Minecraft: Mob Squad: Never Say Nether: An Official Minecraft

I do not like being smacked around by Endermen, and I don’t really want to make eye contact with anybody ever again. The Nether is a tricky place. It’s hard to determine friend from foe here—or, more accurately, friend from fiend. I just wanted to pet the hoglins, and they nearly finished me off. I don’t feel so bad eating the tasty chops they dropped. I tell myself that Thingy would taste very different, and this is just an entirely different animal.

“Let’s take five to look for more berries while Chug fills up,” Mal says, pickaxe over her shoulder. Lenna nods and pulls out her book, and I stop trying to hold myself upright like I didn’t just get the mashed potatoes beaten out of me. I don’t want to be the one to slow us down, because I know Tok needs us, but I also know enough about adventuring these days to recognize the value of a quick break and a big pile of food when someone just got pulverized.Exclusive © content by N(ô)ve/l/Drama.Org.

Jarro and I roast some chops, and then I eat while my friends explore this weird new biome. I sit on the ground, marveling at how it can be both stony and spongy, warm and moist. I see another Enderman appear, but I look away. The last one didn’t seem to notice us at all until I locked eyes with it, and then it got super mad. Maybe if I ignore them, they’ll leave me alone. This one is carrying a block of fungus, and it looks pretty happy to just do its thing. I notice that Lenna is sketching it in her book, while Jarro has automatically moved away from it.

He did pretty well in that fight. That was the first time I’ve seen him actually hit something—well, except me, with his fist, back home. I guess it takes a different kind of nerve to hit a monster with an axe than to trade punches with a kid you’ve known since you were a baby. He’s not so bad here. I wonder if he’ll go back to being a jerk if we manage to rescue Tok and get back home. Maybe travel is like a potion with a limited impact, and the moment we return, he’ll go right back to acting like we’re not friends. Because right now…we’re friends.

Not that I’m going to mention it. Something tells me Jarro’s not one of those people who’s really good at talking about his feelings. That makes me feel a little sorry for him. My parents might not understand me, but I’ve always had my brother and Mal and Lenna. When something is bothering me, it helps to talk it out with them, and then I feel better. Maybe that’s why Jarro is so mean—he doesn’t have anyone to talk to.

Somewhere in the warped forest, I can hear Mal’s pickaxe. It must be neat, to discover stone and ore no one in our town has ever seen before. I never would have guessed that mining would kind of become Mal’s thing. Lenna’s family runs the mine back home, but they’re boring people who like stone and number crunching more than they like Lenna, so I’ve always thought of mining as a bad thing. But now that Mal’s into it, I can see its value. Well, outside of the value all that raw material has to crafting.

Which I can do now, apparently, much to my surprise. Not as well as Tok, of course, and not as well as Elder Stu or Nan, but decently enough to help us on the road. I guess I absorbed more from working with Tok than I really knew. I’m proud of myself, which, again, is not something I usually felt before we began our adventuring. I look down at my hands, now glistening with chop grease. I can cook, too. Who knew I was capable of so many things?

“Chug, you still flat?” Mal calls.

I stand up and wiggle around to determine if anything still hurts. “Nope. Good as new!”

I still kind of expect Jarro to say something snarky about that sort of thing, but he remains silent. Much to my surprise, he’s using Lenna’s pickaxe to collect the pretty fungi.

“What are you doing?” I ask him.

I think he blushes, but when the whole world is red, it’s hard to tell.

“I was just wondering if this fungus would grow back home. I know a lot about growing sweet berry bushes, so maybe there’s a use for this stuff. Maybe it’s edible, or maybe it goes in potions, or maybe it’s just pretty in pots.” He shrugs, looking very self-conscious. “It would be cool to have a job, you know? Like, all of you guys have jobs now. Every family back home has their own niche. This would be a new thing, so I wouldn’t be stepping on anyone’s toes.”

“I get that. Your mom’s pretty protective of her farm, huh?”

He nods. “Yeah. She likes being the only source of sweet berries. But if I can find something new, something nobody’s ever done before—”

“It would be just for you.”

Jarro grins. “Exactly.”

“You could be the horse master. Or the fungus king!”

His eyebrows rumple up. “Are you making fun of me?”

I hasten to assure him, “No way. I love mushrooms. I have some really good stew recipes. I would totally buy fungi from you.”

“You cook?”

“I’m a great cook.”

He looks contemplative at receiving this information, which is the sort of thing he’d make fun of me for back home. “Then it’s a deal,” he finally says.

We walk over to Mal, who’s sweaty but radiating excitement. “Lenna!” she calls, and Lenna reluctantly closes her book to join us.

“Look what I found while I was mining.” Mal grins as she holds up a single sweet berry. “I hate to say it, Jarro, but I’m really glad these guys robbed your mom. Shall we keep heading in that direction?” She points to where she’s hacked a messy mine into the ground, but it’s hard to see what lies beyond the warped forest, thanks to the hanging fungi, twisting vines, and gently floating fog.

“Always follow the berries,” I say, pulling out my sword. I briefly ache that Thingy isn’t here to help us find the trail, but I’m glad he stayed home. This place is too dangerous for pig-shaped things.

Mal goes first, then Jarro, then me, then Lenna. The forest feels both huge and intimate. The way the gigantic fungi float and drip and the vines swirl on all sides make it seem like we’re in a small room, but then it just keeps on going. We hear that odd, sad crying sound again and again, echoing back from somewhere far off. Endermen pop in and out, busily carrying blocks and minding their own weird business.

“Remember not to look them in the eye,” I remind everyone. They probably know that already, but sometimes I just need to say something out loud so I can stop worrying about it.

The ground goes up and up like we’re headed up a mountain, then slopes back down. The forest begins to feel like more of the same, and I wonder how far the Nether can really go. It feels like a cavern, and caverns have to have limits, but what if this place has no limit? What if it just keeps on going forever, and we can never catch the people who took Tok?

But that makes no sense. Whoever they are, they have a plan. They need him, and they need something only the Nether can provide, and eventually, they have to stop to put their plan into place.

The forest falls away to reveal a far less pretty place. The ground is brownish, wreathed in cyan mist and interrupted by tall black towers of stone. The forests were kind of friendly, with pretty colors and promising plant life, but this place is just…dead. There are even curved white things poking out of the ground that look like the bones of monsters that were once as big as houses.

“It’s some kind of desert,” Lenna says. When we all look to her for further information, she adds, “A desert is a biome in the overworld where there’s no dirt or grass, just sand. It’s very dry. This is like a desert, but…”

“Worse?” I offer.

She shrugs. “Maybe. In Overworld deserts, the sun can be punishing, but here…well, there’s no sun.”

“But there is…that thing.”

Jarro is pointing at—well, definitely not the sun, but it’s the biggest living thing we’ve seen here so far. It’s floating toward us, a monstrous gray beast with wavering tentacles that remind me of a squid. As we watch it, hoping it’s friendly or at least chill, it opens its mouth and lets out that eerie, creaking cry we’ve been hearing.

“That’s one mystery solved,” Mal mutters.

The thing is moving toward us now, and everyone readies their weapons, even Jarro.

I wave my sword, making sure I’m all healed up. “Maybe it’s nice?”

“It looks ghastly,” Lenna replies.

The next time it opens its mouth, it releases a ball of fire, which flies straight toward us—but not with particular speed.

“Not nice,” I amend. “Definitely ghastly. Let me try something.” I step up, carefully tracking the fireball, and the moment it’s about to hit me, I swing my sword and lob the fireball right back at the ghastly thing. A direct hit! “Take that, ghast!” I shout.

It screeches and releases another fireball. I get in position to return fire. “Lenna, see if you can take it down with arrows. I don’t think this guy wants to chat.”

Lenna dutifully sends over a volley of arrows as I smack the fireballs, and with our combined efforts, the big gray monster soon makes a hissing screech and falls, leaving behind an odd, glimmering jewel.

“Well, I felt pretty useless in that fight,” Mal says to Jarro. “How about you?”

“I guess I feel pretty useless in most fights down here,” he admits.

I hurry over to grab the jewel, which looks like a giant tear. “Uh, was that thing crying? Because this is weird.”

“A ghast tear,” Lenna murmurs, furiously sketching in her book. “Fascinating. And now we know what the noise is.”

“And we know they’re relatively easy to kill.” I toss the tear up in the air and catch it, thinking about how cool it felt, smacking those fireballs. “Maybe we should invent a game where somebody throws a ball, and somebody else hits it with a stick?”

Mal laughs. “That makes no sense.”

“You’ve got to try it next time. It was super fun!”

She looks worriedly off into the teal fog writhing among the black towers. “I hope there’s not a next time. If there were two of those at the same time, or fewer of us, or multiple mobs, I think it would feel less like a game.”

As if on cue, an arrow zips past her ear, and Lenna drops her book and spins to shoot back at a skeleton. This is a good reminder: Just because the warped forest felt safe doesn’t mean everything else here is. This desert doesn’t look friendly, and we don’t have any of our usual tricks for quick healing.

Mal picks back up on the trail she’s chosen, and we follow her. As I pass under one of the big, white, bonelike structures, I run a hand over the smooth, solid curve. Whatever beast died here long ago, it was massive, bigger than most of the structures in Cornucopia. Only then does it occur to me that just because there are bones doesn’t mean they’re all dead. They could still be here, lurking. Waiting. Hungry.

My stomach growls, right on cue, and I pull out another hoglin chop and nibble. This is not a great place to forget about your health.

We walk and walk and walk, and it feels like it’s taking forever. I struggle forward, straining, but it’s like when you’re in a dream and you can’t move. I look down, and my legs are halfway sunk into the ground.

“Uh, guys?” I try to pull up my foot and fail. “This sand is…”

“I’m sinking!” Jarro squawks.

“It’s sucking us down,” Lenna notes without nearly enough emotion. “But only to the knees?”

“Then we have to keep going. Stopping will only make it worse. Come on!” Mal redoubles her effort, flailing forward, and we follow, because we’d follow Mal anywhere. I think she’s right, though—I can see something, way up ahead, that isn’t sand. It almost looks like a shadow made of blocks, a looming, sharp-cornered form poking up from the ground.

I focus on that goal, slogging forward, throwing my arms to help propel my legs. Ahead of me, Mal and Jarro similarly flounder, grunting and groaning as they fight against the sucking sand. Behind me, Lenna struggles along, and I wonder if she’ll be able to cover us from behind if we’re attacked. If we hold still, will we be sucked under?

We can’t find out. We have to keep fighting.

This is the longest day—night? Nightmare?—of my life. No matter how hard I push, I’m still twice as slow as usual. My armor weighs me down, makes me feel thick and clumsy. My legs are covered in sand, scratchy grains pouring into my boots. It’s coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere—and I mean everywhere. I have my sword out, because if something that can actually walk on this sand attacks us, we’ll be at a disadvantage. When an arrow whistles past, Lenna takes down the skeleton in six shots instead of her usual three, and I realize that the sand is making us exhausted.

I can see now that the form ahead is some kind of structure, and my heart lifts. A structure means people, and people means my brother might be there. Whatever it is, it’s not a neat, well-planned construction. Maybe it’s a shelter they’ve hastily thrown up.

Maybe they’re waiting for us, weapons at the ready.

It doesn’t matter.

We’re going to get to that bastion, and if Tok is there, we’re going to save him.