I woke up that morning, to clear blue skies and a cheerful sun… and a huge freakin crater where my Hive Cluster used to be.

It's obvious in hindsight what happened, now that I think about it. There wasn't any new creature stomping around down there. All those tremors were from Creepers tunneling explosively. They must've mined out a huge cavity below my Hive, then set a bunch of them to explode all at once. I should've seen it.

But what could I have done about it?

Even in hindsight, short of flooding those tunnels with Zerglings like I'd originally thought would have only been a stop gap measure.

But, that's not the true problem…

First I had those white eyed Endermen…

Then the monsters were able to switch targets to the Creep…

Now I'm dealing with Creepers that explode for purposes other than killing their target.

The real question is, how are these monsters changing? What's changing them? If they were anything like they were in game, they wouldn't be able to do this. No, it's almost like there's…

…someone, or something guiding them…

That… that changes things. That changes things a lot. If someone is guiding these monsters to attack me, even change them to give them advantages over myself, I have to stop treating these monsters as monsters, and start treating them like an enemy army.

Ok, killing these monsters is simple, but it's not enough. I can only deny their ability to spread with light, but I can't cover an entire planet with glowing Creep in a day, and I can't account for their ability to tunnel underground, not without tunnelers of my own.

Seems I've only one real option then. I need to get off planet. Not even building under the Ocean would be able to protect my base from over a hundred Creepers exploding at once like that.

What of the Hive though? And I'm not about to abandon my Cerebrate now. It's times like these I lament the Zerg Building's inability to fly like the Terrans do. I think that's going to go on my list of evolutions to pursue. Heck, if I implement that, I won't have to ever worry about something like this happening again!

Only 24 hours until the Cerebrate is ready to go. Just have to hold out here until then, and then I'm getting off world. Let's see how the enemy deals with me then! The only flight capable creatures they have are in the Nether, and I seriously doubt any of them are space capable.

Granted, with these stupid changes being implemented, it's not much of a stretch for a Ghast and a Blaze to be upgraded to handle the vacuum of space. If I were the enemy and I had to chase me into space, I would do that next, along with building a Super Nethergate large enough for Ghasts to pull through. I'm honestly surprised no other Nethergates besides the one I have, have shown up. I would've thought the Endermen would've built a few more gates by now or something. Or perhaps they can't? That would at least explain why I wasn't facing a never ending Nether army from the get go. I can't rely on that anymore though.

Glancing up, I checked on the progress of my Overlords. Thanks to the speed boost, the Overlord carrying my Drones has already made it to the point where the Satellite Overlord was, and the Satellite Overlord is currently heading for the moon to scout out a good place to set up a base.

Remembering my other Overlord full of Drones, I turned my attention over to it. It's just a little ways away from the beach and the water. I ordered it to change course and head for the other Overlord full of Drones. After a bit of hesitation, I decided caution would be the better part of valor now and sent up a dozen Mutalisks to guard the Overlords as well.

Hm, considering I'm going to be dropping Drones on the moon, it'd be better if I had a landing party ready to protect them too. With that in mind, I ordered up 16 Zerglings, loaded them into two more Overlords and sent them up as well.

Turning back to my Cerebrate and Hive, I felt relieved to see both have finished healing from the damage done by the explosion last night.

It took about half an hour for the Mutalisks to reach the Overlords in space. On a whim, I split the group so that six would cover both. It took an hour after that for the Overlord I'd sent towards the Ocean to reach the group holding orbit over my Hive.

During that time, I watched their progress, and toyed with a ridiculous idea I'd just come up with. I figured with over 50 Overlords, why can't I just rip up the ground the Hive and Cerebrate are sitting on and hoist it into space? I tried it just to see if I could, but the Overlords only succeeded in tearing up the ground. Evidently getting a pile of churned up rock to hold together in one solid piece isn't doable. Who knew?

The idea of glue came to mind at that point, which lead to me wondering if the Overlords could lift it up if the Creep surrounded it like a net? It gave to my mind the mental image of making an asteroid covered in Creep to orbit around the planet. Eh, why not? Need more Creep than what I've got though. I pumped out three Drones and had them re-establish the Quad Hive Cluster with three new Hatcheries. It's unfortunate that it'll take 2 hours to finish, but I can be patient.

While I waited, I turned my attention to Artemis. What to do about the place? Once I'm gone, the enemy may switch targets to take out my Zerg there. They might be safer if I pulled out completely to draw their attention away from the place.

I figured I might as well bring it up with Julian. I got quite the shock when he told me he'd felt a huge tremor during the night and couldn't get a hold of me after that. He feared something had happened to me. I ended up assuring him that I'm alright and letting him know what happened. To say he was horrified that Creepers could do such a thing would be an understatement. Like me, he knew that there's no real defense against that, other than not being there.

When I told him of my plan to withdraw my forces so as not to bring the enemy down on his head, he disagreed, asking that I keep my forces at Artemis. Zerg or not, they're still a target, and if the tremors start up near Artemis, they'll need all the help they can get to evacuate. I agreed to this and asked Julian to send runners out to the other City-Forts, warning them of the danger along with an offer of aid from my Zerg to help in the need of an evacuation. Julian agreed, but cautioned me that the others would probably not accept my aid. I told him that I understood, but I couldn't in good conscience not offer to help.

Turning my attention back to my Zerg, I didn't have long to wait for the three Hatcheries to finish now. A couple minutes later, and they hatched, adding their collective Creep to the Hive. In conjunction with the Overlords, I had them direct the Creep to dig into the ground, forming a sphere around as large a chunk of dirt and rock as possible, without letting the Cerebrate separate from the Creep.

It worked better than I thought it would. I then directed all the Overlords, even mine to the edges of the Creep to dig the sphere out and lift it up. Unfortunately the Overlords couldn't even get it to budge. Sighing, I had my Overlords alter the Creep to make the ball smaller and smaller until they were finally able to lift it, but barely. By that point, the ball was only 2% of its original size and the Cerebrate's cocoon is teetering on the very edge of the Creep. If only I could make the thing move!

Wait… why can't the Creep move it? All the buildings are sitting on the Creep, and the Creep has been shown to be able to move. Carefully, I had the Creep lift up the Cerebrate as best it could. Rather than lift off the ground, the Creep started piling up higher and higher, elevating the Cocoon slowly but surely, until it's on a hill of Creep that rivals the height of the Hatcheries. Then finally it started to move. While it was doing that, I was able to see a few meters into the Creep via the Overlord's ability to detect things, which is how it sees burrowed units. With that, I was able to answer my own question.

Why doesn't the Creep move buildings? Evidently the buildings of the Zerg don't normally move because both the Creep and the buildings are rooted deep into the ground. Moving them would require uprooting the building itself like what's happening now, which requires an obscene amount of Creep. There goes my idea of having mobile bases then. It's taking all the Creep from four Hatcheries just to move one Zerg Cocoon. There's not enough Creep to pick up all 3 Hatcheries and the Hive on top of that as well.

As soon as the Cerebrate had been resettled next to the Hive and Hatcheries, the Creep was directed to form a ball underground once again, much smaller than I would like. The Overlords then dug down and gripped the Creep, and slowly but steadily lifted the ball up.

Inwardly cheering, I directed the ball up where it would be resettled on the moon. My original thought had been to put it in orbit, but unlike the Overlords, this ball doesn't have the ability to fly on its own so can't course correct to keep itself in orbit like an Overlord can. I really don't want to have to deal with my Hive plummeting to the ground burning up on re-entry, just because I don't have the ability to set up the artificial satellite on a non-decaying orbit. To the moon it is!

Slowly, my Overlords dragged the ball skyward. We're going a lot slower than I was hoping we would be. I contemplated having the Overlord still hanging onto the active Nether Gate drop the thing to see if that'll speed the process up then decided against it.

I checked on the status of the Cerebrate again. Still the same, with no change. I've tried mentally prodding the connection to it, but there's still no answer. At least I'm actually getting an impression this time. It appears to be sleeping.

It took over half the day, but the Overlords finally got the ball of Creep up to where the Overlord full of Drones is waiting. The satellite Overlord has pulled ahead a ways, and the Mutalisks have already caught up with both, splitting up to have half a dozen guarding each one.

We finally breached atmosphere a little after that, with the sky completely fading from blue to black, revealing the night sky. The instant we crossed over into space, something unexpected happened. The Nether Portal suddenly deactivated.

Eyes wide, I wondered what to do. It took half a day to get up here, and in less than a minute a new portal is going to appear in that clearing where I first made that Nether Gate, and a horde of Zombie Pigmen are going to spill out. Artemis can't stand up to that! At this point a small part of me wishes I'd never ventured to the Nether. Surely I could have gotten Glowstone from elsewhere somehow?

With no other recourse, I split off half my group of Mutalisks and sent them as fast as they could back to that clearing. Immediately 25 Mutalisks broke off and folded in their wings to start plummeting back to the ground. I'm trusting they know what they're doing and I'm not about to lose half of my Mutalisks to burning up in reentry. As I'd hoped, the Mutalisks seem to be using their wings on occasion to make a controlled descent. Thank goodness for that. Here's hoping they get there fast enough to run damage control.

-END CHAPTER-

AN- For those worried that this story is going to change from a Zerg ROFLstomp into a 'Let's see how we can dump on the main character now!' story, fear no more! My character has only been having trouble cause he's been blind sided by an enemy he didn't even know he had. Now that he has an inkling that he's fighting more than just a never ending horde of mindless monsters, things are going to be different! Why? I present to you a simple quote in answer:

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."

- Sun Tzu, "The Art of War"

Also, for those who are curious, I did the math, and the maximum size that ball of dirt the Overlords tried to lift would have weighed a little over 700,000 tons. A single Overlord can carry 300 tons comfortably, which is the guesstimated weight of two Arclite Seige Tanks or two Ultralisks. 60 of those together can only lift 18,000 tons. That's ~2% of the weight of that creep covered ball of rock, hence why it had to be shrunk to a much smaller size.

Extra AN – I screwed up… I completely ignored the distance between the Moon and Minecraftia. The next few chapters have my Overlords making the distance in half a day. That is an unacceptable bout of lazy writing on my part. My Overlords travel at approx. 30 MPH. Did you know that at that speed, it would take one month shy of a year to travel the distance from Earth to the Moon? (assuming it would even be in the same spot as when you left thanks to orbital drift). Considering Minecraftia, Luna, and the distance between them is proportionately larger, it would take well over a year, maybe even a few years to travel from Minecraftia to Luna. I can't just ignore that. So I'm going to have to rewrite the four chapters after this one. Sorry guys, but getting to the Moon is going to have to wait.

Overmind Matthew
PSI Energy – 50/50
Status – Normal

Abilities
- Burrow – Active – High vibrations from muscles allow user to drop below ground level to hide
- Spawn Hatchery – 50psi – 12 hour build
- Regeneration – Passive – Heals anything not instantly fatal; time needed depends on extent of injury.
- Anaerobic – Passive – No longer requires breathable atmosphere to survive.
- Temperature Resistance – Passive – Currently able to survive temperatures between -450 and 118 F.
- PSI Regeneration – Passive – Regenerate energy at .5 points per second.

Zerg Swarm
Bio-Energy – 9645/Income rate – 550
Support – 147.5/311

Entities
1x Quad Hive Cluster (1xHive, 3 Hatcheries)
1x Cerebrate (growing)

60x Overlords
31+25+6(62)x Mutalisks

16x Drones
12+16+3(31)x Zerglings

Swarm Upgrades

Burrow
Carapace 1,2,3
Defiler Consume (ugh…)
Defiler Metasynaptic Node
Defiler Plague
Flyer Attack 1,2,3
Flyer Carapace 1,2,3
Melee Attack 1,2,3
Missile Attack 1,2,3
Overlord Antennae
Overlord Ventral Sacs
Overlord Pneumatized Carapace
Zergling Adrenal Glands
Zergling Metabolic Boost
Hydralisk Grooved Spines
Hydralisk Muscular Augment
Queen Ensnare
Queen Gamete Meiosis
Queen Spawn Broodlings
Ultralisk Anabolic Synthesis
Ultralisk Chitinous Plating
Custom Upgrade – Glowstone Green Grass Creep

Friends/Allies/Vassals

- Lord Julian of Fort City Artemis (Vassal)

Objects added to the ZGA

Coal Shard
Cotton thread (black; strand from shirt)
Grass
Human hair (Overmind)
Obsidian Shard
Stone (Rhyolite) Shard
Tree