Survivor: Definitely Not Minecraft

I held the oathblade, the diamond in its hilt swirling with crimson motes of demonic essence. It was a physical reminder of the growing interconnection between me and the demons. A practical necessity, but not one I was happy about. While Esmelda had been outwardly supportive, as she always had, I knew she didn’t feel good about the compromises I had made to get here.

Gastard had been less discrete, telling me outright that I had to abandon this path before I succumbed to the taint of Bedlam and became a demon myself. Though he hadn’t said it in front of my son, I was afraid Leto might come to a similar conclusion. He was sensitive enough to pick up on their opinions whether or not they shared them with him.

Could I become a demon? That wasn’t how it worked, as far as I knew, but if Bedlam’s taint could change me sufficiently, there might not be enough of a difference to matter. What if they had been human once? My horns, thankfully, seemed to have stopped growing, so at least they didn’t interfere with me wearing a helmet.

Malphas’ forces surrendered soon after Gaap had appeared on the horizon with our army at his back. The raven demon had come alone to the gates of Mount Doom, wounded and willing to talk. Asmodeus and a troop of hollows had escorted him to the throne room. The skeletal warriors crowded close to him, their pitted weapons drawn, still marked by drying blood.

Malphas would be one more mote in the diamond, one more tie to the demons, one step closer to becoming someone I didn’t want to be.

“Are you ready to acknowledge me?” I said.

Malphas walked with a limp. Shards of metal from Asmodeus’s orb were still lodged in his leg, but he was not cowed. “I am Malphas, thirty-ninth harbinger of the One Who Knocks, and I come before the one who would be Dark Lord to gauge his worthiness.”

“Gauge my worthiness?” What was this bird getting high and mighty about? “You already lost. The men have surrendered, and Bojack is rounding up the entities. Offer me your allegiance, and you can continue to exist on this plane. Otherwise, we cut you down and wait for your replacement to spawn.”

“What do you have to offer me in return for my loyalty?” He asked, black eyes glittering. I stood up. All the demons were the same, and it was getting on my nerves.

“I just said what I have to offer you, your life. You’ve caused me enough problems. If you want to join the team, you’re welcome to. You can keep your seat, 39th, but I’m not going to give you anything in the top ten. You don’t have a city or reinforcements. You have nothing left to give me other than yourself.”

“He is insolent, your darkness,” Asmodeus hissed. “Allow me to end his wretched existence. There are many demons more suited to your service than this one.”

“I have knowledge,” Malphas said quickly, “I know secrets none of your vaunted councilors possess.”

“Like what?”

“The previous Dark Lord had worked wonders you cannot. He could become invisible, heal himself, even throw fire from his hands.”

“How do you know I can’t?”

“Because you didn’t.” Malphas croaked. “You are strong enough to wield his sword and wear armor like his, but if you had his other weapons at your disposal, you would have used them.”

He was right. Kevin’s brewing stand was nowhere to be found in Mount Doom, and I had no idea how to make one of my own, or what ingredients would have resulted in what potions if there had been a stand to use. Potions were a game changer in Minecraft, and they would be one for me too.

The demons knew plenty about their magic, but little about the Survivor System. Bojack had learned the recipe for an oathblade, but he hadn’t been able to give me much else.

“What can you teach me?” I asked.

“Alchemy. That was his secret, and it can be yours as well.”

“How would you have learned alchemy? It isn’t demonic magic, it has nothing to do with you.”

“Ah, but he taught me. Despite my low seat, the Dark Lord found me to be an adept assistant. My memory is perfect, and his was not.”

“Do you know the formula for a brewing stand?”

“I do.”

“Then tell it to me and consider your life saved.”

“That is not enough.”

“I think it’s more than you deserve.”

“This is a simple bargain. You have the power to kill me, that is true, but that is not so great a threat to our kind. When my body is destroyed, my spirit will return to Bedlam. It will regenerate, in time, and I will be sent to some other world to further the designs of the One Who Knocks. I am not so proud as some of the others,” he inclined his beak toward Asmodeus, who flickered his tongue in response. “I am willing to accept that I have failed in this world and seek the justice of Bedlam. But I do not believe that I have failed, not yet. Because you need what I have to offer you.”

“And what do you want in return?”

“Lands of my own, authority, a stipend of lesser entities. The tenth seat will suffice. I do not ask so much of you.”

He was more reasonable than Berith had been, at least, and if he was telling the truth, he was going to be more useful than any other demon had been so far. Still, I didn’t want to give in too easily.

“There are going to be lands available in Atlan. Would you settle for that?”

Malphas clicked his beak. “I have no interest in being promised what is not yet yours to give.”

“Tell me how to craft a brewing stand, and I will consider being more generous. As it is now, I have no reason to believe you know anything worthwhile.”

Malphas ruffled his feathers. “Your distrust wounds me, but I suppose I can give you that much enticement. A brewing stand is simple enough to construct; three stone blocks, a steel rod, and the core of a fire elemental.”

That sounded right. In Minecraft, you needed a blaze rod to craft a brewing stand. You got blaze rods by killing blazes, which were fiery mobs floating around the Nether. They could easily be described as fire elementals, but I’d never seen anything like them on Plana or in Bedlam.

“Where am I supposed to get the core of a fire elemental?” I said. “There aren’t any here. You could still be making this up.”

Malphas croaked in agitation. “They exist in Bedlam.”

I looked at Asmodeus, who had closed his hood and was watching Malphas through slitted eyes.

“Is that true? Are there fire elementals in Bedlam with cores that can be harvested?”

“It is,” Asmodeus hissed, somewhat reluctantly. “Though I cannot confirm that his formula is a true one.”

Kevin’s Bedlam portal had not been hidden. It occupied an entire cathedral on the eastern flank of Mount Doom, but I’d never tried using it. Bedlam was a rough place, and I had no intention of going back if I could help it. My one previous visit to the alien realm had cost me too much.

Was Kevin’s alchemy lab on the other side of that portal?

“Okay,” I said, “I can take a trip into Bedlam to look for a fire elemental core. Until the formula is confirmed, you’re going to be considered a prisoner. It’ll only take a few minutes to craft a nice box to put you in before I go.”

The hollows pressed in around Malphas, ready to restrain him, but he held up his arms in protest.

“No need. There is no need for that. There is a core here that you can use.”

“I doubt it. I’ve already gone through the storage complex. There weren’t any flaming orbs to be found.” Aside from the mysterious orb in my inventory, which was overflowing with the essences of all the monsters I’d killed the previous day, but I wasn’t about to try to break it down for components, and I doubted it was made from a fire elemental core anyway.

“The sanguinum factories,” Malphas said. “Among them is a furnace that burns hot enough to craft diamonds out of coal. It is powered by an elemental core of the kind you need.”

I’d seen the furnace. It wasn’t automated like the rest of the machines in the factories, but given the sheer quantity of diamonds in the chests around the furnace, its use hadn’t been hard to guess.

“Alright,” I said, “let’s pay it a visit.”

The sanguinum factories were no longer active, as they’d eventually run out of the various materials they needed, and I had never bothered to refill their dispensers. I suppose you could never have too much iron, and there was one machine that converted the dark sands of the wastes into ingots which I did plan on using when I got around to it. The room dedicated to producing railroad tracks, however, had fallen silent, and the central hub of the factory that looked like a collection of clocks was ticking the time away with nothing to do.

The blast furnace was huge, fifteen feet high, and winged by rows of pipes that gave it the air of a church organ. Even though it was inactive, it still radiated enough warmth to make the room uncomfortable.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s break this thing down.”

Summoning Durin’s Digger, the pick I’d stolen from Kevin, I tapped at the side of the furnace to harvest some of its panels. Its guts were more complicated than I expected, coal got fed in through the pipes pressed together by super-heated pistons, then regurgitated as diamond through the pipes of the other wing. The engine that powered the whole thing was built into its base, a nest of sanguinum power lines attached to the elemental core. The entire apparatus was more complicated than Survivor crafting was supposed to be. But Kevin had been around so long, I wasn’t surprised he’d found ways to play with the System until it could do things it had never been meant to do.

The core was the size of my fist, and though it had a coherent shape, a perfect sphere, it looked liquid. It was like someone had convinced a handful of lava to curl up into a ball and stay that way, still shifting and churning as its cooling exterior cycled inward and the liquid at its blazing heart bled up to replace it.

I poked it, and seeing as my finger didn’t disintegrate, picked it up. It was heavy, at least fifty pounds, and if I hadn’t been wearing gauntlets, it would have charred my hands off. The heat was stinging me even through the protection as I carried it back to the forge with Malphas, Asmodeus, and the hollows in tow.

The other components Malphas had mentioned were readily available, so I picked a spot near the lip of the cliff overlooking the magic cauldron to place it, and a minute later, had myself a brewing stand. The formula resulted in a sturdy column segmented into three equal parts. Within this stone cage, the core was suspended on the steel rod which had come into being inscribed with arcane runes.

The columns were decked out like a Christmas tree with holsters of vials, tubing, and compartments for storage, even though no glass or rubber had been included in the crafting formula. It looked primed and ready for alchemy, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Not having access to potions had been frustrating, and if Malphas knew a few functional recipes, then I was going to be in business very soon.

“Good news,” I said, turning to the raven demon. “You can live.”

He nodded. “This is only the beginning,” he said. “You have no idea what wonders this device can produce.”

“I have a pretty good idea,” I said. If it was anything like crafting, what came out of this stand would mostly follow the lines of what I remembered from the game.

“Are you ready to give me your oath?”

“Subject to my desires.”

“Tenth seat it is. You have my word.” If this demon could help me turn invisible, it would be worth a lot more than that. I produced the oathblade, and motioned for the hollows to step away from Malphas, though Asmodeus remained close at his side.

“And my lands?”

“You can work that out with Zareth, I’m sure we have areas that are still available. And Orobas can make sure you get the monsters you want.”

The raven knelt, his injured leg wobbling, and nearly giving out under him as he went down. I rested the tip of the oathblade on his shoulder, and he touched it with his hand.

“I, President Malphas, hereby offer my allegiance, knowledge, and support to the Dark Lord of Mount Doom in exchange for the rights and privileges of the tenth seat. May the power of the blade sunder me should I prove false. I am yours to command.”

A pulse of pink light traced its way along the edge of the sword until it settled into the crystal, which darkened and swirled as a new fragment of demonic essence was added to the mix.

“Great,” I said, after adding my part to the oath, “let’s get brewing.”

Malphas, it proved, did have an eidetic memory, and he was soon reciting recipes for me like he was reading them from a list. A lot of the ingredients from Minecraft had been substituted with materials of this world. I didn’t have all of them at hand, but most of what we needed to get started was available in the fortress.

He knew how to make a Potion of Invisibility, as well as Healing, Slow Falling, Leaping, and Water Breathing, among others.

Malphas, Asmodeus, and I were headed over to the farms to collect plants and mushrooms when we ran into Zareth and Gremory. The Esmelda look-alike was walking a step behind my vizier, her hands clasped at her waist, and an angelic look plastered across her face. Zareth looked more harried than usual.

“My Lord,” he said, “I have been seeking you. There is news from the war front.”

“Atlan?” I asked. We hadn’t stepped into that mess yet, and the demons in charge of northern Dargoth weren’t sworn to me. Zareth had been getting updates, but as far as I knew, they were busy fending off raids on the farmlands from the Orkhans.

“No, my lord.” Zareth paused to adjust the scrolls under his arm. “To the east. King Egald is beginning his annual sally into the border march, and Underlord Godwod is requesting further aid.”

Godwod. It bothered me that he was still in power, and now that I had my family back, I could start thinking about what to do about him. “Don’t we already have a demon in Henterfell? What’s he doing?”

“Barbatos,” Zareth nodded. “He stopped sending messengers shortly after your ascent to the throne, and the lord complains that he has disappeared, taking what was left of their monstrous regiment with him.”

Yet another demon who was going to need to be bullied into swearing an oath to me. It was getting tiresome. “Do you think we’re going to lose Henterfell?”

“It is hard to be sure, but at the least, from what Godwod claims, most of the border march will soon be lost, if not the city itself.”

Nothing like having two war fronts to be worried about. I turned to Asmodeus.

“Have we assigned you a territory yet?”

‘No,” the snake demon unfurled his hood. “You have not.”

“Right, well, you pissed me off on the train when you ran after the other snake. But you basically rescued me out there yesterday, so I’m ready to make this official. The seventh seat belongs to you, and I want to give you Henterfell as your domain. Any problem with that?”

Asmodeus’s tongue flickered. “It will suffice.”

“Great. Take the hollows with you, and anything else you want from the stables below that’s fast enough to keep up with the varghests. You’re in charge of making sure we don’t lose the city to King Egald and see what you can do about the rest of the border. We need better information about what we’re up against, so I’ll send some harpies with you as well. But I don’t want you to risk them in skirmishes. They’re going to be for reconnaissance only.”

They would also be my eyes and ears in the region, so I wouldn’t have to trust the demon completely.

“As you wish,” Asmodeus offered me a slight bow, and Zareth was busily taking notes.

“I’ll see to it that he has what he needs,” Gremory said, apparently not wanting to be left out. She sidled closer to me, smiling sweetly, and I stepped away.

“Fine with me. The bird and I are going to go brew some potions.”

Gremory’s face darkened for a heartbeat, disappointed, and then went back to being blandly angelic.