It was hard to say how long it took to reach the end of the line of buses. Their attempts to rush through didn't amount to much when there were just so many. John started to wonder if each bloody line was meant to represent all the buses in London, which he'd once read the precise number of in some article, but had since forgotten. It was in the thousands for the entire city, he knew.

A lot of them were open-topped, but equally as many turned out to be regular enclosed double-deckers. There wasn't much difference between them, practically speaking. The buses were all still clumped together, their engines roaring as they slowly pushed the inactive buses forward, and an entrance always opened up to allow them through once the monsters on the bus had been cleared out.

But it was notable that so many of them were open-top in and of itself. Those buses were meant to be for tours around Central London, and he was pretty sure there weren't actually that many of them in reality. Definitely not enough for the ratio between open-top and closed-top to be so close. He wondered what that meant.

Either way, the sheer number of them all together negated the speed they were clearing individual buses. Even though they were getting rather good at it, frustration was rising.

By the time John stopped counting buses cleared—the 50th—their routine was working like a well-oiled machine. Having unlocked Flash Step, John would use it to dart past the monsters that bunched up at the front of the bus then activate Accelerate, heading straight for the stairs down to the bottom floor, where he'd take in the situation at a glance before utilising whatever technique seemed most efficient to kill the monster(s) driving the bus.

Whether it be a Soul Arrow, an Elemental Bullet, a Wind Shear, Soul Drain, or even rushing close for a Mana Blade, he was getting pretty good at it. Then, he'd disable the bus' controls, again utilising his better judgement to decade on what technique to do so.

With the driver dead and the controls broken, the bus would come to a stop, adding another dead weight for the buses behind to push against. The others handled the monsters upstairs. John, meanwhile, generally handled the downstairs monsters one of two ways: if the bus was open-top, he unleashed a barrage of Fireballs, utilising Soul Drain and Summon Undead to pick off any stragglers that survived the flames. If the bus was enclosed, the risk of smoke inhalation was much higher, so he used Wind Shears instead. It was quite significantly slower, but got the job done well enough.

By the time he'd stopped bothering to count the buses, he'd gotten good enough at the routine that he could get back up to the upper deck before Accelerate even ran out of heartbeats.

It was, to be blunt, becoming rote. He was barely even registering what type of monsters he was fighting anymore. They rarely had a chance to fight back. When they did, that just annoyed him even more. They were speed bumps, rather than true obstacles. It felt like the portal was just throwing them in front of him for the sake of it.

Alissa's questions before had been apt: What was the point of all this? Why force them to clear out the monsters before allowing them to move to the next bus? Why were the monsters even disguised as passengers in the first place, and why had the ruse been discarded at daybreak?

Frustration was building and building inside him, to the point that he'd long ago found himself unable to throw out any dumb quips, and the flashy kills seemed a waste of time. He was still gaining copious amounts of Aura, especially on those times when he returned to the upper deck having cleared out the lower floor before all the others combined had managed to deal with the top. There was still some satisfaction to be had in moments like that, but it was dwindling.

Even unlocking more Skills and Spells couldn't brighten his darkening mood. He unlocked all of the Level 4 and Level 3 specialist Skills to try and cheer himself up, but it had diminishing returns as time went on.

Flash Step was objectively awesome, letting him essentially teleport a certain distance forward depending on how much strength he put into moving forward as he activated the Skill, so long as nothing was in his way. To him, it felt like the world suddenly blurred around him, too fast for even his heightened Mind to comprehend, and then suddenly he was somewhere else. It took him a little while to get used to the disorientation and figure out how to gauge distance.

Air Step was absolutely awesome as well. At Level 4, it let him kick off the air a single time, essentially giving him a video-game double jump. Even in the enclosed space of the bus, it came in useful: being able to leap up and hang in the air for a second so he could shoot his arrow over the heads of the bottom floor's monsters sped things up significantly, once he got the hang of it.

Thread Walker rarely got a chance to show its worth, but being able to almost casually balance on the headrest of a chair on his tiptoes was undeniably impressive. It gave him an opportunity to hold high ground against the monsters while he launched Fireballs or Wind Shears, which was useful.

Precognition did pretty much as expected, letting him see hazy translucent images that showed what was going to happen a little less than a second before it occurred. Like Accelerate, he could maintain this state for about five heartbeats, then it would go on a five-second cooldown. Useful in abstract, but he didn't actually need it for fighting blue-souled monsters.

It wasn't immediately obvious what Titan Tendons did, since he wasn't really having to strain himself on his rampage through the buses. The name gave him some assumptions, and he confirmed that the Skill essentially let him lock his body in place for a moment, becoming immovable through pure strength. The satisfaction of figuring out the Skill was severely offset by the time he wasted grappling with a rat monster to confirm it.

Unstoppable Charge was similar in nature to Flash Step, except a lot slower, and it didn't matter if anything was in his way when he activated it. The Skill essentially launched his body forward, smashing through anything in his path. It didn't make him invulnerable, notably. He still felt every impact until coming to a stop five metres from his starting position, and he discovered that it wouldn't let him ram through the force field around the buses. That had been a painful lesson, and had lost him 1000 Aura to boot. He was careful with the Skill after that.

Catfall performed as expected. A passive Skill, it gave him the reflexes to land on his feet in even the most ridiculous of circumstances. Somehow, he was always able to twist his body in just the right way to get his legs underneath him. Even at Level 3, it seemed a pretty unassailable Skill, and he was dead curious how exactly it would improve upon levelling up.

Intuition was a strange one. The Insight Skill provided him trains of thoughts leading to its conclusion, allowing him to review its analysis. Intuition just gave him an observation with no explanation. For example, if he used Insight on Chester, it would pick out the muscular teen's body language cues and facial expressions to determine the guy was scared. Intuition would just tell him the guy was insecure due to bullying. No reasoning provided.

He didn't see himself using it that much, if his practically nonexistent use of Insight was anything to go by.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Speed Casting, out of all the Skills he unlocked, took him most by surprise. He hadn't been under the impression he was particularly slow with his Spells, so he'd left it to last, and even then had been hesitant to unlock it at all. But he decided it was worth checking. He was glad of the decision.

The first time he'd launched a Fireball after unlocking Speed Casting, it had taken him off guard how fast the orb of flame had formed in his hand. The Skill had implanted in him a kind of instinct that let him perform the necessary steps for a Spell far faster than it had before, and with more significantly greater efficiency of movement.

Before, he'd merely been given the knowledge of how to use the Spells and left to his own devices. Now, he had an intuitive awareness of how to interpret those instructions efficiently.

It made a difference. After a few buses of combat to get used to it, he was getting so efficient with his techniques that he was clearing out the bottom floors and making it back to the top with enough time to held the rest of the group with their enemies.

The remaining Level 2 Skills couldn't really live up to that improvement.

Inhuman Stamina meant better endurance. Meh.

Iron Fist let him punch harder. He wasn't really punching much anyway.

Danger Sense was just annoying. He didn't need a little niggling feeling in the back of his mind to tell him he was in danger, here. At least he could console himself that it would probably come in much more handy in future.

Looking at how many Skills he barely used, John wondered if he'd eventually gain an ability to combine Skills, too. He hoped so. It was getting hard to keep track of them all.

He levelled up his stats while he was at it, bringing everything up to Level 6. At that point, he started to truly feel superhuman. He was hardly an expert on such things and didn't have the time or space to really test out the limits of what he could do, but he felt like he was at the very apex of what a person could achieve without supernatural assistance, and perhaps even beyond it.

Either way, it was an intoxicating feeling. His body was corded with dense muscles, he felt like he could run forever, and his reflexes were absurd even without the various Skills that assisted him with matters requiring quick reactions.

But he wasn't the only one levelling up. Alissa gained the ability to 'charm' monsters into fighting for her, which she hated. Lily now had the option to set fire to her crossbow bolts. Jade actually levelled twice, upgrading her blade projection so she could have three at once from the same machete, and adding a ranged attack that appeared to be a spherical storm of obsidian spikes that shredded enemies. Doug abruptly looked a decade younger. And Chester, in his own shaky words, could tank more hits.

There was a bit of back and forth as the others started getting through their own enemies quicker, until it reached the point he'd find them waiting for him when he emerged from the stairs. He lost Aura at those times, and was forced to speed up his runs through the bottom floor, no more experimenting with Skills and whatnot.

And even with all that, it felt like it took hours to reach the end of the line. John found himself constantly glancing upwards, as if to check that the sky hadn't darkened with the Black Hole's presence once more.

For all his upgraded stats and Skills and whatever else, exhaustion started to weigh on him. He still hadn't had the chance to sleep. His eyelids kept drooping like there were weights hanging from each of his lashes.

The monotonous routine of clearing buses didn't help. It was somewhat surreal to realise he was getting bored in such a situation, but here he was. At times, he felt like he was on autopilot, barely focusing on the task at hand.

The monsters became contemptible in his eyes. When this had all started, he'd thrown out some dumb insults about monsters "knowing their place" and "wasting his time" and shit like that, but it was actually starting to feel true. Expending effort on these useless trash mobs was starting to seem beneath him. He really did begin to mentally check out.

As such, he wasn't the first to notice a change in the scenery. In fact, he was a bit embarrassed to admit he probably wouldn't have picked up on it at all before running straight into it.

"Is that another wall?" Jade said, leaning towards the edge of the double-decker bus they were on and squinting towards the distance.

John blinked, then moved to do the same on the opposite side of the aisle. The others quickly followed.

Countless buses were still trundling along on either side of them, making their inexorable way towards the front of the depot, but the line to the back no longer looked so endless.

Many of the lines beside theirs were about to come to an end, overtaking them as theirs was forced to move much slower. In fact, their line was barely moving at all now, as they'd cleared out well over fifty buses—probably closer to a hundred now—and there were far fewer than that mounting the push.

John squinted, delving into Eagle Eye for the first time in a while. What he saw there filled him with such relief that his legs almost gave out.

Maybe thirty buses away stood a grey smudge that stretched from horizon to horizon, with shimmering blue circles at intervals that matched the rows of buses. Portals.

"This is it," John said. He explained what he was seeing, and took some pleasure in witnessing the relief in the faces of his comrades. "Just a little longer."

With an end finally in sight, they set a record pace through the remaining buses. John didn't even stop to check his Aura or consider upgrades and unlocks. There was no conversation. Evidently, everyone was just as done with these fucking buses as him, and wanted to get out and burn this entire goddamn place to the ground.

Time blurred. John lost touch with reality, a bit. His world became a routine of Flash Step, Accelerate, Air Step, Soul Arrow, Fireball/Wind Shear, Soul Drain, and Summon Undead. Bus after bus after bus. Determination filled him. The end was in sight, he just had to push forward to it.

And then, just like that, they were standing at the back of the bus, looking out from the upper deck with no further buses behind them, just a few hundred metres of empty space before the back wall of the depot.

The portals had signs above them reading "Repairs, Maintenance, and Management." They'd check that out in a bit.

For now, John led the way as they moved back down to the bottom floor and towards the front of the bus. No new passage had opened up at the back, but none of them panicked about that. They all had the same hunch.

When John made it to the front of the bus and the doors hissed open on their own, he could have cried. When he stepped off, he was halfway tempted to get down on his knees and kiss the ground. He wanted to take a breath of the open air—despite the lingering stench of motor oil and petrol—and laugh with joy.

He didn't do any of that, because it would all be deeply uncool. But he wanted to.

"Now what?" Lily said. She was looking between the wall at the back and the receding buses driving away in the opposite direction.

"We destroy this fucking place," John said, pointing at the portals that lined the back of the garage.

Jade stared at him. "You don't want to go after the other buses?"

"No," he said. "All this bullshit the portal world put us through... There's a design to this. I don't understand what, exactly, it is, or why it's like this, but it feels to me like this was meant to be some sort of trial. Except it was piss easy to the point I was bored of it, because we've all levelled up enough that blues aren't a challenge at all."

John took a breath after that. It felt like the longest he'd spoken in one go on along bloody time, even though it had been less than a day since his last prolonged tirade.

"That doesn't explain why you want to go for the portals and not the other buses," Lily pointed out.

"Because it felt to me like the buses were designed to slow us down from getting to the end," John said. "And so I want to fuck up whatever this place was trying to stop us from reaching."

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.