The racket caused by the collapsing stairs filled the entire school.

The sound of the explosion turned out to be nowhere as loud as Mathew expected. That was a good thing, as sudden noise was one of the main attractors for the zombies.

But on the other hand, when several hundred pounds worth of concrete fell down and crashed into the floor below, the ruckus turned out to be immense.

‘It’s bad,’ Mathew’s attention spiked up in a mere instant.

The main stairs to the floor were gone. The safety of the floor should then be secured…

‘If an entire horde comes, not only will they sweep up through all the survivors, but force their way through the side entrances as well,’ Mathew could easily imagine the scenario playing out.

During their normal activities, zombies wouldn’t do much. They would naturally gravitate towards areas with a high number of living humans, but that effect often took a long time.

The situation changed when a zombie would get agitated, though.

It could be done by alarming it with sounds, attacking it, or allowing it to smell a human’s blood. And smell it they could, even from several meters away.

But what was important was that once a single zombie in a congested area would end up agitated…

Mathew swallowed down a gulp of saliva, forcing his imagination to shut the vivid picture out.

He never took part in the defense against the horde. But he caught some rumors about it happening near the school. It was about when one day, almost all of the zombies from the school, for some reason, rushed towards one side of the fenced area.

‘Thinking back, if that didn’t happen, we would all die a week earlier,’ Mathew thought, noticing the mistake he made.

IF the power of each specific zombie was laughable, then the might of the horde was on an entirely different level.

‘They said it could be compared to locust swarm,’ Mathew recalled, blinking his eyes a few times as he focused on his hearing. ‘Eating everything in their way to a degree of collapsing entire buildings,’ the young man continued to recall the pieces of the story.

Mathew’s mouth twitched, only to turn into a small smile.

The noise caused by the crumbling stairs finally concluded.

And in the sudden silence, Mathew could clearly hear it. The sound of the approaching mass of zombies.

‘We don’t have much time,’ Mathew thought.

He then shook his head, snapping out of his daze. Then, he looked toward the officer.

“I changed my mind,” Mathew spat out, turning around and approaching the merchant, now standing near the edge of the broken stairs. “Go and destroy the other stairs as well. Then, throw some explosives outside the windows so that they will explode near the lower floors,” Mathew gave a very specific order.

“No way,” the policeman only shook his head. “We used all the stuff we brought on the main stairs,” he shook his head, refusing Mathew’s request for the first time since the man bloodied his hands for the first time. “And I can’t allow you to cut all our routes of escape,” the man added.

From the tone of the officer’s words, it was clear that his decision wouldn’t change, no matter what Mathew would say. As such, keeping the negotiations up would only waste time for everyone.

A time everyone was currently in desperate need of.

“You lack explosives?” Mathew raised his eyebrow. He then relaxed his hand only to bring it up in one fell swoop, grasping at the darkness of the merchant’s face.

The shadowy realm expanded outwards from the strange figure, enclosing Mathew within its bounds. And just like before, some force projected the images of the items on the shadowy clouds.

“Explosives,” Mathew stated, throwing a life core towards the center of the weight of the realm.

The core flashed, exhausting its energy in the process. And when the small star of light vanished, a neat package with three premade demolishing charges appeared in its place.

“I guess I need to use another,” Mathew muttered under his nose, giving up on yet another core.

Bit by bit, the small fortune he made during the first two waves continued to melt away. And in the current world, rather than a tool to buy both necessities and luxuries, this new currency became one’s bargaining chip with the very death.

For the outsiders, Mat appeared to simply freeze in place as if playing a mime. And then, a short moment later, his consciousness would seemingly return. But what was pretty weird was how his body would twitch during the latter transition, as if Mathew’s real body took over the still image cast by some projector in its stead.

And it was during this twitch that the two sets of charges appeared in the young man’s hands.

“What the hell…” the officer muttered, taking a step back and nervously raising the barrel of his handgun a little.

“You don’t have that many explosives left, you said,” Mathew brought the recent words of the man up. “Here,” he said, only to throw the two packages towards the man. “Use what you have left as the lure,” Mathew ordered, instantly moving forward, not waiting for the officer’s complaints.

For a moment, the middle-aged man stood in his place, watching how Mathew approached his girl yet again.

‘Should I? Or should I not?’ the officer asked himself, only to raise his hand to his face and then cover his eyes for a little.

The events of the recent hours took a toll on everyone, all the more on one of the leaders of the police. He had to both make use of his physical skills but also keep his mind in its peak condition.

The officer then shook his head.

“Fine!” he muttered under his nose as he picked the explosives up.

A sudden racket from one of the floors below reached the now silent hall of the topmost level.

Mathew froze in the place, perfectly aware of what this sound meant. Yet, even with his prior experiences, the next sound took him by surprise.

“ROAR!”

The cry of a monster.

Not an evolved one, a creature that was still within the frame of what the human brain could expect and, to a degree, explain.

But it also meant something far more disastrous. Because back in Mathew’s first round against the apocalypse, the evolved monsters wouldn’t appear until the second week after it all started.

‘There is no way it’s something else,’ Mathew thought, tightening his hands as he pulled his eyes away from the girl to look towards the demolished stairs.

‘But the monsters shouldn’t appear for over a week yet!’ Mathew attempted to ridicule the truth, refusing to accept it.

He then shook his head and slapped his hands on his cheeks to sober himself up.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Mathew thought, raising from his knee.

Nadia was still several minutes away from waking up. Only God could know if she would still act like a human by the time she would wake up, which would mostly happen right as the horde would attack their makeshift stronghold.

Mathew couldn’t change the facts. He had no magical, out of ordinary power to reshape the fabrics of causality.

If there was a monster here, one could only think about how to deal with it. Ignoring the reality just because it didn’t suit one’s tastes just wasn’t to Mathew’s taste.

‘I guess we will need to deal with it sooner or later,’ Mathew thought, only to hear two dull explosions going off a moment later. ‘Good,’ he thought, glancing over in the directions the booms went off.

And then, Mathew threw one last look at the girl, still fast asleep. Or rather, instead of looking at Nadia, Mathew glanced at her system.

Because there was one line that he suddenly noticed.

[Level: 1]

It was said that defeating the unevolved monster was just as hard for the system-less, as easy as it was for those who possessed a system. In other words, while a person without a system could still kill it, it was basically the limit of how far an ordinary human could go.

‘The problem is,’ Mathew thought, gnashing his teeth together. ‘I don’t really know how to use this damned system!” he complained in his thoughts.

‘If I don’t know how to use this damned system, what did I pay that merchant for?!’ Mathew neared a state where he couldn’t hold his sour cry back.

But then he raised his eyes. Then, he moved up only to approach the merchant’s shadowy figure for the third time.

“Since we are going to abandon this floor,” Mathew said in a clear voice, paying no mind to the survivors eavesdropping on every word that he would say. “I might as well use all those cores up!”