Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon

Do you think he’s right?

Tulland hadn’t been ignoring his System, exactly. It had been laying back for a few days, not intruding much as Tulland worked on his farm, dealt with the necessary steps of getting established in a new safe zone, and became acquainted with new and potentially dangerous people. On the other end, Tulland had taken the opportunity to not always appear to be having a conversation with an imaginary friend.

Trust was a hard thing when it came to a being who had once tried to get him killed, and who by all accounts would still benefit from him going down. There weren’t a lot of chances to prove that the System wouldn’t do it again, especially since the further and further Tulland got, the more of a threat Tulland posed to the System.

Still, it hadn’t ever been in the habit of lying to Tulland outside of the first big run of dishonesty. Every single time he had come to the System for advice, it had come through. That was true, as long as The Infinite and the various rules governing systems of all kinds didn’t keep it from talking.

Tulland had settled into an uneasy compromise, one where he generally regarded the System’s advice as valid unless it was clearly suicidal.

About what? That you aren’t much of a fighter? Certainly.

Not that I’m not much of a fighter. Tulland decided to keep his dialogue internal for the time being, lest observers figure out he was carrying around unexpected System cargo in his brain. I know that. I’m asking if his plan to make me better is a good one. Today he just kept whaling on me. I didn’t learn a thing.

That’s probably not so. It’s hard to take a beating for an entire afternoon and not pick up any details on how it happened at all. You don’t remember how he was hitting you? It should still hurt in those spots.

Tulland rubbed his jaw. Every part of his body hurt which made it hard to glean any data from any particular place he had been punched. But some of the places hurt more, and as the overall injured state got more and more fixed by his regeneration, it was easier to pick out the hotspots where he had been hit a higher total amount of times.

That’s accurate, given what I was able to observe. Today, he focused on showing you where your stance is too high and exploitable from attacks from below.

Hard to believe he did that on purpose.

Whether he did or didn’t, the best way forward is to figure out how to keep him from doing the same thing tomorrow. I can’t help you determine that, but it should be possible to at least make it harder.

And then I can fight him?

More likely you can force him to show you another flaw. And another. Don’t discount the value of that. Even knowing about a flaw helps you deal with it.

It certainly made enough sense, as little as Tulland wanted to deal with learning everything the hard way. If today was any indication, the rest of the week was going to hurt a lot, a fact that was only slightly easier to swallow when he considered that he owed the best performance he could muster to not just himself but the entire group of two or three people who had helped him so far.

What are my chances of living through the next floor, do you think? Or of getting to the next safe zone.

Impossible to say.

Come on.

I’m not holding out on you, Tulland. Every fight you’ve been in has been comparatively easy. Do you know why?

I wouldn’t call them all easy.

You walked away with all your limbs. Easy enough. The reason why is because you had the necessary power to win. If you hadn’t, it would have gone from seeming possible to being impossible in a moment. The border between what you can do and what will kill you is razor-thin, and impossible to see until you cross over.

Is that so?

It is. In the outside world, it was much less of a problem. Adventurers would train until they were absolutely sure they were ready for the next step. Sometimes they’d take years. Sometimes, they’d cease advancing entirely and give up. You don’t have that luxury.

The pull of The Infinite was something Tulland had never become used to. Right now, it was quiet enough. With plenty of time until he was forced forward, the compulsion was subdued. But his experience told him that the voice prodding him forward would get louder and louder as the time ran shorter, assuring him in a way beyond questioning of disaster if he dallied any longer.

What happens if I don’t go forward? If someone held me down or something, and didn’t let me move forward. Or if I resisted it.

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The first scenario is impossible. The Infinite would never let that happen. The second is similar. There are ways to extend the amount of time you have between normal floors. You’ve even seen some of them. But I suspect that if you could resist the call, eventually The Infinite would either force you forward by teleportation or another more physical way, or else just destroy you.

Ah. Well, let’s not do that. It doesn’t seem like the kind of dungeon system I should mess with.

That it’s not.

Tulland was just about healed up from the fight now, although the psychological blow to his pride was still alive and kicking. He rubbed his jaw one last time, determined to hide the truth of just how badly he had lost from Necia if he could.

It turned out to be a useless effort. He shouldn’t have bothered.

“My poor body.” Necia was laying on her back in their front yard, still in full battle form. “My poor everything. Tulland, am I dead?”

“Not quite. Hard day?” Tulland asked.

“Yes. They used me for practice, Tulland. I didn’t even have a teacher for most of the day. I was just near three pairs of fighters. They’d take breaks to pound on my shield. I just had to stay alive.”

“That’s it?” Tulland wondered if there was some sort of wide-spread rule about beating kids into submission before teaching them anything valuable. “No lessons at all?”

“Later in the day, some other heavy classes came by and asked me what I was having trouble with. By then I had a pretty good idea. They gave me some pointers. Not that it mattered by then. I was already beat to splinters.”

“It was about the same for me, honestly. I had Brist. The puncher guy.”

“Oof. I can only assume he punched you.”

“Yeah. Although I think I’m starting to get a handle on how he managed to punch me so much.”

“Think you’ll do better tomorrow?”

“Maybe a bit. But what I’m really looking forward to is a few days from now. You know that this afternoon was the first time I’ve been drawing power from this local farm? And I took my time getting it planted, it’s going to be the best one I’ve made yet.”

“Oh, hell yes. How big of a difference is it going to be?”

“About four times as much as before. It’s more complex than that, but I’m going to be much, much stronger by the end of the week.”

“I wish I could see it.” Necia laughed on the ground, then groaned as the motion aggravated her sore muscles. “The big guy trying to figure out why you’re doubling in strength each day.”

Tulland sat down by Necia, stretching out his legs and just enjoying the silence for a bit. As much as he also looked forward to closing the gap between himself and the big puncher guy, he knew better than to assume it would be as much of a hilarious triumph as Necia thought it would, at least if the only growing he did was building up his farm.

“You going to hit the baths?” Tulland asked, after a while. “I was thinking about it. I still have dirt in my ears.”

“Well, think again. Because you made some promises, right? There’s a lot of hungry people out there you said you’d provide with grain. Ruthless, trained killers. Not least of them me. I’m starving, Tulland.”

“Oh, shoot. Right. Yes, I did say that,” Tulland moaned. “I guess it’s harvesting time.”

Tulland went to work harvesting his field, wondering how he’d ever get enough food ready by the time people came looking for it. Luckily, that was one problem that solved itself without any more effort on his part. As hungry, tired people started showing up, he put them to work stripping grain from stems and plucking plants from the soil. It took hours more, but eventually, his whole food stock was depleted, separated out into multiple days’ supply of food for each combatant on the floor.

And then, finally, it was time to rest.

“Here.” Necia handed Tulland a bowl of food. “I figured you didn’t have time to feed yourself today.”

“Not much, no. Thanks.” Tulland sat down and inhaled his first bowl of food. “I haven’t even been able to look at my notifications.”

“You’ve been getting them? Here?”

“Yeah. Not sure why, except one of them probably has something to do with my Primal Growth skill. Something was weird when I was using it earlier.”

“Well, look. You can’t just ignore that stuff, Tulland. It’s dangerous.”

Tulland nodded and kept spooning food into his mouth, thankful he could read system screens without tying up his hands. He hadn’t been wrong about the general gist of the thing, at least.

“Bad?” Necia asked.

“Mixed bag. Mostly bad.” Tulland summoned up one of his Clubber Vines and patted it, affectionately. Obsolete or not, they had saved his life more times than he could count. “These were already having a hard time keeping up. The Infinite just made it official. I’ll have to do something else.”

“Any luck with the splicer? I know you had put some sphinx parts in there.”

“I did. It didn’t work. I haven’t reloaded it yet. But I guess there’s no time like the present.”

Tulland broke out his gene splicing machine, one of his few ways to create new plants. The thing functioned by giving him three spaces in which to mix seeds from various plants with other sources of genetics, hopefully creating something new in the process. It rarely worked, but the few times it had so far had proved absolutely vital to his continued survival.

“I was hoping to hang onto the bit of material we had gotten from the chimera boss longer, but it looks like I’m giving it a shot here.” Tulland went and pulled a seed from his Clubber Vines, the long-since obsolete Briar Lunger vines that had carried him through the first few floors of the dungeon, and the original Hades Briars that had started off his farming efforts in the first place. “Good luck, little seeds.”