Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon

“All right. Shift!” White screamed over the battle. Somehow, maybe by virtue of his class skills, it became like a command that was supposed to be obeyed.

As one, the entire group of attackers fell back behind the sturdier blocking group. Only a few of them, like Necia, were truly tank classes with blocking as a primary role of their class. As the robed studier-of-things Potter had put it, they were more aptly called survival classes or endurance classes, people who focused on outlasting their opponents and putting the finishing touches when others were finally exhausted.

In any case, there were only a few adventurers who were worried about facing off against a single Earthen Warrior, but there were more than a single warrior for each of them. To keep the shield fighters from getting swarmed, everyone was doing their best from the back to destroy as many of the system generated warriors as they could. The sturdier fighters left gaps to their sides big enough to allow strikes through, and the two layers fought together to destroy the hundreds of tiny men attacking them.

“It’s going well! White, keep it up!” Potter yelled. “Wait. What’s happening?”

Suddenly, without any warning, every remaining dirt man disengaged. It was so sudden and so much like a retreat at first that a few fighters cheered. The stop to cheering came quickly when it became apparent that what was happening was less of a retreat than a reorganization. While earth-men were still getting shot down left and right, their remnants organized into a single block at the center of the line, with a few of the warriors acting as point on what amounted to a giant wedge formation.

As much as Potter and White had drilled them on their basic tactics, nothing could have prepared the group to move to counter the wedge in an organized way.

“Licht! Dull the point!” White yelled. Licht nodded, pulled a particularly nasty looking chunk of bone from his quiver, and launched the bolt at the tip of the formation. The resulting explosion of bone chunks took out several of the Earthen Warriors, but others simply moved forward to take their place, still sprinting towards the line.

“Throw anything you can at them. And get ready to run, if you have to.” With hundreds of the little dirt men still in play, it wasn’t hard to imagine the group getting swarmed by their numbers if their formation was shattered. “Fight until you can’t, then run.”

Tulland watched as all this went on, then realized that there was one thing he could do that likely nobody else could. He was terrible at dealing widespread damage, and almost worse at taking down a single target. But what he was good at, despite his weaponry lagging behind in that respect, was creating confusion and irritation. He was facing a big cluster of enemies, each of which seemed to be cheaply built. They were literally and figuratively not very fleshed out. Even if they had any poison defenses, they weren’t built around it like other monsters Tulland had encountered.

And, being one of the cheapest, worst plants he still carried, he could carry not-quite-literal tons of them with him.

“Who can throw?” Tulland yelled, dumping all of his Acheflowers into his pouch. Brist was suddenly by him, looking interested. Tulland tossed the bag at him. “Throw this over that group. Just over. Leave a couple feet of gap.”

Brist nodded and easily did just what was asked, so suddenly that Tulland’s reflexes barely kept up with the task of blowing the thing up at the right time. Yellow powder settled down over the enemy group, briefly obscuring the entire remainders of the wedge formation. Tulland pondered the idea that he might have just made the enemy invisible, helping their plans. People probably wouldn’t be very happy with him in that case.

He was relieved when none of that ended up happening. He had expected either to have nothing happen, or to have a minor effect. What he hadn’t expected was for the cloud to clear and show an army of dirt men completely stuck in their tracks.

“Tulland! What was that?” White asked after seeing the new development.

“Halucinegenic powder, I guess? Poison. Mind poison.”

“How long does it work?” White was frantic. “How much time?”

“If it worked that well?” Tulland screwed his eyes shut and made his best guess. “Maybe half a minute. Maybe more.”

White didn’t wait any longer.

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“Charge! Everyone! Hit them hard!”

What happened next would have been a bloodbath if the dirt monsters had any blood at all. The entire human army abandoned defense, charged forward, and mowed down the rest of the dirt men without so much as a single additional injury.

Tulland, who had never been the stand-out player in a casual sports game on his island, suddenly found himself hefted up on the shoulders of much larger, stronger warriors. Men and women cheered his name as word got around of just exactly what had caused their enemies to glitch out.

“I trained him,” Brist said to some other nearby muscle-head. “Taught him to do all that. It was a lot of work, especially the bit with the flowers. But worth it.”

Tulland was almost passed around from person to person while even the pretty scary looking warriors took the time to thank him for what happened. He wasn’t sure how the battle would have gone otherwise, but he was starting to get the impression it would have been a pretty negative, hard thing if he hadn’t put a stop to it.

And then, just like that, everyone stopped. The Infinite had started dropping rewards, and there was no amount of politeness that could draw people’s attention from that. Tulland had killed so few actual enemies that he didn’t expect much. The Infinite defied that expectation.

What are you thinking? Class related item?

Without a doubt. The other things can be obtained in easier ways. Even if they couldn’t, any class related item labelled as miscellaneous does something for your class that is in some way hard to define. That’s going to be worth more than ten or twenty stat points, unless The Infinite is being stingy. It does not strike me as the kind of entity that is ever stingy in that way.

That’s the direction I’m leaning, too. Maybe if it was going to include my Farmer’s Tool in the bargain, I’d think about the second option.

It likely can’t, and almost certainly won’t even if it can. We can talk more about that later. For now, take your reward. You will find there will be those that will be curious about what you received.

There was wisdom in that, and there was no reason to delay. It wasn’t like Tulland was allergic to new and shiny things. He let The Infinite know his choice, and watched as a metal object about the size of his head flashed into being, clattered to the ground, and rolled around in semicircles before coming to rest on Tulland’s food.

“Is that… Tulland, is that a bucket?” Brist looked honestly confused. “Is it maybe a helmet or something?”

“No, it’s probably a bucket. And quiet, Brist, if you can. He’s going to have to read the description to tell us what it is.” Necia sat down on the ground, cradling what looked like a new gauntlet. “Knowing his weird class, it’s probably something good, no matter how it looks.”

Tulland tried not to laugh at the look on Brist’s face and ducked his head down to find out what he was looking at.

“This is actually pretty weird even for me.” Tulland picked up the bucket and stored it in his dimensional space. “But I think it’s going to be pretty good. Really good, depending on what The Infinite means by high quality.”

“Good things,” Potter said. “Very good things, from my experience. It might be adjusted to your level, but high quality is never less than impressive in some way or another.”

White nodded in agreement, then turned to the crowd.

“Unless my eyes deceive me, that’s our exit arch in the distance. And before you all go through it, I’d like to point out a few things. First, we all did a pretty good job. Without organization, the first part of that fight would have gone a lot differently. We might never have forced them into a group for Tulland to… well, farm at, I guess.”

“Hear hear,” Brist cheered. A few people joined in, only to quiet down when White motioned for them to stop. “Go on, White. Sorry.”

“No problem. It’s good to have something to cheer for. But we also have things to worry about. That enemy formation changed, and ours didn’t keep up. I don’t think any of us expects the same trick to work twice. We have to do better.”

There were at least a few nods in the group. The near-miss had not gone unnoticed.

“For those of you that are interested, and everyone should be, Potter and I are going to put our heads together to see if we can keep us all alive through the next floor. That means planning, but it also means practice. Real practice moving together to meet different needs in different situations.” White looked around as if gauging the reaction of the crowd. “Nobody is going to force you. And I’ve talked long enough. Go. Rest and eat. And if you are interested in living longer than the next break between floors, we’ll see you tomorrow afternoon.”