At Kevin’s warning, I pulled up sharply. Epsilon beat his wings, and we rose higher above the water. The dark shape beneath its surface grew and grew, and when it breached, it reminded me of nothing so much as a whale shark, though enlarged to unbelievable proportions.
Its mouth was broad enough to swallow me and Epsilon whole, lined with rows of tiny teeth as well as a forest of bristles for filter feeding. While the bristles suggested humans and wyverns were not its preferred prey, none of what was on offer there would result in a pleasant experience. It rose ten, then twenty, feet from the rushing water, and my wyvern banked, escaping to one side of the behemoth’s mouth, which snapped shut a moment later.
The monster’s moan echoed above the shrieks of the phantoms and the cry of my mount, and it fell back into the ribbon of endless water with a tremendous splash.
“Was that a leviathan?” I called to Kevin as we flew away.
“What? No. That was just a big fish.”
It was hard to gauge how long travel took in Bedlam. The realm was both larger and smaller than Plana in its way, extending infinitely, at least by appearances, but with countless unique worlds all clumping close together, and no sun or moon to mark the days. It was a matter of hours before we reached the island of pale sand, though how many hours, I could not say.
Tall shadows slipped across the landscape, projected into three dimensions, with eyes of violet fire. Some seemed to wander, shuffling listlessly, their too-long arms swinging. Others stood still as ice, only to periodically blur into motion, reappearing some distance away and in a stance that suggested they had never moved at all.
The Endermen didn’t look up at us as we approached and circled one of the dark towers jutting from the surface of the barren region. The space was silent apart from the rush of air under the wings of our wyverns and the occasional guttural cough from the tenebrous entities below. Their vocalizations didn't seem to signify anything, but for all I knew, the monsters spoke in some eldritch tongue of their own.
We alighted atop the tower. The peaked roof was a tight fit for three wyverns, and the material of the structure was too dense for their claws to dig in, but a lip of blocks around the rim of the peak allowed them to find purchase.
Obsidian. If I didn’t have enough in my chest to build a portal before, there was more than I would ever need right here.
“Why up here?” Kevin said.
“I want to go down through the tower if we can to avoid the Endermen. Did you see if this thing has an entrance?”
Kevin shrugged in response, and Astaroth circled closer, tongues of flame trailing from his multicolored wings.
“It does,” he said, dipping down and then winging up to hover in midair. “This is the front face, marked by an open arch.”
I looked at Kevin. He was flexing his right hand. Having an appendage as twisted as that one likely came with plentiful discomfort.
“Can the Endermen cross running water?” They were harmed by water in the game, and wouldn’t cross through it. If it didn’t work that way here, I still wouldn’t regret having collected the source blocks. Having a reality-defying liquid in your back pocket was always a plus.
“They don’t like to,” he said. “It doesn’t kill them. But it would keep them out.”
Of course, I could have always walled off the entrance when we got down there, but a barrier of water was less of an impediment than a wall if we needed to get out of there in a hurry, and we wouldn’t have to reach the bottom before putting it into place.
After reconstituting one of the buckets, I spent a moment in contemplation of its apparently innocuous contents. No special sheen or sparkle. Just water.
“Do I have to do something special to place the block?” I asked.
“Dump it where you want it,” Kevin said. “It’ll spread from there.”
Slipping from Epsilon and navigating the narrow ledge with a full bucket in one hand was awkward, but the center of the front face of the tower was only a few steps away. Glancing down gave me a hint of vertigo. The tower was more than a hundred feet high. For whatever reason, flying never bothered me, but looking over the verge of a steep drop still made me uncomfortable.
I dumped the bucket.
It emptied instantly, and an oddly stable glob of water appeared on the obsidian ledge. It wobbled for a second as if deciding which way to go, then it poured. I had to take a step back as it spread to either side, only a foot in each direction, and a thin stream poured over the edge onto the sands below.
As waterfalls went, it wasn’t wildly impressive, but it fell to the foot of the tower and spread from there. The water followed paths of least resistance, never rising, even as it propagated down every channel where gravity could pull it. It pooled around the front of the tower and slipped along a dip in the sand to fill a small well between two dunes beside the edifice.
“It never runs out?” I said. My thermos had a source block inside of it, and Kevin used them in his underground farms, but I’d placed on myself before.
“It won’t rise any farther than it has.” He carefully made his way over to my side of the peak, placing one hand against the sloped roof to help himself balance. “Once it stops going down, it never fills anything deeper than a block.”
An Enderman appeared near the waterfall, seemed to ponder it for a moment, and then slipped away. There were five or six more within a hundred paces of the tower, but they didn’t appear concerned with the pair of Survivors that had landed in their midst.
Calling Durin’s Digger out of my inventory, I tapped away at the slope of obsidian beside me until the first block disappeared. It wasn’t a sufficient window for me to take stock of what was in the tower, all I could see was more obsidian, so I continued to harvest until there was enough of an opening for me to squeeze inside.
The Fortune enchantment on the pick was giving me a slight tug, down and to one side. There was meta-material here, though we couldn’t be sure what it was until we found it.
“Hey,” I said, waving at the wyverns. “Don’t fly away.”
Epsilon chirped, and I took that as agreement. The other two gave me blank stares. They wouldn't be able to follow us inside, and the taming mechanic made them inclined to stay close to me, so I didn’t expect them to disappear as soon as we were out of sight.
“Any info about what’s inside?”
The question was for Kevin, but it was Astaroth who answered.
“Duraks,” he said. The way that he was floating made his wings seem like they were just for show, a brilliant statue suspended in space. “Lesser entities that hide within dense shells. They have a modicum of magic, and it allows them to manipulate gravity to a degree.”
Shulkers, then. They were annoying in the game, but not much of a threat if you were within a structure. If there was no ceiling overhead, though, you would keep rising until the attack wore off, and the ensuing drop was never pleasant. That and they would keep shooting you while you rose.
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“Great. Any particular weaknesses?”
“They will close their shells when you draw close, so you may be better served by a bow than a sword. Water wounds them, and being less mobile than Endermen, they are more threatened by it.”
Were shulkers hurt by water? It was hard to remember every detail of the game. I should have made notes when my previous life was still fresh and easy to recall.
“You feel like coming with us?”
Astaroth paused before replying, beating his wings once, which released a shower of sparks.
“I will keep watch above.”
“Fair enough.”
With a nod to Kevin, I pressed into the gap I had made in the peak of the tower and found that there was nowhere to stand. It was a twenty-foot drop to the floor below, but I didn’t see anything that looked like a shulker, or a durak, whatever. Dropping from the opening caused my elytron to open, and I drifted to the glassy black stone to land with minimal clanking.
The floor was bare, the room empty, and a staircase in one corner led to the next level down. Kevin got out his bow, and so did I. There was no light within the tower, so the scene was cast in the gray shades of my darkvision.
As soon as I was halfway down the stair, I spotted the massive, blocky clam in one corner of the room. Its shell cracked open, revealing a gleaming yellow eye as large as my fist. Before I could nock an arrow, the air between us rippled, and I felt the strike of an invisible fist. The attack was accompanied by a ringing sound, the loss of a half-heart, and my feet lifting off of the steps.
It didn’t feel like weightlessness so much as being tugged up by my navel. Kevin bumped into me as I rose, and a few seconds later, my back jarred against the peaked roof of the tower. It didn’t do any more damage, but the effect had been more immediate than I expected. This wasn’t floating upward, it was like I’d been thrown.
Kevin backed up quickly, an arrow ready to fire, but the string was not yet pulled.
“Guess we found one,” he said.
“Do you know how long this lasts?” I asked, still pressed against the ceiling. Aside from up becoming down, the effect didn’t restrict my movement, and it no longer felt like my guts were being pulled out through my back.
Almost as soon as the words left my mouth, gravity remembered how it was supposed to work, and I dropped.
“About that long.”
My elytron kept the fall from being too precipitous, and I set the bow down to produce another bucket. At the top of the steps, the second source block wobbled like a happy little slime before vomiting a thin river down to the lower floor.
Not long after, a grating sound rose from the darkness. The durak was moving.
If it had been something like a troll, I would have hacked out a section of the floor and attacked it from above. But after seeing that shell, I was certain there were no arrows in my selection that would have the slightest effect.
Kevin and I rushed down the steps, and the current tugged at my boots. A few inches of water had a surprising amount of pull to them, but neither of us slipped. The ringing came again, but the rippling in the air passed behind me and struck Kevin instead.
“Dick!” He shouted, falling upward. I slid to a stop, water splashing around my greaves, and leveled my bow. Pallid tendrils had extended from the lower half of the durak’s clam shell and were strenuously dragging it away from the spreading pool. Their flesh steamed where they touched the water.
Its eye focused on me, and I fired.
The shell snapped shut, but not before the broadhead penetrated. The damage was already done when the wooden shaft crunched, and the feathered end dropped to the obsidian. It didn’t make a sound, but its tendrils writhed, scrabbling against the wet floor to turn its heavy body away. As the floor was perfectly flat, and the next stair was on the other side of the room, the water from the source block didn’t spread much farther than it already had.
I switched out the bow for my viridium blade and approached the mob, crouching just out of reach of its tendrils, and waited for the clam to open. It was still blindly dragging itself in a full turn, and I followed it.
Kevin came back down the steps, grumbling to himself, and the shell parted a few inches. The tendrils slipped up. It was trying to remove the arrow.
I stabbed it through the gap. The clam snapped shut again, and I experienced a brief moment of terror at the sharp sound of its shell striking the green-gray blade, but my weapon did not break. Its tendrils shivered, then went limp, and the top of its shell rose as its muscles relaxed in death.
I harvested the body for materials. No bones or leather, but the shell was a new coin.
“Are the shells good for anything?” I asked. In the game, they made a special chest that could carry items while in a player’s inventory, but regular chests did that in this world, so I wasn’t sure what the difference would be.
“Shields and chests,” he said. “If you get enough of them.”
“These would make some tough shields. Why didn’t you have any?”
“Didn’t use shields much. I passed a couple out as rewards, but that was a long time ago. They could be anywhere.”
My sword was scratched where the durak had bitten it, though it hadn’t cracked. The weapon’s description had claimed it would repair itself with stolen essence, so I could soon see how effective that was.
We made our way down to the base of the tower, encountering more of the gravity-magic spitting mobs as we went. The only snag we ran into was on the bottom floor, where we found three of them waiting, each in its own corner. After being battered by the blasts, we were forced to retreat and eat beets and carrots until we’d recovered the lost health.
Our shields, with runes of protection, proved the deciding factor. They didn’t negate the magic, but they absorbed it. The gravity reversal was at least loosely tied to weight, so when they took a hit, our shields jerked up, but we were both strong enough to hold them down through at least two shots, and the duraks weren’t capable of rapid fire. It was annoying, and slow, and we had to go back up to heal a second time before we’d blinded the first of them, but these clams would not stop our descent.
Once all the shells were harvested, I saw that a pair of Endermen stood just beyond the thin stream of water that protected the entrance. The waterfall, such as it was, didn’t fully reach the sides of the open arch. Still, it was enough to deter the shadowy humanoids from interfering with our fight with the duraks.
They stood stock still, their violet eyes and blank faces focusing on me as I approached the thin screen of water.
I waved at them. Nothing.
“Are we going to dig or what?” The back and forth with the duraks had put Kevin in a huff. Being repeatedly thrown into the ceiling by magic clams had not been beneficial for the ego of the former dark lord.
“We are.” I said.
The obsidian foundation was deeper than I expected, ten blocks before it gave way to sand. Durin’s Digger was tugging me away from the tower, but not by much, and I planted torches as I went on the off chance that it would keep Endermen from popping into existence around us, if that even happened here.
There wasn’t much to find in the sand aside from sand, but the Fortune enchantment knew what it was doing. I handed the pick over to Kevin so he could give me directions while I used a shovel, and after a solid twenty minutes of digging, I reached a vein of exactly what I was looking for.
Sandstone laced with hair-thin crimson lines. Sanguinum.
“Redstone.” Kevin sounded excited. “I told you. Let’s get out of here.”
“You craft the portal.” I stowed the shovel in my inventory and reached out for the pick, which he handed to me automatically. “I’ll make the compasses. Then we’re gone.”
A golden compass would lead us to other heroes, and obsidian would lead us to portals. Wherever we appeared in the world, with both of them, we could navigate our way to Mount Doom. Now that I had the materials I needed, crafting the compasses was the work of moments.
My worktable took a place of honor next to the entrance so I could monitor the Endermen. Despite respectively calling for four blocks of obsidian and four ingots of gold, the pair I crafted were of identical size and weight, small enough to fit in my palm. The slim arrow within the obsidian compass spun madly, fixed on a point through the back wall of the tower, then spun again. It might not be much help in Bedlam. The golden version pointed directly at Kevin, rock steady.
He had to knock out the ceiling on this level of the tower to make room for a portal, but I’d given him Durin’s Digger to do it, and the task was almost complete.
Astaroth burst through the waterfall in a cloud of steam, the Endermen blinking out of his way and coughing aggressively.
The bird demon landed, his topaz talons clicking on the glassy black stone of the floor.
“You must hurry,” he said, tilting his head up to look at me from down his beak. “The demons come.”