Chapter 6

I hear soft footfalls behind me as I wander into the room. It's just large enough for the retinue I have with me, so I am quick to head towards the edge of the room. 

Ahead of me the grim sounds of monsters echo faintly across the walls of the mineshaft. I take tense, cautious steps as I slowly move forward and I grin faintly when I hear my allies and partners behind me. We are not a subtle group, but hopefully we're a strong enough group to handle the nonsense we're about to have to deal with. 

Normally fighting in such a tight passage would put us in danger, but with both Rebis and myself here and "Rips and Tears" at our disposal… We can circumvent some of the dangers of this kind of fighting. Still, this is hardly my ideal fighting situation. I close my eyes and focus on a piece of equipment in my ear, a nifty device I made using some of my enchanter perks over the course of the last few days.

"Alright, can everyone hear me?" I ask, not speaking but actually projecting my inner voice out to everyone. I smirk when everyone affirms that they can, in fact, hear my mental voice. Some of them, such as my wolf pet and Eliza all respond with articulate words of their own, and I smile appreciatively at them when I glance back in their direction. 

I quickly refocus on the area in front of me, and as I do I subtly tighten my grip on my weapons. The area I'm in is dangerous, unlike most of the region around my home which my friends and I have tamed through sheer diligence. If I relax I'm putting myself and my friends in danger. 

I reach the back of the room, an area to the right of the door that serves as a subtle warning to the rest of my faction, and proceed past its boundary. I find myself stepping past a pair of walls made from wooden planks. The lightly colored planks could easily be collected and be used by my faction but so far I don't need wood that much. Heck, I've actively begun to plant trees on the surface and in selected areas underground to ensure that I have wood, as well as making use of some of my more curious abilities to achieve that same end result. 

I step past the two pillars and into the area where my forces and I have never actually set foot. Ahead of me the mineshaft continues for a short while, past more pillars made of wooden planks, and eventually ends in a dark, open area. My sharp senses also alert me to the reality that beyond my current location and before the end of the shaft are places where monsters lurk. I relay this information to my followers and I proceed towards the end of the mineshaft, a smile on my face as I explore new locations. A familiar bar appears in front of me alerting me to the reality that I'm making progress towards unlocking my next "Explorer" perk. 

I step past a pair of pillars and find myself surrounded by paths, both of which obscured monsters from view. A zombie lunges at me with a hideous, and hateful screech and a gigantic spider darts towards me from the other side. I don't truly react to their lunges, more than adequately able to deal with them by using "Rips and Tears". I don't even turn my hands towards them to do so, merely willing a tear to appear in front of the zombie darting at me and another to open up right in front of the darting spider. The zombie enters it and crashes headfirst into the spider, hitting it and causing it to emit an awful pain-filled screech. 

The spider levels its rage against the zombie, hurling the full weight of its gigantic body against the humanoid corpse. I turn to face the two fighters and with a single fluid movement I summon and immediately toss one of my blades at the spider. The blade impales the beast between two of its eyes and I feel new power surge into me even as I will business cards to slide into my fingers from my inventory. The spider slumps to the floor and vanishes, leaving behind green experience orbs I'll collect in a second as well as its eyes.

The zombie attempts to turn and lunge at me now that I've dealt with the spider and I don't give it the chance. I utilize "Rips and Tears" again, and open a portal in front of the zombie and one far away from me, and when the zombie teleports through the thing I hurl some of my cards through the rip right as it shuts. The cards hit the zombie in the head, chest, and groin and the creature falls before vanishing in a puff of smoke and releasing experience orbs. 

I instinctively know that I can now climb walls without using ladders like spiders in this game can. That's a neat ability and I smile as I glance down the two paths that have now revealed themselves. 

One path leads deeper into the mineshaft, staying as narrow as the path I've been walking down and the other, the one to my right relative to where I was walking before, also leads to a massive and dark opening. At a glance it looks like the area beyond the mineshaft is an underground canyon… It's perfect for harvesting stone and finding monsters, and it's terrible for trying to claim an area. 

Claiming an underground canyon is an arduous task. Before one even begins trying to permanently render the bottom of the canyon safe they need to go up each ledge and painstakingly make it so that monsters can't spawn and then drop down on unsuspecting travelers. Plus there's never a time when one can explore the canyon in relative safety, since it's always dark. 

I see a skeleton walk into view and with a smirk I open a rip right in front of the area it's walking towards and then open another one further out, over a large pit where the wooden floor of the mineshaft gives way to the open air of the canyon. The skeleton walks into it and suddenly disappears. It reappears in the open air before plummeting and eventually crashing with the ground and I am delighted to see a notification appear in front of me. 

[Alert: New Perk Earnable

Complete the following quest to gain the perk [Skeleton Company]: Kill five different enemies from five different enemy types with arrows fired by skeletons.

[Skeleton Company] is a perk that lets you summon skeletons who will obey you. Initially you can only summon ordinary skeletons but in the future when you slay one hundred different skeletons of different types such as wither skeletons and strays, you will be able to summon them as well. 

This perk is also the first perk from [Minecraft Manhunt] that you can earn. Doing so will immediately allow you to complete other quests, and potentially even immediately unlock some perks if you have already done enough for them.]

The deep implications of this are not lost on me. Among other things this says that there is a source of some sort that dictates what I get, as the word "From" is a fascinating word in one of the sentences in the message. It's not the biggest deal, or at least the most immediately important, but it doesn't escape my notice. I wish I could somehow do some research on "Minecraft Manhunt" as I don't actually know what that is off the top of my head. It sounds like some player-vs-player type Minecraft minigame, but I'm not familiar with it so I am just stuck in the dark right now… 

There's also the intriguing fact that this perk gives me command of normally hostile mobs, though by summoning them rather than by making normal ones recognize me as a leader. That is curious, and makes me wonder if there are other perks like that. Something tells me that there are, I just need to unlock them. 

I subtly spread news of this to my companions, alerting them to the fact that we will be keeping skeletons we come across alive for now. They are confused, but none of them question it. 

My companions join me and ask me what direction we're going to be moving in. I point one of my swords in the direction I was initially coming in and my companions nod at me as we begin to move in the direction I pointed in. 

We pass by more pillars and as we do occasionally we'll stumble across more branching paths. It turns out that this mineshaft is surprisingly labyrinthian. Nonetheless, we persist and reach our end goal, all while smartly blocking off the branching pathways and using doors to give us an ability our opponents don't have: the power to move freely throughout the dungeon. Doors, even in this version of Minecraft, stymie all of the enemies I've encountered so far. 

We are standing on a large wooden platform held aloft by thick iron chains that extend pretty far down, perhaps three hundred feet. I sigh as I study countless ledges that need to be reached and illuminated before I can even begin to think about claiming this area. 

"This… This shit sucks." I complain, as I study the vast gap. None of my allies other than Rebis or Eliza could even make it down the gap without dying or suffering some intense damage, and I doubt that any of us would survive down there for long, judging from the fact that I can hear a healthy amount of activity below us. Eliza walks next to me and she studies the gap before letting out a quiet laugh. 

"That… that is a drop." She exclaims and I lightly chuckle. I gesture at some of the distant ledges, all of which are too far for any of the monsters on them to try anything, before I begin to speak. 

"This canyon is massive but it's way too dangerous to try and claim it with all of those ledges." I remark, and she nods. 

"Too many chances for something in the dark to drop down on us. So what do we do?" She asks, looking at me curiously. I begin to equip one of my wooden plank blocks and I kneel before affixing it to the edge of the ledge. She watches me curiously and smiles when she sees my block adhere to the platform and effectively expand it. 

"We spread out and illuminate the ledges." I tell her, even as I begin to spend some of my wooden blocks doing just that. She smiles from behind me and carefully participates in her own way, by using her powers as an enderperson to go and retrieve stone blocks from claimed parts of the mineshaft and our small mine and coming back to give me blocks. At the same time, other groups of my retinue split off and do the same thing, with Rebis and the Guardian staying together and expanding the platform towards some of the other ledges, while the mannequins do the same thing.

For the next few minutes, I do this continually until I reach the closest ledge. Strangely during this time, no monsters have spawned on it, and so I fully illuminate the thing in moments, using just two torches. I have dozens of the things so I'm not worried about that, though some of the torches are now resting on the largely expanded platform we're standing on. 

I study my surroundings and spot inhabited ledges. Zombies and skeletons, as well as creepers and bats, explore the ledges. At the moment they seem serene, almost happily wandering the area, unbothered by the effects of the sun. 

My followers and I end up spending the rest of the day expanding the mine's platform to connect various ledges and illuminate them. We connect several dozen ledges and I successfully trick various skeletons into killing several different enemies using "Rips and Tears", and also just controlling the battlefield while ordering my allies to stay out of fights involving the creatures. I punish the skeletons when they try to hit my allies, redirecting their arrows into themselves and chuckling when their efforts to hurt Rebis, Eliza, or the Guardian result in them getting hit by their own arrows. 

All in all the day was a success, and when we finish up we erect various walls and doors to ensure that no wandering mobs accidentally stumble into the mine we've made. The day ends with me cooking meals for us thanks to a nifty item named "Kitchen Space", which is a portable kitchen that I can overlay anywhere that is appropriately sized for the kitchen and use as if it were fully powered and I were in a modern space. Truthfully, my biggest powers are my items… They make living in this world a lot safer than it would be otherwise. 

Things like "Portable Cabin" and "Kitchen Space" are immensely helpful and allow me to do stuff like have a safe place to live and eat things more complex than cake or bread. I also have weapons and armor that are mine due to my multiversal nature rather than being products of my own hard work, and such items are of solid quality. Still, I do need to be careful. Creepers could still do tremendous damage to me if I wasn't careful, even if I used my own handmade armor and had perks backing me up. 

Plus this world has strange enhanced mobs like that gigantic zombie I encountered on my first day and the ender assassins… I can't let my guard down at all, unless I want my story to end early. 

Eventually my companions and I wander out of the workshop and find ourselves outside at night. This is a rare occurrence, but I feel like seeing the world under the moon's light is a nice change of pace. We are just outside of the workshop and are only a few feet from the cabin. Torchlight illuminates the area around us, and allows us to see the cabin as well as the pens where the animals live. 

All sorts of large creatures, many of whom have grown larger thanks to my powers as a tamer, watch us and greet us warmly. None of them speak, at least not words a human could understand without perks, but I still return their greetings warmly as I make my way back home. 

In a few minutes I'm back in my own bed, and I hear Eliza slip into her own as well. I shut my eyes and welcome the dark unconsciousness that overtakes my senses nearly instantly.