Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon

“Run?” Tulland looked up. “We could run.”

“No point. We’d just be making me face the dive in a non-optimal way.”

“Got it.” Tulland held up his pitchfork. “I’ll harry it. If I can. Even if it’s just distraction, it should help.”

“Tulland…”

“No. No more. If I don’t help, I’m going to go crazy. You can’t hold up the entire load by yourself.”

“I can. I will.” Necia flexed her arm. “But if you really need to, you can throw him off balance where you can. Just be safe about it.”

Tulland never got the chance. As the sphinx dove, Necia planted her feet and got ready to block-counter the attack. She activated the ability with the same timing she had for every sphinx yet, perfectly intercepting the force of the attack and reflecting it back onto the animal. But where previous attacks had at worst sent her spinning to the ground, this one blew her back as the disturbed earth around Tulland’s makeshift cave turned out to be just unsettled enough to give way.

Every single hit Necia took should have created a big furrow in the ground as the stat-enhanced combined strength of her and various monsters clashing searched for an outlet. The reason it didn’t was wrapped up in the weirdness of a system class, which massaged reality to make things that shouldn’t have made sense work anyway.

All that went out the window when the earth those skills expected to interface with crumbled. Freed of the bounds of the dirt she was standing in, all that power sent Necia shooting backwards into the cave like a barrel out of a catapult.

“Necia!” Tulland ran to where she was laying, filled with fear as he noted how little she was moving. When he got close, he saw why. The force of the impact had wedged her into the cavity in the earth. As she struggled to get free, they were burning seconds they normally spent running away while the sphinx was stunned. It took Tulland a shameful three breaths to realize the solution to the problem. “Shrink, dammit! You can get big again once you are out of there.”

Necia’s eyes went wide with realization as she minimized her stature, sprung out of the hole, and grew back to her battle-size. With Necia’s shattered arm dangling, they ran as fast as they could away from the problem.

“Is it going to have time to heal?” Tulland aske.d

“Nowhere near enough.” Necia sheathed her sword and began shifting her shield over to her other arm. “Dammit. This is going to hurt a lot, Tulland.”

“I’m sorry.” Tulland’s eyes misted over with frustrated tears as he wallowed in his own uselessness. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine. You are all out of those flowers?”

“I’m all out of everything. I have seeds that don’t do anything but grow and my Farmer’s Tool.”

“I can take at least one more hit. It won’t stun him. Just get ready.” Necia looked grim. “And do attack him. We need every second we can get.”

The sphinx sprinted across the land, looking too angry to take the time to rise into the sky again. This was about as good of a result as they could have asked for in the short term, as the resulting impact wasn’t nearly as strong. Necia pivoted, bashing forward with her shield as there were openings, generally keeping the sphinx off balance.

For a bit, Tulland had some minor hope that she’d be able to keep it away until her other arm was back together enough to hard-counter it. He could see the bones pulling back into place. If she had another half minute or minute of time, they would have been intact enough to take a real hit, to stun it, and to let them continue their smash-run-smash pattern from the day before.

It didn’t end up happening that way. Even though Necia was blocking every shot, her class was never meant to merely hide behind a shield the entire time. The threat her sword posed usually bought her time between impacts, stretching out the total damage she absorbed over longer periods. She had none of that advantage here, and the sphinx knew it. Tulland watched as she went from steady to unsteady to reeling, and then as the sphinx feinted, dove past her guard, and ripped her current guard arm from shoulder to elbow.

“Damn!” Necia somehow managed to shift her shield to her still mending arm as the sphinx sprung out of range, cautiously assessing the damage it had done. When it saw the shield rise again on her other arm, it screeched, flapped its wings, and took to the air. ŗА₦ỘʙƐs

“It’s too soon, Necia,” Tulland called.

“Doesn’t matter. I have to do it.” Necia shrugged the shield up and into place. “Cooldown’s off, anyway. It’s our only option.”

“No.”

“Yes. And Tulland?” Necia locked eyes with the poor, powerless farmer she had tied her fate to. “Thanks for the fun. If this goes as badly as I think it will, you need to run.”

The sphinx dove out of the sky, claws glinting in the sunlight. Necia braced, activated her skill, and took the full force of it. This time, it wasn’t just her arm that broke. Tulland could almost count the distinct pops as ribs, joints, and tendons all shattered or tore apart from force she couldn’t quite cushion. Necia flew through the air like an arrow-shot, landing limply on the ground several yards away and staying there.

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Tulland roared and began attacking the sphinx with his Farmer’s Tool. Somewhere in the mix, all the adaptive intuition of the animal had finally clued it in to the fact he was about as dangerous to it as a newborn kitten was to a rhino, and it ignored the attacks as it cautiously approached its real foe, more wary of any tricks the unconscious woman might still have up her sleeve than it was of any amount of Tulland’s useless stabs.

“No. No.” Tulland jumped in front of the sphinx, trying to block its path. It batted him casually out of the way, almost as if it hardly noticed him. He did it again, and got a real swat for his trouble, one that sent him tumbling across the ground. Any injuries he picked up in the process went unfelt as the sphinx continued closing distance on Necia. “Stop.”

He scrambled to his feet and reached them both just as the sphinx’s human face cracked into a terrible, unnatural smile. It raised a claw into the air, ready to bring it down and end a threat before toying with the much less intimidating, much less dangerous prey it had been ignoring up until that point.

Heart filled with despair, Tulland jabbed forward the Farmer’s Tool with all his might in one last, desperate, but useless stab. He could do the math. It wasn’t even going to get there before the claw dropped.

Until, suddenly, it was. Tulland felt a shock of influence shoot through his muscles as the speed of the Farmer’s Tool more than doubled. It was almost whistling through the air by the time it made impact with the sphinx’s shoulder, penetrating clear through the joint and out the other side through its armpit.

In usual times, the shock of what was happening might have pulled Tulland out of the fight long enough to cause another disaster. These were not usual times. As he gawked at the results of his own hit, he realized the sphinx wasn’t reacting at all. It was frozen in place. And, he realized, so was he.

“There’s no real reason to have a whole conversation about what’s going on. In a lot of ways, what’s happening right now is just a notification message. You know the kind. The ones you get all the information from at once. I’ve just changed the format a bit.”

A small man in glasses Tulland had never seen before was standing looking down at Necia. Despite the unfamiliarity, there was no mistaking the general style of the encounter, or the panicked, almost feral fear he was getting from the System’s babbling. This was The Infinite.

“Remember when we talked about your class, all that time ago? When you fought the forest duke? You were just about to stumble into an advantage that classes in general can’t have. I bet you were pretty sore about that, actually. Like we stole something from you.” The man looked at Tulland, finally. “But nobody could have had it. It’s not a way classes work. This conversation that we are about to have is about the same thing.”

Tulland wasn’t able to move, but he felt rage building up like white-hot coals inside his chest anyway.

If this ass thinks I’m going to let him take away the strength I need to defend Necia…

“Oh, calm down. It’s not like that at all. Well, it is, but in the opposite way you think. The short version is that just as classes can’t have incredibly strong advantages that ignore normal class progression standards, you also will never find classes that have huge weaknesses that aren’t compensated for in some way.”

The man walked over to Tulland and poked at the tines of his pitchfork before pulling his finger away.

“Sharp. Good job with that weapon. It’s about as good as you could do at this point in your progression. Anyway, the 48-hour grace period thing was never meant to be a double-edged sword. We had it priced into your build as a complete positive, a sort of buffer that would make your class viable. Letting people get at your farm was stupid, and that’s on you, but at worst it should have left you weak until you could grow more plants. Not arbitrarily set to a power level of zero until you waited an arbitrary amount of time.”

The man looked at the situation around him one more time and nodded.

“Anyway. Adjustments come with compensation, as you know. For your inconvenience, I’ve allowed your farm on this floor to grow just a little bit faster than it otherwise would. That’s in addition to giving you a couple hours credit on that 48-hour grace period. From now on, it will be a 48-hour grace period or until your current farm overtakes the strength of the previous floor’s farm. That should fix the problem.” The man waved slightly and left. “Good luck, by the way. You should be okay for the next little bit, but don’t forget you still have a floor boss to handle. Keep your wits about you, Tulland.”

Just as Tulland realized what was about to happen, the universe clicked back into motion. He had just enough presence of mind to pull his pitchfork out before the sphinx got his arm, and had the Farmer’s Tool moving into another stab as the big composite animal got its weight down and staggered on his now-failing foreleg.

The Farmer’s Tool was a whole different cat now, as performance went. It only took a quick sideways glance at his farm screen to see why.

Farm Status: Total Points: 4344

That was a huge, almost insane jump in power, and all of it was coursing into his pitchfork, enhancing what it could already do to new, previously unimaginable sharpness and rigidity. The sphinx had been caught off guard by the first stab, and seemed to have a very hard time recovering from that surprise as Tulland hit it again and again, now able to injure it badly in any area he hit.

The next hit after the first caught it in a wing, which didn’t do much to its functional fighting strength but did seem to be painful enough to keep it on the back foot. The pitchfork came around again just as the sphinx turned to face him and ripped through the hide on the animal’s forehead, showering its eyes with blood and letting Tulland got to the shoulder joint on the other side of the animal.

After that, it was more or less defenseless. Tulland took no chances. He didn’t stop until the animal was dead. As it turned out, he didn’t even stop after.

“Tulland.” Necia’s voice reached him weakly from the ground. “I think it’s dead. You can stop.”

“Necia!” Tulland rushed over. “You’re fine!”

“I’m not. It broke almost every bone between my neck and my waist.” With Tulland’s help, she rolled painfully onto her back, several bones clicking into alignment as she did. “Oh, that’s not good. I wanted to get a bit more healed up before I had to deal with another one.”

They must have been pretty close to the spawn point. The new sphinx was already approaching from the horizon.

“Shit. This is going to hurt.” Necia tried to sit up, all of her frame making distressing noises as she did. “A lot.”

“No, don’t.” Tulland looked up at the sphinx, which was almost into dive range. “I’ve got this.”

“What?”

“I’ve got this.” Tulland looked down at Necia’s eyes. “I promise.”

Necia furrowed her brow a bit, but finally nodded and plopped back down.

“Good, then. I wasn’t sure if I could actually help. I’ll watch from over here.”

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