Chapter Text
The man sheathed his sword, elegantly tossing his hair back as he watched the warrior in front of him slowly bleed to death, falling to his knees as he grabbed at the gaping wound. It was a futile effort anyway; anyone with eyes could clearly see who had won this match.
With a dying rasp, the person finally went limp and turned into a pile of items and experience orbs, floating gently on the ground. Only then did the victor move, bending down in order to pick at the items on the floor, scrunching his nose up as he dropped item after item with a scathing flick of the wrist.
"Hm— nothing. What— blast protection?! This guy was a noob! And they called him the best?"
He shook his head in disgust, dropping the iron— iron chestplate, how was this guy so pathetic?— in his hands, and pulled out a flint and steel, striking them together to burn the loot that couldn't even be considered loot, with how absolutely trash it was. And to think he wasted a whole ten seconds on this dude, ugh. Could've spent his time on much better things, like leaving this hellhole.
"You know what, this town's ugly. I'm committing arson," he muttered to himself, turning around and casually setting the nearest house on fire. That was the punishment for being annoying. "I'm outta here."
With the fire starting to spread behind him, Technoblade took one last look at the town and walked off.
...
He bit into a piece of steak, refilling his hunger bar and giving him saturation while he checked his inventory— twenty-three pieces left. It was not nearly enough for the journey he had remaining, although he was pretty sure he knew where the Friendly Builder was now, the only ray of light in these dark, dark times. Just... a few... more days of utter bullshit... and he'll be back home with his wolves...
"I'm running low," he muttered, eyes scanning the forest for an animal, ears twitching upward as he heightened his environmental awareness. Cow, chicken, didn't matter, just something he could eat, please? Preferably not a pig, it was weird whenever he bit into a piece of porkchop knowing damn well he was part piglin, even though the biology books all told him that piglins were only in the same family as pigs and not directly descended from Overworld pigs, so it technically wasn't cannibalism, but godsdamn if it didn't feel like it.
Hooves sounded somewhere to his right. A cow, pig, or sheep, perhaps, so he started walking toward the source of the noise. (He hoped it wasn't a sheep, mutton was trash and he didn't really like its taste either way.) Techno kept his footsteps light in order not to scare off the animal until he was close enough to whatever it was to outrun it— shoving a bush aside, he squinted at the animal lazing beneath a tree... and discovered that it was a cow, not a pig. He wouldn't have to resort to cannibalism yet, hooray!
Drawing Orphan Obliterator, he stepped closer to the unaware animal, the sword's blade gleaming in the residual strands of sunlight that made it through the canopy. "Sorry."
With a swing, he cleaved into the cow's throat, aiming directly into the flesh to end this as soon as possible. It gave out a single, painful moo, set ablaze with Fire Aspect II, before it dropped dead, turning into a few cuts of cooked steak floating above the ground. Techno shoved them into his inventory, standing up, eyes scanning the undergrowth for a threat or anything that could have been alerted by the sound and movement just now. Hm, he seemed to be in the clear...
His right ear suddenly twitched, picking up noise. Oh, great, he just instantly jinxed himself, didn't he? Lady Luck definitely had some personal beef (heh) with him. It was stupid how bad his luck was sometimes. Maybe the teletubby took it all for himself.
Nearby, the gallop of horses became slowly louder, and Chat instantly perked up.
E
More bloodshed? Pog
BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD
Kill them orphans Techno
We want blood now Techno!!!!!
More killing? After that village? Ah, maybe he'd do it. Depended on who the hell those people were, though.
"Who's there? Show yourself!" a voice yelled. Most likely a girl, currently in her twenties or so. She probably saw the village the voices made him kill and decided to try and find out who did it. Gods above, hero types were always the absolute worst.
"Do you nerds really feel like committing suicide today?" he drawled, attempting to intimidate them into leaving him the fuck alone, even though a feeling in his chest told him nope, they would not, in fact, leave him alone.
"Come out where we can see you, or are you scared?" another voice taunted. Male, this time. Also in his twenties, another hero type, because why not? They always seemed to travel in packs, and they always seemed to kind of just spawn in these Closed-Off Worlds. Sometimes Techno felt a little pity for them, not being able to cross into the other servers and actually see the world for what it was, but it was often soon overwhelmed by the annoyance they always brought him.
He muttered a few curses in the Old Tongue, enough for Phil to want to wash his mouth out with soap or craft a belt, before raising his voice to answer again. "Alright, fine."
He walked over to the source of noise, silently cursing his luck all along for bumping into these fucking vigilantes that had no sense of self-preservation, nor any common sense, and strode into a clearing to see four horses, two kids holding swords, a third with a bow drawn, and a man hiding behind a tree.
Oh, the Order of the Noobs. They took down a Witherstorm or something, he wasn't keeping track.
That was a major case, he remembered, the Council of Admins sent Phil to pick the Command Block up. A Command Block wasn't anything special, since they could only influence a single world, but it somehow appearing in a Closed-Off World, with a supposedly absent Admin? That was strange.
"Well, well, well, look who we have here. Do you want to die, too?"
"We're here to take you down!" Nerd #1 yelled.
He scoffed. He was right on the vigilante part and the no sense of self preservation. The guy hiding behind that tree had the most common sense. "And what makes you think you'll succeed? Because you killed a Witherstorm? Or because you call yourself the 'Order of The Stone'? Terrible name, by the way. And what'd you enchant a gold sword for? Noob."
Nerd #2 stumbled in shock. "How did you know about—"
"I've got eyes and ears everywhere." Dream, it meant Dream, who was a gossip that would hang around for hours talking his ear off about every Admin meeting he went to. Now, you answer my question—" he leaned on his sword, tilting his head at them— "why would you even try to kill me?"
It was a genuine question. Even if they came from a Closed-Off world, there was no way they hadn't heard of him, or at least knew about the Gods, as he distinctly remembered myths and legends ingrained in every world's creation. Or maybe they got lost to time, only remembered in certain places. That was possible if their world was old enough.
"You massacred the entire village back there!" the girl replied angrily, "or did you already forget?!"
He froze for a second, then threw back his head and laughed. Hey, he hadn't even meant to kill them. It was just that some random hunters started attacking him for no damn reason, and when he tried to turn away— see, he was provoked— they started chasing him. So, he chased them back. Fair and square. "That? That was nothing. Trust me, it would've been worse if I hadn't done that."
"You killed dozens!"
Techno turned, locking eyes with Noob #3. "Listen up. I hear voices in my head that constantly tell me to kill, and they were very loud and annoying today. Believe me, I don't always massacre every village I come into contact with. You could call me a heartless monster, but you can try having, like, ten million different voices screaming at you to kill something twenty-four hours a day. Trust me, it isn't nice."
Also, they were probably just going to respawn in a different world with their memories wiped anyway. Kristin usually did that for the Closed-Off lives he took.
"Violence isn't the answer! There must be some other way!" #1 blurted out, and he rolled his eyes at that.
"Violence is the only universal language, kid. Believe me. I've seen it all."
He had. He rose through the ranks in the Kingdom of Hypixel, got selected to receive training at the Admin world, and was crowned as the Blood God. All of it was achieved with the power of extreme violence and warfare, although it was a little less terrifying when you considered that most of them respawned. Most.
Techno sighed, raising a hand to rub at his forehead. A painful migraine was coming on, this time brought on by the sheer stupidity of these ignorant children. Violence isn't the only solution, there must be some other way, blah blah blah, the words of Closed-Off players. Literally everyone on Hypixel could swing a sword before they learned how to spell properly.
"I'd kill you all right now, but I've already gotten my share of blood today. So I'll let you go, I'm kinda busy trying to find my home world." He turned around, sheathing his sword, and started to walk away.
"Wait!" #3 said, causing him to respond with nothing at all save more walking, "you said something about your home world?"
"Yes. The Portal Network. I know you noobs aren't from here, and you're trying to get home— that much is obvious."
#2 stepped forward. "How do you know about the portals?"
He finally turned around, facing them, 100% annoyed and done for the day... and the next century or so. Man, he needed to hibernate. "I was there when it was constructed, idiot. I made the mistake of entering a portal without my damn communicator, and now I'm trying to get home."
#2 blinked. "You— you're an Old Builder?"
Those Old Builders? Please. They just maintained the code of the portals and then went rogue when they were crowned as minor Admins. It's not like they actually built anything worthwhile-- in fact, they're fucking horrible at building, actually. Like, complete shit at it.
"Nah. Just someone that's been alive for quite a while."
"Can you help us?"
He paused.
These noobs would probably just get in his way.
A voice that sounded suspiciously like Phil's popped up in his head. Techno, mate, you gotta help these kids!
Phil, they're annoying pests.
Techno. Imagine if you were a normal human, very much capable of dying. How would you feel if someone aeons older and more powerful than you refused to help you get home?
I'd suck it up and forge on.
Well, yes. But they're kids. Techno, come on.
He gave a heavy sigh, and nodded. "Alright. I can't get the Atlas all by myself anyway." Because it'd be a lot more fucking annoying if he had to play in those stupid fucking games on his own. "Follow me, the exit is this way."
He started walking off, but #1 stopped him. Again.
"We haven't had time for formal introductions," Noob #1 said cautiously, "I'm Jesse, this is Petra, this is Lukas, and the guy who's hiding behind the tree is Ivor."
He glanced at them all and nodded, sighing as he resigned himself to this fate. "My name's Technoblade."
...
"Can you slow down?" Ivor complained, some thirty blocks behind him.
He turned around, annoyance definitely showing on his face.
Earlier, they had offered him to ride with one of them, seeing as they had horses and he had none. Techno had refused, telling them that he could run much faster than their horses, seeing as they were just normal breeds, and not the ones specifically created for Admins and Gods. While they had been skeptical at first, he had quickly proven them wrong— literally.
"Why are you all so slow?" he asked, turning and crossing his arms, "at this pace, we won't arrive until tomorrow!"
"Well, you're the fast one!" Petra snapped, finally catching up.
He rolled his eyes. "Uh-huh.”
“It's nearly nighttime anyway, let's make camp,” Jesse suggested.
...
The fire crackled, sending out a burst of sparks.
"I could be at the portal now," he complained, leaning back and running a hand through his hair. His crown was resting on his knee, edges gleaming in the firelight. "But unfortunately, you people aren't capable of dodging arrows or outmanoeuvring spiders and zombies."
"Well, why'd you team with us, then?" Petra retorted, and goddamn if he wasn't already sick of having to deal with children.
He threw his hands up in the air. "Because if the Old Builder I need to bargain with saw me, they'd run in the opposite direction, as far away as possible! And I, according to Phil, have to be nice!"
"The Old Builders? Are you that scary?"
"Apparently! What I did was just completely beat them up in a 2 v 1 and massacre their army with no armour and a pickaxe when they tried to yank me over to their world--"
He paused, reconsidering. He was still in training at that point, they had just been looking for a kid to bully, or "make their champion" according to them. And considering that these nerds in front of him thought the Old Builders were cool, that would seem pretty intimidating.
"Wait, that sounds pretty terrifying when I say it out loud, actually."
They were all staring at him in disbelief.
"What?"
Lukas cleared his throat. "You said something about an Atlas earlier. What is it?"
A glorified Server Encyclopaedia, which was distributed, made, and ingrained in every single communicator. A guide to the Server Codes, translating them into the portal equivalents. That was it, that was all there was to it, but the Builders, always so melodramatic, named it the "Atlas" like it was some incredibly special artifact and not something that had literal millions upon millions of copies. He guessed that it was more special than the communicators, with its fancy-ass cover and spine, but it wasn't exactly the poster boy-girl-object for practicality.
He probably should've remembered the old Code for the servers, and not relied on his communicator so much.
"The Atlas is a book that can locate and identify worlds. If you have it, you'll be able to get home. The Old Builders have it, and we'll have to negotiate our way to the Atlas. Anyway, you do your thing. I'm getting bored, I'm going to beat up some mobs."
With that, he gathered his cloak and left, heading for the nearest patch of mobs, sword out.
...
Orphan Obliterator slashed through the monsters easily, and he worked without break to take this bullshit off his mind.
One early morning, he had decided to go for a lumber trip, and since his destination was thirty blocks away from his house, which meant he'd be ten blocks away from Phil's house, literally right outside his bedroom window, he'd decided to leave his communicator behind. Of course, that was when a glitch in the Code would show up and fuck his morning up.
It was probably Dream, now that he thought about it. That bastard had even allowed him to go on Hypixel and upgrade his sword the week before, something that he had never allowed anyone to do— how did he not see this coming?
He'd been zapped into a completely foreign part of the Portal Network, at least thirteen sections and six subsections away from his frequented parts, seeing as this was all Closed-Off worlds, and because he'd been stupidly dependent on his communicator, he couldn't find his way back to the Dream Esempi on his own, which meant that he had been server-hopping for the past couple of weeks attempting to find one of the Old Builders so he could threaten them into sending him back, because it would take literal years if he tried to journey on his own. And although he did have the years to spare, immortality and all, a lot of his friends did not.
Of course, Phil wouldn't be worried. He was the Blood God, and Technoblade never died, after all, but Chat had had the decency to tell Phil about where the hell he ended up, to which that absolute jerk had replied with, quote, "LMAO TECHNO GOOD LUCK YOU'VE SLEPT FOR MONTHS TIME TO GET ACTIVE" instead of a message of support.
Worst. Friend. Ever.
However, while this wasn't straight up dangerous, this was indeed very annoying, and after way too many days of work and Chat's interference, he had finally, finally gotten the whereabouts of the Friendly Builder, who was apparently living in the Redstone World.
And because he wasn't stressed enough, just as he had been leaving, these absolute noobs showed up and he somehow ended up chaperoning a bunch of twenty-year olds.
He yelled in frustration, slamming the blade into the last mob.
Please, let his misery end soon.
...