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"It followed the ancient rules of locating it in a vital point of the area. It\'s also extremely easy to defend as the kinetic defense was the very purpose of its existence..." Mathew muttered, voicing out the points that continued to pop into his head.

"It\'s pretty far from the school, though," Beatrice pointed out. "I know that there are going to be some zombies out there and not as many as there would be in town\'s center... but didn\'t you claim that hunting zombies are actually a basis for our growth?"

​ Mathew pursed his lips.

"I\'m actually tempted to..." he muttered. \'Agree...\' he thought, when yet another realization struck him.

"On a surface level, it\'s true," he admitted. Mathew then lowered his head and started to rub his chin. "In terms of zombie density born from the natural population density, it\'s a shitty choice, I totally agree," he muttered.

Then, the young man raised his face and looked right at Beatrice.

"But isn\'t the castle location something that was aimed at cutting across the main transit paths?"

That was the very idea behind the castles. Rather than protect the location population from attacks, its purpose was to oversee important trade and logistic routes. In this way, in a situation of an attack, no army could leisurely move past a random castle because it would mean allowing its soldiers to freely cut the logistic chain open as they wished!

"What do you mean?" Beatrice asked while squinting her eyes. She then twitched. "Oh, I get it," she said only for a smile to appear on her lips. "You wish to think bigger, don\'t you?"

It was true that a castle situated in a far and relatively inaccessible area wasn\'t the best kind of forward operating base.

It was located far from areas with a lot of zombies. It was generally far from every other facility Mathew and his group might want to exploit.

But, at the same time, it oversaw not only the entire city below the hill it was located at, but it also stood guard over the main roads that connected the town with other population centers of the country!

"To sum it up. It will be extremely easy to defend once we fix the ruined parts. It will give us control over the entire west side of the town and the paths going through that area..." Mathew muttered.

Then, his eyes flashed.

"And I don\'t even want to think about the potential perks of claiming such a specific building!"

The school itself provided quite the awesome perks once Mathew turned it into a fortress. Even the media building came with massive economical benefits... even though it was in no way related to the economy or production at all.

And given how the system appeared to take the situation at hand into the account, the military benefits of claiming an actual castle, a building constructed with the task of being a sturdy fortress in the first place...

"Benefits? What benefits?" Beatrice asked while leaning her head over her shoulder with a puzzled expression on her face.

It took a further few minutes for Mathew to explain the concept he was thinking about.

"Okay then," Beatrice nodded her head, at least pretending to take Mathew\'s words for granted and assume he was correct with his guesses. "What sort of benefits do you think the castle would bring?"

"First off, I need to point out an important thing," Mathew said as his expression turned grim. "As much as I want it to somehow bring us more people, I don\'t think we should consider it as its potential perk."

Beatrice raised her eyebrows in surprise.

"A castle with great defenses? I bet it would attract a lot of survivors once the news would somehow spread," she pointed out.

After all, those who have yet to embark on the journey of actually trying to rebuild the civilization in spite of the ongoing apocalypse would only have two desires in their mind.

Safety and resources. And while the two existing fortresses could provide the latter, it would be the ability to put the threat of the zombies behind them that would pull people in like a magnet.

"If we consider this castle as an attractor for survivors, we would have an easy time to stop considering them people and start thinking of them as numbers," Mathew explained.

It was a guess he came up with the games he played as a basis rather than some elaborated philosophical way of thinking.

\'A good ruler in the real world and a good ruler in a game...\' he thought, his face twisting in a weird expression. \'I can conquer the world in a strategy game... But if I were to employ the kind of tactics necessary to do it in the game but in the real world... I would soon be hailed the greatest dictator to live!\'

There was an obvious difference between a game and real life.

In a game, throwing millions upon millions of bodies to a battlefield just to conquer a single province could be rationalized as a necessary cost.

But in the real world?

Mathew released a long sigh.

"Isn\'t this how civilization always worked?" Beatrice asked, proving to be surprisingly open-minded about the topic despite being the one to push hard for saving everyone they could. "To a degree, you have to desensitize yourself if you want to make the right choices," she pointed out.

"Trust me," Mathew said in a dark voice. "You don\'t want me to do that. Unless you want crowds of people thrown to their deaths just to gain a slim tactical advantage."

"If you want to be a leader, you need to learn how to sacrifice people," Beatrice replied with a dark voice of her own. "And trust me," she then said while turning her face away. Her voice turned softer and deeper.

"I do know something about what I\'m talking about."