POV Jacob

  Mia pushes away the nausea-inducing winds that incapacitated her in the last spar as she forces her way deeper into my mind palace, only to pause for a moment and frown. I look at her expectantly behind a wall of illusions as a tentative hand prods the fake scenery, and her frown deepens only for her to rapidly backpeddle as the jump scare forces her back and provides an opening for the projected memory prism to envelope her avatar.

  Hours of video essays reinforced by will, infused with pain she would have to experience to break free. Or not, I stare on in confusion as her mental projection simply appears where she entered my mind, surrounded by the shredded corpses of mental constructs she destroyed earlier.

  Aspects of her denominated minds swarm out of her body into the storming ocean, in random directions, searching for my rudimentary control centre. It was impressive but ultimately predictable; there was only so far you could run on a treadmill after all. Waves of depression swallow the confused, stationary constructs as Mia does her best to dodge the towers of disposable watery memories erupting from the depths of my mind.

  Crude representations of animal minds were crushed under the combined weight of 18 years' worth of human memories as Mia sends out blasts of will, destroying what little remained of the illusions and revealing my mind proper in all its storming glory.

  Thought forged lightning strikes down at the intruder, blasting apart her defences as winds and waves do their best to overwhelm her senses. But it didn't last; she sent out waves of willpower that demolished my traps and landscape with frustrating ease. It would appear I couldn't beat a hive mind within the mental plane in brute force. It should have been obvious; it was her whole thing after all, and I was just some cocky guy who thought power was the answer, like some cliche little bitch.

  It's not like strength has gotten me this far, so I will have to try another approach. I watch as Mia lands on the boat, signalling her victory. After a short discussion about what we could have done better, she left my mind palace to return to the real world and engage Noah in mental combat while the rest of us relaxed and explored the Brood mother's cave. We eventually found 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 in the stone walls. It was a strange, highly reflective metallic substance that peeled away from the stone walls in a satisfying manner, leaving us with panels of strange metal. Upon further experimentation, we found that it was highly flexible yet wouldn't tear, despite our best efforts, reminding us of heavily tear-resistant aluminium foil.

  The flexi metal was a great find but it slowed us down as I needed to wait for my spark to heal and make everyone better amour with a base of flexi metal and cloth padding with reinforcements made from a queen spider and stone worm chitin composite, all of which I dusted with the dark moss and stone dust to make a dull grey that blended into our surroundings. I made people's armour to size by slightly melting and fusing parts around people's bodies, all the while making sure we could take the armour on and off, before adding padding and reinforcements as and when needed, ending in a shell of form-fitting, damage-resistant protection that was only slightly heavier than the motocross padding we were wearing before. Even if it did take hours for the spark of power in my chest to heal and several more to forge the new additions, it was worth it.

  But my time fucking around with metal and fancy corpse bits slowed us down and was why the others were engaging in mental combat and crystal extraction while I worked on our armour. Despite the busy workload, we still made an effort to complete the 100-mile challenge, so we ran through the tunnels and stopped whenever I was able to work on the armour and weapons until they were done.

  With everyone's weapons sharpened, armed with boom sticks and armoured, we quickly headed deeper into the passages and the maze of stone and monsters that lay within the earth's crust, fighting our way through hordes of bats, spiders, barnacles, cave crawlers, stone worms, and pale ones. We continued to push through and even encountered a healing pool that was just out in the open, with its only protection being a lone Brood Mother that caught us by surprise as it jumped down from the ceiling. 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, Noah was able to keep its attention until we killed it and stocked up on healing tonic, then rested for a few more minutes to get something to eat.

  ***

  Hurricane winds imbued with disgust, nausea and pain slam into a flying Mia while I try my best to restrain her without digging too deep and summoning the goliaths hidden above the clouds. I try to worm my way into her mind through the connection she has formed, but find myself thrown into my own ocean, skimming across its surface and crashing into one of the pillars I summoned in an attempt to catch the wayward intruder.

  I summon swarms of pointless memories and slam them into my friend at full force, but she creates a cleaver of intent and cuts them to ribbons before they distract her, casually walking through the horde of homework assignments and lectures like they weren't even there.

  I curse as she steps foot onto the raft once again and surrender before she sees anything she shouldn't.

  'Not good enough, try harder, you dumbass'

  ***

  We spend the rest of the day fighting more monsters until we stumble onto another Brood Mother cave, and Mia sacrifices a spider covered in black moss bombs and flammable liquids that ignited the webs, weakening the small hive enough that we could mop up what little resistance remained. With the defenders dead, it didn't take us long to raid the cave of resources and set up camp for the night.

  ***

  Another illusion falls before Mia, the fake patch of storming sky crumbles to her horde of dominated monsters before I can squash them with the tides of despair. Her beasts were rapidly closing in on a hastily made wooden boat that looked like it would fall apart at any moment. The horde surrounds the small floating platform, protecting their Queen from the schools of constructed sharks that leap from the deep to try and drag her into another trap.

  She steps foot onto the raft with a smug smirk that lasts just long enough for her to realise what the boat was made of. Will-infused pain explodes into my mind, blanketing the mental palace in a cacophony of agony. Screams of anguish, my own and Mia's, fill my mind before she retreats back into her own mind.

  'Not enough, she could have seen it.'

  ***

  I spent the night watch eating crystals and trying to cultivate the strange energy, earning myself another loop throughout my body, but there was no sign of what the energy was attempting to do to my mortal coil, although I was able to note down two locations that appeared to drink in more of the foreign power. My stomach and heart. What it meant, I did not know, but I made sure to pay close attention to the two energy sinks going forward.

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  ***

  I reshuffled what I could of my mind as Mia tried in vain to find the hidden boat and avoid the numerous traps I had laid out for her. She weathered blow after blow of surprise attacks but was slowly pushed back in the storming landscape towards her own mind, only to seemingly teleport out of the cage of chaos into a less fortified landscape. The storm still raged, but not in the predetermined destructive manner that kept the ever-growing hive mind at bay.

  With a curse, I threw everything I had left at her in an increasingly brutal fashion as she fought her way through my mind, forcing her to a standstill, but not before she found the boat. Making the hard-earned draw a sugar-coated defeat.

  'She almost made it! Do better!’

  ***

  We killed and harvested more monsters today, I'm not sure what. It's all starting to blur into one.

  ***

  Chaos reigned as the storm screamed, typhoons of delirium threw the balance out of sync, rendering Mia's usual navigation and movement obsolete. She tried to teleport but found herself trapped within a memory prison landmine that I quickly homed in on and crushed with my will, forcing her to try to run away, but not before unstructured thoughts rained down, striking her into the depths of the churning ocean and forcing her to retreat from my mind.

  ***

  We killed more.

  ***

  Screams of panic echoed through my mind as more defences were forced into place, more chaos was allowed to run rampant, and more redundancies were sacrificed. But it would not be enough, she could not know.

  POV Mia

  Secrets, secrets and lies. Blank spaces hidden within minds that couldn't help but draw my attention. I thought being able to enter people's minds would improve my understanding of my friends and bring us closer together. Maybe find out if they felt the same way…

  But as I walk through their different mind palaces, castles, stitched-together buildings, and storms, I just see frantically hidden secrets. Everyone has secrets, myself included, but seeing how strongly people didn't want me to find out about parts of their lives was disheartening.

  But, in all honesty, if the roles were reversed, I would feel the same. These powers, our experiences with the dead, the dark and the demons given flesh were changing me, all of us. How could they not? We kill beings made of magic, hate and hunger indiscriminately or get ripped apart and eaten slowly, minuscule pieces of flesh peeled off and gorged on. I had seen it through the eyes of the monsters I control, remembering the taste of human flesh slowly slipping down my gullet, the smell of fear as they scream and beg. Using their begging to lure in more prey…Humans. Always humans, never prey.

  The more monsters I control, the more I have to sacrifice or risk losing myself to these abominations. But the more we put down in the depths of the earth, the less they roam up towards the retreating remnants of humanity. So we pushed forward. I used the stalkers' mental projections to track down hordes of the beasts and attack their minds while the others rendered them into pools of meat that fed my pets.

  Better, more flexible armour, sharpened blades, and rudimentary guns gathered sweat and grime as we pushed deeper into the monotonous crust of earth, facing ever-larger swarms of monsters. Our powers grew stronger and our bodies tougher.

  I was starting to feel as if we were truly becoming superhuman, adapting quickly and 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. Noah was able to take most blows with barely a flinch. Ella could heal us faster and for longer, while Jacob continued to train with a zealot-like zeal and create weapons and armour that allowed us to push forward and deeper into the bones of the planet.

  So we kept pushing further, into the gradually growing caves, collecting crystals to feed to my pets or sell. The brood mothers, in particular, seemed to have my tamed monsters biting at the bit to eat the apex predator's crystal, and each of their gems allowed a single monster to grow rapidly. The Crawler I was funnelling most of the crystals to had almost doubled in size by the end of the week, allowing it to join the front lines and protect our non-crystalline members.

  But even with Brood Mother crystals to spare, the caves still had more to throw at us. Towards the second part of the week, as we finished dismantling a particularly large Stalker, we discovered a massive albino crawler that struggled to move on its deformed limbs but had the strength comparable to a rock worm, easily knocking back a shielded Jacob before being quickly dealt with. More and more mutated albino variants popped up the deeper we went, but they only appeared to be giant centipede-like monsters and barnacle varieties, saving us from facing an even stronger Brood Mother.

  Once we became accustomed to the chaos of larger hordes and stronger variants, we quickly found our rhythm and were able to make efficient choke points where I would sacrifice a blood-soaked pet to lure in various swarms of monsters into traps before we would move on to the next passage or chamber, allowing us to make great progress throughout the tunnels.

  And yet, the secrets and lies created an undercurrent of instability. Mental sparring and exercises quickly became commonplace between us as we tried to become resistant to various forms of mental attacks. It started off as a mere battle of wills and creativity. Innocent enough, I got to explore the interesting mind places of people I had known most of my life, and see how their brains worked in ways I would never experience otherwise. But the innocence quickly died, drowned in a bath of paranoia. People didn't want to spill their secrets or have me see something I shouldn't, completely understandable, reasonable even. We just didn't understand what we were doing.

  Affecting your mind palace affected your mind. In an effort to hide secrets, people pushed their mental constructs to their limits, becoming withdrawn, caged off or…unhinged. Most of the group didn't resort to drastic measures, but by the time we found out, Noah was a numb wall, and Jacob was manic, more unpredictable than normal.

  I don't know what they were hiding, but they turned their mind palace into a cold castle constructed of gym weights and a chaotic storm of mania. They would rather unravel their minds than let me see things they have hidden in there. By the time we figured out what they had done, it was too late; their personalities cracked, and what was meant to protect them filled in the gaps. Cold, hard steel and chaos.

  That's when I started to notice things outside their minds as well. Driven by curiosity, I started to watch them more closely. Some things…Some moments weren't quite right. They grew faster than the rest of us, and acted differently when they thought no one could see. Magic like gadgets, slipping out of view somehow in particularly brutal fights and punching far above their weight class, for lack of a better term. I don't know what was happening, but my curiosity likely fed their self-destructive paranoia.

  So I backed off and allowed them to reform their mental defences, and while Noah was making good progress in returning to normal, Jacobs' redevelopment was slow; his mind palace was already a raging tempest, and it took time to unravel and rebuild.

  Despite these distractions and almost constant training, running, and fighting, I also managed to keep my map updated to the best of my ability, which allowed our resident crafter to create various shortcuts through passages that ran side by side but did not meet. This allows a quick escape, either from a large horde or back to the surface when the event ended, since we didn't know what would happen to the tunnels once the week was over.

  Which was why, on the final day of the event, we decided it would be best to try to make our way up to the surface so as not to be trapped in a potential cave-in or suffocated by teleported stone. Although the shortcuts and predetermined route allowed us to cut off days of travelling, it was still a slow, twisting process as we struggled to run uphill over uneven terrain. But through our meticulous planning and hard work, we made impressive progress and cut miles off our journey.

  Before long, we were back at the layer of the spider queen's lair, with a couple of hours to go before 4 am, when we assumed the change would happen, since that was when the event started. The assumption was based on pure guesswork, but it was all we had, 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. "Fuck”