Leveling Up Wives In The Apocalypse

"The push on the left is withering!" Daria called out when she retreated from the frontline to take a minute of rest. She accepted a bottle of water offered by one of the school survivors, taking a long sip of the liquid.

"Do you want to switch sides?" Mathew asked, turning his head around only to wink at the girl and get right back to fighting.

It was still a time deep into the night, and yet, opposite to what common sense would dictate, everyone from the school was now working out in the street, right between the two waves of zombies pushing towards them.

"If you asked me this half an hour ago..." Daria replied, only to cut her sentence and shake her head. "I'm too tired to handle so many of them on my own, sorry," she said before lowering her head in what appeared to be a shame.

"It's okay," Mathew cheered the girl up. "You already did enough. On the other hand," Mathew took a step back, swung his saber across a group of three zombies, decapitating the two of them only to lodge his blade into the skull of the third one. He then kicked the third of the zombies, forcing it back into the zombie wave while letting the worker survivors smash the still-moving heads with some makeshift tools before extracting the cores out of their brains. "How are those new survivors?"

Daria took one more sip from her bottle before resting it on the ground and standing up.

"The last time I checked, they were all asleep," she said, glancing over in the direction of the school's fence.

In theory, that alone should be enough to check up on the trio that Mathew and his group saved from the police vans... yet, with nearly forty people in total now busying around, it was challenging to keep a straight line of sight over anything.

"We need two more guys to move the cores behind the barrier!" Someone shouted from within the crowd. Even though it wasn't related in any way or form to what Mathew was talking about, it somehow served as the kick in the butt he needed to focus back on his task.

'Fuck,' Mathew cursed when two zombies slipped past his guard. Yet, before they could reach the worker survivors, the two hunters from Carols' group rushed in to intercept them, quickly bringing their spears through the zombie's skulls.

"Sorry for that!" Mathew called out, only to turn back towards the waves and get back to slicing away.

"We've reached three hundred cores!" another shout came from the direction of the school's gate, where a small number of survivors busied themselves with organizing and then counting up all the cores brought inside by those working directly on the street.

"Assuming most of them are worth five cores at the merchant, we can already afford another fortress,' Mathew thought, kicking at the zombie that attempted to flank him from the left and pushing it back into the crowd of zombies behind. 'And the waves are already starting to thin out,' he then thought, turning his eyes back towards the right side of the street.

When the entire excursion began, it was on the left side where most of the zombies came from. It was also the place where Daria operated, killing twice as many zombies as the cores she directly absorbed during her fight.

'On that note, the intervals at which she needs breaks...' Mathew thought, stealing a glance at the girl who finished her round of stretching and invoked her shadowy form again. The survivors around her parted, opening a path for her to return to the second frontline where Carol, Frank, and Kasper alone held back the zombies for a moment.

"I would use someone else here as well!" Mathew then called out, quickly turning his face back towards the approaching zombies, unwilling to let any of them pass by him again.

"What, am I not enough?" Nadia suddenly appeared by his side.

She was currently covered in blood from the soles of her feet to the tip of her head. Her blade was already showing signs of being used up, proving that it was high time for Mathew to replace it for her.

"Most of the zombies are coming from this side anyway," he added only to glance over at the third front, one blocked by all the police cars. Thanks to this obstruction and a relatively small number of zombies coming from the direction of the town's outskirts, Leila alone was enough to hold that front.

And then, came the one report that Mathew longed to hear for quite some time already.

"We've harvested and moved all the cores!" the same math genius that approached Mathew roughly two days ago to help him out with the formula now fearlessly stepped through the piles of rotting mess zombie's corpses while holding a small notebook in his hand. "There might be a few of the cores left, but not on the scale that could cause a problem down the line," he added, privy to some more information than the rest of the survivors due to his managerial position within the school.

"Finally," Mathew released a sigh of relief only to take a step back and cut the hands of the zombie that attempted to grab him. He then took a deep breath.

"EVERYONE!" Mathew shouted from the bottom of his lungs. "Stop killing them!" he ordered. "Maiming is enough!"

Now that most of the cores on the ground were harvested, it was time for all of the non-combatant survivors to get back within the safety of the school's barrier. And in order to stop the leftover cores leading to the birth of a new army of evolved monsters right by their doorstep, everyone had to hold back their natural instincts of killing the zombies that kept on attacking.

Mathew turned his head to the young manager of the school. "Call everyone back, we are pulling out," he ordered only to put his focus back on the fight.

Between how the horde looked when the excursion started and how it appeared now that it turned into a fully-fledged operation that involved every last surviving soul within the school was extremely different. When it all first started, the zombies were crowding to the point they couldn't really fit all within the entirety of the road's width.

And now, while more and more of them continued to come out from the small alleys and areas deeper into the town, they could no longer even be called a proper crowd. The gaps between each of the zombies turned from millimeters to two and three meters, allowing just two or three people to hold an entire frontline.

And despite all of that, Mathew judged it was high time to retreat.

Not because they were all exhausted and couldn't hold on much longer.

It was simply because he was too curious about what the police survivors had to say to keep on the boredom of this easy fight!

"All the workers are behind the barrier!" Frank shouted from by the gate, as the one tasked with ensuring no one was left behind.

'That's a relief,' Mathew thought, taking a step back. "Run the usual check!" he shouted, slowly starting to give up more and more ground.

The area that they secured with so much effort now continued to shrink, with zombies filling up the gaps in the space.

"Carol, bring all of yours back too!" Mathew then ordered the weakest of the combatants off the field of a still ongoing battle.

And a mere moment later...

"We are safe!" Carol shouted.

"Well then," Mathew looked to the side to where Nadia continued to enjoy throwing herself into the state of a rampage. Yet, despite how crazed she appeared while pulling the legs out of the zombie's hips or tearing their arms apart... She held herself back from properly killing even a single one of them.

"Shall we go back?" the girl then looked towards her man, with a wide smile decorating her lips.

"Yeah," Mathew said, nodding his head. And then, after retreating for two more steps, he shouted, "Pull out!"

They did enough for one night. And with the first rays of sun slowly starting to appear, it was only a matter of few moments before Daria, their greatest fighting power in the night, would revert back to being the weakest link in the chain.

"It's time to enjoy the spoils of the fight. Retreat!"