15 Staff Increase

Standing before the unfinished fortress, I couldn't help a smile working its way onto my face. Micheal stood there, dumbfounded, looking at the collection of buildings around a massive wall, 30 meters high, with a mansion in the middle of it.

Before coming here, I had asked Micheal what would be the ideal conditions in which to train, to which he gave me a detailed description of the types of facilities and equipment that he would need if he were to train them to a military standard.

Something that he hadn't mentioned was that he worked as a replacement drill sergeant for a month when one of them had been injured in an accident. This meant he knew all the basics, and some advanced training, because he had gone through it not just once as a recruit, but also and the sergeant.

'I really got lucky this time.' I thought to myself, looking him up and down. We walked to one of the two 50 by 20 meter buildings on the west side of the walls which are going to be the barracks. The barracks are conveniently next to the garage.

Micheal is planning on setting up the garage into three parts. The very bottom floor, the third, is going to be set up into something like a paintball map, with obstacles and random walls spaced throughout. He is going to use that to make the men go through intense battles, with non-lethal guns of course, to train their reaction speed, stealth, and adaptability.

The second floor is already set up as a gun range, with 25 ranges set up and able to support up to a .50 caliber rifle. Larger guns, such as anti-tank rifles, have a special gun range above ground.

The first and top floor is going to house all of the vehicles that will be needed during training, although I haven't boughten any yet. When I asked him if he could train someone to use a tank, he started at me with a weird look. Although not knowing why I would want to have a team trained in operating a tank, he said that tanks weren't his area of expertise and that he had never been trained in how to operate one, but he did say that he knew a guy that could help.

I really wanted to have teams trained in using tanks, so I asked him for that guys contact information, giving it to me hesitantly. I had looked up to see if it was legal to own a tank, and in all the 50 states of America, it was totally legal. You are able to drive a tank on private property and even public roads so long as you have an H license (license for driving vehicles with treads) and the tank needs to be road registered. Of course, if someone with a lot of money, like me, wanted to buy something like a tank, I would at least have to be given permission from the local law enforcement after they did a background check on me.

All in all, I am planning, and am able, to buy some tanks either from the market or my user store. The one problem with buying them from the user store is that they would have to be road registered, which could lead to some obvious complications (unless I bought a normal, modern tank). If I just bought them, they could be already road registered.

'I'll just buy some advanced tanks from the user store when the apocalypse starts.' I thought to myself. With my mind thinking about tanks, we walked into the barracks. Glancing around, the barracks aren't anything fancy, just some bunk beds, a place to store you things, and oddly, a shower room at the far end, walled off, with one door used to access it.

Micheal turns to look at me, his voice incredulous,"Really? Showers? You do know that this is going to basically be bootcamp for them, right? You could've just created a communal shower."

Giving him a sheepish grin, I respond,"What? I don't like those things. I would much rather there be individual showers."

Rolling his eyes, he walked around, examining the room in more detail.

Giving me a thumbs up, he says,"Everything looks good, though I would've preferred the showers to not be directly connected."

I still didn't understand why this would be a problem, it's basically the same as a communal shower, just smaller and less people.

Continuing on, we arrived at the, momentarily, empty garage. Walking straight to the third floor, Micheal takes a piece of chalk from the bag that he brought with him.

"Why did you bring chalk?" I ask him, slightly puzzled.

Kneeling on the ground, he starts drawing lines,"I'm using it to map out what the practice course is going to look like." He says, scribbling down more and more lines.

"Oh, I see. It will take a really long time to draw it all out. Wouldn't it be easier to just create it on a piece of paper?"

"It won't take as long as you think, I'm just marking where the walls will be. I don't like the idea of drawing it on paper, doing it in the actual place helps me get a feel for how it should be."

Although disagreeing with his method, I still go along with it, helping him when needed.

It didn't take as long as I thought it would. Although the garage's floors were really big, we were only drawing lines in a few spots. In total, we spent around four hours drawing. When we were finished, Micheal and I were caked in chalk. It turned out that the backpack on him was full of nothing but sticks of chalk. He didn't even have a single water bottle.

Even though I knew he had brought another bag with him, I was worried about its size, wondering if he didn't bring many, or any, spare clothing.

We finish the tour by quickly looking over the second floor before going to the mansion to wash ourselves of the chalk.

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A little over 30 people had applied to be security guards at the moment, which is a surprisingly high number since it had only been a few days since the recruitment started. I suspected that a few of them were people sent by other companies trying to find out company secrets or our technology.

Sadly for them, there weren't really any company secrets to find and there isn't anything like a secret lab where all of my inventions come from. All of the technologies came from me, or more specifically, my system.

Along with security recruits, I had hired 13 receptionists, three electricians, two mechanics, and 10 people for the janitorial staff. I found out that it was time consuming maintaining my bases through my system, so I hired electricians to maintain the electrical system, mechanics for the water filtration system, who will also maintain future vehicles, and the janitorial staff would keep everything clean (I didn't like if things were dirty if I had the ability to keep them clean).

With many of the jobs filled, with the exception of wanting even more security, I focused on improving the defenses of my various buildings. I had asked my sister what she would do to improve the defenses of my buildings if there was, hypothetically, a zombie apocalypse. She came back to me the next day with a surprisingly detailed plan which included coating the glass on my office building with poly or resin and tinting it, making the glass resistant to shattering and making it so zombies couldn't see people inside.

Taking her idea into full stride, I had looked through the user store for a long while, searching for the best materials to use for it. I eventually found a type of polycarbonate that had a dull metallic look. Although replacing all the windows with these would be much more expensive, with each window costing a surprising cost of $3000 (30x more than normal ones), the advantages they provided were many.

Normal polycarbonate windows were much better than normal safety glass since they were 250 times more resistant to impacts, although cutting them was surprisingly easy. The advanced polycarbonate windows bought from the store, on the other hand, were more than five times as resistance to impacts than normal polycarbonate? Furthermore, they were also resistance to cutting, though not as resistant as it was to impacts.

When buying and replacing the windows, I noticed that the prices for things in the user store seemed a little higher than normal. Scrolling through things I had previously bought, I confirmed that the price for them had gone up, though only my 0.01%.

'What is going on!'

Franticly thinking, I couldn't understand why this was happening.

'Does the system see that I am selling things really easily? Did I do something that it didn't approve of? What could be the reason?!' I worriedly question myself.

Trying to find a reason that the prices had gone up, I look under <System Information> and open <User Store Info>. Reading through it for the second time after that first exploration of the system, I find that a new piece of text had appeared.

~The prices listed in the User Store, after reaching the halfway point in the countdown to the apocalypse, will slowly increase in price until the end of the first year of the apocalypse. This is to ensure that the User doesn't rely entirely on the system. After this, no other changes to system operations will happen~

After reading that, a few things made more sense.

Speaking to myself, I said,"The reason why the prices for things in the user store seemed so low before was because it had been lowered for the first half of my time befor-"

My voice came to a sudden halt.

I bolt upright from my desk in my office. "Wait, what?! The first half of the time till the apocalypse has already passed?! It hasn't even been a quarter of the time till it was supposed to happen!" I shouted, a little fear tinging my voice.

Taking a moment to calm my rapidly beating heart and slowing down my breathing, I sit back down. I needed to rationally think about this.

'The apocalypse started, the fist time, on a day a year after I had been given a second chance,' I glance at the calendar on my open computer,"but it seems that things are different this time around. It has only been two months since I was killed, meaning that, judging by what the system said, the apocalypse would start in two more months, eight months earlier than it should have been.'

Thinking this sent a shiver down my spin. I needed to speed up my plans or else I wouldn't feel completely secure for the coming storm.

Rethinking my schedule, I started trying to fit all the things I planned into a two month time frame. There wouldn't be anymore time to relax in the coming months. All my time will need to be focused on building up my power.