by Cube Kid
I figured the mayor would just brush us off, but we had to try. Max grabbed the Legendary Mobs book and off we went to the mayor’s house.
The sound of a distant explosion echoed through the streets—and then there was a distant roar, which could have only come from that gigantic pigman, Urkk.
I drew my wooden sword, remembering Max’s words.
Friends. Family. The little kids who play in the street. No mobs are going to get them.
This giant noob named Urkk
is going down.
Ever been in a big village just before sunset?
Ever watched all the villagers scrambling around, desperately trying to get home before the sun went down? Well, after the explosions, our village was like that. Only in reverse.
And with a lot of screaming.
Despite weeks of intense training, we just weren’t prepared.
It was total chaos.
Smoke was rising in the east, and almost no one wanted to stick around for the mobs’ little surprise party.
Well, some did. Some were actually running toward the smoke, like fish swimming upstream. My friends and I fell into that last category. Call us brave. Call us foolish, or foolhardy, or simply fools.
Call us whatever you want to, but we were determined to crash that party. The thing is our anger toward the mobs goes back a long way—way before the slime bombings. All those years of living in fear, unable to sleep, listening to the spiders shrieking, the skeletons rattling . . .
We’d had enough.
We’d decided that we just weren’t going to put up with it anymore.
I won’t provide a detailed narrative for this battle—not too many he saids, she saids, I did this, he did that.
To be honest, I can’t remember much. It was just a blur.
In those first moments, I, like everyone else, was struggling to accept the cold, hard reality: In broad daylight, with barely a cloud in the sky, the mobs had launched the biggest attack in the history of the village.
The first thing I noticed was . . . the zombies weren’t burning in the sunlight. There they were, shambling in the distance, without so much as a spark emitting from them. It was their armor. Some were fully suited in leather; a few were even in iron.
Regardless of what they wore, though, every single one was equipped with at least a helmet.
(Some zombies wore a helmet and a pair of boots without a tunic or leggings, which was just bizarre.)
Anyway, amidst the terror and confusion, I remembered hearing about how a helmet can protect a zombie from the sun.
Which brings us to our first interesting point: A zombie wearing any sort of armor is quite rare, let alone an army of zombies wearing armor.
Consider how much work it must have taken to outfit them all. I mean, have you ever tried crafting a full suit of leather armor? It’s an epic quest. You need, like, fifty cows, which means feeding cows over and over for what seems like forever—and the whole time, you’re listening to that endless mooing and wondering if you have enough wheat: you’re going out to check your crops at night, thinking, Are those torches close enough, should I use bone meal, should I gather more seeds, should I go to those plains over there and take out some horses for extra leather—until finally, you stop farming for leather altogether and go into a cave, because why not? The truth is you could get iron faster.
By the way, that’s just for one set of leather armor. How about one hundred? That’s the estimated number of zombies, in full leather, that attacked our village today.
Knowing that, one must ask: Where did they get the materials? It meant they were farming cows. It meant, somewhere in Minecraftia, there was a cow farm—a farm quite possibly the size of our entire village—tended by various mobs. It also meant they were mining and smelting iron. Not only did they have the resources for such a massive number of items, but they knew how to craft them as well. So—they probably have zombie blacksmiths. Zombie miners. Zombie butchers. Zombie armorers. Zombie crafters. Zombie builders. Zombie cooks. Zombie bakers. Zombie advanced redstone engineers.
Zombie every possible profession
you could possibly
ever think of.
And why stop at zombies? Somewhere out there, there’s probably a charged creeper lumberjack.
Nothing would surprise me anymore. But hey, all this is just preparing me for the real world, you know? At least this way, if I ever see a slime fisherman, I won’t freak out, or be shocked, or offend him by asking how a slime could possibly be a fisherman since he has no arms. Instead, I’ll just plunk down next to him, whip out my own fishing rod, and ask if he’s had any bites. Skeleton librarians. Enderman shepherds. I could accept all that.
There was one possibility I couldn’t, though: What if some of those zombies have a better combat score than I do?
Zombie . . . warriors?
No way!!
I refuse to believe it!!
With sudden anger,
I cut into a zombie with my wooden sword.
This, of course, brings us to our next point.
You see, after I attacked that zombie,
well, it attacked me.
Who knew?
Let me tell you, that single moment was worth more than two or three days’ worth of Intro to Combat. Steve is a great teacher, don’t get me wrong, and that Drill guy scares me to no end, but that zombie gave me a hands-on lesson in just how strong zombies actually are. My vision flashed bright red. A wave of pain flooded my senses. The life bar in the bottom of my vision reduced by two hearts.
The courage I’d felt just moments ago vanished like an enderman in the rain, like water in the Nether, like mushrooms in sunlight, like a waterfall after someone scooped up the spring block with a bucket.
(Actually, that last example is a bit slow, isn’t it? Gah. Never mind.)
Anyway, I was knocked back from the sheer force of the zombie’s attack.
Just then, a horrifying thought hit me: Real. This is real. I’m 20% closer to vanishing in a puff of smoke. If I make too many mistakes—if I let Mr. Stinkypants remove every last heart from my life bar—that’s it.
After that, I felt impossibly heavy and cold. An anvil in my stomach and ice blocks in my veins. For a moment, Intro to Combat went right out the window. So did Sir Runt, the word warrior, and everything in between. I forgot everything.
Everything I’d ever learned, everything that Steve had ever taught me, and everything Drill had ever drilled into my head—gone, like an enchanted diamond sword accidentally dropped into lava.
In fact, I . . . almost ran.
In my defense, the number of mobs out there was enough to make an iron golem cry.
In the words of Urf: “This is baadddd.” He said this in a deep, terrified voice. (In addition, he made a deep grunting sound before saying this, which I cannot replicate with words or letters. Perhaps something similar to what a pigman might sound like when struck in the butt by lightning.) Then he ran into a nearby house and peeked out a window with the most ridiculous expression on his face. He reminded me of a creeper that had to go to the bathroom really bad.
In contrast, Drill was at his angriest. Somewhere in the distance, he was shouting so loud my ears hurt even from where I was standing.
“HOLD THE LINE, YOU RABBIT JOCKEYS!! GET IN FORMATION!!”
Whatever. No one was listening to him. Everyone was too shaken, too confused, and way too preoccupied.
It was like this everywhere you looked. Kids from school, the best of friends, fighting back to back as zombies trudged endlessly forward.
Chris and Kevin.
Joanne and Jamie, twin sisters.
And fighting in one big group: Kristen, Brennan, Marco, Beth, Jackson, Jenn, Tanesha, and a kid nicknamed CamouflageBoy. They all foug
ht valiantly, oblivious to Drill’s shouts. Besides, no matter how many times he ordered us to “hold the line,” there was simply no line to hold. Zombies were everywhere.
Things looked really grim. Until Stump freaked out, that is.
“I hope you brought an anvil,” he said to a zombie, “because you’re gonna need it to repair your face ten times after this!!”
With a loud cry, he slammed the zombie back again and again.
The zombie actually tried to run . . . before it crumbled into light gray dust.
Experience orbs flew from the pile, into my friend, who then swung his sword around slowly in the air.
Kids cheered as if he’d just slain the ender dragon itself. It was enough to bring me to my senses and respawn several weeks of combat classes in my mind. This time, when a zombie lunged for me, I stepped back and swung my blade. When he staggered back, I dashed forward and swung again.
Three swings later,
I defeated
my first mob.
After the zombie fell, I felt a slight surge of energy from the experience flying into me.
Max dropped his own zombie at about the same time. He muttered something about how slaying his first mob wasn’t as cool as it had sounded in the adventure books he’d read.
All around me, more and more villagers were doing the same. We were pushing them back. (Well, technically, we were chopping them or slashing them.) Morale only increased when Mike showed up. “I saw that,” he said to Stump. “Nice work, kid, but don’t get too reckless, huh? Same goes for you two.”
“Okay, hurrr.”
“You got it, Mike.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll be careful.”
The warrior gave us the strangest look.
“Man, what are you guys? The Three Muskanoobs?”
I returned the expression.
“Um, what?”
“Never mind.”
Hurrrgg.
I was still trying to remember all the weird words Steve had taught me, and now Mike was using them, too. Max seemed equally annoyed.
“Honestly,” he said, “if any more of you guys show up in our village, we’re gonna need a class on Earth slang.”
The third point I’ll bring up is perhaps the most interesting (to me, at least).
Tactics. Not ours, mind you. Our tactics mostly consisted of screaming, trembling, shaking, and randomly freaking out.
But the mobs had it down. As a warrior-in-training, I’ll admit it: the way they moved was beautiful. Even Drill was impressed, shouting something about how he wanted to switch sides instead of commanding a bunch of no-good, carrot-brained dirt farmers.
Here’s the most common trick the mobs pulled. We’re calling it the “zombie shuffle.” Basically, the zombies seemed to realize that they were the least valuable, the most worthless. So they’d make a formation in front of the skeletons. They were shielding the skeletons with their own bodies.
The technical term here is
meat shields.
But it didn’t end there. Sometimes, the skeletons hissed in an unknown language. (That language is the ancient tongue, by the way, like the words found on enchanting tables.) Then the zombies moved to the side slightly, giving the skeletons enough room to shoot arrows at us.
If anyone tried to close in on a skeleton, the zombies moved back, blocking their path.
Unbelievable, right? At least, Mike couldn’t believe it:
“So they’re using formations now?! Is this even Minecraft?!”
Max blocked an arrow with his sword.
“Welcome to our world, buddy boy.”
Of course, the mobs had many more tricks up their sleeves. Once, a single spider carried five skeletons up a house, one by one.
A few zombies carried axes and chopped holes in walls to launch surprise attacks.
One zombie even had flint and steel and set fire to everything he could. A lot of houses were lost today.
The craziest mob trick, however, was the “zombie sandwich.” When we first saw it, we didn’t know what to think.
What is a zombie sandwich, you ask?
How can you make one? What are the ingredients?
Here’s the recipe:
Step 1: Take three to five creepers.
Step 2: Surround those creepers with eight to eleven zombies.
Step 3: Just cry.
They moved together as a single unit, which meant that we had a hard time taking down the creepers before they blew up. When those creepers started hissing and flashing, all we could do was move back. They pulled this off a few times, whenever they wanted to blow up a certain building . . . or take out a group of iron golems.
Incredibly, the zombies moved away before the creepers went off, minimizing their losses.
Meanwhile, a few of us had trouble holding a sword.
We’re never gonna hear the end of this
in Intro to Combat.
The Nether will likely freeze over
before Drill’s done scolding us.
That’s not to say we didn’t have tactics of our own. For example, once, two zombies lunged for me at the same time. I managed to knock one back but didn’t have time to deal with the second. Then an arrow cut through the air, above my right shoulder, and nailed the zombie in the arm. It wasn’t the best shot—not that I could criticize someone’s bow skill—but it did knock the zombie back. I finished the second off before it could recover, then dropped the first and looked around.
Who shot that arrow?
They must be perched on top of a house.
Of course.
Even at a time like this, she’s still following me around . . .
No matter where I go, she’s there, somewhere in the background . . .
A crazy fangirl. A creepy stalker. Well, she did help me out. Am I being too harsh? No. No way.
If she wants to be friends, she can talk to me like a normal person instead of lurking around like that! Besides, combat class has become so lame because of her! If she wasn’t always hanging around, Drill would have just let me keep training with my friends!
I wish she’d leave me alone!!
I don’t need her help!!
Hurrrgg!!
My anger returning, I cut through a new zombie.
While we were fighting, some girl showed up and made some flashy moves. Well, she wasn’t just some girl . . . Her name’s Emerald, and she’s one of the most popular girls in school. I’ve never really talked to her much. She’s kind of annoying. She’s never humble, occasionally snide, often cowardly, and always getting into and out of jams.
Despite her somewhat girly appearance, her bad temper can be legendary. Max said she outshouted Drill a couple of days ago when he scolded her about something in the street.
After taking out a few mobs, she turned and bumped into me.
“Sorry.” She smirked. “You, um . . .kinda got in my way.”
“Sure thing, hurrr.”
She glanced at the piles of dust.
“So, are you guys holding up?”
“We’re getting by.”
She nodded.
“By the way, have you seen Pebble?”
“No. Here’s hoping an iron golem mistook him for a zombie.”
At my response, she made an expression like a cat left out in the rain. “Hmmph! Y’know, he’s not so bad.”
She took off after that. So another one has joined Team Pebble. Anger level: off the charts. A zombie approached with a clueless look on his face. He had no idea what was in store for him. No idea.
I almost felt sorry.
Still, as angry as I’d become, I soon cheered up. You see, one of my dreams is to someday wield a diamond sword. Diamonds are super expensive, right? Well, t
oday was a wonderful opportunity to save up. There were a few iron golems roaming around, smacking mobs high into the air. At one point, I just started following a golem around and picking up all the dropped items.
Why not? The golem didn’t need them. Besides, it was better those items went to me instead of some noob.
But then, the golem was a bit slow. Rusty, perhaps. It would knock a zombie into the air, and I’d have to wait for it to come back down . . . and then wait even longer for the golem to trudge over and do it all again.
Eventually, the golem knocked a zombie onto the roof of a house. The zombie didn’t jump back down, either. He just glanced around, decided that was that, and sat down. Urg. After that, I started following Mike. With the way Mike dropped zombies, he was a much more time-efficient source of items.
I figured he already had enough emeralds and wouldn’t mind if I took a few things.
Just a few.
Man,
was I wrong.
He glared at me as if I’d just looted every last item in his secret ender chest.
“Why are you giggling over there, Runt? It’s not funny! Stop stealing my items, noob!!”
Tee hee hee.
At some point, Breeze jumped down from a house.
She must have run out of arrows. But she was afraid down here. She didn’t even draw her sword. In fact, I don’t even think she had one. What a noob . . .