Their experience in dealing with zombie outbreak boosted their confidence and made them think they were invincible.

I didn’t think like them. I didn’t want to win a battle and end up losing the entire war. I wanted to win this damn thing, end up being the top victor in all this mess.

“Just do as I say,” I stressed over, “a time will come when I’d need you to move forward without even taking a single moment of rest.”

“We’ll see about that,” she rolled her eyes, and during our little talk, Angelica jumped over my chariot and recalled her back.

“See you later,” I waved my arm to Lily, opened a portal and led my chariot through it.

And the next moment I appeared at the nearest layer of shield defences in the region.

“Did you miss me or what?” Just when I was about to tell her about what to do, she was half a beat faster and asked me this.

If this was another time, I’d be surprised by her sudden question. But the great tension of this entire situation left a deep shadow over me, making me unable to feel any surprises at all.

“I want you to do something for me,” I seriously said, ignoring her question.

“You, the great Hye, want me to do something for him? That’s funny!” she said these mocking words with a face that showed a totally different emotion than what her words conveyed.

I sense longing, deep longing in her eyes and face. And seeing her like that made me inwardly sigh.

“Sorry girl, I can’t curse you like I did with my previous girls,” I told myself this, without sharing any with her. “I want you to do something, something that’s too important for all of us here.”

She looked deeper into my eyes, and I couldn’t tell if she turned quite serious or got lost in her feelings for me.

“What do you want me to do?” she paused before sighing, “trying to chase a king isn’t that easy, but at least give me some hope for the future of the two of us, can you?”

“I… I can’t promise you such a thing,” I couldn’t help but add, “if I do, you’ll end up losing much more than you imagine.”

“Being with you is enough!”

“Even that can’t be guaranteed,” I sighed, recalling my long gone girl whom I didn’t know where she was right now.

Even being with me, staying by my side, wouldn’t be an option for my curse. Just open your eyes and see what happened to Hilary! She was with me, and wasn’t!

“Tsk! You are just too overprotective for me, even to the degree of hurting me like this.”

“Small early loss is much better than long term disastrous grievances, right?” I paused before adding, “I want you to lead my people here in case something bad happened.”

“And what about you?” she gave me a weird look, “aren’t you here?”

“I might be busy doing something else,” I didn’t say out loud that I was going away. But for a girl like her, it was easy to guess such a point by her six senses.

“How do you expect me to help anyone the same way you do?”

“That’s why I brought you here,” I looked around before adding, “you got that staff from before, right?”

“This one?” She took an exact copy of my stuff and showed it to me. And I nodded.

“Start saving the places we’ll visit from here onwards as bookmarks.”

This was why I needed her. If I thought about what my forces would truly need, then it’d be the ability to jump over and fill any place with needed reinforcements.

With her staff, she could easily jump all over the zones, just like me. She wasn’t going to have the same impact over any distressful battlefield, not when she lacked my artefacts like pillar and Libra, lacking my techniques, but at least she could fill in the gap left by my absence for a little.

“And?” she could tell things weren’t that simple at all.

“I’ll give you enough warrior tokens,” I paused before adding, “enough to cover up the twenty regions here with floods of warriors if needed.”

She went into silence, raised her staff before nodding to me to jump over another place.

I started to jump around the layers of defence in each region, while transferring tons of warriors and stat crystals over to her.

She was smart enough to know what I wanted from her. And when she saw the grand number of emptied shields in the advanced layers, she could easily link the missing dots together.

I wanted her to take up my role as the main warriors giver, jump all over the zones and fill the emptied shielded zones with warriors and stat crystals.

She’d also act as fire fighters, jumping to the most dangerous and weakened spots anywhere, taking out enough warriors to fill in the gaps and support the defences.

“For how long… Do you want me to do this?” After we ended up on such a grand tour, she looked at me in a weird way.

I transferred what I promised, enough warriors to fill the entire twenty zones up with warriors like sand grains.

And that made her realise that I might be gone for a long time.

“For as long as it may take.”

“That’s why you prevented us from shifting into offence?” As expected, Lily wasn’t speaking before just for herself, but in the stead of many others.

“That’s right,” I nodded, “and also there are other reasons I’d like to keep for myself for now.”

“Pretty mysterious, huh? Don’t you realise that acting this way makes you sexier?”

She winked, and I simply ignored her flirtation. She kept trying all this time to tempt me to touch her, but I was already too busy with problems that I couldn’t yet solve.