Plants vs. Zombies for All: I Can Add Passives to Plants

Three, four splashes came one after another, like someone had thrown several large stones into the pool at once.

Cattail's tail spike abruptly snapped back from the fifth lane, carving a red arc through the rain before turning toward the pool.

Lin Yue glanced at the water in the fourth lane. The rain and fog were too thick for him to see the surface clearly, but those blurry gray-green silhouettes stirring up the water were gathering toward him.

The kitten's spikes had already pierced out before the second wave of Zombies entered the pool. A string of dense pops and splashes rang across the water. The first Zombie slowly sank, while the second struggled to swim toward the Lily Pad.

But it was still helpless. The kitten's next wave of attacks had already arrived.

Just as Lin Yue withdrew his gaze from the pool, a set of footsteps came from the second lane, heavier than anything from the other lanes before—stomping through mud and water, dense and weighty, as if an entire squad's footsteps had overlapped.

Snow Pea kept firing into the thick fog, spitting out icy peas.

The moving bodies churned the dense fog from within, making it roll and twist. The gray-green shadows formed a scattered line behind the fog, filling the entire width of the second lane.

Twenty seconds later, the first Buckethead Zombie emerged from the edge of the fog.

The battered iron bucket on its head had been crushed on one side, its rim dented inward as though something had smashed it.

(Snow Pea: Was there ever any doubt?)

The second Buckethead Zombie followed immediately after, a head taller than the first. Its bucket rim was intact but covered in rust, and its gray-white eyes stared straight toward Snow Pea.

Three Zombies followed behind the two buckets. Five bodies were crammed into the narrow strip of lawn, with gaps between them too small to fit even a normal arm.

Snow Pea was still firing.

An ice-blue pea struck the center of the leading bucket. Frost patterns spread rapidly across its surface, slowing its pace to seventy percent of normal.

The second shot hit the second bucket's right knee. Seeing the Buckethead Zombie slowed, the Zombies behind it rushed forward.

The slowing effect alternated and stacked among the front-row Zombies, forcibly pressing all five Zombies' advance speed down to the same sluggish pace.

They were like a herd of clumsy livestock squeezing across a river. None could outrun the others, none could overtake the others. Under the coating of slowing frost, they could only shuffle toward Lin Yue at the same speed, in the same rhythm, across the same narrow strip of lawn.

The first lane broke through the fog at the same time.

A Screen Door Zombie stepped out of the mist holding half a broken iron door, followed by two Conehead Zombies. Torchwood's flames outlined the three figures in a warm red glow through the rain.

Most of the door's surface had already been destroyed. Only a small patch of intact metal remained in the middle, but that patch happened to block two fireballs fired straight at it by Peashooter.

The fireballs exploded against the metal sheet, scattering sparks everywhere. The heat burned a blackened dent into the door, but failed to break through.

The five Zombies in the second lane advanced slowly and evenly.

The slowing effect remained in place, keeping their formation extremely tight as they pressed chest to back.

The true killing move was still waiting behind them... Potato Mine crouched on that square of lawn, its two large front teeth exposed in the rain, its round white eyes staring straight ahead at the gray mass closing in on it.

Potato Mine's smile had vanished. It glared fixedly at the group of Zombies before it.

"People who want to win... don't smile."

Lin Yue stood beneath the eaves, watching Potato Mine through the curtain of rain.

Its expression had changed.

Its usually wide, goofy mouth was now pressed tightly shut. Its two round white eyes lowered slightly, as if taking aim, as if gathering strength.

Its entire body had sunk half an inch lower than usual. Its roots tightened against the ground, like a spring compressed to its limit, waiting for the exact shortest moment.

The Zombies in the first and second lanes stepped into Potato Mine's range around the seventh column almost simultaneously.

The Screen Door Zombie in the first lane had just pulled its broken door back from in front of the Conehead Zombies, preparing to adjust its defensive angle;

The five gray-green bodies packed together in the second lane had already reached two squares in front of Potato Mine. The leading Buckethead Zombie's foot was stepping down toward the wet soil of the seventh column—

"Boom!!!!"

"Boom!!!!"

A tremendous explosion rang out, the flash unique to Ash Plants.

The blast overwhelmed the sound of the rain.

The shockwave erupting from the soil spread upward like an inverted gray umbrella opening from the ground. Carrying shattered stones, mud, and fragments of blasted metal, it expanded outward in a semicircle.

The Screen Door Zombie in the first lane was caught by the shockwave, and its already battered iron door immediately disintegrated.

The two Conehead Zombies behind it were both knocked backward. Their cone hats rolled off their heads, turning them into two ordinary Zombies.

The five Zombies in the second lane stood at the center of the explosion, suffering a far greater impact than those in the first lane.

After the blast, five bodies lay sprawled across that patch of lawn.

Then they vanished.

Over in the first lane, the unarmored Zombie that had lost its door was climbing up from the ground.

It had just pushed its upper body upright when a huge pea wrapped in purplish-red flames flew over Torchwood and smashed precisely into its face...

Its entire head was blasted off by the fireball. The remaining half of its body swayed in place before falling backward into the muddy pit.

The two Conehead Zombies behind it had just recovered from the blast. Before the first could even adjust its footing, the second fireball had already landed in the center of its chest;

The second Conehead Zombie was pierced through the left shoulder and abdomen by Peashooter's follow-up barrage. When it fell, its knees hit the ground first, then its entire upper body plunged forward into a puddle.

The first lane was cleared.

The second lane was cleared.

The two defensive lines had almost simultaneously finished clearing their respective waves.

A wisp of white smoke rose from Peashooter's barrel, which slowly lowered half a degree. Snow Pea's icy blue leaves trembled slightly in the rain before it stopped firing.

A full fifteen seconds of silence.

Only the rain and faint scattered sounds from deep within the fog remained in the backyard.

"Splash—"

The sound from the pool almost perfectly coincided with the end of that silence.

Cattail's tail spike abruptly withdrew from the second lane, curved through the air, and stabbed back toward the water in the fourth lane.

New splashes appeared in the pool. More than one body had fallen in. The splashes sounded one after another, like someone was endlessly tossing stone after stone into the pool.

The kitten's spikes stabbed toward the murky water the instant the splashes began. But the fog was too thick for Lin Yue to see how many gray-green silhouettes were beneath the pool. He could only hear the dense popping sounds of Cattail's spikes landing, along with the occasional dull thud of bodies sinking to the bottom.

The stacked attack speed had turned it into a stationary turret capable of continuous fire.

The only pity was that once the kitten lost all targets across the six lanes at the same time, its stacked attack speed would return to zero.

It stacked faster and faster, but the moment it was interrupted was still a gap in its damage output.

Lin Yue stared toward the pool. The water had been churning nonstop. From just now until this moment, not a single Zombie had successfully swum out of the pool's fog-covered area.

The kitten held them off, but it never had a chance to catch its breath.

"Creak... crunch..."

A sound Lin Yue least wanted to hear came from the sixth lane.

The dull sound of Wall-nut being chewed, teeth repeatedly grinding against its hard wooden shell—dry and continuous.

The rain and fog made it impossible to see Wall-nut's exact condition, but it had remained standing on that square of lawn, always blocking in front of Chomper, never once falling.

Chomper had just swallowed what was in its mouth.

Snap Pea had just emerged from underground, with half a chewed Zombie clothing fragment still clinging to the edge of its purple flower head.

Toadstool's cap bulged slightly in the rain, as if it were digesting the last prey in its mouth.

The three devouring plants in the sixth lane had been taking turns working for nearly an hour, and each of their health panels was silently rising.

But Wall-nut had always stood at the very front, bearing all the pressure of close-range biting for them.

"Thud—"

After Chomper swallowed the Zombie in its mouth, it spat the Zombie's head like a pea toward the Zombie chewing on Wall-nut.

The gray-green head was coated in sticky plant fluid. It traced a low arc through the air and accurately smashed into the Zombie's head, knocking its teeth away from Wall-nut's shell for a moment.

Snap Pea seized that opening and moved underground. Its flower head opened, swallowing the Zombie that had yet to turn around, shoulders and back included, before retreating beneath the ground again.

The chewing stopped for a few seconds, then resumed from another direction.

Lin Yue stood beneath the eaves. Rainwater ran from his brow into his eyes, making him squint from the sting.

Listening to the continuous chewing from the sixth lane, unable to see Wall-nut's condition through the thick fog... how long could its shell hold out, could it keep up with the rate of damage... he had no idea.

Fortunately, his Wall-nut had no other strengths... it was just tough!

As long as Wall-nut was still there, that little bunker that had silently stood at the front for him since the first night was still crouching in its original spot, never retreating a single step.

The battle in the backyard continued for nearly an hour.

The downpour never weakened, and the thick fog never dispersed. Every five to ten minutes, a new batch of Zombies surged in from different directions.

Third lane, fourth lane, first lane, second lane, fifth lane, sixth lane—they rotated without a fixed order or interval.

Every so often, Lin Yue opened the sunlight panel to restore the status of the wilted plants. Fortunately, he had plenty of sunlight, so there was no need to panic.

There was no panic. He merely glanced from time to time at the "Happy Residential Community" chat group on the system panel—the messages had stopped for quite a while.

The last wave of messages had come twenty minutes ago. Farmer had said Buckethead Zombies had filled the third lane over there, and no one had sent another message since.

The "10 people" indicator in the group now showed only four lit avatars.

Lin Yue's gaze lingered on those four avatars for a moment.

Everyone was fighting desperately.

After watching for two seconds, he closed the panel and turned his gaze back toward the depths of the gray-white rain and fog.

In the backyard, fireballs from the first lane continued to spray out. Snow Pea had just fired its second icy blue projectile. Cattail's tail spike switched back and forth between the pool and the fifth lane, while Chomper swallowed the Zombie in its mouth.

They began waiting for the next wave of Zombies.

Behind them, Toadstool swallowed another Zombie and produced a huge sun. From the beginning until now, the sunlight produced by Toadstool alone had been enough to sustain the entire backyard's operation.

The torrential rain that was deadly to everyone else had little effect on Lin Yue instead.

[ Ding... a large group of Zombies is approaching your backyard. ]

"Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh..."

The wind changed.

The wind that had previously passed through the rain curtain had been smooth and even, but now the airflow pouring in from the west side of the backyard carried an urgent, immense pressure that struck him head-on.

The wind pressed close to the ground, blowing the rain diagonally. It struck the eaves with dense, crisp slapping sounds.

Lin Yue's shoulders tensed.

The fingers gripping his wooden hammer tightened. His toes curled slightly inside his soaked shoes. Though his entire body was already drenched, he still stared unblinkingly into the thick fog.

He did not dare relax for even an instant.

Footsteps followed immediately after the howling wind... not the previous dull, measured stomps, but rapid and dense, like running shoes fitted with iron cleats repeatedly striking hard ground: "Thud, thud, thud, thud..."

The interval between each step grew shorter and shorter, the sound closer and closer, like an iron ball launched from a mechanism and rapidly hurtling this way.

"They're here."

The plants across all six lanes reacted almost simultaneously.

Peashooter's first fireball, wrapped in purple flames, shot into the fog of the first lane. It exploded into a burst of orange-red light deep in the mist, illuminating several gray-green bodies slowly advancing through that area;

Snow Pea fired an icy blue pea into the second lane. The slowing frost activated in the fog as an expanding pale blue halo, and some Zombies were even frozen into blocks of ice;

Dense splashing came from the pool at the same time, waves of "splash" after "splash." The kitten let out a "Ha!" and its tail spike gave a brief shriek through the air, quickly turning its attacks back above the pool from the other lanes.

The water in the fourth lane churned with murky waves beneath the rain.

Gray-green torsos floated up from beneath the water. Some still wore tattered life jackets, while others had only half a shoulder exposed. Three Zombies emerged from the surface at the same time. The closest was less than three squares from the Lily Pad in the fifth lane.

The kitten's tail spike swept back and forth between the exit point and the center of the pool. The red spikes stretched into a thin red wire through the rain, stabbing from one end of the pool to the other before turning back. Each return sent new bodies sinking beneath the water.

(Phoebe, don't pull wires.)