Leveling Up Wives In The Apocalypse

Chapter 397 Pretty Damn Smart!

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"What the hell is going on?" Mathew muttered while still frozen in place, struggling to connect the dots into a picture that would make any sense.

Someone in the group of hunters fired their gun which led to everyone retreating in a more or less orderly fashion? And a mere moment after the shot?

'If it was an accidental discharge, everyone would panic instead,' Mathew thought before moving his eyes further down the street.

And contrary to his expectations, not a single zombie gave any signs of being shot! Not a single animated corpse wavered from the force of the impact. Not a single one of them fell to the ground only to be crushed by the hundreds of rotting feet walking over it.

No.

Whoever fired, clearly didn't aim their gun at the zombies at all!

"Mathew!" A single person rushed out of the retreating group. Yet, rather than causing panic, everyone actually moved aside to let him pass.

"What happened?" Mathew asked as he looked down at the panting Kasper.

"I've shot him," Kasper answered through his heavy panting.

Mathew raised his eyebrows.

"Who did you shoot?" the young man asked even though he could already guess the answer. Still, if there was anything that this apocalyptic world taught him, it was that things always liked to happen outside of the area of his expectations.

"That fake leader of ours," Kasper answered right away. "It was the only choice we had, or he would lead us all to death just to prove that he was the one leading the expedition."

Mathew took a deep breath.

"Did he die?" he asked shortly.

Kasper took a few more breaths before closing his mouth and refusing to keep on panting. After a few seconds of letting his heart calm down, he raised his eyes and opened his mouth back again.

"He's still alive, but we've left him for the zombies to get distracted with," Kasper added… only for his eyes to escape to the side.

'So he can easily admit to shooting a guy but is ashamed of leaving him to his death?' Mathew thought, raising one of his eyebrows when the doubt filled his soul.

"I guess that explains why the zombies have yet to jump on your asses," Mathew concluded as he looked over the retreating hunters and at the zombies behind them.

And just like Kasper suggested and Mathew figured out, they were currently busy with something.

Still, after a mere three seconds of Mathew's observation, all the zombies suddenly lost interest in whatever they were doing and picked up their chase after the hunters.

"Now I can't help but wonder," Mathew admitted as he turned his eyes back to Kasper. "You admitted to shooting a guy and then leaving him to die. I know that you are taking the blame for one of those things. I just can't tell which."

If someone was bold and cold-blooded enough to shoot one of their companions, they shouldn't have a problem leaving them to die to the zombies. And yet, Kasper appeared to be ashamed of only one of the things he admitted to doing.

"We don't really have the time for this," Carol muttered, her eyes locked on the approaching wave of zombies.

They were all clearly only the basic ones. Without the upgrade to their physique, their bodies couldn't resist the decay of the last two weeks. It was a miracle that some of them could still move around with the degree of rot that took over their undead flesh.

Yet, when faced with their incoming charge, even those basic zombies managed to appear quite fierce.

'Are they going to do anything?' Mathew thought, looking over his shoulder in the direction of the escaping hunters…

Mathew's face tensed up, quickly followed by the rest of the muscles in his body.

'We are standing right at the chokepoint!' he realized upon seeing the entire front row of the hunters getting ready to cover the area with gunfire.

"RUN!" Mathew shouted, grabbing Carol and Kasper under each of his arms before dashing to the side.

In theory, he bought absolutely no distance whatsoever by escaping perpendicularly to the direction of the zombie's charge.

But it wasn't the zombies that Mathew was worried about.

"FIRE!"

The already familiar voice of Pavel filled the air only to get replaced by the deafening noise of several firearms going off at the same time.

Still, it was a salvo, not the repeating sound of the automatic fire.

"FIRE!" Pavel shouted again, his words followed by another series unleashed by the hunters at the front of the group.

'Damn,' Mathew breathed out, safely hidden with two of his stowaways behind a lone pillar somehow still standing at the edge of the street. He raised his head and dropped both of his temporary wards to the ground, focusing on the battlefield instead.

Thankfully, now that the troublemaker of the hunters was gone, Pavel could lead the hunters and newbies with no obstructions.

Salvo after salvo, seven guns fired into the crowd of rushing zombies. Soon, though, two of the guns turned silent. Then three. And then, the fourth one turned silent as well, leaving only three active shooters in the front.

'Are they jammed?' Mathew thought, squinting his eyes as he turned his attention from the zombies to the hunters.

Yet, from the relatively calm and composed actions of the former shooters… he could tell that it wasn't the case.

Still, with the intensity of the fire now more than halved, the first few zombies managed to get past the choke point.

"Do we deal with them?" Nadia asked, calmly appearing by Mathew's side and watching how seven out of the eleven zombies that went past the narrow area turned their attention to their position instead of the hunters.

"What, do you want to just keep them at bay for those kids to clean them up after it's over?" Mathew asked, pulling out his saber. He then took a step forward and slashed down, splitting the fastest of the zombies in half.

Normally, such a cut would be near impossible as it went through a huge number of bones and other tougher parts of the human body. Starting with the skull, followed by the spine, a vertical cut like that could appear only in movies!

But Mathew was far from being a normal human. His saber was far from being just a simple blade. And the zombie…

Despite how fast it was, it was rotted to the point even its bones didn't pose many challenges to the blade of Mathew's saber.

'That's weird,' Mathew squinted his eyes, surprised by the ease at which he cut the zombie down in half. 'Its bones shouldn't rot out that quickly!'

It was clearly an important thing to notice… but there were too many things going on right now for Mathew to really pay any attention to such a fact.

Instead, the young man turned his eyes to the line of the hunters… Only to see that the number of shooters now climbed back up to five!

'Oh, so that's what they were doing!' Mathew thought, opening his eyes wide in realization.

Pavel most likely arranged the hunters so that some of them would stop shooting prematurely and went to load their magazines back to their full capacity. Then, once others started to run out of the few shots their magazines were limited to, those who stopped early came to replace them, keeping the wall of fire more or less constant!

"Damn…" Mathew released a small moan of ave. "That's pretty damn smart!"