Fire was the first one to wake up, it was still very early and the blaze core was the main light source in the tree. He sat up and made sure everybody was sleeping. He jumped out of his hammock, down onto the soft ground, not making a sound, ready to fight off any monsters that might be left from the night. When he saw that there were no monsters, he relaxed. The thing he needed to do now was make equipment for the whole group and in this case equipment meant stone swords and wooden plate armor. Wooden plate armor meant wood and wood meant trees. After chuckling about this stupidly simple chain of conclusions he looked for a small tree and found one right away.
After cutting down a few trees using his claws he crafted some of the wood into planks and those planks into a crafting table, which he put down. Fire put a hand on the block, closed his eyes and the crafting grid appeared in front of his mental eye. In this case it was easier to make a regular Minecraft stone sword than to use the materials to construct it physically. He would need bindings, a handle and several other things that would just make it more complicated and less effective. You could do this with stone tools but for iron or diamond it would be a complete waste of materials to use a crafting table. To make proper tools you would have to smelt the iron and forge a blade or tool head, which would take longer but the tools would be a lot better. For diamonds the process was even more complicated and only few people knew how to turn diamonds into armor or tools. While Fire was one of those people, he did not have the equipment necessary to do so in his base. If you succeeded in completing the diamond forging process however, the tools and armor would be nigh-indestructible.
After making ten stone swords the difficult part began. The wooden plate armor had no recipe in Minecraft so he had to make it himself. First he had to cut the wooden logs into fitting pieces meant to protect the wearer's chest and back. That was the easy part.
Fire spent the next two hours shaving tiny strips off of logs and bundling them together into a tough rope.
"Fire, what exactly are you doing there?" A voice said, Fire recognized the speaker as Unchosen.
"I am ensuring that we don't get slaughtered by the mobs in the first hundred meters of the valley. Why don't you come down, I could use someone helping me bundle those ropes." Fire explained.
Unchosen hung down from a branch and dropped down to the ground.
"Ouch!" He said as he felt a sting in his feet.
He got up and walked over to Fire, who looked pretty funny with all the tiny wood pieces scattered around the area.
"The workbench log massacre." Fire joked.
Unchosen smiled and asked: "How can I help you?"
"You just take those thin strips and do this." Fire took a handful of strips and quickly wove three together to a very thin rope.
"Good, I know how to do that." Unchosen said and sat down, took some strips for himself and started working.
After a good thirty minutes most of the strips were woven to thin one meter pieces of rope, then they took three of those and wove them together to thicker ropes.
While still weaving ropes Unchosen asked: "Fire, how do the mobs here work, are they still about the same only with more details?"
Fire shook his head and replied: "They are not the same, mostly. The creepers still do what they can do best, they explode. Spiders are also quite similar, they jump you and try to eat you alive. But there are no zombies or skeletons, there are just the generic category of 'undead', this can reach from a standard zombie over ghouls, and let me tell you, those are no joke, up to the very rare lich lords. Lich lords will most likely kill you, even with the best equipment. They are powerful undead mages without life force, they just drain the energy straight out of the environment."
"Sounds pretty nasty." Unchosen commented.
"It is, trust me. Remember me saying that combat a lot harder here? You will really see what that means when we reach the valley, the skeletons that have bows aim where they will do the most damage, so for heart and head. They are not very accurate but when they do land a good hit you will be wounded pretty badly."
"About how many mobs will there be?" Unchosen wanted to know and shivered.
"There won't be that many, the spawn rates tend to be pretty manageable, but we will sometimes have to fight multiple mobs at once." Fire said.
The sun was just rising over the trees, which looked amazingly different from the desert sunrises, which only were red, orange and yellow, this one also had the green from the trees mixed into it.
An hour later freeZe and TehLulz joined them. freeZe, TehLulz and Unchosen were making rope while Fire was carefully drilling holes into the wooden plates using his claws.
"How much of this rope are we going to have to make?" freeZe asked.
Fire answered: "I'll make one chestplate and we'll see." He took four wooden plates and a piece of rope, put the rope through the holes and used more pieces of rope to make a crate of log pieces without top and bottom.
"Mind trying this on Unchosen?" Fire asked.
Unchosen nodded and got up, Fire handed him the crate and he put his head through.
"It is a bit heavy but it fits. Sort of." Unchosen said.
"That sounds just great." freeZe commented.
Fire took the crate again and put additional small plates on some holes and a bit later it looked much better and more like actual armor.
"Now try this." He said.
Unchosen stood up and put the wooden plating armor on again, this time he didn't have to hold it up with his hands.
"Better than before, I actually feel a bit protected but it is even heavier now." He laughed.
"Move your arms as far as you can." Fire commanded.
Unchosen was a bit limited by the wood but he was able to move his hands pretty freely. Fire gave him one of the stone swords, which looked exactly like you would expect a sword to look like, only made out of stone.
"Try swinging it." He said.
Unchosen was surprised by the weight of the sword and it fell out of his hand, he tried to pick it up again but couldn't because the wooden armor was limiting him. freeZe chuckled, picked up the sword and gave it to Unchosen again, he was visibly embarrassed.
"Attack me with the sword." Fire demanded.
"Isn't that dangerous for you?" TehLulz asked.
"No, he won't be able to hit me and if he does hit me, it is just stone, it will just bounce off my scales. Just go for it."
As Unchosen was charging at him, the world around Fire slowed down, not as much as when the Shop Guy attacked, only to about to one third of normal speed. Unchosen prepared to strike but to Fire it looked hilariously slow, he could easily take a step to the right and make Unchosen hit the air. Unchosen almost fell over because of the weight of his wooden armor and his stone sword but he managed to stay upright.
"Again!" Fire commanded and smiled a little.
Unchosen attacked again, this time he didn't slash vertically but horizontally. Fire saw the swing coming and jumped back a few steps, this time Unchosen could compensate for the momentum a bit better.
"Try a little less powerful swings." Fire advised and readied himself again.
TehLulz had stopped making ropes and was now standing closer to the two watching the fight, so had freeZe. Unchosen raised his sword for a vertical attack, Fire took a step to the left but then Unchosen suddenly redirected his sword, forming an arc. Time slowed down by an additional half, Fire barely managed to evade the incoming hit by jumping backwards again.
"That was much better!" Fire congratulated as he saw that Unchosen could manage the weight of his gear even better. As he saw Unchosen preparing another attack, he added: "But we should stop now, we don't want to exhaust ourselves before the actual battle, right?"
Twenty minutes later they heard a sound, which sounded like something heavy falling from a high place onto something soft.
Five seconds after that they heard Ambigious' scream: "I told you these are not safe!"