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“This is a simple question,” Mathew stated. He then lowered his eys and shook his head. “But sometimes, the simplest questions have the…”

“The hardest answers,” Leila said and nodded her head before rolling her eyes in a sign of her impatience. “Yeah, I know. But I don’t recall asking for your philosophical thoughts.”

The look in the girl’s eyes was solid. Leila crossed her hands over her chest and moved her right leg a little bit forward only to tap the top of her leg against the ground.

‘She won’t take this kind of shit right now,’ Mathew realized, gritting his teeth only to then close his eyes.

Mathew took only a moment to sort out his thoughts. Yet, in this short moment, Leila’s eyebrow already traveled all the way up her forehead.

“Do you remember what I said about there being an intent behind this entire apocalypse?” Mathew asked while raising his head and looking Leila directly in the eye.

“Yeah, I do,” the girl replied, nodding her head.

‘She stopped tapping her leg,’ Mathew took notice, silently breathing a sigh of relief.

“Then I believe that this intent isn’t just some passive entity that brought the apocalypse to this world for funsies,” Mathew revealed what he had suspected for a while yet kept to himself, worried about scaring both his group and the other survivors. “And for the second time since we approached this building, I believe they directly interfered in the events.”

Leila froze in her place. Her gestures of annoyance all ceased as well, stopped in the last frame they were in when the girl processed the news.

Besides Leila, no one else appeared to be surprised by the revelations, though.

‘Nadia, I can understand,’ Mathew thought, glancing over at his crush. ‘With how fiercely intelligent she is, it would be strange if she didn’t figure it out herself already.’

Mathew’s eyes then moved over at Daria.

‘She saw all the things that alerted me in the first place so her lack of surprise is expected,’ he thought, only to turn his eyes towards the last two people on the ground.

Norbert didn’t belong to his group in the same, direct way the girls did. And while they continued to cooperate, he was too far detached from Mathew to be able to catch all the bits of information he would sometimes reveal.

Yet, it was Norbert who brought everyone to the shed. And he did so because he apparently witnessed what Mathew just said with his very own, although ghostly, eyes.

And lastly, there was Daniel. And it was this exact man that escaped the scrutiny of Mathew’s eyes, keeping his expression perfectly calm.

‘I can’t tell whether he can just hide his emotions that well or if he managed to figure it all out himself,’ Mathew thought, puzzled by how ambiguous Daniel could be at times. ‘I guess he wouldn’t get the negotiator’s job if he wasn’t like that.’

The entire apocalypse started only around two days ago. Yet, with how those two days were packed with events and high-stakes situations, Mathew nearly forgot about the very reason that brought him and Daniel together.

“Ugh…” Leila released a pained moan as she shook her head before turning it towards Mathew… and then dropping her eyes down.

“Now I get why you didn’t want to speak about this,” she admitted, lowering her eyes even further. And then, she lowered her whole head, just to express the depth of her apology.

“Don’t worry about it too much,” Mathew advised, turning around and making his first step back towards the media building since Leila’s interrupted their return in the first place. “Time spent worrying over things we have no influence over is a time wasted.”

‘So is time spent on standing in place and talking when we could all be moving to complete our next objectives!’

With the topic of outside interference somehow settled, no one stopped Mathew from going about his own missions anymore. He reached the immediate courtyard of the media building only to find all the leftover cores from the fight neatly stacked by the doorway.

“Even with all the distributions, that should be just enough for the third merchant and establishing a second fortress,” he muttered, squatting down by the pile of the shiny cores. He then loaded them all onto his shirt only to stand up and turn right back.

“Now, back to the shed,” Mathew announced, starting to move before anyone could start whining about going to and fro.

‘I do recall that there was supposed to be some sort of special bonus for establishing the merchant in that shed,’ Mathew thought, moving as slow as necessary to keep the cores safely tucked onto his shirt while not moving any slower than absolutely necessary.

“Now then,” Mathew muttered as soon as he got back to the shed.

His group left the area only a few moments earlier, with no one but Robert’s girlfriend awake back then. Yet, in the short time since they left, Robert and his girl managed to wake up most of the survivors, already working on moving them out of the way.

“Should we wait?” Nadia asked soberly.

‘No good will come from letting all of those people know about merchants,’ Mathew thought, gritting his teeth.

Yet, this moment of hesitation passed as soon as it appeared.

“It doesn’t matter,” he replied, pointing with the side of his head back towards the main building. “They are bound to find out about merchants once they get back to the media complex,” he pointed out.

Mathew then knelled down by the corner of the shed’s doors, lowering the bottom of his shirt to allow all the cores stored on it to trickle down to the ground.

Mathew then selected a hundred of the cores before standing up and approaching the very middle of the room all the while ignoring the sleepy survivors that have yet to vacate this place.

“I wish to summon a merchant,” he then said in a casual tone one would use to strike a conversation with someone on the street.

As usual, the bright light exploded from the cores within Mathew’s possession, only for the flash of light to vanish a moment later, depriving Mathew of all the cores he brought with him.

‘Huh?’

Or rather, that’s what Mathew thought would happen. Because while all the other elements of the procedure, starting at the flash of light and at the appearance of the merchant worked…

Only about twenty cores vanished from his grasp, leaving a whole eighty of them safe and sound!