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Copyright © 2018 by Danica Davidson
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The Library of Congress has cataloged this book as follows:
Names: Davidson, Danica, author.
Title: Clash in the underwater world / Danica Davidson.
Description: New York : Skyhorse Publishing, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018001522 (print) | LCCN 2018008921 (ebook) | ISBN 9781510733503 (eb) | ISBN 9781510733480 (pb) | ISBN 9781510733503 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PZ7.D28263 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.D28263 Cl 2018 (print) | DDC [Fic]--dc23
Cover design by Brian Peterson
Cover photo by Lordwhitebear
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5107-3349-7
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-3350-3
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
CHAPTER 1
WE WERE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN, AND we’d lost all sight of land. If anything went wrong, we’d be on our own.
In our little boat were Dad, my cousin Alex, my Earth friends, Maison, Destiny, and Yancy, and Yancy’s newly tamed parrot, Blue. And me. But even though I was part of the Overworld Heroes task force, I felt small compared to this huge ocean with all its incredible creatures swimming just below the surface. I had had no idea how dangerous this mission would be until now—when it was too late.
Yancy wasn’t helping any. In fact, he was really freaking me out.
“Hey, look at this one, Stevie,” Yancy said cheerfully, showing me another picture. He’d pulled some book about ocean life on Earth out of that backpack he was always carting around. Now he was flipping through pages, showing me creatures that looked like they’d come straight from my nightmares.
I stared at the image of a hideous fish with a mouth full of row after row of fangs. On its head was a prong with a small, glowing light on the end of it, like a tiny sea lantern. If anything like that fish was waiting in the ocean below us, I’d rather just stay on the boat.
“This is an anglerfish,” Yancy said. Blue, who was perched on Yancy’s shoulder, whistled. “They live in the deep ocean and can grow up to three feet. They even glow because of bacteria down there. It’s so dark in the deep ocean that you wouldn’t be able to see a thing unless you bring your own light or see fish glowing. Some of the fish use their glow to lure in their prey. And the pressure is so bad down there that if you don’t go in a submarine, the weight of the water will crush you.”
I didn’t know what being crushed by water pressure felt like, but my stomach was squeezing pretty badly on its own. And my mouth was getting dry just looking at that anglerfish.
“Yancy, stop it,” Destiny sighed. “You know the ocean in Minecraft isn’t the same as the ocean on Earth. There aren’t any anglerfish here, and I don’t think it gets that dark, either.”
“Hey, there could be anglerfish. And who knows how dark it gets?” Yancy said. “On Earth, we’re still discovering new sea life because the ocean is so big. And you know that some of the creatures we have on Earth are also in Minecraft. Like Blue.” He gestured to his new parrot pet. Earlier Yancy had said that being in a boat with a parrot made him look even more like a pirate. But when no one had paid much attention to that, he’d pulled out his book instead. And this agony began.
“See, look at this,” Yancy said, turning another page. “A pufferfish! We have those in both places!”
Next to the anglerfish, the pufferfish looked pretty okay to me. “My dad has hunted pufferfish to make the Potion of Water Breathing,” I said, looking at Dad. I wanted him to tell me that pufferfish weren’t too bad. And that even though lots of the Overworld ocean hadn’t been explored yet, there was no way we’d run into any anglerfish.
Unfortunately, Dad was busy looking at the map. Normally, we’d have had to go to a special cartographer in the village to get an ocean map. But we had our own special map thanks to Steve Alexander, my ancestor, who had left us the clues we needed to find Ender crystal shards that could be used to make a special weapon to defeat the Ender Dragon. Each time we completed another mission, the crystal shard we found helped us read more of Steve Alexander’s magical book, which showed us where we had to go next.
Clearly, Dad wasn’t going to be any help. Yancy went on, “Some people eat pufferfish on Earth, which is really dangerous if you don’t do it right. They’re toxic. If you eat the bad part, you’ll be poisoned.”
I gulped. “Well, we don’t like to eat pufferfish in the Overworld,” I said. “Because if you do, it makes you nauseated.”
“Yancy, put the book away,” Maison said, her arm hanging off the side of the boat so her fingers could trail through the waves. She looked as annoyed as Destiny was with how Yancy was acting. Alex was the only one who was staring at the book with gleeful fascination. The creepier the fish, the more interested she looked.
“Not till we get to the sharks,” Yancy said, flipping the pages quickly. “Here you go, Stevie. Take a look at the great white shark.”
I saw an enormous mouth, even bigger than the anglerfish’s, with even larger teeth. The anglerfish had lots of tiny, jutting fangs, but the great white shark had a forest of triangular teeth with jagged edges.
“The great white shark can grow up to twenty-one feet long,” Yancy read.
Twenty-one feet! I never thought an anglerfish could seem safe by comparison!
“Dad,” I said in a slow voice, turning to him. What I wanted to say was: Dad, please tell me Yancy is wrong and we don’t have these fish here!
“Not now, Stevie,” Dad said with a frown. He was still studying the map in Steve Alexander’s book. “We should be near the ocean monument holding the next crystal shard.”
“Yancy, can you ride one of those?” Alex asked, po
inting to the great white shark. I could tell she was already in love with the shark. “I bet they swim fast.”
“If you try to ride it, it will probably eat you,” Destiny said matter-of-factly.
Yancy looked up from his book in disgust. “Sharks don’t go around eating people!” he said. “That’s just a myth, and people believe it because they see it in movies. Sharks have more to fear from people than we do from them.”
“Then what about shark attacks?” Destiny countered.
“They usually take a bite and then stop,” Yancy said, as if this made everything okay. “They bite to try to figure out what something is, because they don’t have hands like us. And anyway, shark attacks are incredibly rare. I’m sick of sharks getting a bad rap.”
“Says the one trying to scare Stevie by showing him shark pictures,” Maison muttered under her breath.
Yancy shut the book and tossed it dramatically on the floor of the boat. “I’m just trying to get us prepared for this mission. I’ve never been in the Overworld ocean before.”
To tell the truth, I hadn’t either. And that thought kept growing and growing in my head, like a pufferfish puffing itself up.
“Hey, if you’re in shark territory, you’re in their space,” Yancy went on. For some reason, he was really worked up about this. “They’re just trying to eat to stay alive, and if people are being careless and in the shark’s hunting grounds, they might get bitten. But don’t blame the shark. It’s not like in Minecraft, where you have hostile mobs that attack you for no clear reason.”
Even though I was still nervous, I thought Yancy had an interesting point. If sharks had to eat, they had to eat, even if I thought they were scary looking. And if something unfamiliar was in the water, they had to figure out what it was, right? On the other hand, if we ran into any hostile mobs underwater—“mobs” was another word we used for “monster”—then they’d attack us just because they can, not because they need to in order to survive.
“Do you know you can pay to go under the water in a cage and have the great white sharks come right up to you?” Yancy asked. “I want to do that some- day.”
“Cool!” Alex cheered. “How many emeralds does it cost?”
“Why would anyone pay money for that?” Destiny asked at the same time, making a face.
“The cage keeps you safe, and there’s a boat right there next to it,” Yancy explained.
“I heard that sharks circle their prey,” Destiny said. “What if they start circling your boat?”
“I know where you’re going with this, but it’s not going to happen,” Yancy said. “As long as you’re in a boat, nothing is going to hurt you.”
That’s when something leaped out of the waters and landed, with a screech, in our boat.
CHAPTER 2
I GRABBED MY DIAMOND SWORD, STUNNED. FOR THE briefest second, I thought it might be an anglerfish or a pufferfish or even a great white shark. But it was a guardian, one of the fish known in the Overworld. And it was hostile.
The fish was flopping around, able to breathe in water or out of it. It was green and had rows of orange spikes all over its body, like a set of fangs outside of its mouth. The fish kerplunked right into Yancy’s lap, making him yelp and jump back.
Even though I had my sword, I froze. The guardian had a single eye in its broad forehead, and it was staring right at me. I knew that was a bad sign. When a guardian stared at you, it meant you were its prey.
With a roar, Dad jumped to his feet and struck the guardian with his sword, all while I sat frozen under the fish’s creepy gaze. I felt like I was hypnotized.
“Whoa, Uncle Steve!” Alex said to Dad, impressed. The fish disappeared and dropped some prismarine crystal shards. “I didn’t know they could jump into boats like that!”
I caught Yancy’s eye. He had backed himself into the far end of the boat, panting and sweaty. For the first time, I realized he was scared, himself. Maybe he had been showing me all that Earth ocean stuff to try to share his fear, or to act tough, or something.
“You kids need to stop jabbering about Earth fish and pay attention,” Dad said sternly. I noticed then that he was hurt and trying not to show it. His sword hand was trembling a little, and he put his other hand on top of it to steady it. “Of course they can jump into boats. They can also electrocute you while you’re in your boat and they’re still in the water.”
“But that’s why we’ve got this armor,” Alex said. For good measure, she pounded her fist against the iron armor she had on.
When Dad had learned our next crystal shard mission would take us to an ocean monument, he had said we needed to get armor made—no ifs, ands, or buts. I’d always dreamed of having diamond armor someday, but Dad had said we didn’t have time to mine diamonds. With the village blacksmith’s help, we’d quickly made ourselves sets of iron armor. It turned out the armor for the Earth kids was a little trickier to make because they had different body proportions.
“The armor helps,” Dad said. “However, it doesn’t protect you entirely. If you touch the guardians when their spikes are extended, you will get hurt. I have some milk for us to drink so that we can heal, but we don’t have a lot of it.”
That was why Dad was hurt. I knew guardians could extend and pull in their spikes, but the guardian in our boat had had its spikes out the whole time.
Dad narrowed his eyes at us. “And what did I say about guardians?”
We all looked down. That’s just the posture you find yourself in when you’re getting lectured. There’s no helping it.
“When they’re getting ready to shoot you with their lasers, they start shooting out sizzling purple rays,” I mumbled. “You only have a few seconds to fight or get out of the way. Then the rays turn yellow and zap you. You can hide behind columns to avoid being zapped, or you can swim right at them, or you can get out of their range. Otherwise . . .”
“Otherwise, we’re not going to have enough milk for you all,” Dad said. “We had to set out before the Ender Dragon’s minions, so there wasn’t time to collect a lot of supplies. We only have a few bottles of the Potion of Water Breathing and the Potion of Night Vision, and we have to use those sparingly. You won’t be able to see underwater well without the Potion of Night Vision, and you definitely won’t be able to stay underwater long without the Potion of Water Breathing. I used everything I had in my supply shed to even get this much.”
Dad used to have the best supply shed around, until a Wither attack destroyed it. Now, when it came to supplies, he just had odds and ends that somehow hadn’t been ruined. It took bottled water, one Nether wart, and one pufferfish to make the Potion of Water Breathing. It took bottled water, one Nether wart, and one golden carrot to make a Potion of Night Vision. I knew Dad had snagged a few extra pieces of Nether wart to bring along, just in case, but there weren’t any more golden carrots or pufferfish around.
“I still think it would be safer if I went to the ocean monument alone,” Dad said, looking at us.
“No, Uncle Steve!” Alex whined. “We want to go too! We’re the Overworld Heroes!”
That was a name Alex’s mom, Aunt Alexandra, had given Alex, Maison, Yancy, Destiny, and me. Dad still didn’t seem to care much for us being a task force and wouldn’t let us go alone on these missions. But the Ender Dragon was growing stronger, so we didn’t have time to bicker. Longer nights were a symbol of the Ender Dragon’s power back in the days of Steve Alexander, and we were seeing those longer nights happening again. She had also been speaking to me in my head, though lately she’d been suspiciously quiet. When she’d been howling her evil words at me, I’d wished she’d go away. Now I was worried about what her silence meant. She must be up to something.
“Besides the guardians, we might also run into elder guardians,” Dad said, choosing not to respond to Alex’s whining. She was lucky she wasn’t his kid. If I’d been the one whining, I sure would have heard about it! “These fish are much bigger and they will hit you with Mining Fat
igue if you get close to them.”
“We get Mining Fatigue in Minecraft too,” Maison said. “It will make it harder to mine, but we’re not here for that. We just need to find the crystal and get out.”
“That’s exactly right,” Dad said. “We are not tarrying there.” He put Steve Alexander’s book in front of us so we could all read his words again. I tried to imagine Steve Alexander writing this thousands of years ago with his quill pen, warning his descendants.
There is much yet to be discovered in the depths of the ocean, he’d written. The guardians’ lasers will burn you, so bring armor. To your left and to your right, there will be elder guardians. Avoid them as best you can. Find the glow, and find your treasure.
“Every ocean monument has three elder guardians,” Dad informed us. “One in each wing and one in the top. Steve Alexander is telling us to stay away from them, so at least that seems to be a clue that the crystal shard is not in any of those rooms. Let’s be grateful for that.”
Alex looked very disappointed.
Maison said, “I bet it’s still difficult, though. If it were too easy, the Ender Dragon’s minions might find the shard.”
Yes. The Endermen were the main minions of the Ender Dragon, though lately she’d gotten other hostile mobs to fight us, like zombies and armed skeletons. I hoped the fish weren’t on her side as well.
“What do you think he means by ‘find the glow, and find your treasure’?” Maison asked. “Is it just because the crystal shard will glow?”
“I think it has to do with the sea lanterns you find in ocean monuments, because they also glow,” Alex said. “I think we should check around all of those first. I want to collect some to decorate my bedroom, anyway.”
“No,” Dad said firmly. “We are not bringing back any souvenirs. We are bringing back the Ender crystal. And. That. Is. It.”
He was treating us all like babies, I thought. Dad had been to ocean monuments before to collect the gold you could find there, but he’d told me he didn’t care for them and preferred to stay on land. Because of that, I’d never been out to the open ocean like this. The only things I knew about ocean monuments were from books I’d taken out of the village library and from stories Dad had told me about his own adventures.
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