Chapter 57: Almost a Clean Sweep
{ You have felled a Level 24, Destitute Zombie, harvesting its essences. Your Strength and Endurance have been nourished significantly. }
{ Your Strength has been enriched to E+++ }
{ Your Endurance has been enriched to A+ }
{ You have earned a freely distributable Essence Saturation + }
The system messages came, but he barely registered them for now.
He would be saving the freely distributable essence saturations for dimensions that he would need to increase in emergencies.
Even with how the zombies had closed the gap in their strength with their evolution, currently, he was still able to handle them, but that clearly could not be the case soon enough.
And he was in no place to afford putting Saturation into dimensions that he didn’t know he needed to face an enemy.
Pulling for breath somewhat heavier, Dion got himself off of the corpse and pulled his blood back from the corpse and from the spears, letting the body slump to the floor, and he immediately stepped around to shove all of the ammunition that was so patiently waiting to be plundered.
Then, he immediately headed out for the rest of the shop.
The door on the other side of the stockroom opened into a short corridor.
The first door to his left was slightly ajar, and he pushed through it into a small office.
There was a desk with papers spread across it and a chair pushed back as if someone had stood up in a hurry.
’The zombie that was in there...’ Dion wondered to himself with his brows furrowing to himself, ’With the way this looks, it should have been the owner working on something? Did he work through the night?’
That had been his immediate thought when considering the chair, but then when he looked at the bands of money stacked over the top of the table, as well as the shotgun nearby them, he immediately reconsidered.
’No, he came here right after the descent and was preparing to leave.’
Dion couldn’t lie to himself to say that he felt bad about it. Especially when his own emotions about many things were being changed and skewed so drastically.
At best, he felt respect for the man’s effort.
In that same thought, there was the fact that, selfishly, he found himself feeling a little relieved because of how he noticed that there was less hesitation within himself compared to earlier.
And so, he took the money into his treasury
Dion then picked up the shotgun and swung the cylinder open. There were twelve shells sitting packed in a ring where the barrel should have been.
"’Now this... has to have been modified by the shop owner.’"
For a shotgun to be able to hold that many shells, the guy had to have known what he was doing, or at least known someone that did know what they were doing.
Nevertheless, Dion appreciated the useful weapon.
He clicked it shut before putting it into the treasury.
Thereafter, considering that this was an office, there was nothing else that he was going to immediately find that would help him, so he made his way out of the place to plunder the rest of the building.
If he still had time, then he could come back here to take his time.
Thereafter, Dion had moved on down the corridor.
The range and the workshop opened up beside each other further along, and he went through, filling his treasury with everything that looked remotely useful from both without slowing down.
Everything from ammunition and tools to parts and protective equipment alike was flashed in red into the treasury.
The shopfront was finally the last place that he had yet to go through.
It was dark with the roller shutters towards the front entrance of the shop down, with whatever light there was coming from behind him.
Racks held rifles and shotguns upright in rows along the walls, as well as some bolt actions and semi-automatics. He didn’t know what most of them were, but that didn’t matter, because Adam would.
His treasury swallowed them in waves as he moved through. Boxes of ammunition vanished from where they sat.
He cleared holsters, slings, bags, and cases from each section and kept moving forward.
The middle of the shop had glass display cases running in a line down the centre.
By the time he reached the back end of the shop once more, where the cash register was—he had already broken it apart to find that there was no cash inside it—the shop behind him looked gutted.
The last display case right near it sat against the wall beside the shuttered door, and inside it, a row of pistols was laid out on felt, two of which stopped him.
He had put every other pistol besides these two into his treasury immediately.
’These are 1911s... I haven’t seen one of these in a while.’
His fist broke through the display glass, and he reached in, lifting the first one out.
He thumbed the magazine release and the magazine slid free into his other hand, but there was nothing loaded in it.
The chamber had nothing in it either. The grips were standard, nothing aftermarket, and the sights hadn’t been swapped out.
’It should be stock...’
There was a second one beside where the first had been sitting. He picked it up, and a faint smile, slightly longing and regretful, crossed his face as he held one in each hand for a moment.
Then he let them both disappear into the treasury.
Suddenly, his expression darkened, and his body felt a rush through it that sobered him up immediately.
The roller shutter suddenly exploded inward.
Glass splattered and broke even more as it broke inwards, metal creaked, and then the sounds of more than a few footsteps crunching down in through the opening came.
The impact had at the same time brought back in all the ambient and distant sounds of chaos from the outside.
"Don’t move, big guy. We don’t want this getting aggressive."
Dion heard a man’s voice speak from behind him, and he sighed a little to himself.
Getting lost in his memories had made him a little careless.
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t heard them before the impact had happened; he had only dismissed it in thinking that they shouldn’t have logically tried to break in when he had caused an explosion that should have been drawing zombies and potentially worse here.
’That was just my selfish thinking though... I should have thought that they had the same goal as me here.’