a giant magnet. Karl was pretty sure he’d remember something like that if he’d seen it before. Still, he couldn’t shake the sense of familiarity.
He ignored all that, though, when he saw that the battle had just gotten a lot more complicated. As if it wasn’t bad enough that Illagers had raided the village, they’d somehow attracted a crowd of Undead mobs too.
To tell the truth, that kind of excited Karl. He liked a challenge. Just not too much of one.
He wasn’t sure if he should be afraid yet or not. If things got too tough, he could always head for the hills. It wasn’t like he was all that attached to anyone in the village, after all. At least not enough to brave certain death for them.
As it turned out, he shouldn’t have worried for a moment. The Undead hadn’t come there with the Illagers—which would have been weird. Karl had never seen Undead and Illagers working together before.
Instead, the husks and skeletons seemed just as eager to attack Illagers as Villagers, which made everything a whole lot easier. At least for Karl and maybe for the Villagers too. All they had to do was lock themselves in their homes again and wait for the Illagers and the Undead to knock themselves to pieces.
Before Karl could hustle the Villagers back inside, though, he saw that tough woman Villager—the one who took care of the iron golems—talking to the squirrelly Illager with the glow-topped staff. While they spoke, the little guy took a couple cheap shots from some sneaky skeletons right through his rib cage. He went down like he’d never bother the Villagers again.
That seemed to upset the Villager for some reason, but Karl didn’t concern himself about that. Instead, he finished taking apart the now-armless redstone golem lumbering around in front of him—a couple sharp slashes to the knees put an end to its walking days—and then he started shouting for a retreat.
Not everyone listened to him, including that tough lady Villager. She seemed to be trying to keep the Illager alive, which didn’t make a lick of sense to Karl. If she stayed out there, she was sure to get herself killed, so he did the heroic thing and grabbed her.
She fought him at first, but only until she realized who he was and what he was doing. She came to her senses after that and let him shut her into a nearby house.
It was for her own good, after all.
With the useless Villagers out of danger and the Illagers and their other redstone golems on the run, Karl had free rein to take the battle to the Undead mobs roaming through the streets. He started hunting the husks and the skeletons one by one, and then began taking them down in groups. They weren’t any match for his speed and skills, especially since most of them were busy banging on the doors and windows of the Villagers’ homes. That meant Karl could come up behind them and get a good whack or two in on them before they figured out what was going on and turned around to defend themselves.
Karl had a ball smacking the Undead mobs into pieces. He knocked one skeleton into a pile of bones with a single blow. The rest of them just hung around and waited for him to get to them—at least for a while.
Karl was in the middle of taking down a particularly hungry husk when he realized that he didn’t have any others lining up behind that one to get the same kind of special treatment. Once he finished up with that creature, he glanced around to find himself utterly alone. The village streets stood empty.
The Villagers, of course, were huddled in their homes. The Undead seemed to have disappeared too, but Karl didn’t understand where or how. Most of the time such creatures kept at it until Karl defeated them all or the sun came up. He was pretty sure, though, that he hadn’t torn apart every one of the mobs he’d seen rampaging through town.
Sure, it was possible that Karl had lost track of the numbers of his defeated enemies in the excitement. It wasn’t like that hadn’t happened before—maybe more than once. But when he surveyed the village streets, they were just way too quiet.
Unsure if this was cause for celebration or caution, Karl kept his sword in his fist as he stalked around the vacant village, hunting for any stray mobs that needed ending. Not one creature presented itself to be cut down by his blade.
At that moment, he wished the other heroes had been staying in the village that night. For some reason they’d decided that commandeering homes from Villagers was the wrong thing to do, and they’d built their own places to live in. He’d never seen the point of wasting so much time on building a personal fortress when he could just borrow a perfectly fine one in the village whenever he wanted.
Despite what the others might think, that had worked out to the mutual benefit of the Villagers. If he hadn’t been sleeping in one of their beds when the Illagers attacked, the entire place might have been burned to the ground. Especially when you tossed in the attack of the Undead mobs at the same time.
For a night that had raced from a dead sleep to a raucous brawl to an epic battle, it had gone dead silent awfully quick. Even after looking down every one of the village’s streets, Karl still didn’t trust it. He contemplated going back to bed, but he didn’t want to fall asleep and then have to come back out and save everyone once again.
Beside
s, he was still wide awake from the adrenaline of the fight. It was going to take him forever to nod off this time.
He was just about to give up and try that anyhow when the other heroes showed up. They strolled into the village like it was the middle of the day, fearless of anything the night might be hiding from them.
“What are you all doing here?” Karl asked, instantly suspicious. He’d had a wild night and wasn’t about to put up with any more lectures from them about respecting the Villagers’ rights and property.
Pinky gave him a grim nod. “We heard the sounds of a battle and came to help.”
Karl waved his sword all around, gesticulating at the empty streets. “You’re a little late. I took care of it.”
“Nice work,” Stache said with grudging approval. “You took out all these enemies yourself?”
“What do you think?” Karl sheathed his sword and put his hands on his hips, arms akimbo. “After all, who protects this place while you folks all sleep in your own comfy beds?”
Scarface knelt down next to the base of a building. “This place took a lot of skeleton arrows.” They pointed to the wooden stand for the alarm bell nearby. “That got marked up by an axe.”
Karl felt the others all looking pointedly at his sword and his clear lack of a bow or an axe, but he was too shameless to blush at the attention. “Fine. Of course I didn’t take out all of the bad guys,” he explained. “I mean, they’d already started in on each other by the time I got out here. If I hadn’t saved the day, though, we’d have a lot more Villagers missing tonight.”
“Sure,” Red said in a tone that almost sounded convincing. “They must be happy to have you here.”
“They ought to be,” Karl said, just a hair indignant but not wanting to show it. “I mean, who wouldn’t be grateful to not have their homes burned to the ground.”
“What happened to the Illagers?” Pinky asked as they glanced about, confused. “Did they all get beaten, or did some of them get away?”