The bus rumbled along a bumpy dirt road, its oversized tires crunching over cobblestones and monster bones alike. The sky outside glitched occasionally—flickering between a pink pixel sunset and a broken skybox. Floating castles drifted lazily overhead, while enormous monsters wandered the hills like lost mods looking for a purpose.
Inside the bus, five teens slouched in their makeshift seats. Half of the seats were reinforced with scavenged metal, duct tape, or just sheer willpower. One had a turret mounted on top of it. The whole thing looked like a failed school project modded in a sandbox game. That's because it basically was.
Alex sat in the front passenger seat, flipping through a hand-drawn map filled with doodles, scribbles, and coordinates written in red ink. His Toolgun rested on his lap, humming faintly like it wanted to be useful.
"Alright," he said, dragging the pencil across the page, "we've passed Glitch Lake, NPC Farm, and the Infinite Staircase. What's left?"
Riley, lounging with a beat-up laptop and cracked VR goggles hanging from his neck, barely looked up. "We've been riding for two hours and I'm already bored. I ran out of NPCs to mess with. And my last custom boss crashed the server."
"Was that the one with the anime laugh and rocket fists?" asked Kael, halfway out the side window with a giant shield strapped to his back.
Riley shrugged. "It was thematic."
"Yeah, well, it broke the bus horn," Kael said. "Now it just screams in binary."
"Which is awesome," added Jax from the back, fiddling with two sword-hybrid rifles. "I mean, come on! 'BEEEEEEP-011001110010' is way cooler than a honk."
Dane was sitting upside-down on the seat, one boot tapping the roof of the bus, watching the world upside-down through cracked goggles. He grinned wide, eyes glinting.
"I dunno, man… I kinda like the weird silence before the world throws a boss battle at us. It's like breathing in before you scream."
Riley looked up from his screen. "You say that every time we're about to blow something up."
"Because it's always true," Dane replied, flipping upright with a thunk. "And something's always gonna blow up."
Alex rolled up the map and tucked it into his pack. "So what now? We've conquered 570 maps. We've made a city out of office chairs. We turned the final boss into a pet. Maybe we finally… I dunno… beat GMod?"
The bus fell quiet. Even the background ambient hum from Riley's laptop cut off.
Kael looked genuinely disturbed. "Did… did we really finish the game?"
"No way," Jax said, standing up and tossing his weapon onto a nearby crate. "GMod can't be finished. It's chaos incarnate. We're just not being chaotic enough."
"I vote we drive into a volcano and see what happens," Dane said, cracking his knuckles with excitement. "Worst case? We respawn."
Suddenly, the bus hit a pothole the size of a small lake, sending everyone airborne for half a second.
"Okay, who didn't bolt down the coffee pot?" Riley groaned as a metal thermos clanged off his head.
Kael, still hanging half out the window, gave a sheepish wave. "My bad. I was using it to block an air draft. Kinda forgot gravity's a thing again today."
"You guys," Alex said, rubbing his temple, "can we not get concussed before our next encounter?"
"No promises," Jax said, already loading something volatile-looking into his hybrid rifle. "If we drive into a volcano, I wanna fire a full salvo mid-air and yell 'FLAMIN' VICTORY DIVE!' before we crash."
"We're not diving into lava," Alex said flatly.
Riley snorted. "Says the guy who once built a mecha out of toilets just to win a prop hunt."
Alex crossed his arms. "That was strategic. And effective."
"Effective?" Dane burst out laughing. "You slammed it into a wall, it exploded, and we all ragdolled halfway across the map."
"That's how you win hearts and respect," Jax said, high-fiving Dane.
Alex muttered, "It worked, didn't it?"
Kael nodded. "We did win that round. Sort of. The admin cried."
"I hacked the admin's spawn scripts to trap them in a loop," Riley said with a lazy smirk. "He deserved it. He kept resetting our gravity to 'floaty spaghetti' mode."
"Oh, yeah," Kael said with a shudder. "I still dream of slow-mo flipping through the sky while monsters scream opera at me."
"You dream about that?" Jax asked, eyebrows raised.
"...Yeah?"
Riley leaned forward. "Okay, how did we all even meet again? Like, seriously. Who put a tactician, a hacker, a berserker, a weapon hoarder, and a tank in a school bus with mounted turrets?"
There was a pause. Everyone looked at each other.
Dane grinned. "The plot, baby."
Kael raised a hand like he was answering a class question. "Technically, we were all banned from different servers and got dumped into this rogue map file."
"And instead of dying," Alex added, "we hacked reality, built a respawn bus, and started fixing maps ourselves. Which, by the way, no one asked us to do."
"We're not fixing maps," Jax protested. "We're improving them with explosions!"
"I gave the last map legs," Riley said proudly.
"Didn't it walk into the ocean?" Alex deadpanned.
"Still a win," Riley replied.
Dane reached over to slap a big red button labeled 'DO NOT PRESS UNLESS BEING ATTACKED BY GIANT FROG'.
"Don't even think about it," Alex warned.
"But what if a frog attacks while we're talking?" Dane asked. "I'm just being prepared."
Jax squinted at the horizon. "Guys… uh. I think we're about to have a plot point."
Everyone turned.
From the distant hills, a cloud of dust was rising. Shapes. Dozens of them. Crawling, stomping, slithering—some looked like corrupted textures, others like nightmare creatures with too many eyes and no render priority.
Riley sighed and shut his laptop. "Welp. So much for boredom."
Kael raised his shield and cracked his neck. "Time to turn this bus into a drive-thru of pain."
Jax grinned. "Dibs on the big one."
Dane finally pressed the red button. "LET'S GOOOO!"
The bus jolted as defense turrets popped up from the roof, the horn screamed in corrupted binary, and music started blaring—"Ride of the Valkyries," but remixed in 8-bit dubstep.
Alex stood up, calm as always, scanning the map one last time before pulling out his Toolgun. "Alright team, formation chaos. Standard protocol: don't die too much, keep Dane off the roof, and try not to crash into the multiverse again."
Riley leaned back and grinned. "It's a good day to glitch."
The bus roared forward, kicking up clouds of pixelated dust behind it. On the horizon, the swarm of corrupted monsters grew clearer—an unholy mashup of glitched models, rejected assets, and unfinished nightmares from other games. A half-rendered dragon roared with no sound. A six-legged toaster galloped next to a massive slime creature wearing a traffic cone like a crown.
"Why does that thing have your face, Riley?" Kael shouted, pointing at a gelatinous cube oozing toward them.
"I used my face as a texture placeholder once!" Riley yelled back. "That was two servers ago!"
Jax was already halfway out the emergency hatch on the roof, dual sword-rifles in hand. "Too late for questions, boys—IT'S SMACKDOWN TIME!"
The bus turret whirred to life, rotating like an indecisive blender. It fired a volley of neon-colored plasma rounds that painted the sky with retro light trails. Explosions rocked the hills as the front line of monsters vanished in brilliant pixelated bursts.
"Nice shot!" Alex called. "Try aiming for the non-exploded ones next!"
"WHERE'S THE FUN IN THAT?!" Jax howled, already switching weapons mid-leap as he launched himself off the roof, guns blazing.
Dane whooped and climbed after him, cackling. "YOU FORGOT RULE ONE, JAX: ALWAYS YELL SOMETHING COOL WHEN YOU JUMP!"
"Wait! You idiots forgot parachutes!" Alex shouted.
A beat.
"Oh, right. We don't have parachutes."
Riley smirked. "Respawn logic, bro. Gravity is just optional pain."
Kael kicked open the bus's side door, shield ready. "Guess it's our turn!"
"Try to stay with the bus this time," Alex muttered. "I'm still finding bits of Dane from last week."
With a war cry that was equal parts heroic and meme-worthy, Kael leapt from the bus, his oversized shield glowing as it absorbed an incoming monster blast. The impact sent a shockwave through the field, knocking three toaster-hounds into a pile of angry polygons.
"Let's gooo!" Kael bellowed. "I CALL DIBS ON THE GIANT CHICKEN!"
"It's not a chicken, it's a corrupted chocobo—" Riley started, before the bird-monstrosity let out a horrifying electronic screech and dive-bombed the battlefield.
"Never mind," Riley deadpanned. "It's whatever it wants to be."
Meanwhile, Alex was still in the bus, calmly coordinating through his headset. "Kael, flank left. Jax and Dane are up ahead causing chaos. Riley, give me a drone eye from above."
"Already on it," Riley said, tapping away at his laptop. A small, bug-eyed flying camera zipped up into the sky and beamed down a full 3D map overlay.
Alex's eyes narrowed. "There's something big coming behind them… bigger than anything we've fought yet."
"How big?" Riley asked.
The bus shook as a monstrous shape crested the horizon. A towering abomination made from stitched-together models—half train, half kraken, half supermarket aisle. Its roar sounded like a corrupted sound file crashing on playback.
"Oh," Riley said. "That big."
"We'll call it… THE GMODULON," Dane's voice cackled over the comms.
"Because of course he named it," Alex muttered.
Jax's voice crackled through, yelling over chaos. "WE'RE GONNA NEED MORE BULLETS!"
"No," Alex said, eyes sharp as he grabbed the steering wheel and shifted the bus into overdrive. "We're gonna need style points."
He slammed the bus into a drift, tires screeching as the vehicle launched into a ramp made from an abandoned terrain prop. The bus soared into the air, flipping once—then twice.
Alex activated the music system.
Boss Fight Theme: "Banana Slamma Dubstep Mix" blasted through the speakers.
"Everyone hold on!" he yelled.
Kael roared, "I'M GONNA HIT SOMETHING AND I'M EXCITED ABOUT IT!"
Riley calmly tightened his VR goggles. "We're totally gonna crash."
Dane, already dual-wielding fire launchers, laughed. "Exactly. Let's make it a beautiful crash."
As the bus hurtled through the air toward the Gmodulon, each teen readied for the impact—the chaos, the lag spikes, and the possibility of respawning as a ragdoll with no collision.
But they wouldn't have it any other way.
Because this was Monster Mash Highway.And this was just Tuesday.