was black except for his eyes. His eyes were big and white, with two small spots of pink or purple – it was too dark for me to tell. The dark creature had a stone block in his hands. He turned around and looked at us. I kept repeating in my mind: don’t look him in the eyes, don’t look him in the eyes, don’t look him in the eyes.
Jerry whispered:
“Come on, let’s go. Stop looking at him; you’ll probably end up looking him straight in the eye, just like I did the first time I was in Minecraft. Come on, move your feet.”
I turned around and followed Jerry. We walked along the banks of the underground river in which I initially fell. We walked at a moderate pace. Running in the dark will only get you in dangerous places. And from time to time we would drop a torch in order to keep the way lit up for when we would return in search for other useful raw materials or even to explore that abandoned mineshaft that Jerry was talking about. We walked for quite some time until Jerry and I recognized the place where we took cover when the zombies swarmed us and where we almost got blown to bits by that ghastly creeper. Small blocks of stone were still hovering near that area. We placed several torches on the walls and on the floor to make sure that no monsters would spawn out of the darkness and ambush us out of the blue.
We figured that the hole through which I fell into the river and inside this giant ravine wasn’t far. The torches that we set managed to light up the cave pretty well, but not enough for us to spot a tiny, one-block hole in the roof.
“We should start building a stairway to take us close to the roof. We stand a better chance of seeing the exit when we will be nearer to the roof than if we look for it from down here,” said Jerry.
I knew that we had a lot of stone blocks in our inventories so building a thin stairway wouldn’t have taken us that much time to build. And in fact, it didn’t. Within a few minutes we found ourselves halfway to the roof. The stairway that we had built so far was pretty tall, but it only reached half the distance. It was a very thin structure and I bet that from afar it looked pretty funny. Luckily, the laws of physics don’t fully apply in Minecraft, or we would have been falling pretty fast into the river and all that stone would have sunk to the bottom of it.
“There it is, Jerry!”
“Where?”
“Right there!”
I started building again, laying block after block of stone and gradually making my way up to the hole in the roof. In a few minutes we were through the hole and into our initial mine tunnel and a few minutes after that we were back inside our original shelter.
I felt pretty good about finally being home, even if home meant a smaller cave dug into the side of a mountain. We deposited all the materials that we had mined inside a couple of big wooden chests next to our beds. We then ate some of the food that we had left over and headed outside.
It was the middle of the day, so Jerry went out hunting again and I focused on trying to acquire some more seeds in order to plant some nice wheat crops.
By the time the day was over, Jerry came back with quite a hefty quantity of provisions of meat and some leather, too. Apparently, he managed to find some cows. I, however, managed to build a small farm that could give us enough wheat for us to bake a sizeable amount of bread.
“So did you scout the area?” I asked Jerry.
“I did, but so far I didn’t find much, apart from trees and hills. Not many animals, either. A few cows, but no pigs or cats or dogs, not even more sheep. The forest looks pretty empty,” he said.
“Well that’s not good,” I concluded.
“No it is not. We should bunch up our resources and head back down the tunnels tomorrow and see what we find in that abandoned mineshaft. We can empty that whole area and then draw out a plan to move camp somewhere else,” said Jerry.
“Sounds good to me,” I told him.
And so we cooked the food and repaired our tools, because they were pretty much near breaking point from all the wear-and-tear that came with all that fighting and mining from the day before.
When the night came we got a good night’s sleep and in the morning we packed our inventories full of provisions and headed down the tunnel.
We carefully descended into the earth’s depths once more. As we went down we could hear the growls of zombies at every corner and the crackling of bones and winding of bows. It seemed like we were gone, monsters crawled out of the dark corners and started spreading out through our tunnels.
It didn’t take long until we were face to face with a small pack of zombies that was accompanied by three skeletons.
The zombies charged right at us. I huddled up with my back to the wall, thinking that in doing so, I wouldn’t be caught from behind. Two zombies attacked me, arms flailing. I used my iron sword and started smashing away at their heads. The first zombie was easy to dispatch of, but the second zombie charged rapidly after his companion disappeared in a puff of smoke. I managed to duck out of the way as he rushed towards me. But then out of the blue something hit me. One of the skeletons fired an arrow at me and managed to hit me dead on. The arrow hit my armor with a loud bang and managed not only to chip away at my health bar, but also to send me back a couple of feet and interrupt my attack on the zombie. Seeing that I was thrown off my guard, the zombie that was attacking me rushed with even more rage. At that point, I turned my back and ran around the corner. I then stopped and turned around, awaiting my attacker. The unsuspecting zombie followed me through the tunnel and when he turned the corner after me, I started wailing on him with my sword. I managed to land every blow, and with each successful hit, the zombie went back a few paces. Finally, I managed to destroy him for good.
Realizing that I had left my friend behind, I quickly turned around and ran towards the battle scene that I had previously abandoned. When I arrived, I saw that Jerry was overwhelmed by the monsters. He kept pushing them away with his sword and trying to dodge the incoming arrows that the skeletons were firing at him.
I rushed to my friend’s side and managed to kill a zombie within the first seconds from entering the battle.
Both of us killed the remaining zombies quite easily, but there remained the skeletons. They were a tricky bunch, as they were at quite a distance, meaning that we would have a hard time reaching them without getting riddled with arrows. I, like the noob I was, charged the skeletons full on. This was not a wise idea, because it meant that they could fire their arrows at me pretty easily and hit me almost every time. Luckily I had a stack of cobblestone handy. I switched my sword with the cobblestone stack and built myself a two-block pillar behind which I could hide, in order to heal myself from the wounds that the arrows had inflicted upon me. From behind the pillar I could see Jerry reaching the skeletons. Having a lot more experience than me, Jerry knew that in order to successfully defeat skeletons, you had to run up to them in a zigzag pattern and not charge them head-on. He ran diagonally from one wall to the other and when he finally reached them, he positioned himself in front of one of the skeletons in such a manner that the other could not hit him with his arrows unless he fired at his own friend. Pretty smart, don’t you think? This way Jerry managed to destroy one of the skeletons using not only his own iron sword, but also benefiting from the “help” of the other skeleton. You see, skeletons are not that smart, so the second skeleton kept aiming for Jerry. Jerry kept using the first skeleton as cover, thus, the second skeleton had to fire at his own friend. Within seconds, the first skeleton had perished by Jerry’s iron sword and by his own friend’s arrows. Jerry then attacked the second skeleton. Jerry furiously swept his sword at the remaining skeleton. Each time he brought the sword down on the monster, the monster would flash red and jump a couple of feet back. But getting hurt didn’t stop the monster from firing more arrows at Jerry. Finally, my friend managed to push the monster up against a wall and smashed him completely with his sword.
I came out from behind my cover feeling a bit ashamed that I did not help my friend defeat the skeleto
ns.
“Are you alright, Jerry?”
“I’m fine. But those monsters aren’t. We didn’t even make it to the bottom of the tunnel this time. Where do all these monsters come from?”
“I have no idea,” I confessed to Jerry.
“There must be some other portions of tunnels where we forgot to put torches in. Never mind, let’s get down there and check out that abandoned mineshaft.”
And so we continued our journey into the dark recesses of the earth.
After about ten minutes, we found ourselves climbing down the stone stairway that we had constructed not too long ago. We didn’t run, though, as the steps were pretty narrow and the way down was pretty steep. We didn’t really realize how hazardous was the stairway when building it up. In fact, it seemed fine when we were building it, but we couldn’t say the same thing right now, when we were going the other way.
Eventually, we managed to navigate safely down the stairway and reach the lava river. Jerry led the way. He suddenly stopped.
“I’m pretty sure that we didn’t lay down that many torches,” he said in a concerned tone.
“I think we did”, I told him. “Who else would lay down these torches? We haven’t seen anyone the past few days.”
“Still…Keep your sword drawn, just to be sure we