After clearing five separate buses of monsters after the first, they discovered a few things:

First, they found out that they couldn't leave a bus until all the monsters that had been on board were eliminated. They had transferred to the bus behind the one they'd started on—it had taken some courage to step out onto the invisible bridge, but John had forced himself to look nonchalant, telling himself his improved stats would tank the damage if he fell a single story to the ground—and went straight across the exposed upper deck, intending to avoid the monsters and cross directly to the next, just for the sake of trying to explore the bus depot as far and fast as they could.

However, when they reached the back of the bus, there had been no gap in the force field. The entrance they'd come through had closed behind them, too.

John had suggested slaying all the monsters on board, only partially because he suspected the truth. In reality, the majority of his motivation was in gaining more Aura. This bus ended up being busier than the previous one, and the phantom passengers mutated into hideous humanoid jellyfish creatures once they were activated. After Accelerating down to the lower floor and killing the driver to make sure the bus didn't start driving, John had made sure to be as flashy as possible in killing them, and when they'd gone back up to the top deck, the way had been open in both directions.

The ghostly passengers of the next bus transformed into those familiar rat monsters once activated, and they'd been easily dealt with, even though they'd been the busiest bus so far, so full that the bus looked as packed as a Tokyo train at rush hour, dozens of translucent people packing into the aisles between seats. But here was where they had learned their second fact about the buses: busy routes came with more passengers.

Lily had been the one to notice that the screen behind the bus driver's head scrolled through a much larger number of edgy parody names of London locations on this bus, and theorised what it meant. Over the course of the next few buses, they'd confirmed her hypothesis, finding a bus with barely any passengers at all, on a route that sounded more like it parodied a countryside service, and another bus that was about half full, boasting a few dozen stops before eventually terminating at a familiar location.

Knightsgrave.

This had led to another realisation about the bus depot and what it might do. That location name had not only come up on another bus, but on the Underworld network, too. And it wasn't the only name that repeated itself across multiple different bus routes. It seemed to be a fairly major station, but they didn't really know what that meant. The portal world they were in was obviously a bus depot, and all these routes implied the buses would become active, but what, if anything, existed on the routes between stations? Would passengers get off and on?

A question they couldn't answer, but they experienced a couple more revelations.

For one thing, in case it hadn't been obvious already, every bus hosted a different type of passenger, disguised as ghostly outlines of human passengers for reasons beyond their comprehension. Whether that would change when the buses were out on their route, they didn't know. Jade speculated that the buses would be active during the day, ferrying monsters around to other portal world locations. It was a decent idea, nonsensical as it sounded on the face of it, but they had no way to confirm it.

The next revelation came on the fourth bus, and was perhaps more of an individual thing for John, rather than a group epiphany.

It came to him when he managed to execute a flashy spin execution that he never could have dreamed of pulling off without Ninja guiding him and his stats augmenting him. There was something about the way his Mana Blade came down in a perfect arc to slice through the neck of a blue crystal creature, separating its head from its shoulders and dimming the pale light in its eyes. It just brought a grin to his face.

And that made him realise he was enjoying this. Guilt tugged at his insides after this understanding dawned on him, but somehow it felt muted compared to the burning passion that lit in his chest in response.

Why shouldn't I enjoy it? He asked himself. Why shouldn't I take pleasure in killing these bastards, after all they've done to our world? To our people, our animals, our way of life?

Humiliating them with overly elaborate deaths felt right. It felt like justice.

But there was still a voice nagging at him, sounding like the nasal drawl of one of his most hated primary school teachers. It told him to face the truth, that he was enjoying this power in its own right. He liked being badass like this. Admittedly, spouting punny one-liners and trying to look cool in general made him want to die inside a little, but he'd do the cringiest shit the world had ever seen without hesitation if it meant experiencing more of the heady rush that came with undeniable strength. Of having goddamn magic superpowers.

And, again, what was wrong with that? Why shouldn't he revel in his newfound power? He was only going to use it to kill monsters, so what was the harm in enjoying it?

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With those justifications, he crushed the guilt into a little pellet and buried it deep in his gut until he could barely notice the itch of it. It couldn't hope to compete with the satisfaction that filled him every time a notification popped up telling him that he'd obtained more Aura. Each gain was another step up, raising him to greater heights.

+800 Aura

+1200 Aura

+1400 Aura

John gained thousands of Aura on each bus. Enough to make some upgrades to his combat Skills, which just compounded his gains. The increased competence in fighting that came with upgrading Striker, Grappler, Duellist, and Marksman to Level 2 was substantial; he went from feeling like he was a relative beginner who'd really only just recently got all the basics of combat down, to someone who'd been training for a good year. This led to flashier kills, which meant more Aura. More Aura meant another increase, getting them all up to Level 3, leaving him feeling like he wouldn't put up a terrible showing against a professional in any of the four arts.

And that wasn't all he was doing with his Aura. In fact, it was kind of a tertiary thing.

Most of his attention was on the Combine Skill. They made sure to take short breaks between each bus to mentally recharge, and John spent those times laser-focused on his menus.

Just for the sake of confirming whether a Spell that had already been formed from Combining two others could be further Combined, he added Light Burst to Ice Bullet as soon as he had 5,000 Aura and a minute to spare. At first, he thought it hadn't worked; the Level 3 Spell it yielded had still been named Ice Bullet, and he worried that he'd simply paid extra for a simple Level upgrade.

Not so. Testing the New Spell, he found it worked the same as its predecessor, firing a bullet of ice at wherever John pointed, except now it created a flashbang effect wherever it struck, on top of the build up of ice. The ice buildup was increased, too, as appropriate for an upgrade to Level 3.

After that, he wanted to go all in on adding upgrades to his Ice Bullet, figuring he could get something hilariously OP at a much cheaper cost than actually buying a Level 10 Spell outright, which would cost 250,000 Aura in one go. Unfortunately, things weren't so simple.

Adding the Level 1 Electric Shock to the Level 3 Spell worked just fine, and the result was still named Ice Bullet, but it remained at Level 3, gaining only an effect that left the bullet trailing a thin bolt of electricity from his finger to its target. It made it look like he was smiting enemies with a lightning bolt, Zeus-esque, and he got 500 Aura just for testing the Spell in front of the others.

Immediately, he set to theorising why the Spell's Level hadn't risen when it had before. His best guess was that whichever Spell was higher Level out of the Combined pair would essentially consume the lesser one, and that would only result in a greater Level for the final product if the lesser Spell was close enough in power to the greater one.

In order to test this out, he added Burning Gale to the increasingly elaborate Spell. This time, its name changed, becoming Elemental Bullet. Firing one off a bullet now came with a gust of wind in its wake, carrying with it the same white-hot embers the original Burning Gale Spell had generated, spinning in a vortex around the miniature lightning bolt. The entire effect was eerily silent, considering how elaborate it was visually.

Most importantly, it grew to Level 4.

That meant he had somewhat of a discount for upgrading his Spells, but also not really? It meant that he could take a Level 9 Spell and upgrade it to Level 10 for the cost of a Level 8 Spell plus 5,000 on top, which was certainly a discount, just not as big as he'd first hoped. It felt kind of like arbitrary heavy-handed balancing to him, but he supposed it would be stupid if he could just Combine his way to a Level 10 Spell with a fraction of the Aura of an actual Level 10.

He ran into a snag at the next step of his experimentation. Combine simply would not let him create a new Spell that was higher than his Arcane stat. It just… fizzled out when he tried to add a newly purchased Level 3 Necrotise into the mix.

He'd never had any of his Aura-granted abilities fail on him before, and it took him quite by surprise. It was like the sphere of mana that rested in his navel had tried to stir itself, only to get reset to utter stillness by some unseen force. He imagined that if the Aura system was more directly communicative, it would be wagging its finger at him.

It still took his 5,000 Aura payment, though.

Sitting at the back of the bus, he glared off into space. Okay. So I can't unlock Spells higher than my Level. That's knowledge gained. It's not a total waste.

It was the first time in quite a while that he'd wanted to curse at the Aura system. He managed to refrain. If there was one thing he was certain of when it came to what was considered cool or uncool, angrily ranting at nothing had to fall on the latter end of the spectrum. Even if it didn't, the system would surely not feel particularly charitable towards him if he went on insulting it.

At that point, he had little Aura left to spend unless he was willing to leave himself without the possibility of levelling up a stat for its healing effect, which he wasn't. Taking Arcane and Talent from Level 4 to Level 5 would take 1,600, and he found himself sitting at 3,400 after all his experimentation.

I can mess around with Spells more later, he told himself. And I have a highly versatile Level 4 Spell in my pocket now. Can't complain about that.

Well. That wasn't true. He absolutely could complain about it. The flash had increasingly affected his allies as he levelled the Spell, though, so he'd have to be careful using it.

And so he was fighting off a frown as he rose to his feet, signalling the others that it was time to move on to the next bus. Their seventh in total.

There, they rather unfortunately discovered that the false bus driver could indeed get the bus driving, and when it did so, the other buses activated as well.

Needless to say, this proved to be somewhat problematic on several levels.

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