The Complete Elementia Chronicles: Quest for Justice; The New Order; The Dusk of Hope; Herobrine’s Message. Sean Wolfe Fay

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ He laid the gold ingots and redstone out on the table, and moments later he had made a new clock. The face showed that it was about noon above ground.

      “All right, so I guess we should look around this mine shaft,” said Charlie, pocketing the clock.

      “Good idea,” said Kat, drawing her sword. “Maybe there’ll be some more chests down here.”

      “Or maybe,” said Charlie, “the King decided to put his secret stash somewhere in here. From what I understand, these things are pretty hard to navigate.”

      “Uh, guys?”

      Kat and Charlie turned. In the excitement of finding the chest, they had forgotten about Stan. He had followed the train tracks down the corridor, and now seemed to be looking down another corridor that branched off at a right angle.

      “You guys might want to check this out,” he said slowly.

      Kat walked over to him, followed by Charlie and the animals. The hallway in front of Stan was completely blocked off by thick Spider webs, stretching from floor to ceiling. The webbing continued down the hallway as far as the eye could see.

      “What do you make of this, Charlie?” asked Stan, looking uncertainly at Charlie for an answer. Charlie was shaking his head, apparently at a loss. Kat, on the other hand, stepped forwards and slashed at the cobwebs with her sword.

      “Kat!” cried Stan, pulling her back.

      “What? There’s gotta be something that way, right?” she snapped, yanking herself out of Stan’s grip and continuing to slash the strings in front of her.

      “But what if there’s a trap? There could be anything down that hallway. We can barely see three blocks in front of us,” said Charlie, and it was true that, with the cobwebs and lack of torches down the hall, visibility was very limited.

      “Do I look like I care?” said Kat, still hacking through the cobwebs. Followed by Rex, she continued on to the point where she was out of sight of the boys, and they could only hear her voice. “I’m sick of all this hiding from the King. I want to find this stash. And if I get in a fight, then so be it. I’d personally prefer a straight fight to all this—aaaaaugh!”

      Kat’s anguished scream reverberated around the walls of the mine shaft, making it seem three times louder than it actually was. Stan sprinted into the darkness towards his friend, weaving through the path Kat had hacked through the Spider webs. Stan heard a pained whimper as he approached where he judged Kat to be. He pulled back his shovel and swung it, baseball style, as it connected to the Spider that was digging its teeth into Kat’s chest as she lay unconscious on the stone floor, with Rex lying lifeless beside her.

      As the Spider fell down onto the floor, Stan noticed in the low light that it was small, only about two thirds the size of a normal Spider. It had the same red eyes, but it appeared to be blue. He only noticed it for a moment, though, before another one came barreling out of the darkness, straight towards him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Charlie kneeling down, tending to Kat, so he batted the Spider back with his shovel as he had the first one. This one landed on its feet, and he had to hit it a few more times before it finally succumbed to death.

      More Spiders kept coming, and their numbers were increasing. Stan wondered what was happening. Hostile mobs did not attack like this. There were a variety of them, and they didn’t spawn this frequently, even in such low light.

      Then, slowly, as he batted down more and more Spiders, with Charlie now fighting at his side, he noticed a faint glow in the distance. He dodged a Spider and stepped close. What he saw was a black cage, one block in size. Every now and then, a small glow of fire would burst from the cage, and Stan could see a miniature Spider, blue like the ones he was fighting, spinning inside. Immediately after each burst of fire, another Spider would appear, which Stan would hastily beat down.

      Stan realized that this thing was spawning swarms of Spiders, and if he didn’t destroy it soon, they would have a serious problem on their hands. Then he saw Kat’s stone sword lying on the ground, and he knew what had to be done. Without thinking, he snatched up the sword, cut aside two of the Spiders, and, with all his strength, thrust the sword into the heart of the cage, impaling the miniature arachnid inside.

      There was a burst of light. Fire flew from the cage, and there was a loud shrieking noise, like thousands of Spiders being murdered at the same time. Then, the cage was silent. The fire within it had died, and no more monsters were being spawned from it. Stan picked up his shovel, cast aside the remains of the ruined sword, and turned back to Charlie, who was just puncturing the body of the last Spider with his diamond pickaxe.

      “Good thinking, man,” heaved Charlie, wiping the sweat from his brow.

      “Thanks,” replied Stan, and he looked down at Kat, who now appeared to be shivering in a puddle of her own vomit. “Is she going to be all right?”

      “Yeah, but it’ll take a while,” said Charlie gravely. “Those things were Cave Spiders. They didn’t do much damage to her, thanks to you, but they poisoned her. The poison will make her throw up anything in her system. I was stupid and tried to feed her one of her potions, but she just threw it back up. Her system will rid itself of the poison eventually. We just need to give it time. When she wakes up, she’ll be very weak and very hungry.”

      “Man, I’m so glad you read that book,” chuckled Stan. Then he had a thought. “Oh God, you didn’t get poisoned, did you?”

      “I doubt it,” he replied. “None of those Spiders even touched me. You?”

      “I don’t think so,” said Stan in relief. “That’s good. Even with the bread we got from that chest, we only have six loaves left, and I think that at least two of those are going to Kat when she wakes up.”

      Indeed, after a while the unconscious Kat woke up, and the first words out of her mouth were incoherent grumbling, asking for food. Charlie gave her two loaves of bread and one of her two remaining healing potions. Even after this, Kat was very weak and had to walk slowly. She was also on edge.

      “What do you mean, my sword’s gone?” Kat barked at Stan when he explained what had happened after she was knocked out.

      “I told you,” he said, “I used it to destroy the Spider spawner.”

      “And you couldn’t save it or something?” Kat spat in disgust. “You’re useless, you know that? Absolutely useless.”

      “Shut up! If you hadn’t just barged in like that, we wouldn’t have been ambushed by those Spiders. It’s no one’s fault but yours that your sword is gone. Stop blaming me.”

      “To that point,” added Charlie, who had just finished healing Rex with some rotten flesh, “I still have that stone pickaxe. You can use that until you can craft a new sword, Kat.” He pulled it out and gave it to her. She looked at it in disgust.

      “I need to get a new weapon,” she said, spinning the pickaxe over in her hand.

      “Welcome to the club,” sighed Stan, his shovel still gripped in his hand. “You, at least, have your bow.”

      They wandered the mine shaft, taking side tunnels they had never seen before, trying to find some way out or, even better, an entrance to a secret stash room. Before long, they became hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of tunnels. Stan was just about to say that they should tunnel back up to the surface СКАЧАТЬ