I could feel the rumbles through the soles of my boots as Biscuit and I sprinted across the Rumbling Ridges, the volcanic rock cracking and hissing beneath us like the whole landscape was annoyed we’d shown up. Which, honestly, was fair. We had shown up uninvited. Again.
“Four vents sealed!” Biscuit announced, checking her list at a full run, which is an impressive skill that I have never once managed. “Three remaining — northeast, northwest, and the big one at the ridge peak. Fizzwick has been at vent two, but I re-capped it while you were talking to that magma sprite about his feelings.”
“He had a lot of feelings,” I said, slightly out of breath. “Very valid ones, actually.”
The Champion’s Crown buzzed against my forehead, warmer than usual. Four villains down, and its glow had been getting steadily brighter since the Ender Earl — but right now it was doing something new. It was pulsing, like a heartbeat that had just had a very alarming piece of news.
I didn’t get to think about that for long, because we rounded a boulder and nearly ran face-first into an army of Magma Cubes.
There were dozens of them. Big ones, medium ones, and a frankly concerning number of tiny ones bouncing along in a line like a very dangerous conga. They filled the entire path between us and the northeast vent, jiggling and glowing and blocking the way completely.
“Right,” I said. “Wool of Wonders. Magma block disguise. I’ve got this.”
Biscuit’s eyebrows went up. “You’ve successfully become the correct block roughly forty percent of the time.”
“That’s a much higher percentage than when we started,” I pointed out, and I pulled the Wool of Wonders from my pocket before she could argue.
The warm, shimmery fabric rippled over me. I felt the familiar tingle, held my breath, and thought very specifically: magma block, magma block, please be a magma block and not a hay bale or a dirt block or that one time I became a bookshelf—
I looked down at my hands.
Glowing orange. Cracked and warm. Magma block.
I actually gasped out loud. Biscuit made a noise that sounded like a proud sniff combined with shock combined with someone trying very hard not to cheer.
“Don’t say anything,” I told her. “I’ll lose it.”
I walked straight into the Magma Cube army. They bounced around me, completely unbothered. One of the bigger ones bumped into me, squinted with its tiny cube eyes, and then bounced away. I gave Biscuit a thumbs up from inside the disguise, which probably looked extremely strange, but she understood.
She darted around the outer edge of the army while they were focused on not-noticing me, and we met on the other side, both slightly out of breath and grinning enormously.
“You were a perfect magma block,” Biscuit said.
I nearly tripped over a pebble from pure happiness. “I know.“
The northwest vent was trickier. The puzzle required stacking three iron blocks in a specific order, and the steam puffs kept knocking our carefully placed blocks sideways. Every time I got the second block down, a jet of steam would come from nowhere and send it rolling toward a lava crack.
“Nugget,” I said. “I need you.”
The small golden feather tucked in my tunic pocket gave a warm shimmer, and from somewhere behind Biscuit’s backpack came a very self-important cluck. Nugget — the End chicken who had given Biscuit the feather in chapter ten and had apparently decided to follow us ever since — strutted out onto the steam vent platform like she owned it.
She clucked once, officially, and the feather activated.
I lifted off the ground just slightly, floating above the worst of the steam jets, and stacked all three iron blocks in perfect order from above. The vent sealed with a deep, satisfied thunk.
“Thank you, Nugget,” I said.
Nugget gave me a look that said obviously and went back behind the backpack.
Two down. One remaining.
The ridge peak vent was the biggest, and it was also where I smelled trouble before I saw it. Not smelled it the way Biscuit smells things — she can identify diamonds as cinnamon-y and redstone as strawberry, which is a skill I will never stop being impressed by — but smelled it the old-fashioned way. Smoke. Hot rock. And something that reminded me, oddly, of Baron Blaze’s dramatic entrance at Rainbow Meadows all those chapters ago, when we first learned that some villains announce themselves before they arrive.
Magma Queen Mira announced herself with a fireball that turned the path behind us into a wall.
She was extraordinary looking, in the way that very alarming things sometimes are. Crown of hardened magma blocks. Cape shimmering orange and red like a sunset that had decided to be dangerous. Yellow eyes that burned bright as furnaces, and little puffs of smoke rising from every footstep.
“HEROES,” she boomed, in a voice that seemed to make the ridge itself straighten up nervously. “You have sealed five of my vents. FIVE. Do you have any idea how long it took my Magma Cubes to open those?”
“Actually,” Biscuit said, pulling out her list, “based on the depth of the original bore holes and the average Magma Cube bounce radius, I’d estimate approximately—”
“That was not an invitation to calculate,” Mira said.
Behind her, the seventh vent bubbled and hissed, and Fizzwick — tiny, cackly, insufferable Fizzwick — was already reaching for the cap we needed to place.
And that is when my nose tickled.
I do not know what was in the Rumbling Ridges air. Volcanic dust, probably. Steam. Possibly the extremely strong feelings of several hundred agitated Magma Cubes. Whatever it was, it hit me all at once, and I had approximately zero seconds of warning before the biggest sneeze of my entire life arrived.
“Oh no,” Biscuit said, reading my face. “Oh NO—”
The Sneeze Shield flared to life automatically, the way it always does, converting the explosion outward into something else entirely. There was a sound like a cannon crossed with a party horn, and then the entire top of Rumbling Ridge peak was absolutely buried in confetti.
Pink. Blue. Green. Gold. Tumbling, spiraling, sparkling confetti in every direction.
Every single Magma Cube stopped bouncing. They stared at the confetti with their tiny square eyes, and then — slowly, one by one — they began trying to bounce on it. Little bounces. Happy bounces. Fizzwick caught a handful and threw it in the air, cackling with delight instead of mischief for the first time.
Mira stood completely still, covered in gold and pink confetti squares, her mouth open.
“Your cape,” I said, because I could see it and it was genuinely true, “looks absolutely magnificent with the gold confetti on it. The colors are incredible.”
Mira went redder than her own magma crown.
Biscuit was already moving. No hesitation. No list. No seventeen backup plans. She crossed to the seventh vent in four quick steps, placed the iron cap, and sealed it with both hands while Mira was still standing there turning the color of a freshly-poured lava block.
The ground gave one deep, settling rumble, and went still.
All seven vents sealed.
The Champion’s Crown blazed so brightly that I had to squint, and when I looked at Mira — really looked at her, the way I’d looked at Captain Cactus when I understood he was just lonely — I saw it. The way her shoulders dropped. The way she looked at her Magma Cubes, still happily bouncing in confetti.
“Nobody ever says nice things about my building work,” she said, very quietly, in a voice about sixty percent less booming than before.
“Then they haven’t been paying attention,” I said. “But we can talk about that. Just — maybe without the fireballs?”
She looked at me for a very long moment.
Then she sat down on a rock, crown slightly askew, and said, “Fine.”
Biscuit walked back to me, brushing confetti off her yellow sweater, and held out her hand. In it was a sparkly blue helmet, still cool to the touch despite everything around us — the Frostcap Helmet, offered by a grateful ridge the moment the last vent sealed.
“The Surprisingly Warm Trophy for Cooling Things Down in the Most Chaotic Way Possible,” she said solemnly.
I put it on. It fit perfectly.
“I meant to sneeze that hard,” I told her.
Biscuit opened her mouth, closed it, and then just laughed instead, which is honestly the best sound in the entire Overworld.