It turned out John's comrades weren't the only ones who'd been building their teamwork.

The next set of monsters they encountered after adding the four birds to their ranks were a set of a dozen or so green-souled humanoid lizard dragon things with neon blue scales. They wielded crude spears and daggers with blades made out of broken glass. Doug stepped forward to form up the team's usual formation, but the birds beat him to it.

With a great caw and a mighty beat of its midnight wings, the crow shot forward and divebombed towards the nearest monster. At the same time, the diamond dove started to emit an array of lights towards the reptilians like a concentrated disco ball. Those touched by the light stumbled, disoriented. Polly and Zazu also got in on the action, flapping off of John's shoulders and splitting in each direction, moving to the flanks of the bus.

John expected to see another rendition of Polly's laser beam and Zazu's ghostly fire projections, but instead discovered that the humans weren't the only ones levelling up and gaining new abilities.

Zazu flapped his wings, and silvery arcs tore through the air in their wake, looking razor sharp. They headed right for the lizards at incredible speed.

Polly, meanwhile, opened his beak wide like a snake about to devour a mouse, and dark energy rapidly gathered there, little blobs drawn together until a dense black sphere started to form. Eventually, it was the size of a golf ball, larger than Polly's head, and the parrot snapped its beak shut, sending the sphere zipping forward like it had been fired from a slingshot, instantly overtaking the crow and smashing into one of the lizards.

Dazed as they were by the dove's sparkling disco light, the lizard monsters were helpless against the two parrots' ranged attacks. The sphere and the arcs tore into them, shredding their skin and sending blood flying all over the place.

Then the crow finally got in on the action.

The parrots had left its target untouched, and John immediately saw why. The crow was the size of an eagle, with a wing span that surely measured at over a metre, and its talons were glinting obsidian, fiendishly sharp. It had tucked its wings in close to dive towards its prey, but it spread them wide at the last moment, arresting its fall just enough to let it get its claws in front of itself, spearing them towards the lizard.

To the monster's credit, it tried to bring its crude spear up to block. The crow was just too strong and fast for it. One of its taloned feet lashed out with the speed of a master martial artist, batting the spear aside with contemptuous ease, leaving the monster defenceless against the other talon. Even then, it tried to dodge back, to no avail.

The crow caught it around the neck. Its talons dug in as easy as a hot knife into half-melted butter, and they stabbed in deep. Then, it beat its great wings and hurled itself up into the air once more, still clinging on to the monster's throat. The monster's throat came with it. The rest of the monster did not.

Gore sprayed out in a great fountain, but the crow was already moving on to its next target. Zazu's wing-generated wind cutters had torn apart two biped lizard monsters and were working on more, while Polly was now harassing its third lizard monster with his lasers. The dove circled overhead, its twinkling lights blinding the lizards with unerring precision.

Supported by a competent team, the crow was able to go to work. It wasn't even using abilities, as far as John could tell. The oily darkness dripping from its black feathers didn't appear to be doing anything. There was no sign of magic affecting its obsidian talons. He saw no magical glows or runic symbols or other telltale signs of Spell activation. It was just methodically leaping from one monster to the next, lashing out with claws faster than a viper's strike, tearing out throats and pecking out eyes.

The 'battle' couldn't have lasted for more than ten seconds before the bus fell silent once more. A dozen monster corpses lay in bloody heaps in the ground, already sizzling as they went through their rapid decay process. The dove shut off its light. The crow landed atop a chair at the other end of this section of bus. The two parrots returned to John's shoulders, giving a few victorious curses for good measure.

"Fuck you," Polly said in a man's voice that sounded fairly far away.

"Cockjuggling thundercunt," Zazu said in what John was now sure was Ryan Reynolds' voice. He wondered what movie that was from. He rather doubted the parrot had actually met the actor. That got him wondering if Reynolds was even alive, and then his mind moved on to questions of what the situation looked like in America, and then the rest of the world.

America actually probably did a lot better than most place, with their guns and all, John thought grimly. I can never, ever let an American hear me say that, though.

The silence lingered after the two parrots' declarations, until the crow let out a sharp caw at the other end of the bus, looking back at the humans with what John could only interpret as judgement. Why did it feel like the crow was finding them wanting?

He hadn't been penalised any Aura for standing back and watching, thankfully, but John still resolved to make sure to put in an impressive showing at the next monster encounter.

"Okay," Lily finally broke the silence on the human side. "Monster-killing birds. Probably not the number one craziest thing I've seen in the last day or two, but it's up there."

"I thought I simply saw a monster when a three-headed dog spewing different colours of fire from its jaws ran past me, before I met with Alissa," Doug said, rubbing his chin with his thumb and forefinger. "Now I'm wondering if that was actually just a dog."

"There has to be other animal groups like this out there, with powers and all," Jade said. Her machete was resting against the bus wall while she fiddled with the clasps of her armour. "Can you image? Monsters try to go into a rainforest or something, then get their shit wrecked by millions of super-powered creepy crawlies."

"Never thought I'd cheer for spiders," Chester muttered.

"I like the idea that my cat might still be out there," Alissa said, her voice a little tight with emotion.

"I had to give up my Betty when I went into the retirement home," Doug said wistfully. "The home would have let me keep her, but it wouldn't have been fair on her. Border Collies need lots of attention and exercise. Smartest dog I ever met, my Betty. If animals can get powers like the rest of us, I guarantee she's still alive out there, showing these monster buggers what for."

"My ma and pa's farm had lots of animals," Lily said. She opened her mouth as if to continue, then closed it, shutting her eyes. Her next breath was a little shaky, but the one after that was back to normal. A reluctant smile pulled at her lips. "Their bull, Rocky, probably could have survived all this even without powers."

Jade let out a chuckle. "Aye. There were these horrible bastard llamas at the sanctuary I always walked past on the way to school. Spat at anyone who walked past and would swing their heads at you like flails if you got too close. Bet they're causing havoc up in 'Ness."

John listened passively to the conversation as the others started speculating on what animals might be out there, still alive. Mostly, he thought of the animals in his life. Bobby the Maine Coon, who turned 16 this year. Cheese the orange cat, 10 years old and dumb as bricks. Was Sophie's rabbit still alive, even before all this? That seemed doubtful. Grandma had a chinchilla, he recalled. Dave. He might be okay, if the nocturnal animal stayed quiet under the sheet that was always over its cage during the day. It had an automatic feeder, but he didn't know how long that would last.

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I need to get over to Dagenham. The goal had slipped his mind a bit in the last few hours, focusing on the fellow surviving humans and the horde of monsters and the portal world.

"Let's go," John said, stepping forward without looking back. He'd interrupted their conversation, but couldn't bring himself to care.

The lizard monsters had left their crude weapons behind. Daggers and spears made of shards of glass lashed to sticks didn't appear too impressive at first, but the glass was impossibly sharp, perhaps even more so than John's Mana Blades. The others distributed the weapons between themselves while the birds watched on, presumably accepting that they couldn't use this loot anyway.

Those that didn't get used went into John's Inventory. With Level 6 Strength, he was able to hold over 480 kilos in his extradimensional space. The Inventory listed the items as Glass Dagger and Glass Spear and so on.

After that, they moved on.

The next monsters they came across were a bunch of blue souled rats that had only just gathered a few buses down from where the birds had showed their mettle. John didn't give anyone else a chance to act, Flash Stepping forward and throwing himself into Accelerate the moment he landed. The parrots gave slow-motion squawks of surprise, flapping off his shoulders as they abruptly found themselves half a dozen metres ahead from where they had been before.

At a glance, there were fifteen rats in total, sprawled across the bus' seating. The further they went inside the kraken's labyrinthine innards, the less comprehensive the bus interiors were. There were no posters on the walls, or any of the little warning signs. Many of the seats were just plastic without cushion. Some of them didn't even have railings.

Let's make this quick, John thought. He figured the best way to assert his superiority here was to match how the crow had performed: by showing he didn't need any special tricks to get this done in no time at all.

John kept Mana Sense and Soul Vision up, and instead let his martial Skills guide him. Ninja had some insight into martial arts, even at its low level, and Striker and Grappler filled in a few of the blanks. With Level 6 in Vitality, Strength, and Agility, it ended up feeling like he didn't need any Skills or training at all.

They still helped. John dashed to the closest rat, which hadn't even reacted to his presence yet, unaware that a human had crossed into its territory. He threw a straight jab with his left hand. He wasn't expecting the blow to go straight through the monster's skull, cracking it like an egg and sending red yolk and grey matter spraying in slow motion through the air.

Grimacing, John tried to shake the gore off his hand as he moved on to the next monster. The ensuing dozen or so heartbeats consisted of much the same as he went to work beating the rats to death in dilated time. Punches, kicks, elbows, knees. The rats' inferior bodies couldn't stand up to any of them. He had to admit that watching their souls fade away through Soul Vision was oddly soothing, and he wondered if that said anything about him. Surely it couldn't be considered wrong to take reassurance in seeing monsters that would have gladly slaughtered humans be taken out of the picture.

In the end, the monsters were all dead before Accelerate even finished. He looked around in disbelief for a moment, but soon had no choice but to accept he really had dealt with a dozen blues that easily. It wasn't so long ago that a single rat monster had been a scary fight. Mere days.

With nothing else to do and no way to manually terminate the Accelerate Skill, John spent the remaining heartbeats brainstorming a cool pose to finish in. Options abounded, but in the end he settled for a tried and true classic.

And so, his human and bird companions would have hopefully seen something like this:

They would have witnessed John suddenly teleport into the midst of the enemy and immediately lay into them at impossible speed. Moving in a blur, the man in the red leather jacket would have thrown kicks and punches faster than the eye could track, striking with such force that the monsters' heads were turned to bloody pulp in one hit. The badass warrior would have zipped back and forth between the monsters in the blink of an eye. Before they could even react, they'd all be dead.

And then, as the bodies finally fell to the floor, the man came to a stop in the middle of them. His back was to the group. His legs were slightly parted. His shoulders were squared. His fists were at his side. His head was facing down and slightly to one side. His sunglasses were over his eyes. His hair was wild.

John slowly turned, looking over his shoulder and regarding his comrades out of the corner of one eye. "I can't believe it's been taking you guys so long to kill these things," he said.

+2000 Aura

The crow puffed up its feathers. The dove was still. The parrots were flapping around in the air, and came down to land on his shoulders once it was clear the fighting was done, if it could even be called a fight.

To John's surprise though, there wasn't much in the way of awe on the humans' faces. Doug showed a wry smile. Alissa crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows at him. Jade rolled her eyes. Lily gave him a thumbs up. Chester slumped his shoulders and let out a long sigh.

Well, John thought. Not exactly the reaction I was looking for. Am I becoming too predictable?

They settled into a bit of a back and forth after that. The birds would kill some monsters. The other would kill some more. John jumped in and solo-ed a few groups here and there, but generally was content that he'd asserted his dominance and didn't feel the need to put up much of a display.

As they moved further in, blues became less frequent and greens rose in prominence. Eventually, it felt like every encounter was against greens of a wide variety, and all of them dropped loot. None of it was game changing, but it was interesting nonetheless.

A lot of it was probably crafting and alchemy material, like the Eldritch Ooze he got from killing some piss-yellow slimes, or the Evil Eyes that lingered after the rest of a werewolf's corpse melted away, or Gigantula Venom from the corpse of a giant spider, as well as stuff like Beast Bladders, Hearts of Death, and Arcane Arteries. But there was also practical stuff, like the carapace of a beetle, the mandibles of a crystalline centipede, and the stinger of a scorpion.

What few monsters used crude weapons left them behind upon their deaths, too. It was mostly caveman shit in appearance, sharp objects tied onto sticks and such, but there were hints of magical properties, like the bandages. Killing some coal-black kangaroos earned them a set of Honing Boomerangs that always returned to the thrower, for example.

Anything that nobody wanted to use went into John's Inventory. He gained over 100kg of monster loot surprisingly quickly.

The further into the bus kraken's innards they went, the less coherent their surroundings became. Soon, they started noticing chairs on the roof, windows that warped and shifted, and railings that stuck out at odd angles. The corridors started twisting, until they found themselves occasionally walking on the windows, or on what was supposed to be the roof of the bus. There was an area the length of half a dozen buses where every wall was covered in a wide variety of different bus chairs. Some places narrowed until they had to crawl, while others widened to the extent ten or more buses could have fit inside. They even went through a long section that consisted entirely of driver's seats.

In these sections, the monsters no longer simply waited for them. There was no clear mark between one bus and the next anymore, and the monsters they encountered weren't bound by those rules. Through his Mana Sense, he knew there were no longer any stationary monsters ahead of them; they were all on the move, heading towards their designated buses. They started to attack on sight.

It didn't really make much of a difference. John felt like he was a high level player who'd gone back to a low level area, and his companions were overlevelled too. It just meant there wasn't much of a break between fights anymore.

He did notice something through his Mana Sense, though. While almost all the monsters were constantly on the move, there were a handful that remained still. It was hard to put together a truly clear mental picture of the bus kraken's internal layout, but it seemed that the flow of monsters funnelled towards these stationary individuals. It was like they were guarding a choke point.

That gave him an ominous feeling. A hunch. His apprehension rose as they came closer, and he had his Soul Vision peeled, focusing the majority of his attention on the direction he knew the monster in question to be, trusting in his companions and their burgeoning teamwork not to get overwhelmed.

So he was the first to see it, and thus the first to recognise it.

It stood in a section of bus that had widened to the width of five buses, standing thrice as tall as any of the other monsters streaming around it. Chunks of marble were linked together by thick chains, forming a blocky humanoid creature that waited with its arms crossed.

Through Soul Vision, he saw yellow.

"Keep the trash mobs off of me," John said, rolling his shoulders. "I'll deal with the big guy."

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