Minecraft Dungeons Read online

  Minecraft Dungeons: The Rise of the Arch-Illager is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by by Mojang AB and Mojang Synergies AB. All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  DEL REY is a registered trademark and the CIRCLE colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Hardback ISBN 9780399180811

  International edition ISBN 9780593159644

  Ebook ISBN 9780399180828

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Elizabeth A. D. Eno, adapted for ebook

  Cover art and design: M. S. Corley

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Interlude

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Interlude

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Matt Forbeck

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  Karl wasn’t sure why a bunch of undead mobs had decided to attack the raiding party of Illagers who’d been roaming through the lands outside of the village he’d adopted, but he didn’t question his good fortune. He’d been spoiling for a fight all week. Now, on this otherwise dreary and rainy day, he finally had one on his hands.

  A smarter hero might have found a comfortable place to sit—any clear stretch of grass or even a convenient tree stump would do—and might have watched the entire battle unfold in the clearing below the hill on which he stood. It would have been easy to just let the two sides fight it out, wasting all their energy on each other. In the end, there might only have been a few foes left over to take care of, or maybe just to run off.

  But Karl was a man of action. A hero in his own mind, if not in the minds of others. So help him, the fight looked like fun, and he wasn’t about to let all those fools down there have all of it.

  Bellowing a loud, wordless battle cry, Karl drew his jagged iron sword and charged down into the fray. A wide and reckless grin creased his face.

  The undead mobs were too focused on their current foes to notice the screaming hero racing toward them, but the Illagers spotted him and began to break off from the fight. Karl cackled with delight at their reaction. Clearly his reputation as a mighty warrior had preceded him.

  He could understand why the Illagers would flee before him. They had lives they valued. The undead—who weren’t burdened with such treasures—continued to ignore him though. They chased after the Illagers instead.

  Karl knew it wasn’t terribly fair to attack foes from behind, but he’d never worried about such things. After all, the undead were mobs, right? And there were so many of them, it only seemed wise.

  He waded into the skeletons and the zombies, swinging at them from behind. Thwack-a-wack-wack!

  He mowed them down like fresh grass, his blade singing a metallic song of death. “Death to the undead!” he shouted as he struck again and again.

  If he stopped to think about it—which he wouldn’t—those words wouldn’t make any sense, but he didn’t care. The undead weren’t about to correct him.

  Karl smacked a nearby skeleton, knocking it into a pile of bones with a single swing of his sword. He stopped to shade his eyes from the rain and watch as its bleached skull arced high over the fleeing Illagers and landed in front of them. They skidded to a halt before it, horrified at what its sudden appearance might mean for them.

  Karl threw back his head to laugh at their reaction, but when he was through he saw that the remaining skeletons and zombies had finally figured out that he was the bigger threat and had turned on him. The skeletons spread out to flank him, already peppering him with arrows from their bows. Meanwhile, the pack of zombies lunged toward him, filling the air with their wordless groans.

  Karl’s smile grew even wider. “Bring it on!” he shouted as he plunged into the crowd of zombies and slung his blade back and forth, smashing down foes with every strike.

  There were downsides to being a hero. It was a lonely job in a strange land where you couldn’t make a bit of sense out of the local language. You wound up saving the place over and over, and no one ever bothered to say thank you. The only people who really got him were other heroes, and they didn’t always want to have much to do with him, either.

  But Karl didn’t care about any of that. This was what he lived for. He never felt more alive than when he was beating down mobs and taking their loot.

  The zombies crowded so thick around Karl that they couldn’t all get at him. Despite this, the skeletons kept shooting at him, planting arrows in the backs of their zombie pals.

  Karl spun about like a top, hacking away with his sword in every direction. Zombies fell away from him, toppling like saplings before an axe. Few of them managed to lay a rotting finger on him, and even those glanced off his armor, leaving him unharmed.

  As the crowd of groaning zombies around him thinned, an arrow finally made its way through the melee and caught him on the shoulder. It stuck in his armor as if it had been fired into a tree. The tip of it had punctured the iron and stabbed into his skin, although not much farther.

  The magnitude of the injury didn’t matter to Karl. The fact that he’d been damaged at all made him see red.

  “Hey!” he shouted at the skeletons. “That hurt!”

  Furious, Karl put down the last of the zombies with a few quick blows and then turned his attention to the skeletons. “You’ll pay for that,” he told them. “With your bones!”

  He flanked the skinny monsters, moving to line them up in a rough row so they couldn’t all shoot at him at once. Then he began chopping his way through them like a farmer taking down grains at the harvest.

  The creatures peppered him with arrows, sticking several more into his armor, but all they did was make him angrier. Fighting skeletons was supposed to be fun for him, not dangerous!

  As the last bony beast fell before his mighty blade, Karl let loose a howl of triumph and spun about to see who else might want a piece of him. His eyes fell upon the hapless Illagers, who had turned to face him, their weapons out and ready. Apparently they’d found their courage in the defeat of the undead.

  They were too witless to shiver at his approach. Foes with any brains in their he
ads would have fallen to their knees and begged for mercy, but these nomadic raiders actually charged at him as if they stood a chance.

  The ridiculousness of the moment brought a laugh to Karl’s lips once again. The anger he’d felt at the skeletons faded away, and he roared with delight as he threw himself and his sword against the oncoming Illagers.

  Before he could reach them, though, one of the Illagers—a particularly short one with a massive nose—raced forward, spun about, and shouted something at his compatriots. He seemed to be pleading with them to show some sense, something that Karl had long decided wasn’t worth bothering with when it came to such people.

  “They won’t listen,” Karl said to the little Illager, even though he knew no one could understand him. “They never do.”

  Out of morbid curiosity, he held up and let the tiny guy speak. If the imp wanted to keep his buddies from trying to take off Karl’s head, well, he wasn’t going to stop him.

  But he wasn’t going to lower his sword either.

  The little guy gibbered along in his barbaric language, begging the others to see reason. To be swayed by the power of his logic, emotion, and words.

  Karl marveled at it the way he would have if he’d spotted a two-headed pig roaming around the village. Amazing but really beside the point. It didn’t matter how crazy it looked, it wasn’t going to make a difference. In the end, he was still going to whack it with his sword.

  Probably.

  The other Illagers listened to the little guy for a moment, but they steamed at him, clearly unhappy with whatever he was blathering about. The little guy’s voice rose almost to a squeak as he reduced himself to what Karl could only interpret as actual begging.

  It ended when the Illager standing right in front of the little guy reached out and smacked him on the side of the head with the flat of his sword. That put a sudden end to the squeaking, and the little guy toppled right over, senseless before he hit the ground.

  Before the bigger Illager could even call for an attack, Karl took him out with a sharp snap of his blade. He recognized a fight starting when he saw one, and he wasn’t going to get caught flat-footed.

  “It’s on!” he shouted at the Illagers as he barreled into them, knocking them over like bowling pins. “It’s on!”

  Over the course of the next few minutes, Karl systematically took down each and every one of the Illagers. Some of them fought well. Most of them didn’t.

  Some of them tried to flee. He didn’t let them.

  In his experience, if he allowed them to get away, they’d only come back to bother him later, or torch the village, or annoy him in some other way. The only way to make sure that didn’t happen was to get rid of them for good.

  He might have felt bad about it, but they were the ones who’d attacked him. Even after he’d saved them from all those undead mobs.

  “Not an ounce of gratitude from any of you,” he said as he surveyed the tattered battlefield and the utter absence of anyone to stand against him. “So that’s what you get.”

  A high-pitched groan sounded from across the field, and Karl perked up his ears and squinted around to see if he could detect where it had come from. It stumped him at first, but after a moment he spotted an Illager stirring on the far side of the field.

  “Hm,” he said as he strolled over to check out the one survivor. “Thought I got them all…”

  When he reached the softly groaning Illager, he realized his mistake. This one was much smaller than all the rest.

  “Ah,” Karl said as he recognized the Illager who’d tried to talk some sense into the others. “The little guy with the big mouth.”

  He knelt down next to the creature and turned him over onto his back. “Nice try there, fella,” he said with a chuckle. “I mean, it was worthless, but I respect the effort.”

  The sawed-off Illager gazed up at him with dismay and then tried to retreat. Since he was already on the ground, all he could do was worm away on his butt, right up until he bumped into a tree stump behind him.

  Karl got up, put away his sword, and dusted off his hands. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he told the little guy. “You did me a solid by distracting that big fella anyway. Once I took him out, the rest of your little band of misfits went down easy.”

  The body the little guy had run into let out a low moan. Karl edged up to the fallen Illager and leaned over to get a better look at him. Was that the one he’d stabbed to start the battle with them? Honestly, he had a hard time telling the bandits apart.

  “That’s all right,” he told the little guy, who goggled at him with fear-struck eyes. “He doesn’t look like much of a threat to anyone at the moment.”

  Karl backed off a few steps and smirked down at the little guy. “Neither do you.”

  He was feeling magnanimous at the moment. All he’d wanted to do was keep the mobs away from the village, and he’d managed that. Mopping up the last injured Illagers just didn’t seem worth the bother.

  An idea struck Karl then, something that would make him seem clever rather than lazy. At least in his own estimation.

  “Tell you what,” he said to the little guy, as the other Illager seemed too miserable to manage to listen. “This is your lucky day. I’m going to let you and your groaning pal there go. You know why?”

  The little guy couldn’t possibly have understood Karl’s words, but maybe he got the gist of them from his tone. Either way, he shook his big-nosed head in terror at just the right time.

  Karl flashed a wide smile. “Because you’re going to go back to whatever you rotten, scummy Illagers call a home, and you’re going to tell the rest of your kind not to come around here anymore. This village is under my protection, you get it? And when your people ask you what happened to you and all your friends, I want you to tell them one thing.”

  Karl held up his index finger to emphasize this particular point. “One thing, right?”

  The little guy gaped at him while he tried to parse what to do. Maybe he gave up, or maybe he finally got it. In any case, he nodded so hard in agreement it looked like his head might fall off.

  “Tell them my name.” Karl pointed at himself. “Tell them, ‘Karl.’ ”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Archie couldn’t stand it anymore. The so-called “hero” who had taken down the rest of his raiding party strolled off, leaving him there among the ruin of the failed battle, and he hadn’t been able to do a thing to stop it. All Archie could manage was to seethe in frustration and fury.

  Sure, technically he could have picked up a sword and chased after the man, but what good would that have done? The only way that venture could end would be with Archie utterly defeated, and he’d had a rotten enough day already. He didn’t want to cap it off with that.

  Instead, Archie pushed himself to his feet and surveyed the complete disaster that surrounded him. As the runt of his band of Illagers, he was used to having bad days, but this topped them all.

  It was awful enough that Archie had been roped into joining the patrol designated to defend the rest of the Illagers from that marauding mob of undead that had been wandering too close to their lands, but to wind up as the only survivor? He didn’t think he could return to the rest of the Illagers if he had to bring home news like that. Enough of them already hated him that they’d probably kick him out of the tribe, and if that happened, he didn’t have anywhere else to go.

  Archie had fully expected to meet his end today at the clawing hands and teeth of a zombie or a skeleton’s arrow. The irony that he had failed at even that made him struggle to choose between laughing and crying. He decided to do both.

  As he stood there, racked with sobbing guffaws, someone smacked him on the back of the head.

  Archie spun about, figuring the hero had changed his mind and decided to come back and finish off the job. He almost welcomed that. At least it w
ould put his misery to a quick end.

  Instead, he found himself face-to-face with something even worse: Thord.

  Thord had been Archie’s nemesis since childhood. The vicious Illager had picked on Archie relentlessly for as long back as either one of them could remember. The simple sight of Archie skulking around the dark forest in which they lived often spurred Thord to torture Archie with terrible taunts and even magical spells.

  Of course, Thord usually spent whatever spare time he had plotting against someone. It didn’t take much to encourage him to ruin someone’s day. The elders in the Illagers’ woodland mansion had tried to clamp down on his tendency toward violence over the years, which perhaps explained why Archie had somehow managed to survive to this day, but they’d failed often enough that Archie flinched every time he encountered his old foe.

  Unfortunately, he hadn’t scurried away fast enough that morning when the elders had called for volunteers to join the raiding party. Thord had pointed out Archie trying to slink off unseen and had insisted on dragging him along instead. “Just so I can keep an eye on you.”

  The one bit of good news about everyone else in the raiding party being taken down was that Archie wouldn’t have to worry about Thord picking on him anymore. It might have been a small consolation, but he had clung to it.

  But somehow Thord had survived too.

  Of course.

  Thord snarled at Archie and staggered over toward the smaller Illager, nearly tripping over the hem of the long, dark robes that marked him as an evoker, a dangerous Illager spellcaster. Archie could see how the hero had thought he’d taken care of the Illager. He looked more than half-dead. If he’d stayed on the ground, Archie would never have suspected he was still breathing.