The Battle of Zombie Hill: Defenders of the Overworld #1
For my miner and redstone friends at Reynolds Learning Academy Nick Sean and Colton and for Ken Marc and Charles
The cavalry commander watched the last of his troops hurry into the hidden Nether portal with their horses The ragged soldiers had come such a long way from their days as solo players How had they reached this point Now a trip to the Nether was safer than a moonlight trail ride It had been the wildest night ride of Roberto’s life What had begun as a snap a cinch a midnight run for goodness sake had become a massacre Diamond armored zombies enchanted skeletons and immortal griefers had forced his battalion into a stranglehold putting their artilleryman and the villagers in mortal danger It had been his decision to ride uphill and now there was no way down One wrong move would have been the end of them all At the last moment Rob had to cut his losses to prevent any more bloodshed Fleeing the Overworld he realized might be the only way to someday save it As much as Rob pined for his home this place deserved to be released from griefer tyranny and the people free to go where they would Stormie had shown him that Rob led Saber toward the Nether portal and took one last look at the sky all purple-black aglow with twin kling stars He might not be of this world but he was in it And he would defend it wherever that might take him
CHAPTER 1 One moment Rob was leafing through the in-flight magazine glad to be returning home to the ranch and the next he was falling Something had gone terribly wrong with the plane But where was he now And where were the other passengers Although he had never fallen from thirty thousand feet before that was clearly what was happening I should be more afraid he thought as he plum meted through the spotty cloud cover The land below unfolded like a map blue ocean bordered by white sand a stripe of green trees And beyond swaths of open meadow broken by rock formations His face dampened as he caught the tail end of a rainstorm and then instantly dried as he dropped through the atmosphere heading for the ever-looming landscape 1
