Minecraft: Mob Squad: Never Say Nether: An Official Minecraft

I’m so sleepy that I’m delirious, but I’m definitely riding a monster that’s walking on lava, and my brother looks fine but is about to croak. I ease my strider closer to him and hold out a Potion of Regeneration.

“Drink this,” I command him, and believe me—I never command Chug. “It should help.”

He takes the bottle and nearly drops it but manages to gulp it down. I guess there are times when it’s helpful that he’s so food motivated. “Not quite as good as Floor Potion, but still pretty good,” he murmurs. He perks up a little, but not all the way, and that worries me.

“What got you?”

“Some freaky withered skeleton guy,” he says. “Just hit me once, but it feels like a building fell on me. The potion helps,” he hurries to add. “But not completely.”

I frown and long to pull out my books and see what’s really at work here. I didn’t know there were things a Potion of Regeneration couldn’t heal. I make him drink a Potion of Healing, too, but he’s still not back to his usual Chugginess.Contentt bel0ngs to N0ve/lDrâ/ma.O(r)g!

“When we get home, you’re going to drink an entire cow’s worth of milk,” I warn him, remembering that it worked for Mal the last time she was fading away like this.

“As long as it’s served warm in bed so I can just go directly into a coma,” he promises. He looks at me, eyes swimming with tears. “Bro, I’m—”

“No,” I say firmly. “No. Absolutely not. I will not tearfully reunite with you and have a tender moment when we’re fleeing bad guys over lava.”

“We’re not safe yet, are we?” Chug says darkly.

I shake my head. “No. These guys mean business.”

We stride along together for a few minutes in silence, with Mal and Jarro a bit ahead of us and Lenna behind us with her crossbow. Chug seems a little perkier, but he’s still swaying in his saddle, his eyes unfocused. I would say I need to keep him awake, but no one can sleep here. I need to keep him steady.

“Okay, so two questions,” I begin.

“Her name is Miss Twolegs, and no, Thingy doesn’t know I’m riding another animal,” Chug says weakly.

I snort. “Okay, I promise not to tell your pig that you’re cheating on him with a monster from the Nether. But seriously, how did you guys find me, and…” My voice rises a little as I look up ahead to Jarro’s back. “Why did you bring along the guy who bullied me my entire life?”

Jarro must’ve heard me, as he flinches. We were alone on the beach with the striders while we waited for the others, but it was a very charged silence. I still have no idea what’s going on.

“Those answers are connected,” Chug begins. I can tell that every word costs him, but we both know that if he goes silent, he’ll really be in trouble.

“The brigands kidnapped Jarro—”

“I know! I heard him whining.”

“—and stole all his mom’s sweet berries, but they abandoned him in the Overworld. We found him, plus a trail of berries.”

“I dropped them for you to find,” I say, glowing with pride that my gambit worked.

“Smart thinking, bro. Thingy was especially grateful. We followed that trail until we found iron ingots and horse prints, then we followed those. Once we figured out that whoever took you had to be headed for the woodland mansion, we took a mine cart through the underground cavern. Found the secret room, stepped through the portal, and—”

“What did it look like? Was it cool? It felt cool, but I was blindfolded—”

“Boom!” Chug interrupts me, as if telling the story is the only thing keeping him upright. “We landed in the Nether. And then we followed more sweet berries until we found the skybridge that led to the fortress.”

“And my bed exploded,” Lenna adds from behind us.

“Huh.” I nod along. “I guess that’s why they wouldn’t give me a bed or let me fall asleep. Are you guys getting any sleep here?”

Chug snorts. “No way, bro. That’s the only reason I was loopy enough to get smacked by some janky old skeleton.”

“And I fell out of a window,” Lenna reminds us.

“I totally would’ve done that anyway,” Chug says with a chuckle. “Like, as a joke.”

“Speaking of jokes…” I stare at Jarro, who has fallen back a bit. He maneuvers his strider until it’s right beside mine. My skin crawls, and I wonder what it says that I felt more comfortable in a Nether fortress with brigands than I do this close to Jarro. “I’m sorry, by the way,” Jarro says quietly without looking up. “For everything I ever did to you. This trip has taught me a lot, and…I’m just sorry. I’m not that guy anymore.”

“He’s really not,” Chug breaks in. “And he tamed horses. And caught and tamed these striders!”

“Oh, I rode a horse. But I was blindfolded and gagged, so it wasn’t really fun.” I look down and pat my mount. “What’s up with these guys?”

“They really like warped fungus from the warped forest,” Lenna says. “We call them striders.”

“Because they stride,” Chug adds. “I wanted to call them twolegs, but Lenna argued that since we had two legs, too, that made things confusing.”

Jarro finally looks at me, and his eyes are haunted. “The brigands kidnapped me and left me tied to a tree to die. What about you? What did they do to you?”

I gaze out at the never-ending lake of lava. “They took me out of bed, blindfolded and gagged me, made me point out all the useful things at Elder Gabe’s shop, marched me to the horses, made me ride, brought me here, and then gave me a list of potions and weapons to make.” I can’t help sighing deeply. “The funny thing is, if they’d just asked me to do it and treated me nicely, it would’ve been really cool. I learned all sorts of things that I’ve been dying to know back home, but I couldn’t enjoy it because I was away from you guys and couldn’t sleep and didn’t get enough food. And I was scared.”

Against my will, I sniffle, and a tear sneaks out. I dash it away and glance back at Jarro, hating that he’s here to see me in such a vulnerable moment.

“Don’t worry about it, bro,” my brother says. “We’ve seen Jarro cry and Jarro has seen us cry and after what we’ve all been through on this journey, it’s okay. We’re here, and we’re together.”

“And the whole point of having friends is knowing they’ll share the burden of your difficult emotions,” Jarro says, and my jaw drops.

He really has changed.

As we travel, I notice that Mal keeps glancing up at the bridge overhead, so I do, too, but I don’t see any sign of the brigands. I can’t believe how high up we were, that whole time. The brigands definitely didn’t tell me that we were dozens of meters over a sea of lava, they just shoved me onward and told me to stay on the path.

We pass striders now and then, and a skeleton shoots arrows at us from the shore, and when a giant gray creature with tentacles appears, crying its lonesome song, Mal and Lenna work together to take it down. My brother looks at it with longing and murmurs, “So many fireballs I won’t get to hit,” and I start to wonder if I’m hallucinating.

I can’t stop looking around, amazed at everything I missed the first time they brought me this way. I would’ve been so much more scared if I’d known the truth of this place. We pass waterfalls of lava and a giant, sunken black castle, and then I see a welcome and pretty patch of bluish green up ahead. Our striders chirp and walk faster as we near what appears to be a strange forest of fungi, but the moment they’re on land, they start to shiver pitifully.

“We can’t make them walk on land,” my big-hearted brother says. “They hate it. They’re so sad now.”

He pats Miss Twolegs, and she makes a pathetic, whining chirp.

“Yeah, they hate this,” Jarro confirms.

The bridge overhead ends, but there’s been no sign of the brigands all this time. I hop down, and Jarro takes off my strider’s saddle and offers him the warped fungus that’s been luring him along. The strider takes the fungus and steps back onto the lava with a purring chirp. As the striders chomp their fungus, Chug rubs Miss Twolegs’s cheek.

“You’re a very good strider,” he tells her before leaning close to whisper. “And you’ll never tell Thingy about this, just like we talked about.”

The striders all hurry away, striding across the lava and chewing their fungus. We store our saddles and fishing rods in our pockets, and Lenna collects more warped fungus to bring back home. She’s pulling out her journal, and Mal steps up.

“Lenna, no. We have to hurry. They could be following us.”

“But the Nether! We need to record everything—”

Mal shakes her head firmly. “Not now. Not this time. We can come back.”

Lenna puts her journal away, looking utterly depressed. “You know the adults won’t let us.”

“They couldn’t stop us last time or this time. How are they going to stop us next time?”

There are plenty of ways, actually, but Lenna trusts Mal. She takes out her crossbow and waits to take her place at the end of our troop, always protecting us from behind. We tromp through the warped forest, where Chug warns me not to look the Endermen in the eye, then enter the crimson forest, which is beautiful in an entirely different way. Lenna doesn’t pull out her journal again, but she does take samples of everything that she can and stuffs them in her pockets. When a fierce sort of pig-thing snorts in rage and prepares to rush us, she takes them down with a few shots, and Mal finishes them and collects the meat. We walk faster after that.

“Hoglin,” Chug tells me. “Nearly killed me. Here’s a hint: They don’t like to be scratched under their chins.”

“Or anywhere,” Jarro adds, and Chug nods.

We’re so sleep deprived that it’s like we’re marching in a dream. At any moment, I expect the brigands to appear and charge us, but all we see are hoglins…at least right until the portal is in sight. Then I hear an entirely different kind of grunt and look up to find a half-man, half-pig rushing at us, axe raised.

“But piglins have never attacked us before,” Chug says, looking conflicted.

“Well, they’re attacking us now!” Mal shouts, parrying their strike with her sword.

Lenna gets in a shot, and Mal hacks away with her sword, but Chug stays out of the fray. I can’t tell if it’s because he’s hurt, since my brother generally never misses a fight, but being Chug, he just has to shout,“I don’t approve of this! I’m a big fan of pigs and piggish things!”

That piglin goes down, but another one runs in from the side. Mal throws me a spare sword, my old iron one, and Jarro gets his axe out, too. With Chug out of the fight, it’s all hands on board. It seems like every piglin in the area hates us now, and when Chug tries to toss one a gold ingot—which makes no sense to me, because why would a pig guy want gold?—the piglin completely ignores it in favor of attacking us.

“Why are they doing this?” Chug cries from outside the fight. Despite my potions, he looks grayish and smaller than he really is. “They didn’t before.”

“It must be Tok,” Jarro says.

“What, do they hate nerds?” I shoot back.

“We’re all nerds,” Jarro says, swiping with his axe. “But you’re the only one not wearing armor. Or gold. They really like gold.”

As we all focus on the latest piglin, Chug roots through his pockets and throws me a pair of gold boots. I duck out of the fight to shove my feet inside, and we finish off the piglin, and then everything goes quiet.

“I hated that,” Chug says.

“We all did,” I tell him, wiping sweat from my brow.

We keep walking, and Chug looks worse, and I can barely place one foot in front of the other. I’m just about done with this place, so it’s a huge relief when Mal points at a weird rectangle of black blocks and says, “There’s the portal. Let’s hurry.”

We’ve almost reached it when I hear a familiar brigand’s voice shout, “There they are!”

Much to my surprise, Jarro slings Chug’s arm around his neck, and we run.