An antechamber, lit by an eternal torch the size of a candle. This room was brickwork, the same ruddy red on all sides, with a stair ahead that I hoped would take me closer to the forge. An arch on my left opened onto a long warpstone corridor. The hall was unadorned and ended on a door sealed in the same overcomplicated fashion as the one I had just entered through. What would Kevin need to lock up in an area only he could enter?

A treasure room, or an alchemy lab? Some secret project he wanted to keep from the demons? The same notched stick fit the lock, and when turned, caused the gears to spin. I heard clanks on the other side as the bars disengaged and the door swung open automatically.

It was Kevin’s bedroom, and for being the private chambers of the Dark Lord of Dargoth, decidedly underwhelming. He’d crafted himself an efficiency apartment, with painted white walls, a messy twin bed, and a nightstand. Though I didn’t require the light to see, I flipped the switch of the redstone lamp resting beside the bed to get a better look.

The stand was simply three oak blocks stacked on top of each other, no eldritch carvings, no tapestries on the walls. There was a bookshelf lined with enchanted tomes begging to be stolen, but aside from that, no obvious loot. A wooden door on the far side of the room led into the bathroom, a carbon copy of what I had discovered in the Bedlam base.

I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this. Kevin had modeled Dargoth after Mordor. Though the natural features of the region lent themselves to the comparison, he’d put a lot of work into the dark lord schtick over the centuries, and it showed. The rest of the fortress suited that model perfectly, and the mountain itself. But the little space he had carved for himself, only himself, was inarguably mundane.

A reminder of his previous life? Did the simplicity of the space comfort him? The tousled sheets suggested this room was in regular use, there was a layer of dust on top of the bookshelf, but the floor was clean and the sink in the bathroom had droplets of water around the drain.

If I waited long enough, he would come back here. A prime site for an ambush, though there was no way for me to coordinate that with the demons unless I went back down to talk to Vepar. Bojack was planning to follow Kevin to the forge, not to read him bedtime stories.

Still, it couldn’t hurt to set a trap.

What I envisioned as a quick build took me almost an hour, and I spent the time rushing to complete a set-up I wasn’t completely sure would function, delayed by several mistakes and a workflow that involved glances up every ten seconds afraid that Kevin would catch me half-finished.

The warpstone corridor was more than thirty paces long, and six blocks wide, a lot of space to manage. The distance had to be related to spawn mechanics. He didn’t want mobs appearing around him while he slept, so the hall likely served as a corral for the creatures before they could be mind-controlled by Bael and added to the menagerie.

I did a quick inventory. Caliburn was my primary weapon, but if I was lucky I might get a few shots off with the bow before engaging him in melee. Shadowbane arrows wouldn’t carry any extra oomf against a Survivor, and I had to assume his armor was as or more fire resistant than mine was. Knockback, though, could be very useful.

With as long as it had taken me to install the trap, Kevin had to have already gone to the throne room to talk to Bojack, if he wasn’t coming back down already. If I could find or craft a place in the forge to pop out of at an opportune moment, that would be ideal. However, Bojack had seemed confident that the Dark Lord could be overcome as long as we could face him alone.

Survivor was a utility class. No matter how far he’d advanced, he was still a crafter, not a sorcerer or a more traditional hero with flashy combat abilities. It was the equipment we had to worry about, I didn’t have potions, and his weapon was bound to be better enchanted than mine.

The stairs spiraled through several landings, ending on a stone arch that included all the melodramatic finishings that had been absent from the bedroom. Heavy, dark blocks chiseled with sharp patterns made up the frame, which was surmounted by curved iron spikes like the spines on a dragon’s back.

Kevin’s workroom, his forge, was located in the caldera of Mount Doom. A flat, andesite platform extended from the arch, a crescent overlooking a pool of lava far below. Heat radiated upwards, as well as smoke, but it wasn’t those fumes that filled the sky.

A cauldron hung over the pit suspended by thick chains, its belly stamped with unrecognizable runes. From its mouth, a vast black column issued, rising to the open sky above. Was this even a real volcano, or had he imported that lava and mined out a caldera to recreate the ambiance of the fictional Mount Doom?

The glow of the lava cast a brooding, orange light over the forge. Gleaming metal and gray stone, racks of tools, and a rail system complete with minecarts carrying chests. Furnaces, and anvils, one of which was crafted from diamond. That seemed like a terrible material to use for an anvil, but the System had never been meaningfully invested in realism. A section of the platform was squared off, an enchanting formation every bit as large as the one I’d used in the underground base. Its corners were marked with diamond blocks, their edges gleaming in the hellish light.

I’d paused to absorb the setting, and had to do a double-take when I noticed the figure standing at the edge of the crescent, his head bowed as he gazed down into the flaming pool below.

He was smaller than you would expect a dark lord to be, well under six feet. His armor was a mirror to mine, though if it was orichalcum, the metal had been painted black. Heavy, interlocking plates encased his body, his shoulders and arms studded with spikes, and his helm surmounted by a curving pair of horns.

No weapons were clipped to his waist, and his barbed gauntlets were empty. My breath caught, and for a long moment, I froze.

He hadn’t noticed me. If this was a trap, it should have already been sprung. Kevin was here, pondering god knew what, lost to the world. Had he not been called to the throne room yet? Maybe Bael had made Bojack wait, or they had already had their meeting, and my horse-faced backer hadn’t been allowed down to the forge.

Without demons to even the odds, Kevin was too much for me. Recent upgrades aside, there was no way I was anywhere near reaching the apex of what my class could offer. Attacking him alone was stupid, and yet, here he was; standing with his back turned on the precipice of a serious environmental hazard.

“Don’t go swimming in lava,” the Fire Resistance notification had said. There are limits to protection. In the game, with the right gear, you could indeed go swimming in lava, for a while. It would still kill you if you didn’t escape before your heart bar ran out.

The air was hot and tasted of ash. If Kevin burned to death, we’d have time to prepare for the return of a naked Dark Lord. The location of his point of origin was a secret, but we had a trick for that. A second Anchor. An entire set of them had been sitting around since the last batch of heroes was griefed off of Plana, and Bojack had taken an extra when he was assigned the one my soul was tied to.

He was still just standing there.

I had a few Knockback arrows hanging through a loop, and I pulled the first to line up my shot. Kevin wasn’t moving, and at this distance, his back may as well have been the side of a barn. The missile crossed the distance in a fraction of a second, striking the Dark Lord between his shoulder blades.

It didn’t so much as scratch the cuirass, but that wasn’t the point. Its point bounced off, but contact triggered the enchantment. It was a nonlethal effect, but only in the loosest sense of the term. Knockback hit with the force of a troll’s fist.

Kevin stumbled forward, not quite thrown off his feet. He spun, keeping his footing by the toes of his boots as his heels hung over the edge of the pit, but didn’t fall. No time to freak out. My hand was already moving, nocking the arrow and pulling back again in a single motion. I wasn’t sure why using a bow came to me so much more naturally than a sword, but this was one thing I could do without looking like a fool. It was almost point-and-click.

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His hand snapped up as I loosed. His timing was perfect, and he was fast enough to catch an arrow, but he overshot it. The iron head hit his wrist, ricocheting to one side. The Knockback effect went off on his arm, and his gauntlet snapped back, smacking him in the grill of his helm. It couldn’t have been hard enough to hurt him, but it was the last straw for his already precarious balance.

He fell, and for about two seconds, I was too stunned to move. Had that actually worked? Sprinting to the verge, I looked down, expecting to see his armored form descending slowing toward a liquid inferno. But he had already hit the lava.

Bro didn’t even have Feather Fall.

The platform was five blocks thick, and the rest was a sheer drop. A hundred feet below, the Dark Lord was dog paddling in a two-thousand-degree hot tub.

It wasn’t instant death, but at the very least, he was taking damage. Targeting him required me to shoot almost straight down, leaning in a decidedly unsafe manner over the edge of the platform, and I missed. The arrow disappeared into the superheated rock to one side of the bobbing dark lord. I dug out another handful of medallions to convert, but by the time I was ready to try again, he had swum beneath the platform.

If he didn’t have a ladder down there, these could be his last moments, at least in this life. I fished out an obsidian token from my pack. It wasn’t unusually large, but it had to weigh at least five pounds. I threw the coin, and the glowing, rune-ridden block came into existence beside the diamond anvil.

Its range was finite. If the lava pit was too far down for it to suck in his essence, or however it worked, then we were going to be in for a major problem. Still, even if Kevin did come back tomorrow, at least I could steal all his stuff before he did.

I got down on my stomach and looked over the edge, craning my neck to get a look under the platform.

Problem.

Kevin did not have a ladder, but he was building himself a stair. The lava couldn’t be very deep, more evidence that this was not a real volcano, because he had to have planted the bottom block somewhere, and he was not crafting a stone helix to make his way back up.

Moving midway back to the entrance, I produced Pickle Rick and quickly dug through the platform at an incline to avoid dropping through my own hole. I was mining at breakneck speed, hitting the blocks so hard that they popped at a single strike, and I broke through at an angle where I could see Kevin, but not line up a good shot.

He was more than halfway up. I kept digging, mining out a wider shooting range, and he either didn’t see me yet or didn’t care. My hands were shaking as I switched out the pick for my bow and tried to aim. As I took a few breaths to calm myself, he rose a few feet higher.

The first arrow took him in the shoulder. He spun, slipped off the helix, and caught hold of a block on his way down. It barely phased him, and my next shot whizzed between his horns as he pulled himself back up and continued crafting. There were no coins involved. He was just pointing, and blocks appeared. It was faster than fiddling with coins, and there was nothing for him to drop. Kevin had an inventory.

Not fair.

I managed to hit him one more time on his way up, but he shrugged it off. It wasn’t difficult to guess where he was going to come through the platform, so I shouldered the bow and slipped on a shield, drawing Caliburn as I ran into position. It was a tense few breaths as I waited, second-guessing myself. The surprise attack hadn’t worked, and it didn’t count as an ambush if I was the only one here. Bojack was in the wind, either delayed by Bael or waiting around in the throne room with Vepar. Maybe I should make a run for it.

Two blocks vanished almost in the same instant a few paces to my right, in front of the bank of furnaces. I’d been slightly off on the location, and another block had disappeared before I even moved. I jumped, I don’t know why, but my leap carried me to the opening and I drove Caliburn blindly down.

The blue-gold edge of the blade scraped his helm and pinked against the top of his chestplate. His armor was scratched, or at least, I’d scraped the paint off, revealing the orichalcum beneath. A sword appeared, a really big sword. He thrust it up, and I hopped back to avoid it. A second later, he was halfway out of the hole, and I lunged in, hoping for the miracle thrust that would drive in through the thin eye slit in his visor.

I wasn’t that lucky. The jab knocked his head back, but he didn’t stop coming, and as soon as he had room to swing I was forced to duck under that ridiculous blade. Bojack had said Kevin favored a greatsword, but this was a straight-up buster blade, right out of Final Fantasy. Six feet long, at least a foot wide, no normal human being couldn’t have used it effectively, and Kevin was holding it like it was made of foam.

“Jason?” His voice sounded higher than I expected. “Is that you?”

Who? Still, whoever he was thinking of was probably a lot more intimidating than me. It could even be the guy whose armor I was wearing.

“What if it is?” I asked.

Kevin gripped his buster in both hands, holding it out in front of him so I had to back off to avoid him resting it on my head. Was he even hurt? His armor looked fine except for where I’d scratched it. Had the lava done nothing?

“One shall stand, one shall fall.” His tone dropped like he was doing a dramatic movie voice.

I backed away, trying to visualize how far I was from the entrance without looking. The bedroom was a dead end, but if my trap worked, at least it would buy me some time. What would Jason say in this situation? No idea.

“So it’s been a while,” I said, taking another step, “how have you been?”

“I have become more powerful than you could ever imagine.” Kevin was motionless, maintaining his pose. Classic villain dialogue; had to give him that. There was a little more distance between us now.

“Are you afraid of me, Jason? Have you finally learned fear?”

“Not afraid,” I said, “just concerned.” If he wanted to talk, we could talk. “Plana’s not doing too well. Have you ever considered dropping the Dark Lord bit and fixing things?”

“There’s nothing to drop,” he said. “This is who I am. What brought you out of hiding? There hasn’t been a new Survivor in ten years. You’re too late to save anyone.”

My heel bumped the minecart track, and he chose that moment to attack. I brought my shield up as he leaped forward, a small defense against a weapon that size, and it shattered on the first blow. The impact jarred my shoulder, but no hearts were lost. The poor little buckler had given its life in the service, and now there were a few useless shards of wood strapped to my forearm.

To fight him, I needed to get in under that weapon. It would be incredibly difficult to use a buster at close range, but the blue corridor, and the stairwell, would be just as bad for him. If he didn’t have room to swing, it would take a lot of the power out of those blows.

I jumped back, the enchantments on my boots giving me extra air as well as a light landing, and moved under the arch onto the stairs. He rushed forward, thrusting with both arms, and I parried it to one side. More than half my brain was required to keep me from tripping down the steps as I descended backward, continuing to fend him off, but he kept talking.

“You can’t win,” he declared, “I have the high ground.”

Star Wars? Was he quoting Star Wars? We hit the first landing, and I ducked around the curve to avoid his next jab. He had the range, but he fouled more than one swing by scraping his sword against the walls. Kevin was stronger than me, but the difference wasn’t as great as I’d been worried it could be. Also, he kind of sucked at sword-fighting.

It wasn’t that I was a master by any means, and maybe the nature of his weapon made it harder to keep things clean, but at least I had drilled some basics with Gastard. How do you live a thousand years, or however long he had been here, in a fantasy world without learning how to fight properly?

Since my mind was on Star Wars, all I could think about was the scene in the original movies where Obi-Wan and Darth Vader clumsily poke at each other like two old, confused men rather than the Jedis they were supposed to be. Down the staircase, landing after landing, I kept up my defense. Caliburn was holding up, and the difference in the speed ratings of our weapons was stark. My sword wouldn’t hold up in a full-strength collision with his, but my blade was dancing around like a hummingbird, tapping his where I wanted it to go. Though he’d tagged my armor a few times, I hadn’t taken any damage.

How had this guy taken out all the other heroes?

"You’re better than I remember," he taunted, “but you can’t keep this up forever. I have survived countless battles. You are nothing but a speck in the grand tapestry of time."

The sheer melodrama. Was Kevin…LARPing? And how was I better than he remembered? Had Jason not learned how to fight either?

We reached the antechamber lit by a miniature torch, and I sliced it in half before backing into the warpstone corridor. With the shaft broken, the gem winked out. An incomplete item did not function.

“You think darkness is your ally? You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it…” He trailed off, likely forgetting the rest of the quote, or else realizing it wasn’t appropriate.

I had no trouble seeing him, and despite his words, Kevin did hesitate before entering the corridor. He let his sword droop, relegating it to his left hand, and a new torch appeared in his right. Was he left-handed, or could he only summon objects from his inventory with his right?

He followed me as I continued my slow retreat. Maybe he thought he was herding me to an inescapable position. We were a third of the way down the corridor when the floor sank under my backfoot, a pressure plate, and the ceiling opened overtop of him. Sliding doors in a new home.

A column of stone, several tons, dropped on the Dark Lord like a hammer. There was a thunderous thud, followed by silence.