Leveling Up Wives In The Apocalypse

'Beatrice didn't lie,' Mathew thought as he climbed past the middling floors and all the way up to the top of the school's wing that his group inhabited.

There were only two or three people in total on the top floor. Mathew saw them through the hole in the wall leading to the room that used to serve as a toilet. They all wore masks on their faces made from some cloth folded several times over and had even more cloth wrapped around their hands.

And their job was fairly simple. They would go into the room with huge bags and shovels and fill the bags with all the filth inside before throwing them down the class window.

Out of curiosity and while waiting for Nadia to return with the rest of the used blades, Mathew approached another window and took a look outside.

The area below the dumping window used to be just another part of the grass-covered courtyard with a single strand of the concrete path going straight across.

Used to, as over the course of Mathew's expedition, the survivors dug out a layer of roughly two meters of ground, using the concrete path as the marker to where to dump all the dug-out earth.

In effect, they ended up with one massive septic tank raising about three meters above the ground and then two meters below.

'I guess I won't be able to avoid spending some cores on upgrading the services,' Mathew thought as he inspected the construction.

It was something that could only come from a mind of a person that never done any engineering before. Because be it filth or pure water, liquids... They tended to weigh a lot more than people expected them to. And while the hole was far bigger than necessary to hide all the filth that stacked up so far, it would collapse pretty much as soon as the waste would pile up above the ground level.

'So, for the current expenses, I need to upgrade the services, possibly fix the entire construction, set aside some cores to potentially let Norbert level up, get new weapons, keep enough cores to raise new fortress...' Mathew listed out the list of things he would have to shop for while at the merchant.

And the list was far longer than he would like.

'Now that I think about it, I should rebuild the stock of our supplies too,' Mathew thought as he took a quick look in the direction opposite the former and makeshift toilet, to where all the remaining supplies were warehoused.

There were still three boxes of food stock left. An insane amount worth at least two or three months of food for a single person. But barely a day's worth of food for all the people currently gathered at the school.

'We will need a separate group of people just to take care of the meals,' Mathew took another point into account.

From what he could see from all the hints around the place, there was hardly any control over the food expenditure. At most, there were some specific hours when the supplies would be distributed and then everyone would be free to consume them on their own.

"What a waste," Mathew muttered as he looked down at some half-opened package of dried-up fruits.

It was a snack with an extremely specific taste, a taste that not everyone might like. And because of that very reason, they ended up lying on the floor with more than half of the pack left!

'Another point to note,' Mathew thought while releasing a long, heavy sigh.

"Matt!" Nadia called out from the deepest part of the corridor. As the central staircase was as destroyed as it was since Mathew blasted it out of existence, the side stairs at the end of each wing of the school were the only possible way for people to move around.

Obviously, normal survivors had no other choice but to make use of the shaft. But for Nadia, climbing over the ruins of the last stretch of the stairs that she herself destroyed on the first day was an easy task.

'Maybe we should clean out the ruins over there and turn it into a lift of some sort?' Mathew thought about another point while stepping closer to the girl.

"Do you have them?" he asked as soon as Nadia approached... with a total of three sabers and one machete stacked in her arms.

"Don't you see?" she asked while rolling her eyes before dropping all the weapons down on the ground.

Every single blade bore extensive marks of wear and tear, with Mathew's former weapon standing out as the one in the worst state.

'And here I would think that Leila's weapon would be worse,' Mathew thought. 'Well, her being a blademaster might influence the precision of her strikes and thus the wear on the blade, I guess,' he thought, leaning down and grabbing the weapons.

"Oh right," Nadia jumped up to Mathew's side as he was about to turn around and head to the merchant by the hole where the main stairs used to be. "If you find some sort of glove-like weapon, make sure to get it for me," she requested with a lovely smile.

"Sure thing," Mathew replied with a smile before heading off to the merchant. This time, however, he faced an uncommon struggle, as he had to keep hold of all the weapons... while freeing one of his hands to reach for the merchant's shadow!

After some gymnastics, Mathew managed to stack all the blades on his shoulder while keeping all the handles in the open palm of his left hand. Then, while doing his best to maintain balance, Mathew tilted his body to the side and near blindly reached out with his right.

The shadow surged, and the world changed. Mathew simply closed his eyes and allowed the process of transporting to the merchant's subspace to continue while he took a momentary rest.

And as he opened his eyes, he realized one extremely obvious thing.

When the system announced that Mathew now could buy system seeds, it announced that the level of items Mathew could buy at the merchant's place also changed.

But what it didn't say, was how it turned the insides of the merchant's space on its head like that!