“I’m ready!” Nadia reported from the head of the formation.


    “Same here!” Le followed suit, reporting from the second line located right at the exit of the entryway.


    “So am I,” Daria joined the roll call, waving her hand at Mathew from behind Le’s back.


    With one member down from their initial setup, Mathew could no longer deploy his group in the same, favorable formation. Yet, the benefits of doing so anyway were simply too great to pass on.


    As such, rather than remodeling the entire thing to make the best use of everyone at once, Mathew opted to abandon the hopes of keeping the insides of the building perfectly safe.


    With only Le responsible for clearing out the zombies Mathew and Nadia would let through, she could easily get overwhelmed. And then, it would be all on Daria’s shoulders to keep everyone safe by ughtering all the zombies that would pass through the group.


    It was all for the sake of keeping the one advantage Mathew wasn’t willing to give up on. The advantage of fighting the zombies outside of the building’s entrance.


    “Let’s do this, then,” Mathew said as he nodded his head and took a step forward. He then ced his hand down on the metal b that kept the doors locked shut. Yet, before moving it away, Mathew stole a quick nce to his right.


    “Are you really ready?” he asked, taking a long look at Nadia’s face.


    He grew used to putting her right at the forefront of the danger. It was the rational choice given Nadia’s statistics. Yet, this rational choice imposed Mathew to keep putting the love of his life into more and more danger rather than keeping Nadia as far out of harm’s way as possible._.


    ‘And that’s why we need more people,’ Mathew thought, right as Nadia turned her head around to look back into Mathew’s eyes.


    “I’m fine, you don’t need to worry about me,” she replied with that insane, gentle smile of hers that could easily melt all of Mathew’s worries and turn his soul into a state of bliss.


    Yet, as soon as her face turned towards the doors, the kind and delicate look on her face gave way to the ferocity she disyed in all of her fights so far.


    “Let’s not dawdle, then,” Mathew said, shaking his head before raising and then dropping the b down on the floor.


    “REEEE!!!”


    An rmed cry rose on the other side of the doors, right as both Mathew and Nadia pushed their respective wing open. And contrary to how the fight started before, it was the zombies that attempted to draw the first blood this time.


    “Those annoying pests,” Mathew cursed under his breath as he wiggled his weapon a little, giving it just enough momentum to smoothen the transition when he pulled it back, behind his head.


    And then, with a single, brutal swing that used his shoulder as the base of a leaver, Mathew cleaved right through the two zombies that rushed at him, leaving their halved corpses for Le to deal with.


    “Don’t waste your strength like that,” Nadia instructed, easily dealing with the few zombies that took her as a target. Rather than a fight, this sh turned into a leisure-grade activity for her, something on the same level as the thousand punches she would perform during every day of her martial arts practice.


    “Yes, teach,” Mathew replied, happy to use a moniker for the girl. And just like he announced, he made sure to bring the strength of his next attack to the bare minimum required to cut through the zombie’s flesh and bones.


    ‘It still takes quite a lot of power,’ Mathew thought when he failed to measure his strength to the perfect degree, his ax locking itself on the discs of the zombie’s spine.


    ‘Well, no biggie,’ Mathew thought, tensing his muscle and forcing the de through the bone anyway.


    Normally, shing something without any momentum on the de would be a near impossible task. Yet, with Mathew’s system upgrades, he was just able to perform this seemingly unreal task.


    “In the end, I wasted more energy,” Mathew muttered to himself, judging the results of attempting to follow Nadia’s advice.


    “No one gets good on the first try,” Nadiamented, sneaking right past Mathew the moment he dared to doubt her words. She then punched a zombie with her left hand, pushing it just far away for her machete to slit its head off its neck.


    “Do you really think a fight with our lives on the line is a good time for me to learn such basics?” Mathew asked, kicking the torso of the zombie away before pushing the de of his ax against another enemy. “You saw just how quickly I stumbled,” he then pointed out.


    ‘It’s not like I believe it’s a good idea to learn how to fight better,’ Mathew thought, clenching his teeth. ‘But how about I start my practice in a somewhat safe ce?’


    “Stop whining,” Nadia said as a wide grin spurred on her face. “The harder you sweat during the training, the less you bleed during the real fight,” she quoted one of the strategists of the ages gone.


    ‘She heard it during her lessons, I believe,’ Mathew thought. Knowing the girl quite well, he could tell her interests didn’t align with any other potential source that quote coulde from. ‘Or maybe when she tried that game I rmended to her?’


    While Mathew continued to struggle over this meaningless puzzle, his hands continued to do the work he signed up for. And with each second, a zombie’s head or several of its body parts would end up cleaved away from the rest of its body, only to fall behind their extended line and end up well within Le’s reach.


    “Their influx is slowing down,” Daria shouted from the back, making the most out of time, given how no zombie managed to make it past Le yet.


    “Did we cut through that many of them already?” Mathew asked out loud, stunned by the girl’s remark.


    ‘Sure, I got quite into the fight, but it wasn’t even that long yet,’ he thought, looking around his immediate surrounding.


    Daria’s report didn’t sit well with the young man because it was dissociated with what he expected. And after just a short look, Mathew managed to find the source of that dissociation.


    “So that’s how it is,” he thought as a small grin of interest appeared on his lips.


    The influx of new zombies indeed did slow down. Yet, that didn’t mean Mathew’s group cut through enough of the zombies to visually decrease their numbers yet.


    The answer to that questiony roughly a hundred meters away from the entrance. The orderly rows of red-eyed zombies stood by the back wall of the courtyard, refusing to buckle.


    ‘There is a lot more of them than they were before,’ Mathew thought. He then gripped his hands into fists, taking a step back to avoid a zombie rushing with its arms aimed at the young man’s head.


    This one step was what cut Mathew’s vision at the enemy in the back, forcing him back into the meaningless ughter of the small fries.


    “We need to get back,” Mathew announced after clearing the zombies in his immediate area.


    The experiences of several hours earlier were still vivid in Mathew’s memory. And with quite a lot of distance separating them from where the merchant and the touchable grass were, Mathew had no wish to risk another confrontation with the red-eyed zombies.


    Not if he could avoid it.


    And especially not when their numbers grew from just a few individuals into an army of several hundred.


    ‘I really should’ve kept Norbert’s vision with us,’ Mathew thought, gulping down his saliva as he slowly started his retreat back towards the entrance.


    “Why are we backing out so quickly?” Nadia asked, refusing to move from her ce while waving her machete in aplicated dance that continued to smoothly deprive the nearest zombies out of their heads. “I can still keep going!” she imed.


    “We are going back,” Mathew repeated his order. He then lowered his ax, took a step to the side, and reached out to grab Nadia’s arm. “We are going back now!”


    This time, the girl listened. Yet, the sight of her startled and somewhat fearsome expression heavily stung Mathew’s heart.


    With all the zombies they cleaned in the short amount of time, Mathew found it actually problematic to move over their remains to get back.


    ‘Why didn’t they attack?’ he asked himself once he finally climbed up the impromptu barricade. Yet, rather than sliding or jumping down to reach the doors, Mathew turned his head and looked to the back.


    And there they were, the red eyes zombies. Standing in their orderly formation, looking exactly like the zombies that initiallyid siege to the school’spound.


    And yet, even though Mathew could tell that all those red eyes were aimed at him, not a single one of those strange zombies made even a single step forward.


    ‘Strange,’ Mathew thought, before turning his focus back to the topic at hand, dropping down from the pile of remains and then finally hiding back in the entrance.


    “And that’s it for now,” Daria muttered a secondter, as she shut down the doors and blocked its wings with the same metal b that Mathew dropped on the ground before. “And we’ve got quite a haul,” she added as she looked over all the heads that filled the entryway.


    “Strange,” Mathew muttered to himself, as he ignored the girl’s remark and moved back into the hall. “Why didn’t they attack?”