It was dusk on the plains again, that feared time of day when monsters rose up from nowhere and blackness slowly crept over the land. In the nearby village, testificates locked and barred the doors to their quaint wooden abodes, then crawled shivering with fear under tables and chairs to wait out the night.
Far above the town and out of sight, someone sat in midair with no means of support, watching the monsters rise up from nothing and tossing a fireball from hand to hand.
He was of average height, with slightly messy brown hair and pale skin, and was dressed simply in blue jeans and a loose turquoise shirt. By all accounts, he seemed normal, save for his eyes, those fell, blankly white and glowing orbs.
He was known mostly as the Netherlord, as due to his fearsome reputation few dared speak his name, but those who did dare knew him as Herobrine. The man was older than anyone else in the land, old enough that nobody knew from whence he came or why he torched villages and terrorized people - and yet he looked no more than thirty.
During this particular evening, he had been debating over whether or not to torch the village below him to the ground, but now a more interesting opportunity presented itself. Far in the distance, there was a small patch of abnormal light cast by whitish-grey metal.
He frowned, then flew a little ways towards the area. It appeared to be iron or a similar, unknown metal, and there were a few things moving around just out of sight within it.
Herobrine grinned, eyes sparkling nastily. "I wonder whose contraption this is... and how bad it might be if someone were to bust it up." He snapped his fingers, and a glowing diamond blade appeared in his right hand.
"Let's see here," he muttered, then vanished in a flash of light.
On closer inspection, the small odd area was made of a white metal that was definitely not iron, and the movements inside the area were in fact small, weird-looking creatures scuttling around like insects. Herobrine observed them for a few seconds, then summoned a fireball into his left hand and tossed it down at one of the smaller ones.
The explosion glanced off of the mechanical thing's plating like nothing had happened, and then every single creature simultaneously looked up at at the Netherlord, some walking closer with odd limbs and all of them turning to face him with the odd polished red orbs he could only assume passed as eyes.
He grinned, chose a multi-eyed and floating one - one with a vaguely feminine floating form - as his target, then hefted his blade and sliced at it.
It vanished from sight, and he turned around to find that it had teleported behind him, and in addition bore not even the smallest scratch from his direct hit.
He growled and charged at another, one whose three legs and spiked head made it resemble a pyramid, and sliced at it again. However, yet again the thing took no visible damage, and those eyes on the creatures began to look menacing.
Something hit him in the center of the back, and he hissed in pain. The feminine-figured one was firing on him, shooting rapid bursts of red energy at him. The rest of the enemies had turned too, and he now found himself under fire from all sides.
Herobrine's eyes burned brilliantly as he raised his left hand in a claw, intending to raise a legion of monsters from the ground, but nothing happened, as the white substance that the ground was comprised of seemed to be far too thick for anything to break though.
A strange feeling burnt at the center of his chest, and he realized he was scared - frightened half to death by these unflinching mechanical things that took not even the slightest scratch from a heavily enchanted blade. Eyes wide in panic, he propelled himself up into the sky, but found himself being pulled back down again by some strange three-pronged laser beam emitted from one of the pyramidal creatures.
He clawed at the air frantically, trying to get away from the monsters, but to no avail - the air slipped through his fingers, and he began to fall. The beams of light drilled into his back, and his vision became blurred and unfocused, then blacked out altogether.
He remembered flashes of light and pain, and the feeling of clutching onto his sword for dear life, remembered those damned red orbs and something happening to his arm, but it seemed all like a dream.
He was somewhere else, definitely. Although the memories were blurry and dreamlike, the Netherlord thought he remembered finally remembering to teleport, and shaking off the monsters and doing so.
He took a deep breath and felt clean air enter his lungs, then opened his eyes and pushed himself up off of the ground into a sitting position.
He was in a birch forest somewhere, a peaceful place with poppies waving in the wind and clear pools of water. Safe. Secure. Daylight, but beggars couldn't be choosers and if the horrible things hadn't been a dream, safety was really the only thing that mattered.
Herobrine frowned - something felt different. It was his sword, he realized quickly, he hadn't let it go from his hand from the moment he summoned it back at the village and yet he was not holding it now. He looked over to his right, fully expecting to see it lying somewhere near him.
What he saw chilled him to the absolute core as he realized two things - that he had indeed not let go of his blade, and that the horrors from the night before were no delirious nightmare.
His arm, his right sword arm looked like those things. It was shining a dull whitish-blue, like the color of his trusty diamond sword mixed with the white metal of the creatures, and it had gaps where there once was skin and a large claw with one of those red eye-like things set into the center where his hand had once been.
He recoiled from his own arm, then stood up and rushed over to a pool of water and looked into it.
For the most part, he seemed normal, save for the fact that his right arm, the upper part of his right shoulder, the right part of his neck, and even a small amount of his chin had all been turned into whatever those things had been made out of.
The Netherlord flexed his clawed hand experimentally, realizing that for some reason it felt completely natural, then on a sudden impulse turned and swung it at a tree.
The claw suddenly rearranged itself, turning into something that looked faintly like his old blade and slicing clean through the birch tree as if it were paper. He stared at his own hand, already a claw once more, with sheer horror in his white eyes as the birch tree fell, crashing to the ground loudly.
He could hear something at the base of his mind as well, some faint whispering that sent shivers up his spine when he listened to it.
...cl_n th_ w_rld th_ w_rld m_st b_ p_r_ m_st b_...
"No!" he shouted, startling several birds and very briefly driving the voice away. He didn't talk to himself, not like this. Gloat, yes. Cower in fear? Never. He looked around for anything that would distract him from the mechanical-sounding voice drilling into his brain, and then in desperation hurled a fireball at a particularly large tree, engulfing it in flames instantly.
...p_rg_ _t _ll t_ _ bl_nk sl_t_ Pr_c_ss _t _n_w th_ c_cl_ m_st...
Trees fell harder and faster, the forest once idyllic now burning up. He couldn't let those things beat him, would not become one of them - because he, he was the lord of the Nether and the unkillable, the unbeatable, the terror of Minecraftia itself...
...And, for the first time in his life, he was terrified.
((I love Transistor, I love Minecraft, and I've always wanted to try my hand at cosmic horror. Here, have a fic.
((Please review!