500 Miles

Jude & Strength SMP

JudeLow was a legendary name in the Minecraft community, widely respected as one of the smartest and most talented players to ever touch the game. But that reputation came with a hidden, exhausting cost. Lately, a heavy weakness had settled deep into his bones, leaving him drained and tired almost all the time. Despite the exhaustion, he forced himself to push through, focusing his remaining energy on creating videos for his channel.

Those very videos caught the eye of Tai, the owner of the Strength SMP server.

Tai reached out and invited Jude to join the server, and Jude accepted the offer instantly. He did not do it because he was lonely or looking for a tight-knit group of friends; he did it because he wanted to farm clips and design intricate, inescapable traps. On this server, strength points were the ultimate lifeline. More strength meant devastating damage, but if your strength dropped too low, you were completely finished.

The catch was that while Jude was a genius at trapping people, his mechanical skill was lacking. He could not swing a sword properly to save his life. Looking back at his older videos, the only reason he constantly won matches on Hoplite was through pure strategy and outsmarting people with his builds. Everyone on Strength SMP knew this, and they were terrified of his mind.

Yet, even the smartest players can be killed. In Jude's case, he was constantly hunted and beaten down by a notoriously aggressive player named Conexion, known to everyone simply as Sharpness. Sharpness possessed an absolute, terrifying dominance with sword combat. He had beaten Tai, the server owner, so many times that players would literally run the opposite direction the moment his username appeared in the chat.

Unfortunately for Sharpness, he knew how to wield a blade, but he had a terrible grasp on how Minecraft actually worked. Redstone mechanics were a complete mystery to him. As a result, he constantly fell into Jude's brutal traps, and in return, he would hunt Jude down and kill him out of pure revenge.

The two clashed so frequently that the rest of the server began to see their dynamic as something much deeper than a simple rivalry. People started joking that the only reason Jude kept trapping Sharpness, and the reason Sharpness kept killing Jude, was because they were secretly obsessed with each other. Tai actually came up with the theory himself after binge-watching a popular romance show called *Heated Rivalry*. The rumors only intensified after the two briefly teamed up, an alliance that ended spectacularly when Sharpness tried to trap Jude using Jude's own redstone design. Being steps ahead, Jude had built a backup trap inside the backup trap. After all, you can never truly trust your enemy.

_Tai: Guys I swear, they like each other
Skeppy: bro ur delusional
Flowtives: NAWH
Flowtives: THE LOVE IS REAL BRO
Sword4000: frfr
ItsN00B: y'all r weirdos
_Tai: syfm Noob

Deep down, though, Tai was closer to the truth than he realized. Even though Jude fought with Sharpness almost every single day, he had developed real, heavy feelings for him. Sometimes, Jude would sit alone at his desk, staring at the screen and imagining what would have happened if Sharpness had not betrayed him that day.

"Maybe... just maybe... they are right," Jude whispered to the empty room. "Maybe he actually likes me."