"Time?"
The question came from several people at once.
Takumi pointed toward the sky.
"It's around one o'clock right now. We have roughly three to four hours before the sun starts dipping toward the horizon."
He lowered his hand.
"It's not winter, so we'll have more daylight than we would during that season, but we can't rely on that.
I didn't check the weather forecast before leaving, and the clouds I'm looking at don't exactly reassure me."
His eyes moved toward the sky for another moment before returning to the group.
"So we move quickly."
Takumi adjusted the bag hanging from his shoulder.
"But first, we need to get outside and remove the people."
He deliberately emphasized the last word.
Several students stared at him.
"...People?"
Takumi looked toward the gates.
"The people outside."
A few students immediately understood what he meant.
"The undead?"
Takumi nodded.
"Exactly."
Hikigaya looked toward the massive crowd beyond the gates, his expression becoming increasingly serious.
"And how exactly are we going to do that?"
Takumi reached into his bag.
"We're going to use the phones."
He briefly explained the strategy again, telling them how the devices could be placed at different distances and set to activate at different times, creating a chain of sounds that would gradually pull the undead away from the school.
Haruno listened carefully before her eyes narrowed.
"Isn't there a problem in your plan?"
Takumi looked at her.
"How are you going to place them?"
She pointed toward the phones.
"Your plan depends on distance. You need the phones far enough away from one another to actually pull the horde away from the gates, but you're not exactly going to walk up to a crowd of undead and place them down one by one."
She paused.
"And if you throw them, there's a good chance you'll damage them."
Takumi didn't answer immediately. He looked down at the phone in his hand, taking a slow breath before finally looking back toward Haruno.
"...You made a valid point."
He lowered the phone slightly.
"I was planning on placing them manually."
The reaction was immediate.
Several people stared at him in disbelief, their expressions tightening as they glanced toward the gates.
None of them had even stepped outside yet, and the growls of the undead were already deafening despite the distance separating them from the horde.
"How exactly do you plan on doing that without getting yourself killed?"
Saeko's voice was unusually sharp.
She was probably one of the people who doted on Takumi the most, aside from Yuki and Rei, but there wasn't anything affectionate in her tone right now.
She knew Takumi wasn't the type to put someone else in danger simply because it was safer for him, which meant that if someone had to go outside and manually place those phones...
It would be him.
"I know what you're thinking," Takumi said, looking toward her. "But I've already thought of how to do it. I wouldn't put myself in unnecessary danger when I still have plans to meet my sister."
He paused for a moment before adding with a faint smile, "If I somehow got myself killed, she'd probably find a way to resurrect me just so she could kill me herself."
Nobody laughed.
The joke was dark enough that under normal circumstances, someone probably would have appreciated it, but there was something about the way Takumi delivered it that made the humour fall completely flat.
They were beginning to notice it.
Takumi had always possessed a somewhat dark sense of humour, but lately there was something different about it.
His jokes were a little stiffer than they remembered, and if someone paid close enough attention, they might have noticed that there was genuine pain hiding behind some of the words.
[This part is always the most sickening, yet it's still the one part I have to do. I wonder how they're going to view me after this. Heh, it's my second first time in a situation like this, and I'm still nervous.] -Takumi
Takumi eventually looked toward the undead gathered outside.
"They rely heavily on their senses to identify and track prey. Sight is rare but not u impossible, but the two most important senses we need to worry about are scent and hearing."
"Yeah."
Several people echoed the response almost simultaneously.
"For hearing, we simply remain quiet," Takumi continued. "That's the easy part."
The group fell silent.
A few expressions darkened as they slowly realised what he was implying.
Haruno's eyes moved toward the horde outside.
"...You're joking."
Nobody needed an explanation.
They knew what camouflage was.
The problem was that Takumi wasn't talking about hiding from the undead.
He was talking about making the undead mistake them for one of their own.
If scent was one of the primary ways these creatures distinguished humans from themselves, then the answer was painfully obvious.
To move among them...
You had to smell like them.
Their eyes slowly shifted toward the field.
The corpses of the students who had died during the outbreak had been gathered there after the school was cleaned, leaving behind a grim reminder of what had happened.
They had become accustomed to seeing the bodies there, but suddenly they looked very different.
Takumi followed their gazes, after seeing the dead students bodies, he nodded.
"Sooner or later, everyone is going to have to get used to the scent of blood anyway."
Someone swallowed.
"You're going to cover yourself in blood."
Takumi shook his head before looking directly at them.
"No."
His expression remained calm.
"We're going to cover ourselves in blood."
End of Chapter 18
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I thought about keeping it for next week but naw, I'll just post it now
This isn't a bonus chapter ( I'm not that free ) but for the next week where I'll be busy
I got maths to fight now buy!