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"What?" Beatrice noticed Mathew\'s stare after a moment and shrugged.

"I mean, if you are going to say shit like that, you bet I will need an explanation for it," Mathew explained.

\'If she just wants to save more people... Well, I can\'t say I would disagree with her idea. But still,\' the young man clenched his jaws. \'My reasons for needing more people to grow up from my understanding of the system and knowledge that she doesn\'t have. So I need to know her reasons first.\'

The media building would soon be able to somehow turn work hours into some sort of benefit. It was something that Mathew learned in the recent past but also something that would only become possible once his fortresses would become something bigger.

The same could be said with the simplest method of growing stronger by obtaining the cores from monsters. If they wanted to speed it up, the easiest way to go around it was to create a bigger force. And even if it was impossible to monopolize their loot, taking a percentage of it would allow Mathew to achieve his goals in the long term.

\'No matter what we do, the more people we have the easier it should be,\' he thought. He then crossed his arms on his chest as he raised his eyes and gave Beatrice an inquiring look.

"We need more people," the woman replied after a while with a sigh. "More workers to clean the areas from the rubble and bury the corpses. More fighters to ward off the zombies once their number starts to grow. More scavengers, more farmers, more medics..."

Beatrice shook her head and slowly exhaled. Then, she rocked her head up and looked somewhere far off in the distance, to a place one could see only with the eyes of their imagination.

"What we can do is mostly limited by the number of people we can deploy. What we need right now isn\'t some fancy equipment. It will come useful, for sure,\' Beatrice admitted right in the middle of her lecture, "but manpower is not only something that\'s relatively hard to come by but also our most precious resource."

Instead of interrupting the flow of Beatrice\'s words, Mathew simply allowed her to keep going.

"Civilization can be led by individuals... but it\'s built by masses," she finished, adding a proper conclusion to her prolonged statement.

"I agree," Mathew said, not finding it in himself to reply in an elaborative manner.

The woman twitched a little.

"What, are you surprised that I agreed with you?" Mathew asked, openly grinning. Yet, his smile soon degraded. He then lowered his head only to end up shaking it. "And our lack of manpower... Well," he muttered, turning his face away from Beatrice\'s face and back towards the street. "It\'s even worse than you thought."

"Huh?" Beatrice twitched again. "What do you mean?"

"Do you remember the media building? The one where Daniel is in charge?" Mathew said.

"Yeah, what about it?" Beatrice leaned her head over her shoulder, puzzled by the weird way in which Mathew\'s logic jumped from the current topic to a seemingly unrelated one.

"As soon as we get the third fortress up and move to the next level that\'s beyond fortresses..." Mathew\'s voice got lower and lower as he spoke, all the way to the point where it was too silent for the woman to hear him.

Just like he did before, Beatrice didn\'t bother to inquire about the rest of what he said out loud. Instead, she simply kept on staring at the back of his head, waiting for when Mathew would give the answer properly on his own.

"We are going to need a lot of people over there, then."

"I see," Beatrice muttered. She then turned silent again before following Mathew\'s example and moving her eyes toward the street.

The school\'s area perimeter was currently bustling with people.

Thanks to a nearly complete lack of zombies in the vicinity, the non-combatants ended up working for their keep on the street.

To facilitate their movement and jobs alike, there were several more makeshift crossings established in two distant parts of the fence, both of which had a hunter assigned to them just in case.

All of Mathew\'s wives, save for overseeing and physically useless Beatrice, along with the rest of the hunters were patrolling the street, hunting for any and all zombies that ended up unfortunate enough to appear anywhere near.

And in this relative safety of the emptied-out area, the non-combatant survivors dug up all the cores from zombies\' heads that they could find before stacking the corpses and their spilled-out guts on the front porch of a nearby building.

"Are you going to burn them down?" Beatrice asked after watching the situation move at a slow yet steady pace for a long while.

"That\'s the easiest way to prevent the diseases from spreading," Mathew replied. "And we can\'t really afford to bury them properly," he added with a shrug of his shoulders.

For humans, the act of burying their dead was something deeply rooted in their culture. Yet, in hard times like war, pandemic or massive famine, or an apocalypse, cultivating one\'s tradition and respect for the dead would end up put off on the later plan.

Especially when those deads were the source of the threat of the apocalypse around them.

"Anyway, since we both agree we need more people, do you have any idea how to achieve it?" Beatrice shook her head and got back to the real topic at hand.

"I wish they could just appear out of thin air," Mathew grinned. "But that\'s not going to happen. So if we want to get more people, we will need to find them first."

Mathew smiled.

"And since it means we are going to create an expedition, we might look for a good place for the third fortress while we are at it, don\'t we?"