John strode forward across the cavernous boss room, luggage crunching and groaning beneath his feet. His Shadow Coat billowed behind him with theatrical flair, darkness streaming from the fabric in wisps that made it look like he was trailing smoke. Through his Soul Specs, the boss's soul burned crimson against the cool azure wash of the portal core above.
+4000 Aura
The notification scrolled past his vision with a haptic buzz in the back of his mind, confirming what he already knew. Looking confident and unworried in the face of a red-souled enemy was worth its weight in Aura. Every step toward that creature was another small victory, another fragment of proof that he could face these monsters without flinching.
The boss remained where it was, atop its mountain of bags and cases. One arm extended, pointing at him still. Its carry-on head tracked his approach with those wheel-eyes, which spun with a slow, grinding rotation that made him think of slot machines reluctantly paying out.
The blue portal core hung suspended in the air above the boss like some malevolent eye, bathing everything in azure light. Its pulsing glow painted shifting shadows across the mountains of suitcases and backpacks and duffel bags, all stacked in precarious towers that reached toward the darkness overhead. The sight of it pulled John's thoughts backward, to the other portal cores he'd faced and the guardians that had defended them.
The bus crab at the end of the depot had been the first. He'd been barely half of a half of what he was now, scrambling against something that could have simply stepped on him and been done with it. But it had seemed to… play with him, almost. It hadn’t taken him seriously until he’d targeted the portal cores, and once he’d destroyed one, it had given him a thumbs up, insofar as a crab made of bus parts could do so.
And it had said it would see him again.
The headmaster had been more sophisticated. It spoke, playing the part of some strict disciplinarian, before eventually delivering its little monologue about hopelessness and inevitable suffering. It had been the first one to make him feel, in a wholly unwelcome way, like the enemy was playing a role. Like it was following a script it hadn't written.
The stickbug had taken that impression and weaponised it, positioning itself with tactical intelligence that was at odds with what a 'monster' was supposed to be, herding him away from the core.
And the dragonfly had raged. Not at being hurt, not at losing ground. It had raged specifically and pointedly at the threat to the portal core, dropping the theatrical disco persona and snarling about things he'd been too busy to unpack properly at the time.
You have no idea what you're part of.
There had been more, of course, in his run through Watford, but those were the ones he’d truly faced.
John had frameworks and theories and hypotheses, and he was quite aware that most of what he thought he knew was inference and speculation stacked precariously on top of a very small amount of hard fact. But there was one thing that had solidified in his mind over the boss fights and a body count he'd stopped counting.
The bosses weren't constructs. They weren't conjured from nothing. They had opinions. They had something that passed, at least at the edges, for feelings.
They'd all been sentient. That much had been obvious. They'd played roles, acted out parts like actors following a script with some small amount of freedom to improvise.
And threatening the portal cores had thrown them all into genuine rage.
John's eyes fixed on the blue sphere above him, then dropped to the luggage mech monster glaring down at him with malevolence in its eyes. Its arm was still extended, pointing at him like an accusation.
If these bosses were survivors of previous apocalypses, beings from alien worlds who'd somehow ended up here, then what were they being offered? What carrot, what stick, what combination of both had convinced them to guard these portal cores? Were they being threatened with something worse than death? Promised something better than freedom?
The thought that they might be fellow victims of this cosmic nightmare sat uncomfortably in John's gut. He pushed it aside. Whatever sympathy he might feel couldn't change the fundamental reality that it was him or them, and he had to choose himself. He had people depending on him. Lily, Chester, Jade, Doug, and the rest of the resistance.
He was still thinking about that when he reached the base of a smaller luggage mound, maybe three metres high, and scaled it in two easy steps. From there, the boss was close enough that he could see the individual bags that constituted its body—a Louis Vuitton print wrapped around what might have been a shoulder joint, a cracked hard-shell case serving as a kneecap, a dozen daisy-chained duffel bags forming the segmented curve of a forearm. The zipper-mouth was closed, the wheel-eyes fixed on him with naked malevolence.
Still, he decided it was worth at least trying to talk to the thing.
He activated Ventriloquist and felt a subtle shift in the way his vocal architecture worked, and threw his voice upward with easy control, aimed to land precisely at the boss's carry-on head.
"Tell me something," he said, tone conversational, unhurried. "Why do your kind guard the portal cores so fervently?"
The luggage mech moved, its body language shifting. It struck a pose, one arm flexing while the other pointed skyward, and when it spoke, its voice boomed through the chamber with theatrical bombast.
"The Lugger sees you down there, little man!" The monster's voice was deep and resonant, each word emphasised with exaggerated flair. "The Lugger thinks you've got BAGGAGE you need to unpack! Looking at that outfit, seems like you packed in a HURRY! Did you even CHECK yourself in the mirror? Because you certainly didn't CHECK any BAGS with style like that!"
The creature struck another pose, this time crossing its arms and nodding its head as if affirming its own brilliance.
John felt his jaw clench. The petty mockery, even lame as it was, reminded him viscerally of school, of Luke Farnell and his friends laughing at him, finding a hundred small ways to make him feel worthless.
-200 Aura
The deduction stung, but he pushed down the anger with Biomancy, manually regulating his stress hormones. Getting baited into attacking wasn't going to help anyone.
"You're a survivor, aren't you?" John called up, keeping his voice level. "From a previous apocalypse. You came from another world, another planet that went through the same thing Earth is experiencing now."
"The Lugger doesn't know what you're CARRYING ON about!" The monster struck a new pose, this time with both arms raised triumphantly. "The Lugger only knows that you're trying to UNLOAD some conspiracy theories that won't FLY! You want to know about the Lugger's BAGGAGE? The Lugger's past is PACKED AWAY where little TOURISTS like you can't CLAIM it!"
More poses. More bag puns. The creature was deflecting, hiding behind the persona like a shield.
John tried a different approach. "What happens after this? After you guard the portal core and we destroy it anyway, or after you manage to kill us? Do they let you go? Give you something you want? Or are you just stuck here, playing this role forever?"
"The Lugger doesn't need to answer to CARRY-ON luggage like you!" The monster's voice boomed. "The Lugger is FIRST CLASS! You're just EXCESS BAGGAGE that needs to be CHECKED! Why don't you PACK it in and go home before the Lugger has to TAG you for REMOVAL!"
It struck another pose, then another, a rapid-fire sequence of exaggerated flexes and points.
"You’re really not even trying to fight back against whatever the fuck is going on here?" John's voice was harder now, anger bleeding through despite his best efforts.
"The Lugger thinks your ATTITUDE needs to be RE-TAGGED!" The monster struck another pose. "The Lugger thinks you need to CHECK yourself before you WRECK yourself! The Lugger thinks—"
"What would your people think?" The words burst out of John before he could stop them, fury overriding tactical consideration. "If they could see you now? If your people, your family, your friends from your original world could see what you've become? Acting as a guard dog for the same evil that took everything from them? Do you think they'd be proud? Do you think they'd understand?"
The Lugger went still.
Silence stretched between them, heavy and suffocating.
John decided this had gone nowhere. Whatever answers the creature might have had, it was clearly not going to share them. Time to end this.
He splayed his fingers, pointing up at the blue portal core that hung in the air above the luggage mountain. John clenched his fist, and the world turned white.
Light erupted in a sphere of incandescent brilliance, expanding outward with the fury of a miniature star. The explosion swallowed the portal core, the surrounding luggage, everything within its radius consumed by pure radiant energy. Heat washed over John even from his distant position, making the air shimmer.
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When the light faded, he expected to feel the familiar sensation of the portal world beginning to collapse, that telltale shift in reality that signaled the dimension's impending destruction.
It didn't come.
John's eyes narrowed behind his Soul Specs as he processed what he was seeing. A layer of luggage had wrapped itself around the portal core like a shield, absorbing the blast that should have destroyed it. Suitcases and duffel bags and backpacks all fused together into a protective shell that was still smoking from the attack.
But that was far from the most alarming sight.
Every piece of luggage in the massive chamber was glowing red. Not just the shell around the portal core. Not just the mountain the boss stood on. Every single suitcase, every backpack, every piece of baggage piled high in the boss room blazed crimson.
The boss had taken control of all of it.
John registered all of this in approximately one second, which was enough time to kick off the small luggage mound he'd been standing on, Booster Boots adding explosive force to the jump, activating Dragon Wings mid-leap.
Less than a second later, the luggage mound beneath him opened from the centre outward, the top of the mound peeling back to reveal a cavity lined with zippers and buckles and straining handles, the whole thing snapping shut with a concussive boom on the space he'd just been standing in. The shockwave of air hit him like a shove as he cleared the danger, his great black wings catching the air and lifting him in a sweeping arc that took him thirty feet up and out of range.
John's pulse hammered as he banked away from the gaping crater of luggage, gaining altitude. A glance toward the chamber entrance showed that the others had already retreated out of the boss room. He could see them clustered at the doorway, watching from a safe distance. Lily and Chester must have directed everyone to pull back the moment things got dangerous.
Good. They'd shown initiative, gotten to safety without him having to order them around. That meant he could cut loose without worrying about collateral damage.
John turned his attention back to the boss monster, already angling toward the shielded portal core.
He turned to the Lugger, who had resumed pointing at him, the theatrical fury back in full force.
John tucked his wings and dove.
He pulled up at twenty feet above the chamber floor, and raised his hands to either side of his body. His palms slammed together.
Gravity Bomb crushed inward around the luggage shield protecting the core, dozens of metres of compressed reality folding itself into a point, the shield luggage groaning and warping and compacting with screaming metal sounds. It held, barely, and the Lugger immediately pumped new material upward, replenishing what had been pulverised in the compression.
John was already moving, banking hard, bringing his hands up to frame a circle with fingers and thumbs.
He peered through the frame at the shield's upper hemisphere, activated Dark Side of the Moon, and much of the shield disappeared entirely as the targeted section plunged into perfect darkness. His hands glowed silver-pale, cold light bleeding between his fingers. He pulled them apart.
The flash-freeze was instantaneous. A section of the luggage shield turned to ice, brilliant and crackling, and then fractured apart into cascading chunks that fell away from the core. For half a second, the portal core's surface was visible, unprotected.
Then a veritable wave of luggage washed over the core, and it was encased in a sphere of luggage once more.
John reached his hand downward.
Planetary Devastation pulled from the floor of the chamber rather than exterior earth, the concrete buckling and tearing apart as tonnes of material screamed upward in a column. He directed it at the ceiling above the boss' position, the debris impact crashing down on the Lugger itself in an avalanche of broken concrete and rebar. The boss staggered, its mass keeping it upright, but several layers of its luggage-shell body were simply obliterated in the cascade.
But it reached into the mounds of its arena, scooped up what looked like a vintage steamer trunk, and hurled it at John with the speed and force of a siege engine.
He Flash Stepped sideways, and the trunk sailed past to crashed into the far wall with an impact that shook the entire chamber. Where it struck, a malevolent and green-tinged gas crawled out of the destroyed trunk, burning against the stone with a hungry persistence that blackened everything it touched and showed no sign of going out.
John banked hard and caught his breath in the half-second he had before the next one came.
The next one was larger. A hard-shell case reinforced with something that made it denser than it had any right to be—he felt the shockwave when it missed him, a pressure that would have shattered bone. The one after that exploded ten metres away in a blizzard so concentrated and violent that he was crusted with ice before Biomancy stripped it away. A fourth tumbled end-over-end and burst open in mid-air, releasing a cloud of something acrid that stung his eyes. He had to Teleport away.
He rematerialised near the ceiling, gasping, and took stock.
The boss had no meaningful limit on ammunition. Every shelf around the perimeter was packed with raw material, every piece of it now an extension of the Lugger's red-souled will, and the Lugger was absolutely fine with being hit repeatedly as long as it had bodies to spare. John had blasted off significant fractions of its mass with his last few casts and it was already restoring itself, drawing suitcases up from the shelves in smooth, unhurried conveyor-belt rhythms.
Luggage peeled off the shelves and joined the boss's body from every direction, adding mass in swelling layers, the mech's dimensions expanding outward and upward with an organic fluidity that was grotesque in something constructed from cases and bags. It kept rising. Twenty feet became forty, then sixty, then a hundred, a vast and lurching colossus, many of the mounds stripped bare around it as it incorporated everything within reach into itself. The floor shook. The air displaced by its movement was a wall of pressure.
The wheel-eyes turned on him from a hundred feet up.
"HA!" The voice was thunderous now, echoing through the chamber in overlapping layers. "YOU ARE STRONG, LITTLE MAN! THE LUGGER SEES IT! THE LUGGER RESPECTS IT!" A sound like the grinding of a thousand closing zippers, which John interpreted as laughter. "AND THAT'S BAD NEWS FOR YOU, LITTLE MAN!"
The giant raised one massive arm and brought it down like a hammer. John Flash Stepped away. Shockwaves rolled through the chamber, toppling smaller luggage mountains.
"YOU THINK YOU'RE DIFFERENT?" The boss roared, swinging again. "YOU THINK YOUR STRENGTH MAKES YOU SPECIAL? IT DOESN'T! IT JUST MARKS YOU AS USEFUL! THEY'LL TAKE YOU! BREAK YOU!"
John's jaw clenched as he filed the confirmation away. This was something that had survived exactly what he was currently surviving, and whatever waited on the other side of it was apparently this. A red soul, a portal chamber, playing a role it hadn't auditioned for.
He felt something that was adjacent to pity, and he crushed it immediately.
"Then fight back!" John shouted at the titan. "You have all this power! Use it to break free instead of defending the thing that enslaved you!"
The laughter stopped.
"You will see," the Lugger said, "how clever that idea sounds, from the inside."
Another devastating swing. John dodged, but the displaced air from the near-miss sent him tumbling through space. He stabilised with Dragon Wings, then began the activation sequence for Reaper's Gale.
The Spell required time, and time meant vulnerability. The boss monster seemed to sense it. The giant lunged forward, one massive hand reaching to swat John from the sky.
John held his position, arms spreading to his sides in an angelic pose. Agony exploded through his left side as the boss's fingers clipped him, sending him spinning. Blood filled his mouth. His ribs creaked. But he didn't abort the Spell.
He lifted his hands above his head, palms facing upward, head bowed. The boss was coming at him again, massive fist pulled back for another strike that would surely kill him if it connected.
Something soft and light fell into John's waiting hands. The ghostly scythe’s bone-white handle felt cool against his palms, ethereal cloth drifting in impossible winds. It hummed with power.
The boss's fist was coming in fast. John could see every detail of it, his enhanced perception rendering the moment in perfect clarity. He could see the individual suitcases that made up the giant's knuckles, the seams where they'd fused together, the texture of fabric and metal all merged into unholy flesh.
He swung the scythe.
A visible gale erupted from the blade's path, billowing out like mist that didn't disturb physical objects. The phantom wind swept through the boss monster's massive form, passing through luggage and matter without resistance, pulling something else instead.
The Lugger's giant body shuddered. Its red soul, so bright and blazing through John's Soul Specs a moment ago, steadily dulled. There was a scream, like the usual dirge that accompanied the Reaper’s Gale was being tortured. Still, it steadily bled from crimson to orange, the colour shift occurring over the spun of seconds as the boss seemed to resist the gale. Eventually, the luggage titan stumbled, its cohesion failing as the boss lost its iron control over the thousands of luggage pieces that formed its body.
Hundreds of suitcases fell, clattering and tumbling with a tremendous noise. The shield around the portal core dropped next, the luggage that had formed it raining down in a disorganised mass and leaving the blue iris exposed and glowing and intact. The giant body lost cohesion, the enormous scale shrinking rapidly as mass failed to hold together, and the twenty-foot mech crashed to its knees on the chamber floor where the mountain had been, its orange soul burning dimly in his Soul Specs, its wheel-eyes gone still.
John landed heavily on a pile of suitcases, his injured side screaming in protest. Blood soaked through his skull shirt, his breathing came in pained gasps, but he forced himself to stay focused. Through the pain, he registered two things: the portal core was now exposed, and the boss monster was looking up at it with something that almost resembled relief in its eyes.
"Maybe," it said, in a voice that was much quieter than it had any right to be after everything that had come before it, "this is better. Better to just... let go."
John pulled himself upright with a wince. He flew closer to the kneeling monster, close enough to see the details of its luggage-constructed face. "Let go of what? What are they holding over you?"
The Lugger's gaze shifted to him, and for a moment John saw something profoundly weary in those eyes. Something that had endured too much for too long.
"Hope," the monster said. Its voice was soft, tired. "The devious bastards." A pause, its gaze drifting back to the portal core. "They tell you if you do this, if you guard it long enough, if you serve the quota, there is a way back. A way to—"
Its voice cut off mid-sentence like someone had flipped a switch. The Lugger's body went rigid, posture freezing in place.
Then its soul winked out. The orange glow that marked the creature's life force simply ceased to exist in an instant. No fade, no gradual dimming. One moment there was a soul, the next there was nothing.
The Lugger's body collapsed forward, suitcases clattering as the construct fell apart completely. Whatever had animated the bags was gone, and now they were just… bags. Inanimate objects.
A heartbeat later, the portal core above vanished.
It didn't explode like the ones John had destroyed before. The blue sphere was simply gone, taking its eerie light with it, plunging the room into darkness.
The darkness didn’t last, but what happened next was unlike any portal destruction he’d ever experienced. The typical sequence of the world twisting and breaking apart didn’t occur. There was no transition between one state and the next.
One moment he was standing in the chamber, staring at empty space. The next, he was standing on cracked tarmac in the crimson light outside the small luggage warehouse, the morning air tepid, and the place where the blue portal had been was an unremarkable doorway.
Gone. All of it. Without ceremony.
