"Ugh, disgusting…" Daria muttered while she moved her hand around the white and blue insides of the monster's corpse.
Her entire body twitched over and over again, proving just how much she hated her job.
"I'm sorry for making you do this," Mathew apologized in a weak voice, still trying to recover from the exhaustion of the fight.
He could walk, stand up or maybe even run around… but doing so even for a few seconds would be enough to sap most of his strength. As such, by the decision of all of his girls, he had no other choice but to sit tight while the girls got down and dirty in their attempt to recover the monster's core.
"I won't be the one to dig the core up whenever we hunt another big-ass monster like this," Daria complained under her nose. And yet, despite all of her complaining, she continued to dig with her hand around the steaming-hot insides of the lobster's white flesh.
"Stop whining," Leila replied to her friend. "You lost fair and square so just get this core and get this thing over with!"
Leila simply standing near the corpse forced her to grab the upper part of her skirt and raise it to cover her nose with the cloth, unable to bear the stench of the quickly rotting mess.
'Now that I look at it, we couldn't dispose of it even if we tried our best,' Mathew thought, feeling a sense of inner relief.
Seeing how quickly the monster's flesh was deteriorating, he could claim it wasn't him deciding not to do anything about it. It was all the monster's fault for decomposing too quickly for his group to do anything about it!
"I know I lost, you don't need to rub it in my face now," Daria bickered back, only for her face to suddenly tense.
The movements of her body stopped when she put all of her focus on the sensation below her fingers. And then, a small smile appeared on her lips in spite of her standing right on top of a steaming pile of stinking, rotting flesh.
"I think I've got it!" Daria called out, burying her hand even deeper into the white flesh. She then latched her fingers against something before grabbing the backside of her arm with her other hand and pulling back with all the might of her body.
Whatever Daria found inside the monster clearly didn't support her efforts to extract it. She fixed the position of her feet, locking them against the monster's shell and one of the bones inside its body. Then, she repeated her attempts at pulling the core out…
Only for her arm to move up by a mere inch.
"Leila, I'm sorry to ask this, but could you go and help her?" Mathew requested.
In theory, all Daria needed to do was to transform into her shadowy form to extract the core not only with ease but also without getting herself all dirty with the monster's blue blood.
Sadly, by allowing Daria to act out in her shadowy form, they would risk her consuming the core. It was something that the girl was still learning to control. And while she would obviously get far stronger by consuming the essence of that massive monster's strength…
Right now, their group had better use for the value hidden within the monster's core.
"I think… I've got it now!" Daria muttered before squeezing the last bit out of her muscles…
Snap.
Whatever held the core within the monster's flesh reached the limit of its endurance. And the second Daria's pull went beyond that limit, the flesh simply gave up, allowing her to finally pull the core out of the corpse.
"Woah!" Daria then cried out in surprise when she failed to stop her backward momentum, falling right down on her ass and smearing her still relatively clean clothes with blood and filth of the rotting flesh.
"Ugh…" Daria let out a moan of disgust as she took a glance at the massive crystal in her hand.
It was at least four times as big as the biggest core Mathew saw before. And the shine within was on a whole different level too.
Still, the strands of thickened blue blood and strips of white flesh that was attached to the core made it look pretty damn disgusting!
"Good job!" Mathew called out, hoping to encourage the girl as much as he could from the safe distance where the awful stench of the rotting corpse didn't reach.
"I wonder how much it will be worth…" Daria muttered, staring right at the core for a second before shrugging her shoulders and raising back up to her feet. She then took a short leap, jumping down from the top of the monster's biggest wound and dropping to the ground. "Now then, shall we be on our way? I really want to go and take a shower."
"Are you ready?" Nadia, who observed the entire situation from Mathew's side, turned her face to her partner. She also reached out with her hand, offering to help him stand up.
"Yeah," Mathew raised his eyes towards the sky while accepting the girl's hand.
The first rays of the morning sun cut through the horizon, announcing the nearing end of the current night.
"Here," Daria approached Mathew before stuffing the core into his hand the second he managed to get on his feet. "Do you think we will have enough by now?" she then asked, clearly glad to get rid of the disgusting piece from her hands.
"Honestly, I have no idea," Mathew replied while taking a closer look at the massive core in his hand.
It was huge… but pretty light. Sadly, up close, it was even more disgusting than when Mathew could only see it from far away.
"At least, I don't think we will be that far off," he then added before covering the core with a piece of cloth that Leila scavenged from one of the buildings nearby.
"Worst case scenario, we can just sell our weapons," Nadia suggested with a shrug of her shoulders. "Weren't they worth five hundred each?" she asked, bringing back the small detail Mathew shared somewhere along the line. "We used them to kill quite a few zombies, so their price should, at the very least, double by now."
"The idea in itself is not wrong," Mathew signed while busying his hands with attaching the simple package with the huge core to his belt before raising his eyes to Nadia's face. "But don't forget that establishing the settlement is just the first step."
All the way up until very recently, going beyond the level of the fortress was the ultimate goal of the group. And yet, the second they started to near their completion, Mathew's thinking started to change.
The reason why he was so anxious to establish the fortress wasn't only about keeping the stronger zombies at bay. Sure, it was an added and great benefit that brought relative safety to all those within the settlement's range…
But no, there used to be one more major reason that now turned into three more reasons that Mathew had for rushing the settlement.
The upgrades to the already existing fortresses required the presence of the settlement to work!
'With that, we should be able to start some production, allowing us to shift from a group centered around hunters to a party making use of the non-combatants,' he thought, wrapping his clean arm around Nadia's shoulders before making the first step back towards the school base.
Mathew took a deep breath.
'And as long as we manage to abuse that productiveness mechanics, it will become possible to buy as many systems as I need to turn every last member of our group into an able fighter!'
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