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“Are you…” Norbert attempted to utter a comment, only for the latter half of his sentence to turn out to be too silent for anyone to hear it.

So he took a moment, gulped down his saliva, and took a deep breath. And then, he opened up his mouth again.

“Are you fucking serious?!”

“Trust me, I wish it was only a stupid joke,” Mathew admitted, hiding his face in his palm, too embarrassed to look at the others.

“What are we going to do now, then?” Nadia asked, getting over the shock of Mathew’s revelation faster than anyone else in the group.

“You are just going to gloss over the fuck-up?” Norbert asked, clearly unhappy that such a massive failure could go away as if it never happened.

“Gloss over?” Nadia asked, raising her eyebrows. “And what good…” she attempted to say something, only to hold her breath back and close her eyes. “No, I’m just saving the daylight for action. I will be able to scold or make fun of Matty all I want during the night,” she added with a shake of her shoulders.

“That’s so?” Norbert muttered, putting Nadia’s words in doubt.

“That’s so,” Nadia replied with confidence only to then throw a quick glance at the side of Mathew’s face. “Nothing good will come from wasting time now to pressure him. And it’s not like we do not make mistakes either,” she then added, shaking her shoulders once again.

“It’s not like we lost that much time either,” Daria joined in, taking Mathew’s side without much hesitation. “The question is…”

“What are we going to do now?” Leila finished the question that Daria started. “Do we continue back to the school? Or do we go back to the media building? Or maybe we are just going to roam around to gather more cores and decide what to do next later?”

‘All the options are valid right now,’ Mathew thought, keeping his thoughts behind the barrier of his mouth. ‘But deciding which one will be best… That’s a whole different beast altogether.’

“Hmm?” Norbert mused as he turned his eyes to Mathew, indicating who he thought was responsible for making this decision.

“We are still closer to the media building than we are to the compound,” Mathew pointed out. He then took a deep breath and raised his eyes with renewed confidence. “We will lose less time if we go back now than we would by putting it off for later…” he added, only for his voice to turn lower and lower with each word.

“What did you think about, now?” Nadia asked, getting quite good at noticing the moments Mathew would usually keep to himself.

“It’s nothing,” Mathew replied, shaking his head. He then pursed his lips into a thin line before taking a long breath. “No, it’s nothing,” he then added before any of the girls could add her own two cents. “I just thought about what we talked about before,” he said, taking a step back towards the media building.

“The idea of hunting some zombies for cores?” Leila asked. And while her guess was wrong, the small smirk on her lips indicated it was just a clever way of prompting Mathew to reveal his thoughts.

“No,” the young man shook his head, “rather than thinking about the cores, I’m worried that raising another fortress will turn all the zombies in the area even stronger.”

The idea of completing certain tasks leading to the growth of the general strength of all the zombies was just a theory in the making. Mathew had no proof of its validity, just like with most of the ideas he took into account when planning his actions.

And yet, it was a theory he couldn’t ignore just yet.

“I don’t think we are in a position where we can bother with how our actions will affect others,” Leila stated her opinion on the matter. “Caring about random strangers is a privilege we are not privy to, not when we struggle to survive ourselves.”

“I’m glad we had this talk away from Daniel,” Norbert pointed out with a sigh. “I can bet you any amount that he would strongly disagree with that.”

“Well then, I think we reached a conclusion, then,” Mathew pointed out, taking another step back the way his group came from. And then, before anyone could challenge his unvoiced decision, he took another step.

And soon, without any vocal agreement within the group, Mathew’s party turned around only to walk the very same road they took before.

“A group of zombies ahead,” Norbert reported about a minute later. “I don’t see any reasonable way to move around them,” he added some details to his report.

‘If it was night, I would send Daria to take care of it and feed her shadowy form on their cores,’ Mathew thought, only to shake his head and turn his eyes towards Leila. “Can you take care of it?” he requested. “With your blade skills, you should have the easiest time out of all of us.”

“Sure thing,” the girl replied, hurrying ahead without a word of complaint.

For a mere moment, the girl disappear from Mahtew’s field of view, only to appear again a minute later, when the group reached the place where she cleaned up the party of the zombies.

“How were they?” Mathew asked when his group reunited with the girl. He then looked down at the double-dead corpses of the zombies, analyzing the sight before the girl could even answer.

“I believe you are asking how strong they were,” Leila said with a small smile. “Nothing out of ordinary,” she then replied. “Way weaker than those we fought during the night.”

“Huh?” Mathew muttered to himself, throwing one last glance at the corpses before turning his eyes back on the road and picking up the pace. “The question is, are they weaker overall than those we fought, or is it the influence of the night itself?”

Mathew’s question remained without an answer, just like most of the doubts he had about this new, changed world. And with the members of his group thinking hard about the meaning of Mathew’s offhanded question, the rest of their journey passed in relative silence, broken only by the random screeching of the zombies coming from way off in the distance.

“Oh, hey,” a survivor of the hole in the media building’s wall jumped when Mathew’s group appeared from beyond the ruins of a nearby house. “Wait, what are you guys doing here? Didn’t you leave a few moments ago?”

“What are you even talking about?” Mathew asked, rolling his eyes in reaction to the stupid question. “This is our first time here!” he then added as if it was an obvious matter only to then pass by the stupefied survivor and enter the building.

“… have that for now. Fixing the holes should be our…” Daniel spoke to one of the other survivors while scribbling some notes in the notepad he held in his hand. Yet, before he could finish his sentence, the noises Mathew’s group made alerted him, making the officer turn his sights towards Mat’s party.

“Huh?” The officer shook a little while raising his eyebrows in surprise. “Weren’t you guys supposed…”

“Yeah, yeah,” Mathew cut into Daniel’s sentence while waving his hand. “I forgot something important,” he shortly explained before approaching the shadowy figure of the merchant and reaching out for the shadows hidden underneath its hood. “It will only take a moment and we will be back on our way out,” he added before squeezing the shadows and allowing the strange power of the merchants to transport him to the separate dimension.