by Nancy Osa
“Turner!” Frida exclaimed. She frowned. “How is it that you’re here?”
“I didn’t think Captain Newbie would survive a trip down under. I dismantled my portal once I crossed over so he wouldn’t fall in and die.”
Rob saw red. “Thanks, Turner, but I can take care of myself. What you’ve done is high treason.” The stunt had cost him and Frida, Kim, Jools, and Stormie hours of worry and worthless searching.
“Treason!” the colonel repeated. “How so?”
“If you please, sir,” Rob began, “our cavalry unit was preparing to defend the Overworld against a griefer boundary takeover. Turner here went AWOL.”
The colonel’s eyes darkened. To Turner, he demanded, “Explain yourself, soldier!”
“Yes, do,” Frida said, tight-lipped.
Turner pushed the subdued magma cube away and leaned forward. “Found the fortress coordinates in Kim’s browser history. Thought I’d offer my services to the colonel before pestering him with our . . . little problem.”
“Little problem!” Stormie echoed. “If you call a world war little—”
Colonel M’s gaze flashed between the two like a searchlight.
“Well, to him, mebbe it is little,” Turner defended himself. “In fact, he thought he could use some paid muscle to keep the mobs in line. We was just getting down to the nitty-gritty when you showed up.”
Jools was upset about the danger Turner had put them all in for personal gain. “You’re saying that you’d prefer to stay here if you got a better offer?”
The mercenary relaxed and put his feet back up. “I know there ain’t as many savory women in the Nether, but for the right salary, a guy could live here quite comfortably. . . .”
The head seemed to grow as it drew itself as upright as a disembodied skull could. “Money,” said Colonel M, “has no place in a just quest.” His eyes shot a beam that knocked the magma cube out from under Turner’s feet, causing the sergeant to lurch forward and fall to the ground. “My offer is withdrawn. Now go, all of you. Before I open the interior gate!” He flew threateningly over to the torch-lit grid, through which the wither skeletons poked their swords and bony arms.
The horses strained at their handlers, terrified. Turner and the others scrambled toward the fortress entrance—except for Rob. “No,” he said, gripping Saber’s reins with all his might.
Colonel M could scarcely believe his eyes. This tiny dragon bait of a man? Defying him?
Rob had not come all this way to be slapped aside like an annoying insect. Again, his terrifying first night came back to him, and all the trials he’d faced. Losing Turner, and Kim’s horses, and having to bring his friends to the most awful, dangerous place on the map . . . He had put himself on the line and had nothing but pain to show for it.
“You were supposed to be this great legend,” Rob snapped at the gargantuan ghost. “This cavalry expert who could do no wrong.” He let go of Saber’s reins and approached the colonel, letting the horse back away toward the others. “Look at you! You don’t even have a body. The only forces you’re commanding are a bunch of burned-up skeletons. The only ‘just quest’ you’re interested in is one that’ll keep people in need from knocking on your door. If you don’t care about us,” he said, waving at his compatriots, “you could at least give our horses some shelter. They worked their butts off getting us here . . . and they’re afraid!”
The entire assemblage was stunned into silence. Their host’s patience had nearly come to an end, and a swift death for all might certainly be coming.
Rob quoted, “‘In no case should a horse be punished for timidity.’”
The colonel’s terrifying glare broke. “Cooke’s Cavalry Tactics, 1862,” he murmured. “A good cavalryman puts his horse first.” A ray of amusement returned to his eyes. “I like your style, Captain. And I thank you for the reminder.” He nodded at Rob. “It has been quite some time since I commanded horse soldiers.”
“I don’t suppose you have any water,” Rob muttered. “They could use a drink.”
*
Colonel M’s ghostly state required no water, or food, for that matter, but his horse, Nightwind, was still in bodily form. The officer invited his visitors to help themselves from his fireproof storage of hay and his infinite water source.
“He must have some ace powers to keep water here in the Nether,” Jools said, watching Beckett slurp from a bucket.
“How else d’you think he gets by with just a head?” Turner said.
“I’d sure like to know how he ended up this way,” Stormie whispered.
Their host floated toward them from a back room. “I’ll tell you how it happened,” he boomed. “In the final battle of the First War, my unit was far outranked by the unified hostiles. My men needed a decoy to allow them to double back and surround the enemy from its rear flank.”
“You!” Rob gasped.
The head nodded. “Me. I took so much damage all at once that I could never respawn with my body.”
“But . . . what about Nightwind?” Kim asked.
“I’d left him ground tied, out of range. He never budged an inch.”
“Awesome training,” she said, appreciating his skill.
“But why did you move to the Nether?” Frida wanted to know.
Colonel M regarded her with a bemused expression. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” He bobbed down the line of horses, checking to see that they’d drunk from their buckets and were finding the hay palatable. “And now seems like a good time to return to the Overworld. Try to finish what I started.”
“You mean—you’ll help us?” Rob blurted out.
The disembodied colonel nodded at the rest of the battalion. “You have everything you need right here,” he said. “What I can do is provide supervision.”
Rob had never been so thrilled by the thought of someone telling him what to do. But he had to maintain his authority. “We’d be proud to have you ride with us, Colonel. But I command this unit.”
Again came the bemused expression. “That is not a job I wish to reclaim. I’m a civilian now. A colonel in name only.”
Their counsel secured, all the battalion had to do now was backtrack to their portal.
“Nothing like a quick trip to the Nether, I always say,” Turner commented from his perch on Duff.
Colonel M had entrusted Nightwind to Kim, after hearing her history and watching how quickly she charmed the horse. Nightwind was the tallest animal she had ever ridden, yet his body was so well-rounded that he didn’t seem overlarge from the saddle. He responded to the slightest shift of her small pink frame, so effectively, in fact, that she didn’t need to do anything with the reins but hold them steady.
The pair led the rest of the group without incident over the lava stream where Beckett had balked. They picked their way back along the trail of clay pillars left by Stormie. She mentioned to Turner how his markers had tipped them off that something was up.
“Great minds think alike,” he said, causing Colonel M to roll his massive eyes at Rob.
Fear sprouted, however, when a numerous mob of wither skeletons blocked their path on the narrow ledge that rimmed the lava lake. Thanks to Colonel M’s presence, though, the threat never took hold. Those that yielded to his command to stand down literally withered in his presence; those that placed arrows to blackened bows were summarily blown by the colonel’s oversized lips into the molten sea, where they shrieked, burned, and sank dead away.
As the party climbed closer to the portal through which they had entered the Nether, Stormie questioned their orientation.
“It was—right here,” she stammered.
Now it wasn’t.
With some squinting and crouching over the ledge’s edge, Frida identified a partial section of obsidian block stuck in the netherrack cliff like a cookie in an ice cream sundae. “Looks like this is all that’s left of it!” she cried. “Must’ve been destroyed by that ghast. Let’s head for the shelter and craft a new por
tal there.”
Turner’s reclaimed obsidian would be enough to construct it. While he and the others got to work crafting, Rob felt an overwhelming drowsiness wash over him. This leadership business took a lot out of a fellow. With everything under control, perhaps he could afford to take a short catnap. He pulled his bedroll off the saddle and left Saber with the other horses.
Frida glimpsed him heading for the stone shelter. “What’re you—?”
He ducked inside, squatted on the floor, and unrolled the woolen bed.
Frida sprang for the door. “Rob! Don’t do that!”
“Don’t do what?” he asked climbing into the sleeping bag and preparing to get some shut-eye.
Foom! The sudden explosion was strong enough to throw the vanguard backward, into the branches of a dead-leaved tree.
*
I’ll never live this one down, Rob thought as Jools and Stormie carried his limp body to the new Nether portal. Worse, his health bar had taken a nosedive.
“How many times have I got to tell you?” Turner upbraided the captain. “Never go to sleep in the Nether!”
“You didn’t tell me,” Rob grumbled. “And how was I supposed to know that my bed would blow up!”
Frida winced. She had taken pride in keeping her naive friend safe thus far. She, too, had received some damage from being hurled at the tree and then falling onto sharp, uneven netherrack. After Turner activated the portal and waved Jools, Stormie, and Rob through, he let Frida lean on him, and they entered the purple mist once more.
Kim led Armor, Saber, and Ocelot through the dimensional pathway.
Colonel M drifted behind Beckett, Duff, and Nightwind, guiding them through. The freshly augmented Battalion Zero moved back into the sun and trudged wearily toward their camp.
Smoke rose in the distance. Stormie put a hand up, halting their progress. For a brief moment, she wondered if the portal had failed. Dozens of small fires burned where their base camp should be. Were they still stuck in the Nether?
But the sun shone, and the mesa was otherwise as they had left it. They wandered into camp. The only sign of life was a very large chicken, which bobbled around in circles.
“Griefers!” Jools muttered.
“One griefer in particular,” growled Turner. “That there chicken’s a sign from Legs.” He threw Duff’s reins to Kim, stalked over, and pushed the demented bird into one of the fires. He picked up the cooked meat that was dropped and passed it around the group. “That there’s a sign from me,” he said, more bent on revenge than ever now.
But retaliation would have to wait. “We’re as helpless as ocelot kittens!” Jools told the group. “We just lost a supply chest in the Nether shelter, and now our communal stores have been plundered.”
How would they mount an attack with no armor, potions, weapons, or ammunition?
“I told you consolidating our inventories was stupid,” Turner complained to the captain, who lay still next to their old campfire pit. It, too, had been set on fire.
Rob didn’t have the strength to impose sanctions on the sergeant for insubordination. But he did throw a bucket from his personal inventory at him and told him to go put the fires out.
*
Thanks to a potion of regeneration that Jools and Colonel M worked up, health and vigor gradually returned to Battalion Zero’s leader. His dignity, though, had taken a more permanent beating. He couldn’t help feeling that the loss of supplies was his fault. The mistake might cost the team everything they had hoped to accomplish.
As he walked along the mesa stream thinking, Colonel M joined him. Having been in Rob’s shoes before, he understood his dilemma clearly. The old ghost asked the newbie commander, “What is it that makes a cavalry a cavalry?”
“Well . . . horses,” answered Rob. “And men,” he added, and the colonel nodded.
“In some cases,” Colonel M said, “whole battles have been fought without a single blade. Consider your effective traps.” They walked a bit farther. “Now you can’t repeat a successful strategy . . . but you can modify it.”
The two discussed how they might use subterfuge to enable them to get back to the village, resupply, and regroup for another assault on Dr. Dirt. “You’re thinking too much about modern warfare,” Colonel M pointed out. “How can you use the two things you’ve got to get what you want?”
Horses . . . and men. Rob envisioned them as chess pieces and moved them around in his mind. The horses, including Beckett if he had a strong lead, would carry them through a charge at the village or any other battle line. What does everyone else do best? Rob asked himself, thinking of his players. They were a very talented group. If he capitalized on their strengths, they could win without firing a shot.
There was no sense in sticking around the ruined campsite. Rob called the battalion together. “Kim! We need some intel from Aswan. Find out if the town replaced their iron golem. And Turner, see if Sundra has enough metal to arm the villagers with good shovels.”
Turner looked at him sideways.
“No smart remarks, now. Jools, Stormie, let’s study that map again.”
Colonel M stood back, satisfaction blanketing his face. “That boy’s a born leader,” he remarked to Frida, who surprised herself by agreeing with him. It hadn’t been so long ago that she had been able to trick Rob with a wooden carrot. He had come a long way.
Kim reported that the village did have a new iron golem, and Turner had cajoled Sundra into crafting as many sturdy shovels as she could.
“Now what?” Stormie asked. She had located a rise behind the village that could be connected to the top of the outer wall by a bridge, essentially forming a back door where one did not yet exist. Such a breach would leave the village vulnerable—if an enemy knew about it.
Jools snapped his fingers, making all sorts of connections. “We get Aswan and friends to install this bridge during the day, when Dirt’s legions are off in their caves. They camouflage it . . .”
“. . . using dyes and wool to paint the normal wall scene on a facade,” Stormie offered. “No one will be the wiser.”
“Then Aswan relays the order to dig a moat at the front gate, where Dirt always strikes,” Jools continued. “Ditto with the camouflaging.”
Now Frida could see where the plan was heading. “The iron golem stays on the village side of the moat, and the skeleton and zombie mobs will rush to assault it, to get at the villagers.” She paused. “But what sets off the mobs? How do we know they’ll show?”
Rob grinned. “We set up a network chat from a bogus source, saying that a huge shipment of gems has been delivered to the village. Dr. Dirt can’t resist an easy score.”
Jools nodded. “While all of that transpires, we’ll have ridden in through the back door, and we’ll hold the fort until sunup.”
Now the outcome dawned on Turner. “Every last monster in the moat will burn to a crisp.”
Kim clapped her hands. “And we’ll get the supplies we need, with no one standing in our way between the village and my ranch!”
Rob hoped they would have some good news when they got there. Retreating to the ranch would allow them to attend to their horses, whose feet desperately needed new shoes after traversing netherrack. Sometimes you have to backtrack in order to make progress, he thought.
Colonel M read his mind. “Now you’ve got it, Captain,” he said with a twinkle in his extremely large eyes. “A good strategist can’t think in just one direction.”
“Hear, hear,” said Jools.
Turner scowled. “That Legs is gonna find that out. What goes around comes around.”
CHAPTER 15
FRIDA’S SUGARCANE HAD BEEN TORCHED, AND KIM was fresh out of carrots and hay for the horses. Before they struck camp, Rob sent the two girls north and east to gather grass and apples for their stores. Turner and Stormie were put to work in the old mine shaft to replenish their iron, gold, and gemstones so they could trade in the village and work on armaments after they reached the ranch. T
hey also placed the old mine carts they found in the battalion inventory.
Colonel M graciously offered to share his larder of brewing ingredients. He and Jools went into a huddle and cooked up the base potions they would need to help safeguard the village. Then, their tasks fulfilled, Battalion Zero said good-bye to the mesa hideout and headed for the plains border.
As they rode along with the colonel’s head gliding beside them, the group filled him in on the action they had seen together.
“You made your entrance in the wake of Lady Craven’s exit?” Colonel M said to Stormie, obviously impressed. “A genius with artillery is behind many a grand triumph.”
“But we lost the TNT cannon at the plains battle,” Stormie confessed with regret.
“I didn’t want to turn tail. . . .” Turner said, trying to preserve his reputation.
“That’s funny,” Jools mentioned. “I recall Duff withdrawing at the head of the line with a skeleton arrow sticking out of his butt.”
“Horse has got a mind of his own,” Turner griped.
“At least he’s still a real horse,” Kim said tearfully, thinking of her mutated herd.
Rob described their pursuit by Dr. Dirt’s mob mounted on zombie horses and their fears that he had transformed all of the stock Kim had spent years breeding on the ranch.
The corners of the giant mouth turned downward. “Such dirty tactics,” the colonel remarked, deeply affected by the loss of so many good horses. “That griefer lives up to his name. And suggests a final resting place where we might send him.”
This show of solidarity bolstered Rob’s spirits. After feeling alone and broken for so many days, hope seeped back into his mind and body. Wars aren’t won with brute strength alone, he thought, although he had to admit that having Turner at his back would be a real asset . . . if the mercenary were dependable.
They discussed their short-term plans. Assuming the ruse with the moat worked to diminish Dr. Dirt’s ranks, they would be able to safely make a run for the ranch. A brief hiatus there would prepare them to advance on the extreme hills—and perhaps break Dirt’s hold on it and the six surrounding biomes.