Survivor: Definitely Not Minecraft

“You may go,” I said, dismissing the scribe. She bowed sharply and hustled off down the dimly lit corridor. Turning back to the war room, I gave a command.

“Continue without me.”

Zareth bowed in acknowledgment, seemingly unperturbed at the prospect of being left alone with three demons.

“Walk with me,” I said, beckoning to the messenger. He looked like he'd had a rough time since I'd seen him last. His eyes were deeply shadowed, and a fresh cut marked his face, vivid red against his dusky skin. I walked down to the entrance hall of Bael’s tower and told the guard to step outside. It was just us and the gargoyles.

The messenger's hands trembled, his lips quivering as if he was afraid I was about to order his execution.

“What happened?” I demanded, harsher than I’d intended to be. The kid hadn’t done anything wrong.

“Agares…” the young man stammered, “he asked me to deliver a response.” His eyes darted as if searching for escape.

“Just give it to me,” I said, trying to moderate my tone. This response was all I’d been able to think about for the past two days, and now I was on edge.

“It… it isn't written, my lord.” It was almost a plea.

“Tell me.”

His short-cropped hair slick with sweat, the young man unhitched an oilskin pack from his back, his movements awkward and hesitant.

“Forgive me, my lord.” He untied the pack, and what hit me first was the smell. Decay; a nauseating, pungent odor that suddenly filled the chamber. I took the pouch from his trembling hands and looked inside.

The demon had sent me a head. The head of a lillit, its lifeless eyes staring, mouth agape. It wasn't anyone I recognized, the casual victim of a cruel master, caught in the heartless games of kings. My throat tightened, but I forced myself to breathe. Anger, hot and primal, rose from my belly and filled my head until it was hard for me to see.

I closed the pack, my hands steadier than I felt. My voice went flat.

“What did he say?”

The messenger swallowed hard, his eyes wide and white. He wasn’t afraid of what he’d seen, I realized, he was afraid of me. But I couldn’t bring myself to say anything to alleviate his fear.

“Duke Agares said that he was happy to comply with your request…” he swallowed. “And that he would be delivering the rest of the lillits this way unless you came to Nargul to command him otherwise.”

The words hung in the air as I felt the blood drain from my face. My anger wasn’t gone, but it felt as distant as if it were a separate entity hovering just outside of a body that had gone numb.

“Thank you for your service,” I said. “Did the wyvern give you any trouble?”

“No, my lord.” The young man bobbed his head, unsure of what I was getting at, but I wasn’t getting at anything, my mouth was just running on automatic. I waved toward the door, and he took that as his sign to leave.

I was in the war room again, and I couldn’t remember climbing the stairs to get there. That wasn’t a good sign. It wasn’t like I had blackouts, I could just get so deep into my head sometimes that my body went on autopilot and I didn’t notice what was going on around me.

“Bojack,” I said, “we need to talk.”

The other demons looked confused, and Bojack’s ears flattened in annoyance as he crossed the room. “What was that?”

“I’m going to go kill Agares.”

He stopped midstep. The room was silent. “Perhaps we can discuss this privately.”

“Nothing to discuss. Agares knows about me, and he’s using the lillits as hostages.” Hildar’s message had never left Mount Doom, but there must have been someone else to pass the information. “I need you to watch the prisoner while I’m gone. The new guys are coming with me.” I looked past him to the demonic trio watching us with varying degrees of interest. Gaap was grinning, which may have just been his way of hiding his true thoughts, and Berith was gazing at me with narrowed eyes. Asmodeus had closed his hood, his face too reptilian to reveal any inner feelings.

“This will be a good exercise for them, see where they’re at.”

Bojack crossed his arms. “Why?”

I was still holding the pack, so I handed it to him. Bojack looked inside and sighed. He wasn’t upset by what it contained, of course, just the knowledge that this was going to make me harder to manage. He lowered his voice.

“I could insist you remain.”

“That would be inconvenient for both of us,” I said, brushing past him. “Zareth, I need a tactical summary of Nargul. It’s layout, and the monsters I’m going to find there.”

Zareth stepped around the map table and gave a deep bow. “As you wish, my lord,” he said, not missing a beat. “Nargul is generally considered the heart of Dargoth. Its towers and fortresses are crafted from black iron, obsidian, and stone. Much of the construction was completed by mortal laborers, of course, but your predecessor spent years overseeing the process, laying the foundations with his own hand.

It is home to numerous mines, and the Eternal Engine, of course, which circles it night and day. Agares resides in the Dread Keep at the heart of the city.”

He paused, it was the first time he’d ever openly referred to the fact that there had been a Dark Lord before me, and I wondered if he was just realizing that he’d done so.

“I can collect the appropriate records for your review, but in short, the city's defenses are daunting, and its gates are reinforced by runes. There are three entrances, each guarded by a battalion of five hundred soldiers, and scores of watchtowers manned by crossbowmen. Inside the city, there is a standing army of five thousand men, and easily as many lesser entities under Agares’s control.

The men are sworn to you, of course, but if it comes to a public confrontation, Agares may be able to convince them that you are not the master they know. They will have served the demons all their lives, while many have never personally seen their Dark Lord.”

The numbers didn’t mean much to me, I wasn’t as if I was planning on engaging them in a mass battle.

“What about the other demons, how many are there?”

“A moment,” Zareth said, walking to a shelf along the wall and quickly retrieving several scrolls. He carried them to a bare table further in the room and unrolled the first one, revealing a map of the city in question. I approached to examine it as he consulted one of the other scrolls. Nargul

was as he described, and even in two dimensions, it was obvious that it had been designed with defense in mind. There was a second wall around the heart of the city, encircling what had to be the Dread Keep. If the scale was accurate, the structure would be the size of a small mountain.

“Astaroth and Forneus serve under Agares,” Zareth said, looking up from the scroll. “Both of them likely remain within the city to aid in its administration.”

“What do you think?” I asked, rounding on the trio of demons that had sworn allegiance to me less than half an hour ago. “You know those names, are you as strong as they are?”

Berith actually purred. “I could kill them both myself.”

Asmodeus extended his hood again, giving Berith a sidelong glance before he answered me.

“They are not foes to be taken lightly, but I would consider myself a match for either one. Agares is another matter, he is the second harbinger of the One Who Knocks. He is older than us, and his

magic runs deep.”

“I’m going to be dealing with Agares myself,” I said, “but I can’t go in worrying about fighting more than one demon at a time. What are their elemental affinities?”

Bojack shook his head, his mane swaying. “This is too reckless. Agares and I share an affinity for earth. I could counter him, but I will not be there to help you.”

“So he can do everything you can do?”

“More than him,” Berith said, sneering, and Bojack bristled, but didn’t disagree. Bael had been powerful enough to take on Bojack and Vepar together, and I had to assume that Agares was operating at that level as well.

“Where am I likely to find him? Does he live in the keep?” As far as I knew, demons never slept, so catching him in bed wasn’t an option, but I would prefer sneaking in and taking him by surprise to announcing ourselves at the gate.

“Agares takes an active role in governing the city,” Zareth said. “It is my understanding that he regularly holds court during the day, much as a human king would do.”

“I don’t suppose that you guys have some kind of trial-by-combat tradition, do you? Can we just call him out for a duel?”

Gaap cackled at the suggestion, and Bojack snorted.

“He would be under no obligation to agree to single combat. If you demand an audience as a supplicant he would be happy to accept, that would certainly suit his ego, but you would be facing him without us, surrounded by entities and guards.”

“Do you think he would be open to bargaining with me?” I had no intention of allowing Agares to continue his rule, but he didn’t have to know that until after I’d stabbed him a few times.

Bojack sighed. “Our kind is always open to negotiation, but Agares is cunning, and you will not find him unprepared.”

“If I kill him for you,” Berith began, “will you promise to grant me his seat in return?”

“Agares would crush you to dust,” Asmodeus hissed.

Berith spun, growling from deep in his throat. “Do you require a demonstration of my strength?”

“You are not above me anymore,” Asmodeus said, showing his fangs.

The tiger took a pace closer to the snake, preparing to draw his ax.

Asmodeus was physically less imposing than the other demon, but there was a fancy chain shirt beneath his tunic and a pair of wavy Kris daggers at his hips, and I had a feeling he knew how to use them. “Our rivalry need not stretch on,” he said softly, “why not decide it between ourselves when the moon rises?”

“I forbid it,” I said, seeing Berith was about to draw. “I forbid you to fight amongst yourselves. You are sworn to me, and I need you both alive for this.”

Asmodeus closed his hood, and Berith stalked to the other side of the room to cool off. Gaap had been grinning through the entire conversation, and it occurred to me that apes didn’t actually smile like people did. Smiling was a sign of aggression for them.

“What part would you have me play?” He asked, ignoring the other two.

“A diversion,” I said. “I want you to march to the front of the city with an army at your back. Get the attention of the defenders so I can sneak in with Berith and Asmodeus.”

“You want me to attack Nargul?” There was a dangerous light in his eyes, the prospect seemed to excite him.

“No, I want you to make them think you might attack. Demand entrance, demand to be acknowledged, say you speak with the authority of the Dark Lord, that sort of thing. The bigger the scene, the better. The more of the defenders that are focused on you, the fewer people I might have to hurt. If Agares comes out to the walls to deal with you, then at least we know

where he is and we can keep an eye on him until the moment’s right.”

I looked at Zareth. “We’re leaving in the morning. I want you to help these three make an army out of the monsters in the basement. Pick out a few officers and the soldiers that should go with them to manage the supplies, they won’t be expected to fight.”

My eyes fell to the stained pouch hanging from Bojack’s huge, hairy hand. I took it back from him and gave it to Zareth.

“Whatever you do for soldiers that have died in battle. Please do that for him. Full honors. Twenty-one gun salute. I don’t know. Make it nice.”

“Twenty-one gun salute?” Zareth’s brows furrowed.

“Forget that part,” my head was pounding, and I felt a little manic. It was hard to organize my thoughts. “Just honor him.”

“Of course,” my vizier bowed, and I walked out of the room with Bojack close at my heels, even gloomier than usual.

“This is rash,” he said.

“Yep. It’s a snap decision, and not all of my snap decisions have been good ones, sure, but I’m the Dark Lord now, so this is what we’re going with. That’s what you wanted right, me committing to the role?”

He made a rumble deep in his chest, not quite disagreeing.

There had to be a smarter way to go about this, but I was too worked up to think it through. The lillits needed to be out of Nargul, and Agares needed to die. There was a straight line through those two objectives. It looked like the master of Nargul had wanted to make a point and show he knew I wasn’t Kevin and couldn’t be ordered around.

That point had been made, but he’d chosen the wrong way to go about it. I wasn’t going to be intimidated, and I wasn’t going to let him hold the lillits hostage. Seventy-two demons needed to come into the world to make the way for the One Who Knocks, but Agares didn’t have to be one of them.

I was supposed to expand Dargoth’s influence to allow more demons to spawn, but killing Bael had opened up a spot, so there was a chance that another demon would slip through the veil any night now. Killing Agares wouldn’t set back the cause, because any demons that were killed could be replaced. Bojack had been pretty cagey about how all of that worked, but he had so far refrained from giving me a general order not to kill demons.

“There is too much that still has to be done here.” He said. “The prison is not fully secure, and Mount Doom will be vulnerable to assault without you to defend it.”

He wasn’t wrong. There was a chance that Agares had sent the head to goad me out of Mount Doom. But staying home while he sent bundles of heads to my door was not an option.

“You’ll just have to hold down the fort until I get back. Why don’t you check on Kevin, I’ve got some crafting to do.”

I had one more idea about the Storage Ring, and it was a dud. When I tried to rename the ring on the anvil, the System refused to oblige, giving an error message about not having sufficient aetheric presence.

I doubted simply continuing to wear the ring would lead to attunement. That would have been too easy. Over the past few days, I’d found myself becoming progressively more aware of its existence in an odd way. Usually, if you wore jewelry for a while, you stopped noticing it. But the ring wasn’t uncomfortable, and it fit my finger fine.

This awareness was more like what allowed me to notice mobs that were hiding from me. An almost spiritual sense. I stared at the cauldron pouring acrid smoke into the sky. The lava below gave the underbelly of the column an ill-tempered, ruddy glow. I felt its warmth seeping through my armor.

There were no Storage Rings in Minecraft. You had an inventory, but it wasn’t an item that gave it to you. Storage Rings were a trope in cultivation novels and xianxia, though they were also called by different names. The Survivor class wasn’t Minecraft, even if it was Minecraft adjacent. There were no magic runes in the game either, and I’d already run into those a few times.

My class was one version of a System that had a lot of other stuff going on with it. Other heroes had been wizards, shapeshifters, healers, and who knew what else. Kevin had killed them off, and the ring could have belonged to one of them.

What if this wasn’t a crafting thing? I sat down on an anvil made of diamond and closed my eyes. The image of a dead lillit, mouth open, eyes rolled back, appeared in my mind. I let it sit there, and it slid away. Intrusive thoughts were a feedback loop. If you tried to focus too much on controlling them or let them upset you, it was adding fuel to the part of your brain that kept pumping out bad thoughts.

I’d attended a variety of religious services in prison. It had been something to do. By law, they had to let any recognized religion run services. Plenty of Christian stuff, obviously, but also Buddhist groups, Wiccans, and some pretty obscure variants as well. I’d tried them all.

Meditation was a helpful practice when you lived in a stressful environment. I couldn’t remember the mantras, but mantras were simply a tool to help you get centered. The idea was to stop thinking and try to experience existence in the moment. In cultivation novels, characters could do a lot more than that.

Even in the real world, some people believed in ki, life energy, whatever. I’d dabbled in that sort of thing when I was younger, and my conclusion had been that the sensations you experienced while practicing “energy arts” were entirely psychosomatic. Magic wasn’t real, and Taoist immortals had been old guys sipping mercury.

Except that here, magic was real.

Let the thoughts flow in and out. Demons, lillits, Esmelda. The fate of an entire world that was somehow resting on the shoulders of an ex-felon with professional experience as a sandwich artist.

Mizu had made some questionable choices.

I tried to be aware of my body, starting with my toes, and felt a tingle. That was a normal, psychosomatic response, no different from when I’d been a kid reading my older brother’s books on the occult, imagining I could learn to shoot energy blasts like on DBZ. Moving my mental focus, I brought the tingling feeling up through my body to my head. Nothing special there. Dumb chakra stuff. The sort of thing that convinced gullible people that acupuncture and healing crystals could cure cancer.

Deep breaths. Thoughts flow in and out. I moved my mental focus onto the ring. It wasn’t a part of my body, but I could almost convince myself that I was experiencing it as an extension of myself.

This was silly. Lillits were going to die while I tried to remember a breathing method written by someone who had the sheer lack of self-consciousness to call himself a “Chaos Magician.”

But I felt the ring, and something else, almost like there was another finger on top of my finger. A spirit finger. That was weird. Without really thinking about it, I flexed the imaginary digit, and something ridiculous happened.

A grayish, semi-transparent line of squares appeared in front of my hand, all of them filled with symbols and odd-looking numbers. When I moved my hand, the line moved with it, staying in the same relative position. I could stretch the phantom digit to touch any of the boxes, and when I did, it was highlighted. I selected the first item in the line and tried a few different motions with my hand.

A block of black bricks appeared on the platform in front of me.

That worked?

For a moment, I was stunned, still seated on the anvil and staring stupidly at the stack of bricks at my feet. Then I hopped up and got to work.

There were only nine slots in total, so the ring gave me a hot bar, not the full twenty-seven-slot inventory of a Minecraft player. That was still a lot of extradimensional space to work with. The first four boxes were taken up by building materials that were common all over Mount Doom; basalt bricks, chiseled andesite, obsidian, and sandstone. There was also a stack of torches, though they didn’t appear to be enchanted with any extra effects.

The gesture that brought items out of the inventory was more subtle than tossing a coin, and though it required concentration, by the time I’d run through the ring’s contents, the process was already becoming second nature.

The symbols in the display were meaningless to me, and the numbers were only superficially similar to the one through nine I was used to, but it was obviously a counting system because the superscript label above the brick symbol changed every time I dropped one. Not all of the items in my inventory had a superscript like that. The last three slots were taken up by a crossbow, a pickaxe, and a glass orb. Only one slot was empty. He must have used that one for the buster sword that was currently residing in his old bedroom.

When I converted a material into a coin, or an item into a medallion, it automatically sorted itself into an available inventory slot. Rummaging through my pack, I found that any resource unit could be swiped into the ring, but tokens, medallions, and cabochons were all treated as different kinds of items than regular coins, refusing to share a slot.

Each slot could contain up to eighty-one units of whatever it was holding as long as they were identical. The alien numbering system was a little annoying, but it wouldn’t take too long to get used to it.

How this was going to help me kill Agares, I wasn’t sure yet, but I was stoked.

The crossbow looked pretty scary, dark wood, with spiky designs engraved along the stock. It didn’t come with ammunition, but it looked like it would take my arrows. Kevin’s pick looked just like my pick, which made sense, given that he had crafted them both. The orb was more interesting.

A sphere of glass the size of a cantaloupe, with motes of light like fireflies floating within.

I used the anvil to identify all three items.

Journal Quests Notifications Materials Crafting

Boltcaster

[Ironwood Crossbow]

Damage Rating: 8

Speed: Slow

Durability: 74/100

Enchantments: Piercing (III), Quick Charge (IV), Unbreaking (III)

[Quick Charge] allows you to reload 25% faster for each level of the enchantment.

[Piercing] grants ammunition a 20% chance of passing through its target to strike whatever is directly behind it. Use with appropriate caution.

Durin’s Digger

[Orichalcum Pickaxe]

Damage Rating: 6

Speed: Fast

Durability: 99/100

Enchantments: Unbreaking (IV), Efficiency (IV), Fortune (II), Mending (II)

Mako Eater

[Essence Stone]

Essence Stones will draw in ambient spirit energy from the environment over time in addition to capturing additional energy from slain entities. Great for an enchanter on the go!

The pick was an improvement over Pickle Rick, and it would be great to have a high-quality backup. Though I now had access to orichalcum, the enchantments were much harder to replace, so I could leave Pickle Rick at home and not have to worry so much about losing one or the other if I died.

While Boltcaster did a little less damage than a bow, [Piercing] was a fantastic add-on. The warning wasn’t necessary. Shooting into a crowd was never a good idea unless everyone involved was a potential target, and I didn’t expect my enemies to be standing in front of my allies too often.

Of the three, the Essence Stone was the best find. Kevin’s sword had won me extra experience from killing monsters with its [Looting] enchantment, and it looked like the stone would act as a general purpose [Looting] effect no matter what weapon I was using. Getting bonus ambient mana was even better, depending on how quickly it accrued. It was like enchanting for free.

With limited slots to work with, I preferred to keep as much of my equipment outside of the ring as I could afford to. Caliburn was going to stay on my hip, and the crossbow came with an attachment that allowed it to hang from the other side. I’d be putting arrows in the ring, as they were awkward to deal with in large numbers, and being able to have them appear in my hand was wildly convenient. The orb could stay in storage as well, as it looked fragile, though I’d have to check on it to make sure it operated while in extradimensional space.

Keeping more than one slot full of rocks seemed like a waste, so most of the raw materials could be relegated to my pouches and pack, but having a full stack of torches handy was fantastic. I spent about an hour applying [Shadowbane] to as many of them as I could.

Kevin had left me with a supply of enchanted books, though not as many or as much variety as I would have liked. As I saw no reason to hoard levels before going into battle, I expended all the experience I’d accrued making torches and enchanting new books.

The books were a wash, redundant or irrelevant enchantments. But after I’d thrown away my last available level on a [Lure I] book, which was only good for fishing, the System saw fit to reward me.

Journal Quests Notifications Materials Crafting

Quest Completed: Journeyman

After a mere decade, you have completed your one-hundredth enchantment. This calls for celebration! A new recipe has been added to your crafting log, the [Infusion Chamber]. Infusion chambers reduce the aetheric strain of enchantment and open the door to the generation of truly wondrous items.

In addition, an Enchanting dictionary has been added to your journal. Never again will you be befuddled by those squiggly lines. Enjoy.

For my first ever completed quest, it felt anti-climactic.

Had that really been my one-hundredth enchantment? I wasn’t keeping a tally, so I would trust the System on that one. Almost the entirety of the total number would be Shadowbane torches, of which I’d just created an additional twenty. The Infusion Chamber had to be the proper name for the room-sized enchanting tables. As I already had access to Kevin’s, as well as its twin in the base under the mine, that wasn’t a huge deal, but being able to accurately select what I wanted from the randomly generated enchantments without Bojack’s help was a nice bonus.

For the moment, however, I was out of juice. Though the smoke gushing out of the caldera prevented me from seeing the sky, I knew that night would soon arrive, and I was leaving in the morning.

I’d been sleeping in Kevin’s old room. It had been a pleasant revelation that monsters did not spawn on warpstone, which meant the corridor that led to it was safe. There was a chamber beneath the bedroom that Bael had used to collect the Dark Lord’s nightly spawns.

When I had Esmelda back, we could work out different accommodations. When I had her back.

Nargul was yet another detour, but in this case, I didn’t have a choice. There was no question in my mind what Esmelda would want me to do in this situation.

One more night, then one more mission, and I would find her again.