Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon

We are getting there.

It hurts already. But there’s no huge army coming to meet us.

Such is the way of distractions. And behind you is support. I know you well enough to know you won’t turn back, and this is the best possible chance you’ll ever have. Just try not to be seen.

The ruined capital offered plenty of places to stay mostly hidden. There were remnant walls, even more nearly intact buildings than Tulland would have thought. He tried not to go into any of them, as there wasn’t a single one of them that didn’t look like it wouldn’t topple on him given the barest excuse. There were monsters to kill, but each of those was taken care of so quickly they had no opportunity to make noise or alert any of the others.

To its eternal credit, the other System was doing its best to keep them informed of whatever it could see, bending rules to their absolute limit to make it work.

I assume it’s going to get in trouble for that.

Let’s hope.

In his storage, on his hip, and anywhere he could stow them, Tulland had seeds. He scattered them as he walked, leaving them passive and seemingly dead on the ground as he kept pushing further and further. He had a sneaking suspicion that as soon as any of them were activated, it would be the end of his stealth. He couldn’t afford that yet.

The closer he got to the blight, the more his skin burned. Somewhere, Necia was fighting droves of blighted enemies with the toughest, hardest to kill remnants of humanity anywhere on this world. He was sure she was almost completely surrounded by rotting, terrible things. She was probably in terrible, horrible danger. And he almost envied her.

Eventually, the blight was going to wake up. Nobody knew what it could do once that happened. Nobody had been close enough in years to see how it had grown. For all Tulland’s preparation, for all that everyone was helping him, the blight might reach out and crush him like an ant. It was possible all the new growth hemming it in had weakened it enough that it wouldn’t be an issue, or it was possible it would take every bit that Tulland’s buff-cannon corps could supply him to keep him alive.

He didn’t move fast. He couldn’t. Running, he could have probably made the center of the town in ten minutes. Picking his way through carefully, it had already taken more than twenty minutes and would probably take twenty more. Amrand, Necia, and even Yuki had been very clear that he needed to do this, no matter how much he might have wanted to take the pressure off the distraction sooner. It might be uncomfortable. It might burn a hole in his very soul, but no matter how much he disliked people putting themselves at risk for his sake, it was at least not only for his sake.

This was for the whole world. The whole entire world.

Tulland ducked into a decrepit building that looked like it might have once been a store that sold building hardware as a group of terrifying gulls flew overhead, so thick they cast a solid shadow on the ground. They were loud enough and visible enough as a group that he had just enough time to get out of sight, then hid for ten or twenty seconds longer than he thought was strictly necessary to make sure they had moved on.

After that, he got three or four streets before having to hide from what felt like his thousandth group of bears, then skirted around a large body of water filled with something moving and blight-colored he wanted absolutely nothing to do with.

It’s clear that this is where the blight had the most control. So many varieties of monsters, and no shortage of them. Even just maintaining this army must come with costs I can hardly fathom.

Maybe it gets cheaper close to it. I just know this is taking forever.

It would be faster if you could go directly to it. That’s not an option. Just keep going. You’ll need every inch of travel you can get. There cannot be too much.

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Tulland kept making his spiral through the city, dropping handful after handful of seeds everywhere he went, letting them leak out of his hand like sand as he covered as much ground as possible. He’d never get more than a small percentage of it, but he tried to cover the territory in such a way that there would be a plant somewhere on every line radiating out from the center of the city. However the blight wanted to leak out, he wanted it eventually to run into a place he had dropped a seed.

The formation Amrand and Necia were using for the battle was purely defensive, planned over several painful days to annoy and harry attacking troops rather than to kill them. They had plans to kill everything they could once the monsters got wind of the threat to their home. The main point for Tulland was that they at least had a chance of holding out the hours it would take him to do his prep work.

He slowly and painstakingly made his way close to the center of the city, stopping just at the border of where his health regeneration would no longer keep up with the demands of the blight’s concentrated rot. It was the only place on the planet where it was strong enough to burn him, a high leveled semi-warrior wearing incredibly specialized anti-blight armor. And that was just passively, the force of a monster that was still more or less ignoring him completely.

That would stop soon. Tulland made a few laps around the perimeter of pain, dropping as many seeds as he could anywhere they looked like they had even half a chance. Finally, he ran out of them. It was time to show the blight where the real threat was.

Thank Yuri again, when you get the chance. I couldn’t have thought of better synergies myself.

I will.

Yuri had spent a week juggling numbers with every buff-class she could find, pulling together all the accumulated knowledge of the continent’s best stat-enhancers and skill-turbochargers. There were only so many buffs a person could hold at the same time, it turned out. Tulland had not the strongest of everything, but a couple of very strong enhancing skills balancing a mix of range-enhancement and magical-efficiency spells. And, of course, on top of all that were layered enhancements to his magical capacity, letting him hold more total energy than he could have ever dreamed of otherwise.

He took a deep breath, held out his hand, and let it all rip at once. He felt the feedback of thousands and thousands of seeds as they each took just what they needed to sprout and not a drop more. The regeneration buffs kicked in automatically as his magic bottomed out, filling up his normal pool size over a couple of seconds. That one burst burned out every buff he held, but it was worth it. He felt the warmth of thousands of seeds germinating all at once, and smiled.

It would be his last smile for a while. The seeds had just wrenched untold acres of land from the control of this planet’s primary threat. In response, the blight did not hiss, or growl. It boomed. An explosion of rage eradicated Tulland’s idea of where he would be safe and where he would be in danger as the blight fog suddenly condensed, and the sounds of thousands of howling enemies rang out through the city as the ground started to shake.

Get to high ground. You need your next set of buffs.

On it.

Ignoring the threat of structure collapse, Tulland kicked hard off the ground, a wall, and a partially collapsed roof as he jumped to the highest local point in the city. He’d need to stay there for ten seconds, they had said. Longer if he moved, and longer still if he moved a lot. There was a chance that if he didn’t stay still enough, he’d miss one or more of the second set of buffs and this whole plan would become impossible.

Tulland raised his pitchfork in the air, signalling that he was ready. He started to get hit by various balls of light, arcs of buffing lightning, and beams a moment later, and held as still as he could. That was made more than slightly harder by the fact that he was also staring down an approaching cloud of gulls, screaming in mindless anger as they swept toward his position. Despite all the planning and strength he had attained, he felt his throat closing with panic and turned to the only friend he had nearby.

They’ll shred me.

Hold.

I can’t, System. They’ll get here too soon. I have to run.

Tulland Lowstreet. You are my only friend.

The sheer non-sequitur of the statement caught Tulland off-guard. It might have been the only thing that could have wrenched his attention from the oncoming birds.

What?

My only friend. Necia likes me well enough. I once had a friend who was as close in some ways, but you know what happened there. He’s long since gone, anyway. You are the person who I have, my only friend in this or any world, and I would not tell you to stand if there was no time. There is. Hold.

Somehow, that was enough. Tulland’s legs stopped jerking in place, his panic receded, and he held. The buffs kept coming, flying through and around the birds as they slammed into him, bringing his magic to bear in a different direction than before, if still encouraging him to have an overwhelming amount of it.

The birds came closer and closer until he felt as if there was no chance he’d be fully prepared in time. Finally, the System granted him the mercy he needed.

Destroy them.

Tulland’s hands flew out, letting loose a scattershot of his enhanced flowers. From this close, he couldn’t miss. As weak as each individual gull was, they stood no chance against the poison-acid explosion. The chain effect jumped gull to gull so fast the sheer light of it almost blinded him as he jumped down from the roof before it exploded into a cloud so thick he doubted he could have been seen in it.

By now, the blight was burning him every second, drawing on his health reserves as delivered to him by his farm and slowly weakening his base. He’d have to do the rest of this fast.

He ran towards the real center of the action, a tornado of power that had grown smaller but no less terrifying as his plants sapped more and more of its power in the outside world. The whirlwind distorted in parts before sending great billows of blight in his direction, almost too fast to dodge. He zigzagged, getting closer and closer until he finally jumped the wall into the compound’s courtyard.

Just by the shape of it, he could tell it was a place that plants had once grown. He ducked down to the ground, shoving in a seed about the size of his finger before hitting it with Primal Growth, then moving fifteen or twenty yards away and planting another one. He had only made five of these. It was all there was time for. It would have to be enough.