POV Jacob

  Undead screams echo around the empty corridors as I sprint away from the mutated corpses of my parents and friends through the empty, distorted corridors of our school. Acid drips from the ceiling, melting away the roof to reveal a bloodied Sky lurker trying to entrap me within its tentacles and drag me into its waiting, bloodied maw.

  I try to duck and weave through the electrified obstacles, but my body feels like it's submerged in sand, and none of my powers work; I'm a sitting duck. Vivid colours swirl around me, blurring the edges of my vision. Distorted shadows stretch out and become tangible, blocking my escape.

  ‘Not…real’

  I try to dart to the side, only to trip on a blurred figure that comes into focus as Logan, his arm still in the floor he tries to bite into my leg with his elongated fangs. "You killed me!!!" He screams out as he starts gnawing on his arm to free himself like a rabid animal.

  ‘Dream…wake’

  I try to will myself awake, but find myself back at the start of the corridor, face to face with my undead Mother. Her clothes were shredded, revealing grotesque tumours leaking a sickly yellow pus, and her brown hair was matted with chunks of flesh and dried blood from where I smashed her head against the tarmac. A low snarl escapes her dry, cracked lips, "You killed me." She manages to rasp out before she lunges forward.

  "...Wake…"

  I spring up out from under my covers and look around frantically, drawing a knife between me and the darkness before sending out a pulse of energy into my surroundings, mapping out the solid matter in my mind's eye.

  "Jacob, it's okay," I hear Sam's voice, causing my head to snap in the closest gap in my senses. A blotch of void where I couldn't feel any matter.

  "Are the tunnels safe?" I ask not to lower my knife until a carefully placed tarp is pulled aside to reveal a dim light that floods the stone chamber where my makeshift bed was tucked away. We were in a small cave that widened into an intersection, where Noah and Ava fought off the chitinous creatures. The air was stagnant and held the foul odours of death, as every action echoed from wall to wall, making it hard to determine where they were coming from.

  "Safe enough, the Crawlers haven't been able to get past Noah and Ava while we waited for you to get back," Sam answers from his perch on a small outcropping of rock that loomed over my sleeping mat as if waiting to crash down upon my sleeping form.

  I put away my drawn knife and stand up straight, only now noticing my missing sections of armour and colder head. Hesitantly touching my head with my bare hand, I feel rough scarred skin that zigged and zagged across my scalp, burning away half my hair and trailing down my neck. 'Huh, I wonder what I will look like bold.'

  "You were in pretty bad shape." I hear Ella from behind me and turn to face the healing blonde woman. "Shocked nerves, burned skin and muscles, cracked bones, several burst blood vessels, stretched-out respiratory and digestive system, plus all the pulled ligaments. Took three hours of on and off again healing, but you still need rest." She explains from her place, sitting next to Mia, who looked to be meditating.

  "Right, yeah, thank you," I reply, deep in thought about the implications of our new situation, only to snap out of my thoughts at Sam's coughing. I turn to face him and watch as he awkwardly looks around the stone tunnel before steeling himself and facing me.

  "I am sorry, Jacob…" He pauses, likely trying to collect his thoughts. "For letting you get taken and for everything beforehand, I should have…Been better." He finishes off with deep remorse laced into his words.

  "Oh, yeah, that's alright.." I started only to be cut off by Sam. "No, it's not. We thought you died, and you came back a mess because you took my place. I was useless, have been since this started. I just don't know what to do."

  'Please stop, I don't know how to comfort people, and it's not like I died. Much.' I stare at his sincere face in thought before opening my mouth to respond again. "Some mistakes get made, and that's okay if we learn from them. We need to be less useless. You want to help people, but if it were you up there, you may not have helped anyone get out." I pause at Sam's wince and glance at Mia, only for her to tell me the others in the Lurker made it out without opening her eyes or acknowledging us in the slightest. "But it's not like we can see the future, and we can all be doing things better. You can do a lot to improve our chances, we all can, we just need to start…doing it?" I ask, unsure how to end my little speech, and feeling distinctly uncomfortable at all the eye contact.

  Luckily, Sam accepted my half assed pep talk and almost seemed excited to share his ideas on the matter. "Yeah, I think so. I've just copied the senses of mittens, the cat, and the Cave Crawlers. I can't give them to other people yet, but I can feel the vibrations through the stone, have faster reflexes, and smell a lot better. I, um, do you have any ideas? I know you were excited at the start and made a lot of notes on everything."

  "Oh, don't get him started on his bloody lists. I don't need my powers mansplained again, please and thank you." Ella cuts in from the side, her head resting back against the cold stone. 'It wasn't the intention…' My thoughts trail off as Noah and Ava finish up the latest wave of monsters and come over, thanking God I was alive, like it wasn't the Gods' fault we were all in this situation or even cared to help me make it back alive. But it didn't matter.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  From there, the conversation naturally evolved into what we should do next while I got changed into more functional armour. I thought we should try to complete the challenges, explore, and find the resources alluded to in Wheel Head's announcement. But some of the others kept bringing up irrelevant subjects such as "not surviving" or "getting lost in an endless tunnel network filled with unknown risks". Okay, their objections may not be wholly unfounded, but we still need to get stronger so we don't die in a future event where we can't just sit in a relatively safe area for the whole week or melt the ceiling into a controlled cave-in to protect ourselves.

  But I don't currently voice my opinion. I am instead cutting my hair, like any normal person would, instead of helping a group of people decide whether to potentially risk their lives or go exploring magic tunnels made by a hallucination-inducing wheel God. My opinions were already known; they hadn't changed since the apocalypse started, and nobody asked to hear them again.

  "I still think we should at least try to complete the first two challenges. If it's too much, we can slow down and focus only on the resources mentioned. What do you think, Jacob? You haven't said much…Are you cutting your hair?" Noah asks while looking at me with confusion. "It looks terrible, pass me the scissors," he finishes off, gesturing in the place in front of him and Ava to sit.

  'Huh, I stand corrected.' I sat between Ava and Noah as they began fussing over my terrible styling.

  "Being stagnant will only get us killed after a short life of hiding. It's also very boring. If we are going to die, we may as well make the most of it and have a good death." I state, before going quiet at the sight of the others' aghast expressions.

  "That's kind of a fucked way of saying it, but you guys are right, I'm just stressing out about what could be down there," Mia says in a defeated voice as she pets Twitch.

  'Hmm, she's petting herself in another body.' I muse internally not to worry about their decision. I would be attempting the challenges regardless. After a few more minutes, the others reluctantly agree to head down the tunnels and try our luck at the God-given tasks. As we didn't know how dangerous the unknown creatures were or what the Gods counted as killing the Cave Crawlers, we decided to try to kill the monsters one-on-one to secure the challenge completion before heading into the deeper sections of the caves.

  With a basic plan of action finally laid out, we headed deeper into the inky blackness of the tunnels. The constant twisting and turning, and the uniform grey illuminated by the single flashlight, made the whole journey disorienting. The only sounds were our footsteps echoing off the rough stone wall, which only reminded me of the literal tones of earth surrounding us in every direction, funnelling us in a single direction. 'Hmmm, yeah, I was definitely made for open air and freedom, not tight spaces and sadness.'

  In an attempt to stop my claustrophobic thoughts of being buried alive, I focused on developing my sense of matter to create a sort of budget echolocation, careful to not use up too much power or upset my stomach, I began experimenting. My training involved sending small pulses of my matter-affecting abilities through my hands into the air and trying to sense stagnant air particles in the cave by measuring how much energy the saturated air could hold. It took a lot of concentration and a fair bit of stumbling as I walked, but I was starting to get the hang of my small pluses when Sam announced another Cave Crawler was close.

  Not wanting to be a complete liability, I stopped playing with myself and checked the knives on my hip before doing a few light stretches to limber up. As everyone but Ella and I had already completed the challenge, Mia's own Crawler was able to get a surprise attack while I was sleeping. It was up to us to deal with the beast.

  An incredibly impressive arrow shot through a bulbous eye later, and it was up to me to secure the final kill. Which, as it turned out, wasn't too tricky. While their pointed legs allowed them to slip out of re-solidified stone, it slowed them down enough that stabbing a rose-steel blade through the link in its armour connecting its head to the rest of its body was child's play.

  The only thing that really gave me pause was the crystal embedded within its skull. A liquid head made extraction easy, but the whole concept was odd. The entire subject reeked of fantasy media, both Eastern and Western. Kill the beast, extract its valuable cores to help your cultivation or sell them to some alchemist. The wording, of course, varies by fiction and genre, but I have read hundreds, if not thousands, of books that spew the same cliches in different packaging. Monster cores, or crystals in this case, could be used for a lot of things.

  Which begged the question: why are they now out of the pages of a book and held between my thumb and forefinger? Either the Gods took inspiration from our stories for whatever reason, or they influenced our media so that this whole process was easier to understand. Not that it massively mattered, just brought into question the validity of "recently buying Earth". I could stand here all day trying to guess the plots and inconsistencies of Gods, but my real, most pressing question is what I could do with the strange gems?

  Luckily, Mia had provided the best test subject to determine the effects of consuming a core, a common trope in stories used to strengthen monsters. And if it improved the beast, then it should enhance me. As for trying to process it for others or being included in various gadgets, that would have to wait. 'What fun. There truly is no rest for the wicked.'

  So far, the crystal distribution was based on who killed the beast, but it was discussed becoming more communal once we faced worse or more enemies, as it was unfair for those of us without combat powers to contribute towards fighting, yet still did so, such as gathering information, healing, etc, etc. As it stood, Mia only had a single crystal, the same as me. But it was my hairbrained scheme, so I offered my crystal to her in the name of science.

  Once I explained my thoughts on the subject, the others crowded around the docile arthropod monster in curiosity as Mia fed it the small, sickly, green-looking gem. I watched in baited breath as the crystal slid down the creature's gullet, only for nothing to happen. I was about to deem the first test a failure when the tamed beast screeched, curled in on itself and started shaking.

  Mia let out a pained curse and clutched her head as her pet grew slightly before our very eyes. How it could do that with an exoskeleton without moulting, I had no idea, but it rapidly expanded by a centimetre or two before shrinking back down to its original size. Or maybe it was slightly bigger? I had no idea and was far more interested in the subsequent tests Mia put the centipede look-alike through.

  Despite the dramatics, it only improved slightly across the board. As far as Mia could tell, its body had improved in every way, from its speed to its strength. That put a smile on my face, as any noticeable improvement from the mere action of eating something held great potential in my books. I just needed to get my hands on more of the little gems, along with the time and privacy to see if it worked on a particular human who could eat anything.

  A slow grin spreads across my face as we head deeper into the caves to hunt down more glorified rock candy.