NOVEL NEXT Chapter 40: Merchant
After a few hours, everyone had awoken, and they were off. Merlin intended on reaching the dungeon entrance by noon, have lunch and then enter it. He wanted to kill of as many Tier 1 beasts within the dungeon before the tutorial boost got over.
With both the tutorial boost, as well as his passive skill [Multiplier], he could get a lot more from the beasts than what he could get in his past life.
As they were moving along, honking to attract more zombies, while Max was killing them, and slowly growing stronger, Merlin noticed something off in the distance.
"Stop calling for more zombies."
After saying this much, Merlin exited the car, with Foveros held in his hands, and started a bloody massacre, only this time none of the blood landed on him. This was his favourite shirt than was the last gift his parents had gotten him. A simple black T-shirt, along with a black hoodie. It was also his last pair of clothes remaining.
He needed shapers in his group. Shapers were players who focused on producing items which can be infused with mana for different tasks, like fighting, cooking, digging, etc. But the only way to have some would be to wait for the tutorial to get over, and force a few of the collected survivors into doing that.
When Merlin had allowed people to join, he naturally wouldn't allow untrained people to randomly join the trained police force. Most of them would simply become base personnel, who would help manage the base, like cleaning, cooking, and maintenance. This was why he gave the order to allow able-bodied people to enter his group.
After killing off the zombies, Merlin turned around to look at Max, who seemed to be in much better condition the yesterday.
"Protect the car and those two. If too many or strong zombies come, ditch the cars, take the two and return to base as fast as you can without stopping. Got it?"
"Yes Sir!"
Merlin could estimate that Max was nearing the 4rd level just from this one expedition. With this strength, he could easily escape even a zombie wave like the pseudo-class 1 wave Merlin had faced earlier, even with two extra weak officers in tow.
With this, Merlin invokes some tier 1 wind spell and boosted his speed to the degree that even Max could only see a faint after-image. I should be known that Max was at the peak to the 3rd Tier, and his eyes should at least be able to keep up the maximum speed of a normal Tier 1 being.
However, with the use of wind magic, Merlin was moving at about half the speed of sound, around 150 m/s.
[SM: That is really fast for those who don't know. For reference, a Boeing 747 travels at a cruising speed of 250 m/s]
Merlin was heading in a straight line, towards a certain building. It was an apartment building with quite a few survivors. They had passed through multiple such buildings.
But what caught his eye was the circular rift in the space at the centre of the building. With his senses elevated to such a high degree, he could easily see inside the buildings, even if they were half a kilometre away.
Merlin knew exactly what that was. It was the dimensional gate. A gate used by 'Merchants' from other dimensions. A gate which can be considered more refined and expensive, than the rifts used by strong beings like the Blood Wolves, and Zero. This was not because the Merchants were weak! They were in fact almost as strong as Zero! The reason was that they were carrying all their goods in special rings, which are delicate objects that can be easily broken with a little bit of special fluctuations in rudimentary special tears.
Therefore they designed these 'Gates' which are much safer. But they also take a long time to produce, and a lot of money.
A gate appearing during the tutorial meant that the Merchant coming out of the gate was incredibly rich. Why? Because the co-ordinates of Earth are revealed as soon as the tutorial begins. However, the earlier the 'Gate' ante to be opened, the more mana crystals it would take, since Earth's mana was incredibly low at this point.
Which meant that the one who opened the gate was rich enough to open one to earth at this time.
And Merlin needed to get to the gate before it completely opened and the Merchant came out. Why? Because Merchants were selfish. And would take everything they wanted, and would leave right after. If one could not get to the merchant in time, they would lose out on the chance to get items from superior world.