342 Daniel's Maze
“Sei!” Daniel shouted while throwing his right fist out.
The skull of the zombie stood no chance against his attack. It shattered in a mere instant, sending the zombie’s brain matter all over the bloody field where he decided to take the approaching horde on.
Ring!
A relatively low yet extremely penetrative sound filled the area, making the former police officer turn his head to the side and look back towards the barricade protecting the main entrance to the building.
‘I should head back I guess,’ Daniel thought, pulling his hand back. He moved his eyes back to his front, giving the battlefield one last look, before turning around and unhurriedly retreating behind the two walls made from rubble and sand-filled bags.
“How’s it going?” Gabriel, one of the few men who volunteered for the protection force of the base asked right as Daniel passed by him.
“Only the usual so far,” Daniel replied, accepting the towel that the other party passed to him before moving away from the hole in the barricade, giving the man some room.
“That’s good to hear,” Gabriel replied with a small smile, securing a huge piece of cloth over his left arm before pulling out a short, makeshift spear from a special holster on his right hip. “I guess I should be able to manage for one turn,” he added before jogging out from beyond the barricade and standing at the mouth of the special defense area.
In the time since Mathew left Daniel to manage the second base of the group, quite a lot of things changed.
Starting with the organization of the group, Daniel turned a bunch of highly motivated but also highly unskilled strangers into quite the workforce.
‘We might be lacking the firepower, but Mathew’s support sure does help with that,’ Daniel thought as he passed by the ruins of the building’s proper entrance before climbing the main staircase and reaching his resting spot by the front window.
It was his favorite position to oversee the events, given how it gave him the perfect view of the greatest achievement that his group could pride themselves on.
Thanks to the strictly hierarchical structure that he introduced, Daniel squeezed every last bit of usefulness of the people that he and Mathew saved in the building.
The people that used to do nothing but produce and manage sounds and content now turned into a group mainly consisting of dedicated workers, several supporters who ensured everyone’s comfort, and a lacking number of fighters who supported Daniel in the task of keeping the entire place safe.
It was this organizational change and harsh handling of the whiners and complainers that allowed the construction of the special defense area. Or to be more precise, the construction of a special type of maze that now blocked the majority of the street in front of the building’s destroyed entrance.
pAnD a(-)n0ve1.com
Just like all five of the other fighters besides Daniel, the girls worked in turns. And every two rings of the bell, they would go out, and switch with their counterpart before taking the brunt of the horde’s attack on themselves, forcing the zombies to slowly trickle into the maze instead of assaulting it all at once.
The maze itself was a construction wonder, a project that should not be possibly completed in such a short amount of time.
On its own and against an intelligent human, it served no purpose. As long as one followed some basic sense of direction, climbed one of the maze’s walls to get a look from above, or even followed the right-hand rule, they could cross it within a few short moments.
But zombies…
The maze itself consisted of a set of simple triangles of rubble and whatever Daniel’s workforce could use to create a stable construction. Those triangles would easily split the incoming zombies into two, funneling them down different meandering paths.
Some paths would be outfitted with simple obstacles that would slow the zombies down. Others finished with a dead-end, forcing the zombies to waste time and energy to climb over the maze’s wall, only to enter yet another fake path.
Yet, no matter how long it would take them, all the zombies would ultimately end up in the same, relatively narrow area, with only one entrance and one exit. And it was right in this place, where a single fighter could take his or her time to battle the zombies one by one, while the other undead would be taking their time to reach the place.
‘There are seventeen mobs left in the maze,’ Daniel thought after scanning the entire maze from a vantage point that allowed him to peer into each of the possible paths at once. ‘And there are no signs of even more of them coming from where those girls are going wild,’ he thought, raising his eyes beyond the maze, only to end up staring at the wall of a nearby building.
Ever since those two girls appeared, things turned pretty hectic at Daniel’s base.
First, he had to call everyone up and raise an alarm, ensuring no one would needlessly wander outside of the safety of the media building. Then, he ended up coming up with the shift battle system on the spot, so that all of his systemless fighters could save their strength and have a chance at a proper rest between their shifts.
Soon after the two girls arrived, a horde on a scale Daniel never saw before appeared, threatening to simply overrun both the maze and the media building, regardless of all the other traps and ploys Daniel put in place in recent days.
And when all hope appeared to be lost, Carol came out to hold on to the zombie’s advance all on her own. Then, before the girl could even get tired or run out of energy to cast her area of attack spells, the night began, allowing Daria to transform into her monstrous form and lay waste to all the zombies that avoided Carol’s wrath before.
It was impossible to hold the few thousand zombies that attacked all at bay with only two people, regardless of how insanely overpowered they were.
And yet, when around a total of a hundred zombies managed to get past the two girls…
They were met with the maze. And although it was designed to handle much smaller groups of zombies, the special defense area quickly proved to be capable of handling that number of zombies too.
‘Still…’ Daniel clenched his jaw as he turned his eyes down towards the centerpiece of the maze only to watch the desperate struggle of Gabriel currently facing just two zombies at once.
He used his cloth-wrapped arm to ward off the bites of one of the zombies while poking and slashing with his short spear to keep the other one at bay.
It wasn’t a fight that Gabriel was going to lose, but it certainly was one that would give him quite some trouble.
‘If only we had more people,’ Gabriel thought, gritting his teeth as he closed his eyes for a second.
As great as the maze was, it could only secure the front of the building when it came to an assault. And while the back entrance was protected by the ruins of all the other buildings that made up the local block, there was no telling when and what number of zombies would somehow get through this obstacle to attack them from the back.
In order to avoid this kind of disastrous scenario, Daniel had no other choice but set the resting place for the rest of his fighters to be at the back entrance of the building, so that they could protect it in case of some unforeseen attack.
‘Is this my punishment for only ever using the cores from the zombies that we hunted as a mean to get our food and other supplies?’ Daniel thought, burrowing his furrows as a hint of doubt appeared in his soul.
It was his and only his decision to adopt this kind of tactic. It worked out great so far, allowing him to put the majority of his manpower towards the construction of the maze.
And yet…
It was also the reason why the fighters of the group both boasted the greatest privileges… but also the greatest burden and risk.
And those two downsides of the role were the direct reason behind such a low number of those who were willing to risk their life hunting zombies when just a single scratch would be enough for them to have their lives forfeited.
‘Either way, there is one thing that I cannot ignore,’ Daniel closed his eyes as he slowly arrived at the conclusion that he wasn’t all that happy to acknowledge.
BOOM!
The noise of a distant explosion followed a short flash of light that came from the mouth of one of the nearby streets.
Given how it was currently her turn, Carol, one of Mathew’s girls that came to support the defense of the media building, was clearly not holding herself back while taking on the bulk of the zombie forces by herself.
‘Without Mathew’s support, we would all be long dead,’ Daniel thought, gritting his teeth as the consequences of this realization appeared in his mind. ‘And between what I learned about the apocalypse from him before and the scale of this zombie attack…’
Daniel released a long sigh before turning around and resting his back against the wall.
‘I guess the time to fulfill my end of the bargain is coming.’