Leveling Up Wives In The Apocalypse

\'Why is this happening?!\' Mathew thought, momentarily failing into a daze as he attempted to see through the situation he found himself in.

The appearance of the horde wasn\'t anything out of the ordinary. Sure, it wasn\'t something that he expected to go through so soon, especially right after they managed to clean the immediate area of the school from the zombies, but it wasn\'t something to be surprised at either.

In other words, just a bout of bad luck, especially when combined with how they just returned from another expedition.

The appearance of the horde was just bad luck, a shitty draw at the lottery called life in the zombie apocalypse world. But...

The same couldn\'t be said about the number of evolved zombies and monsters that went for a ride along with the horde!

\'Is it all happening because I used so many cores at the merchant?\' Mathew thought, turning around and throwing a quick look at the shadowy figure standing on the edge of the broken part of the floor.

Mathew squinted his eyes... and then shook his head.

\'No, that cannot be,\' he then thought, raising his hand and putting the nail of his right thumb between his front teeth. \'Judging by how quickly Norbert got here, he had to notice Daniel\'s messages before I even entered the merchant\'s realm.\'

"Mathew?" Nadia called out, noticing the troubled look on the young man\'s face.

\'Then where did this horde come from? Is this really just bad luck for it to appear now when we are all exhausted?\'

Mathew closed his eyes and scoured his brains. He focused all of his mental power on the task... but without feeding on more information regarding the matter, it was hard for him to piece the puzzles together in a way that would make sense.

\'No, I cannot ignore the fact that I used quite a lot of cores,\' Mathew thought, opening his eyes and raising them on the two of his companions, eagerly awaiting for him to get out of his daze.

\'Didn\'t Norbert say that a detachment made mostly of those higher-leveled enemies is heading here?\' Mathew then recalled the important detail. \'Maybe that\'s what happened because of the cores I used?\'

Mathew shook his head and forced himself out of his dazed state.

"We don\'t have much time, Nadia!" Mathew said in a stern tone, glossing over how he was the one wasting the time. "Get Leila and Daria here. We need everyone to get through the touching grass so that we can recover."

Despite how useful it was, Mathew didn\'t like to use this feature of the merchant unless it was absolutely necessary.

Sure, it was great to know that it apparently allowed healing even the gravest of injuries as long as one used it before their demise. It was great that it would recover anyone capable of using it to the absolute best state they could be...

But there was no cost attached to it. No consequence.

That alone made Mathew distrust the entirety of the feature. As there wasn\'t something like a free meal in this world, especially ever since the apocalypse began.

And then...

Then, there was the element of one\'s mental state.

\'I don\'t want people to expect to be forever capable of just restarting their body,\' Mathew thought.

Save for the side effects that he didn\'t know about, this kind of mental approach was likely to make people disregard their problems or injuries as they would be sure they can just heal them right away.

And if this kind of mindset were to settle in the minds of Mathew\'s people, what would happen if they ended up acting too recklessly for their own good, end up with heavy injuries... while being way too far to reach the touching grass feature in time?

"On my way," Nadia stood up straight as if saluting before rushing towards the far end of the school\'s wing, clearly intending to use the broken stairway rather than crawling through the narrow tunnel that connected the top floor with the others.

"What\'s the timeline," Mathew asked, turning his attention towards the former policeman.

"One to two hours before they reach Daniel," Norbert replied right away. Hen then closed his eyes and sank into the ghostly form of his system.

"It\'s complicated," he then added once he opened his eyes back up. "The detachment I mentioned before, it isn\'t cohesive like the rest of the horde," he added as he lowered his eyes.

"What do you mean by that?" Mathew asked, even though he could guess a huge part just from the tense look behind Norbert\'s eyes.

"They are not coming here as one group," Norbert replied as his face darkened. He then closed his eyes again, taking yet another look at the situation relatively far away. "The fastest ones will hit this place in ten minutes," Norbert reported as his darkened face took on a grave tone. "The majority of them will arrive within an hour but..."

This time, Norbert\'s face turned fully blank.

"There is one that I can\'t even begin to describe," he uttered in a shallow voice.

"Try to anyway," Mathew insisted.

"It\'s as big as..." Norbert hesitated, scouring his mind to look for the words that befitted what he saw with his ghostly form. "It\'s as big as six buses," he finally found a way to describe it. "Imagine two lines of three buses standing side by side. Then raise their usual height by a half. Cover the exterior with what looks like ten inches thick armor."

Norbert\'s face continued to turn whiter and whiter with each word he used to describe the slowest of the monsters approaching the school.

"It should arrive in four hours," he finally gave out the only answer Mathew cared about.

"Good," Mathew shook his head and slapped his cheeks with his hands.

"We are here!" Nadia then shouted, appearing right at the mouth of the corridor along with Leila, Daria, and surprisingly enough, Carol and Beatrice.

\'How did she climb up the stairway?\' Mathew thought, staring at Beatrice for a second before waving his hand toward the merchant.

"All of you, touch the grass," Mathew ordered before turning his eyes towards Beatrice. "As for you, you have three minutes to figure out how to deal with all the monsters coming here," he gave another order, only for his face to tense up as he reached the point where he couldn\'t avoid dropping a massive bomb on the woman and the tactical leader of the group. "And make sure to include how we need to go to the other fortress of mine to help them defend against the horde too."