It had already been obvious that the portal's version of the bus depot didn't match the real place that had been visible from outside, considering the real place hadn't appeared to contain many more than thirty buses or so. Quite apart from the giant circular portals, the back area of the portal depot was another departure from reality. In the real place, the main storage room had doubled as a maintenance bay, with little pits beneath each bus allowing engineers and mechanics to get underneath and do repairs. It hadn't needed a separate room.

They made their way towards the portals as a group. John was sure he wasn't the only one filled with trepidation. It seemed ridiculous, to be so cautious about more blue portals when monsters of that level had proven to be far beneath him in strength. But there was something to be said for the fear of the unknown. These portals were opaque blue, giving no hint of what lay beyond them. Their only clue came from the signs reading "Repairs, Maintenance, and Management," and that didn't exactly clear things up.

It allowed his imagination to run wild a bit. He pictured swarms of monsters waiting to get on their buses, and he was really, really sick of swarms of monsters. He hoped it was something else. Hell, he'd take a desperate fight against a red, at this point. The possibility that there'd be nothing dangerous on the other side and they'd be able to destroy this place with ease wasn't even worth considering, in his estimation.

No one spoke. There wasn't a long distance between the back of their halted bus line and the portals, and he was sure there would have been little conversation even if they'd had a mile to travel. Their footsteps were drowned out by the distant rumble of a thousand bus engines. The smell of motor oil and petrol was cloying—John would count it as a blessing if he was never subjected to those accursed scents again. The stench was turning him into an anti-oil environmentalist.

They reached the portals before he was really mentally prepared for it, but he didn't stop. If they paused, it'd give them an opportunity to discuss the situation and speculate and fuss over plans. The delay would grow his anxiety until the task had inflated to impossible proportions in his head and he'd be a nervous mess by the time they entered.

So he stepped straight through the portal without hesitation. His heart was racing, his hands were clammy, and his mouth was dry as sandpaper. But he kept reminding himself over and over, screaming in his head in an attempt to drown out anything else:

I've killed hundreds of monsters. I have dozens of Spells and Skills, and my stats make me a goddamn peak human. I can deal with whatever's in here.

Mana Sense was at the ready as blue light filled his vision. He had Elemental Bullet primed and ready to go in case anything attacked once he was through. Accelerate was on a hair trigger. His eyes were wide open.

What he saw once the blue light faded probably wouldn't have occurred to him if he'd had all the time in the world to fret over the contents of the Repairs, Maintenance, and Management area.

"What the fuck?" Jade said, once she'd joined him.

"What the fuck?" Lily murmured in agreement a beat later.

"What the fuck?" Doug repeated with a disbelieving, somewhat hollow laugh.

"What the actual fuck?" Alissa decided to differentiate herself slightly, but ultimately she seemed to share the same sentiment as everyone else.

"What the fuck?" Chester whispered a beat behind everyone else.

John deliberated on the matter for a second, trying to decide whether it would be more "uncool" to express his disbelief aloud like the others, or if it'd be worse to be the only one to not say anything. But he figured his indecision had already cost too much time, and it would be weirdest of all to react so far behind everyone else, considering he'd been the first one through.

Instead, he just frowned.

What the fuck? He thought privately.

Many possibilities had occurred to him on the way over here. Funnily enough, none of them had included a scenario where they'd find a giant monster that appeared to be an eldritch kraken thing made out of red double-decker buses squatting at the end of a cavernous room that looked like it could fit Wembley Stadium inside ten times over.

Every part of the monster was formed out of stitched-together buses; wheels spun uselessly in midair, axles groaned like old bones, and shattered windows glinted with a dull red light. Countless tendrils formed out of entire buses sprawled out from its main body in every direction, an impossible tangle of massive limbs. Where a head might be, a crown of crumpled bus roofs jutted outward in a thorny halo, and it took him a moment to realise the flickering lights were old advertisement screens. Its core pulsed with a dim, hellish glow, visible through the broken shells of passenger compartments. Rivulets of oily ichor dribbled down its body, forming a pool of black fluid that flowed into grates in the ground.

John found himself wondering where the smaller monsters entered this equation.

Seeing a room that had to be measured in kilometres was daunting. The room itself looked like a supersized version of the depot they'd just fought through, complete with the same lines on the floor denoting the routes buses would travel along. Each of the lines eventually lead to the end of a 'tentacle' of the enormous monster, so they at least had an idea of where the buses were coming from.

Within the lines rested intermittent lowered spaces for the promised maintenance, though John didn't understand what repairs might need to be performed here—the buses were clearly being spawned by this massive monstrosity. Between each bus lane was another aspect that hadn't been present in the main area: there were clearly marked walkways that would lead to the front doors of any bus that would stop there. John imagined the monsters forming a nice, orderly queue to get on board their bus, and his urge to burn this place down increased ten-fold.

Still, the question of where the monsters actually came from was left unanswered. John didn't see any sign of any, beyond the eldritch bus kraken squatting at the end of the room. Mana Sense, much to his chagrin, didn't even reach the bus monster, it was so far away.

Soul Vision did, though, and John's heart sunk.

"That bus thing is red in more than one way," he said, grimacing.

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Jade was the first to look at him, but the rest soon followed. They'd been enraptured by the ridiculous monster, too. "What are you saying…?"

Judging by her slowly widening eyes, she knew exactly what he meant.

John nodded slowly. "That thing is the strongest level of monster I've seen. Its soul is red."

Everyone reacted in their own way. There was a lot of cursing from Jade, and her creativity impressed him—leave it to a Scot to show how to swear. Lily closed her eyes and bowed her head, muttering softly to herself. Alissa gave an angry stomp before turning away to pace back and forth behind their group. Doug's fists clenched at his sides, but a grin slowly started to spread on his face, and it didn't look forced.

Quite surprisingly, Chester reacted the least out of all of them. He just slumped his shoulders a bit, still staring up at the monster. "What do we do now? Do we still try to destroy this place?"

"Figure it's worth giving it a go," John said. The monster was inert, not reacting to their presence. What was a red doing in a blue portal world? That seemed rather unfair.

"Do you have a plan?" Chester asked.

"Not yet," John admitted. "But I reckon we should investigate, at least. Get a better idea of what we're up against." He paused, sensing an opportunity. "Besides, everything dies. No matter how big it is, I'll figure out how to kill it."

+400 Aura

"Yeah, everything dies," Alissa said from behind him. "Including you."

John looked at her over his shoulder. "I disagree."

+400 Aura

After a bit more discussion about how to approach the matter, they started moving forward as a group once more. John took the lead as usual, keeping his senses, mundane and magical, peeled for any hint of a change. There wasn't much to note. The cavernous room was empty all around them, stretching on for miles in every direction, the monotony of grey concrete only broken up by the countless yellow strips of paint that denoted the bus lines.

But it quickly became clear that the enormous room was not infinite, as the depot area had appeared to be. There was no looping trick here. With Eagle Eye, John could see all the way to the end of the giant room in either direction, though the far walls were hazy grey blurs even with the Skill and his stats.

He saw other, more alarming things, too:

There weren't just blue portals leading into this room.

"I see more portals," he informed the others as soon as he realised it. "Green and yellow ones. There's way less green than blue, and even less yellow than that. A 100-to-10-to-1 ratio, maybe."

"So this big bastard is supplying buses for all three of the portals we saw from the front," Doug mused.

"Seems that way," John said.

The possibility of meeting more greens and yellows did put them on edge for a while, but that soon subsided when it seemed like they weren't facing any enemies at all. The room truly held only one occupant, as far as they could tell. They saw no signs of anything else even as they passed beyond the halfway point of the room, and the bus kraken finally came within range of John's Mana Sense. That just brought another strange revelation.

"The buses are already occupied," John said, frowning. "They all have monsters inside them, I mean. Not the phantom passengers. Just actual monsters."

"What the hell is with this place?" Jade asked.

Even though it seemed like a rhetorical question, Doug answered, "It's a challenge."

John found himself nodding. "Something set up to be beaten. Who, what, why, and how are the pertinent questions."

Silence rested between them as they all mulled that over.

"I thought the buses blocked your sense of the inside, somehow?" Lily asked.

"They did." John focused on his Mana Sense, trying to pick his way through the signatures it was pinging back to him. "No, they still do. See the ones fully formed at the end of its tentacles? I can't sense anything from those. It's the others making up its body that my Spell is feeling right now."

"It's growing new buses," Chester murmured.

"Seems that way," John said.

"The entire thing registers as one entity to you with your Soul spell, but another spell picks out individual monsters?" Alissa asked, confusion in her voice.

"Seems that way," John repeated. Then he narrowed his eyes and indicated towards the further end of the room to their right. "But the portals back there lead me to believe there'll be green and yellow monsters on board those buses. I reckon the other portal worlds would have had similar set-ups to the one we went through, except with more dangerous monsters."

"Sounds like that would've been more fun," Doug said, a grin audible in his voice.

-400 Aura

John swallowed back a sigh. Had he really not definitively proven himself to be cooler than Doug at this point? He'd have to try even harder.

"It would have been too dangerous for the rest of you, most likely," John said, hoping that wouldn't be taken too badly by the others. He hadn't had time to think of a better response, fearing that leaving it too long would let the problem fester.

+400 Aura

To his relief, no one commented on that. Doug just laughed.

Lily spoke next, "I think most people would see it differently to you guys. If you have three options that all lead to the same place, why wouldn't you take the safest route?"

"More danger, bigger reward," John said.

"I guess," Lily muttered. Then louder, "I just feel like there has to be more to it than that. If you want to maximise points for your system with minimal danger, isn't it better to just kill more weaker monsters, rather than risking it against a strong one?"

John thought of the monster corpse still resting in his inventory, and the 'parts' it had been divided into. He had theories. If the green and yellow portal worlds survived what was to come, he'd go and put those ideas to the test. "There might be more to it than points, eventually. And you'll start to see diminishing returns on killing blues before long."

The only reason John still got anything worthwhile out of killing blues was because killing was arguably only a small factor in how he accumulated his Aura. Even against weak monsters, he could still show off and do it flashily. When he did it efficiently, he got barely anything. That aspect to his system undeniably gave him a big advantage over his companions, though Alissa could theoretically do the same. She was just less willing to. He wondered if that said anything about him as a person?

Conversation lapsed, and they covered the rest of the distance to the bus kraken in silence. Their footsteps echoed through the cavernous room, accompanied only by the little hisses given off by the streams of motor oil cascading down the big red behemoth. The air was thick with the stench of rubber, oil, petrol, and something metallic that stung John's eyes. The monster loomed higher and higher as they got closer, until it felt like a mountain rising above them.

By the time they reached the creature, John had formed an idea of what was going to happen here. They approached the nearest bus growing out of the end of one of its great red 'tentacles' and peered in through the front window. As expected, this individual bus was occupied by only a few monsters—spidery things with furry round bodies—and none of them seemed to notice the humans lingering outside.

Mana Sense covered the entire monster from here, and it told him all he needed to know.

"The monsters are densest towards the core of the kraken," John said. "And they're travelling through it like blood, making their way down its tendrils. I think it's creating them, deep inside itself, then sending them out into the portal through these buses, which take them into the world beyond."

"And," Doug said, "you want to fight your way to the core of this thing and destroy it."

John looked at him. "Yup."

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