Extremely high heat came from outside. Even with the house blocking it, the rising temperature was still obvious.
Amid the violent jolting, through Han Zhi’s vision, everyone and every plant was horrified to discover that the river was boiling.
When Han Zhi pulled the perspective farther back, he realised it was not the whole river boiling, but the section around Building Seven that had been enclosed by other ability zombies using metal and earth abilities.
A seventh-rank ability user was terrifying indeed. It was actually using fire to forcibly boil and evaporate thousands of tons of water.
Without the ability user who could split the river, it would simply drain the pond to catch the fish?
Even if pothos and the succulent reached out into water heated to one hundred degrees, they would be scalded until they curled up and lost their attack power.
Among the zombie horde on the riverbank, the group of zombies who looked the most like normal people all had human-like smiles of triumph in their eyes.
Only the person in the middle, who was almost indistinguishable from a normal human, had eyes full of vigilance.
Those other idiots did not know what was strange about this plant house, but it did.
This house was not completely controlled by the plants. It was controlled by that gardener’s so-called “home ability.”
It had clearly waited until the Butterfly Gardener left before launching the attack. Logically speaking, this building should have been just an empty shell containing plants.
But now, in full view of everyone, this building had changed shape.
There was only one possibility: that seventh-rank gardener had never gone back at all!
At the thought, its scalp went numb.
Suddenly, there was an almost imperceptible sound of something slicing through the air. The zombie king instantly bent down to dodge.
The bullet grazed the zombie king’s scalp, entered the skull of a sixth-rank zombie beside it, and killed it instantly.
The zombie king turned around in horror and looked toward where the bullet had come from, only to be met head-on by four more bullets.
Behind those bullets stood two people with guns, people who should have already returned to C City.
The one in Sang Wenhao’s hands was still the sniper rifle from the beginning. The one in Fu Erdie’s hands was a handgun D City Base had given her.
After gaining the ability to use Sang Wenhao’s power, she could also copy his ability to transform metal elements into bullets anytime and anywhere.
Her shooting accuracy could not compare with Sang Wenhao’s, but even Sang Wenhao did not rely purely on accuracy to kill enemies.
What he relied on was his metal control ability, which allowed him to slightly adjust the bullet’s trajectory at any moment.
Fu Erdie could layer the dandelion’s wind ability on top of that. If the opponent reacted too slowly, the bullet would normally pierce through its body. If the opponent reacted too quickly, she would have time to slightly alter the bullet’s path, making it curve toward the direction the enemy dodged.
Just like now. After Fu Erdie fired several bullets, she controlled them to chase the enemy for a long time. Only when one bullet lost its kinetic energy and another was knocked down by a wall of fire did she finally give up and condense more bullets, firing them from the magazine.
The fire wall created by the seventh-rank zombie king knocked back the bullets, but it also struck the surrounding zombie allies.
The flames were tyrannical. Only two or three high-rank zombies could resist them. The other zombies had no room to counterattack and almost turned to ash the instant they caught fire.
But the zombie king reacted quickly, immediately ordering the burning zombies to run toward the water while the other zombies counterattacked.
For a moment, abilities of every colour and form bombarded Fu Erdie, swallowing both her and Sang Wenhao.
The zombie king was attacking both Fu Erdie and Building Seven in the Li River at the same time. It was already struggling. Seeing that Fu Erdie seemed to have been dealt with, it had only just breathed a sigh of relief when it instinctively felt its scalp prickle.
Thinking a bullet had pierced through the smoke and dust, it jumped on the spot, dodging rapidly to avoid the unknown source of danger.
But the moment it moved, it realised the situation was not as it had imagined. What came at it was not a bullet, but an extremely tough metal thread.
Relying on sharp perception, it narrowly dodged the path of the metal thread sweeping horizontally. But it failed to avoid the end of the thread, whose whipping arc had been deliberately altered by Fu Erdie.
The tail end just barely brushed across the zombie king’s side waist, instantly triggering the vacuum ability Fu Erdie had used.
Caught off guard, the zombie king instinctively used its fire ability to resist the vacuum ability.
But normally, abilities were used outwardly. Now, using its ability inwardly in a panic, the zombie king could only blindly follow instinct to block it.
Without question, this wasted a huge amount of ability energy, and it did not truly eliminate the vacuum ability. Instead, the ability awkwardly exploded at its shoulder.
Realising it was no match for the Butterfly Gardener, the zombie king immediately retreated. It no longer cared about continuing to surround Building Seven in the river. It stepped on the heads of its zombie allies and fled.
How could Fu Erdie let this zombie king go?
She could now borrow the abilities of two close companions at once. Sang Wenhao’s metal ability and Cen Xiyang’s vacuum ability could be used for attack and airborne movement.
When she needed to travel quickly, she could temporarily abandon the vacuum ability and switch to the dandelion’s wind ability. In an instant, she entangled the zombie king.
The great fire raged. The zombie king’s own zombies were caught in the aftermath, contributing a little bit of damage that felt like scratching an itch to Fu Erdie before turning to ash.
After burning all the nearby zombies, the zombie king finally gave up on sending its zombie underlings to their deaths. Instead, it ordered them to attack Sang Wenhao while it dealt with Fu Erdie alone.
A battle between seventh-rank ability users was brutal and earth-shaking.
The moment the zombie king attacked without restraint, the surroundings became a sea of fire.
Fu Erdie stood high above, switching her borrowed abilities again. She used Han Zhi’s X-ray vision together with the handgun, attacking from the air at long range.
With the situation fully suppressed, Fu Erdie even had enough spare focus to use her ability on the house and the succulent, helping them recover energy.
The attack and defence stalemate lasted for over half an hour. The banks of the Li River became a sea of flames. Only when the seventh-rank zombie king had exhausted too much of its ability did it finally fail to push the bullet away with fire in time and was shot through the head.
The fire burned fiercely. While Fu Erdie continued using her ability on the house and the succulent, she and Sang Wenhao created over twenty cubic metres’ worth of metal water tanks, filled them from the river, and poured water over the burning riverbank.
The fight lasted half an hour.
The clean-up lasted the whole night.
By the time Fu Erdie had extinguished the fire and picked up the large pile of crystal cores on the ground, it was already one in the morning.
The succulent had curled up into a ball and gone to sleep. The house had also entered a short dormancy because it had consumed too much healing ability.
Fu Erdie was incredibly glad that this time, she had only pretended to go home. In reality, she had left the house behind. Halfway through, she had asked Yin Xuan, who came from the complex to meet them, to drive the car back, while she and Sang Wenhao quietly returned, pulling a feint on the zombies.
She had previously guessed that so many fire-type zombies launching troublesome suicide-style harassment attacks were being driven by some zombie king to probe her strength.
Now, looking at it, that was indeed the case.
Fu Erdie stroked the succulent’s fleshy leaves, her eyes narrowing slightly.
As expected, in places with denser populations, there were also more complicated situations.
She had thought she was invincible now and could lead her army toward more populated areas.
But from the look of things now…
“I was too impatient.” The next day, after everyone, including the house and the succulent, had woken up, Fu Erdie apologised. “Our territory has to be occupied bit by bit. I need to go downstream first and investigate the situation in those cities.”
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