Saleem looked at the creature's body, standing next to Kim. He was providing ammunition support to Kim and Edmond and stabilizing the large guns so that Kim could shoot comfortably with the ability she had learned.
Whenever he found an opening, he would pull out a machine gun and try to land as many accurate shots as possible.
After a while, Saleem ran out of ammunition. He had intended to use smaller bullets to suppress the creature, but things were not going as he had hoped.
"This isn't going to work." Saleem looked at the creature. It didn't have any health bars, but he didn't think they had even taken out 25% of its health.
He looked at Kim. Her face was covered in sweat, and she was struggling to hold her sniper rifle. It was very difficult to use such a weapon continuously and be exposed to recoil when her strength stat was only 2.
"We have to escape..." Saleem thought, but didn't dare say it out loud.
He knew that all the people here were full of hope.
Killing this creature was a turning point for them. They believed that if this creature died, everything would be much better, they would become stronger, and they could build a better future.
Saleem frowned.
"I have to help." He then went to Edmond, grabbed some ammunition, and continued fighting.
Marcus closed his eyes for a second to focus. Since learning the meditation technique, he had become calm and had a clear mind that allowed him to read any situation with ease.
Most importantly, his emotional stability was at its highest level.
Nothing could shake his determination, resolve, and composure. Or so he thought.
Just as the creature was about to swing its hammer, he heard two voices shouting at the same time.
"Defend!" It was Mick and Ed.
With that shout, Marcus felt his shield become harder and his arms stronger.
When the hammer struck his shield, he staggered back a few steps.
This time he didn't fall.
He quickly got up and attacked, but the creature's left arm was already defending itself, and his mace felt like it had hit a concrete wall.
At that moment, he heard a sound.
It was two sounds at the same time, but it distracted him for a moment and forced him to look behind him.
Mick and Ed were standing on either side of Eliza.
In Eliza's hand was a blue mass of energy larger than a basketball.
Eliza's face was illuminated by the brightness of the energy in her hand. Her forehead was covered in sweat, and her hands were shaking.
Mick and Ed's voices came to Eliza and Marcus's aid.
"Get back!"
"Attack!"
As soon as these words were spoken, Marcus had already taken a step back. However, under the amplification of the voice, he was pushed back two meters further than normal.
At that moment, the energy bolt in Eliza's hand flew out.
It was aimed right at the creature's head, but Marcus's attack pushed the creature back a little, so the attack hit its chest.
The energy bolt exploded on the creature's chest with a loud bang. "BOOM!"
A hole and burns could be seen on the creature's chest, along with melted pieces of flesh.
The creature fell back a few meters and let out a loud roar.
"RAAAAAGGGGHHHH!" The sound was like a human scream.
It was a cry filled with pain and exhaustion.
And death...
No one expected the energy bolt in Eliza's hand to be so powerful.
To pierce the creature's chest in one shot and kill it.
The creature remained on the ground, only for a few seconds.
Marcus and Joseph felt relieved. Edmond and Kim sat down where they were, exhausted.
Pete and Min-Jun stepped back and breathed a sigh of relief.
Bradley sat down on the heavy rifles. Liam was about to step forward to reassure everyone.
A single voice, just one voice, broke all the peace, relaxation, and silence.
"Run!" It was Saleem who shouted. He had seen what happened. He had seen how the creature died so easily.
While everyone was relaxed, he had seen changes in the creature's body.
The moment Saleem said this, everyone paid attention and looked at the creature lying on the ground.
Then something strange happened. A golden and holy light fell from the sky.
It was as if heaven had taken pity on the death of its most beautiful angel and was giving it a second chance.
The creature's body rose slightly into the air and stopped after rising two meters. Its arms and legs, along with its long, crimson hair resembling a waterfall of blood, hung down.
The golden light falling from the sky did not heal the hole in the creature's chest; instead, it sealed it with stone.
The broken bones and burns on the creature's body were quickly covered with stone, and these stones, with their black marble-like and golden veins, were the embodiment of divinity and power.
The golden light did not stop there. It also fell on the creature's hammer.
The moment the creature's hammer was bathed in golden light, its size shrank. Finally, it reached a size that even an ordinary human could use and fell into the hands of the unconscious creature.
The moment the hammer touched the creature's hand, its eyes opened, and it screamed furiously at the sky.
"RAAAAGGGGHHHHHHH!"
Then it floated in the sky and allowed the golden light to wash over it.
The golden light then began to merge the surrounding stones and form two massive wings behind the creature.
The wings, which took shape in just a few seconds, created a striking contrast with their intertwined gold and black hues, while the creature's hair was also bathed in golden light.
Among the golden-hued red hair, a few strands had completely turned gold.
The creature held the small hammer with its hands.
With a single flap of its wing, it rose three meters into the air and then slammed it down with all its might.
The shockwave that erupted swept everyone away, sparing not a single person.
Even Marcus, despite his strength, was thrown back to the edge of the dungeon. Fortunately, it was only a shock wave, and everyone was relieved to see that no one was hurt.
Realizing how right Saleem's words were, Marcus looked into the creature's eyes and shouted.
"Retreat!"
Then everyone, including Joseph, broke their keys.
Except for one person. Jason. The fastest member of the group.
The most curious and the quietest.
Seeing that only Jason was left, the creature swooped down on him with a single flap of its wings, and Jason was enveloped in a white light.
There was only one thing on Jason's mind. "There is no hope."
The strange thing was that after Jason escaped from the dungeon, the creature punched the empty air, and then, finding no one around, turned its head to the sky and roared.
Then, as before, it slowly walked to the center of the dungeon.
As it walked, the stone wings and flesh on its back and chest fell to the ground as if the glue holding them together had lost its power, and upon contact with the ground, they turned to ash and scattered into the sky.
The wound on the creature's chest, which Eliza had inflicted, healed within a few seconds, and when the creature returned to where it had first stood, the golden light in its eyes faded.
It turned its head toward the sky and began to stare.
There was only one difference between this creature and its initial appearance. Its eyebrows... Its eyebrows were now furrowed.
...
When everyone came out of the dungeon, panting, they collapsed where they stood. A few people were waiting for them outside, and even though he was the last to come out, Jason gave Marcus and Mick a healing potion each.
Joseph shook his head.
At first, he thought he could kill it with his first attack, but now he realized that running away was the right decision.
He was the first to leave and called out to the group. "Let's go."
There was nothing left for them to do here. They needed to rest and regain their strength as soon as possible.
First, they went to the beginning hotel and discussed why they couldn't defeat the creature.
They came to a single conclusion: the creature wasn't strong; they were weak.
None of them had any real abilities. They didn't even have cheap abilities bought from the market.
This explained their lack of power.
Upon further reflection, the idea that people could level up by killing billions of first-level zombies and thus be able to defeat such creatures seemed absurd.
Zombies had a limit, and that limit was the number of people.
They hadn't seen the battlefields yet, but overcoming level limits with such methods seemed like nothing more than a child's fantasy.
Jason's idea was to use the Marketplace.
The Marketplace even had a meditation technique that could relax Marcus. In fact, Kim's unlimited ammunition ability came from there.
So he encouraged everyone to shop at the Marketplace and acquire new abilities.
The creature's level was also 11.
This confirmed Joseph's words.
They needed to become stronger, not in terms of level, but in terms of basic statistics.
He used William's words as an example.
"Building muscle increases your strength statistics. This allows you to learn new abilities. These abilities allow you to work your muscles more, which increases your strength statistics. It's an endless cycle.
Training gives birth to new abilities, and new abilities give birth to power. Power gives birth to more training, more training gives birth to more abilities, and more abilities give birth to more power." William once said.
Although not very cleverly said, Joseph repeated these words so that everyone would remember them.
After that, things got much more complicated.
Joseph began to pursue tougher policies. No one could stand idle anymore.
If you stood idle, you were considered lazy, and that was not well received.
There was no specific punishment to deter people, but the deterrent came from the social order.
Looking at the present, no one could hold back someone at level 10. They could leave the shelter and go wherever they wanted, but they were used to it. They longed for the old social order.
Who among them could go out and find food for themselves? The answer: no one. Anyone could go out as they pleased, find a truckload of food, and be quite successful on their own.
But a community was being built. A new order, a new world, and people were working for it.
To achieve this, they stopped killing zombies and leveling up and tried to build huge walls. In short, they tried to improve.
That's why they did what Joseph told them to do and didn't go beyond the set boundaries.
...
Eliza was one of them. She had been working under Joseph for a long time, basically as a transport captain, which was her previous job. She was responsible for the vehicles and Joseph's transportation, but now she did everything.
This included building walls, helping to construct houses, and training herself.
Sometimes she wanted to quit. To stop building walls, to leave and never come back. But she couldn't. Because she had seen and experienced the catastrophe when it first struck.
She had seen people struggling, crying, and dying. Now she didn't want anyone else to suffer the same fate.
The shelter was growing. They had already gathered all the survivors in the surrounding area.
As far as they could tell, there was no one left within a hundred and fifty miles. They didn't know if there were any survivors left in the forests due to the lack of communication, but Eliza was working for nearly a thousand people.
A week had passed since the raid on the dungeon, and Pete arrived with good news.
They had secured enough fuel for the helicopters by clearing the airport.
Twenty soldiers and fifty civilians who had survived at the military airbase had joined them. Their total number now exceeded a thousand.
Once the helicopters were secured, Pete, Bradley, and Tom had the opportunity to do their real jobs.
They took the largest megaphones and radios they could find, went up to the sky, and tried to make announcements.
Their goal was to find the survivors.
But everything they did was in vain.
There was no sign of any living human being in the vicinity. The helicopter announcements served no purpose other than to draw thousands of zombies toward them.
It took over a week to clear the zombie wave, and dozens of people lost their lives in the process.
The area was cleared, especially New Telludure and its surroundings.
However, only low-level zombies were cleared.
That's when they realized that the real danger was still far from being eliminated. Outside the open dungeons, there were high-level boss zombies. Most of these boss zombies stood on specific ley lines and did not leave the area they were in.
Saleem called these regional bosses. Another term for them was field bosses.
One of the characteristics of these bosses was that they did not welcome helicopters. They displayed aggressive behavior, attacking everything that entered their territory, including the zombies they controlled and all other zombies. This made the people in the shelter feel like they were trapped in a triangle.
Fortunately, there was an open dungeon No. 34 in New Telludure. Even if all the zombies in the surrounding area were cleared, there was a never-ending source of experience points. This made them think that if they were patient, they would eventually be able to defeat the field bosses and be free.
The people, however, were bored.