POV Jacob
We spent the last few hours of that day practising, getting into defensive positions whenever Sam or Mia would yell out monsters. I would collapse part of the ceiling while the rest took out shields and weapons to make a shield wall. Without any real monsters to fight while we drilled It felt like we were LARPING at first. But we quickly got the hang of it, not dying and protecting those we cared about was a quick way for us to get over our teenage embarrassment and develop code words related to different positions and what creature we were going to face to save time and add to our efficiency.
After running through a few drills and fighting through a nest of cave spiders we eventually came across a new type of monster. At first, we just came across traps in the form of pitfalls or bone clubs that would swing from the ceiling when you stepped on a wire both of which we located easily with two people with access to enhanced senses and my own developing void sense/echolocation ripoff.
Once the traps were located it was easy to disarm them by setting them off prematurely or just turning everything into liquid and making clear hand and foot holds out of the pitfalls. Eventually, we found what was making the traps, short light grey skinned humanoids in crude chitin armour. We tried talking to them at first but they just bared their needle like teeth in a snarl and tried to skewer us on shoddily made spears of bone and rock.
Taking that as a sign that they were hostile I melted their weapons and butchered the small group of the newly named pale ones to find that they had a monster crystal in their head similar in size to the spider. We didn't take it as meaning they were mindless beasts that couldn't think past their next meal, just that they were hostile and needed to be put down. Or I did at least, the others weren't super happy about fighting and gutting human-looking creatures but I didn't really care, plus a crystal was a crystal that I could eat or sell. Their insides look similar to that of a human, from what I have seen in a textbook or online so I also took their stomachs for their stomach acid to try and train my body against acidic substances in the future, much to the disgust of my friends.
We came across a few more groups of the pale ones and dispatched them with ease once their traps, weapons and armour were rendered useless by my abilities and I was able to trade for 11 of their crystals before we set up camp for the night.
As previously discussed I set up the defences while Ava cleaned up everyone's gear so that I could fix and strengthen anything I could. I also discovered 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 shaped 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.
With everyone's gear improved and sharpened Noah, Sam, Ava and I started the painful process of trying to rapidly adapt. We did this by beating the shit out of ourselves and each other in spares and self-inflicted injuries while microdosing on spider and cave crawler's venom. It was a horrible and 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 gruelling hour for a much needed rest.
Even if the others set up their sleeping area and did their dishes I was still not done for the day. I decided to start eating some of the new crystals I had gathered through killing or trading to see if the small body improvements from last time were a fluke. I started with the smallest bat crystals and ate them two at a time after confirming that they had the same effect as the cave crawler crystals, albeit to a lesser extent. After eating 11 of the bat crystals and throwing up a lot I noticed that the cap off for me to absorb the strange energy was once again 10 crystals.
When I tried again with the leech crystals I managed to absorb another 10 crystals of power before the 11th didn't do anything, leading me to believe that I could only eat 10 crystals from each species for whatever reason. By that point, the others were trying to sleep and for some reason weren't appreciative of me vomiting continuously so I agreed to consume the spider and pale one’s crystals when we woke up again.
So to kill time on my first watch, I lightly practised with my abilities and 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 at the contact I didn't initiate I nodded and proceeded to pack up my gear as neatly as I could before taking off my gimp mask and proceeding to get back to work eating the monster crystals.
The spider crystals were the worst so far, almost putting my body into shock as it trembled and spewed my guts out. But I powered through much to everyone's disgust but there was no way I was letting a bit of temporary mind numbing agony stop me from getting stronger even if it was by only a small amount. With 10 spider crystals down I started scoffing down the disgusting pale one’s crystals and when I was finally done I started to notice a real difference in my body.
After all the disgusting crystals and violent 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 and grinned wildly at how it reacted. If I had to put a number on it as Noah asked I would say I was about 50% better including the boost from the cave crawlers yesterday.
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.
Once camp was packed up Mia checked our minds one by one and once again complained about how my mind worked, but didn't find anything out of the ordinary. With that out of the way we headed off again into the bowels of the earth to look for monsters to kill and loot to horde.
That was when we came across another adversary, a large heavily armoured worm like creature that chewed through stone and had thick armoured plating that my sharpened blades barely cut through. Noah tried his best to breach its defences with his hammer with little to no success leading us to us as a group restraining the great beast while Ava drowned it with her water manipulation. After all was said and done it wasn't that hard of a battle as the worm was slow and didn't have any means to attack other than chew in our general direction.
But what it lacked for in offence it certainly made up for in defence so I took some of its armoured plating as well as its crystal that was larger than anything else we had found within the caves. It was roughly twice the size of the spider crystals so I traded two pale one crystals for it and saved it for our next stop to consume.
Speaking of pale ones we came across two more large groups of them with some of the smaller ones riding the cave crawlers, even so, they were quickly dealt with once their traps and weapons were disabled, and then we just had to dismember their bloodied corpses before moving on. And move on we did, we tore our way through more groups of spiders, stone worms, cave crawlers, and another water cave before we finally came across another challenge.
“I am not tanking that thing its the size of a fucking bus!” Noah yells, referring to the large mother spider queen thing that we were currently facing in their web filled layer, covered in large stalagmites and stalactites connected with bridges of white webbing. The grey stone that had dominated our sight for the last few days had a curious metallic sheen dotted around at random that sparkled with the light of the glow moss.
“Please, it's like a minivan at best.” I laugh out while gutting a new, hairy variant of the cave spider before It can shoot its barb-like hair into the air to embed into our skin and clog up our lungs. “You could fit like 10 kids in there max.”
The cave tarantula died due to its lack of chitin armour to defend it from my blades causing me to move on to the next in the horde of cave spiders and tarantulas that were protecting their queen/mother.
“Ok, but hear me out, maybe we shouldn't put kids in the large spider monster made from nightmares?” Mia asked while she and her pets held part of the shield wall we had made at the mouth of the spider queen's layer. Ideally we would retreat deeper into the caves to make a bottle neck against such a large number of monsters but the tunnel had a particularly high ceiling that would only give the wall crawling creatures another direction to attack from.
“Don't make me slap you again Jacob!” Ella says between shooting arrows into the tarantulas that were scuttling towards us.
“I would only be so lucky.” I laugh out while sinking a cave spider into the floor and using its body to slow the incoming wave of its friends. “But seriously…” I disembowel another Spider, “We can't keep them and the queen at bay at once,” I use my machete to cleave through a spider's legs and impale its eyes with the blades hooked end.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
“No shit, it's almost down from its webb…Oh, fuck off!” Mia yells in annoyance as she pushes a cave spider back with her shield towards her pets so they can rip it apart.
“Dodge tank?” I ask, almost giddy at the thought of facing the mini bus-sized monster while surrounded by its children. ‘I wonder how big its crystal is?’
I hear the confirmation from my friends that it was properly the best course of action for the situation and slip into the spirit realm to bypass the horde of spiders only to come face to face with a 2 metre tall wraith with the body of an enlarged praying mantis and the head of a piranha with a mouth filled with multiple layers of jagged teeth.
“Any more tricks and tips?” I ask the unholy mismatch of animals as I dodge its scythe-like limb by a hair's breadth only to get a roar in response. “Will take that as a no,” Not having time to face off against the wraith I try to go around the creature only to almost have my head removed from my body by the incredibly fast freak of nature that appeared in front of me to block off any means of escape.
Out of reflex I pop out of the pain inducing realm and find myself amidst the horde of arachnids causing me to be stabbed and bitten by their long legs and fangs before I can get out of the swarm. With a grunt of effort and a hiss of pain, I jump atop the closed spider, forcing it to buckle to the floor and start sprinting towards the spider queen.
I jump between the spirit and physical realm with selfless abandon as I weave my way through and around the wraith and spider horde before being forced to stop as the queen screeches and lets out a thick torrent of webbing from her mouth. Rolling to the side I manage to avoid most of the thick webbing and liquify the threads that would have pinned me to the cave floor.
The next second sees me jumping into the spirit realm to avoid its 8 five metre long spear-like legs that descended upon me like a vengeful angel only to see the wraith rushing towards me as soon as it noticed my presence.
“Ha…hahahaha, now this is more like it!” I scream out, inhaling as much of the toxic miasma as I could before returning to the physical realm and dancing through the scuttling legs of the behemoth that now that I was closer really was the size of a bus, not that I would admit it to Noah, with its body being approximately 3 metres tall and wide with thick grey chitin armour and eight blood red eyes perched atop its spiky head making them look like jewels upon a crown. Its weapon-like appendages stretched out 5 metres each making it a colossal beast with a long reach with a home advantage.
A Tarantula appears in my void sense and releases its barbed hairs at me as I try my hardest to not be crushed or impaled by the queen’s legs but I just grin wider and lure the queen over the approaching spiders causing her to kill several of her own children while I just melt the barbs that get caught on my person.
By the time the queen stopped her single-minded pursuit of me to figure out what was going on, she had already killed numerous of her offspring. Her brief pause and cry of anguish gave me time to finally fight back. I quickly got to work hacking into one of her many leg joints with my sharpened bush hook machete making it bleed and start to collapse onto its own weight. Just as the queen pulled away I finally released the toxic Miasma into the wound making it infest the exposed blood and flesh with its otherworldly properties.
Which is just fancy talk for saying it caused the wound to worsen as the muscle structure unrevealed into a spasming mess of gore. The queen, understandably, flinches back and shifts her mass to her other legs that I was already running towards just in time to liquefy the stone floor. The shifting of weight made the queen put more pressure on her other legs which helped drive the leg deeper into the stone and trapping it within.
With a leg trapped and another hanging uselessly things were looking up at me as I started to hack into one of the legs' many joints, until they very much weren't. Just as I almost got through the leg on my fifth swing the queen suddenly sprayed copious amounts of webbing from every nook and cranny of its armour. This did three things, first, it stopped the bleeding from the two damaged legs, secondly, it trapped my machete within the webbing as it struck the leg, lastly, it trapped me just long enough that I wouldn't be able to dodge a pointed leg from piercing my skull.
Acting on reflex I jump into the spirit realm to avoid the deadly blow without my machete. Quickly grabbing a large modified kitchen knife from one of the many sheaths strapped across my body I barely block a slash from the wraith only for the knife to shatter upon impact.
The blow numbed my left arm but I managed to roll onto the floor and come back up with an axe made of stone and shattered knife pieces that I managed to embed into the monster's eye. Or at least I would have if it did absolutely no damage and left my arm wide open for the wraith to slice through my armour and into the tender flesh of my right arm.
‘Rude. Why didn't it cut?’ I look again a see no viable mark from a sharpened axe to the skull and felt cheated before I had to jump back to the physical realm to avoid being disembowelled only to find myself on the receiving end of the mother of all bitch slaps from an enraged spider queen.
Instinctively I try to harden my own body with my power but it just makes my body spasm and leave behind a trail of vomit and blood as I am flung through the air and into the queen's nest of webbing several metres off the ground.
“Owey…” I cough violently, blood spraying from my mouth. “That was one hell of a combo, are you guys working together?” I ask the spider queen as she hobbles towards me, her two inoperable legs doing little to slow her down when the other 6 are working just fine. “Because I feel like that's cheating.”
I try to move my right arm only to be reminded of the large cut now decorating it by a sharp pain coursing through my nerves. With a grunt, I free my left arm without melting the webbing holding me up and wince when the motion makes me realise that several of my ribs are broken. Ignoring the pain temporarily, I retrieve a bottle of healing tonic from my inventory and pour it onto the open wound before ripping some of the webbing holding me up and using it to bandage my wound in an effort to stop the bleeding.
I throw the empty glass bottle at the incoming queen but miss completely causing it to shatter harmlessly against the ground, before retrieving another bottle of tonic and dowing it in two large gulps. The tonic didn’t heal my numerous injuries but I hoped they would help me finish off the oversized bitch so I could eat her corpse.
“Right, plan, a plan would be good. Attacking the legs didn’t work, the spirit realm has an unkillable cunt. Soooo,” I cough up another mouth full of blood. “get on its back and ride it like a bull until I can kill it.” While I rambled like a resident of the fun hotel with grippy socks I managed to free myself of the webbing and slowly start climbing up the nest with my one working arm and a dream.
A few moments and metres later I felt the webbing tremble as the queen began to climb her way up towards me with murderous intent. With a grin and a cough of blood, I turn around to see the giant monster only a metre away from me, its fangs dripping a corrosive green venom that melted any webbing that it touched and glowing red eyes filled with hatred.
‘Corrosive, acid, stomach acid, I have some of that. This is going to be fun. Or I’m going to die. Same difference really’ With little hesitation, I will my power to start melting off the large section of webbing holding me up on the nest. In the next moment, I took out the several bloated stomachs from my inventory, melting the stomach lining and throwing the stomach acid at the queen's eyes, blinding her to my falling body surrounded by webbing.
A brief moment of falling later and a jolting impact later I find myself stuck to the queen's head with her spiky crown digging into my back through the torn up armour and held up the now not-so-loose webbing and my still functioning left hand. “Hahaha, I can’t believe that worked, Hahaha. Ok, now what?”
While I had blinded the queen and managed to get on top of her large spiky head I still needed a way to kill the bitch while she thrashed around trying to dislodge me from my perch, her long legs moving around frantically until we find ourselves out of the nest and onto the cave floor. “When in doubt, go for the eyes I guess.” With that in mind, I use the webbing to slowly crawl up the monster's head, over the spikes and through pools of acid, while it does its darndest to shake me off and crush me like a bug.
Normally I like to think I was pretty good at climbing but with broken ribs and a dysfunctional arm every move was agony and the adhesive properties of the webbing that covered the Queen from her earlier self defensive move was doing most of the work.
‘Come just a few more moves and I will be at the eyes.’ I grumble while holding on for dear life and slowly shuffling up the head until I was finally at my prize, the eyes. The weak point of most creatures I had come across so far. Without further ado, I start to frantically stab with one of my remaining knives and good arm into one of the bulbous orbs making it pop into a disgusting goo yet, I could not get the purchase to go much deeper even with using the solidified goo to lengthen my blade.
“Why won't you die, you know you want to! Great, now I’m talking to myself, fuck you spider!” using what little remained of my energy levels and functioning body I managed to position myself so I was crouched above the damaged eye held on by nothing but the thin strands of webbing I retrieved my spear and ram it into the empty socket repeatedly, going deeper and deeper until the great beast finally stops thrashing around and collapses on the cold stone floor and stops moving.
Quickly checking I can interact with the dead matter I promptly collapse and down two more bottles of healing tonic. I lay there for a solid minute before I heard a slightly panicked yell from Noah. “You alive up there Jacob?”
With a grunt and a herculean effort of will I managed to sit up atop the corpse to see my friends killing the last few dregs of the spider horde. “Still have my mortal coil, don't worry about me, babes. You guys alright?” I call out across the cave towards Noah and the rest of my friends.
I see Sam stab into the last cave spider, finally finishing off the horde and clearing the cave of hostiles. “Yeah we’re a little bashed up but all good,” Calls out Mia in response. I give her a quick glance and notice she has two spiders standing around with her pets while Ella heals her. ‘Impressive, not sure how she managed that in the middle of all that but good work.’
“Good, good, when possible, could I have another heal? I’m pretty fucked up over here.” I let out a chuckle and lay back down against the spiky head of the dead queen, trying not to put strain on my multiple wounds.
With everyone out of immediate danger, I let out a sigh of relief and relaxed my broken body for a moment before letting out a small giggle. ‘I’m starting to enjoy these big fights, now I just need to get good at them.’