Chapter 254 — The Battle (Part 1)
Upon receiving the news that the two eagles at home were rebelling, the two men hurriedly pushed the cart with the pile of quail eggs back to the second floor. Leaving the cart behind, they impatiently scrambled into the elevator to head up to the first floor.
Rushing out the main door and into the greenhouse, they could hear a chaotic racket from afar—the two eagles were flapping their wings, chasing after the two deer…
The little deer and sheep that had been brought back by Luo Xun and the team and accidentally injured by the hail had healed up not long after. These two deer, in particular, were full of energy and wild to boot, frequently bounding and leaping all over the greenhouse. Sometimes little Xinran would even ride one of them, running back and forth across the artificial hills.
The two eagles loved to chase behind them, leaping and hopping along—it was counted as a friendly exchange between the household pets.
But now, heaven only knew if the two eagles were chasing them for fun or if they had unexpectedly discovered they could wield superpowers. Either way, the two deer were bounding ahead while the two eagles pursued on their short legs. Unable to catch up, the eagles flapped their wings, hopping along while spitting balls of lightning…
Crack!
Zzzt—
Boom!
“Dammit! Ahhh! My garden!!” Luo Xun’s face completely changed color at the commotion. He was so furious he wished he could violently throw those two menaces right out of the base’s main gate this instant!
Although those two eagles weren’t exceptionally massive yet, their destructive power was nothing to scoff at. The lightning balls they spat out systematically blasted several massive pits into the ground with a loud crackle-pop. Two of the metal mushroom boxes—explicitly deployed next to the trees in the garden to absorb hazardous substances—were currently flipped on their sides on the dirt.
Should they be profoundly grateful that the birds hadn’t directly blasted the flowers, plants, and fruit trees into splinters?
The several superpower users spent an immense amount of grueling effort before they finally managed to subdue the two creatures. The primary issue was that they didn’t want to injure them; they merely wanted to make them calm down, which made the task significantly more troublesome.
“What on earth happened?” It wasn’t until the two eaglets were captured, stuffed back into their nest, and the two deer were partitioned off that Luo Xun finally found the breath to question He Qiankun and the guys.
“We don’t know either! By the time we detected it, they were already brawling.” He Qiankun and the young men expressed that they were entirely in the dark. They had merely been executing a routine check of the garden layout to see if any trees bore issues or if any fruits were ready for harvest. Who could have predicted that these two factions would suddenly launch into a brawl?
Lacking an eyewitness, they had no choice. Luo Xun and the team could only bring out their ultimate weapon—the surveillance cameras.
They couldn’t mount those surveillance units too far out, but they could seamlessly install them across numerous coordinates inside the complex. Normally, no one would explicitly monitor the feeds, plying them only when a necessity arose. Since this disruption had only just unfolded, no one had deleted the recorded footage yet, so it remained perfectly intact.
Verifying that the eaglets had finally quieted down, Luo Xun and the team hurriedly retreated to the server room in the basement to inspect the footage. Exporting the recording that monitored the garden—specifically the slot trained on the eagles’ coordinate—everyone instantly understood what had transpired.
As they did every day, the two little deer were smugly bounding across the courtyard to showcase their sleek, athletic frames while getting some exercise.
Bounding along, they handily bounced right up to the eagles’ nest. Consequently, exactly like every single past encounter, the two eaglets naturally gave chase.
Thus, with one faction sprinting and the alternative pursuing, they launched into a literal game of tag. This brand of game played out inside the complex daily, and everyone had normalized it long ago. But the anomaly arose because one of the eagles unluckily tripped and fell. When it facedplanted against the ground, the impact remarkably knocked a rogue bolt of lightning right out of it…
Discovering that they remarkably possessed the capability to wield a bizarre power, the two eaglets instantaneously threw open the main gate to a whole new world. Consequently, they broke into a frantic sprint while spitting elements, blasting raw lightning balls across every coordinate.
If the elements of these two frauds hadn’t been completely depleted by the time Luo Xun and the team climbed upstairs, leaving them unable to manifest more, heaven only knew how long they would have kept wreaking havoc!
Massaging his temples with a massive headache, Luo Xun felt thoroughly exhausted inside his chest. Every single one of his household pets was a superpower user, dammit! Yet communication remained completely impossible! How on earth were they supposed to manage them?
Their own puppy and those two massive dogs were relatively manageable. The puppy was remarkably well-behaved and refrained from using his superpower wildly on regular days. Those two massive dogs had systematically mastered self-control before ever stepping inside the base, ensuring they didn’t deploy their elements erratically. But these two eagles… their feathers had barely grown full before they started emulating others by slinging superpowers?! Outrageous!
New Year’s Eve inside the Otaku Team’s base was handily weathered amidst this chaotic cacophony of eagles flapping, deer leaping, and dogs barking. Ultimately, the dumplings they had been craving were successfully wrapped, but regrettably—they had originally plotted to tuck in during lunch, only to be disrupted by the various emergencies until the afternoon, finally getting a bite into their mouths by dinner time.
The team spent this winter remarkably well. Compared to the basement vaults and the above-ground greenhouse, the third floor where Luo Xun and the team active-lived carried a slightly higher probability of catching drafts. However, when Yan Fei was originally installing the water pipes, he followed Luo Xun’s directives to ensure every single room could be individually climate-controlled, meaning they merely required adjusting the third-floor temperature to a higher baseline.
Regarding food logistics, long before the winter parameters set in, Luo Xun and the team had accumulated a massive stockpile of supplies, rounded out by a heavy volume of cured meats and sausages hung from the kitchen ceiling vents to air-dry. Coupled with the various meats packed inside the freezers, the endless vegetables cultivated across the basement, and the fruits harvested inside the greenhouse, they spent a winter that was exceptionally comfortable and delightful.
Not to mention the abundance of animal hides, which had been processed into carpets, rugs, and heavy comforters. The entire residential block was thoroughly layered with these plush materials without anyone policing the layout. After all, not only could they hunt for themselves, but those two wolves had also relentlessly and selflessly carted a massive medley of items back home prior to winter setting in. The absolute majority of their haul comprised animal carcasses or pristine hides; the carcasses were systematically processed into wolf feed, leaving the crew to unreservedly and joyfully accept the fine furs.
Once little Baozi’s first birthday drew past—and the Lunar New Year seamlessly concluded—the massive army of South African migratory waterfowl neared the timeline to launch their northward trek. Right at the tail end of February, precisely as the ice and snow began to thaw, that long-delayed, colossal zombie army was finally drawing near!
Exploiting the window as the snow thawed, Luo Xun and the team had already poured the mushroom juice straight into the various pitfalls. On the absolute day before the zombies were scheduled to cross their perimeter, they pre-activated the integrated heating filaments via the pre-deployed metal lines, smoothly thawing the solid mushroom juice inside the cavities.
When Yan Fei retracted the protective metal lids, he merely worked through a tight structural opening hidden amidst the snow drifts. Consequently, evaluating the layout from a distance—as long as a party refrained from actively drawing close to those pitfalls—a layer of snow and ice crust remained perfectly preserved over the coordinates, revealing absolutely zero anomalies.
However, the absolute moment the vanguard zombie unit crossed the track and stepped onto the trap boundary, the entire crust violently collapsed inward—and the battle finally commenced!
Standing before the monitor screens, Luo Xun silently watched the colossal zombie army—resembling a mountain of black storm clouds—slowly press forward from the distant horizon. He finally let out a slow breath from his chest—at long last, it had arrived.
This incoming horde had behaved exactly like a persistent early warning, relentlessly broadcasting that danger was imminent, yet stubbornly delaying its actual arrival. Currently, the second shoe had finally dropped. Although the future parameters remained deeply worrisome, his heart could finally settle flat on the ground.
Calculating the timeline beautifully, Luo Xun and the team had pre-evacuated into the deep basement alcoves well in advance, doing their absolute best to ensure no human remained on the ground level to let the zombies catch a biological scent. After all, they had consistently hypothesized that this batch of zombies possessed exceptionally sharp olfactory traits; if they tracked the scent to lunge straight toward their base walls, it would trigger a massive complication, wouldn’t it? Although they wielded a baseline layer of defensive capabilities, their absolute personnel count was far too sparse.
Every single surveillance camera across the base tracks that trained outward to face the oncoming zombie tide was systematically and securely locked inside solid metal boxes, the structures reinforced with at least a dual layer of compact glass panes for maximum protection.
In the distance, the vanguard zombie units had visibly plummeted straight into the traps, yet the colossal army anchoring the rear continued to push forward in a majestic, thunderous column.
Luo Xun and the team knit their brows, their faces darkening as they evaluated the endless black tide flooding the screens, a trace of silent anxiety inevitably rippling through their chests—once the heavy mass of the zombie army pressed further inward, even if these units simply stepped flat over the heads of their fallen comrades, they could handily and effortlessly cross past the trap network.
Early this morning, Luo Xun and the team had hurriedly executed a sweeping check across the various crop rooms, before silently taking up their guard posts inside the planting vaults. Across the above-ground levels, apart from leaving the fruit trees, flowers, and wild grass behind, they had long since escorted the young sheep and deer down to the third subterranean tier to temporarily huddle alongside the rabbits and quails.
The twin eaglets—having finally mastered the baseline concept that they must absolutely refrain from spraying lightning balls erratically—were currently nesting obediently right beside little Xinran, flanked by the puppy crouching on the floorboards.
Down across the second subterranean floor, those two massive dogs had similarly trotted over to anchor themselves right by the main tunnel entrance vault flanking the subterranean lobby. Early this morning, Yan Fei had systematically mounted several heavy metal gates across segmented tracks within the secret tunnel, explicitly guarding against rogue zombie units accidentally compromising their tunnel infrastructure and burrowing straight into the base proper from the tracks.
Those two dimwitted wolves, alongside their household eagles, sheep, and deer, had turned exceptionally subdued over the past few days. The specimens that normalized highly energetic behaviors had seamlessly become perfectly docile, appearing exactly as if they possessed an inherent awareness that a monumental event was about to unfold.
Luo Xun hypothesized that if these predators had been left free to roam across the open wild currently, would they have long since fled as far as humanly possible, exactly like the two idiot wolves had executed last winter?
“They already breached the first row of traps!” The boys who had been staring laser-locked at the screens suddenly shouted out in unison, causing the atmosphere within the deathly silent room to instantly tighten with high tension.
True to form, exactly as the group had calculated, although the pitfalls they excavated were monumentally deep and massive—reinforced with a multi-layered framework—they were ultimately no match for the layered, endless mass of the zombie army! Before long, plying sheer raw numbers, they successfully packed the traps to the brim, surging straight toward the base trajectory.
“Tell me, do you think they possess explicit data confirming our presence here?” Watching the zombie units draw aggressively closer across the screens, Li Tie couldn’t help but voice a chilling possibility.
“It’s highly possible,” Luo Xun didn’t deny the parameter, merely throwing out a sharp reminder to the crew. “Maintain absolute vigilance over their movements at a moment’s notice. The rampant mutated plants are anchoring the rear lines; they can easily hold the line for another fair stretch.”
Right while he was speaking, those zombie columns had already crossed over half the clearance separation separating the pitfalls from the mutated thickets. The weight inside everyone’s chest sank aggressively lower as they watched that black tide finally smash flush against the mutated plants that had remained hidden beneath the ice sheets!
Colossal, monstrous branches snapped awake from beneath the ice and snow. The mutated plants, having slept through an entire winter’s duration, appeared exceptionally ravenous currently, frantically and desperately lunging forward to coil around these incoming provocateurs!
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