Survivor: Definitely Not Minecraft

There were more mushrooms than I ever wanted to see in my life. It was still a swamp, or at least it smelled like one, but the fungal jungle was so dense and massive that all I could see was the canopy. We landed on a greenish-white cap that was bigger than a helicopter pad and spread out to take stock of our surroundings.

“This place reeks of death,” Gastard said, stepping away from the wyverns to peer out over the fungal expanse. Though his attitudes toward the winged beasts were far from positive, he treated Beta respectfully, patting its flank for a job well done before he left it. A mount was a mount, and some habits were ingrained.

“No shit,” Kevin said. It was a casual remark, issued without feeling, but Gastard did not take it casually. He strode across the cap, grabbed the former Dark Lord by the collar of his leather tunic, and put him on the ground.

It happened so fast I didn't see exactly what he did. Just that one moment Kevin was on his feet and the next he was on his back.

“You will address me with courtesy,” Gastard said cooly, crouching over him.

Kevin had frozen, the curse preventing him from responding physically. For the moment, he couldn't even speak.

Gastard let him go and backed away, waiting to see what he would do. Kevin's oath required him to follow my orders, not Gastard’s, and here was the reason. Giving him a command like that would have been bound to cause problems. We needed the curse to stop Kevin from betraying us, not to stop him from being rude. When the paralysis wore off, he would be free to act how he wanted, if only for a minute.

Kevin got up, his face blank, and acted like nothing had happened.

“There should be some atreanum in the center of the island. When I came here before, I didn't find it, but I know there's meta-material here. If you take out Digger, you’ll feel it pull.”

I summoned the pick and held it out in front of me. The Fortune enchantment turned equipment into dowsing rods for special materials, and the effect weakened with distance. While it wasn’t exactly dragging me anywhere, when I swung it slowly from side to side, I felt a mild resistance moving through part of the arc. The island was big, stretching for hundreds of miles, not that I had a way to estimate the total distance accurately. For the Fortune enchantment to be doing anything, either there had to be a little something close to where we’d landed, or a massive deposit farther in.

“How do we know it’s atreanum?” I asked.

“You don’t.” Kevin held out his arms, then dropped them. “Could be any meta-material, but Jason always said that he found atreanum in swamps. Could be a couple of them. Orichalcum comes from the bones of dragons. Cerulium and Sanguinum are magic run-off, like toxic sludge from a nuclear power plant. I have no idea where Viridium comes from, never found any, and Jason didn’t either. I just know that it exists. Atreanum is an overload, or like, you know, something really bad happens. It’s the black hole of magic metals. Something big breaks down and swallows itself and you end up with atreanum.”

“Dragon bones?” Gastard said. “Surely, you jest.”

“Doesn’t have to be dragons,” even though Kevin was answering Gastard’s question, he was talking to me like the other man didn’t exist, “big entities, old ones. The rest of the body gets eaten after they die, but the regular spawns can’t do anything with a material that dense. They chew the fat and leave the good stuff for us.”

“Why don’t the demons use it?” I asked. “Or Towk, or someone. It has to be valuable whether you're a crafter or not.”

“I think they do, some of them.” Kevin shrugged. “Bedlam’s big, and mostly empty. There are probably monsters here that munch on orichalcum like its taffy. But I don’t know, I’ve found stuff. It exists. Why question it?”

Spoken like someone who didn’t care how a thing worked, only that it did.

“Tell me what happened last time you were here.” There had to be a reason he hadn’t already mined everything there was to mine.

Kevin gave me the short version. The last time he had ventured this far into Bedlam was after a skirmish with forces from Thallasso. They had magic, though unlike the shamans of Atlan, it wasn’t specifically geared toward fighting Discord. Their sorcerers could animate water, pumping out bespoke elementals that were hard to kill because Shadowbane had no effect on them. Atreanum would have come in handy, so he’d overcome his aversion to Bedlam long enough to do some exploration.

There were zombies aplenty, and hollows, and before he’d come across the deposit, he’d run into a more advanced monster and retreated empty-handed.

“It was a super-hollow,” he said. “Three heads, three sets of arms, a snake tail. It kept regenerating any damage I did, and wouldn't let me get close to where Digger was taking me, so I just left. I hadn’t died in a long time, and I especially didn’t want to die here. It wasn’t worth it. Got some water demons to deal with the Thalassians, and that was it.”

“What happens if you die in Bedlam?” I asked.

“Maybe nothing. Zelda still has dibs on your soul, so you could go back to her. But it’s not for sure. Out here, there are entities waiting to catch heroes before they reincarnate. Towk could do it, if he was paying attention. Or you could get stuck in something. It’s risky, is all. Like I said, not worth it.”

What he was describing sounded like a Wither, a mob from Minecraft that only appeared if you crafted it yourself. It was ridiculously hard to kill, shot skulls from its skulls, and could blow through almost any block, making it untrappable. Of course, it wouldn’t be identical, none of the mobs were, but it really called into question whether the programmers at Mojang had tapped into a cosmic wavelength while they were working on the game.

“If you can find what we came for,” Gastard said, “I will hold off the beast.”

Aside from scattered phantoms, there weren’t many mobs above the canopy, so we flew from mushroom cap to mushroom cap to make our way deeper into the island without having to travel through the jungle. The hours went by, and we had to kill a few monsters, but it didn’t feel like we were under attack or had earned the notice of any exceptional entities.

There was no day or night here, no moon or stars. Some of the fungus was bioluminescent, but it was far from bright, and Gastard couldn’t see well in the dark. We kept torches on the wyverns, not Shadowbane though; the enchantment would have made them unmanageable, and they made us exposed. Anything else flying above the caps, or even on the nearby islands, would have noticed us, but we went unmolested.

Pausing for a snack break, we landed on a brown cap with ruffled edges and I passed out bread before dropping a crafting table. Digger had pulled at a lower angle, suggesting we would soon have to climb down. Before we did, I wanted to make use of some of my newly won experience and craft a few more runes. Making my boots had given me a few levels of Inscription. Restoration and Speaking required level ten, and Fixation wasn’t available until twenty, but Shadowbane and Protection were the base of the pyramid, and I wanted force fields.

The barriers I’d encountered had all been stationary, but it wouldn’t hurt to experiment. As Kevin watched, I went about applying the Protection rune to planks until I had enough to craft a shield. The resulting item looked mostly normal, a wooden circle with iron studs and an arm strap, but at the center of the circle was a single large icon. Nothing complicated, almost a hashtag symbol.

I put it on.

“Hey,” I called to Gastard, “punch this.”

He obliged. His diamond clad fist knocked against the wood, and a bluish square field of energy popped into existence around the shield. It weighed nothing, and wasn’t large enough to get in the way if I was fighting, but it remained in place for only a few seconds before fading away.

“Interesting,” Gastard said, and proceeded to test the limits of the barrier. After attacking with his fists, he switched to his sword, slicing with increasing intensity as the shield continued to hold. This went on for several minutes until he finally called upon the white flame within his sword and went all in on a two-handed side stroke. It jarred my arm, and more significantly, caused a small plume of smoke to rise from the symbol, though the shield itself was unharmed.

“So there are limits,” he said. “Still, it is an impressive defense.”

I had to agree. Though my shoulder was sore, nothing he had done had resulted in a loss of health. Kevin had observed the display with a sour expression, and now saw fit to chime in.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Shields are overrated.”

“Did you ever make one like this?” I asked.

“No,” he said, defensively, “I didn’t need to. No one could hurt me in my armor.”

That wasn’t true. I’d beaten him, and apparently, the Wither had come close to doing so as well. It never ceased to amaze me how little Kevin had accomplished in all the time he’d spent on Plana. Then again, he hadn’t been pressed to do more. Kevin had made himself comfortable and stayed that way, relying on demons to do his grunt work.

The wyverns fed and seemed content. The environment beneath the canopy was too overgrown to accommodate their flight, and I didn’t want to risk losing them, which left us with a conundrum.

“You want me to watch the horses?” Gastard said, not amused in the least.

“We can’t trust Kevin to stay here, and we can’t risk losing them. We would be stuck on this island.”

“We have your wings,” he said, tapping the strap of the Elytron he wore.

“As far as we flew to get here, I don’t have enough fireworks to get us back. We could hopscotch to the nearest island, maybe one more after that, but we’d end up stranded. They aren’t that reliable to begin with.”

Gastard shook his head. “I can’t abide you traveling alone with him. That was one of Esmelda’s conditions, was it not? I am not here to be a maid to these beasts. I am here to protect you, and I cannot do that if you go on without me.”

“I’ll stay behind,” Kevin said. “I didn’t want to go down there again, anyway. You won’t even let me wear real armor or have my weapons, so what’s the point?”

Now I was thinking of an old brain-teaser, something about having a fox, a chicken, and a bag of grain, then having to take them across a river in a boat that would only carry two of them at once. Was Kevin the fox or the chicken? Gastard would not eat him if I left them alone, but there was a boss mob on the other side of this river, and I wanted Gastard with me if at all possible. We had five wyverns, so maybe we could split them up to cover our potential losses.

“So we all go,” I said, not bothering to answer Kevin, “but we take two of the wyverns with us, and lock the other three up to make sure they’re still here when we get back.”

Gastard grunted his approval, and I quickly erected a wooden pen for the wyverns. They could have broken out if they were sufficiently motivated, but I was worried a stone barn would be too much weight for the mushroom cap. They were sturdy, but my boots were leaving imprints, and I didn’t want to topple the stalk or build a structure that would rip through the skin and crush the wyverns.

Splitting the group wasn’t absolutely necessary, but I preferred not to have all my flying eggs in one basket when I wasn’t watching, and the pair we brought might come in handy fending off other mobs.

Getting down from the canopy was a pain. The underlayer was a mix of more mushrooms, branches, and stalks, only some of which were sturdy enough to hold my weight. I slid off the big cap onto a clump of mycelium that half disintegrated on contact. My fall was brief, the Elytron catching and allowing me to drift onto a more substantial substrate, but I didn’t take it as a positive sign for navigating the jungle at this level.

I got my back against a central stalk and retrieved the pick to suss out the way forward. Down and to my right. We could do that.

Gastard and Kevin were watching me from the edge of the mushroom. As both their faces were covered, I didn’t have to put up with any skeptical expressions.

“Let’s just glide down,” I said. “The atreanum isn’t going to up here, and there has to be a solid surface somewhere.”

“There’s going to be mobs,” Kevin warned.

“I’m not worried,” I lied.

The descent wasn’t overly difficult, aside from knocking into seemingly every bump and ridge of fungus in the world on the way down. Alpha and Beta had no trouble navigating. Though they could hardly spread their wings, they clung to the stalks like massive bats, climbing and leaping as comfortably as if this were their natural habitat, pausing only to hiss at any stray sound or movement amid the clustered landscape. The air was thick with spores, and though my System protected me from whatever poison they contained, and Kevin was unaffected, Gastard was coughing heavily by the time we reached the jungle floor.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “My throat is dry.”

It wasn’t nothing, but I’d brought bottles of mooshroom milk just in case. Now that Gastard had a System of his own, maybe it would help. We dropped onto a wet, spongy outcrop that I took to be the bottom and checked the pick for our heading. The vague resistance had developed into a full on tug. We were making progress.

In an effort not to become hopelessly lost, I placed glass blocks at regular intervals as we moved further in. It was more fragile than stone, but less likely to blend into our surroundings. They were the only things that glittered in the light of the bioluminescent moss that cast the jungle in a perpetually dim, purple twilight.

As Kevin had promised, there were zombies. Lots of zombies. No kulus, babies or otherwise, hid among the stalks, which suggested that the shambling mobs had no natural predators here. They sloshed through shallow pools, or rested in nests of lichen, before lurching after us. Wither or no Wither; as long as I didn’t have to deal with another giant squid, I was happy.

The hollows were more of an issue. They had weapons, rusted and well-worn, but dangerous nonetheless, and they wielded them with a skill that belied their skeletal appearance. Some of them appeared among the shamblers, using the slower, stupider mobs as cover to approach. Others lurked in the shadows. They were more of a danger to Kevin than to me or Gastard, and they ignored the wyverns, as did the zombies. Apparently, being tamed by my skill wasn’t sufficient to mark a mob as an enemy for the natives of Bedlam, at least until they acted in our defense.

Alpha bit the head off of a zombie that got too close to me, crushing its skull in a swift chomp before swallowing it whole. I cut down a few more, my boots squelching in what I hoped was mud, before again summoning Durin’s Digger to get a bead on the prospective atreanum. The pick dipped, jerking to the left. It was the strongest response I’d ever gotten from Fortune, and it was taking me to a small mountain of mycelium surrounded by a peat clogged pond.

Frogs, or the Bedlam equivalent, chirped and ree’ed in the shadows of the jungle. The void was cool, but the deeper we traveled into this region, the warmer it had become. The air here was sweltering, and the spores were thick enough to limit my vision to a dozen paces. A wet cough brought Gastard to a stop.

He sheathed his sword, and doubled over, lifting his visor to spit something dark into the murk. Kevin laughed, then quieted at a harsh look from the templar, turning away as if he was suddenly passionately interested in the glowing moss hanging nearby.

“Take this,” I said, offering Gastard a bottle of milk.

He eyed it dubiously, knowing its origin, as he wiped his mouth. “Shall I compound one poison with another?”

“I’ve tried it,” I said. “It’s not bad. If we do have to fight a boss mob, I can’t have you getting sick on me, right?”

He grimaced as he accepted the bottle, uncorking it and throwing it back in a few gulps. He returned the glass to me, and I tossed it over my shoulder.

“No room in my inventory for empties,” I said. “How do you feel?”

“Better,” he admitted. “Why doesn’t the mist affect you in the same way?”

“We’ve been around longer,” I gestured to Kevin, who was nervously watching a zombie shamble toward us through the murk. “Also, to be honest, the corruption is so deep at this point that when I breathe in mushroom spores, they probably go ‘hey buddy, how are you’ as soon as they get into my lungs and see all their friends.”

I hadn’t felt sick since arriving in Bedlam. The runic boots might have been helping, but I knew I wasn’t cured. What taint actually meant for me in the long term was still a question mark, not that the answer would be anything good. Would I suddenly transform into a demon? Probably not. Still, it was a matter of time before I hit an inflection point. That was why we were here.

Gastard was not amused. We made our way to the mound, and my pick jerked down. The atreanum, or whatever it was, lay beneath us. Mining, the mycelium poofed at a touch from Durin’s Digger, and I soon hit bedlamite. As I continued to dig, beddlemites appeared, but Gastard cut them apart while Kevin and a pair of wyverns watched from the lip of the growing pit.

Bedlamite was porous, so I filled in the walls of my impromptu quarry with granite, harvesting the brackish water in bottles as I went. It wasn’t as swift a descent as I would have liked, but the deposit was here, and Durin’s Digger was vibrating in my hands. The bedlamite changed, replaced by something more solid, a green ore. As soon as I harvested the first block, the System gave me a ding.

As if in response to the notification, a wail surged through the jungle, chasing us into the fresh pit. It wasn’t a phantom. The sound was lower, more resonant, and I felt it in my breastbone.

“It’s here!” Kevin shouted. “Fu—”