Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon

“Most of them help crafters,” Yuri said. “Imagine that. Being so boring that you don’t even craft yourself, you just feed power to people who do. I knew that wasn’t the way to go my first day in this class.”

“So you got combat skills?” Tuland asked.

“Ha! No. You can’t, as far as I know. The class is supposed to be used for crafting. I have the best movement skill an assistant class can get, which isn’t great, but I’ve leveled it. And I’ve gotten very good at staying out of the way.”

“So nothing combat relevant at all?”

“I didn’t say that. First, I’m a very high level for this class. Nothing like you two, but high enough that I can supply a lot of energy.”

“Great.” Necia nodded. “I don’t have much. Tanks, you know.”

“I know. But you run on cooldowns mostly, right?”

“Mostly.”

“That’s the other thing I can do. I can store two or three cooldown restores, depending on what skills I use them on.”

Necia had moved forward and was doing her best to look like she couldn’t explode another mountain of turtle at a moment’s notice. So far, none had taken the bait.

“It’s normal enough. Even if you did, that blocking skill is… something else. I think that will be a two-recharge skill. Not a three.”

Tulland nodded then rushed forward. Even if Necia could take the punishment, it seemed rude to expect her to without any help from him at all. He launched through the air, his pitchfork held high before he landed like a horsefly on the side of one of the turtle’s necks. He got in one mighty stab before he realized his terrible mistake, in that the entirety of the turtle’s being was blight. As he slammed into it, the energy engulfed him, burning at his skin even through his armor.

As fast as he could get his feet up against the monster’s neck, he kicked off, flying backwards through the air just in time to catch a strike from one of the monster’s swinging arms.

“Are you alright?” Necia lifted him up by his shoulder with her club, setting him bodily back on his feet. “You flew a really long way.”

“I’m fine. Just don’t touch them,” Tulland said.

“I knew that already. Made out of blight. I can take care of them all, anyway.”

At that moment, the same turtle Tulland had wounded charged, and exploded in the same way.

“No, you can’t.” Yuri passed off another spark. “That’s going to be my last recharge for a while, and there’s three more of them, not including the other monsters on the ground. Someone else needs to get their hands dirty.”

“Keep Yuri safe. Wait for one of them to charge before you use up that last block.” Tulland set his feet again. “I’ll do the rest.”

Tulland started out by rushing forward to take down the little guys. There were plenty of bears and grabbers, but not nearly as many had been involved in the attack. There was certainly nowhere near the amount there would need to be to stop him. He let the grabbers hit him as he stood in each section of street just long enough to eliminate all the foes in peace, then cleared them off his body with light swipes from his pitchfork.

All this was made a little harder by the reptilian mounds.

Soon the street was clear of everything smaller than a good-sized barn, and he finally stopped dodging the huge piles of flesh as they skidded by and got to work on one in earnest. He dodged the first attack from one of its massive flippers by a few feet and almost got blasted off his feet by the shockwave coming from it. He managed to stay upright and running, gaining enough momentum to push his legendary weapon’s tines down the crossbar into the monster’s flesh.

I have no idea how I’ll hit anything vital. Look how big it is. How do you even kill something like this?

Tulland, I am shocked at how long you’ve kept capable of shocking me.

Not helpful.

Tulland ripped his pitchfork out and jumped back just as the turtle adjusted position, settling tons of blight right over where Tulland had been standing.

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Just keep stabbing it, Tulland. Have you forgotten how health works when mediated by the System? I know it’s been a while, but did you actually forget?

With a shock, Tulland realized he had forgotten. Hitting something in its vital points was great, and usually was the fastest way to take it down. But for someone who was a part of the System, it wasn’t the wounds to the heart or brain that actually killed you. It was overall health. Vitality determined how much health things had, and any wound deducted from that pool. With enough effort and time, you could kill someone with wounds to the foot, so long as you were producing those wounds with plenty of stats and good weapons.

So I just need to chop it down.

Yes. And luckily for you, they aren’t particularly hard to hit.

Tulland didn’t miss any of his next ten strikes, and by the time he was through laying them into the side of the monster it was slowing down considerably. Despite his love-hate relationship with using his own scythe, that was around the time it occurred to him how much time he was wasting not using it. He ran deeper into the turtle’s blind spots on its flank, swung the scythe in a huge looping blow, and got it embedded up to the handle in the turtle’s side. Enhancing his Chimera Sleeves for all he was worth, he pulled back hard on the scythe and ripped a yard-long furrow into it.

The living mountain bellowed and turned, knocking him off his feet once more, but it was futile. Anything it did now was the death throes of an animal that had been hurt beyond its own ability to recover, and it was only a second longer before it exploded into a pillar of gas as wide as a small neighborhood and twice as tall.

One of the other turtles finally decided to attack Necia around that time, and got a face full of shield for its trouble. Rather than leave her alone, he called both her and Yuri to him, and they launched an attack on the last turtle together.

The turtles were truly unbalanced for their level, but they weren’t that high level, all things considered. For an appropriately powerful party, they would have been a real danger. For him and Necia with the backing of a human mana refill station, they weren’t all that hard. The last turtle swung at Tulland and for once, would have hit, if Necia’s shield skills didn’t defy physics, held off the worst of the weight, and left it standing propping up a leg so far Tulland was able to land several hits on its exposed armpit.

That proved to be the right move. The few hits to the joint took most of the functionality out of the turtle’s arm, leaving Tulland free to absolutely demolish it while Necia shield-bashed it with a series of stunning blows that left it dizzy and off-balance the entire time.

“Well, that was a thing.” Yuri uncorked her canteen and took a drink while the last of the blight fog cleared. “Hopefully, that’s the worst of it. If the System was telling the truth, it can’t make many of those turtle things. And the dungeon should be pretty depopulated, by now.”

“I hope so.” Tulland turned his scythe back into a pitchfork and stowed it on his back. “I guess we’re about to find out. Let’s get in there.”

The doors to the building were twenty feet of the heaviest, darkest wood Tulland had ever seen outside of his own farm, ornately carved with two warring armies. One was made up of beasts, featuring a few Tulland was aware of and dozens of others he had no idea about. The other was humans. The frontline was the warriors he expected, with swordsmen in shining armor, archers with their bows, and mages casting spells left and right. It was all very well done, so lifelike that Tulland would have almost believed he was looking at a real scene if it wasn’t for the wood grain.

The Tulland of a few years ago would have been awestruck by it. It was a glorious, incredible clash, the kind he had always dreamed of being a part of as he grew up on a little paradise of an island where nothing bad ever happened. Even if that much time hadn’t passed, he was much older now in a lot of ways. He had no idea how to express that usually, but today he was getting some help from the backline human forces in the battle, who weren’t at all what he was expecting.

They were craftsmen. The backline was all blacksmiths, cooks, tailors, and porters, the people responsible for making and moving the goods that kept the fighting forces of humanity in shape to fight. His tutor had spent long, hard months trying to bang the idea that those kinds of people won wars into Tulland’s thick head. It had never worked. Now, it was all he could see. Behind them, there were cities and towns carved into the borders of the door, representing the civilization they protected and that, in turn, provided them what they needed to fight.

“The army isn’t just the fighters. It’s every living person, doing their jobs,” Tulland said.

“Oddly philosophical, Tulland.” Necia looped her arm through his. “What do you mean by that? Just for those of us who weren’t lost in thought for a couple minutes while staring at a door.”

“It’s just something my tutor used to say. I don’t think I understood it before I left my world. I didn’t even really understand it in the dungeon. Now I’m here and I’m seeing what it’s like to live in a world that really is just fighting and adventure, and it’s pretty terrible. I mean, look at this town. It used to be a good place, I bet. Now it doesn’t have any of the stuff that made it worth living in, and people just abandoned it. Where did they even go?”

Yuri shrugged. “Here and there. I heard the blight has a harder time opening up dungeons in the mountains, and I know a lot of people fled towards them. Some people just stay on the move all the time, looking for any place where there’s a little bit of food growing. And a lot of people are already gone.”

“Blight beasts?”

“And malnutrition. There’s just not enough food to feed everyone. I don’t think you realized how sick that town was getting before you gave them back their food supply. When we say there’s not much time before the blight wins, we aren’t kidding. One way or another, this is all going to be over soon.”

Tulland nodded, then put his hand on the door handle and pulled. It slid open silently, sliding on greased hinges he doubted would be possible outside of system interference.

Do they still call them blacksmiths when they make hinges?

Tacklesmiths. At least on your world, that was the class. But you are stalling.

Yes. I am.