Descent into Overworld
Battle of the Blocks
Book One
Liam O’Donnell
liamodonnell.com
feedingchangemedia.com
For the Rools, the Grims, the Aeries
and all the Youngers and Elders
on GamingEdus.
Contents
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 | Chapter 18 | Nether Nightmare Preview | Author’s Note | Thank You! | Also by Liam | About Liam | Copyright
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Descent into Overworld
Battle of the Blocks 1
Things got serious when the creeper blew up the cafeteria.
Hamid, Ant and Jaina just want to create epic builds in Minecraft. When a mysterious stranger gives them four foam swords, the three friends and their videogame-hating principal are transported into a world of blocks and thrown into an epic battle to save their favorite game.
An army of Minecraft monsters threatens to rampage across the real world, destroying neighborhoods, terrorizing families and totally giving videogames a bad name.
Together, Hamid and his friends must harness the power of their swords to fight the horde of zombies, skeletons and creepers. But first, they have to stop their principal before he makes a deal with the game’s ultimate dark force to destroy Minecraft once and for all.
Grab your pickaxe, the Battle of the Blocks has begun . . .
Chapter 1
Things got serious when the creeper blew up the school cafeteria.
Three-day-old macaroni salad covered the kitchen.
“This is bad,” Ant said from under the food prep table. Goopy pasta dripped from the edge. He caught a glob with his fingers and popped it in his mouth. “Bad but very delicious.”
“It’s bad and it’s very much your fault!” Hamid said. He elbowed Ant in the back to get more room under the table.
“I said I was sorry about that.” Ant squished over, giving his best friend prime access to the dripping macaroni.
Ant hated to admit it, but Hamid was right. This was all his fault. Ant had caused this chaos. He was the reason why his school was filled with roaming creepers. And there was no way to stop it.
A loud hissing came from the other side of the windows running along the kitchen wall. Hamid spied a tall, sausage-shaped shadow crawling through the darkness. The creature peered through the window with sad eyes. Its body flashed like a broken light bulb. Hamid knew what was coming next. He plugged his ears.
BOOM!
Chunky red goop splattered against the windows.
“There goes the pizza lunch special.” Ant rubbed his belly. Tomato sauce and pizza dough covered the floor. It mixed in with the spilled macaroni to create a swirling mess of food that Ant might have sampled if they weren’t hiding for their lives. He stared longingly at the goop. “All that pepperoni gone to waste.”
“Another reason to hate creepers,” Hamid said.
Sharp screeches echoed through the ceiling from outside. The school windows rattled as a squadron of flying ghasts rained fireballs down onto the schoolyard.
“Sounds like they hit the Adventure Playground,” Hamid said.
“The kindergartners are going to be ticked off,” Ant said.
The kitchen door burst open. Two thin shapes clattered through the doorway. The sinister pair moved as if they were one. Their long bows were pulled tight, arrows ready to fly. Skeletons. The clean-up crew, moving in to mop up anything that survived the creeper blast. They pointed their bows around the kitchen, looking for a target.
Hamid felt like he’d eaten a tub of rotten mayonnaise. There was nowhere to run. No escape.
“This is the end,” he said. “We’ve come all this way to be defeated by two lousy skeletons in our own school kitchen.”
The skeletons rounded the end of the table. They spun their bows directly at the two friends.
Ant and Hamid looked their attackers in the eye. They were ready to accept their fate.
The real world would never be the same.
They had lost.
Herobrine had won.
* * *
Two weeks earlier, Ant and Hamid were thrilled to be surrounded by skeletons and creepers.
“I told you Mini-Minecon was going to be a blast,” Ant said.
“You said it was going to be total fail.” Hamid gave his friend a playful punch.
“Ouch!” Ant rubbed his shoulder in mock agony. He stood a head taller than Hamid and was thin as an enderman but moved slower than a slime-slurping uphill.
“He’s right, Ant,” Jaina said beside them. She was in sixth grade, was almost as tall as Ant, and loved Minecraft just as much as both boys did. “You said no one would come to a Minecraft convention in our home town. Remember?”
“Okay, okay,” Ant said. “Maybe I had a few doubts.”
“Only a few doubts, Ant?” Mr. Rodinaldo’s deep voice made them all jump. It always did. For a guy the size of a refrigerator, Mr. R moved as quietly as a ninja. Hamid wondered if they taught Sneaking 101 at teacher’s college. “I seem to recall you saying our Mini-Minecon convention was going to be just me and a plate of uneaten sandwiches.”
“Did I say that?” Ant said.
“Yes,” Jaina and Hamid said in unison.
Mr. R chuckled. “I’m only teasing, Ant. I had my doubts too, but this little event turned out to be a success.”
A sea of people moved through the lobby of the convention center. The place was packed with fans of the blocky building game. People in cardboard creeper costumes hurried across the orange carpet. Families wearing Steve heads posed for pictures. There was even some dude on stilts in a full-on enderman costume. For a town as small as Renville, it threw a pretty good Minecraft party.
A woman with big hair and an even bigger smile walked up to them.
“Are you ready for your interview now, Mr. Rodinaldo?”
It was Mr. R’s turn to jump in surprise.
“Ah, yes!” he said. His face flushed a deep red.
“Excellent. We’ve got the camera set up over here.”
Mr. R followed the woman across the lobby to a quiet corner where a tall man carrying a TV camera on his shoulder greeted them.
“Is that Sheena Raine from Channel 57?” Ant’s eyes bugged out. He looked like a toad that just swallowed a hot pepper. “Is Mr. R going to be on the news tonight?”
“That would be cool,” Hamid said.
Mr. Rodinaldo had played Minecraft since it was in beta. He was the one who had started the Minecraft club at their school. Not that it was much of a club, thanks to their principal’s dislike for videogames. Principal Whiner refused to allow any videogames on school computers — even those lame educational games that tried to trick you into learning stuff. Whiner’s motto was ‘If it’s fun, it’s not learning!’ He even had it painted on the walls of their computer lab in the library.
Naturally, Whiner refused to allow Mr. R to start a Minecraft club at the school. But Mr. Rodinaldo’s favorite motto was ‘If at first you don’t succeed, keep nagging.’ Eventually Whiner caved. Sort of. He allowed the club but definitely didn’t w
ant it to succeed. To ensure its failure, Whiner limited the club to only three members.
Chaos ensued. Every kid in the school hounded Mr. R. They pestered him before school, after school, at recess and even while he ate lunch in the staff room. They pleaded with him to be one of the lucky three. You would think Principal Whiner would take this as a sign that the club would be a hit with the kids. Instead, Whiner blamed Mr. Rodinaldo for distracting students from their valuable learning.
Most teachers would have just cancelled the club after all this hassle, but not Mr. R. He put all names in a very large hat. Jaina, Hamid and Ant were the lucky three chosen. Everyone at the school hoped Principal Whiner would let more kids into the club next year. Hamid figured they had a better chance of seeing the old fart wear an ‘I pork chop Minecraft’ T-shirt.
Mr. Rodinaldo had helped organize today’s Mini-Minecon in their home town, and what a great day of geeking out it had been.
Jaina had gone to all the redstone workshops and learned a bunch of new tricks and builds for her pistons and redstone contraptions. Ant had spent time in the master building sessions, learning about new ways to use Minecraft’s blocks to create colossal builds. Hamid got his nerd on with the back end coder types. They sat around talking mod packs, plug-ins and other admin level stuff to keep his server humming along.
“We should say goodbye to Mr. R before we go,” Jaina said. “If he ever finishes talking to Sheena Raine.”
Hamid grinned. “When Mr. R gets talking about Minecraft, it’s hard to get him to stop.”
“He’s not the only one.” Ant fixed Hamid with a knowing stare.
“It’s my Minecraft knowledge that has saved your butt many times, noob!”
A guy in a villager’s costume pushed his way out from the crowd. He ignored the complaints of the other fans and stumbled toward them. Without a word, he collapsed into Hamid’s arms.
Jaina rushed to the man’s side, helping him stand.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
The villager didn’t respond. He struggled to breathe under his mask. Was it even a mask? It was the best Minecraft villager head Hamid had ever seen. He couldn’t tell where the costume ended and the person began. But the guy did get one thing wrong: this villager had red hair. Even the biggest noob knew all villagers are bald.
The villager grabbed Hamid’s shirt and looked him straight in the eyes.
“Help us,” he gasped.
“Get the mask off him so he can breathe better,” Jaina said.
The villager shook his head. He let go of Hamid’s shirt and sat down on the carpet. He slipped his backpack from his shoulders and began rummaging through the bag.
A thin piece of wood tipped with feathers stuck out from the villager’s side.
Ant leaned close to Jaina. “Look at that arrow! Is that part of the costume?”
“I have no idea,” Jaina said, unable to take her eyes off the very real and very painful-looking wound on the villager’s side.
Jaina kneeled down to get a closer look at the stranger’s wound but the villager waved her away.
“There is no time,” he said, still fumbling through his bag. “He is coming.”
The villager pulled four blue foam Minecraft swords from the backpack.
Hamid wondered how he fit the long swords into such a small bag. Before he could ask, the guy in the villager costume thrust the swords into his hands.
“You will have to do,” he said.
“Have to do what?” Ant asked.
The villager paused as if he was thinking about Ant’s question.
“Save the Seed. Save us from Herobrine,” he said. His whole body slumped like he had just fallen asleep.
But he wasn’t asleep. Jaina shook him gently. He didn’t wake. She turned to the others, her eyes filled with worry.
Around them, people kept moving through the convention center. No one took any notice of the little man on the ground.
Ant was about to yell for help when the villager began to sparkle. The sparkle grew into a glow that lit up their corner of the lobby. Then, as quick as flicking a light switch, the glow vanished.
And so did the villager.
The three friends stared at the empty patch of carpet where he had been moments before.
The only trace of the strange visitor was the foam swords in their hands and his words echoing in their minds.
Save us from Herobrine.
Chapter 2
The foam sword lay across Principal Whiner’s desk. It looked out of place on top of the teetering stack of spreadsheets, test scores and detention records. Each piece of paper represented the worst thing about school: children.
Principal Whiner often dreamed of the day when some genius would figure out how to run a school without those miserable, gap-toothed, snot-nosed monsters known as children. They were loud, rude and always getting in trouble. And when they got in trouble, it was up to him to punish them. He considered it one of the perks of the job.
Whiner scowled at the two boys standing in front of his desk. Anthony Thistle and Hamid Parvan. Two examples of what was wrong with schools today: they let in brats like Hamid and Anthony. Unlike many teachers at North Gray Elementary, Principal Whiner refused to call Anthony by his nickname, ‘Ant’. Nicknames did not appear on report cards. They were a distraction to a child’s learning at school. And often they were fun. To Principal Whiner, fun did not belong in school. Ever.
Whiner picked up the foam sword and held it like it was something pulled from a first grader’s nose.
“This is from that game of yours. Isn’t it?”
He said game like it was a swear word. To Principal Whiner, videogames were worse than any bad word. They warped the minds of children. They made kids lazy. They made kids violent. Videogames were a scourge on the youth of today. And this Minecraft, with its zombies and skeletons, was the worst one of them all. It had seeped into the minds of children in his school unlike any game before. Even the teachers enjoyed it. Some, like that fool Mr. Rodinaldo, wanted to play the game in class to make school fun. School was not meant to be fun. It wasn’t fun when Whiner was a child and it should not be fun today. There was no question about it, Minecraft had to go. Principal Whiner didn’t just want it gone from the halls of North Gray Elementary, he wanted it gone from the world. And the first step in that quest began with the two boys in front of him.
Whiner dropped the sword back onto his desk.
“Well,” he said. “Are you going to answer me or just stand there like two terrified guppies?”
Ant took a deep breath and launched into his prepared defense.
“It is from Minecraft and it’s perfectly harmless —”
That was as far as he got.
“Harmless?” Whiner said in that high, squeaky tone he got when he was getting ready to lay into an unlucky student. “Young man, there is nothing harmless about a sword! It can seriously hurt people.”
“It’s made of foam,” Ant said. “You know that, right?”
Hamid cringed. Was his best friend trying to make things worse? Interrupting Whiner when he was on a roll only added to the inevitable punishment.
“I don’t care if it’s made of diamonds!” Whiner said. “You know the rules. No weapons at school. Foam, wooden or real.”
Hamid knew better than to tell his principal the blue foam sword was meant to be a diamond sword in Minecraft. Ant, who clearly didn’t know better, opened his mouth to speak. Whiner silenced him with a look. Their principal read the pink note that had traveled with them from class.
“According to Ms. Talagrand, you were playing with them during a math test.”
“We were finished, sir,” Hamid said. Technically, Whiner had stopped talking so he hoped this didn’t count as interrupting.
“Don’t interrupt me!” Guess not. Whiner continued to read the pink note. “You were chasing each other around the classroom waving this weapon while one of you was shouting, and I quote, ‘SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
SSSS … BOOM!’ Does this sound correct?”
Ant stood up straighter and cleared his throat. “Hamid was a creeper, sir. And I was merely trying to save my classmates from being blown to smithereens.”
Principal Whiner turned his glare up a notch. “Are you messing with me, young man?”
“No, sir, he’s being totally serious,” Hamid said. He struggled to keep a straight face. He was scared of what Whiner would do but the confused look on his principal’s face was pretty funny.
Hamid knew his dad would be furious to hear his son was in trouble again. That would mean no screen time at home. And that meant no Minecraft. He had a dozen things to do on his server. He had plug-ins to update and most likely griefing to roll back. There was always griefing to fix. He couldn’t lose his screen time.
Ant began to speak again but Hamid jumped in first.
“We won’t do it again, sir. Whatever punishment you feel is fitting, we will gladly do it.”
Hamid could feel Ant’s glare burn into him. His friend had trouble with that whole ‘knowing when to quit’ thing. Hamid would have to explain it to Ant. Again.
“A month’s detention for both of you. Starting today.” Principal Whiner jabbed his finger at the foam sword on his desk. “And I’m keeping this.”
“You can’t do that!” Ant said.
“Yes, I can,” Whiner said. “Now get back to class before I make it two months’ detention.”
Hamid dragged Ant out of the office.
“But! But …” his friend stammered on the way through the door.
The office door closed with a satisfying slam. Mr. Whiner’s whole body glowed with satisfaction. Finally, those two brats got to see who was in charge at this school. A month of staying after school instead of rushing home to play that silly game would wipe the smug smiles from their faces.
Whiner allowed himself a satisfied chuckle. There were parts of this job he did enjoy. Showing young people who was in charge was definitely up there as one of his favorites. Principal Whiner tried to enjoy the satisfaction of a kid well punished. But something wasn’t right.
Descent Into Overworld: An Unofficial Minecraft Adventure Page 1