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Henry was beginning to think he had made a mistake.
When he had first pitched the idea to the other boys, he had been excited at the thought. It was only a bet, a challenge they had set up on a brand new server to see whether he really was as good at playing as he thought. The premise was simple: he would try to beat the Ender Dragon – the universe-famous boss feared by many throughout all the worlds they had travelled – before the others could capture him. Wisp had jumped at the challenge – eager to prove he was equally as skilled as Henry, whereas Billy and Jonny had simply agreed for the fun of the challenge. They had often loved to test each other like this, using their unlimited lives and powers across the worlds to see what exactly they were capable of. A personal favourite of Henry’s had been the mob shifting; he could sometimes still imagine the feeling of flying as he merged into a blaze, and the way the heat of the nether had faded instantly while becoming almost completely all-consuming as he controlled the rods floating around his body.
But today, he was not feeling up to it.
It had started like any of the rest of their challenges, leaving him pushing through a crowd of fists coming towards him, hungry with the need for victory, but what Henry lacked in teammates, he made up for with cunning, managing to trick Billy into falling into a huge cave and leaving Jonny chasing east as he ducked behind a tree and headed west. Kit had immediately given up chase, opting to raid the village nearby to stop Henry from getting there first. It had been annoying, but nothing he couldn’t overcome with some skill.
He’d been halfway through crafting his stone tools when he had started feeling too hot. Not in the way he often felt in a Savannah or even the nether, this seemed to come from inside his body. A strange heat twisting his insides and leaving his palms clammy as goosebumps erupt over his arms. He shivers, despite feeling like he’s burning inside as sweat trickles down the back of his neck. Nausea begins to rise as he picks up his crafting table, churning through his insides as he begins to dig down into the cave below, hunting for some iron.
He finds a large vein of iron pretty quickly, crafting a furnace so he can smelt the ore into something more useful. He’s vaguely aware of Kit closing in on his location, but if he can just get one iron smelted to craft a shield, he’s at a huge advantage. He’s lost track of where Jonny and Billy are, their voices too faint to pick up much through their communication system.
He crafts the shield and breaks his furnace just in time for Kit to dig directly into his cave. A nearby creeper, lurking just out of sight from Henry, explodes, and Kit curses loudly, giving away his position entirely. Henry ducks behind some stone, crouching to hide his position.
“Oooohhhh Henrryyyy,” Wisp sings loudly, confidence oozing from his voice. “Where are you?”
Henry swallows loudly; his palms feel sweaty around the stone axe in his hands. His head is beginning to ache, and the shield in his inventory doesn’t feel very useful when he considers how it would feel to actually take a hit if he were to fight Kit right now.
He digs straight down instead, ignoring the one crucial rule for survival. Desperation overtaking his common sense. He covers the opening above him with some diorite he had picked up, and crouches until he can hear Kit’s footsteps fade away.
His heart pounds in his chest. He has never run from a fight before, especially not so early into one of their challenges, but something feels different this time. He’s suddenly desperate to have this over with, to be back home in their own world. Not this fake one, where his closest friends have become his biggest enemies.
He swallows the rising nausea and continues to dig down. The quicker he can find a lava pool and get the rest of his iron smelted, the better.
**
Henry doesn’t encounter any of the other boys for a while, giving him ample time to dig down far enough to smelt the rest of his iron, find some diamonds, and craft a good axe and pickaxe. He’s like some armour too, but the strange heat building beneath his skin hasn’t faded yet, and he’s started to feel like his skin is crawling as he shivers and sweats at the same time. His stomach hurts too, nausea building like he’s gotten desperate for food and had to eat rotten flesh again. Even the steak he’d managed to scavenge from some cows on the surface isn’t shifting the feeling. He’s eyeing the gold in his inventory, debating using it to craft a golden apple to heal himself, but the sick feeling rising within is telling him that a golden apple wouldn’t do very much at all to help.
They’ve always been for physical injuries, not for stupid headaches and hot flushes. It’ll pass eventually.
He finds a lava pool pretty quickly after getting his pickaxe and uses his water bucket to make a nether portal. The nether is always his least favourite part of these challenges, and today it feels like an enormous thing to tackle.
None of the others are around him, so he spreads the water over the rest of the lava and uses the pickaxe to mine some obsidian. The quicker he can escape the nether, the better, so it pays to be prepared.
He’s just finished mining the last piece he would need when he hears it. Voices in the distance, faint but getting closer. He curses, his choice to mine obsidian allowing the others to gain considerable distance. He hears the familiar clink of iron armour and looks down at his own bare arms and legs. A chest plate would be good right now. Maybe some pants. Even a helmet would help him feel stronger.
He manages to duck into his portal just as they round the corner. Kit had clearly been busy since their last encounter, as all of them are now decked out in full iron armour, with Kit carrying a diamond sword while the others have iron axes. There’s a faint purple shimmer to their armour, and Henry realises with a jolt that they have enchanted their stuff. The nether portal swirls around him just before they spot him, and they fade away with a dizzying lurch.
The nether isn’t any better. The oppressive heat burns his body on a good day, but today it feels like it’s boiling his organs alive. He thinks of the water bucket in his inventory and wishes more than ever that he could get it out for some temporary relief. He staggers as he exits the portal, dizzy from the dimension shift, and reaches his hand to the cool obsidian for support. Lava trickles down from above, sliding over the edge of the chunk into an endless lake below him. Netherrack burns with fire beside him, and some piglins nearby squeal as they close in for their hunt.
Henry doesn’t have much time. He’s only got a few minutes at most until they come through his portal, so he forces himself to move. The familiar sulphuric smell of the air catches in his lungs, forcing him to cough.
The nausea rises even more, he gasps as he turns a corner, and he ducks into a small cave, desperate for some relief from the heat. His head is pounding, and dizziness is distorting the biome around him beyond recognition. An acrid taste fills his mouth, his skin feels raw with the heat, and his eyes burn. The inferno around him is unrelenting, the razed terrain releasing blistering heat. The world spins around him, and he’s beginning to consider asking for a ceasefire – the idea of returning home and just sleeping this off becomes all too tempting, but before he can consider it seriously, he hears the portal thrum with energy as someone comes through it.
“It’s not trapped,” Jonny yells, “He’s not here.”
I am, Henry wants to yell back, I’m here, help me.
Instead, he pushes himself through the cave. The pounding in his head has transcended from a dull ache into a radiating stabbing that seems to hurt more with every single step. He clutches the wall of the cave for support, as footsteps seem to get closer and closer behind him.
He gets so caught up in the manhunt that he forgets that his friends aren’t the only dangers in the nether. Henry doesn’t even consider that he isn’t wearing any gold armour until the piglin behind him grunts, and he hears that familiar sound of a crossbow charging up.
His axe feels too heavy to swing, and he’s too far away to charge.
All he has time to do is turn around as the arrow flies through the air towards him. It penetrates through his clothes, piercing just below his heart. The shield in his left hand feels useless, raised too slowly to block the attack and instead just dragging him backwards. His axe slips from his hand as he reaches up to touch the blood spreading down his shirt.
It tingles, more than anything, and a tiny part of his brain registers that must be bad, but he staggers backwards before he can think of why. It starts hurting after a few seconds, a shooting pain that echoes through his chest. He regrets not crafting that golden apple; it would be useful right now to heal him up.
The crossbow charges up again, and Henry turns, staggering against the wall, desperate to put some space between himself and the piglin. He coughs, tasting something metallic and spits blood. There’s an explosion in the distance, and the ground shakes underneath him. An arrow flies over his shoulder, embedding itself in the wall.
He breaks into a run, dragging the last of his strength out of his body. If he can just make it to the bastion, he might be able to find some potions. Fire resistance or instant health would be ideal, anything to help him manage right now.
Henry stumbles, the shield slips out of his grasp and clatters off the ground, but he doesn’t have time to pick it up again. The crossbow charges behind him. He lunges forward, desperate to put some distance between it and him.
The arrow flies and hits his leg. The force pushes his leg from under him, and he falls forward. Without him noticing, the cave had opened up again, twisting around so he could see his portal again. He spots Kit in the distance, locked into his own fight with a ghast. Billy is laughing. He can hear their voices more clearly now and wants to call out. Manhunt be damned, he just wants his friends.
He falls, hits the ground hard and rolls to one side – straight between a gap in the netherrack. He just about has time to twist himself so he’s facing upward, as the ground he was standing on gets further and further away.
He hits the floor below, and everything goes black.
**
Kit had thought this challenge was going well for them. Without Henry realising, they had been able to follow him most of the way and keep track of his movements, but there had been something different. Usually, Henry wouldn’t let anything slip by him. As much as it pained Kit to admit it, Henry was good at these challenges. He could always tell when he was being followed, and he was careful with it, doing things to try and conceal where he was or leaving traps for them.
But for him to just hide from Kit in that cave had been weird, leaving an unpleasant taste in Kit’s mouth – a nagging feeling that something wasn’t right. He was suddenly desperate to have this over with and had focused his efforts on getting more stuff so they could guarantee a win early on.
He’d spotted Henry’s nether portal from across the cave, but catching a glimpse of Henry had halted him in his tracks. Neither Billy nor Jonny had seemed to notice the sheen of sweat on Henry, or the pale tint to his skin. The usual confident movements that had seemed to be more robotic, strained even.
Kit had nearly halted the manhunt there and then; this was unusual behaviour, and concern filled him over his friend.
Before he could speak, though, the portal had shuddered, and Henry had disappeared into the nether.
“Something isn’t right with Henry.” Kit had said, gathering Billy and Jonny into a circle before they entered the nether.
“He seemed okay when he pushed me into that cave,” Billy protests, “I had to dig stone with my hand for like an hour.”
“Did you not notice how pale he looked?” Kit adds, trying to convince the others to recognise what he had picked up on, or convince him it was all in his head.
“It’s probably just from spending too much time in these caves,” Jonny says, shivering slightly as he looks around.
Kit sighs. There’s probably no convincing them now; he just has to hope he’s wrong. He swallows the rising nerves and steps towards the portal.
Jonny steps through the portal first, testing whether it is trapped or not, and just as Kit had feared, it is not. Usually, when doing these types of challenges, there’s a river of lava they need to fight their way through to get out, but this time, the only thing greeting them is a ghast and a few mildly annoying zombified piglins.
Kit’s senses prickle, the back of his neck tingles like he’s being watched. He looks behind him, and there’s only the exit to a cave, with one lone piglin charging its crossbow. He switches his iron boots for some gold ones and warns the other two to do the same. A single block catches his eyes, as the ghast screams and something explodes only a few blocks away. A lone square of dirt, placed in the entrance to a cave.
Henry, he thinks. He takes off running, desperate to find his friend and end this game once and for all.
The ghast shoots again, hitting the ground just in front of him and Kit curses under his breath. He draws his sword, the diamond glinting red with the reflection of the nether around him. The ghast screeches again, and he manages to intercept the fireball, sending it straight back towards the ghast. It dies with a single, lone scream.
“Nice one!” Jonny congratulates him, but Kit doesn’t feel very proud of his achievement. His eyes flick back over to the dirt block, and he points it out to the other two.
The hunt is back on as they begin to close in on Henry’s location. Their compasses pointing them forward towards the cave. The needle spins slightly as they enter the cave, but Kit’s eyes are drawn to something shimmering on the floor.
He steps closer, slowing down while Billy and Jonny trail behind, letting him take the lead.
A diamond axe rests on the floor.
Henry’s diamond axe.
Why would he throw it out?
Kit voices his question. Jonny shrugs.
“Maybe he found a better one?” Billy questions, but his voice is uncertain now, too.
“In the middle of a cave?” Kit responds, doubt creeping into his body.
Nobody replies, and Kit feels his heart sink. Jonny picks up the diamond axe, assesses it for any damage, and throws his own iron axe out when he decides it's suitable.
Despite his instincts telling him to run, Kit continues to walk slowly down the cave. He’s aware that this could still be a trap, but something is telling him that something is wrong with Henry.
He rounds another corner and spots a discarded shield. Next to it, a small puddle of blood. A piglin walks past them, turning to mutter something in their language while shouldering its crossbow. It sniffs the air around them, and Kit prays their gold boots are enough to camouflage the scent of the overworld. The piglin decides they aren’t worth it and shuffles past them. Kit breathes out a sigh of relief, rushing forward to investigate the scene in front of them.
Throwing out an axe could be done genuinely, but throwing out a shield, however? In the nether? That’s basically suicide, especially with the threat of fighting the blazes looming.
The blood on the floor seals the nail in the coffin. If Henry had let a piglin sneak up on him, there was clearly something wrong.
Kit picks up the pace. If this is a trap, he’ll be glad to get this bet over with, and if it’s not, he’ll have no regrets for being a concerned friend.
An arrow sticks out of the wall of the cave. A few more drops of blood litter the floor. The cave opens up so they’re back facing the nether portal again. Kit steps forward with such urgency that he would’ve fallen straight through the gap in the floor without Jonny grabbing his shoulder and pulling him back.
He mutters a thanks before glancing back down at his compass. The needle is spinning wildly; they must be right above or below Henry. Kit eyes the hole in the floor, dropping down twenty or thirty blocks to a fiery island of netherrack amid the endless lava lakes. A fall from this height would hurt any of them significantly; a fall after an injury might be something they couldn’t heal from, even with health potions.
Kit blinks down the hole, drops to his knees, and his hands touch something slimy. Congealed blood, turned into slimy lumps by the heat of the nether, stains his hands red as he peers through the gap.
At the bottom, impossibly out of reach, lies Henry. Unmoving. A red stain spreading across his shirt, his eyes closed like he could be sleeping.
Kit wants to panic, regrets ever taking Henry up on this bet. Besides him, Billy curses, and Jonny starts riffling through his inventory looking for anything that could help. Kit feels frozen; he doesn’t have any blocks, he couldn’t clutch the fall with a hay bale because he crafted every one he stole from the village into bread to feed the three of them.
They have to go around. There’s no other choice.
If he follows the horizon, through the haze of the fire and smoke, he can just about follow the cliff edge across the gap until there’s an area they could dig down from. It’s going to take some time, time that Henry might not have, but it’s the safest way for any of them.
Kit takes off running, and Billy must get the idea too because he’s right behind him. Jonny curses as he finds nothing useful in his inventory and follows behind them.
It takes time to dig down, Kit’s pickaxe breaks halfway, and he has to step back, letting Jonny take the lead. Billy rests a hand on his shoulder as he steps back.
“He’ll be okay,” Billy says, “He’ll be back to challenging us to these dumb competitions soon.”
“Yeah,” Kit laughs humourlessly, “And maybe next time you’ll win one.”
“Low fucking blow, mate.” Billy laughs, slaps Kit on the shoulder, and pushes past him down the staircase that Jonny is digging.
After what feels like an eternity, they reach a low enough distance for them to jump down without taking any damage.
All three of them are sprinting now, racing across the barren landscape to reach their fallen friend. It takes too long, but they make it eventually.
Henry is still, unnervingly so, and pale. His face coated in a thin layer of sweat. A broken arrow tip is lodged in his chest, and blood is staining his shirt dark red around it. An iron ingot has fallen out of his inventory, shining on the floor beside him. Kit shakes his shoulder, trying to wake him, and is shocked by the heat coming off his skin.
Henry doesn’t stir. Kit lifts his arm and is shocked to see the skin underneath is red and blistered from the heat of the floor. If he had to bet, he’d guess the burns are spread across Henry’s back from lying on the floor for too long. Even more proof that the nether is uninhabitable for anyone born in the overworld.
Kit searches his inventory desperately, looking for anything they could use for healing, but comes up empty. There’s only some steak and bread, and both of those are useless if the person needing to heal is unconscious.
Jonny comes to the rescue, digging some gold ingots out of Henry’s inventory and using his own apple harvested from an oak tree to craft a golden apple. A holy grail of healing in a time of need. As long as they can force some down Henry’s throat, the magic should begin to work, allowing them to remove the arrow and get him out of here.
Kit tears a chunk off, watching the juice drip down his hand, opening Henry’s mouth and pushing the piece inside. Almost instantly, the magic begins to work. Henry stirs, groaning slightly, and Kit gets to work pulling the arrowhead out so the wound can heal. Inspection of a similar wound on his leg reveals a long, angry gash, but no arrowhead.
Henry’s eyes blink open, dazed and disoriented but conscious nonetheless. Kit pushes the rest of the golden apple into his hand as Jonny drags him to sit up.
Henry blinks at them, eyes open but unregistering and Kit pushes his arm up so he can take another bite. Henry complies, pliant in his semi-conscious state, and Kit watches as the wounds begin to close and the skin knits itself together.
Henry finishes the golden apple, but the pale tint to his skin doesn’t fade. If anything, he seems to look worse.
He drops the apple core, hands sticky with the juice, and shuts his eyes as if he is falling asleep.
Kit shakes his shoulder again, and once again it feels too hot beneath his touch. The red burns left by the nether are gone, but he’s still too hot and unresponsive, and something isn’t right.
They don’t even need to speak; Billy is gathering Henry in his arms, carrying him bridal style in a way that the other would surely object to if he were awake, and the lack of complaint is more concerning than anything else. Kit opens the menu on his comms, generating a portal back to their home server. Jonny gathers their dropped loot and follows them through the portal.
They’ll figure out what is up; they always do.
**
Consciousness comes back to Henry slowly and then all at once. He’s vaguely aware of someone talking around him, feels a sticky sensation across his body suggesting he’s been splashed with a potion of some kind, and wiggles his fingers, touching a soft blanket.
Okay, so he’s at home again.
He forces his eyes open and blinks as the pain hits him. There’s sunlight coming through the window, so bright it makes his eyes burn, and he squeezes them shut. His head pounds in a way that sends him dizzy, and he finds himself shivering. Aches have spread their way through his body, leaving him feeling weak and disorientated as he struggles to remember what happened.
A bet? The nether? That same headache and nausea he feels now?
Had he gotten sick?
Luckily, Henry is saved from wondering what had happened and the brightness of the room as someone draws the curtain closed, and the bed depresses beside him as someone sits down on the edge.
Someone else moves, and a glass bottle clinks by his head. Another weight presses down by his feet.
He knows those people, would know them from touch alone, would know them if he were blind and they were mute. Would know them by the way their feet struck the earth, and he would know them in death.
His head spins, and he feels the nausea rising again, but his heart is pounding happily in his chest. His friends have got him, he’s safe here. He might have lost the bet, but it’s a small price to pay. He’d lose a thousand more bets to be able to wake up in this house they built together, surrounded by love.
Someone laughs at his side, and Henry registers that he might have spoken that out loud, but the words seem to die in his throat before he can speak them.
He blinks his eyes open. Kit is standing over him, Jonny sat by his side and Billy down by his feet. Kit pushes a water bottle into his hand, unscrewing the cap so he can drink. Henry gulps it down, suddenly aware of how thirsty he is.
He’s just about pushed himself to sit up after downing half the bottle of water, when something in his stomach contracts.
He has just enough time to groan before Kit is thrusting a bucket in front of him, and he’s throwing up all the water he just drank as his stomach objects.
So much for the relief.
“You got, like, so sick, man,” Kit laughs dryly, stepping to fill the water bottle up again, “Easiest dub of our lives.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Henry mutters sarcastically between gags, “I want a rematch.”
Jonny laughs, “What? Right now? You couldn’t even make it off the sofa, never mind to the end dimension.”
Henry flips him the middle finger as his stomach settles back down.
“We couldn’t tell what was up at first, splashed you with some instant health in case that piglin arrow had been poisoned,” Kit says.
“Yeah, and all that did was make our house smell like gunpowder,” Billy grumbles, hiding a small smile.
“That’s what you get for ditching us all to go hang out in someone else’s server,” Kit stares back at him. Henry would feel bad if he hadn’t had so much fun. He hadn’t known none of them had been invited to Marissa’s birthday party event last weekend, had just wanted to see his friend for the first time in a while. Worth it anyway, he’d not laughed like that for a long time.
He sticks his tongue out in response. Childish, but effective as Kit laughs and ruffles his hair. Something in his chest starts pounding again.
Wow, he must be sicker than he thought.
He’s suddenly really exhausted. He eyes the refilled water bottle, but thinks twice about taking another drink and discards the bucket to the side. Someone else can deal with that; he is not in the mood.
“Hey, Hen,” Someone asks, and Henry becomes aware his eyes had drifted shut as sleep called out to him. “Do you wanna move upstairs to your bedroom?”
And yeah, actually, he does. The couch is comfortable enough, but it does kinda smell like gunpowder now, and the indents from where all of them have spent hours sitting are getting uncomfortable underneath him.
Thankfully, he doesn’t need to talk. Someone pulls him up to his feet, someone else wraps an arm around his shoulders, and someone else grabs the bottle of water for later.
They carry him between them, taking most of his weight from his shaking legs, until he is deposited gently on the bed.
Kit pulls the duvet cover back and pushes him to lie down, tucking him in.
All three of them go to leave then, to let him sleep, but something constricts painfully in his chest at the thought of being alone.
He wants to blame the noise of protest he makes on the fever, but thankfully, nobody questions it. He doesn’t need to speak; they all understand each other better than anyone else ever could.
Before he even has time to think, they’re crawling into bed with him.
It’s an awkward fit, four grown men in a double bed, but they make it work. Kit curls up around Henry, with Jonny on the other side and Billy sprawling in a way that seems to cover all of them at once. It’s warm and comforting, and Henry feels safe in a way that he hasn’t for a long time.
He drifts off into a dreamless sleep, excited for what the future holds. Even more excited for the rematch when he's feeling better.
(And, in a week, when he’s the one looking after the other three while they’re sick, it forces them to stop teasing him for his half-asleep and delirious rambles. A win-win situation, even if he is the only one who would agree.)