“Ah, because it’s a patented Yancy-and-Stevie idea?” he said. “You know, when Steve Alexander tried new things, it sounds like he faced a lot of resistance too.”
“Patented?” I repeated, baffled.
The yellow blobs were getting closer. Yancy sidled up next to them and opened his backpack wide. “Okay, Stevie, steer them in,” he said.
I began swimming at the pufferfish. They turned away from me and swam around Yancy—not into the backpack. Darn it, this wasn’t working!
“Try again,” Yancy said, sounding like he was trying to be patient.
My stomach tensing, I tried again to push the fish into the backpack. The fish still weren’t behaving the way I wanted them to. They kept turning away from Yancy at the same time that they were turning away from me.
“I can’t get them to go the right direction!” I yelled, frustrated.
“Here,” Yancy said. The next thing I knew, he’d shoved the backpack into my arms. “Hold it open for me.”
I did, startled to see Yancy taking charge. I watched nervously as he went to the fish and started to steer them. When they tried to slip past me, he put his long arms out to stop them. Fenced in by his long arms, the fish moved into the backpack instead.
“Whoo, got it!” Yancy cheered.
I tried to zip the backpack up, but had trouble. We didn’t exactly have zippers in the Overworld! “It’s caught!” I said, afraid that the fish would all swim back out.
“Give me that,” Yancy said, taking the backpack from me. He zipped it up. “There,” he said. “Now we just have to get back.”
We turned toward the ocean monument. Without better eyesight, it looked eerie now, not at all magical. I could vaguely see a purple glow, and figured that was the Ender crystal shard. I hoped the others were doing okay while fighting the guardians!
I opened my mouth to holler that we had the pufferfish, just in case they could hear us. But before I could make a sound, a guardian came barreling at us, already lit up with yellow sparks.
CHAPTER 18
“YANCY!” I SAID, TRYING TO WARN HIM. IT WAS already too late. The guardian blasted me and Yancy grabbed my shoulders when I slumped over in pain.
“I’ll take Earth fish over you annoying little mobs any day!” he said. Once I’d recovered a little, the two of us were after the guardian before it could recharge. Getting close to it made it back up, and I hit it over and over with my sword while Yancy beat at it with his backpack. I saw a brief red glow and knew we’d gotten that guardian. That was close!
I took a deep breath and felt myself choking on it. What was happening? I tried to take another deep breath and realized I couldn’t. I could only take small, shallow breaths, and I could barely even do that.
I looked at Yancy, horror-struck. When I tried to say something, I didn’t hear my gargled voice. Instead I could only hear a weird choking sound. I’d lost my ability to talk! That meant the Potion of Water Breathing was almost used up!
Yancy was making the same sound, so he must have been trying to talk to me as well.
My head snapped forward to where I was seeing the purple glow. We weren’t too far from the room Dad had drained of water, but we weren’t exactly close, either. Our only hope was that the potion would last long enough to get us there!
We both started moving our arms and legs like crazy, as if this could make us go faster. No matter what we did, we could only swim slowly. I put my hand out as if I could grab the monument and pull it closer, or measure how far away it was. My hand slipped uselessly in the water, the monument still so far out of reach.
And then the potion just gave out and I couldn’t breathe at all. Everything was dark, so dark. I wanted to claw at my throat. So this is what it feels like, I thought. This was how Yancy felt when he was in the pool. Except this time there was no lifeguard to save us, and no person with enough Potion of Water Breathing to swim out and help us.
I felt my lungs heat up like a torch and every inch of me wanted to take a breath. I had to fight that instinct because I knew I’d only suck in salty ocean water. The bursting feeling in my lungs kept getting worse. Even being in the belly of the elder guardian had been better than this, because I could still see in there. I could still breathe!
The purple glow was just ahead, and I could tell we must be close. I saw something move. I startled, thinking it was another guardian coming after us. We didn’t need more attacks right now! But instead of another shocking blast, I felt a hand grab me. It was Dad’s hand. The next thing I knew, I was being pulled back into the air-filled room of the ocean monument. Destiny was pulling Yancy in, and Maison and Alex were taking care of the guardians that were still attacking the room.
I sucked in a huge, gasping breath. Yancy unzipped his backpack and out fell our collection of pufferfish.
“You did it,” Dad said, amazed and grateful. He snatched up the pufferfish and began working at his brewing stand.
“We won’t be able to see much, but all we’ll need to do is get back to the boat,” Dad was saying as he whipped up six Potions of Water Breathing. I grabbed my toolkit, glad it was still safe and sound.
“Steve!” Maison called to Dad. “There are more guardians coming!”
“Here, drink your potions,” Dad said, handing them all out. We chugged them down, and bubbles began coming out of our mouths, meaning that the potions were working.
“We did it, Stevie!” Yancy said, laughing as bubbles spilled out of his mouth. In spite of his laughter, there was still a lot of nervous energy about him. “I say we get to the surface and call this a day!”
CHAPTER 19
AS WE SWAM UP AND OUT OF THE OCEAN MONUMENT, the guardians followed us. It was harder to fight them in the middle of the dark ocean, where there was nothing to hide behind. As we swam, we were getting zapped by lasers every few seconds.
“Hold on, kids,” Dad said. “We’re almost there!”
I felt myself get blasted again. Ugh, I hated those fish so much! Another blast hit me but I tried to keep my eyes ahead. As we got nearer to the surface, it got lighter and easier to see. I could see the brown outline of our little boat rocking on top of the waves.
I burst out of the water, inhaling loudly. Sunlight! Clouds! A baby blue sky! I was thrilled to be in a world I could recognize again. The others were all appearing out of the water at the same time and together we scrambled to get into the boat.
Something was already waiting for us there.
It was the guardian that had lunged into the boat earlier and made Yancy and me jump overboard! I had completely forgotten about it, and here it was, still flopping away! Yancy’s parrot, Blue, was flying overhead and whistling in an angry way, as though he didn’t like having the guardian there.
“Another one!” Dad said with a snarl, hitting the fish. Stunned, I watched as Yancy jumped forward and also hit the fish, helping Dad. Just like that, the guardian was gone. Blue gratefully flew back to us and perched himself on Yancy’s shoulder.
“Don’t look down,” Destiny said.
We all looked down. A set of guardians was circling the boat, just like Destiny said sharks did with their prey. The next second, they began to blast us.
“Not so fast, fishes,” Alex said, pulling out her bow and arrows. She began hitting them, one by one, where they were swarming just beneath the surface. Meanwhile, Dad was steering the boat as quickly as he could toward shore. I joined Alex in fighting the guardians, reaching down with my diamond sword to strike them.
“They’re following us!” I said. No matter how quickly Dad moved the boat, the guardians kept circling under it. And no matter how many we made disappear, more kept coming up to attack. At this point Dad was steering the boat and the rest of us were busy keeping the guardians back. And we were still being blasted regularly.
“We just need to get to land,” Dad said. “They can’t follow us far on shore, and we’ll get milk from the village there!” As he said that, he got blasted by a yellow laser
. Angry, I hit the fish that had shot Dad, glad that my diamond sword cut down on it and made it disappear.
A thin sliver of brown and green showed up on the horizon. Land!
I had never realized how magical land looked until this moment. I’d just taken it for granted. When Dad pulled us up onto the shore and we all vaulted out of the boat and onto the solid ground, it was like being home.
The guardians leaped onto the shore with us, only to flop there uselessly, making noise. They were no longer a threat. We could leave them behind. We could leave it all behind.
“That was remarkable,” Dad said as we stumbled farther ashore, out of the guardians’ reach. “Stevie and Yancy, your idea saved us all from drowning. Alex, Maison, and Destiny, you fought so well against the guardians. I know they’re tough mobs to beat. And Stevie . . .”
He turned to me. “I never would have thought to look for the Ender crystal shard with the elder guardian in the top of the monument. That was all you. Maybe Alexandra was right. Maybe having you all as a task force isn’t the risky idea I thought it was.”
I breathed in these compliments the way I breathed in sweet, fresh air. It made me smile. Dad was actually really impressed with all of us and what we’d done in the ocean monument!
“Hey, Stevie,” said a voice from behind me.
This time I wasn’t annoyed when Yancy slipped up to me, wanting to talk. Blue was still perched on his shoulder and looking very happy to have his person back.
“Yeah?” I asked, unsure what Yancy would say after all we’d been through.
“Thanks for listening to me, and helping me out back there,” he said, grinning.
“I knew you had it in you,” I said.
“Did you really?” he asked, looking touched.
“Well, I don’t know,” I said more honestly. Yancy’s smile fell. So I quickly went on, “I think you were the bravest of us all because you were the most scared. Steve Alexander said I had to face my fears. You did all that and more.”
I was used to people getting braver as they got older. It was a little strange to me to have a big, tough-looking kid like Yancy being scared and not wanting to admit it.
“I have a favor to ask you, Stevie,” he went on, smiling again as we headed, dripping, to the nearby village for milk. Dad was already opening Steve Alexander’s book to the last page we’d been able to read and pulling the Ender crystal shard out of my toolkit so we could read it. Soon we’d know where our next adventure would take us.
“What’s that?” I asked, a little uncertain.
“When I go into the shark cage, will you go with me?”
A shark cage? After all that?
“All right,” I finally said. “But only if you go first!”
READ ON FOR AN EXCITING SNEAK PEEK AT THE FIFTH BOOK IN
Danica Davidson’s Unofficial Overworld Heroes Adventure series
Available wherever books are sold in June 2018 from Sky Pony Press
CHAPTER 1
THE ENDER DRAGON WAS ABOUT TO ESCAPE FROM her prison. I could feel it all the way down to my bones, like a cold wind. The monsters in the land had been growing stronger for weeks, and the nights had gotten so long we barely saw the sun anymore.
Then there was her voice: it kept taunting me, inside my head, promising to do evil deeds if I didn’t bow to her. The Overworld’s only hope was to find the last crystal shard that my ancestor Steve Alexander had hidden. With it, we could create the ultimate weapon to defeat her.
But we had hit a dead end.
“Read it again,” my cousin Alex demanded.
I sighed and read the newest passage we’d decoded in Steve Alexander’s enchanted book. We’d already read it a dozen times. After each new crystal we found, the enchantment in the book let us read a little more of the text—but this clue was far too vague. So far Steve Alexander had also been giving us maps in the book to find the next crystal, but we’d gotten no map with this one. And time was running out!
“For its safety, the final crystal shard has been taken from this world and given to Maya,” I read. “Seek out the earth woman. Alex, that’s all it says.”
“This is just great,” muttered Yancy sarcastically, raking his hand through his dark hair. “We have no map, and apparently this crystal is floating around somewhere on Earth. A tiny little planet which, according to the Internet, has a radius of a mere 3,959 miles. You know, just a quick stroll.”
“It’s almost like Steve Alexander doesn’t want us to find the last crystal shard,” murmured Destiny, nervously biting at her fingernails.
“I don’t think that’s it,” Maison argued. She was my best friend, and the first person I had met from Earth. Right now we were all sitting in her bedroom, near her computer that acted as her portal to the Overworld. Or “Minecraft,” as people on Earth called it. “Whenever Steve Alexander gets vague about things, he usually wants us to dig deeper.”
“Yeah, and I’m digging,” Yancy said, clicking on his phone. Blue, the pet parrot he had tamed in the jungle biome, was perched on Yancy’s shoulder, happily chirping. At least that bird was unaware of the stress the rest of us were feeling.
“If we can’t track down the crystal, you’d think we’d at least be able to track down Maya, the Earth woman who helped Steve Alexander imprison the Ender Dragon in the first place,” he went on. “But you know what the problem is with that? Well, there’s the fact that she apparently lived thousands of years ago, before most human cultures had writing systems. Second, when I Googled the name ‘Maya,’ I got about a million hits. It showed up in all sorts of ancient cultures, not to mention modern ones, so we can’t even narrow down where she might have lived. That’s not even counting all the cultures that have disappeared over time, so we don’t even have records of the names used.”
I’d never thought of cultures disappearing. Was that like how we’d find old, forgotten temples in the Overworld and have no idea who’d made them? It hadn’t occurred to me that Earth might have that, too.
“What does all that mean?” I asked.
“It means,” Yancy said, “that Steve Alexander is no help on this one. We’re down to the last crystal shard, and he’s bailed on us. After all that talk about being a hero. What a loser.”
Alex jumped up, furious. “Steve Alexander is the greatest hero the Overworld has ever seen, and he’s our great-great-great-whatever grandfather! Don’t you be talking about him like that!”
“Fine,” Yancy said, tossing his cell phone into Alex’s hands. “Then you find the crystal shard, and Maya.”
Alex frowned. “I don’t know how to use this contraption!”
Alex and I were from the Overworld, while Maison, Destiny, and Yancy all came from Earth. Alex and I knew how to make our own food and build our own homes and create our own weapons. Maison, Destiny, and Yancy knew how to use cell phones and computers and the Internet. We came from very different worlds, but we were still friends.
We were also all part of the Overworld Heroes task force, which had been created by my aunt, Mayor Alexandra. It was supposed to be our mission to stop the Ender Dragon from escaping from the End. She’d been threatening to do so for a while, and if she did, her first mission would be to take over the Overworld and go after Steve Alexander’s descendants. That meant Alex, Aunt Alexandra, Dad, and me. She hated Steve Alexander for locking her in the End thousands of years ago. She’d been biding her time, waiting for revenge, ever since.
I ran the crystal over the book’s pages. Normally using the newest crystal shard would light up more words so we could read. But all these pages were blank. And they stayed blank, crystal or no crystal.
“I think we’d probably have better luck using the original tools Steve Alexander gave us, instead of using the Internet,” Maison said quietly. She had been acting really thoughtful while the rest of us were panicking. “They wouldn’t have had the Internet back then, so he and Maya wouldn’t have put clues there.”
“See? This thing has n
o answers.” Alex threw the phone back at Yancy, and he caught it as it struck him in the chest. “You people on Earth have all these things that are supposed to make your lives easier,” Alex said, “but they don’t answer the hard questions!”
“Hey, at least we live in a world that isn’t overrun with monsters every night,” Yancy shot back. Unlike Earth, darkness in the Overworld brought with it an onslaught of zombies; giant, red-eyed, spiders; armed skeletons; creepers; and other monsters we called “mobs.” “Maybe if you had more technology, you would have figured out how to get rid of them by now.”
Alex’s face turned so red it looked like she was about to spit lava. When she opened her mouth to yell something at Yancy, I turned away and tried to clear my thoughts. I knew they were only fighting because they were stressed, but it wasn’t going to do any good. Destiny looked miserable and hopeless, while Maison was staring out the window at the cold, rainy day, her mind clearly far away. I went to sit next to Maison.
While Yancy and Alex were arguing, I kept remembering what Yancy had said about Steve Alexander: What a loser.
Was he right? Everyone in the Overworld honored Steve Alexander’s name, but when you looked at Steve Alexander’s own writing, it often sounded like he didn’t think he was so heroic. And the Ender Dragon kept hinting that the Steve Alexander we thought we knew wasn’t the real Steve Alexander. Then again, she was always lying and manipulating and trying to destroy worlds. Steve Alexander wanted to save worlds.
Except now he’d left us stranded. It wasn’t fair. Why would he even give us such a weak clue?
“What do you think?” I asked Maison.
“Maya can’t be alive anymore, so it’s not like we can seek her out,” Maison said. “And that must be who he means by ‘the Earth woman.’” She thought for another moment. “Unless . . .”
That “unless” was enough to get my heart pounding. Right then, any idea was enough to get my heart pounding.
Clash in the Underwater World Page 6