145 We got quite a haul, didn't we?
“This looks like a good place to start,” Mathew announced when he reached a set of closed doors.
They were situated at the mouth of a narrow hallway that then expanded into the main communication artery of the building.
According to Norbert’s report, it was slightly off the direction of the secondary building where the people were held as bait.
“It would be hard to find a better place,” Leila agreed as she weighed down her machete in her hand. “How are we going to do it, then?”
“I will take the front with Nadia,” Mathew gave his orders. “We will leave just enough space for some to slip through so that you and Daniel can take care of them,” he explained.
“What about me?” Daria asked, the look on her face proving her recent injury only served to motivate her further rather than putting her morale down.
“Eager for revenge, aren’t you?” Mathew commented with a small smile before shaking his head. “Just like Leila and Daniel will make sure the stragglers won’t get on our back, you need to do the same for them,” the young man elaborated a little on his plan.
“Fine,” Daria said as she pursed her lips and looked away.
‘She isn’t happy,’ Mathew thought, gritting his teeth. ‘Was it really a good idea to come here before leveling up some more?’
The hesitation was a natural part of Mathew’s thoughts at this point. Yet, the benefit of growing used to the doubts was that he could keep them at bay.
“Let’s do this, then,” Mathew said, opting to cut his indecisiveness with actions. He then grabbed a wide slab that held the massive doors together before throwing it aside. “Here we go!”
Mathew kicked the doors open. He could do so only because the zombies treated it as a part of the wall and simply stood around rather than trying to force their way through.
“Come at me, rotting pieces of shit,” Mathew called out.
He added the bit of obscenity just to hype himself up. For the zombies, it was his voice that attracted them rather than the meaning of what he said.
And soon, Mathew had to fix his hold over his ax.
Due to how narrow the entryway to the building was, he grabbed his weapon as high as he could and slide his hand on the handle. Due to the blade extending down from where it was mounted, it then covered Mathew’s hand completely, allowing him to operate the weapon in an entirely different way.
‘It’s like having gloves that can cut,’ Mathew thought as he slashed at the incoming zombies.
Slash after slash, he continued to decrease their numbers.
The normal zombies stood no chance against his system-improved strength. And when he would slide his hand to the side, a zombie’s neck would be no obstacle on the path of his blade.
To Mathew’s side, Nadia immersed herself in the battle as well. And just like one could predict from the member of the group with the highest level, her speed was on an entirely different level.
“Kick the corpses away!” Mathew called out after he dug his elbow into the neck of a nearby zombie before bouncing his arm and pushing it forward to decapitate another enemy.
“I know, I know!” Nadia replied leisurely, slashing zombies with her machete as if she was beautifying a hedge in some high-class garden.
The only difference was that instead of colorful petals trimmed off the hedge, her moves splattered droplets of red, thick blood all over the place.
“Leave some for us, come on!” Leila protested from the back.
‘Oh, right,’ Mathew shook himself out of the battle frenzy, taking a step back to open some more space between himself and Nadia.
‘I immersed myself in the battle so much that I ended up forgetting about the plan,’ he thought, biting down on his lip while kicking and shoving several monsters to the back, giving others the chance to fight some as well.
Pop.
Right in the corner of Mathew’s vision, a notification appeared.
It had a form of a see-through, blue rectangle that Mathew could easily see, yet had to focus on.
It held exactly the same message that the young man saw many times before.
Yet, as moments of the fight turned into minutes and minutes into the hour, notifications in Mathew’s vision started to grow at the same rate as did his exhaustion.
“How many did we get so far?” Mathew asked when his body failed to perfectly execute the attack he planned for the very first time.
“At least half a thousand,” Nadia replied shortly, saving her breath for the fighting.
“Daria!” Mathew called out. “Can you come here?”
“Give me a second!” the girl shouted over, keeping her words short just like everyone else.
“I won’t hold on for much longer,” Daniel reported from the back.
‘Shit,’ Mathew cursed in his thoughts. ‘And here I wanted Daria to check if we culled enough of them to put a dent in their density,’ Mathew thought.
“I’m coming!” Daria called out, pushing through the mass of zombies in the entryway at an extremely slow rate.
“Actually, it doesn’t matter anymore,” Mathew shouted back, dropping his earlier idea. ‘Even if we could open a path to that building, there is no way for us to keep a corridor if we are tired,’ the young man realized before gritting his teeth and turning his head to Nadia.
Over the course of the extended battle, she moved out of the narrow entrance and stood just two steps ahead, breaking the waves of the zombies before they could face Mathew in the doorway.
“Nadia, retreat!” the young man called over. “I’m going to clean the area of the doors to close them!”
There was no point sticking to the plan if they couldn’t handle what it took.
‘There is no point in pushing ourselves now,’ Mathew decided. ‘There is no way anyone could keep up with our pace of growth, so we can afford to take it easy,’ he thought, perfectly aware of the dangers that other humans would pose in a world of apocalypse.
“Let’s wrap it up for today!” Mathew shouted again right as Nadia started to retreat.
“Everyone, get to the main hall and hide away from the blast!” Mathew gave his last order. He then aimed his blades at the skull of the nearest, actually red-eyed zombie.
The attack alone was enough to split the zombie’s skull open. It was also the one and only hit that Mathew needed to finish it off.
Yet, rather than turning around to face another adversary, Mathew dropped his ax to the ground before digging his hand into the zombie’s brains.
“Make ready!” Mathew shouted, wrapping his fingers around the core in his right hand while grasping at the ax’s handle with his left.
And then, just like many times before, Mathew directed all the energy that he could sense within himself towards his hand, before dropping it down and crushing the core in his palm against the pavement of the building’s courtyard.
A shockwave produced blasted all the zombies away from Mathew’s proximity.
A small portion of it rushed through the open doors, pushing a huge amount of zombie corpses and zombies alike through the entryway and into the empty space of the main hallway.
And then, everything came to an end, allowing for an eerie silence to momentarily fill Mathew’s surroundings.
“Time to go get some rest,” Mathew summed the situation up, calmly raising from his knees and taking a short stroll towards the entrance before closing the doors, unbothered by a single zombie, and blocking them off with a slab.
He then turned around to look at the messy insides of the hallway.
“What are you waiting for?” he asked, looking at members of his group hiding from the wrath of the shockwave he unleashed. So he raised his arm and pointed at one of the zombies that survived the mayhem and ended up inside.
“Finish them off!”
It was a simple order, yet crucial one. Because while only a few zombies ended up forced into the building, if they managed to escape their attention, the relative safety of the building’s insides would be gone!
“Leave this to me,” Nadia quickly volunteered. She then stopped right where the mess of zombie remains started. And as she looked around, a small smile formed on her face.
“I don’t know if we got five hundred,” she stated before moving her eyes to Mathew’s face. “But we got quite a haul, didn’t we?”