Chapter Text
The treehouse basement was supposed to be the ultimate place to escape from the outside world. Buried deep underground, it felt like nothing could ever faze the people who spent almost all day down there.
Or, well, at least that's what Wemmbu thought.
He had reluctantly allowed Boosfer to claim a section of the basement, but only in exchange for pure, absolute silence. Surprisingly, for the most part, Boosfer actually kept his head down and didn’t bother Wemmbu at all. He was almost… too quiet.
Wemmbu was sprawled across the basement floor, staring at the ceiling and ultimately trying (and failing) to cool down. "Boosfer, bro- Is that you dog?”
“Huh?”
“Is that buzzing noise coming from your processors or something? Bro, it's annoying as hell, turn it off.”
“I would if I could bro. My fans are running for their lives right now, it's still hot as hell.”
“Okay clanker.”
“It's android, but whatever.”
Being an End demon, the heat didn't affect Wemmbu much as his body functions on a lower temperature, but it was ruining his mood. And he was getting really, really bored. "Yo booster.”
Boosfer didn't answer. He was sitting next to the crafting table, staring at seemingly nothing.
"Boosfer?" Wemmbu sat up, squinting.
"My left leg isn't working right," Boosfer said. His voice sounded flat. "When I tell it to walk, it takes like three minutes to actually move."
"Stop joking around, bro, it’s too hot for a bit," Wemmbu groaned, walking over.
"I'm not doing a bit, Wemmbu." Boosfer said. His right eye started flickering. He tried to point at his leg, but his arm shot straight up into the air instead, giving a stiff wave to the ceiling. "What the hell. Now my arms are mixed up. That's just great."
Wemmbu blinked. "Wait, you're actually breaking."
"I'm overheating, yeah. If my core gets any hotter, my system is just going to shut down completely and I'll turn into a very expensive green statue." Boosfer's head tilted sideways, his jaw freezing open for a few seconds before snapping shut.
"Oh my god, this kid is actually lagging lmao.”
“Stop trolling and actually help me dog.”
The demon crouched down next to where Boosfer was sitting on the floor and started poking his temple. "How do I fix a robot? Do I slap the back of your head?”
"Don't slap me please, I'm not your grandma's TV. Go to the inventory. Get the ice blocks. The packed ones, so they don't melt into water and ruin the carpet."
Wemmbu looked through his items until he found a stack of packed ice in one of his storage chests. He rushed back and shoved the freezing blue blocks straight down the back of Boosfer’s hoodie.
Boosfer let out a loud high-pitched yell as the ice hit his back. "SON OF A- I MEANT TO PUT THEM NEAR MY VENTS, not give me an ice wedgie!"
"I don't know where your vents are! You look like a regular guy!" Wemmbu started shouting over him, stuffing more ice around Boosfer's neck. "Is it working?”
Boosfer sat there as steam hissed out of the seams connecting his neck to his torso, the ice melting fast against his hot frame. Finally, his eyes stopped flickering. "The temperature is going back to normal.” He reached back, pulling a chunk of ice out of his collar and dropping it on the floor. "You are terrible at tech support."
"I just saved your life, you ungrateful toaster," Wemmbu huffed, sitting down on the floor and wiping his forehead. "You owe me.”
"Next time," Boosfer muttered, his arm finally dropping back to his side, "just fan me with a shield like a normal person.”
“God forbid I have to do this a second time.”
__
“This is a joke. This has to be some sick joke. Someone is doing this on purpose, I swear.” Branzy pulled at his white curls as he paced frantically around the obsidian floors of ClownPierce's fortress.
He looked like a mess. His clothes were completely soaked with sweat. Clownpierce, on the other hand, was sitting perfectly still on a blackstone throne as he listened to him vent.
"The redstone is completely bugged!” Branzy shouted in frustration. "I went to check on the main vault and the piston doors are stuttering. One piston fires, the next one delays by like ten seconds, and the last one just breaks off and drops onto the floor as an item! My entire security system is running like it’s on McDonald's internet!”
"Mechanics break, it's not uncommon. Build thicker walls. You rely too much on redstone dust.”
"You don't get it!" Branzy threw his hands up, pointing frantically at the ceiling. "The redstone power lines are literally burning up. When a current runs through them for more than thirty seconds, they don't stay powered- they just emit smoke and disappear into thin air! The server is so hot it's destroying the blocks while they're actively working. Do you get what that means?”
ClownPierce's masked head turned slowly toward Branzy. "The traps."
"Yes, good morning to you too." He stepped closer, "Your super-deadly defense grid is completely useless right now. The tripwires don't even register when a player steps on them because the entity tracking is lagging so far behind! Any bandit group could come and raid us for power over the Nether you colonized!”
"Then we find out who is messing with the panels. Saps wanted to be king. Tell him to roll back the tick speed."
Branzy let out a sharp laugh. "Tell Saps? Clown, Saps is a king, not an admin. Winning a civil war doesn't magically give you access to the server console. He’s just as stuck in the heat as we are. He can't change the settings."
ClownPierce tilted his head slightly. "Then whoever has the operator tags. Tell them to fix it."
"Who, Clown?! Who do I tell?!" Branzy slammed his hands onto the edge of a blackstone table. "We’ve been on the Unstable SMP for how long, and we still don't even know who actually owns the server. There is no active admin team with operator permissions! We are completely on our own out here!”
ClownPierce stood up. He walked over to a heavy stone lever on the wall—the manual override for the fortress’s gate. He grabbed it and yanked it down.
Nothing happened.
Three agonizing seconds passed. Then, with a pathetic screech, the gate dropped halfway down and jammed completely, sparking with particles.
Branzy let out a defeated laugh, gesturing wildly at the stuck bars. "See? Look at that! We can't automate anything! Without the redstone defenses, we're just sitting targets for anyone who shows up with a sword and a dream!”
He sank onto a nearby stone bench, burying his face in his hands. The heat was making everything feel a hundred times worse than it actually was, and the sheer frustration of watching his life's work burn away had finally broken through his usual composed attitude.
The room finally fell quiet, save for the faint, annoying hiss of the broken redstone dust particles evaporating into the air.
Clownpierce didn't say anything for a long moment as the rigid tension slowly bled out of his shoulders. He smoothly sheared his netherite sword back into its slot, the metal clicking into place.
Walking across the obsidian floor, Clown stopped right in front of the bench. He reached into his inventory and pulled out a single potion of fire resistance. It was one of the few precious utilities he had left that hadn't boiled in the heat yet.
He dropped the bottle into Branzy’s lap.
Branzy blinked. "What's this for?"
"It's for you. You're pacing so much you're going to pass out from heatstroke before we even find the problem. Take it."
Branzy looked at the potion, a faint smile finally tugging at the corner of his mouth. The frantic panic in his chest started to settle down. He picked up the bottle but didn't open it yet. "Thanks. Sorry for snapping. It's just... seeing everything glitch out like this is driving me crazy.”
“Don't mention it.” Clown replied, leaning back against the stone table, crossing his arms. "If the automated systems are dead, then we go back to the basics. No one is getting through that gate past me, redstone or not. The vaults are safe."
Branzy let out a much more relieved laugh, running a hand through his hair. "Yeah. Yeah, you're right. A sword and a dream doesn't stand a chance against you anyway."
"Exactly," Clown said, his head tilting slightly in a nod of reassurance. "Drink the potion. Rest for five minutes. Then we can go check the manual locks together."
"Deal," Branzy muttered, uncorking the bottle. The tense argument melted away, leaving them back on the same page as they prepared to handle whatever the server threw at them next.
__
The underground bunker beneath the edge of Capitol City was dark, hot, and completely stuffy. The only light came from a single torch stuck into the wall, casting shaky shadows across the floor.
Parrot sat at a wooden table, his head resting in his hands. He was staring at an old book-and-quill, flipping the pages back and forth. These were the old logbooks from before the civil war. He had been reading them for hours, trying to figure out why the world felt like a giant oven.
"Okay, let's think," Parrot muttered to himself, tapping his fingers on the wood. "It started getting hot right after the war. Why? Did someone mess up the world? Did someone hack it?"
He stared down at a page written right before the big attack on Highwater. His eyes widened.
"Wait a minute," he said, sitting up straight. "Look at the timing. Look at the dates."
He flipped the page, tracing the code logs with his finger. The text talked about the day Cindercrest brought out their giant cannons. According to the notes, right before Wemmbu shot the orbitals that blew up the Highwater farms, a weird command line popped up on the screen. It was a command used to delete a whole bunch of blocks all at once, just to clear a path for the weapon to fire.
Parrot started talking out loud, trying to piece it together. "If they deleted that many blocks at the exact same time... and the server was already lagging from the war... what if they broke something? What if they literally ripped a hole in the sky?"
He stood up, pacing around the small room, gesturing with his hands as he argued with himself.
"Yes!” Parrot exclaimed, his voice getting louder. "Saps wanted to win the war so badly, he told Wemmbu to fire the cannon, but the cannon was too powerful for the game to handle. They accidentally deleted the weather files for the whole server!"
He slammed his fist on the table, feeling a sudden rush of excitement. "The heat isn't a glitch. It’s a giant leak! It’s like a massive pipe burst right where the cannon hit, and now the hot air is spilling out over every single biome! The whole server is boiling because of Saps' stupid weapon!"
He shook his head, a furious look taking over his face. "They broke the game just to get a crown. And now we are all starving more than ever because of it!"
"I need to go see it," Parrot said, grabbing his dark cloak off a chair. "I need to go to the ruins of Highwater. If the hole in the server is still there, I can find the proof. I can show everyone what Saps did, and we can kick him off the throne for good!"
He threw the cloak over his shoulders and pulled the hood down over his eyes. He climbed the stone stairs, pushed open the heavy iron trapdoor, and stepped out into the blinding, suffocating glare of the copper sky, ready to chase down his new lead.
__
The air over the Capitol City square tasted like smoke and dirt.
A siren hybrid named Ne9tune stood in the middle of a massive crowd, shuffling her feet on the hot stone bricks. Her gills flared beneath the collar of her shirt, aching for moisture as the dry, dusty air made every single breath feel like swallowing sandpaper. Her hunger bar was flashing an angry, empty red down at the bottom of her screen, a slow drain that made her character sprint slower and slower. Everyone around her was in the same boat- sweaty and completely fed up.
They were all staring at a row of double chests sitting outside the castle gates. A couple of guards were standing over them, holding netherite swords that looked completely useless in the suffocating environment.
"Alright, listen up!" one of the guards shouted. "The rations are being cut back again today. Two salmon per player. That’s it!"
The crowd immediately lost its mind.
"Two salmon per player! Do you want us to starve?!" a player with a black blob skin named EnderBoy_22 yelled, slamming an empty bowl onto the ground. "Are you kidding me? My hunger bar is down to two bars! I’m going to start taking starvation damage by tonight!"
"The crops won't grow!" the guard yelled back, waving his arms to try and keep the angry players from pushing forward. "The water blocks keep evaporating before they can even hydrate the dirt. The wheat fields are just turning into dead grass. Saps is doing everything he can from the castle, alright? We just have to stick together!"
Ne9tune let out a dry, bitter laugh, crossing her arms. Stick together. That was the same line they were fed during the entire civil war.
Back when they were fighting to put Saps on the throne, everything felt like it had a purpose. They had cheered when the old kingdom was torn down, genuinely believing that once the war was over, the resources would be shared and the server would be fixed. They thought winning meant a better life.
But standing here in the burning heat, Ne9tune realized it was all a joke. Winning a war didn't mean anything if the literal ground beneath their feet was burning up. Saps had a shiny new crown, sure, but his royal laws couldn't make the sun go down, and they couldn't force the game to spawn food.
"I heard it's not even a regular game glitch," the player next to Ne9tune whispered, leaning in close. Her username was eunoi4n, an android whose cooling fans were whirring so loudly from the heat that she had to constantly stutter her speech to keep her voice box from shorting out entirely.
"What do you mean?" Ne9tune asked, turning her head slightly.
"People are talking in the global chat," eunoi4n whispered, looking around to make sure the guards weren't listening. "They’re saying the heat started exactly when Cindercrest blew up the old capital. Someone said the war weapons were so powerful that they literally cracked the world files. They think Saps accidentally broke the server's weather system just to win the throne."
A few blocks away, an avian hybrid stood on top of a stone wall, their feathers looking dull and ruffled. They looked down at the crowd, completely desperate. "We can't just wait for fish! The water hybrids are literally suffocating out here, and the cold-weather builds are lagging to death! If the crown won't give us the environments hybrids specifically need to survive, we need to leave spawn and find somewhere that isn't burning!"
Ne9tune frowned, staring up at the giant Cindercrest banners hanging from the castle walls. The heavy fabric didn't even blow in the wind because the air was completely dead.
The rumor spread through the crowd like wildfire, a low, angry murmur passing from player to player. If Saps' war was the reason the server was boiling, then all of this suffering wasn't just a bad update. It was his fault.
"Hey! No pushing!" the guard screamed as the line started to warp and shove forward toward the chests.
Ne9tune didn't move. She just watched the chaos break out, her flashing hunger bar a constant reminder. They had won the war, but they were holding the keys to a kingdom that was actively cooking itself to death.