352 Carol's reservations
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Carol then dropped the pointy end of her saber down, right into the zombie’s brain matter, before using the blade as a shovel to dig the core out.
“I’m about to,” Daria called back, already making her way over to the site Carol pointed.
There was hardly any danger to their job.
Sure, there were some zombies who remained mobile even after all the carnage brought forth by the firearms. Even the head of the evolved zombie that by some miracle survived the mortar shell explosion wouldn’t cease its attempts to bite at them.
And yet…
This wasn’t the level of danger that Carol would seriously consider, not to speak about Daria.
After all, even in her human form, the bare difference in levels between the girls made Daria several times stronger than the last of Mathew’s actual wives.
“Ugh,” Carol let out a small moan of disgust as she plucked the core out of the mush of the zombie’s rotting brain. “I will never get over just how awful of a job it is,” she muttered.
“You better do,” Daria called over. “Once all the fighting ends, this is the most important part of the job. Leaving the cores would not only make the entire fighting part pointless but also lead to even tougher opponents coming later.”
The idea that zombies could feed on the cores of their fellow zombies was nothing more than Mathew’s idea. And yet, just as it was with most of his strategies, expectations, and decisions, the girls eagerly took them for certain.
Because while there was a risk Mathew’s guess would turn out to be wrong, so far, the records of his ideas were perfect.
“Can’t we just leave it all to workers?” Carol asked while smashing another head with the heel of her shoe. “It’s not like all of them are of any use anyway,” she pointed out with a shrug of her shoulders.
“You can’t always expect that kind of convenient people to be around,” Daria replied with a sigh, cutting off the last remaining leg of a crawler before finishing it off with a strike to the back of its head. “Just take Mathew’s group off this mission. They were out in the middle of nowhere with no support anywhere in sight. And they still gathered the cores!”
Carol opened her mouth to reply, only to shut them closed when the garage gate started to roll open only for Nadia to walk out of the base a moment later.
“Did you gather the cores?” she asked.
“Most of them, yeah,” Daria replied while taking a quick glance at the battlefield. “I would say about four-fifths?” she attempted to put what she saw into concrete numbers.
“How many did you gather?” Nadia continued with her questions while keeping a straight look on her face.
“Around…” Daria hesitated for a second as she ran a quick count in her head. ‘I have about five hundred, Carol should have around half as much,’ she applied a fair share of generosity towards her trust in Carol’s ability to harvest the cores. “Around eight hundred?” Daria then put forth an educated guess. “Give or take a hundred,” she then added just to get the point of it all being a guess across.
“Well, that’s should be enough,” Nadia released a small sigh of relief.
“Wait for a second… enough?” Daria put a puzzled expression on her face while dropping the last few cores she just harvested into the bag she used to collect the loot. “Isn’t the fortress only about a thousand worth of basic cores?”
“If you are talking about that storage window, it didn’t appear in here,” Nadia quickly explained. “Math believes it’s because the first merchant in this place was summoned by someone outside of our group,” she then added.
“No, that’s not what I meant.” Daria shook her head. “We have about eight hundred cores gathered. Even if I were to discount just how much the ones from the high evolved are worth, that should make up to about four thousand worth of cores, isn’t that right?”
Nadia’s eyes widened a little. Then, a small smile appeared on her lips.
“Oh, that’s right,” she admitted before lowering her head a little and then shaking it. “I thought you spoke about the total value gathered, not the number of physical cores,” she explained before turning around and heading back inside. “Get the cores and come with me, we are about to turn this place into a fortress.”
That was the plan all along. And the only party that wasn’t in the known since a while ago was Peter’s group. As such, the revelation came as no surprise to the girls who missed all the action inside the base.
“I will stay here,” Carol said right as Daria was about to enter the base.
“Don’t you want to see how it happens?” Nadia asked, taken aback by Carol’s sudden announcement.
“I would love to do that,” Carol replied with a shake of her head. “But our job here is not over yet,” she added while stretching her arm out and pointing at one of the zombie heads that refused to die, still flapping its jaws around in the pointless hope of biting at something. “And it’s better to finish it up as soon as possible,” she added as she looked over her arm and into the night-covered alleys of the town.
“Right, there is still that big monster we need to take care of,” Nadia muttered. She then shook her head before raising her eyes to Carol. “Thanks for volunteering for the job. It’s much appreciated. I will be sure to mention it to Mathew,” she said before turning around and decisively heading inside.
“I guess I should hurry up,” Carol muttered before heaving a long sigh and stomping down on the head she spotted a moment earlier. She then looked around, painting a mental path that would take her along all the still-moving zombies that she could spot.
“After all, there is no way they will allow me to join the big subjugation if there will be still more work to do here,” she muttered to herself before charging at the nearest of her targets.