POV Jacob

  Things weren't exactly going as planned. Everything hurts. I can't use my powers. My amour, or what's left of it, is stringed together scraps of composite plating and leather. Worse, everyone is sending me looks I am intimately familiar with, concern and mistrust. Oh, and did I mention everything hurts? Because it feels like my very soul has been torn apart and thrown back together only to be held in a vague shape by spit and dirt. It burned. But I could only hope it would pass in time. Who knew using all your powers at once and fighting mental partitions of yourself would lead to consequences?

  With my powers out of commission and body patched up by a glaring Ella, I was forced to face the horrors of the cave with nothing but my knives and untrusting team mates. But I didn't let it get to me. I had more important things to worry about, such as the hollowed-out floors filled with crude bone spikes stained with blood.

  While I'm sure the fall and subsequent impaling would have been fun, Mia was able to discover the trap before Noah walked into it through her Crawler's seismic sense. Purposeful jogging quickly turned into timid steps as we went deeper into the trap-riddled stone passages, walking along a narrow, winding path devoid of pitfalls or trip wires that, when stepped on, forced a stone club to fall from the ceiling. Or at least the one I poked with my spear did.

  Once the traps were located, it was easy to disarm them by setting them off prematurely or just avoiding them altogether. Until after a particularly sharp bend in the stone passage, we came across something new. Something, also most human, albeit in a pale grey-skinned, needle-toothed and pot-bellied kind of way. They cower at the sight of us, shying away from our lights and shielding their noiseless faces with their clawed hands. Dropping their crude spears, they fell to their knees in a sign of submission, crying out in soft tones that still managed to grate against my ears in their offbeat tunes.

  The pale humanoids were dressed in scraps of clothes that tied together shards of chitin and bone. The seven men wore little more than a loincloth and arm braces that did nothing to hide their bulging stomachs that stretched their skins to hang over their bony waists. The two women, on the other hand, wore far more clothes, with more chitin plates, almost like armour, to shield something small and fleshy-looking within their arms from our sight. I grip my knives tighter, half expecting something bad to happen, but unable to discern why my subconscious is so on edge, until a low murmur breaks me from my thoughts.

  "A baby," I hear Sam mutter from my side as he stares at the small group in concern. His comment makes me pause. I had no intention of hurting random, non-hostile life, especially not a baby. I loosen my grip on my knife and watch as the forefront male seems to understand Sam's words and mimics the words in an eerily perfect replica of his voice that sends shivers down my spine, "A baby."

  The words were picked up by the rest of the males as they poured out of the needle-filled mouths, all sounding exactly like Sam. Same voice, same tone, same facial expressions. It felt unnatural, like it triggered some buried instinct I couldn't quite place. Yet the strange people made no move to hurt us, so I kept my thoughts to myself as Sam laughed with joy and slowly approached the alien group. His laugh was mimicked and echoed across the cave's walls as one of the pale males offered a necklace of carved bones and an unknown stringy substance.

  Sam reached out his hand to take the gift, but just before he touched it, my hand found itself on his shoulder, pulling him back. He turns as we both look at my hand in surprise as I try to figure out what was setting me on edge.

  "What? Why?" He asks in confusion only for the words to be picked up by the pale ones. "What? Why?"

  It was only then that I realised what set me on edge. The threads tying their clothes together were the unmistakable bright colours of human clothing, dulled by the darkness. The necklace is made from sinew, something I had not seen on any of the bugs and monsters down here. My fingers tighten against the handle of my blade as the sound of Sam's voice starts to distort into that of a hysterical man and a crying woman. "What are you? Why are you doing this? Help? Somebody help!?!"

  I feel a presence press against my mind, urging me to sleep, to run, to cry, to scream. The compulsions screeched through my mind as the pale humanoids lunged forward like a tide of savage moonlight. I pull Sam backwards just before the one holding the necklace could pull him into the horde. More of the pale creatures emerged from cracks in the walls, followed by stalkers like we found earlier today. They seemed to melt out of the walls like ghostly shadows and join their brethren in charging at us.

  Had this been a couple of days ago, the mental attack would have been enough to throw me off balance, but after battling Titans in my mind, pushing out the stalkers felt like child's play in comparison. It was only then that I noticed that the reinforcements were significantly fewer in number, consisting of only three more pale ones and four stalkers. That wasn't to say we were in a good position; I still couldn't use my powers, and we were significantly outnumbered. But that didn't stop the first pale one crumpling like a folded chair when I jammed a rose steel knife through its heart.

  A quick twist of my body allows me to dodge a crude spear aimed at my lungs, but before I can capitalise on the opening, Mia calls me back to get into line with the others. Tongue clicking in annoyance, I hastily retreat until I am in line with the grim-faced Noah and pained Sam, both of whom had Mia's hand on their back, no doubt assisting them in fighting off the mental attacks.

  Before long, both were fighting at full capacity while bullets of water sailed through the air and into the slowly decreasing horde. For all their cunning and traps, the pale ones weren't skilled fighters; unrefined strikes and sloppy jabs rained down upon our line haphazardly, only causing real damage to me through my scraps of armour and lack of functioning ability. But with Ella's soothing power coursing through my veins, I could keep fighting with gritted teeth as long as they didn't stab something important.

  Things were going well, until they weren't. One of the pale mothers had reached the front of the line to stand face to face with a distraught Sam, who was staring at the baby in its arms with disbelief, unaware of the bone knife aimed for his gut.

  Tangled up in spears as I was, I wasn't able to reach him in time, not before a bullet of water slammed into the Mother, forcing it back into the males behind it with a screech of pain and hatred. Then, in a shocking turn of events, it grasped its baby by the leg like it was a sack of flour and threw it at Sam in full force.

  The sheer absurdity of the act caused a laugh to break free from my throat before I caught sight of the "baby" unravelling into a tangled mess of fleshy cords and mucus that latched onto Sam like a net made of leeches. As if spurred on by the weird baby-throwing strategy, the males roared a battle cry and attacked us with renewed vigour.

  Mia called out a set of panicked instructions, causing Noah and I to spread out to cover the tunnel while Sam was pulled backwards and replaced by Ava. Her kinetic hammer struck into the approaching mob, spraying acidic-smelling blood into the air.

  A strange hacking cough caught my attention, prompting me to glance over in time to see a male's bulging belly contort and rapidly shrink as it sprayed a thick layer of acid onto Noah's shield, melting off layers of metal and releasing putrid smoke into the air. My momentary distraction adds another cut along my shoulder, making me turn to face one of the few males left as it pulls its spear out of my bleeding wound.

  Mia's triumphant laugh echoes behind me just as one of the stalkers at the back lashes out at its comrades, and a crawler falls from the ceiling into the chaos. What little order they had quickly fell apart, and the horde was quickly whittled down to a few twitching corpses.

  With the immediate threat gone, we quickly started the long process of extracting crystals and freeing Sam. Usually, this would be a quick affair, but with my powers tapped out, we had to do things the old-fashioned way. I ended up dissecting the corpses while Noah freed Sam, and Mia explained how she used the possession attempt to invade the monster's mind and take control of the stalker, something about a door being two-way.

  They had a monster crystal in their head, about the size of the spider's gem. Sadly, with the dead matter stubbornly staying solid, the extraction process made me feel a bit nauseous as I dug through the corpses, grey matter and shards of bones. The others weren't super happy gutting human-looking creatures, but I managed to sick it with minimal dry heaving. Their insides look similar to those of a human, from what I have seen in a textbook, so I also took their engorged guts for their stomach acid to try and train my body against acidic substances in the future, much to the disgust of my friends.

  Once everything was cleared up and collected, we headed out into the winding tunnels to hunt down more monsters. We came across a few more groups of the pale ones and dispatched them with ease once Mia got the hang of taking over the stalkers and using them to attack from behind. After a few more waves of monsters, we finally set up camp for the night.

  By now, a small spark of energy had reformed within my core, and I was able to discover a fast and effective way to make sure all bladed weapons were razor sharp by melting off little pieces of the blade to leave behind the sharpened edge. When I tested the new blades, they easily cut through joints in the spider's legs, but needed to be resharpened after a few cuts. I tried to call it edging, but was quickly shut down by the others and Mia's laughter. I was also able to cobble together a slightly better suit of armour before my power ran out and my core once again pulsed with a dull ache of longing.

  With everyone's gear improved and sharpened, Noah, Sam, Ava, and I started the painful process of rapid adaptation. Which is a polite way of saying we started beating the shit out of ourselves and each other and causing self-inflicted injuries while microdosing on spider and cave Crawler's venom. It was a gruelling, painful endeavour, but Ella kept her word and made sure we were healed up every few minutes as we tore ourselves and each other apart. Even with the healing, we called a stop to it after a long, horrible hour for a much-needed rest.

  The others went to bed while I took my first watch, and I used the opportunity to eat the crystals I had gathered and monitor the energy as it purified my body. I was able to channel the current around my body a second time, as opposed to the initial one that came naturally, before I lost control of the mysterious power. Since the whole Titan fiasco, fewer and fewer impurities were coming out of my body, but it still felt like it was doing something, even if I didn't know what.

  After running out of crystals to munch on, I taped my mouth and nose shut to develop my blood's oxygen-carrying capabilities. When Sam finally took the second watch, I went to sleep in my makeshift gimp mask on a carefully made bed and passed out from the long day of fighting and training.

  I woke up that morning to Ella's face looking over me with her soft hand on my shoulder as she let me know it was time to get up. Crunching my nose up at the contact I didn't initiate, I nodded and packed up my gear as neatly as I could before taking off my gimp mask and getting back to work fixing my armour with my still diminished power supply. It seemed to be recovering slowly after almost melting me from the inside out. I still didn't know what had truly happened or even why, but I had been keeping a close eye on my mind palace and the core of my power for any signs of disturbance.

  'At this rate, it will take another two days for my powers to be fully charged’, I lamented internally as we once again began our long trek through the tunnels. It wasn't all bad news, though. After all the disgusting crystals and unpleasant body reactions, I could finally feel a difference in my body. I felt stronger, faster and more reactive. I bounced on the balls of my feet and threw a few punches into the air to test the enhancements, grinning wildly at how it reacted. If I had to put a number on it, I was about 50% better than before I started eating the crystals.

  Obviously, I am pulling these numbers out of my ass and have no idea what I am really doing. Nevertheless, I was happy with the results and looked forward to finding more crystals to consume to further improve myself.

  Along the way, Mia checked our minds one by one for any demons or stakers, but didn't find anything out of the ordinary, and we were once again off into the bowels of the Earth to hunt down monsters and loot to horde.

  Luckily, it didn't take long to find more creatures of the deep to occupy our time, and we quickly came across another black moss bat cave, filled to the brim with resources to harvest. Innately, the sight of the familiar landscape caused my body to break out in a cold sweat as memories of burning myself alive filled my mind, but I was able to squash the involuntary reaction within my mind palace with the excitement of what I could do with a volatile substance that exploded.

  Still, the cave warranted caution, so we retreated to set up our stage for battle. Most of my remaining power was used to narrow the stone passage as much as possible, allowing Noah and his shield to take up most of the remaining space while the rest of us supported him. It didn't take long for Mia's sacrificed stalker to trigger the tsunami of ravenous bats that ripped it to shreds before breaking against our entrenched position. The fight was long, but ultimately most of the time was spent butchering the bats for their crystals in a production line to try and make the process faster, if more mundane. To conserve my limited power, we cut off the heads of 96 monsters and stored 16 each in our inventories, intending to extract the crystals at a more efficient time.

  As for what I used my saved power on? Explosions. I honestly wouldn't know where to start in my drained state if humans didn't have a long history of manipulating the elements to cause as much damage and harm with as little effort as possible. As it stood, I had a long list of ideas for how to make things go boom in truly dramatic fashion. But I only had so much energy to go around, so I had to think of ways to reuse anything I made. Enter the blunderbuss, an early rendition of a shotgun, which, when you peel away all the decorations, was essentially a tube that fired shrapnel in the direction you pointed it. Reusable and relatively easy to make. If you ignore the firing mechanism, that is. I didn't have the knowledge or time to replicate an 18th-century firing mechanism, but I did have modern-day lighters I could repurpose for the firing contraption.

  So with these random bits of knowledge floating around in my head and limited time and resources, I present the boom stick. Because it was quite literally a stick that went boom. Stainless steel tube filled with black moss and shrapnel, a crudely made handle made from reshaped chitin, and a poorly made, if not effective, semi internal firing mechanism attached to a cord that, when pulled, would rapidly spin the flint and steel to produce sparks and then the boom. In the high likelihood that the firing dodad is destroyed in the, hopefully, controlled explosion, it can simply be replaced with another sliver of flint and steel from a lighter.

  Was it perfect? No. Did it work? No idea! I don't want to deafen everyone and waste a firing mechanism, so it's been added to my ever-growing list of gadgets to use if stabbing doesn't do the trick. But now that everyone was fully bored with me making a shitty gun and looking at me expectantly, I finally packed up my gear, and we once again trekked through the monochrome tunnels of stone.

  Which was precisely when we came across another adversary, a large, heavily armoured, worm-like creature, the size of a small car that chewed through stone as if it were swimming through solid matter. My sharpened blades barely cut through its thick, grey armour. Noah tried his best to breach its defences with his hammer, with little to no success, leading us to restrain the great beast while Ava drowned it with her water manipulation. After all was said and done, it wasn't that hard a battle, as the worm was slow and didn't have any means to attack other than chewing in our general direction.

  But what it lacked in offence, it certainly made up for in defence, which means some of its armoured plating found its way into my inventory. Its crystal was larger than anything else we had seen within the caves, roughly twice the size of the spider crystals, so I traded two pale one crystals for it and summoned it within my mouth as we moved on.

  And move on we did, we tore our way through more groups of spiders, barnacles, stone worms, cave crawlers, pale ones and another water cave before we finally came across another, more interesting challenge.