Chapter 7: Plots and Plans
Flynt held out his iron sword at arm's length.
"So how are you with your swordfighting?" He asked. Deci raised an eyebrow.
"Watch me." she said.
She began a series of elaborate movements, thrusts, and parries that Flynt had not seen before, but the result of which was that his sword was on the ground, and Deci's diamond blade was pointed at his throat.
"What was that called?" Flynt asked, as Deci lowered her weapon.
"It's actually from the Nether by origin, but Uncle Bones said that he saw a piglin do it once." Deci replied.
"Well, let's see if you can perform an actual fight." Flynt said, donning some iron armor. "Now, don't actually go for the kill in this. This is just a friendly sparring session."
"I know, dummy. I know what a sparring session is." Deci said, rolling her eyes.
"Just checking," Flynt said, holding out his sword as he glanced at her diamond one.
He swiped at her experimentally, finding that she was able to block easily. She performed a strange upward swipe, though, instead of the usual downward. Flynt used it, and the sword skittered out of her hands.
"Aw, I thought I was doing so well, too." Deci said, as she picked up her sword.
"Well, why did you swing upward?" Flynt asked. "I've never seen a Player who—"
"Like I said before, Uncles Bones only saw his cousins in the Nether practicing swordsplay. He was never a fan of swords, but my mother was." Deci said. "And Uncle Bones said that all his cousins always swing upwards. They win, half the time."
"Well, I'm going to teach you how to kill mobs, not how to be killed by mobs." Flynt said, before realizing that that might have sounded harsh. "Sorry, but you know what I mean, right?"
"Yeah. Let's get on with this," Deci said, taking her position again.
"Now, when I come at you, I want you to swing downward, not upward," Flynt said. "Go."
Deci rushed forward and swung her sword at Flynt, and the blades rang out against each other. But just as Flynt was about to try to catch her off-guard, Deci vanished suddenly. A diamond blade was pressed against his throat from behind.
"Resourceful," Flynt said, as Deci lowered her blade. He turned to face her. "Well done."
"Thanks. Does swinging downward really help that much?" Deci asked.
"Well, the force you need to swing upwards is greater, while if you swing downward you have gravity on your side," Flynt said. "Generally it's a good idea to swing downward."
Deci and Flynt had been practicing and preparing for days at his base. Flynt knew that when the time came to go searching for Deci's parents, they were going to need to be able to fight through hordes of mobs. Though he hadn't exactly told her this, Flynt was pretty sure that Deci already knew. She hadn't been looking forward to telling her parents that she had killed two mobs, which Flynt assumed started the initial attack. How was she going to cope with killing dozens, or even possibly hundreds, of mobs?
Deci sheathed her sword, and sat down.
"Tired?" Flynt asked, sitting down next to her on the grass.
"Mainly worried about my parents. Hoping against hope that the mobs were content to simply imprison them instead of an execution." Deci said, staring out across the plains biome they were in. "But yes, I'm also a little tired from practicing so long."
"You should get some rest then." Flynt said. "I'll wake you up in a few hours."
Deci nodded her thanks and walked inside the house, heading for her spare cot that Flynt had set up in the main room.
Flynt sighed. He felt kind of bad that he had taken Deci to the Admin that day. Though in the back of his mind he knew that she didn't really blame him, he still couldn't help but feel that if he and Deci had stayed near the cave, perhaps the mobs would not have been captured so easily. Or even not at all.
"Hey bro, what's up with the long face?" a voice suddenly said, cutting Flynt's train of thought.
"AGH!" Flynt said, nearly jumping straight up and spinning around. Jake stood there, his stone sword strapped to his belt and his hands raised.
"Don't shoot!" Jake joked. "Honestly had no idea I could scare you that bad. You'll never guess what I found while I was gone…"
Flynt chuckled. "Same."
Jake began walking towards the house, when Flynt realized that Jake would probably disturb Deci.
"Jake, wait, there's something you should probably know first, and you have to be—"
"Sure, sure, just come on in. I'm dying on my feet over here." Jake joked, pushing open the door.
"No, Jake, really you can't—" Flynt began again, trying to grab Jake's sleeve, but he saw it was too late.
Jake was staring wide-mouthed at Deci, who was lying down on her small cot. Deci's eyes were closed, but her breathing was not quite steady yet. She would easily be woken up.
"T-That's…" Jake began, but Flynt whispered back.
"I know it's her, Jake. Don't read anything into it. She and I—"
"S-she… bl-blew up our h-house like some kind of frikkin Creeper!" Jake said, his voice rising in volume. "Is she gonna blow up again!? Do you realize just how long it took me to rebuild our house again!? To get these resources?!"
"SHHH!" Flynt whispered harshly. "I know that's what she did last time, but you know, we weren't exactly acting like hospitable people at the time…"
"'Hospitable'? She. Blew. Up. Our. House. Don't talk to me about 'hospitable'!" Jake said.
"Well, I'm just saying we did kinda kidnap her," Flynt said. "We kinda had that thing coming."
Deci sighed and sat up, having definitely been woken up by Jake's voice. Jake saw this and backed away in apprehension.
"Flynt, I can't deal with another explosion. I had to chop down my favorite trees to get enough wood to—"
Deci stood up and walked over to Flynt, an eyebrow raised. Jake nearly screamed, and jumped back.
"STAY BACK! NO…YOU…BOOM!" Jake said, trying to mime out his words.
"Relax, dimwit, I can understand you just fine." Deci said.
Jake didn't seem reassured. It took Flynt a moment to realize what the problem was.
"Deci, he can't understand you." Flynt said. Jake's eyes widened.
"Wait a minute, are you telling me you actually know what the Nether she's saying?"
"Adam's Admin armbands." Flynt explained, showing Jake his shiny gold band. "The armbands will let me understand Entitian, and it will let Deci understand how to speak with Players."
"S-so you can tell her not to blow up the house?" Jake said.
"Well, she already knows." Flynt said. "She can understand Player."
Deci nodded. Jake's eyes widened, before he put his hands on his forehead.
"This is a lot of new information." He said finally, sitting down. But even as he sat down, another question seemed to occur to him. "Why is she here?"
Deci looked at the ground. Flynt looked between Deci and Jake, wondering if it was his place to tell Jake.
"Jake, hold out your arm." Flynt said, unclasping the lock his armband. Jake looked at him hesitantly.
"What are you going to—" he began, but Flynt grabbed his arm and snapped the armband on it.
Deci saw what he was doing, and sighed. She looked up and began speaking to Jake, though Flynt could no longer understand her.
"Jake, it took Flynt nearly three days to finally figure out how I felt about the things I'm about to say, so please make this easier and keep an open mind.
"I was only a toddler the night of the fire in my village. I don't remember much of anything that happened, only the results of the actions. There were four mobs around me, surveying everything around me, and they were talking with each other. At the time, I was too young to understand what they were saying, but the result of it was that the mobs took me in, and raised me as their own in the caves that you and Flynt found me near.
"The mobs are my family, my Player parents having died early in my life. When you two began to try to take me away from them, I panicked, and I'm sorry I destroyed your house. I thought that you were gonna…gonna…"
At this, Deci shuddered and sat down, suddenly much paler. Flynt walked over and said something, but Deci wasn't listening. Flynt said something to Jake, who shrugged.
"You thought I was gonna…?" Jake said.
"Put me in a mob grinder." Deci said, panting. She'd heard the horror stories from snippets of her parents' conversations. These horrible devices that Players built to mangle mobs for their various body parts, or loot that they perhaps had on them.
Jake raised an eyebrow, and after a few more seconds to compose herself again, Deci continued. "I didn't even realize at the time that because I was a Player, you wouldn't treat me like a mob. So I panicked. Not to mention you did forcefully take me from my home."
Jake shrugged again. "Guilty as charged, I suppose. But how did you—!"
Deci vanished, and reappeared behind Jake. "How did I explode? How did I just teleport? You'd be surprised what you can learn when your parents are mobs. The only thing that's missing from my heritage…"
"…Is your actual heratige. A Player's heritage," Jake finished, "Well, that at least clears up a lot of this… issue. But why are you still here?"
"I'm here because Flynt took me in to teach me how to fight mobs. My parents were captured by other mobs, who don't understand that I don't mean to hurt them. I don't want to hurt them." Deci said. "But ever since the Great Admin wars, the mobs haven't forgiven us Players, or the Admins either."
"Huh," Jake said. His eyes were wide as he removed the armband and handed it back to Flynt, who immediately snapped it back on. "That clears up a lot, actually. I might need to sit and process for a few minutes."
Flynt nodded. "You do that. I'm going to go get some materials and get Deci her own little place for now."
Deci and Jake nodded as Flynt walked out of the house, carrying his iron axe on his shoulder as he set out for the nearest trees.
He hadn't gotten far when he suddenly heard a sound. A gurgling, bubbly sort of sound. He turned cautiously. There were no mobs in sight other than that cow over there, nibbling on the grass. He turned to the only source of water nearby, the river.
As he studied the calm water, suddenly from it burst forth a trident, aimed directly at him.
From absolutely nowhere, Deci appeared, spinning her trident in her hand and shielding Flynt from the heavy weapon, which clattered to the ground after hitting Deci's whirling trident. With all the force she could muster, she hurled the trident back from whence it came, impaling the drowned through its left eye. Her original trident flew back into her hand, and she picked up the second one, inspecting it. After a quick examination, she nodded and strapped it onto her back as well. Flynt just gawked for a second.
"How did you know that I was—" he asked.
"In trouble?" Deci finished for him. "You were giving off bursts of caution and fear. I could feel it from the house."
As the two turned around, however, they were somewhat shocked to see that while they had only been dealing with one drowned, nearby endermen had been teleporting in many more hostile mobs, which began limping and crawling and scuttling towards them. Deci drew her twin tridents, and Flynt drew his axe and his iron sword.
Flynt leaped at the first mob he could reach, a creeper. It didn't even get a chance to hiss at him before his axe cleaved clean through the creeper's skull, killing it instantly. A zombie shuffled up on his left, and it received a sword in its mouth. But as Flynt kept fighting, he realized that the mobs' hostility was not aimed at him. Skeletons would be totally oblivious to him as he walked up and snapped their bows in half, and zombies just shuffled past him. Flynt looked over and saw that the mobs were focusing all of their efforts on Deci.
Deci, however, would not be taken out without a fight. She cleared a circle around herself by quickly spinning, her tridents extended. When this no longer worked, she changed tactics, and began teleporting around, confusing nearby mobs just long enough for them to get impaled on the sharp spikes of the tridents in her hands. Skeletons arrows wouldn't touch her before she knocked them out of the sky, and sent one of her tridents in return at their bony frames. Though the mobs stood no chance against her, Flynt saw in her eyes that sooner or later, she would give up. It just wasn't in her nature to fight so many mobs so soon. That wasn't who she had become.
Flynt leapt into the fray, swinging axe and sword as hectically as he could. Since the mobs hadn't been paying attention to the other Player, it was quite easy to simply dismember each mob before they could turn around. One by one, the mobs were taken out except for a solitary creeper. Deci marched up to it, and grabbed its scaly hide.
"Where are they keeping my family!?" she said.
The creeper seemed genuinely surprised that Deci could speak Entitian. It even forgot to explode for a few second. But when Deci began to grow angry that the creeper wasn't answering, she pulled out a trident, and poised it over her head, shoving the creeper to the ground.
"WHERE ARE THEY?!" she shouted.
The creeper scowled and began flashing.
"Deci look out!" Flynt said, grabbing her and nearly throwing her backwards.
The creeper exploded, but the water surrounding it took most of the impact. Deci and Flynt were thrown forward from the shockwave, but other than that they appeared fine.
When they had laid there for a while, breathing heavily and their eyes bugging out a little, Deci turned, looking over at Flynt.
"You do realize what this means though, right?"
Flynt looked over at her, unsure what she was saying.
"They sent a squad of mobs to come kill me," Deci said, "We have to get moving, if we wanna survive. Otherwise they'll just keep coming until we're eventually overwhelmed."
Flynt nodded, before standing up. Solemnly, he said,
"It's time to find your family."