Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon

Is this a good plan? You’ve seen this kind of thing before. How would you do it better?

I can’t answer that.

It wasn’t the time, Tulland thought, for the System to shed it’s helpful friend-slash-enemy act. The last fight had been something that he and his friends had barely survived. He had no illusions that he would have died if Necia had fallen. If this new combat tactic wasn’t going to work, he needed to know about it soon.

Of course you can’t. The guy who is always saying he has thousands of years of knowledge just doesn’t know this one thing.

It’s not that I don’t know. It’s that I can’t answer. Haven’t you noticed that neither I nor The Infinite have given you advice on your class? They’ve altered it, and even pushed it in a certain direction. But they’ve never told you how to use it.

Your point being?

A System, any System, is usually a hands-off thing, at least in most respects. We communicate little. We grant skills and some direction, but only in a few ways. I can’t guide you on how to use your class.

I seem to remember someone telling me to eat where I would have otherwise died of an unfueled regeneration skill. And warning me against dangers more than once.

Which were all pieces of obvious, immediate advice having nothing much to do with the progress of your class. This is you asking me, the one who gave you your class, to also tell you how to use it. Which will determine how it progresses. More than once, you’ve seen the idea that your own usage factors into what your class becomes. Why did you think that was?

It’s simply the implications of a rule. People with classes are not the servants of Systems. This is true even for The Infinite. I simply can’t tell you if a course of action having to do with the way you are choosing to develop your class is a good one. It’s a step too far.

Tulland cycled through all the instances the System had chosen to give him advice, and found none that he could remember were the exact thing the system said it was talking about. Sure, some were pretty direct don’t-do-that-you’ll-die warnings, but not because of any specific part of his class.

So the System might have been lying or might have been telling the truth. In any case, it didn’t look like Tulland was going to be getting any more information from it.

“You look lost in thought,” Ley commented from the side.

“Just trying to get some more information. Doesn’t look like I can.” Tulland glanced at Ley. “Not for lack of trying.”

“Some skill?” Ley raised an eyebrow. “Any information would be helpful here, no matter how small.”

“Sorry, it’s kind of a hit or miss thing. I’m surprised you didn’t know. You can’t see my status screen? I thought you were a spy.”

“Doesn’t mean I get to know everything about you. Nobody does.”

“That rogue knew my class name, back then,” Tulland said. “Knew I was a Farmer before I told him.”

“And not much more than that, I’d guess. It’s a powerful skill to have. There’s a lot you can learn from a class name. It’s probably a bit like my primary skill. It builds up my knowledge of an enemy until I trade it for a single big strike, but it also feeds me a bit more information about them in the descriptions than you’d get.”

“And his tells him about other people’s classes?” Tulland thought about the direction the rogue must have taken with his class to get that particular skill, then suppressed the resulting shudder. “That’s terrible. Although I’m surprised your class makes you spend all that potential for one big strike. It seems like you’d be ruined by any group of enemies.”

“Who said that’s the only thing it can do? It’s what I thought was best before. Things are different now.”

In the distance, they finally saw another group of enemies, this one comprised of the same number of Stumpers but with a few more Mass Hares in the mix. Overall, it was promising to be a harder, harsher fight.

“Are we sure about this?”

“Of course. Think of it this way. You just have to make the difference of a few rabbits. We should have improved at least that much.” Necia unsheathed her sword. “Besides, I’m going in with or without you. You wouldn’t let me die, right?”

With a flash of white teeth, Necia was on her way. Tulland didn’t have time to think about it, which probably was what she planned. For what they wanted to happen to actually have a chance of happening, he needed to be just behind her.

Falling into position behind her shield arm, Tulland did his best to keep up until Necia impacted with the first Stumper, dropping a few Lunger Briars and one of his Giant’s Hair vines on its back as it reeled from the force of the impact. Necia baited the next, glowing slightly as she forced its attention on her. Tulland repeated the same action on the other Stumper as Necia pivoted to meet it, then darted off to the side, dropping briars every few feet as he ran in the direction of the most concentrated group of Mass Hares.

When he got there, he activated four briars in a circle around him, another two on his arms, and chucked Acheflowers. The rabbits were fast, and out of the three yellow exploding flowers he got into the air before hitting melee range, only one seemed to do anything. The rabbit it hit didn’t seem to have much in terms of poison resistance though, and was taken temporarily out of the fight and sent bounding in random directions that presented almost no threat.

That was the plan. Where Necia had been pinned down before to the point of not being to attack in the first fight, a quick power enhancement to the Giant’s Hair briars meant the Stumpers were half as mobile as they had been. Now in the second fight, Necia was getting distance from them with plenty of time to deflect or even attack the remaining hares.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Tulland was even holding his own. Between the carpet of vines he was fighting in, the two hanging off his arms, and the fact that for once he was able to actually make good contact on a mobile enemy with his pitchfork, he managed to put down an entire hare of his own before the last element of the fight slotted into place.

Ley burst into the fight like a bolt of lightning, not attacking the Stumpers but instead ripping into the hares. With his new fighting stance and pitchfork, Tulland was moving faster than he had ever moved in a fight before, but he had absolutely nothing on Ley’s speed.

“That’s the secret, not that it’s much of one. I can either burn the power I gather in observation time on big hits, or spread it out over time. Whether I do one or the other depends on the situation, but mostly I use the slow-burn version.” Licht had looked sheepish. “I was eager to use it on the Stumpers and thought you could clear out the rabbits. It was the exact wrong way to go. My mistake.”

This time, the plan was to shred the little, less individually dangerous Mass Hares while Necia held the Stumpers at bay. It was possible only because Tulland’s constrictor vines made the bigger animals much less dangerous, and would work fine just so long as they were all able to team up on the Stumpers before the monsters were able to shred his plants and team up on Necia.

That turned out not to be much of a problem. None of Ley’s individual strikes did much damage, but he was landing a ton of them, and the Mass Hares were so busy dealing with him that Tulland was able to move through their ranks, taking out the most injured members of the enemy force. Even his briars picked up a kill, ganging up on one badly hurt rabbit sent to the ground by Ley’s best dagger strike yet.

Not only were the Stumpers unable to hurt Necia by the time the field was otherwise cleared, they were still partially bound by briars when Tulland and Licht started in on them. Each time the Stumpers managed to get the footing to launch an attack, Necia would ping them with their shield, robbing them of their ability to move. Meanwhile, Ley was exploiting every weak point on their bodies, and Tulland had transitioned his weapon from a pitchfork to a hoe, hacking away at the boars with big overhand strikes.

It wasn’t a long fight. By the time Tulland’s vitality was just beginning to give out enough to leave him short of breath, it was over.

“Now that was much better.” Necia put a metal-booted foot on the shoulder of the dead Stumper in front of her and kicked it off her sword. “That felt viable. Any trouble on your end, Ley?”

Ley smiled. “None. Everything went to plan. I wasn’t injured at all.”

“And I felt better. Like I was helping.” Tulland looked down at his Farmer’s Tool, which had done some serious damage for once. “You guys want to do another one? I have lots of briars left, and…”

“Nope. Absolutely not.” Ley shook his head. “I’m tired. Necia is tired. And not just in our bodies. We’ve been thinking a lot today. Now that we’ve verified this works, we need to rest. We’re all going back to your farm to eat and sleep.”

“He’s right, Tulland. There’s no hurry.” Necia wiped her sword quite clean on the grass, then sheathed it. “Lets tend to your garden, then we can get out again tomorrow.”

The days in this place were apparently shorter than most, and it was almost dark by the time they made it to the farm. Tulland built a fire, something he had left just enough room between briars to do. They didn’t seem to mind the heat, at least not visibly wilting from it. Everyone gathered around the fire, ate, and processed the day in relative silence for a while.

Tulland’s processing was interrupted a bit early. As he finished his grains and vegetables and started to process the animal corpses they had dragged back for use as fertilizer, a notification chock-full of disappointments popped up.

None of that was great. Tulland shook his head, pulled another three Lunger Briar seeds from his pack, and enhanced them to the greatest degree his current stats would allow. The choice for fertilizer this time was pretty easy, considering he had two types of new animals butchered in front of him. With the first seed, he dumped in some Mass Hare meat and blood, and loaded the other with the remains of the Stumper. The third got a combination of both.

Does this make sense, System?

It’s not insane.

Not very helpful.

It’s all I can do, Tulland. Even if I could see a million successful variations available to you or none, I couldn’t say anything more. That’s your work to do. I cannot steal it.

That’s what you say. I can’t believe there aren’t any workarounds.

The System paused for a moment, in the way Tulland interpreted as it being frustrated at either his inability to understand what the System was saying or the System’s inability to explain it well.

There are ways to work around it. They are dangerous. I know from firsthand experience.

Well, my life is pretty dangerous right now, and it’s your fault. So excuse me for not caring much.

I… well. Yes. I can see that. But it would be hard to explain why things are more complex than that with mere words. Let me see if I can work something else out.

The System was silent as Tulland sealed his splicing container, and all the way up to a new notification window.

What is this, System?

An agreement. I owe you some information, and it’s relevant now. I’m not pleased by the repetition of this particular conversation. I would put an end to it, if you would allow me.

But you want one of my memories.

For the purpose of making the agreement equitable by The Infinite’s standards, yes. I do not require a particular memory. Pick something useless and harmless.

Tulland mulled this over. If the Infinite was guaranteeing the deal, he didn’t see much harm in it. Mentally designating a memory of a time he struggled against a particularly stubborn jar lid, he gave The Infinite the go-ahead to make the deal happen.

It didn’t take long.

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