POV Noah

It took a few nerve racking minutes and a lot of painful moaning from Jacob before he finally made his way down from the bus sized spider, by melting his way through its corpse, and yes it was bus sized no matter what our resident manic said.

It took a fair bit of stumbling for Jacob to hobble his way over to us as we rushed over to try and stop him from hurting himself more. When we did manage to make our way over the piles of spider corpses and uneven flooring stained and slick with gore, Ava was able to hose down the limping mess of guts and reveal our beaten and battered friend. He was more bruise than man, his armour was shredded to reveal large scrapes, cuts and large splotches of freshly bruised skin. He could barely walk and hissed in pain when Sam touched his right shoulder to try to hold him steady on his way to Ella after his impromptu shower was finished.

Yet despite looking closer to death than the corpse behind him and his right arm being held together by spider silk he just continued to grin like a maniac as Ella finally managed to close the distance to heal him. It’s like he enjoyed the fact that he almost died. It was concerning, I knew he had a history of self-destructive suicidal behaviour, I was there when the ambulance arrived after all, but this looked different. It was concerning. He keeps throwing himself at danger with wild self abandon with a smile on his face all in the name of growing stronger, and while it was working I dread what to think what would happen if Ella wasn't able to heal him.

Despite my worries, he was growing at an unnatural rate regarding his skills, body and powers. It was almost frightening. Even as he became stronger I struggled to look past the borderline anorexic man with dead eyes from before the wheels changed everything. ‘At least he’s not depressed anymore, probably should have guessed that it would take the end of the world to cheer him up, should properly check up on him more though, make sure he's doing ok.’

It took a while for Jaocb to get patched up to the point where he could move without assistance, so I spent half an hour gathering the corpses and slowly making my way through their thick chitin armour to get to their crystals. Without the corpses melting into a foul liquid it took significantly longer, even as Ava and Sam helped me while Mia stood watch with her pets. With the crystals gathered and evenly distributed, with Jacob claiming the queen and 10 Tarantula crystals for his contribution, we sat down for a quick meal and rested before deciding on what to do next.

The only thing left to do within the cave, before we headed off, was to explore the large web-covered chamber to see if there were any resources promised by the event message. We did eventually find several cocoons filled with half dead monsters that we extracted and killed for the crystals, but our most interesting discovery came from the shiny parts embedded within the stone walls. Turns out it was a strange highly reflective metallic substance. Upon further experimentation we found that it was highly flexible yet wouldn't tear, despite how much we tried, reminding us of a heavily tear-resistant aluminium foil.

The flexi metal was a great find but it slowed us down as Jacob made us all better amour with a base of flexi metal and leather padding with reinforcements made from a queen spider and stone worm chitin composite, all of which he dusted with the dark moss and stone dust to make a dull grey that blended into our surroundings. He did this by slightly melting and fusing parts around our bodies, all the while making sure we could take the armour on and off, before adding padding and reinforcements as and when needed. This did mean that I, along with everyone else, was touched rather intimately at times to get an accurate measurement. But this was a small price to pay for new tailored armour that was flexible, fairly light and could take a beating, even if it did take another two hours to make.

With enough time wasted, we quickly headed off back into the passages as we headed deeper into the maze of stone and monsters, and oh boy were there monsters, we had to fight our way through hordes of bats, spiders, cave crawlers, stone worms, and sadly, pale ones. Although the pale ones weren't partially strong, their human-like appearance and reactions made my skin crawl whenever we had an encounter. At least the undead didn't scream in rage when you killed its friend or cry in pain when you broke its arm. But we continued to push through and even encountered a spear tongued frog that Jacob mentioned, hanging around a healing pool that was just out in the open. It hit like a truck and left those without crystal-like skin with enormous and painful bruises as they were thrown backwards into the cave walls.

Luckily our new armour and shields held out long enough for us to kill it and were quickly fixed after their beating as our bodies were healed. Despite the constant fighting the closest brush we had with death was when Jacob ate the spider queen's crystal after the stone worms and Tarantula ones. I’m not entirely sure what happened but Ella said that his heart almost gave out after consuming the enormous crystal, if not for her healing I’m not sure he would have made it, if the pale look and blood bleeding from his eyes and ears were any indication. But of course, after he was healed he was all smiles and went back to doing whatever experiment he was doing with his powers and proceeded to insist on more adaptive training once we ate our dinner for the day. Sam, Ava and I agreed but if looks could kill Ella would have disintegrated Jacob where he stood, not that he seemed to notice.

That particular adaptability training was when we really started to show the fruits of our labour after hours of gruelling training since the beginning of the apocalypse. It was the first time I started to feel as if we were truly becoming superhuman, sure we were adapting quickly but it all still felt relatively conventional. But now? Now it felt as if we were becoming something more. Sam was able to affect our senses during a fast paced spar, temporarily blinding or disorienting us through brief moments of contact. Ava was able to slap us around with tendrils of water and even enhance a limb by covering it in water and using it like an exo-suit to give out one hell of a right hook. I was able to take most blows from hammers, spears and knives with barely a flinch and cause my sparring partners to be thrown back with a single punch, which I won't lie made me pretty proud of myself.

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And while we may complain about the whole crystal eating business, it was showing results, enough results that I was pretty confident that Jaocb was now significantly stronger than I was before the wheels and was gaining on me at a rapid pace. Even with my years of training and passive boost, it wasn't enough to keep up with Jacobs' almost zealot-like training regime and crystal consumption, along with his rapid pace of learning the karate and self defence techniques made me question if this really was his first time learning them or if everyone else I had taught for some extra cash were just truly terrible at the martial art.

Our training continued for over an hour before Sam, Eva and myself had to call it a night from encroaching exhaustion, yet despite our moans of protests we were not able to rest our weary bodies as Mia found two stalker compulsions on Ella and Ava.

It was more annoying to deal with than anything, it was significantly easier to deal with when we were not in the middle of fighting and knew what we were doing. We just had them follow the compulsion which led us right to ambush predators, while not the best hunting strategy on their part it did give us more crystals which Jacob immediately traded for. With the Stalkers dealt with and camp set up we finally went to sleep with a full stomach of nuts, beef biltong and dried fruit.

The next day was much of the same but dialled to eleven. We started with another spider Queen lair, which with our new amour and lack of spirit wraith made the whole thing significantly easier. But our victory was short lived as we made a discovery which would make the next few days significantly harder albeit, more lucrative. The newer deeper caves had large human sized bioluminescent mushrooms that released spores that not only made it harder to breathe than it already was with the stale dry air of the caves, but also attracted large hordes of every monster we have met so far, including the Queens that managed to squeeze their way out of their layers and into the bloodbath that was the mushrooms domain.

The monsters down here fought to be closer to the mushroom and ate the crystals of their fallen enemies or allies making it truly a survival of the fittest, making the monsters stronger, faster and more viscous than the ones we had met before. What's worse is when a monster managed to make it to the mushroom for extended periods of time, it started to mutate into some weird mushroom hybrid that would heal itself as it fought.

They would have large pale green growths that grew out of gaps in their chitin armour and often replaced the eyes of their host with a bulbous cancerous growth that would leak a thick slime that burned the skin and caused rapid fungus growth when brought into contact with the airborne spores.

They were disturbing to look at but the real problem came from their savage intensity complemented by the healing the fungus provided by replacing any lost tissue with glowing mycelium. They would be a nightmare to fight if Ave didn't find a way to stop their healing by washing away the putrid slime while we hacked the monsters to pieces. This allowed us to rake in the crystals at a rapid pace as we slaughtered our way through their ranks.

Once we became accustomed to the chaos and found our rhythm we were able to make efficient choke points and traps that either Jacob or one of Mia’s hive-minded pets would lure various hordes of monsters into before we would move on to the next passage or chamber allowing us to make great progress through the mushroom tunnels. At least when there wasn't a mutated spider queen. Through sheer effort and coordination, the regular spider queen wasn't too much of a threat even with its brood of eight legged abominations that followed their mother around like lost little puppies.

But that didn't mean we could so easily deal with its heavily mutated fungus infected counterpart. Sady with the spider queen being the strongest monster around, quite a few had managed to survive long enough near the “mushroom hub”, as Mia called it, that they were far more common than most of us would have liked. Although I could take a few hits while Ava burst and washed away as many of the cancerous growths as she could, it still took a gurgling battle to slowly whittle down the monstrous behemoths even as it was trapped in stone, blinded and attacked mentally as well as physically.

Yet despite their danger and place at the top of the food change we managed to kill several of the mutated spider queens throughout the days we serpent trudging through monster corpses and training. It was gruelling work but I was now up to well over 100 crystals and I felt stronger than I ever have physically at least. Mentally I was exhausted, I had not stopped for days. When we were not fighting we were training, and when we were not training we were running and when we were not running we were fighting. The exhaustion was starting to sink into my bones and I was really starting to feel it wearing me down. We all were, other than the battle manic that had taken to wearing his disturbing DIY gimp mask when fighting anything he deemed wasn't a threat and eating hearts and crystals as he goes like a madman, causing him to almost die again from a mutated spider queen crystal that almost made his lungs collapse and heart stop.

Despite the almost constant training, running and fighting Mia also managed to keep her map updated to the best of her ability which allowed Jacob to create various shortcuts through passages that ran side by side yet did not meet up. This along with the coded messages on the ceiling were done in the hopes of allowing a fast escape, either from a large horde or back up to the surface when the event ended as we didn't know what would happen to the tunnels once the week was up.

Which was why on the morning of the final day of the event we decided it would be best to try and make our way up to the surface so as not to be trapped in a potential cave in or suffocate in telopted stone. Although the shortcuts and predetermined route allowed us to cut off days of travelling it was still a slow process due to how deep we were underground and how many twists and turns we took to get here. But by the miracle of Mia’s map and Jacob's ability to melt through stone walls like a blow torch through butter, we were able to make impressive progress and cut miles off our journey.

Before long we were at the layer of the spider queen's layers again with a couple of hours to go before 4 am when we assumed the change would happen as that was when the event started. The assumption may be based on pure guesswork but it was all we had to go so we spent those last few hours sprinting back through the tunnels tearing our way through any monsters that got in our way as we headed back to the surface before a disturbingly familiar message filled our eyes.

[ Event: Endless Caves has ended…

I give the message a quick skim before letting my thoughts on the matter out into the world. “Well, shit.”