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He held the girl in front of himself, hugging himself into her back while keeping the girl close with his arms.

"It can be really unnerving," Nadia chimed in.

They went through enough shit to understand the meaning of this strange ambiance.

Carol, Leila, and Daria have left on the journey back to the fortress. Given their physical ability, the round trip shouldn\'t take any longer than ten, maybe fifteen minutes.

It wasn\'t anywhere close for the hunters to finish harvesting all the cores from the primary battlefield, not to speak about the area Nadia left in her wake.

It only made sense for them to split, each overseeing the tasks that would take either time or attention to complete.

The hunters would take approximately two or three more hours before they would take all the value from the encounter. Four if they would tire quickly.

Mathew couldn\'t speed the process up. Even if he were to join personally in the gathering… it would hardly make any dent in the amount of work needed to complete this particular task.

And those hunters needed someone to look over them while they were busy gathering as they were far too weak to face the terrors that lurked behind every corner.

\'While we are locked here, watching over those folks, the three of them might be fighting for their life,\' Mathew thought, only to combat his grim thoughts by sinking his face in the corner between Nadia\'s shoulder and neck.

It was cozy in there. Nadia\'s body was warm, soft, and fragrant, offering Mathew the greatest refuge he could ask for. The refuge from all the stench, ugliness, and brutalism of the world surrounding them.

"Don\'t worry about them too much," Nadia whispered, more than happy to accommodate Mathew in his moment of weakness. "They will be alright. What we talked about were all just the worst-case scenarios. While the chance they will happen may exist, don\'t even get me started on how small it is."

Mathew hid his face even deeper in Nadia\'s flesh. He shut his eyes tight as if refusing the notion of returning to reality while rubbing his forehead against Nadia\'s shoulder to throw off the girl\'s attempt to wake him back up.

\'I cannot stay like this forever, can I?\' Mathew asked himself.

He then took a deep breath… and with great hesitation, he pulled himself out of the hug and raised his eyes.

The field was still littered with zombie corpses… But most of them had their skulls now opened, their brains cleared out from any and all valuable cores.

\'Are they working faster than expected or was I in the retreat of my thoughts for so long?\' Mathew thought, shaken by either of the notions.

"Is it just me or are we nearing the point when we will have to move everyone ahead, to the second field?" Mathew muttered.

"Now that you mention it…" Nadia raised her eyes and looked at the very same scenery that Mathew did. "I guess you are right. But that\'s…"

There was no real, logical reason for them to stay back. The second field of corpses was just a minute\'s worth of normal walk away and a few seconds\'s worths of a proper sprint.

But what if those few seconds would be the deciding factor of whether or not Carol, Leila, and Daria could reach the relative safety of their group? What if the three of them would end up chased by some sort of a powerful monster and moving the expedition forces just a few hundred meters away would settle the fate of the girls?

"I never expected that being a leader would be so heavy," Mathew muttered, gritting his teeth as he forced himself to stand up and take a step away from Nadia.

Her body… No, her whole presence offered way too much comfort. Too much relaxation and a break from the harshness of the world that surrounded them.

And while asking her for help once in a while wasn\'t wrong at all, doing so too often or for too long could easily dull Mathew\'s senses and ability to keep up with the rapidly changing events.

"Once you confirm they harvested all of the corpses, give the order to move out," Mathew ordered as he reached the most logical conclusion he could find.

"You are not going to wait for them here?" Nadia asked, proving that she judged the reason for Mathew\'s doubt quite correctly.

"It\'s like you said. The chances of it making a difference are abysmal," Mathew admitted with a sigh. "On the other hand, there are enough of us here to draw any and all the zombies around towards us. Just like it happened to the people gathered at the fortress in the early days," Mathew pointed out as he walked forward and took a slightly longer look at the field of corpses.

Now that he took a proper look, Mathew could finally make a more precise judgment regarding their number.

\'There were a hundred and fifty cores when Carol left, and from the leftover corpses… They should be able to gather at least fifty more,\' Mathew concluded before throwing a look to one corner of the field where hunters and newbies were hard at work extracting the last few cores from the remaining corpses.

\'The horde was above a thousand in terms of numbers when I spotted it back at the fortress. And assuming a quarter of them got as far as here, there should still be three times as many cores to harvest deeper into the town.\'

Mathew looked off into the distance and fell right back into deep thought.

He could already picture many ways to make the best use of those cores… Despite knowing that it would not happen.

\'After the speech I gave, I cannot deprive them of a single core more than I announced I would,\' he thought, turning his eyes towards the working hunters.

They were the ones to put their lives on the line. And even though it was Leila and Nadia who killed the zombies in the further field of corpses… Mathew already decided to treat it as the hunters\' spoils of war.

\'I guess hurrying up with any project requiring cores will force me to take matters into my own hands, at least before I form a real army,\' he thought while gritting his teeth.

The entire idea of creating a bigger unit of hunters was supposed to take some burden off the backs of Mathew and his wives. And yet, even though Mathew was hard at work to make it happen, even once the number of hunters would swell to more than twice their original rooster… They would only be starting to get useful, given how little of a tax Mathew decided to put on them.

"Well, I guess every growth comes with its own pains," Mathew muttered, taking a deep breath as he came to terms with the limitations of his current situation.

Yet, right as he was about to raise his head to order the hunters towards the second field, a single shout filled the open area.

"They are back!"