Survivor: Definitely Not Minecraft

Leto hefted a travel pack over his shoulder, taking one last look around the cottage. It had been his home for his entire life, and he wasn’t keen to leave. They’d subdivided the bunker to allow for privacy, an amenity I hadn’t included in the original dugout, and Esmelda had spent much of the night debating with him in his room about the subject.

We couldn’t all ride on Noivern, so I sent the wyvern home ahead of us with a letter for Zareth explaining where I was and what I was doing. The plan was to travel on foot until we reached the first waystation in the Wastes and I could use my authority as the Dark Lord to requisition us some mounts. In the days between now and then, there was going to be a lot going on back at Mount Doom. I might even lose it, but I couldn’t help feeling optimistic about the future.

Not knowing what had become of my family had been a burden in the back of my mind ever since I’d started my most recent life cycle. Now that I knew they were okay, I felt like there wasn’t anything ahead of us we couldn’t handle.

“Are you ready to go?” I asked Leto, and he nodded. I’d spent the night at the cottage, but he’d avoided me.

There was a long road ahead to gain his trust, and the effect Bedlam's taint was having on my appearance probably didn’t help matters, but there was no comparison between having this chance to build a relationship with him and not having it. The gap between us was as wide as the years we’d spent apart, but it was bridgeable, and that was what mattered.

He glanced at his mother. “Do we have to? Couldn’t we just stay here?”

“You’ve never met your grandfather,” she said, touching his cheek. “Or your cousins, or any of our people. This has been a good home to us, but it isn’t our forever home. How many times have you said you wanted to see the world outside our little wood? I have been waiting for this, and I think you have too if you would care to admit it.”

“I was a kid when I said those things.”

I couldn’t help but smile at that. It seemed impossible that he had grown so much, but he was still a child. As far as I knew, he didn’t have any cousins, as Esmelda didn’t have any siblings of her own, but the lillits had an extended sense of kinship. They lived in tightly knit communities, and it must have been difficult for her to have gone so long without any communication from her father or any connection to her friends from Williamsburg.

Gastard knelt in front of him, wearing a serious expression.

“It is as you say. You are almost a man now, and you should put away childish fears. Your father is with us, at long last, and we must move forward.”

Leto straightened his back, taking strength from the words of the knight. Gastard had helped raise him, and I could never thank him enough for the role he had played in caring for my family, but it did hurt to see that he already had the kind of relationship with my son that I wanted to have. I was Leto’s father. Gastard had been his dad. He ruffled the boy’s hair, and we left.

Sending Noivern away meant we could travel during the day. The air here tasted cleaner than it had in Dargoth, and there was no perpetual gloom to contend with. The sun was out, and the sky was clear.

While none of them could travel as quickly as I would have alone, they were all in good physical condition, and I let Gastard set the pace. Leto walked a step behind him, apparently preferring not to have me in his direct line of sight, and Esmelda stayed at my side.

Leto kept looking up at the harpies. Admittedly, a gang of oversized vultures following you everywhere would seem pretty ominous if you weren’t used to them.

“You don’t have to be afraid of them,” I said. “They’re my friends.”

“I’m not afraid,” Leto said. “I just don’t like them.”

It was the most he’d said to me all day. Progress.

“How long before we get to Dargoth?” he asked Gastard.

“Days,” the knight replied, “but there’s much to see before then, and we can keep up with your training along the way.”

“I was wondering about that,” I said. “What were you doing sparring in the middle of the night?”

Esmelda touched my arm. “Leto doesn’t always sleep well. It helps to tire him out.”

Insomnia was something I could relate to. Hopefully, he hadn’t inherited too many of my other undesirable traits.

“I’d like to watch you train. I could join in if you don’t mind. It’s been a while since I’ve had any formal practice.”

Leto’s back stiffened at the suggestion that I would be participating, but Gastard looked back at me with a broad grin.

“You were a good student, as I recall. Not much talent, of course, but you persisted, and never hesitated to rise when you were knocked down.”

“Not much talent,” I said, “that’s me. Bullheadedness is about the only talent I have.”

Esmelda hummed for a moment. “Perhaps a few more,” she said.

We reached the stream well before midday. A few hours more, and we were well on our way to the mountains.

They’d brought along bread and some dried meats, and I’d converted every vegetable in the cottage larder into coins to bring with us. The weight of a sack of pans and cooking implements meant nothing to me, so with Esmelda to cook, we would be eating better than I ever had on the road.

Leto’s eyes widened when he saw me produce a few logs and with a single scratch of flint on steel, set them alight. It was one of the least magical things I could do, but it was impressive enough in context. I’d lived with the conveniences of my System since arriving on Plana, but this was my son’s first exposure to them.

“You didn’t use tinder,” he said. “How did you do that?”

“Honestly, I’m not sure. It just works for me. Do you want to try?”

Producing another log, I set it apart from the cookfire and handed him the flint and steel. Though I had crafted them, they weren’t magical in and of themselves. If a person without the Survivor class used one of my picks or shovels, they didn’t provide any special benefit aside from being well-made tools. While I could start a blaze in an instant, anyone else would be stuck striking sparks at a piece of wood without at least a bit of dry grass to get things started.

Esmelda knitted her brows as Leto knelt, shooting me a questioning look. It wasn’t my intention to show off or set him up for failure, I was genuinely curious what would happen. Systems weren’t heritable, otherwise, there would have been heroes running around all over Plana, but I couldn’t help but feel that things might be more complicated than that. Magic wouldn’t be illegal in Drom if there had only ever been a dozen people in history who could use it.

Leto rasped the small steel rod across the flint, resulting in a shower of sparks. A few of them touched the upright log, and it burst into flames.

Esmelda’s mouth dropped open, and I looked at her sharply.

“Can he–does he…”

She shook her head, stunned. “He’s never…he doesn’t have your gifts.”

Gastard rubbed his chin thoughtfully as Leto, with a whoop of delight, rushed over to the nearest patch of tall grass and set it on fire.

“Don’t!” I don’t think I’d ever heard Esmelda’s voice reach that high a pitch. She wrested the flint and steel from Leto before he could start a wildfire.

“I was just testing,” he complained as I harvested the burning grass and kicked his log over to mingle with mine.

“Testing is good,” I said, “but let’s try something safer.”

I had to do a bit of sorting through my pack to find the right medallion, but I was soon able to present him with an orichalcum shovel. He gazed in open wonder at the tool. I’d become jaded by the quality of Kevin’s work, but for a shovel, it was impressive. Orichalcum looked as much like marble as metal, and the handle was engraved with an intricate spiral pattern.

“Its name is Scrapper,” I said.

He accepted it reverently, and we all held our breath as he walked a few paces and found a relatively bare spot of dirt to plunge it into. Its tip bit the soil, and nothing special happened.

“Try tapping the ground with it,” I said.

“It’s heavy.” Leto frowned, but did as I suggested, patting the soil with its blade. We tried a few more things, but it quickly became clear that my son could not harvest materials like I could. He was dejected, but Esmelda actually looked a little relieved.

“Curious,” Gastard said. “Why the flint?”

“The System doesn’t answer questions,” I said, sighing.

The vegetable pot simmered, and we spent an hour or so in relatively easy companionship by the river. Leto couldn’t harvest or craft the way I could, but was it possible there were other advantages to being my child? The Survivor System had already enhanced my physiology before Esmelda and I were together, though not nearly to the level it had now. If it was a purely magical boost, there was nothing inheritable about that, but if it had altered me on a genetic level, then my son would be stronger and fitter than a boy his age should have been. I asked Gastard about it.

“He is hale,” he said, “strong for his size, perhaps, but not to the extent that I suspected a blessing at work.”

“I’m right here,” Leto said. “You don’t have to talk about me.” He was watching the flames like he wanted to make more of them.

I started securing a shelter well before the sun went down. As much as I wanted to speed our progress to Mount Doom, getting an extra hour or so of travel out of the day wouldn’t be worth the risk.

Leto watched me set up a perimeter of torches before I used Scrapper to dig out a full basement. It was faster than laying blocks, and I quickly filled in the ceiling with granite. It was nothing fancy, but it was amazing enough for someone who had never seen a crafter at work before. Leto was already looking at me differently. Not with love, certainly, but some of his distaste had been replaced with awe, which was better than nothing.

“You should tell him about Beleth,” Esmelda said, as we settled around the fire, cradling bowls of vegetable soup. “How you defeated the demon and rescued my father from the Dargothians.”

“It’s a good story,” Gastard agreed.

“I know it already,” Leto complained.

“You’ve heard me tell it,” Esmelda chided him. “You have never heard it from the mouth of someone who was there, let alone the hero of Williamsburg.”

That last bit was an old joke. Esmelda knew I thought having a town named after me was cringy. It had been Boffin’s idea to begin with, but I’d gone along with it.

Telling the story was difficult for a variety of reasons. For one, my memory was foggy, and a lot of what I could recall was like snippets from a dream. The other issue was that much of what stood out in my mind about that whole adventure were things my son didn’t need to know. Killing unprepared soldiers in a barracks. Trapping men with trolls. The mistakes I had made along the way that had put lillit lives at risk.

What kind of story had Esmelda been telling instead?

“Well,” I said. “It started while I was mining outside of Henterfell. We didn’t know Erihseht had been raided until we got back to the city. I’m still not sure why Kevin picked that time to start rounding people up.”

“Kevin?” Leto asked. When his brows furrowed, I saw the shadow of the wrinkle between them that I had seen in the mirror a thousand times before. Our faces were different. His was thinner and more refined, but the resemblance I saw in that expression was so uncanny that I lost my train of thought.

“The Dark Lord,” Gastard supplied. “Your father has never hesitated to speak his name.”

“The former Dark Lord,” Esmelda said, then glanced at me, her gaze unreadable. She’d accepted my ascension to the throne at face value, but she might have been holding back her more critical opinions for a more convenient airing.

“Oh,” Leto blinked. “Kevin, like Kevinian. Why is the language named after him? He didn’t invent it, did he?”

This was an odd tangent, but it was one I was more comfortable talking about than what had happened at the way station.

“He didn’t invent it. He forced everyone in Dargoth to learn it, so now it’s their native tongue, and everyone else thinks of it as his.”

“We always knew better,” Esmelda said, tapping our son on his shoulder to get his attention. “We’ve talked about this, you know. Kevinian, or a version of it, was also the language of the heroes. It was the only tongue your father spoke when he came into our world.”

The words that were added to my vocabulary when I harvested books felt as natural as the ones I’d grown up speaking, so I tended to switch between languages depending on who I was speaking to without really thinking about it. We’d been conversing lillant since we’d left the cottage, even Gastard, though he probably would have felt better using Sprache, which was more common in the Free Kingdoms. On the scale of miracles, it wasn’t top tier, but language barriers would have been a massive obstacle otherwise.

“What’s it called then?” Leto asked.

“English,” I said. “Where I came from, most people spoke English. And Kevin came from the same part of my world, I guess, though we’ve never talked about it. There are a lot of other languages there, hundreds, actually, but I never learned any of them. Sprache sounds a lot like German did, now that I’m thinking about it, which was another one from my world.” Not that I knew more than a few words in German, so it might have been a coincidence, but another isekai could have been an influence there. Mizu had been playing this transmigration of souls game for a long time.

“Where did you come from, then? Mom said it was a place called Earth, but she couldn’t tell me much about it.”

Esmelda and I hadn’t spoken a lot about my previous life, not because she hadn’t been interested, but because I had been cagey on the subject. It wasn’t like my previous existence had been something to brag about, and I generally avoided thinking about the people I’d left behind. Things were easier that way. If Leto wanted to know, though, I was happy to be able to share something with him.

“Earth is the name of my home world, and I lived in a nation called America. It was very different from Plana, mostly because technology was different. The people there built

some amazing things.”

“Like what?” Leto asked curiously.

Bombs, guns, tanks. Human invention certainly had its dark side, but there were also things that a boy could appreciate. “They made a way for people to fly. They would board ships called planes that took them across the sky.”

“Were they hot air balloons?” Esmelda asked, catching me off guard.

“Wait, you guys have hot air balloons?”

She shook her head. “It’s something Fladnag talked about once when he came through Erihseht when I was younger. He said he could fill a big cloth sail with hot air from a flame, and that it would be light enough to carry a person into the sky.”

The name sounded familiar. Had we talked about him before? “Who was Fladnag again?”

“I don’t know that I mentioned him.” She frowned. “I haven’t thought about the man in years. When I was a child, he visited Erihseht every summer, telling stories, and doing tricks. Fladnag was a traveling entertainer, but he was already older then, he must have retired.”

“I know of him,” Gastard said, a nostalgic look softening the hard planes of his face. “He visited Henterfell when I was a boy. Johanna loved his illuminators.”

“They were wondrous,” Esmelda said, wistfully.

Leto was looking back and forth between them, even more lost than I was.

“Illuminators?”

“They looked like wooden candles,” Gastard said, “with a wick at the bottom. When they were lit, they sent lines of fire into the air that burst in colorful sparks.”

An old man going from village to village with fireworks. His name was Fladnag. Fladnag. I spelled it out in my head and felt like screaming. There was absolutely zero chance that the similarities to Gandalf were a coincidence. Another hero was wandering around, and he knew how to make gunpowder.

There were fireworks in Minecraft, but you made them with gunpowder that dropped from dead creepers, a mob I’d never encountered. Not that I wanted to run into an exploding cactus, but the resource would have come in handy.

What did you need to craft gunpowder? The System would almost certainly allow it. I had a vague notion of the ingredients; charcoal, sulphur. Guano? I’d never mined any sulfur, but maybe Kevin had some lying around, and with a kingdom at my disposal, I was sure to be able to get my hands on some guano. Did you have to use bats, or would any fertilizer do?

“Do you know what happened to him?” I asked Gastard.

His chain shirt clinked as he shrugged. “Godwod offered him money for the secret of the illuminators. When the old man refused, he was accused of sorcery, but he fled Henterfell before he could be arrested. I don’t know what became of him after that.”

There wasn’t a lot to go on, and we were headed in the wrong direction. I couldn’t decide if this was good news or not. Another hero, but one who’d shirked his duty, cosplaying as a character from Lord of the Rings. That was beginning to seem like a trend.

The conversation returned to hot air balloons and planes. I will share my suspicions later.

“Did you fly in them?” Leto asked.

“I’ve been on a plane before, but I wasn’t a pilot or anything like that.”

“What else did the people build?” Leto leaned forward, his curiosity piqued by the idea of a flying boat. Magic exists in this world, and monsters, but most people live ordinary lives without much interaction with either. My son in particular had led a very sheltered existence, and a plane would seem like a fantastical artifact to him. Having one to ride on would have certainly been very convenient for us now.

After retiring to the shelter, the four of us talked well into the night, and I did my best to explain cell phones and computers and big cities thrumming with electricity. Out of context, modern conveniences sounded pretty mystical. It was an odd juxtaposition, considering that Plana was a world being invaded by demons who could cast actual spells.

Gastard and Esmelda shared a look, and she declared that we needed to sleep if we were going to get anywhere the next day. Leto wrapped himself in a bedroll facing the dirt wall, a cloth over his head to block the torchlight. Gastard took the opposite corner and displayed the enviable skill of nodding off on command. Either that, or he was pretending to sleep for our benefit.

Esmelda and I shared a grass mat. I held her close, feeling the warmth of her back against my chest. She smelled like a flower, that had to be a lillit magic.

“I missed you,” she murmured.

“You too,” I said. Something was nagging at the back of my mind that I’d been trying not to think about. Esmelda and Gastard, alone in the woods for ten years, raising my son. It was an intimate situation that had gone on for a very long time. Our reunion had felt almost as easy as if I’d only been gone for a few months instead of a decade, with astonishingly little awkwardness. Of course, that was likely because, from my perspective, that’s all it had been.

For them, time had passed at its accustomed rate. They had to have doubted that I would ever come back. Gastard was a man of honor, and Esmelda no less, but everyone had limits.

“This may be a crazy question,” I said, keeping my voice low, “but do you still want to be married to me?”

“Pardon?” I felt her tense.

“I just…I mean, it’s been a long time. If something happened, if there was someone else…” I trailed off. This was drifting perilously close to an accusation that I had no right to make.

Esmelda turned over, adjusting her position so that we were face to face. Her eyes, gray like a morning mist, were the most lovely things I had ever seen.

“William,” she said, managing to sound stern despite speaking at a barely audible level. “We were married under the gaze of the goddess. That is not something to be undone, and Gastard is your loyal friend.” She paused, suddenly amused. “Though I’m not sure if that loyalty would prevent him from attacking you if you insulted his honor to the point where suggesting what I think you’re suggesting would.”

Something unknotted in my chest.

“Sorry,” I said. “Maybe I’m projecting. I can’t imagine being stuck in a cabin in the woods with you for ten years and not having some ideas.”

“If that logic extends to any other woman you happen to be trapped with in the future, there will be consequences.” She was frowning, but there was humor in her eyes.

“Not what I meant.”

“I know.”

We were silent for a while, looking at one another. I could see the question forming on her lips.

“What have you done?”

“You mean the demon thing?”

“Yes, the demon thing,” she said, a hint of annoyance in her voice.

“I know what it looks like, but I’m not going to be another Kevin. We’ll find a way out of the oath. There wasn’t another way out of that egg, and I thought Bojack was holding you captive.”

“I’m not as important as Plana’s fate.”

“You are to me,” I said, and it was true. It wasn’t the most heroic perspective, but the instinct to protect someone I loved was more viscerally powerful than a theoretical moral duty to defend the world.

“Be that as it may,” her cheeks colored, “you have placed us in a precarious position. I support you, Dark Lord or not, but Gastard will be less willing to accept compromises, and I fear the compromises the demon will demand of you will soon become untenable.”

“Fixing the world is a big project,” I said. “There are going to be steps forward and steps back. But Kevin’s in a box, and I’ve got more resources than I know what to do with. We may have a demonic civil war on our hands, and that’s good for us. It means more of them will die. At some point, Bojack’s going to ask too much, and I’ll have to put my foot down and take the consequences. We can prepare for that.”

I felt something inside of me twinge at the thought of killing Bojack. The bond I have made with him was tied to my essence, my soul. With the commands he had given me, even planning to betray him could potentially trigger the curse. That was going to make things difficult.

“The goddess is with us,” Esmelda said. “She brought you out of Bedlam, and she would not have done so if your oath with the demon went too far for grace. But it will be a difficult path to walk.”

“Do you believe in me?”

Esmelda tucked her head under mine, her breath soft against my chest.

“I believe in us.”

It would have to be enough.