POV Jasmine

  The dark tunnels didn't get any nicer the deeper we went; the floor grew more uneven, and the monsters grew more numerous. These crawlers weren't a massive problem by themselves, but we struggled when more than three came at once, leading us to set up camp about two miles deep into the Earth's crust and let the monsters come to us.

  "So you still want to go to some random street to meet up with a potentially dead guy because he was cute?" Zara's words cut through the piercing whistling of my makeshift sling that really was just a rock securely tied to a bit of rope that I spun around.

  "I didn't say he was cute." I immediately defend myself from my twin's teasing as I copy the rock and its momentum, built up from the spinning, into the air a few centimetres ahead of me, and send it through the last of the approaching monster's head, halting it in its tracks, where it collapsed dead to the floor.

  "Not with your words, you didn't, but you are awfully keen to tie us to some random white boy you barely know." She mocks as she approaches the corpses.

  "He made magic rocks and string within a few days of the end of the world, and some glass thing that makes a temporary forcefield. And I can copy them. Imagine what else we could get." I rebuke, my sling slowing down as my hand goes to the ever-growing pouch of trinkets the strange boy had given me.

  "Like a new boyfriend, right? Didn't take you long to get over Steve." She laughs as she crouches by the corpses and places her hand against their chitinous armour, causing blood and gore to pour out of the dead monster and deeper into the cave away from us. The now cleaned corpse was quickly discarded as she threw another Crystal towards me. My hand snaps out on reflex to catch the small gems one after another.

  "For the last time, Steve was gay, and I'm not looking for some man, we can copy his shit and go for all I care." My energy drains, and I see double as two new crystal copies are sent to my inventory, and I hand the originals back to Zara.

  "Relax, I'm fucking with you. The kid could be dead for all we know. You said you didn't see him after the fall, but maybe we can at least meet up with the pissed healing guy, or the girl who could control this cursed metal you are hoarding." She snickers, but my mind was already wandering, 'I wonder if he's still alive or what he's doing now?'

  POV Jacob

  "I am not tanking that thing, it's 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 lair, covered in large stalagmites and stalactites connected with bridges of white webbing and hanging cocoons that wiggled and squirmed as whatever was trapped within tried to escape.

  The thick white strands were a welcome break from the monotonous grey that had dominated our view for the last few days, but I was far more curious about the metallic sheen, scattered at random, that sparkled in the moss's glow.

  "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 7 kids in there max."

  The cave tarantula died due to its lack of chitin armour to defend it from my blades, so I moved on to the next in the horde of cave spiders and tarantulas, which were protecting their brood mother, as it was highly likely that it was the monster mentioned in the advent announcement.

  "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 lair. Ideally, we would retreat deeper into the caves to create a bottleneck 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, while shooting arrows at the tarantulas scuttling towards us.

  "Not the time for your kinks", I laugh out loud while kicking a dead spider into the encroaching horde using its body to slow the incoming wave of its friends. "But seriously…" I disembowel another spider, "We can't keep them and the Mother at bay at once," I use my machete to cleave through a spider's legs and impale its eyes with the blade's hooked end.

  "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.

  "Boom stick and fire?" 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?'

  But before I hear the response to my over-excited suggestion, the world seems to slow down as a thick rope of bleached silk creeps through the air, its thin threads reaching out to grab ahold of an unsuspecting Ava. I tried to reach for my power as my arm shot out to block the tendril of webbing, but my core was still sore and slow to respond to my mental commands. Which is how I found myself dragged by my arm and sailing through the air, over the small horde of spiders and into the waiting pincers of the brood mother herself in all her nightmare fuel glory.

  I feel a deep sense of deja vu coursing through my veins as my internal spark finally roars to life and liquifies the thread, causing me to fly through the air over the engorged arachnid and onto the sticky and oh so very solid floor. The impact forces the air from my lungs and rattles my teeth against my jaw, but I was able to scrabble to my feet just in time to avoid being impaled by the monstrous 8 five metre long spear-like legs that descended upon me like a vengeful angel.

  "Ha…hahahaha, now this is more like it!" I danced through the scuttling legs of the behemoth that, now that I was closer, really was the size of a small bus, not that I would admit it to Noah, with its body being approximately 2 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 and a home advantage.

  Not that such things had stopped me before. Glass beads filled with a toxic red slipped down my throat as air thick with the stench of iron and blood energised my cells. Veins bulged, bones creaked, blood surged, and my smile turned feral. I swallowed bats' heads raw as more and more power flooded my system. My mind finally felt in sync with itself, as if it had gotten rid of the cobwebs and could make use of all its space, as I processed my surroundings in startling detail. It was intoxicating, it was fun, and I was finally able to move to the beat of my own drum.

  A Tarantula appears in the corner of my eye and releases its barbed hairs at me as I try my hardest not be crushed or impaled by the queen's legs, but I just grin wider and lure the queen over to the approaching spiders, causing her to kill several of her own children while I just melt the barbs that get caught on my person.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  By the time the Mother 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 under its own weight. Just as the queen pulled away from the pain, I stabbed a rose steel blade 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 unravelled into a spasming mess of gore. The Mother, understandably, flinches back and shifts her mass to her other legs, which I was already running towards just in time to liquefy the stone floor. The shifting of weight forced the Brood mother to put more pressure on her other legs, driving the limb deeper into the stone and trapping it there.

  With a leg trapped and another hanging uselessly, things were looking up at me as I started to hack into one of the leg's 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. Which fucked me up in three uniquely fun ways: 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. Cursing in panic, I quickly grabbed a large modified kitchen knife from one of the many sheaths strapped across my body, and I barely blocked a slash from a deformed wraith, only for the knife to shatter upon impact. It had the body of an enlarged praying mantis and the head of a piranha with a mouth filled with multiple layers of jagged teeth.

  "I don't suppose you are open to talking about things?" 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.

  I click my tongue in annoyance and 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 Brood mother 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."

  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. Blocking out the pain temporarily, I retrieve a bottle of healing tonic from my inventory and down its contents in two large gulps.

  I throw the empty glass bottle at the incoming monster but miss completely, causing it to shatter harmlessly against the ground, before retrieving another bottle of tonic and another. I feel my ribs knit back together slowly, bones grinding against each other as they struggle to find out where they fit in this travesty I call a body. It didn't completely fix me, 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 mouthful of blood. While I rambled like a resident of the fun hotel with grippy socks, I managed to free myself from the webbing and slowly start climbing up the nest with a barely functioning body 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 turned 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 what little is left of my power to start melting off the large section of webbing holding me up on the nest. In the next moment, I took out several bloated stomachs from my inventory, melting the stomach lining and throwing the acid at the queen's eyes, blinding her to my falling body surrounded by webbing.

  A brief moment of being at the mercy of gravity, and a jolting impact later, I find myself hanging by cords of thick webbing, with a face full of brood mother legs, but most importantly, the silken cords have successfully ensnared their creator. At least for now.

  I willingly drop the last metre to the cave floor and stare up at the thrashing beast coated in multiple layers of webbing as it tries to fix its wounds by producing a vast amount of spider silk. Now, with the arcanaphobics' wet dream trapped, I had several options available to me. Slowly whittle it down with blades, pour more acid on it, try out the boom stick oooor oh who am kidding I'm going to shoot it and set it on fire.

  If fantasy books with annoying know-it-all main characters have taught me anything, it's that giant spiders are easy to kill because their webs burn. I didn't believe it at first, but after the fifth book, when it happened, I had to look it up. I don't remember the science jargon behind it, but it pretty much boiled down to "something, something, chemistry, something, something, when ignited, spider webs burn very quickly, something something, mass, something, something, do not sustain a flame."

  Gasoline mixed with melted polystyrene appears in a flash of blue, and I grin. 'Who knew the weeks of my life wasted would be so useful at the end of the world.'

  But just as I'm about to throw the impromptu flame bomb, I stop for a moment and think. "Is this the kind of thing people keep getting mad at me for?" I look around at the web-covered cave and realise that while I may be able to pop to another reality to avoid the flaming explosions, the others can't.

  Gritting my teeth, I stow the unlit petrol bomb and sprint beneath the goliath monster, level the boom stick at the joint connecting its abdomen to the rest of its body, and pull the firing string. A deafening boom crashes against my rupturing eardrums as the maelstrom of fire and force rips free from its metallic sheath, crashing against the chitin armour with a resounding crack.

  Shards of the brood mother's carapace fall onto me as I'm drenched in a rain of blueish green blood. Whipping my eyes clear, I look up at the open wound of the trembling spider. More webbing bursts free from the great beast, stopping the torrent of blood and revealing a strange book-looking organ that pulsed in sync with the Mother's screeches that managed to pierce through the ringing in my ears. I may not know much, and even less about spider anatomy, but I did know when to stab things, and the strange folded organ quickly found itself becoming intimate with my rose steel-tipped spear.

  The brood mother freezes for a moment, teetering on its spindly legs before sagging within the confines of its web prison. For a brief, blessed moment, it was still before it started to twitch and lurch, its legs flailing around at unnatural angles and would have knocked me back half a dozen times if they weren't still restrained by the webbing.

  I couldn't get close to the beast, and it was gradually tangling itself up even more, so I took the chance to glance around the rest of the cave to see Noah fling one of the few remaining spiders a good few metres with a swing of his hammer. 'Huh…I didn't know he could do that.' I look back to the Brood Mother to find it had stopped moving altogether and was lying in a pile of blood and strands of gore.

  Quickly checking that I can interact with the dead matter, I let out a sigh of relief and sink to my knees as I watch the others finish off the last of the spiders. I sat there for a solid minute before I heard a slightly panicked yell from Noah. "You alive over there, Jacob?"

  With a grunt, I wave my arm into the air and call out, "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 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 that hurt my bruised ribs and stood up to make my way to my teammates. 'Was good fun, but I need to get better if I'm going to keep myself and others alive.'