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It’s their fourth run of the day together, and they spawn on a tiny plains island with one small tree. They punch it down, working together saves a few seconds but based on their location, they’re hardly precious like they are in most speedruns. Feinberg and Couriway both use block of wood to create a crafting table each, which wouldn’t be an issue except it only leaves eight planks for everything else they’ll need to start.
“Wait.” Couriway said as they both placed them down besides each other, “Are you crafting the boat?”
“Yeah, I need one plank though. I only got two wood.”
“I got you, I got you.” and Couriway throws one plank at wood. “Actually,” he mutters to himself, staring at the three planks left. A shovel might be useful, if they find a buried treasure or a shipwreck deep in sand, but except for the pickaxe, wood is worth keeping for backup supplies in the nether. They’ll need to find more trees regardless. He throws the rest of the planks at Fein’s feet.
“Oh, thank you.”
Couri destroys his crafting table. Fein decides to leave his on the island but while he’s climbing into the boat, Couri picks it up as well - they wasted a precious resource on it. The boat is set up at the edge of the island, just off the shore. Fein is already in it, his arms resting on the oars. “We could’ve made another one later,” he says.
“I know.”
The boat rocks under the weight of Couriway as he climbs in. He’s well practised in the tech behind getting in boats fast, but that doesn’t account for duos, where someone is already in the boat. As he swings his second leg into it, it tilts far enough to one side for a small puddle of water to form at the bottom. They both yelp before everything balances out. As soon as the shock wears off, Feinberg grabs both oars and pushes them into the depths of the ocean. He circles around the island.
“What are you doing?” Couriway asks.
“There might be a shipwreck?”
“It’s, it’s a tiny island?”
“Maybe the ship didn’t spot it and crashed.”
“I mean, yeah. But we would’ve found it when we pie chart-” Couri stopped, and Fein doesn’t immediately carry on the conversation with a reassurance that he did pie chart and this was a joke.
The boat stops. Feinberg and Couriway both pull up their pie charts. No runner knew why they had the ability to track the entities but utilizing the mechanical view of the world became second nature. It fit in with most runners' attitudes of resetting and in order to reach the top speeds, they had to use everything the world had to offer them. Couriway’s pie chart wasn’t picking up on a treasure chest on tiny island in the middle of the ocean. He pushed the pie chart away. Feinberg kept his up, so Couri grabbed one oar from under his arm and began to circle the boat still in the water
“Did we miss a BT?” He asked, as he nearly finished the 360.
“There’s something to the East.” Fein replies. He grabs the oars and begins to sail in that direction. The pie chart is still visible, from the corner of his eye. Couri reached forward and swiped it away.
“I’ll pie chart. You focus on seeing if there’s a ship wreck or a monument.”
“I thought you hated monuments?”
“I do. Do you know how often I get mining fatigue? And then I have to detour to find a fricking cow and it slows down the entire run unless I’m lucky and quick. Do you know how often I get lucky?”
“I’m quick. Could probably get one block before the guardians get me. You could do the bastion and I do the fortress, wouldn’t have to detour for milk either.”
“Maybe. But we don’t have picks right now.”
“We need an island.”
“I mean, yeah, we need wood and blocks. A shipwreck would still be great though. Keep looking.”
They continue to sail into the ocean for a minute. The pie chart moves little and infrequently enough that Couri takes his eyes off it to adjust the render distance on his glasses to see if any islands load in that he can direct Fein too. The oceans widens.
“This has got to be insanely unlucky.” Fein mutters. His hand twitches in an unfinished movement to open the reset button. “It’s like the universe hates us.” The minute on their timer ticks up to three. Couri pays it little mind. Without resetting, the timer isn’t worth panicking about until the eight minute mark without a nether entry. He would prefer it to be quicker, of course, he is a runner, but in some worlds it is improbable. This world is one of the improbable ones.
“We’ll be fine once we hit land. Unless it’s a mesa or snow, but that’s unlikely.”
“Okay. Okay.”
Couri replays the past three minutes in his head, trying to figure out where things could have gone better. Not making two crafting tables was one, alongside checking for buried treasure before getting in the boat but they’d still be in the boat travelling Eastwards towards nothing without those mistakes. Like Fein said, it’s just insanely unlucky and not a testament against their skill.
“I don’t think the universe hates us.” Couriways says. The boat stops moving and Feinberg turns his head to stare at Couri. “You said ‘it’s like the universe hates us’ I don’t think that's true. I just don’t think this world was created with us in mind. If all the worlds were good for speedrunners, you wouldn’t reset either.”
“Okay, but who wants to spawn on a tiny island with one tree? That’s like, stupid.”
The wind suddenly picks up. It howls like laugher, turning the boat, and at it’s peak, tilting it enough that both men grasp onto the edges.
“Weird.”
“Definately.”
Couri turns back to the pie chart and squinted. It wasn’t enough to be considered a peak by any stretch of the word but it had shifted to show some sheep, the less than average they’d find on land but more than they’d find lost at sea. “Keep going in this direction.”
“Have you seen something?”
“My chart has evened out.”
“Cool. I’m turning my render distance up so I’ll spot anything. Keep an eye out for shipwrecks still. I’d love to find some easy iron.”
“Gotcha.”
They only travel for twenty seconds more before the desert appears in view. Feinberg throws his fist in the air, whooping. Couriway smiles and closes the pie chart as they pull up to the biome. Deserts aren’t his favourite but they’re home to several structures, lava pools, flat and empty which allows for quick scanning to see if there’s anything nearby. Most importantly, their on land which means if the desert is truly deserted, they’ll find another biome soon enough and can cave from there.
Couri climbs out of the boat first and climbs up to the mainland and looks out. There’s no immediate structure that makes him purse his lips but in the far left corner of his eye, there’s an acacia biome. He turns to Fein and waits.
“I’m going to see if I can find any structures. You coming with?”
Couri’s eyes flicked back to the acacia biome. “I might get some wood and food.” Fein tracked his gaze to the acacia biome and nodded.
“Keep me updated with what you have.”
“I know, I know.”
They turned their separate ways. Couri sprinted over to the acacia tree and punched it down as far as he could reach. He turned it all into planks and pulled out his crafting table from before. Most of the blocks, he turned into sticks besides three, which he used to create a pickaxe. It was likely, that if he kept travelling across the world, he’d find exposed stone by a lava pool but that meant working with luck and as the five minute timer ticked up, he couldn’t rely on luck and turned to the tried and true method of mining down until he had six cobblestone. He built up enough to reach his crafting table, created a stone set of the pickaxe, axe and shovel before going back down the hole.
He had fifteen cobblestone when he reached the first iron vein. Couriway sighed as he began to mine, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, pieces.
“What the hell,” crackled across Couri’s communicator, “How is there literally nothing here.”
“You’ve checked the entire desert?”
“No, but like usually I’ve found something by now.”
“That’s no reset for you.” Couri said, even though no structures in a desert was really bad luck.
“Please tell me things are going better your end.”
“I have seven iron-”
“Was there a ruined portal or something?”
“No, I mined down for it.”
“God.”
“I’m going to make an iron pick, a bucket and leave one iron for lighting the portal, unless there’s something you want?”
“We’ll see… A bucket is good though. I’m going to keep looking.”
Couri crafts the bucket and runs towards the part of the biome that’s fully in the sun's rays and also alongside the border of the desert. The change in terrain means it’s likely there’s a water source that’s allowed grass to grow, and where there is water, there’s gravel for flint. Dry grass is liable to catch aflame and where there is a flame, world generation creates a lava pool to justify it in the code. If there was no lava, there would still be fire for him to push or chase the wild animals into. He spots fire first, just outside of his normal render distance, seven chunks away from an ocean on a border between the desert and the acacia. There’s a small clump of flames that are as bright as a beacon in the dry land.
It’s a small lava pool, five blocks wide and three blocks deep. Couriway groaned because having a decent sized lava pool was apparently too much to ask for on this run. He didn’t even know they could spawn that small. He crosses his fingers that Fein is having better luck in the midst of the desert as he lowers the bucket into the pool and scoops out a block's worth. He doesn’t sprint once it’s in his hands, wary of spilling it and scorching his trousers. (They’re going to get burnt in the nether. Feinberg handles the piglins, Couriway the blazes because splitting the two nether splits almost halves the time. It resulted in Couri leaving the nether with burn marks and scorched clothes so often, he wonders if the universe is sick of having to repair his clothes and heal him with each reset. As he thinks it, the lava in his bucket pops. If it’s a sign, he can’t decide if it’s a sign the universe doesn’t mind or a sign it does.)
He finds a sheep, a crowd of four of them, and throws the lava down near one's feet. It begins to run and the rest of the herd follows it wildly in fear. They step in lava in their panic and the sudden wind of running and their thick coats mean they burn up quick into stars of light before vanishing, dead. Once all four of them are dead, Couri scoops up what he can of the lava. A few drops are left on the floor and quickly burn through grass until that source ends and it extinguishes. The bucket was no longer full to its brim which gave Couri the confidence to speedwalk over to the sheep. The meat is burning hot to touch but nothing he can’t handle. Once it’s in his inventory, it cools down amongst the raw materials, so the extra saturation and the way it fully satiates his hunger is worth it. There’s six cooked mutton in his inventory so he carries on speed walking to find more sheep.
“There’s a ruined portal here.” Feinberg says through his communicator. “Found a desert temple nearby too. Figure that’s why I didn’t see anything earlier. They all loaded in at once. How’s food?”
“Uhm, eight mutton. Cooked. Do you need me to grab more?”
“I have enough rotten flesh. We’ll split everything fifty fifty while we’re travelling. I’m at…” He rattles off the co-ordinates.
“Heading there now. What’d you get in the temple?”
“A Diamond. Some gold I’m gonna make a helmet with , iron.”
“How much?”
“Eleven. Made the tools. There was flint and steel in the portal chest.”
“Cool, cool. I’m going to make myself a shield then.”
“Do you want my spare?”
“Keep it, in case your shovel breaks or something.”
“Sure.”
“Oh also, I found a lava pool.”
“Is it nearby?”
“Uhm, no. You can take it if you want.”
“Okay. You can keep all the pork then, since you won’t have fire res.”
“Is rotten flesh going to be enough? It could be far terrain?”
“I’ll kill a hoglin if it comes to it. But I should be fine. How are you doing for blocks?”
Couriway opens his inventory, “Uhm, not good. I have some wood but not enough.” They could stick together, Fein should have enough from blowing up the temple. It’s not enough to share though. He considers telling Fein that, they could route the bastion faster but it’s not as quick as doing both splits at once. With the seven iron, he should have made shears instead of a bucket and kept looking for gravel. There’s enough iron that he could make shears still but that would mean doing the fortress without a shield which sucks and if he died, he’d have to swim back to the portal. The idea makes him shake. He reaches for his pickaxe as he scrambles through his inventory for anything that could be a spare block. The wooden handle in his hand makes him stop and really, it’s dumb he hadn’t considered it before. He can just mine netherrack in the nether. It’s a time loss in the short run and he’d only be making up for hypothetically lost time but he’s played this game thousands of times, his gut says it’s the right call for this world, in a duo. “I’ll mine stuff in the nether if I need too. I’ll be fine.” He says.
Fein’s grimaces. It’s an immediate loss of time and Couri wonders if he’s doing the same mental gymnastics as he just did to realise this is the right decision. But seconds after Couri made his declaration, it softens. “If you think that’s the right call-” He says as he steps into the nether portal. Couri follows after him.
“-I do.”
“I mean, you do more of this kind of shit than me.”
Purple particles engulf their visions, then the world tilts upside down, and stretches eight times as long. It spits them out onto warm netherack. Couri immediately thanks whatever is out there that they haven’t spawned surrounded by a lava pool. There is no reply but he is not used to one so doesn’t expect it. Fein groans besides him, because they’ve spawned in the second worst place.
“Literally, how could the seed gets worse?” They both open their pie charts and spin around before running in the same direction based off a possible bastion. If they’re wrong, at least they probably won’t still be trapped in a cube of netherrack.
“I mean, I once played a corrupted end portal. It’s pretty rare but it could still happen.”
“That’s rough man.”
“Or did I tell you about that time I traded like, thirty gold blocks and didn’t even get enough pearls to open the end portal? I mean, this sucks, obviously, but we can still finish. It’s not the worst it could be.”
“Yet.”
“Yet.”
There’s still a chance that with good luck on the blaze drops and piglin trades for the run to be around the twenty minute mark but Couri doesn’t say so. Best to keep the expectations low. They work in mostly silence, Fein takes the top row and Couri takes the bottom row as they mine through. Feinberg breaks the blocks quicker because he started mining first but otherwise the pace is near even. They’d allocated the slot of top or bottom during the first run when Feinberg had a golden pick that meant he’d go twice as quick, so they could see navigational terrain first. They had still nearly fallen into a hole several times. Now, they just fell into the habit.
They break through after a minute, above a long but thin patch of land by a large lava lake. The bastion in view. Feinberg pulled out a stack of blocks and began to bridge across the drop and eventually the lake.
“Do you see a fortress?” Couriway asks, following after Fein with their co-ordinates pull up. They’re far to the East but near zero towards the z axis which means if they’d been lucky, the two structures could have spawned nearby.
“Not right now. Do you want to go searching in a different direction?”
“I probably should cross into another quadrant, yeah.”
“Do you have the blocks?”
“I’ll drop if I have too, now we have land.”
“Alright.”
Couri reaches into his inventory and pulls the netherrack into his right hand and begins to place with confidence and speed, parallel to Fein’s bastion towards the negative axis which would bring him into the quadrant below. He chose not to bridge the whole way, jumping down when the terrain picked up enough height to be safe. As a speedrunner, learning how to fall was a skill all the professionals learnt through rigorous training while the universe was a click away from fixing their injuries and returning them to the same state to try again. It was a skill he thought was underestimated by new runners and even some who tried to avoid risky plays to mitigate the potential loss of food.
The drop wasn’t so low that Couri could get away with no health loss. Three hearts dropped from his health bar and his body burnt from the sudden force of itself hitting the ground. If he pulled his trouser leg up, Couri would find bruises already beginning to form. He checks his food bar to see if it’s worth breaking into his rations this early into the nether to alleviate the pain. Enough had dropped during the Overworld split that it wasn’t going to heal but he had a healthy amount. A cooked mutton would be better effective later into the travels when more of his energy had depleted.
He runs across the nether and uses some of his blocks to jump across the soul sand valley as he starts to breach into where the next structure could be. In the corner of his eye, while tracking his co-ordinates and surroundings, he saw the entity counter spike slightly in his western direction so he twisted around and started to head towards it. He opens the pie chart and registers a spawner and he had to stop himself from cheering.
“Please don’t be a treasure bastion, please don’t be a treasure bastion.” Couri whispers to himself. He reaches the border of the soul sand valley and looks around at his surroundings, wandering about to see beyond certain blocks.
“I’ve started trading.” Fein says, “The rates aren’t dreadful but they’re not ranked..”
“You have pearls already?”
“Three from stray piglins I’ve just doubled back on. Haven’t checked the pit yet.”
“I haven’t found the fortress.”
“Are you-”
“I’ve got a spike, I’m heading to it now.”
“Okay, tell me when you find it, and your co-ords. I’ll come to you for the blind.”
“That’s probably best, yeah.”
Couriway spots it seconds later in the corner of his eye and pillars up, nearly running out of blocks as he reaches the top. “I’m here, finding the spawner now.”
“Okay, these trades are pretty good. Almost enough to make up for that overworld.”
“Let’s hope the blaze rates don’t ruin this run for us then.”
The spawner was only two turns away from his entry point. Three blazes spawn but before killing them, Couriway crafts a shield. He shifts it in his hand, adjusting for it’s weight before walking towards the spawner and killing the blazes that were there. The second blaze drops a rod. Couri moved towards the third blaze, but the rod must have touched his foot because the achievement ‘Into Fire’ suddenly loads into the chat logs.
“That was quick,” Fein says in the chat.
Couri doesn't reply, too focused on raising his shield before killing the third blaze, which also drops rod. He gathers both rods into his inventory, and secures them. “I’ve had good drop rates so far but I need to manually mine this surrounding area.”
Fein hums down the line, “Hey, once we’re blinding, there’s a question I’ve been meaning to ask.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t want to distract… that’s enough obby, I don’t want you to die because you were distracted.”
Couriway finishes mining the gates from one side of the spawner, keeping one eye on it the entire time. “The spawns aren’t great right now.”
“No, you’re good. I’ll ask later.”
Curiosity poked at Couri and he would have pushed Fein to answer but a stray two blazes spawn in before he could ask. Instinctively, he raises his shield and tightens his grip as two fireballs hit it consecutively. He axes down one but midway through the finishing blow, the second blaze had flies around and throws a fireball from the back. Couri spots it in the corner of his eye but can’t react in time to raise the shield. The blow makes him stumble, and he fails to crit the first blaze. He ran down the corridor away from the spawner, shoving blocks in the gap between the tunnel and the spawner.
The fireball had hit him with quick force and had burned straight through his back. Smoke rose from his shirt so Couri pressed his back against the wall in a desperate hope it would starve the flames of some oxygen and at least stop the flames from getting bigger. His health was dropping, now at the half way mark. He fumbled about for a piece of mutton and shoved it into his mouth, only chewing as much as necessary in order to regain saturation as fast as possible.
“I might be dying.” Couriway warned as his health stabilized but the fire hadn’t stopped. Did saturation run down faster when he was actively healing? He kept one steak close in his hand in place of his axe in case it went down before the flames did. “Oh my god, the fire just isn’t going out.”
“Do you have enough food?”
“I should, I got out. I’m fine.”
“You didn’t sound it.”
“Shock. You know, I don’t usually do fortresses first. I was caught off guard.”
Fein hummed down the communicator, “I have enough pearls for one of us and the fortress. Do you want me to come? I have three pots of fire resistance as well.”
“Are they splash potions?”
“Two of them are?”
Couriway checked the timer. They had entered the Nether at around eight minutes [tk] and they were at sixteen now in the nether. “I have some gold I can still check on. Might be good, see if I can get more but I’d rather leave early than you die.”
The burning sensation on Couri’s back suddenly stops. He steps away from the wall and sure enough, the smoke had stopped. The coat was charred and he could smell the ash that clung to his clothes but the unbearable warmth of burning had vanished. “I’ve stopped burning now.”
“Phew.”
“I’m going to go back to the spawner. I’ve just got to be careful and we’ll be fine. But did miss a blaze cycle while waiting this out.”
He mines one of the blocks in his way and steps back to the blazes. He sinks his axe deep into one, a crit. It doesn't die so he turns his attention to the friend beside it. Fein asks how the rates were as he critted the blaze he’d originally been after. It drops a rod. Couri grins as he prepares himself for the second blaze. It would be easier, he figures, now he only had to worry about one of them. He axes it down with successive crits, not allowing it to move out of his line of sight. It also drops a blaze rod.
“I’m four for five on the drops.”
“That’s gotta be, like an insane ratio. Not the most insane one I’ve ever seen but on vanilla?”
A sudden, singular blaze spawns on the platform. “What the hell.” Couri mutters. He looks around to see if a second had spawned nearby. “Did that creep up on me?” He wishes Feinberg had been present to ensure the world hadn’t just glitched out and handed him a free blaze. He’d probably explain the exact glitch which made it possible. “I swear to hell, if this drops a rod.” As it died, the blaze whined in a sweeter manner that it used too, and if Couriway had focused, he’d notice how it sounded a bit like a laugh.
It doesn’t.
“That was so weird. A blaze just spawned on its own.”
He ignores any more of the weirdness to continue mining out the spare area, offering the blazes more space to spawn in. He cleans it out and is in the process of placing the soulsand when the next group of blazes spawn in, three this time. He needs all three to drop a rod in order to leave after three cycles and lady luck blesses him because all three do drop rods. Couri doesn’t track the rate of drops for any of his runs because it’s too much information to remember when it comes to pearls, but he considers making a note of it when they finish this one. He’d also have to check the other thousands of runs to see if he’s ever noticed the luck before. High rates aren’t super rare that he finds them special, but between the stray blaze that spawned in and the poor overworld, the recovery of time feels noteworthy because of it.
Feinberg arrived seconds later, despite Couri never having shared the co-ordinates.
“I followed the uhm, path you left, since I knew your rough direction.”
“Cool, cool, do you want to blind from here?” By the time Couri finished his sentence, the nether portal was already built against the wall. He climbed in and jumped, punching the blocks in front of him. “Yay!”
“Yippee!” Fein said, before vanishing into the nether portal and Couri followed soon after.
They didn’t use the ninjabot because the world was registered for Couri’s one hundred thousand speedrun challenge and using it would ‘corrupt its integrity to the core of the game’ as he explained every time he loaded in duos with any speedrunner friend. Fein’s response for the past four games was to hand Couriway the pearls and let him figure out the blind, while he sat atop the portal.
Couriway throws the pearl and begins to measure it using the co-ordinate information. He’s mid way through figuring out it’s .1 position when Feinberg decides to ask the question.
“When you’re doing no reset, do you ever, like feel the universe?”
“Huh?”
“So, like, okay, when I’m doing AA I kill the dragon and go through the fountain but I feel, like different afterwards if you know what I mean.”
“I mean, the void does feel weird, and I know there’s that poem at the end. Sometimes, if I try, I can hear those voices talk you know, but I don’t feel any different afterwards.” The eye falls to the ground. Couri wanders into the woods to pick it up. Fein was silent over the communicator until he arrives back at the portal.
“It’s like, I can feel the universe for the rest of the AA run, you know. It’s weird but like, I know, when I’m going to get lightning or when the run just isn’t going to work out but then it does because I don’t know, things don’t go like how they usually do. It’s warm, that’s like, the only way I know how to describe it,”
Couri clicks his tongue, “Does it go back to being normal,” the word made Fein frown slightly, “like, how it feels now, when you start a new run?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I guess, I haven’t. I don’t hang about worlds after I complete them. They’re complete you know.”
“You should, this time. It’s nice. I think if we could feel it, like if this wasn’t a new world, I reckon it'd be laughing.”
“Laughing?”
“I don’t know man, sometimes when things feel so bad we’ve just been getting lucky. And things like drop rates or trades aren’t in our control.”
“Do you think it wants us to complete the seed?” Couri asks, suddenly afraid it didn’t want to be finished, that this world, like so many others, was going to test him to finish it.
“I don’t think it could stop you.” Fein says in place of an actual answer. “Have you got a good guess on that stronghold?”
Couri forgets to throw the eye in the middle of the conversation. He does so and measures the eye, calculating the change in direction this time as well as its precise measurement. He writes the numbers down for both eyes and compared them to a chart he kept tucked in his pocket, marked as an item of his clothing. It’s technically a banned item but they’ve legalised calculators and Couri’s is just a simplistic version of it that works for him. Besides, only a few of the runs from the challenge are worth trying to verify, and it’s Couri’s challenge. He can decide if some technical cheating is allowed - as long as it's consistent.
“It’s about six hundred blocks away.” He declares a minute later, tucking the pad of paper back into his pocket.
Fein hops into the portal, raising one hand for Couri to grab, “Lead the way?”
Couriway grabs the hand and nods.
They land in the end two minutes later, blinding on top of the correct chunk. Couriway grins ear to ear as they’re mining down.
“It’s just luck.”
“It’s not luck, you know it’s not luck. You literally need a bot to do that for you!”
“And that bot takes skill. That portal though? How far down have we dug so far?” Fein smirks as he speaks and looks incredibly smug as Couri flushes red to justify himself. Feinberg snickered as he noticed and Couriway immediately stopped and stared at him.
“You were riling me up.”
“Not much else to do at this point in the run.”
“We still need to find the portal room then kill the dragon - which I will be doing because you don’t even know how to zero cycle properly.”
“I know how to zero?”
“Not consistently. I’ve seen you practise.”
“That’s practice. Might not even be zero-able. Maybe we’ll be locked in and need a perch. Would align with our luck right now.”
“Weren’t you saying earlier that the universe has been helping us when it can? Wouldn’t it make the end zero-able?”
“I mean, like, yeah, it could do that. But I think it prefers me. It’ll take my side.”
“Sure, sure.”
They hit the stone bricks seconds later and once that is broken, they fall right into the starter staircase. Pulling up the pie chart, Fein spots the spike for the silverfish spawner first and began to move. Couri double checked there wasn’t a second spike caused by a library before chasing after him. They’re three doors, one buried, deep when they find it, Feinberg cheers before wordlessly setting up a hunger reset. Couriway checked how much mutton he had, shocked to find only one piece of meat left. He didn’t remember eating it that fast but supposes that he’s been mindlessly biting on it since the near death at the blaze spawner to prevent a similar incident.
Death is kind but not painless. The sensation of the enderpearl tears his body apart until he’s back, exactly where he was, with the same items, perfectly healed and full. Uncomfortable, is how he’d warn any runners he’d train. The phantom memory of pain fades as the adrenaline kicks back in. They’re so close to finishing this run and despite the dreadful overworld, it’s not been the worst.
The portal is a one eye so they hold back from crafting the twelfth eye and instead opt to use it as an extra pearl. They have enough left each that they shouldn’t need it but there’s no other use for an eye of ender. The portal opens but Couri and Fein don’t stay in the world long enough to hear the fabric of the world tearing as the universe takes them from the void and leaves them in the final dimension.
They are caved into the end island. It won’t be zero-able. Feinberg grins as he begins to mine up and organise his inventory so it has everything they need for the one cycle.
“Do you have enough beds?”
“I have five, plus two anchors.” Fein says. He runs to the end fountain while Couri hangs back. It was good the end wasn’t zero-able he decides, without telling that to Fein to avoid any gloating, because seven was risky for even those highly accomplished in it and while they’re both comfortable with four, it’s best they didn’t waste any of the explosives.
Fein waits at the other end of the island and does so in silence. The dragon is likely to perch when it thinks it’s safe from attack, and making noise disturbs that.
It perches after a minute. Fein pearls to the fountain and Couriway watches as the explosives go off in puffs of smoke. The dragons health depletes, light purple blood runs down its scales and it’s wounds glow faintly. After the fourth bed, Couri pearls into the fountain and axes the dragon's head, as Fein sets off the final bed.
Like all the other mobs in the game, the dragon does not leave behind a body, but instead a stream of experience points. However, it doesn’t vanish either. It’s body starts to crumble into dust and through mix of dust, blood and experience, light purple rays expand into the void of the End’s sky until it fizzles out like blurred edges. It doesn’t matter how many times Couriway kills the dragon, the beauty of its death never fails to amaze him. It’s one of the questions he’d ask the universe if he had the chance: Why does the Ender Dragon return to the void when everything else, players included, drop items and disappear.
“We’ll respawn back in this world afterwards right?” Feinberg asks, “So you can feel the universe.”
Couri nods, “I’ll see you on the other-”
He doesn’t finish before the final portal opens and he falls.
Couriway has completed thousands of runs, he has seen the universe every time but he can never remember what they say, while running. He mouths the words to the speeches words automatically regardless,
“Take care, It has reached a higher level now. It can read our thoughts.” It says. The words are under his eyelids, they are the one thing that exists in the void for him to cling too. They feel like safety and he knows it sounds like the wind and rising smoke and a dead dragons cry. He cannot hear the actual words, but he hears the language, he thinks.
“I like this player, it played well. It did not give up. Even when others would have.” The final part stops Couri short, his mouth snapping shut. He has not heard this before, or he does not remember hearing it before.
The second voice, which sounds like the spitting of lava and the whirls of the nether portal, speaks back before the words on the screen appear. Couri has never understood the universe before, but he imagines it laughing and saying, “Even if we had to help it, at times.” before it returns to the original script.
There is nothing in the void but Couriway, Feinberg somewhere, and the universe. He decides to trust it, and trusts that he will hear this message again, and again. He still has tens of thousands of runs to do after all. Couri lets himself float until the world asks him if he wants to start again or return.
He reaches for start again on instinct, it is what he has chose to do for years. But before he can start again, there’s one thing he has to do.
Couriway respawns back on the tiny island from around twenty minutes ago; he cannot find it in himself to care about the time in this run or if it is still counting up the seconds he spends in this world. Feinberg is already there, sitting by the shore with his feet in the ocean. Couriway sits besides him.
The universe is there, he realises, in the calm winds and the way the ocean submerges his feet but is warmer than it should be. He can feel it looking over his shoulder like it’s whispering in his ear that it’s time to leave but that even if he doesn’t feel it, it stays across every world.
“Does it always feel like… this.” Couri says, unable to explain what he means.
Feinberg understands regardless, “Yeah.”
“Does it ever make you want to stop?”
“No. Why? It hasn’t changed yours has it?”
“No.”
Couriway stands up and reaches for the menu to reset a new world. He takes a deep breath and commits the moment to memory. He knows how it feels now and he knows it will always be an option, if he misses it or if he forgets.
He knows that the universe knows he’d always choose this: that the universe loves him because he is love.