Jacob POV

  You'd think having an adaptive body would make it more resilient or faster to heal after all the abuse mine has been through, and yet here I am, yet again, waiting for my cells to knit back together with the help of Ella's healing magic mumbo jumbo. I know I shouldn't really complain, I imagine most people don't have anyone to heal them and would be dead at least twice over in my shoes, but damn is it annoying to be at someone else's mercy. Not to mention incredibly dull. I wasn't exactly the embodiment of health after falling from the sky in a corpse filled with superheated plasma. I wasn't even fully healed before I had the shit kicked out of me by the crazy snake woman demon hybrid, and it was taking over 2 hours to get my body back into fighting shape. Which, all in all, was incredible, considering I've spent that long just waiting for my doctor's appointments in the past.

  But it didn't mean I liked the wait or the enforced human contact of Ella's hand on my lap, providing said healing. I wasn't able to do much other than speculate what happened in my mind, with Mia and me talking incessantly about it before realising we were just talking in circles, and nobody knew what we were discussing. We had no idea what happened, why, how, or even who. The events appeared to go deeper than we realised, with chaos happening behind the scenes, trying to drag us down into the depths of the unknown. The only good things that came from the encounter were the minor body enhancements from eating the crystals, along with cultivation theories and a research plan to test them, but also access to my mind palace.

  As it turns out, being dragged there by our friendly neighbourhood hive mind has unlocked a part of my mind I didn't even realise was there. It wasn't easy to get to; even by retracing my mental steps, it still felt like I was trying to meditate my way through a hedge maze. It took me a while to find my mental World again and be bathed in the chaos of the storm. So, I spent the first few minutes of my healing treatment, repeatedly making my way back to my mind palace while attempting to calculate how my internal perception of time differed from the real World. Thoughts happen quickly, and it was no surprise that time moved faster in my mind, making the original 2-hour wait feel like 4.

  But for once, I didn't complain about the wait. Instead, I spent it frantically panicking as I tried to refine my mind palace, and failing miserably. It was chaos, and trying to influence it in any way felt like trying to empty a lake with a fork. A complete waste of time. So I changed my approach, leaned into the chaos and panic. If anyone or anything else made it into my mind, I wanted them to be as confused and uncomfortable as possible. Winds of all the nausea and disgust I had ever felt, mirror mazes that copied and pasted my crumbling raft across the vast ocean, pop-up ads of hour-long video essays I watched before the collapse, projected by flocks of birds that were programmed to chase intruders at a distance.

  I had more ideas, but as it stood, the miniature prototype in the palm of my ego's hand was already struggling to be held together by my will. I wasn't exactly used to creating or maintaining mental constructs that lasted even after I left my mind palace. Which leads me to my next experiment, trying to improve my mental facilities. I didn't have much to base this on, but I assumed that if I could improve the efficiency and security of the cognitive manifestations of my thoughts, emotions, memories, etc., then it could translate into tangible improvements in my mind. And it's not like I had anything else to do while I was healing or sleeping in the future, for that matter. So I got to work slowly and meticulously gathering my memories from after the wheels and organising them into an overly complicated, well-organised filing system.

  It was a slow and tedious process that I only just scratched the surface of when I was pulled from my meditation by Noah's shout of surprise. I come back to reality, knife already in hand as I spring to my feet, only to see Noah staring at the vast amount of meat that now surrounds him. I glance around the rest of the cavern, but the only other thing of note is the now-missing blue inventory cube.

  I look back towards Noah and the piles of food surrounding him. No, not food. My stomach twists and churns as I scrunch up my face at the unmistakable sight of human corpses. Some were skinned, most were cut up as if done by a butcher, and there were even a few heads left that stared blankly off into the distance with dead, vacant eyes.

  "Who keeps cut-up corpses in their inventories?" I hear Noah yell in a mixture of confusion and disgust.

  I hear gagging and sounds of discomfort from my friends as I approach one of the heads that sat in a slowly growing puddle of dark blood on the floor. Crouching down next to the head, I ignore the smell and the stiff coldness to peel back the lips to reveal white teeth. 'They weren't undead.'

  "That was from the snake woman's inventory?" Ava asks in horror.

  I look over to the large leg to my side and notice the missing meat and smooth cut marks upon the flesh.

  "Yeah, I opened it by accident, and this shit came out," Noah says in a softer voice as he looks at the butchered human flesh.

  "Well, shit, did anyone else have cannibalism on their apocalypse bingo card?" I mutter, feeling cold and numb on the inside, 'I was almost one of these poor bastards.'

  "Oh, for fuck sake, Jacob, now is not the time!" Sam yells, his enhanced hearing picks up my mutter as if I yelled it out for the World to hear, as he glares between the dead snake woman and the contents of her inventory. I just ignored the outburst and began picking through the contents of the dead woman's inventory. I had no use for the human meat, but the crystals and water were quickly stored away along with anything else of use. Once the inventory's contents were picked clean and the corpse parts were discarded like leftover food scraps, I headed back to Ella to resume my healing as she refused to walk among the frayed limbs.

  For a while, we were silent, not sure how to voice our discomfort and fear. The dead and Crawlers were one thing, but putting down a human that was unwillingly twisted by Gods for their amusement was another. Not to mention, we were now being hunted by intelligent, blood thirsty cannibals with more abilities and variety than you can shake a stick at. It was troubling. I had no problem killing the woman who was once a human; hell, I enjoyed the fight to a certain extent. What did that say about me? Did I have looser ethical concerns than the brainwashed mutated humans? How would the others react if I had to put more of the rabid animals down? Would I be seen as worse than the mutants, would they out me for putting down threats before they could develop? Could I handle being alone or becoming an apathetic monster that killed without a care in the World? I think I knew the answer, and it scared me. But time stops for no one, and we were quickly heading out of the large cave and back into the stone tunnels we had come from. Luckily, Mia had noted our route, so we managed to backtrack to our original path and continued deeper into the Earth.

  The sombre mood seemed to hang over the group as we hunted and killed more Crawlers and Barnacles. Conversation was scarce, so I focused on developing my echolocation training. Occasionally, I would get bored and try to bend various pieces of stone or metal by trying to find the sweet spot between liquid and solid so the object wouldn't shatter or melt under the pressure, but I was making slow progress.

  Despite my training and the increasingly large number of cave crawlers we encountered, I was quickly becoming bored. Again. Which was why I was so intrigued to find a small fork in the tunnel and a dark pool of water that led into a channel of gloomy, frigid liquid.

  After much debating, I finally managed to convince the others and myself that letting me go into the dark watery abyss alone was an excellent idea. I even showed them my fake air tank and claimed I could make air pockets along the way if it was worth exploring. Why did I do this? I have no idea. I hate tight spaces and the cold, so it wasn't exactly a winning combination. Even though I can breathe the murky water just fine, I still felt as if I'm suffocating and the tunnels are slowly closing in around me, blocking off my exit and restricting my movements.

  I was even on the verge of a mental breakdown, fear gripping my heart and blood running cold as panicked breath of water came in short, sharp bursts that did nothing to calm the tightening knot in my stomach. I was in the midst of trying to enter my mind palace to get control of myself when a sharp pain shot through my exposed ankle as what felt like hundreds of needle-like teeth pierced through the thin skin and scratched the bone of the joint. Quickly sending a pulse of my budget echolocation through my foot, I sense the head of what appears to be a large eel attached to my left ankle.

  I spin around in the water and shine my light towards my lower leg to reveal a darkish brown segmented worm-looking creature with specks of red dotted around the head. Its thick, wrinkled body pulsed and contracted as it drank my blood and wiggled around my leg, trying to wrap its elongated body around my calf.

  'Why is it always the ugly things trying to eat me?' I internally grumble, lifting my leg towards my head with one hand while the other holds the flashlight. I bit down on the leech/eel-looking creature trying to feast on my life juice like it was an all-you-can-eat buffet. My enhanced jaws and teeth rip into its rubbery flesh as my mouth is filled with the taste of its foul brain matter 'I guess they could say the same, though.' I grin as I spit out the crystal and put it into my inventory, but pause as I watch the disgusting blood and grey matter float in chunks throughout the water.

  'I probably shouldn't have put blood in the water with blood-thirsty monster leech eels around, huh?' As if reading my mind, three more monstrous parasites swam through the murky depths towards me, their slimy bodies glistening in the torchlight. "Bring it on you worm looking cunts!" I try to yell into the depths, but it comes out garbled as I solidify a tight lair of water around my ankle wound and kick my body through the water towards my would-be assailants.

  Once I was close enough, I solidified the water surrounding the closest leech head into a muzzle and let it slam into my body as I stabbed my knife into its flesh and slid it lengthwise along its belly, gutting the oversized leech before storing its still-warm corpse into my inventory.

  The second leech eel was drawn into my waiting jaws through the suction of me inhaling litres of water, allowing me to bite through its flesh before forming a water spear tip on my wrist as the last leech eel tried to latch onto my bare skin, causing it to impale itself. With a snort, I collected the crystals from the corpses along with the leech in my inventory and continued my swim into the darkened depths with increased vigilance.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  I had six more encounters with groups of the newly named leech eels, bringing their death count up to 28, and covering my body with several more cuts and bite marks than I was happy with before I finally found the end of the narrow watery tunnel. It led into a cave roughly the size of two houses, filled with a few shallow pools of mysterious, glowing liquid.

  Oh, and a giant mutated slug-looking thing with nothing but murder behind its empty black eyes. Definitely can't forget the murder slug that sat taller than me with rolls of fat that stretched its acidic green skin with sharp spear-sized spikes coming out of its spine and a face full of serrated teeth. It looked somewhere between an adult leech eel and the barnacles we have been killing for a while now, leading me to believe they were all vaguely related somehow.

  "Hey, how's it going?" I politely ask the leech queen, king? Half expecting an answer, I bring a glass bottle filled with petrol, polystyrene and a rag out of my inventory. "I am sorry to intrude on your home, Miss Q. I'm just going to assume you're a lady from the apparent kids I've just murdered," I mutter the last part to myself as I shiver slightly from the cold air and damp clothes.

  Taking an unnecessary breath to start again, I suddenly find myself dodging out of the way of a bright red blur that just misses my throat and stabs into my right shoulder "Ow! What the fuck, Q!" I feel my shoulder crack as I fall to my knees in pain and drop the flashlight to the floor. I glance at my shoulder to see a spear-tipped, blood-red appendage swell as it drinks from my shoulder before tearing itself out of my arm and back into the leech queen's waiting mouth.

  "So not cool, Queeny." I hiss out, my vision blurring from the sudden blood loss as I collapse onto the floor and solidify my bleeding wound, to stop it from leaking my greatly diminished blood supply. I then liquify the stone floor under my torso and hold myself up with my three functioning limbs as I stare at the…Spear-tongued leech? 'What the fuck is this thing?'

  "Come on, you secret encounter mini boss looking ass, eat me!!" I yell at the oversized barnacle leech looking monstrosity and wiggle around on the floor until it opens its mouth and I see a flash of red before rolling to my side just in time to dodge the now stuck tongue that strained against the solidified stone. Without wasting time, I place the Molotov cocktail on the floor and light it with my functioning hand before throwing it at the creature, and miss by about a metre.

  "Well, that was a waste." I watched the flames for a moment before turning my head back towards the trapped tongue, which wiggled and shifted shapes as it slowly freed itself from the confines of its stone prison. Before I could think of a way to secure the tongue, I heard a loud thump, alerting me to the large beastie slowly jumping towards me, its fleshy body constricting before it launched its bulky frame like a spring. Luckily, it only made it half a metre or so in one jump. Unluckily, it had friends, or perhaps mates? Three barnacle tongues fell from the ceiling as a fourth and fifth fell from crevices in the ceiling to take up flanking positions, their fat bodies rolling along the floor to keep pace with the jumping Queen.

  "Huh, did I interrupt some kind of mating ritual? That's my bad. I can come back later?" I offer, knowing full well I didn't give two shits about blue balling the ugly fucks. I knew from experience I couldn't pull the ceiling barnacles down; they were latched on tight. But they were also dumb as fuck, relying on pure instinct to trap and pull up their prey, which is why the three dangaling appendages found themselves going up with nothing but clumps of toxic rose steel after I gave the non-sticky parts a good tug. Sadly, that did provide time for the Royal slug to free its weaponised tongue and take another pot shot towards me, narrowly scraping my left calf, tearing through a chunk of armour and flesh like it was nothing.

  I skid across the floor as my leg gives out from the sudden burst of pain, and I am once again forced to solidify my blood to stop myself from bleeding out. A hysterical laugh breaks free from my lips as I laugh away the pain while rolling across the floor, trying to keep the land-based barnacles between me and the spear-like tongue. It only gives me a moment, but that's all I needed. A slab of stone is lifted up from the floor, blocking me from sight and providing cover from the next barrage of strikes that chipped away at my stone shield. But I wasn't sitting ideally; a new slab took the place of the first, this one with a sludge-like surface that was able to trap the tongue long enough for me to start sawing at it like a madman as I bit and chewed on the rubbery flesh. A roar of pain escaped the Royal leech as I ripped and tore into the tongue. My right arm hung uselessly as my eyes darted around, watching the monsters roll and jump ever closer. Its beady black eyes filled with hate now as it got closer to the source of its pain.

  It was at this time that dull thuds filled the cave as the three roof-hanging barnacles dropped dead to the floor after trying to eat the toxic metal. A savage grin spread across my mouth as I bit into the tongue one last time, causing it to finally be torn in two and spray blood everywhere as the Spear-tongued leech was finally relieved of its weapon-like appendage.

  With its primary means of attack gone, and litres of blood now spilling from its mouth, the Royal tried to turn towards the glowing pools and heave its hulking form towards the mysterious liquid as fast as it could. As tempted as I was to let it interact with the liquid on its own to see what it would do, I couldn't risk it getting some kind of power-up. So, with a sigh, I inhale, flooding my body with oxygen as my superhuman lungs fill my cells with energy, allowing them to push harder and faster.

  Heat emanates from my body as I rush towards the rolling barnacles and ram my rose steel blade deep into their brains in a sickening squelch. Vaulting over the second corpse, I find myself beside the Royal just before it reaches the glowing liquid.

  Without wasting a moment, I begin sinking its screeching body into stone and weaving rock ropes around its protruding spines, locking it in place. Once it was unable to escape, I proceeded to leave a myriad of shallow and deep cuts across its body just in case it managed to break free.

  When I was satisfied that it had been successfully trapped and weakened, I was finally able to take a look at the strange liquid that slowly changed colour along with a spiky moss that grew at the bottom of the small ponds. Not knowing what it would do, I formed a stone bowl and filled it with the mysterious glowing liquid before heading back towards my most definitely willing test subject. "Are you ready for your medicine, Miss Q? Why am I talking to a leech?" I stare at the murder filled eyes of the mutated creature.

  "Don't look at me like that, Miss Q. I'm offering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become research assistant number zero seven. You know you want the magic moo juice; you were heading towards it after all. I just needed to find out what it does."

  Bowl in hand, I arrived in front of my would-be killer. I stood to watch it let out a pitiful hiss, belching out a mouthful of blood as it opened its teeth-filled maw, staining its chin a deeper red. "You would have my sympathy if you didn't try to kill me. Now, magic goo, what do you do?" I gently poured the bowl's contents into the newly promoted 07's mouth and watched as some of the shallower cuts stopped bleeding. Upon further experimentation, I found that the liquid healed cuts and scrapes faster when applied directly, and that consuming the liquid didn't instantly kill the strange creature. Sadly, drinking or applying too much appeared to weaken the effect on the injured area, even swelling the still bleeding wound.

  "Ella can monitor the effects in more depth if it's not an instant kill," I mutter softly before taking out my trusty red tinted knife and allowing it to drink deeply from the monster's head, its abused form twisting and writhing in pain as it gave its last breath.

  I spend a few more minutes within the glowing cave dismantling the corpses for their crystals, my clumps of rose-steel and the sticky parts of their tongues. I then drank my fill of the healing liquid, my magic mouth apparently allowing me to ignore the saturation effect that limited its effectiveness. The possibilities of this discovery leave me singing a happy tune as I down another bowl of the magical liquid.

  I used up one of the shallow pools for my personal healing and experiments, leaving me with three more pools of liquid that I quickly solidified and stored in my inventory, where they would remain solid until I took them out again. Then, with care, I extracted the glowing moss, making sure to remove the stone it was sitting on so as not to damage its roots or whatever it used to anchor itself. With my business within the cave finally completed, I dive back into the cold depths, retrieve the rope I trapped within the stone ceiling around my waist and start following it through the dark to return to my friends.

  Captain Alexander POV

  My people died in droves, taken up into the sky never to be seen again, their mouths open in silent screams. Jellyfish looking monstrosities filled the night sky with arcs of lightning and death, their tentacles numbering in the hundreds of thousands, forever searching for more victims to devour. We lost the university within minutes, flushed out of our homes and pushed onto the streets.

  So we ran. Ran underground like rats. Ran through the tunnels until those bastard tentacles stopped picking us off one by one. Ran through all the holes, chaos and passages. I lost most of my team in the chaos and endless maze of tunnels, and was only able to give the order to return to the university when they could over the radio before the signal cut out.

  So now I'm running through these dark tunnels with two soldiers and four civilians, fighting off giant centipedes that soaked up bullets with their erratic movement and tough shells. At least the undead still died to a good old-fashioned shot to the head. We spent the last few hours in a cave with glowing moss, eating the food from Jamie's enhanced inventory while Charlotte kept watch with her danger-sensing abilities. Meanwhile, the civilians proved once again that they were useless.

  They told us their abilities immediately, not that it was needed for the unnatural-looking extra arms coming out of Leo's torso. He looked inhuman and freakish, but I couldn't be picky given our current situation. Still, if we ever got back to a functioning society, I would station him and the other anthropoids away from me. The other three at least looked human, even if they didn't help in the slightest, happy to hide behind us and complain about how hard everything is and how they couldn't possibly kill a single fucking centipede like the worthless shits they are.

  But they could be used. They carry the less desirable monster parts, camping equipment and clean up after my soldiers, and if they could make use of their abilities, they could be even better. Tommy could track anything he touched, but for some godforsaken reason, he didn't bother to track anyone we could have met up with. John could apparently manipulate his bones, but said it was too uncomfortable to do so, the useless shit.

  Their one saving grace was Billie; she could gain people's knowledge by touching them and had taken the opportunity to learn what she could from the people at the university about their different powers and any self-defence experiences, creating a self-imposed boot camp for the previously overweight woman. Despite this, she still wasn't in the best shape, and we didn't trust her with firearms, so she just stayed hiding behind the soldiers, muttering to herself about the things she didn't want to forget. It was annoying, but it stopped us from zoning out in these endless tunnels.

  Despite Billie's potential, I truly believe each of the civilians would have died or, at the very most, be hiding at the tops of the tunnels waiting to be eaten alive or for the event to change without us. Which was why I was so surprised to round a corner and find a group of five teenagers in basic armour and improvised cold weapons standing around a dark pool of water at a fork in the tunnels.

  I look at the kids, staring at their young faces in confusion. They stare back, their body language filled with nervousness but no surprise. 'They knew we were coming.' I glance at the pool again and notice a length of rope going into its depths before looking back to the teen at the front of the group. He stood tall, with broad shoulders, a large shield that looked to be made from a modified door, and was fortified with twisted metal, which he used to hide the other teens. He held a blood-stained sledgehammer in his right hand and wore a determined expression on his face. 'Now he would make a good soldier'

  "Hello there." The only other male in the group said, poking his head around his larger comrade so we could see them. "My name is Sam…"