131 Zombie Army
Mathew got out of the shaft as soon as he could. Yet, rather than heading for the staircase and then the ground floor, he moved in the opposite direction, approaching the main-gate facing window instead.
“This looks far worse in reality than it does on the map,” he muttered under his nose while gritting his teeth and grabbing hard at the edge of the window’s ledge.
“How bad is it?” Nadia asked as soon as she joined her man by the window and looked down. She then swallowed her saliva before freezing by Mathew’s side. “This doesn’t look good,” she admitted when her eyes moved beyond the wall and then the gate.
The entire street that led to the compound’s main gate was now overflowing with zombies. Yet, contrary to how the horde would act in all the cases that Mathew experienced so far, there wasn’t any crowding issue at the small plaza in front of the entrance.
There were roughly two thousand zombies, neatly arranged into formation blocks of twenty zombies wide and ten zombies deep. Three such blocks stood in a small arc in front of the main gate. Five more blocks were arranged in a neat line behind the frontline with one more block left to the far left and a spare, incomplete one standing in the third line.
‘What the hell is this kind of deployment?’ Mathew thought, opening his eyes wide as he stared at the peculiarity. ‘Sure, it looks neat and domineering… but it doesn’t make any sense at all! If they want to lay siege to the fortress, spreading their numbers as wide as possible would be more beneficial!’
Mathew’s thoughts speed down the hallways of his brain as he attempted to figure out the intent that put the zombies in those exact formations.
“Is this all a work of a single evolved one?” Nadia muttered to Mathew’s side while her hands trembled a tiny little bit.
“That’s unlikely.” Mathew shook his head. “I find it highly unlikely for a single evolved one to be able to control so many zombies at once,” he explained his own take only to squint his eyes as he send the army of zombies another look.
‘Wait, if we assume that there is more than just a single commander…’ Mathew thought. He then scanned the picture just a fewteen meters away from the window again.
“No, there are three field commanders and one that manages the entire picture,” Mathew muttered after taking a long look and looking out for patterns that could clue him in.
And once the young man paid enough attention, those clues became fairly obvious.
The unit detached to the left appeared like some sort of a mobile reserve aimed at pushing the advantage on the flanks if such an opportunity were to appear. That is, that’s how a unit positioned in this way would work on a human battlefield.
Moving on, the first line of zombies was arranged in a containing formation. A battle order that one could use when commanding a defense of a narrow passage or when exploiting a natural funnel to push the enemies together into a choke point where their numerical advantage would become meaningless.
Yet, in any of those cases, while the intent was fairly obvious… The actual strategy indicated by the deployment of the zombie units was simply invalid.
Out of the entire army, only the second-row formations had any business in standing the way they should.
Their wide front allowed them to occupy nearly half of the entire length of the school’s campus wall. By standing a respectable distance away from those walls they could also avoid any sort of traps or long-range attacks that Mathew could throw at them.
“There are at least three field commanders,” Mathew replied only to point out his hand at the strayed unit to the left and the one keeping to the back. “Those two groups are under one of the commanders. The three units at the front by another while the long line in the middle serves under the third one.”
Just a few hours ago, Mathew wouldn’t be able to accept his findings. After all, how could three evolved monsters have completely different capabilities to keep their units orderly? Only after experiencing a huge wall filled with possible ways of leveling up did Mathew reach a new understanding of how this changed world worked.
“So we should just kill three of them and then move on?” Leila suggested as she joined their side by the window.
“What’cha looking at?” Daria quickly followed suit and slammed her upper body up on Mathew’s and Nadia’s shoulders only to look through the window from above their heads. “Dang, that looks fun,” she muttered when her eyes fell down on the army of zombies nearby.
“The main question is, is one of those field commanders also the main commander for the entire army?” Mathew threw a question out while continuing to observe the situation.
‘They are getting quite late,’ he thought, stopping the instinctual drive to look to the back. ‘I guess they had to talk some things through,’ he thought as the look on his face darkened.
‘To think that I would have to deal with the trouble on the outside and inside at the same fucking time,’ Mathew complained to the high heavens before heaving a sigh and shaking his head.
“I want to play along with whatever they have planned first,” Mathew then decided as he walked back in the direction of the stairs.
“What if this is a trap?” Nadia asked, clearly worrying about Mathew’s well-being.
“Then we are going to press just the tip in,” Mathew replied, only for a small simple to fill his lips when he noticed the other possible meaning of his words. “We will do it gently as if it was their first time facing system users,” Mathew’s smile turned into a wide grin as he kept the suggestive joke going.
“You don’t look anywhere as near as worried as you were just a few moments ago,” Daria pointed out as she stole a glance at Mathew’s side.
“Am I?” the young man shook his head. Yet, rather than offering some random words to cut the topic, Mathew actually took a moment to think about it. And then, he smiled. “I guess I left all my worries behind,” he admitted only to look at the entrance of the shaft out of which Daniel and Norbert finally crawled out.
“And I have too much on my head to bother with something as silly as worries,” Mathew added, sending the two men a cold look. He turned his eyes away before either of them could notice his gaze.
‘I simply don’t have the spare peace of mind to worry when I’m too busy trying to find a way for us to win this battle!’