A situation not described in the guide had occurred. Thanks to his unique title, Walking Headline, Bai Mu had unlocked a brand-new Side Quest.
'Just as I suspected, that phrase was a hint.'
Dave had said he "didn't know what you could do." Thinking about it in reverse, if Dave actually "knew what you could do," he might issue a different quest.
'But defending against a zombie horde without using Garden Plants is way too difficult.'
Bai Mu recalled the details of the guide. The zombies would launch their attack right after Dave left the backyard.
Players would encounter two types of enemies: regular zombies and conehead zombies.
According to the guide, these undead creatures moved incredibly slowly, shuffling along like the elderly. In an actual fight, a grown man armed with a melee weapon, such as a baseball bat or a crowbar, could easily overpower a regular zombie.
The conehead variants were a bit more durable than the regular ones, but their combat power was still severely lacking. A couple of solid swings with a sturdy club would be more than enough to smash their rotting skulls into mush.
However, the greatest difficulty of this Script did not lie in the individual strength of the zombies, but in their sheer numbers. A total of three hordes would erupt within half an hour, resulting in an onslaught of over a hundred zombies.
The ratio of regular zombies to coneheads was roughly four to one.
While the lawnmowers could help fend off a single wave, losing them would drastically lower the Script's final Rating and rewards, leaving the Player with a single random plant card at best.
If a Player opted not to rely on the lawnmowers at all, they would have to personally deal with at least eighty zombies.
Even the most physically fit adult would be half-dead from exhaustion after slaughtering eighty pigs in thirty minutes, let alone fighting off eighty ravenous corpses intent on eating their brains.
Without the aid of the Garden Plants, this was virtually an impossible task. Taking down just a dozen zombies would entirely drain a normal person's stamina. Ultimately, they would be powerlessly swallowed by the undead tide and lose their brain.
Even for a man with abundant combat experience like Bai Mu, the situation was bleak.
After all, he had no weapons on hand. If he had a gun and some ammunition, he felt he might actually be able to attempt this crazy idea. But his inventory only held two items. He couldn't exactly swat the zombies away with a Solar Panel, nor could he whip out his Police Badge and sternly warn them that they were trespassing on private property.
Zombies didn't obey human laws. They would simply ignore his warnings, scoop out his brains, and feast.
After a rational analysis, Bai Mu concluded that what he currently possessed was nowhere near enough to tackle a task of this excruciating difficulty.
"Neighbor?" Dave prompted, beginning to push Bai Mu for a decision.
No matter what the Player did or how they tried to stall Dave, the zombie horde would arrive exactly five minutes after entering the backyard. At the very latest, Dave would also leave the yard at the five-minute mark.
It had already been about two minutes. Bai Mu needed to make a choice, and fast.
His mind raced. The fundamental difference between a human and a zombie was that a human had a brain capable of critical thought.
He had successfully triggered a new quest using a title. Perhaps he could use his eloquence to coax something useful out of Dave as well.
"Dave, I think your idea is pretty good," Bai Mu said. "I don't know much about your Garden Plants. If I make a mistake while coordinating with them, things will turn disastrous."
"I really want to help relieve your stress, and I'm more than willing to fight those zombies to the bitter end. But I don't even have a decent weapon on hand. If you could provide me with some firepower, maybe I could give it a shot."
"You're absolutely right, neighbor," Dave nodded, expressing his wholehearted agreement. "Being unarmed is indeed a massive problem."
"I've got a brilliant idea." Dave raised an index finger, his eyes lighting up.
He grabbed the frying pan resting on his head, pulled it off, and presented it to Bai Mu. The inside of the pan gleamed with a slick, greasy sheen, likely from rubbing against Dave's unwashed hair.
"Mary is my favorite frying pan. She makes top-tier fried eggs! You can use Mary to mercilessly bash those zombies over the head until their brains spill out. Well, assuming you can actually find a zombie with brains, that is."
The man standing before him appeared completely serious. He truly intended for Bai Mu to fight off a horde of undead with a frying pan.
Crazy Dave certainly lived up to his name. He was utterly insane.
Bai Mu held onto a sliver of hope that this pan was some sort of deceptively plain divine artifact, but no matter how he looked at it, the item's description didn't scream that it was a lethal weapon capable of flattening a hundred zombies.
[Name: Mary]
[Type: Item]
[Quality: Rare]
[Remarks: Dave was deeply captivated by it the moment he laid eyes on it at a flea market. Deeming it the most perfect frying pan in the world, he bought it on the spot and named it Mary. Dave often says that no one understands him better than Mary, and no one understands Mary better than him. It holds immense significance to him, even though Mary's previous owner explicitly told Dave that there were millions of pans exactly like Mary, as it was just something casually bought from a convenience store ten years ago.]
Despite Mary possessing the delicate name of a young maiden, the pan was over a decade old. It was practically ancient in cookware years.
Bai Mu highly suspected that if he smacked a zombie's head with Mary, the thing that snapped wouldn't be the zombie's neck, but Mary's handle.
Poor Dave. He would be absolutely heartbroken.
No, he couldn't use a normal person's logic to analyze Crazy Dave.
Having spent less than five minutes with Dave, Bai Mu had realized one crucial truth: the man's thought processes and behavioral logic were entirely unpredictable. When you thought Dave was raising his hand to pick his nose, he might actually reach into the frying pan on his head, pull out a spoiled fried egg, chuck it at your face, and declare, "Neighbor, I bet you must be starving!"
"I appreciate the kind gesture, Dave," Bai Mu said, feeling a mild sense of helplessness. "Mary is wonderful, but you know... um, I rarely use frying pans to cook my eggs. I'm more of a boiled egg kind of guy."
"What I mean is, do you happen to have any guns or explosives lying around?"
"Oh, what a crying shame."
Disappointment washed over Dave's face. He placed the frying pan back onto his head, resuming its duty as a safety helmet.
"Did you say guns and explosives? No, no, no, that's entirely too dangerous! I can't let an amateur handle such hazardous materials. It's best to let my plants help you protect my backyard. They are much more reliable than firearms. A Peashooter's peas will never misfire like gunpowder!"
"But Dave, I'm not an amateur. I actually have extensive shooting experience—"
"Don't try to pull the wool over my eyes, neighbor! How could a Deserted Island survival expert simultaneously be a sharpshooter?"
The conversation hit a dead end. It was likely approaching the three-minute mark; the zombie horde would arrive at any second.
Bai Mu seemingly only had two options: either commit suicide by trying to brawl with a hundred zombies using Mary, or stick to the original route outlined in the guide.
However, judging from Dave's response, it wasn't that he lacked firearms. Bai Mu simply hadn't met the conditions required to obtain them.