Ethan and Sean stepped back into the house to find dinner already laid out on the table. Mia had everything prepared—and everyone else was clearly just waiting for them.
"Captain! You're finally back! I'm starving here," Big Mike groaned, wearing a miserable expression. "Do you have any idea how torturous it is to have your stomach growling like mad while staring at a full table of food you can't touch?"
Sure, high-tier Awakened could resist hunger way better than normal people—could go five or six days without eating, even—but that only applied when they weren't burning energy.
And today? They'd spent the whole damn day cutting down zombies—over a hundred thousand of them. They'd run themselves dry more than a dozen times. Emily had patched their stamina up again and again, but their bodies had already been pushed beyond the limit. At this point, they were starving—gut gnawing at spine-level starving.
