Just as the brightness from the Colossus was subsiding, and the members of the assault force outside Staten island could barely open their eyes, Merlin's voice resounded in everyone's cards, along with his hologram like face.
"Ignore what just happened and carry one with whatever you were doing. Alright. Then. I'm off. Bye!"
With these simple words, Merlin cut off the connection with the card network through the AI and returned his focus to the creature in his hands; Mecha.
"So… you can eat a lot huh?"
"…" at this point, Merlin's lips curled up into a devilish smile, making the pitiful blob of slimy blackness to shiver uncontrollably.
"Let's see how much you can eat…"
With this, Merlin's eccentric laugh resounded in the entire building.
Through the previous 4 months, Merlin had only bothered to kill Tier 1 creatures, since anything below that would not give him any evolution points, and it would be like stealing evolution points from his subordinates. Therefore, other than rushing to places where Tier 1 creatures were spotted, he focussed all his attention to using his Master Skill [Magic Runes], causing it to level up to level 5, and creating the current Merlin's Sanctum. This was his highest level skill.
Once a skill crossed the bottleneck of level 5, it would advance to a higher tier skill. A level 5 Active skill would advance to Unique skill, and a unique would advance to master. These had all been proven by other people and their corresponding skills. However, even in his previous life, Merlin's Magic Runes were stuck at level 5.
Therefore he had come to the decision to do something he hadn't one in his precious life while he still had the time. He decided to create a Mechanical life form. However, instead of his Magic runes evolving to a higher Tier skill, he got another skill, and one that was higher than Master skills.
Just what was this skill?
…
The assault force had already recovered, and under Sean's orders, they moved out for the operation.
Such a large-scale operation against an even larger number and strength of zombies had never happened before. However, Sean had not reported this to Merlin, since he had ordered, 4 days ago, that no one was to enter his room in the following week.
After the nearby scouts retuned with their reports, and Merlin's flying puppets transmitted their recordings, Sean steeled himself and gave the order.
"Attack!"
Instantly, the core strength of the sanctum, teams numbering 1 to 8, launched their attack. Consisting of only those above or at Level 3, there 8 groups totalled around 400, looked like ants compared to the enormous horde of zombies in front of them.
They looked like Martyrs charging into their own death to ensure their family and friends could live on for a moment longer.
In the eyes of those newly recruited members of Merlin's sanctum, like Ethan, these teams were as good as dead.
However, the next moment, his mouth was left agape.
The small team of 400 trampled over the regular Level 2 and 3 zombies like they were paper. Charging in blindly, around 300 of the people were close combat fighters, wielding swords, shields, and daggers. Around 70 of the remaining 100 were mages, specialising in a range of elements like earth, water, fire, wind, metal, electricity, ice, and other basic and intermediate elements.
Water, fire, wind, and fire were the basic elements, while Metal evolved from mastery over earth, electricity evolved from mastery over fire, and ice evolved from mastery over water.
Mastering wind did not result in any intermediate element, but after a wind mage reached Tier 3, they would automatically receive the Ultimate element of space, as long as they mastered wind. However, space was almost impossible to even begin to comprehend until one was Tier 5.
A simple wind mage was unlikely to survive till that point in the future. Therefore most wind mages decided to give up and start from the beginning, by forcibly extracting all their mana, and restarting the process of absorption, and choose another path. However, there were some cases with people actually master space, such as Grand Mage Han Xiao from one of China's surviving groups, later renamed to the Hanxio group.
Back in the battlefield, the barely noticeable 30 elementalists were blasting all kinds of elemental attacks, along with the 70 mages, to bombard the innumerable zombies from a distance, while the 300 remaining members charged into the battlefield.
However, this did not include the leaders, who were close by, watching everything, waiting for the enemy Tier 1s to enter the battlefield. Although Tier 1s were boss level creatures which required Level 4s to party up in groups of 4 to 5, the leaders were not ordinary Level 4s. They even had a Tier 1, Kyle! The others all had equipment specially made by Merlin to suit their battle styles, while Kyle had a simple sword made of normal metal, with no runes engraved on it.
"Hmph, boss never gives me proper weapons!" lamented Kyle.
"Hahaha. That's because you break every single weapon given to you in the first attack. Your style of fighting is too barbaric and lacks finesse" mocked Jon
"Take the boss for example. He is already almost at the peak of Tier 1, and he has to yet break a weapon!" continued William
"That is because he repairs all the nearly broken weapons while in battle to prevent them from breaking. How is that even humanly possible." Retorted Kyle in a frustrated tone.
"Haha. True. I don't think anyone can repair their staff while fighting against 4 Tier 1s at the same time!" Lamented Carl in a hopeless voice.
"Anyway, we need to get back to dealing with this matter. Boss should be done with his matters soon, and will rush over as soon as he gets the news to steal all the evolution points like every other time. We need to finish this off quickly!" said Sean in a rather serious tone.
All of a sudden, all the high level players within the room turned to one location. A large amount of mana was being released from that location. Enough to petrify even level 3 warriors, the ones with the highest resistance to mana.
Instantly, all the people here, excluding Kyle, rushed towards that mana source. Within 3 seconds, they all appeared surrounding the level 5 Lich that appeared.
Without another word, they released all their attacks onto the lich, bombarding it with all their attacks.
BOOM!
With a resounding bang, the lich, along with the ground 20 meters around it, was obliterated completely. This was the quickest way to kill a lich.
Merlin had told them about the lich's heart, which could be placed outside the lich's body. However, it had to remain in a 10 m radius of the lich.
Naturally, there were some differences between liches, and some of them could even keep their heart 15 meters away from their body. To prevent accidents and sudden developments, the quickest and safest way was to bombard the lich and 20 metres around it, to completely destroy its heart, without leaving anything behind.
This was Merlin's way of doing things. Locating the heart was required if it could be destroyed with brute force.
The great Merlin had once told them, "A problem is not a problem if it can be completely destroyed"