170 I can't let them do everything themselves!
“Throw!” Daniel’s voice somehow reached Mathew’s ears even through all the noises around him.
‘Throw what?’ the young man thought, slashing his saber to the side only to cut the hands of the zombie to his back with a strand of mana. ‘Where the hell are you in the first place?’
Mathew’s question would remain without any official answer. Yet, the problem of who was supposed to throw something and what they were supposed to throw in the first place quickly turned out to be quite obvious.
Plop, plask, crack.
The sounds that the falling bricks made when striking the zombies were of all sorts of kinds. Depending on where the projectile would fall, the sound the rotten flesh of the zombie would make would differ.
‘At least he is not pushing them to fight on the front,’ Mathew thought, sending yet another cut with his saber into the crowd of the zombies surrounding him.
Mathew has yet to unlock all three merchants for this particular place in order to find out its full potential. And yet, from the two that he already summoned, he could tell the value of local survivors.
And as they were able to actively contribute to Mathew’s goals through production, having them die in a battle against zombies would be nothing less than a tragic waste.
“Woah!” Mathew uttered a small cry when he suddenly found himself surrounded by the zombies. His rush to join in the fight resulted in him dropping a bit too deep within the zombie lines for his comfort.
And now, with four different zombies approaching him from three different directions, he found himself unable to dodge or block all the attacks at the same time.
‘I need to get back,’ a single thought prompted Mathew’s cold, calculative side. Instead of retreating like a normal person would, he rushed forward, just slightly to the side.
“Ugh,” a small moan escaped from Mathew’s mouth when a strike to his chest pushed all the air out of his lungs. The zombie that landed a hit had actually no hands, with only the forearm bones protruding from the rotting mess of flesh that remained on his arms.
The strike ended up blunt, just an inch away from Mathew’s solar plexus. It was pretty painful, even after all the improvements to his vitality.
It was painful… but nothing more.
“Wheeze,” Mathew audibly took on air, using the opportunity he paid with his pain to squeeze between three more zombies. In theory, he strayed even further away from the safety of the doors. Yet, in reality, by moving away from the central point of the fight, he suddenly found himself in a relatively open space.
‘Now I have enough room to move around,’ Mathew thought, swinging his saber right away and felling down the zombie that reached its rotting hands for him. ‘What about others, though?’ Mathew then asked himself, cutting two more zombies to open up a circle two meters wide around him with no further opponents.
It would take about three seconds for the zombies to reach him now. Three seconds that he was free to use on looking over the battlefield.
To Mathew’s left, Daria was going on a rampage in her shadowy form. In the single second that Mathew could spare to look at her, she changed her position seven times. And within those seven times, Mathew could only notice her moving five times.
‘Is she able to teleport around or something?’ he thought, turning his eyes to his right.
Given how Daria took the flank, Mathew expected to see Leila on the other wing of their loose formation. And yet, when he looked to the right, he saw no one else but Nadia.
Once again, Mathew could spare just a single second to check her out. And that single second was enough for his mind to turn hazy.
‘What the hell is she doing?’ he thought, unable to even follow up on the girl’s movement. And it was all within the frame of her not even moving all that fast!
Whenever looking at something, the human eye would look for patterns. If someone swung their arm, there was a limited set of further moves that they would follow up the swing with. And even within those limited moves, some were easier and more probable to follow than others.
And yet, those rules didn’t appear to apply to Nadia. She moved around like some kind of robot, programmed to resemble human movements yet unable to replicate them at all.
Her body would swing to the left while she would send her blade to the right. Then, her next attack would result in her body swinging along, only for the girl to follow it up with a kick… that rather than pushing the enemy away, allowed the girl herself to jump away and gain some distance.
‘Ugh,’ Mathew released an internal moan, fighting off his desire to close his eyes and massage his temples. His observation time was extremely limited. And the young man was already stretching it pretty thin.
In such a situation, Mathew had no other choice but to keep his body ready to get back into fighting at a moment’s notice.
In the end, Mathew used his last second to look over his shoulder, to where the girls came from. His view was obstructed by the mass of zombies that separated him from the doors, limiting his view to just the things that happened above the level of the zombie’s heads.
Swing, thrust. Swing, swing, vertical cut, and then thrust. Swing, thrust. Swing, swing, vertical cut…
Mathew couldn’t see Leila at all. What he could see, though, were both the swings of her saber and the effects they had on the mass of zombies around.
And surprisingly enough, despite having the lowest stats in the entire group right now, the pile of corpses around her position appeared to grow the fastest in the entire group!
‘All of that despite repeating the same moves over and over again,’ the young man noticed before pulling his attention back to his own position.
‘Everyone is working so hard,’ Mathew thought, turning his wrist around before swinging his saber upwards. As the cut was perfectly horizontal, Mathew couldn’t even hope to decapitate the zombie that reached him first.
But it wasn’t his intention in the first place.
‘Since we are doing pretty well here,’ he thought, kicking off the halved body of a zombie before turning his face towards his next opponent. ‘Then I might train my spells a bit!’
Mathew spun on his left leg, using the momentum of the turn to execute a powerful upward-horizontal swing. He missed the joint, which was the point where the decapitation was the easiest. And yet, thanks to the sheer weight of the saber and the strength Mathew operated it with, the blade cut straight through the bone, felling the zombie’s head off its shoulders.
Mathew then took a step back. He lowered his saber to a neutral position before focusing on his left palm. Before a single second could pass, he could already feel the energy railing up in his flesh and pouring into his palm.
“It would make me look bad if I allowed the girls to do all the fighting themselves, wouldn’t it?” he muttered under his nose before raising his palm towards the backside of the zombie’s army.
And then, Mathew allowed his intent to separate, infusing his will in the mana that then shoot out of his palm.