Leonidas was the only one who even noticed Charlie’s outburst, however. Commander Crunch was busy tunneling forward alongside Charlie, while Stan, Kat, and Cassandrix walked behind, talking among themselves. Stan put torches on the wall as they walked, and Rex trailed lazily behind Kat.
“I still can’t believe that we’re being forced to sneak into our own city,” Kat spat in disgust.
“Oh, I’m sorry, dear. Allow me to play you a sad song on the world’s smallest violin,” Cassandrix replied, sticking her bloated lip out in mock sadness before reverting back to a scowl. “Kat, we’re all down here together. There’s no need to whine about what we’re all feeling!”
“Shut up!” cried Kat, so loudly, that Stan cringed and raised his hands to his ears. “There’s no need to be so obnoxious about it!”
“I’m sorry, what’s that, Commander?” Cassandrix said loudly, looking over at Crunch, who was still firmly fixated on his digging. “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. There appears to be an infant who’s crying because her feelings are hurt. I do wish the parents would take care of her.”
Kat turned red as a beet, and was about to retort when Stan forced his way between the two of them.
“Enough, you two!” he cried, indignantly glancing back and forth between them. “We’re all stressed enough as it is in this stupid tunnel. We don’t need your bickering making things worse!”
“She started it,” Kat mumbled, causing Cassandrix to roll her eyes and shrug with an arrogant sigh.
“I don’t care who started it, I’m finishing it,” said Stan firmly, as he continued to walk forward between Kat and Cassandrix. Man, I’m so glad to be back with everyone, Stan thought to himself, trying to think as optimistically as possible. I missed talking with everybody so much . . .
“Hey, Charlie!” Kat hollered right next to Stan’s ear, causing him to cringe again. “Are we past the wall yet?”
“If my calculations are correct,” Charlie replied, trying to keep his breathing steady as he winced with the effort of mining, “we passed underneath the wall a little while ago, and we should be underneath the Merchants District of Element City by now.”
“Hey, did you hear that, everybody?” Stan asked, looking around the mine at all his friends. “We’re back in Element City! Welcome home, guys!”
There were lackluster murmurs of assent around the mine as Charlie and Commander Crunch tunneled into a sizable natural cave. Stan sighed. He knew that they had to get to Element City as quickly as possible, and the fate of all of Minecraft might lie in their hands. But that didn’t change the fact that they had been walking for three straight days with no sleep, and everybody was worn out.
“Okay,” he said, finally letting his inner exhaustion come forward. “Maybe we should take a break for a little while and rest.”
As soon as Stan said this, the entire group collapsed onto the ground, letting the fatigue of weeks of trekking with almost no rest finally hit them. Stan lay down as well, not even caring that the stone-block floor below him was uncomfortable. Rex curled up at his feet, and Stan was just about to doze off when he suddenly had a startling realization.
“Hey, guys, we can’t all go to sleep yet,” he mumbled, forcing himself to sit up. “Somebody has to stand guard.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Leonidas said, grabbing a ledge on the cave wall and pulling himself to his feet.
“NO!” Charlie cried, causing everybody to snap up right as Charlie jumped, wincing as his bad leg hit the ground. “Get back to sleep, Leonidas. I’m standing guard.”
“Come on, Charlie!” exclaimed Leonidas, looking concerned. “You’ve been mining all day. You really ought to take a rest!’
“What’s that supposed to mean, huh?” Charlie demanded accusatorily. “Are you saying you don’t think I can do it?”
“No, I . . .”
“Then shut up and sit back down!” Charlie spat out bitterly. “I don’t recall asking for your help!”
Leonidas stared at Charlie, amazed at the harshness in his voice. After a moment, Leonidas lay back down and, with an uncomfortable glance at Charlie, rolled over to face the wall. Stan was outraged, and was about to chastise Charlie for his harshness when, without warning, an explosion erupted in the wall beside them, showering the entire group with dust.
Within seconds, all six players and the wolf were on their feet again, weapons drawn, glancing into the misshapen hole in the cave wall. A shadowy form appeared in the smoke, and as the dust settled, a row of figures came into view. The form of Creeper Khan, with Arachnia, Enderchick, Lord Marrow, and Zomboy standing directly behind him.
There was a moment of silence. Stan and his friends stared at the mobhunters, transfixed in horror that they had been discovered. Meanwhile, the members of ELM stared back, their eyes alight with joyous amazement.
“Fancy seeing you here, Stan,” Arachnia hissed with a grin, stepping forward to the front of the group.
“How did you find us?” Stan demanded as he uncomfortably forced himself to look into Arachnia’s eight red eyes.
“Lucky break, I guess,” she replied with a grin. “We were just about to set some traps for you guys down here. We didn’t expect you to get back here so quickly.”
“We’ve been walking nonstop,” Stan replied slowly, trying to buy time as he wildly thought of how they could escape from these bounty hunters. “We wanted to make it back to Element City as fast as possible.”
“Aw, poor tragic you,” Arachnia sneered. “You tried so hard, and got so far . . . but in the end, it doesn’t even matter.”
“Haha! I ged id!” Zomboy shouted. “Because dose are da words to a song! And you used dem in . . .”
“Shut up, Zomboy,” Arachnia said offhandedly.
“Okay,” he replied meekly, looking to the ground.
“Well, congrats to you,” Stan said, still desperate for more time. “You finally managed to catch up to us. Now what?”
“Well, you’re going to come with us, Stan,” Arachnia replied in a disturbingly sweet-sounding voice that made Stan’s skin crawl. “Lord Tenebris is most anxious to see you. And as for your friends, well, they’re of no use to anybody anymore, so they will be disposed of.”
“Well, I’m sorry, Arachnia,” Stan retorted, keeping his voice pleasant and conversational as he realized that there was no escape, and they would have to fight. “But I’m afraid that I can’t let you do that.”
And before the mobhunter could respond, Stan leaped forward and locked his axe against the glowing diamond sword that Arachnia had pulled out, and the two of them began to duel. Immediately, the players who had been standing behind the two leaders leaped into action. Kat lunged toward Enderchick with Rex at her heels, Cassandrix and Creeper Khan struck at each other simultaneously, and Commander Crunch rushed in to help Cassandrix. Lord Marrow and Leonidas both released a barrage of arrows at each other, while Zomboy lunged at the nearest target, Charlie.
Charlie feinted backward to avoid the giant stone axe that the oversized player slammed into the ground, leaving cracks in the stone blocks of the cave floor. As he moved, Charlie felt a sharp pain in his foot, and it nearly gave out, but he managed to stay on his feet, cringing in pain. Charlie glanced up at Zomboy, who was raising his axe and preparing for another attack. He’s not very fast, Charlie noted to himself, and he’s taking way too long between attacks. He must be a heavy fighter.
Charlie became aware of explosions going off behind Zomboy as Creeper Khan started to use his pyrokinetic powers and Lord Marrow fired off explosive arrows, but Charlie forced himself to focus on his own fight. Zomboy continued to walk toward Charlie, swinging his giant stone axe from side to side, forcing Charlie back down the cave toward the way they had come. Charlie saw multiple openings in the attack that would allow him to counter, but each time he was about to strike, the pain in his leg flared up again, and he was forced to fall back to avoid another attack.
Finally, after a frustrating minute of dodgi
ng, Zomboy launched a particularly powerful downward axe strike, which Charlie sidestepped. The axe blade shattered the stone block beneath it in a shower of sparks and became lodged in the ground, forcing Zomboy to struggle to pull it out. Seeing his chance, Charlie launched himself forward off his good leg, and sunk his stone pickaxe directly into Zomboy’s chest. The giant mobhunter winced and staggered backward, axe still in hand, before collapsing to the ground with a massive thud.
Charlie took a deep breath, and let it out as he looked down at the massive body of his defeated adversary. He was infuriated with himself. That giant thug was so unskilled that it should have been an effortless kill, but his leg had made it much more difficult than it had to be. A dark thought crossed Charlie’s mind. What if he came face to face with a skilled opponent? Not somebody like Leonidas in their fight in the forest . . . someone who actually wanted to hurt him? Charlie shuddered as his mind clouded with these thoughts, and he began to walk back toward the fight, past the body of Zomboy, determined to prove himself.
What Charlie hadn’t expected was for Zomboy’s axe to fly up off the ground and directly at him.
Charlie managed to pull his backup pickaxe out of his inventory to block the attack, but the impact of the oversized stone axe on his weapon still sent him flying across the cave. He hit the wall with a smack, landing hard on the stone-block floor, right on his bad leg. Charlie let out a holler of pain and clutched his damaged limb in agony, glancing up through his teary eyes to figure out what had just happened.
Zomboy was back on his feet. His stone axe was held firmly in his right hand, Charlie’s pickaxe was still lodged in his chest, and he was staring at Charlie with a grin, no sign of pain on his face at all.
Charlie was perplexed, not sure how it was that Zomboy was still alive, until it hit him. Zomboy was part of the assassin team, and, according to what Stan had told him, each member of their team seemed to be modded to have some sort of special ability. Charlie realized that this player must be modded to have extra HP, and be able to take a ton of punishment before he died.
As the giant beast of a player lumbered toward Charlie, he prepared to kick off the wall, and get out of the way of the incoming attack. Zomboy began to raise his axe over his head as Charlie kicked off the wall, only to have his knee buckle under the pressure. Charlie hardly noticed, though; he was too focused on the axe raised over Zomboy’s head.
Just as the blow was about to fall, an arrow flew from deep in the cave and lodged itself into Zomboy’s skull, right between his eyes. The giant player gave a yelp of pain, and then proceeded to look down the tunnel toward the source of the arrow, not dead from the blow (somehow) but most certainly angry.
“Hey!” he bellowed down the mine, his eyebrows, with an arrow sticking out between them, knitted in fury. “Wads da big idea?”
Charlie glanced down the cave, and his face lit up in amazement and relief. There, standing in the mouth of the cave, was Sirus, bow raised, and an army of twenty players, all armed with stone weapons, standing behind him.
“Charge!” the crazed redstone mechanic bellowed.
The entire mass of players barreled through the cave, sending arrows and flying weapons at Zomboy. Sensing that he was overwhelmed, the massive mobhunter turned, the attacks simply sinking into his back to no effect. With his axe in hand, he dashed down the cave and back toward his comrades.
As the wave of freed hostages continued to rush past Charlie, Sirus stopped to help him to his feet. “Hey, Charlie, man, long time no see, how’re you doing?”
“I’m . . . fine,” Charlie replied. He couldn’t believe his eyes. From what he had heard, Sirus had perished in the Battle for Elementia. “I . . . I’m really glad to see you. But . . . I thought you . . .”
“Oh, I get it, you thought I died,” Sirus replied with a short laugh. “Yeah, I thought that, too, but I respawned, and I saw somebody duck into the woods and I figured that the hill probably wasn’t safe, so I decided that I wanted to go out into the middle of the Ender Desert because I thought that could be fun, but then I got hungry and tried to eat part of a cactus, and it kind of caused me to hallucinate to the point where I imagined that I was at a wedding between a cantaloupe and—”
“I’m sorry, but do we have to talk about this now?” Charlie cut in urgently, jerking his head toward the blasts and shouts of the ongoing fight down the cave.
“Seriously though, dude,” Sirus continued, as he got into position to help Charlie up, “you must have done something pretty bad to that leg of yours, ’cause it’s totally busted, gone south, practically useless, comparable to the poop of—”
“Okay, I get it, Sirus,” Charlie cut in, irritated. “I’m already frustrated enough without your commentary.”
Sirus merely shrugged and pulled Charlie to his feet. Charlie attempted to take a step forward, but his bad foot couldn’t take the slightest bit of pressure without him screaming in agony. Sirus noticed his suffering and placed Charlie’s arm around his shoulder, slowly helping him follow the horde of Adorian Villagers that had surged down the cave and toward the ongoing fights.
Look at me, Charlie thought to himself bitterly. I can’t even walk by myself. I’m nothing but a cripple now.
As they reached the end of the cave, Charlie saw that, to his confusion, there was no fighting. Stan, Kat, Charlie, Cassandrix, and Commander Crunch were all standing around, looking exhausted and in various states of injury, but the assassins had vanished.
“Where’d they go?” Charlie inquired to Commander Crunch as Sirus helped him sit down on a loose stone block.
“They warped away, lad,” the Commander replied as he nursed a blast wound on his arm. “As soon as Sirus ’n’ his scallywags arrived, the other scallywags realized that they were outnumbered, ’n’ couldn’t win. Th’ poppet that goes by th’ name o’ Enderchick grabbed her mates, ’n’ they all warped away. T’ where, we can only venture guesses, but I doubt they’ll be comin’ back anytime soon.”
Charlie nodded in understanding and looked around at the scene around them. Sirus and Stan were in deep conversation, Stan’s eyes wide, as if he were talking to a ghost. The hostages were wandering around the cave, some of them tending the wounds that had been inflicted during the fight. Suddenly, there was a commotion in the back of the cave, and two of Sirus’s followers came forward, holding Leonidas with his arms behind his back.
“Hey, what do ya think you’re doin’?” Leonidas demanded, clearly too tired from the fight to resist them.
“We found another one of them, Sirus,” one of the two players said, and Sirus turned to face them. Immediately, his jaw dropped.
“Leonidas of RAT1! Force him down, men!”
And with that, the two players delivered sharp kicks to the back of Leonidas’s knees, forcing Leonidas to fall to the ground, a grunt of agony escaping his mouth as Sirus loaded an arrow into his bow.
“I’ll take care of this,” he announced heroically, and he was about to let the arrow fly when Stan realized what was happening. He knocked the bow out of Sirus’s hand, sending the arrow flying down the mine.
“President Stan, what’re you doing? This is a dangerous criminal who needs to be executed!” Sirus cried out.
“Sirus, calm down, it’s okay! Leonidas is on our side now. He’s realized the errors of his ways and he’s fighting for Element City.”
Sirus looked at Stan incredulously for a moment, and then raised an eyebrow in skepticism.
“President Stan, with all due respect, this player is responsible for tons of terrible things that happened during the rebellion against King Kev, and he’s killed more people than you’ll ever realize as a part of RAT1, so are you sure you don’t want me to kill him?”
“I am positive!” Stan barked in fury. “I’m granting Leonidas a complete presidential pardon for his past actions. He’s been traveling with me for weeks, and has proved to me time and time again that he’s sorry for what he did under King Kev and the Noctem Alliance. Now
, he’s willing to give everything that he has to make up for what he did in the past! So I’ll thank you for not being rude to him!”
Sirus opened his mouth, and then closed it again. He gave a sideways glance at Leonidas, who had pulled himself to his feet and was shooting a dirty look at Sirus. Finally, Sirus spoke again, his voice still sounding suspicious.
“If you say so, President Stan,” Sirus replied slowly, and with that he turned to work on Charlie’s bad leg.
“Thanks, man,” Leonidas said, smiling at Stan for a moment before going to tend to a burn wound left on him by one of Lord Marrow’s attacks.
“Don’t mention it,” Stan replied offhandedly, barely paying attention as he came to a startling realization.
Within the next day, Stan would be at the underground bunker of Element City, which held his friends and all his citizens. They would surely be overjoyed to see him, along with Charlie, Kat, Cassandrix, and Commander Crunch. However, he had never considered how the citizens of Element City would react to Leonidas.
As clear as it was that Leonidas had had a change of heart now, Stan still couldn’t change the terrible things that Leonidas had done in the past. And as he led his citizens forward in the greatest challenge that Element City had ever faced, Stan wondered just how they would take it when they found out that he had granted a full presidential pardon to one of King Kev’s most powerful soldiers.
CHAPTER 18 UNDERGROUND
As the frigid winds of the eternal blizzard tore through the streets of the Nocturia complex, the Noctem Capitol Building stood tall and looming. Throughout the war, the Elementia forces hadn’t come close to scratching the capital city of the Nation of the Noctem Alliance, and the Capitol was proof of that. The building was totally untouched, and still the crowning jewel of the Noctem Empire with its gothic stone-brick block design, gold and lapis lazuli block accents, and beacon blocks that shot radiant pillars of light into the sky. The building was also by far the largest and tallest in Nocturia—the highest spire of the building extended out of the base castle and far into the sky.
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