The New Order, page 12
Leonidas traced the sounds to a house at the far end of the gravel road, near the outer border of the village. He dashed up to about ten blocks away and then silently snuck up to the back window. He began listening to the conversation within, hoping for any more information about these mysterious soldiers.
“Can you believe this? This is like, twice as many diamonds as last time!” one of the players exclaimed, his voice deep and with a slightly Russian accent. There was the clinking sound of the player sifting his blocky hands through a pile of diamonds.
“I know, man, I know! And I can’t believe this chicken!” This player had an upper-class accent, and sounded as if he were talking through a mouthful of food. “Honestly, what does the villager thing put in this stuff? It’s delicious! When I go home, I’m taking one of those villager things with me so it can be my personal chef!”
“Oh, come on! The chicken, seriously? That’s what impresses you? Not the stack of hundreds of diamonds and gold and iron ingots?”
“We could mine our own diamonds if we wanted to, man, but I don’t think that any player alive could make chicken this good!”
“I can’t believe you, man.” The Russian guy sighed in exasperation. “You’d choose a chicken buffet over a diamond buffet? I mean, just think about it! How hard is it to get a chicken, and how hard is it to get a diamond?”
“It’s not about how hard it is, it’s about how good it tastes!” This player seemed irritated now. “The meat is just so succulent.”
“Aw, why am I even bothering with you?” the Russian player scoffed. “You don’t get what I’m saying, you’ve never mined a diamond in your life!”
“Well, I’ve tried a few times, but it’s so hard! You have to fight off a ton of monsters down there, it’s all claustrophobic and everything, half the time you can’t even find . . .”
“I know! I’ve actually done it before, unlike you! So I actually understand that it’s really nice to have these villager things do all the work!”
“Hey, it’s not my fault my dad gives me all the diamonds I want!”
“How did I get stuck with you as a partner? You’re a total brat, you know that?”
“I didn’t ask to get drafted; don’t yell at me!”
“Would you two shut up!” a third voice bellowed, and Leonidas almost fell out of his crouch in surprise. He recognized this voice as the one who had ordered Moganga around in the church. “I might as well be working with two of the villagers. You two are so insufferably idiotic!”
“Hey, sorry, Boss, but I just like chicken, don’t yell at me!” the upper-class player replied snootily.
“That’s enough of you,” the boss said in his cool, collected, yet terrifying way. “Why haven’t you two started to craft the diamond armor yet?”
“Why would we need diamond armor?” the Russian player asked. “We’re not actually going to protect the villager things, are we?”
“Of course not!” the boss scoffed. “These villagers are unintelligent animals. I don’t even understand why President Stan wants the things safe. What are they doing for him? We should just count ourselves lucky that we got assigned out here, where we can just sit around, do nothing and let the . . . ah . . . taxes pile up!”
The player laughed as Leonidas was fighting to keep himself from vomiting with rage.
“So . . . er . . . what’s the point of crafting the armor again?” the upper-class player asked.
“What? Oh, right,” the boss replied as if being awakened from a daydream. “We need to look like we’re doing something if President Stan sends someone out here to take a report on us. The diamond armor makes it seem like we’re actually trying.”
“So . . . we’re not actually going to be fighting anything?” the upper-class players asked.
“Of course not!” the boss laughed. “I certainly don’t care about the villagers! They’re just mindless NPCs, right?”
“Well, of course I agree . . .”
“Then we’re not gonna be fighting anything!” said the boss in an airy voice, clearly amused at how slow his soldier was being. “And even if we were doing anything, it’s not like there’s anything out here that’s an actual threat!”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” snarled Leonidas under his breath as, unable to contain his indignation any longer, he sprinted to the front of the house and slammed the door open.
The three players whipped their heads up in shock. Leonidas was taken aback for a moment by the sheer amount of materials that he could see in the house. The players were gathered around chests spilling over with chicken, cookies, wheat, carrots, potatoes, diamonds, gold, iron, and dozens of other things that the villagers handled in their professions.
The player with futuristic blue armor and the one with the tunic, who was clearly the boss, were sitting atop two wood blocks on the ground. The bearded player knelt next to a crafting table and was in the process of crafting a diamond chestplate. All of them wore an identical look of outrage on their faces.
“What do you think you’re doing?” the one with the blue armor asked in his upper-class accent.
“I’m demandin’ that ya leave this village. Right now,” said Leonidas firmly, eyebrows creased and voice shaking in fury. He drew his bow and loaded it, much to the alarm of the three players. “And you’re to leave all the materials that you’ve taken from the villagers here.”
“Who do you think you are?” the boss asked in a voice of composed fury, keeping his cool, but obviously flabbergasted nonetheless.
“Wait a minute . . . ,” said the bearded one in his Russian accent. “You’re . . . You were that player who was in the church with the villagers when we collected our taxes today!”
“Ya weren’t collectin’ taxes,” seethed Leonidas, pulling the string of the bow back even farther. “Ya were abusin’ the villagers. Ya knew that they weren’t smart enough to see that ya were takin’ advantage of ’em. Ya three don’t deserve to call yourselves members of Stan’s army. You’re just a bunch of thugs.”
“How dare you!” cried the boss, slamming his fist onto the crafting table in rage. “You have the audacity to speak to a ranking officer of the army of . . .”
He stopped in midsentence as the arrow left Leonidas’s bow and flew directly toward him. The boss’s eyes followed the arrow as it passed within an inch of his neck before embedding in the wall behind him. He spun back around to look at Leonidas, outraged.
“Yeah, I do,” replied Leonidas, loading another arrow, no trace of mercy in his face. “As much as I despise the three of ya, though, I don’t wanna kill ya. Don’t make me. I’ll spare the three of ya if ya leave this village, don’t take anythin’ with ya, and never come back. It’s your choice.”
There was a moment of tense silence. Then, slowly, the boss smiled, and, quick as a flash, he whipped a diamond pickaxe out of his inventory. The other two followed his lead, the armored one drawing a bow of his own and the bearded one pulling out a diamond sword.
“Very well then, stranger,” the boss replied. “If you’d like to fight, then we will gladly oblige you. We are members of the army of Stan2012, the greatest armed forces in Minecraft. There are three of us and only one of you, so if you’re man enough, fire the first shot.” A sinister grin broke on his face at these words.
That was all the invitation Leonidas needed. Leonidas jerked the bow downward, rapidly changing aim from the boss’s head to his stomach, and fired. With equal swiftness, the boss flicked his pickaxe downward and deflected the arrow with a rapid spin, laughing and waving his free hand forward. The bearded player rushed Leonidas with his sword drawn, while the armored player shot an arrow at Leonidas from afar.
Leonidas ducked the arrow and short-hopped backward to dodge the powerful downward strike from the bearded player’s sword. This initial strike shifted the gears of Leonidas’s mind into tactics mode. The armored one clearly wasn’t a great shot, and the bearded one’s overpowered initial strike told Leonidas that he wasn’t great with a sword either. That left the boss as the only true threat, as he had moved surprisingly fast with that pickaxe.
Leonidas sprinted into the street, followed in hot pursuit by the bearded one, while the armored one fired more shots. Leonidas reloaded his bow as he ran, and in an instant he spun around, took aim, and shot an arrow straight at the bearded one’s chest. He managed to deflect the first arrow, but the next two sunk directly into the bearded player’s heart, causing him to keel over sideways, a ring of items bursting about him.
For some reason, Leonidas felt uneasy. Although the rage he felt at these players’ maltreatment of the villagers could not be expressed in words, Leonidas still felt a twinge of uncomfortable guilt as he saw the lifeless body of this player whose name he didn’t even know. Despite this, he also couldn’t help but think: one down, two to go.
The next kill was even more effortless. Leonidas’s skill with a bow was equal to the skill of the armored one tenfold. While none of his opponent’s shots had come close to touching Leonidas, it only took one arrow from Leonidas’s bow to send the armored player the same way as his bearded comrade.
There, again, came the twinge of guilt, now even more than before as he realized the implications of what he had just done. This player hadn’t even wanted to join Stan’s army, he had been drafted.
But Leonidas shook away the feeling, for the time being at least, when he heard a voice from behind him.
“Very impressive, my friend. Clearly, you are more skilled than you look.”
Leonidas spun around and locked eyes with the boss, still standing in the doorway of the house containing the villagers’ loot. He smiled that unnerving, merciless smile, holding up a loaded bow. There was no hint of anger in his voice, no hint of any concern that Leonidas had just killed his two comrades. The only emotion present was coldhearted amusement. Leonidas’s temple twitched with vehemence, and he knew he would feel no remorse at all for ending this life.
The two arrows flew at the same time. Leonidas dive-rolled to the side, and then looked up to see that the boss had done the same. Leonidas shot off three more arrows, which the boss evaded by sprawling onto the ground and tunneling with his pickaxe into the sand.
Leonidas knew what the boss was trying. Leonidas stepped up onto the wooden ring encircling the nearest wheat farm and, with a running dash, leaped and grabbed on to the edge of the roof of the nearest house, loading his bow and waiting for the boss to come up from the ground.
Leonidas waited, but the only sounds he could discern came from the Iron Golem’s distant massacre. He began to become a little unnerved. Where was this guy? Shouldn’t he have resurfaced by now?
Leonidas heard the sound of a string being stretched just as he thought this. He barely turned in time to see that the boss had silently resurfaced behind him, and an arrow was flying straight toward him. Very clever, thought Leonidas bitterly as he dodged the arrow, losing his balance and tumbling off the roof of the house.
He landed on the ground with a sickly thud, and he felt pain course through his leg. Through gritted teeth, Leonidas glanced up to see that his bow had fallen on the ground a good ten blocks away. At the same time, he became aware that the boss had rounded the corner of the house and was charging at him at full speed, diamond pickaxe drawn.
Leonidas quickly formulated a plan. He reached for the bow before allowing himself to fall face-down on the ground, pretending to be completely out of energy. The boss gave a devious grin, and he was upon Leonidas in moments. He raised his diamond pickaxe, and right as the killing blow was about to fall, Leonidas sent the iron sword he had been concealing swinging up toward the boss in an almighty thrust.
The sword struck the boss across the arm, opening a gaping gash in his right shoulder. As he clutched his arm in pain, he was in no position to stop Leonidas from scampering over to his bow and sending four arrows into his chest in the space of less than two seconds.
Leonidas watched in satisfaction as the boss staggered backward toward the house, seconds away from death. That satisfaction turned to horror in an instant, however, as the boss haphazardly tossed a block of TNT onto the ground and touched it with a redstone torch before finally collapsing.
Leonidas could only hobble as fast as he could on his crippled leg toward the house outside of which the TNT block sat hissing. As soon as he realized whose house it was, he bellowed in desperation, “LIBRORU! Get out of there, quickly!”
The front door flew open seconds later, and the groggy-eyed head of Libroru poked out.
“What is happening out—” the villager began to ask, before he was cut off by the explosion.
Leonidas, who had desperately and senselessly been limping toward the house, was knocked back by the force of the blast and felt the heat scorch his arms as he tumbled across the gravel road. As his disorientation faded, and his world slowly fell back into place, Leonidas felt a terrible pain coursing through both his legs. He forced himself to glance up at the scene around him. What he saw made his stomach dissolve.
The face of Libroru’s house had been completely blown apart. Scattered blocks were lying all over the ground, and there was a crater where the stairs had been. Despite his every instinct to look away, to avoid seeing the horror before him, Leonidas’s eyes traveled downward to the lifeless body of Libroru, lying in the street in front of the crater beside the corpse of the boss. Most alarming, however, was the Iron Golem that had walked around the side of the house and was staring at the scene before it.
Leonidas’s stomach clenched. His grief over Libroru’s death was completely washed away by his immediate fear of the giant metal behemoth standing before him. The Golem’s head shifted from side to side with a series of ominous creaks, surveying the scene around him. Leonidas realized how the scene looked—a blown-out house surrounded by the body of a villager and the three players tasked to defend the village, with Leonidas as the only one still alive.
Leonidas could not fight the Iron Golem. He had heard far too many stories of players challenging these iron monsters to try something that foolish. The Golems were faster than the players, making escape a non-option, and Leonidas’s arrows would simply bounce straight off a Golem’s solid iron body. The only attacks strong enough to damage an Iron Golem were TNT or an exceptionally powerful strike from a diamond sword, neither of which were available to Leonidas.
But what was he thinking? He didn’t want to kill the Iron Golem at all. The Golem was the only thing truly protecting the villagers from the evils of the Minecraft world, and if it were to fall, then the village would be in serious trouble. He only had two options, both of which seemed equally impossible: either convince the Golem that he was not a threat to the village, or escape.
Leonidas slowly pulled himself up, ignoring the screaming pain in his legs, and forced himself to quell the anguish of Libroru’s death. He remembered Libroru from the old days, when the villager would give Leonidas a free cookie every day and would laugh hysterically at Leonidas’s terrible jokes. Regardless of how much he wanted to grieve, Leonidas looked the Iron Golem in the eye, forcing himself to focus on the metal beast in front of him.
“I am not responsible for this,” he choked out, painstakingly staring into the Golem’s emotionless red eyes. “The players that said they were protectin’ the villagers were actually just bullyin’ them. I tried to stop them, so they killed Libroru, and tried to kill me. I promise, I meant no harm to any of ya. Please, just let me be.”
A moment of silence, in which the Golem stared Leonidas down, and he stared back, nervousness ripe on his face. Then, in an instant, the Golem took off, moving faster than Leonidas had seen any mob move, and launched itself into the air, its giant iron arm headed straight toward Leonidas.
Leonidas barely managed to roll to the side in time to dodge the giant fist, terror tripling his crippled speed. The Golem wasted no time in continuing to attack, wildly flinging its giant iron arms. Leonidas fell backward, the giant iron hand coming within inches of his face. Leonidas looked around wildly, desperate for anything he could use to buy an escape.
His eyes stopped on a diamond sword lying on the ground. Although the bodies of all four of the dead had vanished, the sword of the bearded player still remained. Leonidas snatched it just as the Iron Golem threw another punch toward him. Leonidas kicked off not an instant too soon, scooting himself through the giant’s legs. Leonidas swung his sword across the back of the Golem’s knees, and the iron behemoth toppled to the ground with an almighty clang.
Leonidas jumped to his feet and gave an audible scream of pain. With his survival instincts upped to the maximum, he had forgotten about the spiking pains in his legs, and his knees buckled. He glanced over his shoulder as he fell. The Iron Golem was back on its feet, and it was turning around to ready another charge at Leonidas. He got back to his feet and sprinted as fast as his crippled legs could carry him, aware of an omnipresent metallic clanging growing louder and louder behind him at an alarming rate.
Leonidas cut a sharp right-hand turn at the corner of a house and ducked into an alleyway, instantly feeling a rush of wind behind him as the Iron Golem sprinted past. He heard the scrabble of gravel on iron as the Golem attempted to reorient itself, and realized this was his chance to escape. He eyed the open desert in front of him. If he could just make it out into the dune sea, he could return tomorrow and explain his predicament to the villagers, who would tell the Iron Golem to calm down. . . .
His thought was cut off as he stumbled over a small sand pit, tumbled through the air for a moment, and face-planted. The diamond sword flew from his hand and clattered across the blocks. Leonidas gave another shout of pain. He had landed on a rock-solid surface of sandstone. The ground hit Leonidas’s body like a giant smack. The pain in his body was suddenly universal, no longer confined to just his legs.
Leonidas managed to flop over onto his back, just in time to see the Iron Golem staring at him from the top of the sand ledge. Leonidas only held the gaze of the beast for a moment before it swung its arms backward, and with an almighty leap, flew through the air, fist outstretched and headed straight for Leonidas. The reaction was instinctive. In the space of a second, he sought a way to protect himself. His eyes fell on the sword. He snatched it up and was just spinning it into a defensive block as the iron body made contact.
