Chapter 257 — The Battle (Part 4)
Luo Xun and the team had truly suffered over the past few days. Although they were safe inside the base, the endless flood of zombies outside was a depressing sight. This zombie tide was entirely different from the last one. Last time, the zombies passing through were purely “passing by” and had no idea humans were living here. So, even though some zombies initially attacked the mutated plants, the rest of the army ignored the area and kept moving once they discovered those things weren’t human and couldn’t be eaten.
But the zombies this time were different. They knew people were inside, and instead of detouring when they found the base unbreachable, they left a massive horde behind to tightly encircle the area. They were determined to smash through every obstacle, break down the walls, and devour the humans inside.
Living under these two completely different scenarios, how could the team possibly stay inside the base with the same peace of mind?
Fortunately, they could finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Monitoring the situation outside with their surveillance cameras, they could finally catch a faint glimpse of the tail end of the zombie tide around ten in the morning!
The last remaining zombies had now crossed the pitfalls they had dug early on. They had completely surrounded the base along with the Devil’s Vines, launching their final total assault!
“We’ll wait another hour. Around eleven-thirty, we’ll launch a new round of counter-attacks,” Luo Xun said with a relaxed smile after confirming the conditions outside.
“Got it!” Everyone inside the base pumped their fists and cheered with a trace of excitement.
The reason they scheduled the counter-attack after eleven-thirty was because after long-term observation, Luo Xun and the team had noticed that the satellite photos they intercepted of their base’s perimeter were consistently captured around ten o’clock. The earliest was just after nine-thirty, and the latest was no later than ten-forty. For safety reasons, they never dared to execute any major movements at the base during this specific window. If anyone evaluating the photos discovered something amiss, they could say goodbye to their peaceful lifestyle.
And this final counter-attack of theirs must absolutely leave no trace for others to discover.
Although it would be over an hour before the counter-attack commenced, they could already begin the preparations.
Aside from the members remaining in the server room to monitor the exterior, everyone else deployed to the third subterranean level—specifically to a room packed with a massive amount of ice, right next to where the rabbits and other livestock were kept.
Unlike the alternative rooms, this floor featured zero water-heating. Instead, it relied on a massive volume of ice blocks harvested during the winter. These ice blocks were neatly stacked across the floor and walls, seamlessly transforming the entire room into a natural ice house!
Although Luo Xun’s household stashed an immense number of refrigerators and freezers, those appliances demanded a substantial amount of energy to maintain, and the storage capacity of each unit was strictly finite. They were perfectly adequate for regular food storage and raw meat harvested from hunts, but once the absolute volume of a specific asset ran too high, it wasn’t easily packed inside them.
Consequently, a natural ice house like this turned out to be vastly more convenient and worry-free. Currently, this “ice cellar” was packed exclusively with a single asset—frozen mushroom juice.
During the defensive engagements prior to today, it wasn’t that Luo Xun and the team didn’t want to ply mushroom juice to counter the zombies—was there a more natural, healthy biological weapon than something the zombies dreaded and the surrounding Devil’s Vines loved?
But Luo Xun and the team couldn’t do it. Yes, they couldn’t.
Early on, when they excavated that massive loop of pitfalls outside the base, they had poured enough mushroom juice to fill at least half of every cavity, which had handily depleted nearly ninety percent of their household reserve. If they hadn’t verified today that the colossal zombie army had finally reached its trailing edge, they would have stubbornly continued to hold onto this inventory—this was their absolute final trump card. Although fresh mushrooms were persistently growing at home, they couldn’t possibly accumulate such a monumental volume again within a short duration.
But right now was the perfect window to deploy the asset, putting a final exclamation point on this battle.
Hauling out the crates packed with frozen mushroom juice, they transported them to the second subterranean floor before using the elevator to cart them up to the first-floor lobby. Before long, these neatly frozen blocks of mushroom juice were fully moved upstairs.
By this point, apart from He Qiankun and Wu Xin, who remained in the basement to persistently monitor the situation, the rest of the crew had assembled in the first-floor lobby to execute the final preparations.
Xu Mei plying her fire attribute to rapidly warm and thaw the metal containers crate by crate, while alternative members monitored the exterior conditions and conducted a countdown. Zhang Su and Song Lingling prepped the crystals they required, while listening to Luo Xun explain the targeted direction and precise range required for the upcoming elemental strike.
As soon as Xu Mei completed thawing a few crates, alternative members would immediately transport a fraction up to a room on the third floor via the elevator. Once the absolute final container was successfully moved upstairs, the entire squad stood fully at the ready, assembling across the third floor.
Gripping their weapons tightly, Luo Xun kept a close eye on the exterior conditions. After confirming the status outside via radio with He Qiankun and his partner, he turned to the two primary combat classes: “Prep yourselves, let’s begin!”
Yan Fei threw open the sealed metal window panels, and Zhang Su stepped up flush against the frame to seal off the local airflow. The absolute moment Song Lingling manipulated the mushroom juice from one of the containers to make it “fly out,” he deployed his wind superpower to cradle the crimson liquid, guiding it to soar out through the window frame toward the far side of the exterior walls—a crimson “rain” systematically showered down across all directions.
The absolute moment that crimson liquid splashed onto the grotesque, varied zombie units that were lunging forward after sniffing the raw scent of human flesh, wisps of white vapor violently billowed from their bodies. The vapor drifted lazily into the air like columns of lit incense—not overly dense, yet persistently and relentlessly trailing up.
Flanking the perimeter, those Devil’s Vines—which had been appearing completely stuffed past completion, as if trapped in a sluggish state of low combat efficiency after gorging on food—seemed to snap awake instantaneously. They began twisting with absolute excitement, their branches mimicking an endless forest of tentacles lashing wildly toward the upper sky.
Wave after wave of the mushroom rain showered down, targeted across all directions and every single heading. It successfully drenched virtually every zombie in the immediate perimeter. To those newly excited Devil’s Vines, the zombies caked in the mushroom juice behaved exactly like a platter of roasted mutton dusted with cumin; an asset that was inherently delectable had seamlessly transformed into a vastly more exquisite delicacy! It radiated an effect that caused them to salivate past completion, and the sheer deliciousness drove them to entirely ignore their bloated stomachs. They twisted with increased frenzy, desperately scrambling to divide and devour the food.
Catching sight of those Devil’s Vines outside appearing to “come alive” once more—displaying a state of excitement that aggressively eclipsed their initial momentum when the zombies first struck—Luo Xun and the team were completely caught off guard, staring at one another in utter silence. Absolutely no one had anticipated that their baseline intent to merely spray a bit of mushroom juice to quickly dispatch the zombies would paradoxically act like a digestive enzyme, seemingly alleviating the Devil’s Vines’ bloating and drastically scaling up their appetites!
“…If I had known, we should have sprayed them with some mushroom juice early on,” Wang Duo murmured in a low whisper. Although their current household reserve of mushroom juice ran low, they still possessed enough to regularly spray a tiny bit of digestive medicine onto the Devil’s Vines daily.
Luo Xun let out a tactical cough: “We were entirely in the dark before. Furthermore, although they put on an excited display after being sprayed with mushroom juice, absolutely no one can verify whether forcing them to overindulge will trigger an adverse reaction down the line…” True to form, a zombie siege was a massive complication; they had only crossed paths with the scenario once at this location in the past, so lacking seasoned experience was standard to the absolute extreme. Once this siege concluded, they would carefully evaluate the long-term condition of those Devil’s Vines. If their health remained pristine, things would be easy to manage, and they could better utilize this mechanic to anchor their defenses down the line.
But if these plants overindulged to a point where an adverse reaction manifested—what if they ate too much and completely stuffed themselves to death after the fact? When the time came, they would have to cultivate a fresh batch of Devil’s Vines to replace the dead foliage.
The group of young men immediately accepted the insight with complete humility, indicating they would meticulously absorb the lesson from this engagement. The next time they crossed paths with an emergency of this caliber, they would definitely summarize the parameters beautifully to unearth a vastly more systematic counter-measure.
Continuous waves of the crimson mushroom rain persistently showered outward toward every single heading. Currently, regardless of whether these mutated plants would absorb a structural adverse reaction after taking in the mushroom juice, Luo Xun and the team possessed zero capacity to police the parameter, leaving them to focus entirely on weathering this immediate wave first. Consequently, the core directive driving Zhang Su and Song Lingling currently was to ensure the mutated thickets encircling the base framework were drenched in the mushroom juice as thoroughly as possible.
Bit by bit, quadrant by quadrant, the squad bustled from around eleven in the morning straight until past two in the afternoon. Finally, the entire expanse of mutated farmland tightly encircling the perimeter of their base had been systematically sprayed once over! And they had handily and completely exhausted every single drop of their stored mushroom juice along the way.
Zhang Su and Song Lingling absorbed crystals to restore their mental focus. Seeing that the stored mushroom juice had run completely dry, Song Lingling turned to ask: “Should we deploy down to the planting vaults to extract a fresh batch of juice from the mushrooms currently growing at home?” Their household currently retained a loose collection of mutated mushrooms that had hit full maturity; if the previous volume fell short, executing an emergency harvest on the fly was well within their capabilities.
Luo Xun kept his binoculars held to meticulously analyze the exterior perimeter. Hearing the query, he shook his head slightly: “No need for the time being. Let’s wait and track the dynamics.” Outdoors currently—especially across the coordinates tucked flush against their exterior walls, where zombie units had smashed past the Devil’s Vines to draw beneath the walls—the targets had all been tightly snared once more by the newly frenzied Devil’s Vines. Under these dynamics, they merely required waiting in quiet composure, tracking the final outcome line.
True to expectations, exactly as Luo Xun had predicted, once the surrounding Devil’s Vines launched into a collective frenzy, virtually every single zombie that had penetrated deep into their perimeter was thoroughly trapped within the madly coiling vines. However, because the opposition’s raw density remained immense, although the Devil’s Vines successfully snared almost every individual zombie unit, they lacked the capacity to instantly digest such a monumental mass.
The absolute lethality the mushroom juice plying against the zombie units remained remarkably decent, but due to the sparse volume deployed, it merely inflicted a baseline layer of structural degradation across their ranks rather than completely shattering their core. Consequently, the two factions remained locked in a brutal match of mutual stagnation straight until dusk settled over the complex.
“We’ll evaluate the remaining dynamics tomorrow morning,” Luo Xun noted after a final verification of the exterior conditions. Every single member inside the base finally let out a long breath, temporarily setting their hearts flat back inside their chests.
And wasn’t that the truth? At the very least, zero zombie units were currently pounding against their exterior walls to violently smash the infrastructure anymore, right?
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