NOVEL NEXT 25. The Catacombs I
The first floors of the Catacombs, as Dumbledore had said, were safe and somewhat empty. Long rounded stone passages overgrown with moss and strange glowing plants stretched in all directions, leading into the unknown.
Well, or they would have led into the unknown if Dan didn't have a map.
There were small paths in the middle of the aisles where water should have flowed, but now these paths were almost empty, the water had long gone to the lower levels. Of course, this meant that the smell inside left much to be desired. But this emptiness meant that Dan had the perfect space to experiment. The first thing he did was to take out a very interesting item from his backpack.
The Crafting Table.
The Crafting Table was the heart and soul of every Minecraft player, like a knife for a chef. Without a Crafting Table, life becomes very difficult, not to mention anything about progress.
It was a sturdy wooden cube with a leather top and tools hanging off the hooks on the sides. For Dan, it was his workstation for everything in the world, from making cakes to building mythical artifacts. One could even argue that the Crafting Table itself was an artifact; only aimed at creating other magic items.
Dan's backpack had all the things a researcher might need: wooden logs, a bunch of leather and iron provided by Hagrid, and enough food for a week, just to be on the safe side. Of course, there were some other useful things inside too.
He already knew how he could make wood planks and sticks; he didn't even need anything to do it. The next target was an iron pickaxe. Two sticks with three bars of iron ended up on the table; the objects themselves didn't turn into anything, they lay lifelessly, didn't even twitch. Dan couldn’t say he didn't expect this.
"And how does this work?" The monster boy muttered as he placed his hands on the table.
There was a sudden pulling feeling in his hands, like someone was sucking the energy out of his veins; and right in front of his eyes, the sticks and metal turned into a pickaxe, taking some of his magic as payment.
Dan frowned. The theory that even the Crafting Table was an artifact had been confirmed, but that gave him a new problem. Could anyone else besides him create things?
"I'll check with Luna later."
Taking the pick in his hand, he swung it from side to side, testing its weight. He doubted he would find diamonds or anything better – magic metals were hard to come by when you didn't have a lot of money – so it was his main tool for a long time.
The pick was followed by two more tools: an axe and a shovel. Dan had no idea how to handle a one-handed sword, so the axe was much more useful to him. In order to strike with an axe , one didn't need to have much skill, at least not on the same level one needed to use a sword.
What Dan could use was a spear and a crossbow… His grandfather had strange priorities in teaching.
The next item on the list was the not-quite-obligatory armor, but he wasn't going to waste iron on it. He didn't want to lose even a fraction of his mobility, so Dan settled on leather armor. Combined with his thick skin, this would still be the equivalent of iron armor anyway.
The leather chestplate was actually more like a thick sleeveless vest; the pants were still pants, but the boots became sandals that Dan couldn't tear apart with claws on his toes. Dan wasted no time and quickly put on his new protection, then pulled his long coat over the top so that there was less chance of him getting wet.
Oddly enough, every piece of armor fit him like a glove, and he was especially surprised by the leather sandals. Unfortunately, he didn’t have enough leather for a helmet, but he considered even that to be a good result.
After finishing with the preparations, Dan put everything he didn't need back into his backpack, leaving only the axe in his hands and the pickaxe on his side.
"My ancestors are smiling at me…" Dan said with a smile and walked confidently towards the place where the stairs should be.
It was his first time in a place like this, so the descent today promised to be short-lived. It was the last weekend before Halloween, and with his promise to spend the holiday with Luna, Dan decided to set aside enough time for himself to read about the rituals that took place that day.
The girl had already told him that on this day the veil between the world of the living and the dead was getting thinner and this made Dan think… What if it's not just one veil? Would he be able to send a message to his old world…?
"Stop. Put aside the agnst, you'll suffer later," he said to himself, "now is not the time for that."
It was difficult to keep his mind empty of unnecessary thoughts, especially when all the paths around him looked the same. His mind simply had nothing to cling to.
That was, until he started to hear some strange sounds. It sounded like someone dropped a wet ball of water in the mud over and over again.
Dan stopped, looking in the direction from which the sound came. His eyes could see quite well in the dark, but feeling that there was someone else nearby, he decided to add light to this place.
"Lumos Solem." He intoned, raising his palm to the ceiling.
A miniature sun gathered on his arm and flew up, filling the tunnel with light. And when Dan finally saw the source of the sounds, he didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
His pass was blocked by a Green cube slime and it slowly but surely jumped in his direction. With his height of three and a half meters, Dan didn't think that the slime was that big. Of course, it was exactly up to the moment when he realized that this cube of death was two meters in size from all sides.
"... how the hell are you here?"
Dan shifted the axe handle in his palm and prepared to chop away. It was a great chance to understand just how durable slimes were in this new Magical world. His body disappeared in a flash of purple sparks and immediately appeared behind slime's back, his hand was already lowering the axe on the creature's body.
The axe sliced through the soft flesh of the cube, but it didn't even let out a peep in pain. The creature's eyes moved through his body, disappearing from Slime's "face" and appearing on his "back" where Dan was standing.
The second blow followed immediately after the first, while the sluggish slime was trying to figure out what was going on. The cube jumped at Dan, hoping to crush him with its weight, but he teleported to the side, chopping the creature for the third and last time.
The slime shuddered and its body fell apart into three pieces. Only they weren't pieces of slime, they were slimes themselves. One of them immediately jumped on Dan, but got curb stomped right between the eyes. The second and third were blown apart with a wave of the hand and a bellow of "Confringo!" into little parts.
Dan looked down at the little slimes, with such a size, they even looked cute, but he knew that these assholes were ready to devour him at the first opportunity.
"Gentlemen." He raised the axe. "You're fucked."
A minute later, Dan was twelve pieces of slime ball richer – he's never been so grateful to mankind for the invention of paper bags – and continued on his way. There are already a couple of barely noticeable scratches on his axe, evidence of his first kill.
Dan felt like a real Brit right now. He came to a foreign land and began to take everything that his soul desires, without even thinking about the consequences. 'The only thing left for me to do is exhibit my trophies in some museum, maybe someone will even give me British citizenship for this.'
His descent continued on without much change. He slowly walked along the stone path, sometimes meeting more slimes and replenishing his supply of resources. Stone blocks and cobblestone, for example, were the newest residents of his bottomless backpack.
Some of the slimes were neutral, they just jumped past him and continued on their way. But these were mostly small ones, they knew very well that they couldn't harm someone who was seven times larger than them.
The only thing that knocked Dan out of his routine was a huge hole in the middle of one of the tunnels filled with slimes of various sizes. This scene was somewhat reminiscent of a teenager a can of worms, in which they threw a pile of salt. Each of them writhed in annoyance, trying to get out of the hole.
'And Luna walked around here completely alone, without protection? Although for some reason I'm sure she's made friends with all the slimes.'
Shaking his head, Dan eventually reached the fifth floor. At the end of the corridor stood a tall double door covered in layers of magical protection, huge metal bolts, and a hundred-or-so small hooks. It had no handles, levers, buttons, or even a hint of how an ordinary person should open it. This door seems to have been made for giants.
Standing in front of the imposing structure, Dan stood to his full height and looked at the patterns on the metal. He already had the key to this place, but he just couldn't believe what it was.
"Ha… Say friend and enter, ey?" Dan took a quick breath. He didn't have any friends on the other side of the gate. "Mellon."
Far behind Dan, still near the hole in the wall that led to the catacombs, something unusual happened. A small green slime with black dot-like eyes appeared on a rotten wooden bridge. It was no bigger than a house cat and probably couldn't hurt anyone even if it wanted to.
And it certainly did not want to harm anyone! The little slime believed that any problem can be solved without violence! It even had a dream: to become the first diplomat of its race! After all, development is extremely difficult in isolation; working together is much easier than trying to solve all the problems yourself. And even if people don't listen to him the first time, you can just try again!
This little creature happily jumped forward into the Chamber of Secrets, its jelatinous body shaking a little from every landing. In a couple of minutes, it was already able to cross the bridge and reached flat ground with the last jump.
This was it. It was a small jump for a slime, but a giant leap for all the slimekind!
As soon as its body hit the sone, the slime paused, as if expecting something to go wrong… But nothing happened. So it made another jump forward–
–only to have its life cut short by a bolt of protective lightning.
The humm of electricity continued for a couple more seconds, but eventually subsided, leaving an illusion of calm behind. Salazar Slytherin's defenses didn't care about the little slimes' dreams.
