Survivor: Definitely Not Minecraft

Noivern wasn’t looking very hot. He’d survived our tumble, but broken bones in both of his wings. The grooms had managed to get splints on him, fixing his wings against his back so that he wouldn’t try to use them, and the wyvern was less than enthusiastic about the situation. He hissed at me when I approached, even initially refusing the offal on offer, but when I produced a cow heart, he couldn’t hide his enthusiasm.

Drool slipped down the side of his wide mouth as his beady eyes focused on the organ in my hand.

“I promised I’d get you something nice,” I said, tossing the heart.

Noivern’s maw gaped, revealing row upon row of serrated teeth, before snapping shut again as he swallowed the heart whole.

“Did you even enjoy that?” I asked, but his appetite was wetted. He pulled against his shackle to nose the bucket of meat slops I’d brought him.

“Who’s a good monster?” I said, scratching around his ear holes. I pushed the bucket closer and he dug in.

The regeneration potion was a mixture of red and violet, with a faint glow that pulsed like a slowed-down heartbeat. The key ingredient was chimera blood, which had required another trip down into the pens to collect. While I didn’t want anything bad to happen to Noivern, I would rather use him as a test subject than a human. Unstopping the bottle, I put my hand under his bloody chin and angled his head up so I could pour the contents into his mouth.

Noivern accepted the treatment without complaint, but a moment later, thrashed his head from side to side. He raked his claws along the stone floor and let out a high wail. I stepped back, hoping I hadn’t just poisoned my mount. His wings flexed against their bindings, straining the leather straps and the wooden splints until they snapped, and he spread himself out to his full span for the first time since the injury.

Noivern shrieked like a triumphant eagle, then shook his body hard enough to spill the remnants of the water and food across the floor. He tugged at the chain binding his ankle, giving me a look like a dog that had been cooped up for too long and wanted to go for a walk.

“Soon, buddy,” I said. “I’m glad you feel better.”

Though I trusted Noivern to carry my family, Esmelda had made it very clear that horses were the preferred option for our trip to Nargul. Though I’d never seen the red lightning strike anything, traveling across Dargoth’s skies did seem inherently unsafe, and we weren’t on an urgent timeline at the moment.

Mount Doom’s garrison didn’t have much of a cavalry, but there were mounts on hand, enough for us to ride with spares, and we had Gastard’s old horse as well. After spending a little more time bonding with Noivern, I returned to our suite of rooms to find Esmelda sliding her chainmail over her tunic. She pulled her long hair up from under it and let it fall freely down her back, then looked at herself in the mirror.

“Are you sure this is necessary?”

“I think it looks great on you,” I said.

“It’s heavy, I don’t know how you spend all day in your armor.”

“I’m used to it, and you don’t have to wear it all the time, but it would make me feel better if you did while we’re traveling. If I’m not going to be leaving you behind anymore, you need to have some kind of protection.”

She nodded. Esmelda had been insistent that she didn’t want me running off on my own, and that she wanted to be at my side when we were facing anything short of a full-on battle. Given how long we had been separated, I understood the impulse, but there were still going to be times when I had to do things by myself. They weren’t going to Bedlam, ever, and if she had been with me when I was captured, she would have been taken as well. So there had to be some limits, but it was comforting to know that when I went north to deal with the Atlan situation, my wife and son would not be far behind. The journey to Nargul, being within what was at least ostensibly my territory, was something of a practice run.

“It’s not terrible,” she said, “but I’m still not sure about the helmet.”

“You have to wear a helmet,” I said. “The System is weird about damage. As far as I can tell, it registers the protection from armor as filling up slots on our bodies. So even though the chain doesn’t cover all of your arms, the Protection enchantment still defends you. The cap may not cover your face, but I think wearing it will help regardless of where you’re hit. And I really like your face, so I’d prefer it didn’t get ruined by a stray arrow or a troll slap or whatever.”

She pursed her lips. “If you say so.”

Esmelda donned the steel cap, tying it on with the leather strap that hung under her chin. “This feels odd to me,” she said, “but I think Leto likes armor. He always admired Gastard’s.”

“You look adorable,” I said, “like a little soldier.”

“Shut up.”

Leto truly did appear to be a young squire, and he kept running his hands over the fine chain links of his shirt, admiring them.

“It suits you,” I told him as we gathered in the sitting room. Gastard had packs prepared for everyone, and he was checking through their contents; rations and cooking and camping equipment. Though we wouldn’t exactly be camping, it was good to be prepared.

He didn’t respond. Leto was still sore with me for shouting at Gastard during dinner, and he showed it by keeping his distance.

“I was thinking you needed a weapon to go with the armor,” I said, and that got his attention.

“A sword?” He was trying to disguise his eagerness, but he was practically holding his breath.

“Gastard says you’ve been a very diligent student,” Esmelda said, “we agreed you should have something.”

“It’s not a sword, but it's yours.” I held out my hand, and an orichalcum knife appeared out of my inventory.

His eyes widened as he took the blade.

“You have to be careful,” I said. “I know you know how dangerous blades are, but this is different. It’s sharper and harder than anything you’ve used before.” And the Shadowbane enchantment would make it more effective against monsters, even a full demon.

“I will be,” he said, and his mother glared at him. He glanced at her, then back at me. “Thank you.” His tone was begrudging, but I would take it.

“You’re welcome.”

We got on the road soon after. Orobos, Zareth, and Gremory were left in charge of Mount Doom, which mostly ran itself anyway. My potions were safely stored in a leather carrying case I’d crafted for that purpose, and I was bringing several saddlebags full of ingredients. Without more elemental cores, I couldn’t make extra brewing stands, but it converted neatly into a stone medallion to carry with us. Neither Esmelda nor Gastard was keen on the idea of traveling in the company of a demon, so Malphas would be following us well behind. As he was a new addition to my demonic coterie, I wanted to keep him relatively close at hand, and his role on this excursion was taking control of the mobs that would inevitably spawn around me after dark.

Monsters had gone from being a constant threat to a valuable commodity. In the future, every troll and shambler that I could send to war would mean saving the lives of human soldiers who wouldn’t have to fight in their place. In Williamsburg, I had set up a network of torches large enough to stop the ground spawns completely as long as I was sleeping at home, and the harpies had taken care of the phantoms in the air. But stopping them was no longer the optimal solution.

In the fortress, we’d set up a somewhat complicated system for utilizing my spawns while still allowing me to spend my nights with my family. The suite was protected by torches, but beneath it, there was a large chamber that served as a monster cache. The demons had been taking turns manning it while I slept, taming the mobs, and bringing them all down to the pens in the morning. Gremory had reported that more advanced entities were beginning to appear, though not in large numbers. Varghests, hollows, and endermen were beginning to step through the veil of weakened reality around me, in addition to the usual shamblers and trolls.

The longer I stayed in Plana, the greater the variety of entities that would be able to use me as a doorway into the world. That, and the fact that I was infected with demonic essence from the demons I had killed.

Our first day out went well enough, though Dargoth hardly presented an idyllic view. Roiling skies over shattered plains, and the looming presence of Mount Doom behind. When we stopped for the evening, Leto watched me put together a shelter, and I handed him a set of everburning torches to place around it. Resources weren’t an issue, so I set up a hearth and a chimney as well so we could have a fire inside.

I planned on leaving the shelter behind, rather than breaking it down in the morning, so we could have a network of rest stops wherever we traveled. Kevin had been weird about infrastructure. He’d built a bridge through the Wastes and laid train tracks connecting the major settlements, but the roads were underdeveloped. His fortresses and cities were like islands, with their own farms, mines, and ecosystems to support themselves, but they weren’t interconnected the way I would have expected a nation to be. He’d ruled Dargoth for centuries, but it had been the demons running things while he occupied himself with personal projects. If I was going to be a ruler, I wanted to start putting the kingdom in order, and the rest stops could be the beginning of a stronger link between Mount Doom and Nargul.

Esmelda cooked us a stew, and I set up my brewing stand in the back corner of the shelter. Leto was fascinated by the process.

“Can I try?” He asked as I dripped glistering melon mush into one of the funnels. I handed him another melon. I’d brought a bag full of them for the journey, as healing potions were the one thing you could never have too much of.

“Crush this one for me,” I said, directing him to the anvil I’d dropped next to the brewing stand. He seemed to have a good time doing that, and I kept an eye on him as the base elixir began their conversion process. Malphas couldn’t brew potions himself. Whatever ingredients he fed into the machine would result in a muddy failure. Alchemy, or at least this version of it, was an extension of the crafting system, so it was something only Survivors could do. But Leto had been suspiciously good at starting fires when he used my tools to do so, and even though he couldn’t harvest or convert coins back into resources, I had to wonder if there were other benefits to being my son.

He tasted some of the melon mush that had gotten on his hands, and his eyes lit up.

“It’s sweet.” He said.

“Huh,” I scooped up some of the glistering melon paste with one finger and gave it a try. As I’d only made them to use as an ingredient, I hadn’t tried eating one by itself. They didn’t look totally edible, being that the glistering fruit had a crystalline structure, but the paste was wildly sugary, reminding me of some of the candy I’d had as a kid, somewhere between Nerds and Jello.

“Okay,” I said, “it’s delicious, but in the future, please don’t put potion ingredients in your mouth.”

“What?” Esmelda said, turning from the pot that was simmering over the hearth with a stricken expression. “What did you put in your mouth?”

“It’s just a melon,” Leto said, sheepishly.

Esmelda grabbed our son and pulled him bodily away from the anvil. “What were you thinking!”

“It looked okay,” Leto said.

“It looked okay?” She repeated. “You’re smarter than that. Your father is not the same as other people, he can eat and drink things that no one should ever eat or drink. You need to be more careful.”

“And you,” she glared daggers at me over Leto’s shoulder, “do better.”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said, trying not to smile. When it came to not thinking things through, I was not one to talk, and it may have been hereditary.

“I’m glad you’re helping,” she told Leto, “but don’t do that again.”

“I know,” he said, shifting from foot to foot, “I won’t.”

She let him go, putting her hands on her hips, and regarding us both with a deadly serious expression.

“Dinner in half an hour,” she said and went back to stirring the pot.

The first new batch of healing potions was soon completed, and while they were brewing I told Leto about some of the other formulas. Naturally, this led to the subject of spider eyes, and I told him about the Vorakai. He said he wanted to see it when I had to fight one again, and this led to another outburst from Esmelda about safety concerns and rash decisions.

“Why don’t you try putting the paste in this time,” I told Leto after refilling the brewing vials with base elixir. “Just don’t get your hands anywhere near the core. All of this is very hot.”

He did as I instructed, and we both watched as the ingredients made their way through the funnels and began to swirl around the vials. For the first minute or so, it looked like it was working, but the result was a brownish sludge.

Leto was crestfallen.

“It’s okay,” I said, “some of these didn’t work for me on my first try either.” I emptied the sludge outside the shelter and rinsed out the vials before filling them with fresh water. Though we’d been avoiding fungal colonies as we traveled, I’d harvested plenty of Bedlam Wart in preparation for the journey.

“Try this,” I said, offering Leto a pouch full of wart powder. He poured it carefully into the funnel, and this time, the result was exactly what it was supposed to be. Three new bottles of base elixir.

“Did it work?” He asked, nervously.

“One way to be sure,” I said, quickly preparing another melon and feeding it into the machine. The process began again, and it looked like the elixir was doing its job. There had been no notification ding from my System when the elixirs finished, and Leto didn’t have a System, so there was no way to check if he somehow had one or more of my abilities. I had access to my System screens through the elder sign on the back of my hand, and I’d always assumed that the two were inseparable. No sign, no System. But what if the elder sign was just a way to interact with the System and not the source of the System itself? Monsters and demons had magic and essence, and lillits were special in their way. They had a lot of traits that I would otherwise associate with elves in a fantasy world. Plana itself might have had subtle magic at work in the background.

“If you want,” I said, “you can try brewing a bunch of base elixir. I need it to brew all the other potions, so it would be good to have some extra. Do you think you can do that for me?”

“Yeah,” Leto said, “It’s fun.”

I didn’t want to get his hopes up, but I suspected that with some practice, he would be able to brew more advanced recipes as well. If the foundation level worked for him, why not more? I’d have to get Esmelda to try it as well. Maybe lillits could all do a little alchemy, but I felt it was more likely that the stand worked for him because he was my son.

We shared a meal and listened to the sounds of monsters being rounded up outside. There were moans and hoots, quickly quieted as Malphas drew the mobs away. The phantoms were another matter. Malphas must have claimed some of them as well, but their eerie cries were intermingled with the calls of harpies overhead. My homies were never far off, and the flesh of monsters was a reward for their service. They were welcome to it.

We didn’t push the horses, so we had another full day of travel ahead of us and another peaceful night. Nargul came into view by noon on the day after.