Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon

It was an odd feeling to be in quiet rooms where nothing happened. It was even odder to consider such rooms as an undeniably good thing. A few months ago, Tulland would have considered something like this to be torture. He would have chosen to literally sweat in discomfort in a class with his teacher, rather than be crammed in a room with nothing to do.

Now, it was one of the few minutes he had in which nothing could kill him, or even try to. There were no angles from which anything could attack, and no place for anything to hide unless it could look exactly like a white brick, down to the very same texture and shade of color.

Tulland would have stayed there for hours if he could have, just breathing in the nothing. As it was, he felt lucky that it stretched on as long as it did. The Dungeon System gave him a full ten minutes of respite from the world, something he hoped the other members of the party were getting as well.

He passed the time playing with his new Clubber Vine, which really did seem to be made of stronger stuff than any briar variants he had been able to get off the ground so far. He commanded it to lightly slap his hand, which wasn’t a bright move and almost shattered the bones under his palm. It was a strong sort of thing, even though he could only carry one.

And thank the soil, it has seeds. I thought we’d get back to the farm before we finished, but it doesn’t matter now. This thing has seed pods integrated with the skin.

While he sat, Tulland carefully cut a slit in one mature-looking pod, finding it was loaded with three round seeds each about the size of a pea. He crammed them into one of the more secure pockets of his Wolfwood pouch, ready to plant once he got back home. The briar remained latched onto his arm, where he absentmindedly pet it like a dog.

When he was finally expelled, he hoped the safe zone would be as true to its name as it had been so far. In a perfect world, he’d have another ten days to grow his farm, to get stronger, and to develop his weapons.

In this world, an arrow was arcing at his head as soon as the universe came into view. It wasn’t exactly the last thing he was expecting to happen, nor was it that surprising that both Necia and Ley were wrapped up in melee combat. It was still a real test of his reflexes, something that he hadn’t known was coming and had nearly no time to react to. He missed the moment. By the time he got his arms moving, they were nowhere near close enough to his head to block the arrow coming towards it.

It was the Clubber Vine that saved him. Still attached to his arm, it whipped up as soon as it sensed motion, connecting with the arrow and breaking the shaft clean in half. It diverted the arrowhead just enough to send it careening across Tulland cheekbone, opening a deep and bloody gash.

The System’s words had no real power, no magic that would compel Tulland to follow them. Still, he was moving as soon as his feet found traction on the ground, darting towards a man in forest-colored clothes clutching a short bow in his hand. The man was backing up almost as fast as Tulland could run, but gave just a fraction of a second’s worth of opening when he caught his arm on the corner of a house he hadn’t quite given himself room to clear.

Two of Tulland’s flowers impacted the wall behind him at that moment, bursting into a yellow fog that didn’t quite obscure his form. By now, Tulland didn’t expect much of the flowers when used on human opponents, but he didn’t need much from them here. He was fighting a bow-guy, one who looked like he had no real combat options outside of shooting arrows. Unless he had fancy tricks, Tulland would win if he could get into his own range.

The flowers gave him that time, sending the man into a few seconds worth of coughing, swatting delirium as Tulland moved forward.

Hit him with absolutely everything. Your friends need you to finish him immediately.

Tulland knew that was right, but he simply didn’t have much left to hit the man with. He had a half-spent Clubber Vine and mostly dead Giant’s Hairs. He had the remains of his pitchfork, which was a shattered few inches of Ironbranch shaft just long enough to grasp like a dagger, even as it cut his hand doing so.

That was it. Everything else had either been used up in the fight with the Bison King or just now when he spent his last few flowers delaying his enemy.

Luckily, the Clubber Vine didn’t seem to think about the lack of allies as it caught the man in a backhand slapping motion, throwing him back into the wall and just in front of Tulland’s pitchfork. The man screamed as the shaft-turned-tine caught him in the stomach, pinning him to the wall. Tulland shot the Giant’s Hair downward at his legs and pushed in the same direction with all his strength as he slowly managed to force his opponent to the ground.

The Clubber Vine didn’t sit still while this happened, repeatedly bashing any target it could get to. The archer had a light metal helmet, but it hardly seemed to matter as the club battered his head back and forth as it clanged off of the top of the armor again and again.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Tulland tried not to think about what it meant to kill a human. By the tenth or so blow from the Clubber Vine and the fifth or so second of him leaning on his pitchfork as it dug deeper and deeper into the man’s belly, the man coughed up a mouthful of blood, jerked, and went still.

Now back to your friends.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

Tulland didn’t question the System’s intentions at that moment. These were all things he would have done himself if he had a moment to think, and the System’s instruction now was saving valuable moments off his reaction time as he moved from task to task. As he turned, he was shocked to see how far he had got from the others in the few moments he had been running, and just as shocked to see how few stat-enhanced strides it took him to close that same distance again.

Necia was first. She would have been in any case. Tulland didn’t pretend to have anything like the same loyalty for Ley as he did for her. Even so, there was a reason beyond bias to go in that order. Ley was cut and bleeding, but still moving with the speed Tulland was used to seeing him exercise in a fight when he wasn’t enhanced by an information-gathering period. Necia was bloodier, more staggered, and overall in worse shape than Ley. She needed help now.

Her opponent was another heavy armor user, a dark-skinned giant of a man wielding a heavy mace. He was easily redirecting Necia’s shield bashes, and then using the openings to swing his weapon. Tulland watched her manage to get out of the way or pull her shield back into the path of the spiked head by the time he got into melee range, but it was clear she hadn’t blocked all of them. She had taken damage.

Tulland decided not to beat around the bush. Before the big guy noticed he was there, he leapt into the air, wrapped his vine-arm around the man’s neck, and jabbed down as hard as he could into his shoulder joint with the last broken fragments of his Farmer’s Tool. The man’s arm was on the way up while he did, which meant that his armor pinched and shattered the last of the tool directly out of Tulland’s hand. The bulk of what was left dematerialized immediately, flowing back towards his backpack, where he felt the weight settle as the tool presumably tried to recover from the damage it had taken.

Convenient. I had always wondered what it would do if it really broke, after it became part of my class.

Stop thinking. Keep your head low and hold on.

It was good advice, which Tulland saw as the man’s mace swish where Tulland’s head had just been. It came up again, now unable to get to Tulland’s head as hit cowered behind his enemy’s back but fully able to smash into his arm, splintering his wood armor and digging spikes deep into the meat of his forearm. Tulland shrieked but held on, somehow. The Clubber Vine kept striking again and again, keeping the man just off balance enough that he wasn’t able to finish Tulland’s grip once and for all.

Tulland peeked around the man’s chest as his arm came up for another blow to see Necia crumpling towards the ground. Except that turned out not to be quite what was happening. She did fall a foot or so, landing in a deep crouch with one of her legs extended through the gap in the dark man’s open stance, then exploded upward with her shield.

The edge of Necia’s defense almost dislodged Tulland through sheer force all by itself, rocking the big man’s torso backwards so hard he almost flew off. He was saved from hitting the dirt by the man’s reaction to the hit, which pulled him back forward almost as fast as he had been shot back.

Necia’s sword point was waiting for their enemy. As the man’s head rocked downward, she caught him in the neck-joint with it, driving up so far and hard that Tulland heard it clang off the inside of the helmet.

“Down,” Necia said. “Ley. Now.”

Tulland peeled his arm from around the man’s neck in time to avoid getting squashed under the collapsing mass of flesh and armor. Once he was on his feet again, he realized just how much damage the man’s mace had done to him. The actual physical wounds to his arm weren’t much, or at least not more than his regeneration could handle over the next few minutes. The greater damage distributed to his entire physical self was much more intense. He felt drained and thinned.

Still have to move. Right?

Correct. The time for assessing condition is after a fight, unless you intend to run. If you intend to stay, it matters much less than other places you could put your attention.

By the time the System had finished his sentence, Tulland was near enough to Ley’s opponent that the Clubber Vine was taking shots of his own. That was good, as far as Tulland was concerned. With no weapon left, keeping himself near enough to the fight to contribute was enough of a challenge that he was relieved not to have to work stabbing and slashing into the mix.

Ley had done a much better job of keeping things even in his own fight than Necia had, likely because a fight between two speed classes was an affair of much smaller hits building up over time. Both he and the other fighter looked like they had been put through a grater, and were bleeding in more places than they weren’t. Both were fast enough that Necia and Tulland would have had a hard time joining the fight, but that didn’t appear to be the plan in the first place.

“The other back corner, Tulland. Take away his room to dodge.” Necia was set up behind the man’s right shoulder, bashing with her shield whenever she could. She wasn’t hitting, but as soon as Tulland took up residence in the left corner, he saw the point of the tactic. This was some kind of evasion class, something that could dodge a lot but couldn’t take much damage. If Ley was able to get a dagger in the opponent in a real way, it probably would have ended the fight right then and there. “Good. Stay there. Move towards him when you can but not so close he can hit you.”

Between the two of them, the man started to look very cramped indeed. Tulland watched the man glance over his shoulder with panic in his eyes, looking for ways he might be able to break out of their flanking formation. It was the wrong move. By the time he got his eyes pointed forward again, he was staring at Ley’s dagger burying itself up to the hilt in his chest.

It’s over, thank goodness, now we can…

Don’t be a fool. Look behind you.