Published at 24th of February 2023 9:52 am

Chapter 343 Just For a little longer

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Ring!

The sound of the small bell being struck announced the end of Daniel’s break. But it also announced the time for Daria to switch with Carol who was currently occupied by killing as many zombies as she could.

‘I better get going,’ Daniel thought, yawning a little as he stood up.

He threw one last look over the window at the insides of the maze and counted up all the zombies still stuck in it, before turning around and heading for the stairs.

It took him only a few moments to get from where he was resting to the main entrance of the building. And yet, even though they both had far more distance to cover, both of the girls were already there.

“Thanks for your hard work,” Daniel said as soon as he saw Carol landing down right on top of one of the zombies Gabriel was fighting with. Using her weight, she pinned the undead down to the ground before finishing it off with a quick heel delivered straight to its nose.

Carol then turned around, ready to finish off the other zombie Daniel’s subordinate was fighting with, only for Daria to do one better over her friend, smashing the top of the other zombie’s head with the handle of her saber.

“Those blades are really amazing,” Daria muttered with a faint glint of excitement in her eyes. “I almost regret having the kind of class and ability I have that makes this blade mostly useless for me,” she then added as her face darkened a tiny little bit.

“To think a day would come when you would complain about being too strong,” Carol replied, standing up from the ground with the core of the zombie she just finished already in her hand.

Contrary to how everyone else in the base would use the cores, she didn’t put them away for later use. Instead, she enclosed it within her fists and closed her eyes. The girl exhaled all the air from her lungs and held herself back from breathing for a moment before slowly taking in the air back.

A faint light shone from between the girl’s fingers, dissipating a mere second later. And once Carol opened her eyes back again, the signs of exhaustion that were formerly written all over her expression were now nowhere to be seen.

“Is that single core all you need to recover?” Daria asked going through a simple stretching routine, completely unfazed by the noises of the next few zombies slowly approaching from the deeper parts of the maze.

“Yeah,” Carol nodded her head with a small smile, “not fully, but enough to get right back to the job,” she explained.

“Yeah, yeah,” Carol replied while rolling her eyes, putting on a face a teenage girl would make while scolded by her parents. “Also,” she then turned her eyes back to Daria, “did you get the message?”

This time it was Daria’s face that darkened.

“Yeah,” she muttered while slightly biting down on her lip, “I will do my best to hold back,” she then assured.

Daria then ceased her small stretching exercise, straightening her posture as she looked at the hand of a zombie that just appeared on the top of the left wall that separated the choking point of the maze nearest to the battle spot. “Oh, and before I forget,” she ignored the zombie and turned her eyes toward Daniel. “You should organize some people to start cleaning up the corpses soon,” she advised before taking a step forward.

Daria waited for a seemingly arbitrary amount of time, before randomly swinging her saber horizontally at a huge upwards angle.

Her attack seemingly went against nothing but air… Yet, as soon as the tip of her weapon reached the top of the barricade, the zombie finally managed to climb over the wall high enough to push its head above the obstacle.

Just in time for Daria’s saber to slash right through its throat, sending the zombie’s head to roll back into the deeper part of the maze.

“I will do just that, but only once we push this damn horde far enough for this task to be safe for noncons,” Daniel took the girl’s advice in his own way before sending her a peculiar look. He unknowingly ended up using the military jargon from his past that stood for non-combatants. “But what message were you girls talking about just now?”

This was the one, strangely unexplainable problem that he had with the support that came from Mathew’s side.

The only way in which both groups could communicate as of now was through the use of Norbert’s ghost ability. And yet, even though Norbert could easily reach out to contact Daniel, his close friend, directly…

For some reason, he only ever bothered to communicate with the girls that Mathew sent over!

‘Is that bastard a feminist or something?’ Daniel thought, watching how Carol nodded her head before heading back into the building to clean herself up and get some rest. ‘Or did some stuff change that made Mathew fully buy his loyalty?’

Daniel closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

He could sense another zombie approaching, even though, weirdly enough, it didn’t give out its presence with the usual noises the zombies would make.

‘Is this one of those evolved ones?’ Daniel asked himself, keeping his eyes closed.

Ever since he dedicated most of his time to hunting zombies for their cores, his abilities improved by leaps and bounds. And along with them, his senses also reached a peak he never thought to be possible for a human to stand on.

As such, even with his eyes closed, from just the small cues within the grand, noisy scheme of things, he could tell he still had some time before the zombie would appear.

“About the message, Mathew requested me to hold back on the cores I consume,” Daria spoke out, forcing the man to open his eyes. And as Daniel looked at her, she gave him a quick smirk before turning her eyes toward the front of the maze.

“I will be off, then,” Daria said, done with her warm-up routine. She then smiled and nodded her head at the man before summoning a cloak of the night.

Her figure distorted as more and more of the solid darkness surrounded her body before, in just a few moments, there was no trace of her original build left.

Daria took on the form of some sort of a magnificence beast, that one could perceive only by not paying attention to it at all. The moment Daniel’s eyes focused on the details, her new form turned out to be lacking; its shape constantly changing, the borders of her shadowy figure in constant flux.

‘I bet the physicians of the old world would go into a frenzy over the chance to study this form,’ Daniel thought as only a single word came to his mind when he looked at the girl’s new form.

Indeterminacy.

The girl didn’t wait for Daniel to come back to his senses. The second she finished changing to her fighting form, she dashed forth, climbing the walls of the maze in a single leap before bolting off to the distance, ready to take on the rest of the horde all on her own.

‘I guess I cannot avoid the reality for much longer,’ Daniel thought, turning his eyes away from where Daria’s new form disappeared into the night and moving them over at the zombie that finally walked out from one of the many corridors within the maze.

He pushed his right leg to the back and his left hand forward, lowering himself on his knees right as he started to leisurely hum one of the wholesome songs from the past century he liked.

‘We might have our differences, but right now, this place can’t remain autonomous,’ Daniel thought, forcing himself to come to the terms with this unfavorable reality.

He gathered mana in his right fist, waiting for the zombie to approach.

‘But just for a little bit longer,’ he thought, his entire body snapping when the zombie entered the range of his fists.

In a single instant, right when the drums hit their low note in the song he was humming, Daniel nearly bent in half, sending his mana-imbued fist toward the zombie’s strangely clean face.

‘Just for a little longer, let me act as the true boss of this place!’

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