Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon

“What if I cleared a lot more of these? It doesn’t take very long,” Tulland offered.

“Wouldn’t matter.” Amrand immediately confirmed the Tulland-group guess on the matter. “The blight dungeons pop up, strip the land of any energy it’s managed to regain, take any energy that’s supposed to be reaching the outside world through a normal, healthy dungeon, and then collapse.”

“Why? That doesn’t seem productive.”

“It will be easier to explain once you see it. I promise I’m not holding back anything you need to know permanently. It’s just hard to talk about.”

Tulland saw the sadness in the man’s eyes and decided however he wanted to explain it was fine, so long as it didn’t cause problems. After a quick run around the area to make sure none of the spine pig things had escaped, they took to the road again.

There were no more dungeons for the rest of the day. According to Rand, that was normal. They didn’t know if the dungeons had some level of start-up cost or if there was just a limit to how many of them the blight had caused, but their initial worries that the dungeons would come more and more often had proved unfounded. Instead, as Rand put it, the blight was a slower kind of death.

The next day, the sun rose on a world that was a bit hazier than Tulland remembered it.

“Means we are getting close. The air being all thick like that. It’s something that the blight puts out. It probably won’t kill you, but no guarantees,” Amrand said.

“What is it?”

That something was starting to take up more and more space in Tulland’s worries as they spent more and more time working toward the former center of the country. It had been an agricultural country for the most part, at least based on what Tulland could see. Most of the ruins and ghost towns they passed were smaller places set alongside acre after acre of fallow fields, still visible through the sparse, useless grass that coated them.

Eventually, even that grass gave away to completely bare ground, dirt of a pale, sickly color.

“It’s coming up soon. Just over that rise. The capital was built in a valley, a big round thing like a dome pressed into the ground. It keeps you from seeing what’s going on until you are almost on top of it,” Amrand said.

“Should I be ready to fight?” Tulland asked.

“Sure, but it usually doesn’t react unless you get real close to it. So long as there’s not a patrol right at the edge, we should be fine.”

Tulland followed the old man as he made his same, ultra-steady pace up the rise. It was steeper than it had looked from a distance, but not a real challenge to either of them. It took a few minutes to get there, and a few more to climb the rise itself, but eventually Tulland saw what the Amrand had been so reluctant to try and explain.

Are you seeing this?

I am. More than you see. However bad it looks to you, I assure you that it’s actually worse.

Below, in the center of a city that had been so reduced to rubble Tulland could barely identify that it had been a city at all, was a tornado of sorts. It was a swirling mass of the same brown air he had seen before, endlessly being churned together with the darkest, most evil-seeming blight he had seen on the planet so far. In comparison, it made the ogres look like a sunny day in the park.

How it looked was not the worst part. What it did to his farmer’s sense was worse. This, the skill said, was anti-growth. It was the opposite of a seed, the enemy of good soil and sunshine. It was made to prevent sprouting, to make things barren.

It’s huge. You can tell how strong it is from here.

It’s sopping up all the energy of an entire world and doing nothing but condensing it to one place. The space around it is tearing.

What does that mean?

Nothing good. It’s destroying the reality around itself, slowly but surely. I doubt it even knows. If it knows anything.

Can I… I mean, is there a way for me to beat it?

Not even a small chance.

“It wasn’t always so big. For years, it was something you knew about if you were high enough on the food chain. Someone had tried to build a magic machine that would turn the power from unproductive dungeons into one big, experience-rich monster. We found the plans later. It was supposed to be strapped to something weak and easy to kill, and it would fatten that up. Problem was that the monster took out the inventor, some kind of accident.”

“Nobody could kill it after that?”

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“Nobody wanted to. No telling what it would have done to them. Even then, it didn’t look like the kind of thing you’d want to take on, if you get what I mean.”

“I can guess.”

“Anyway, the idea was to see if we could starve it out. Someone set up some kind of magic pen, something that was strong enough to hold it forever. After that, it didn’t cause any trouble.”

“Until something.”

“Correct. Except nobody really knows what that is. Maybe the pen broke down, maybe someone fed the damn thing. No idea, except that it got out. And by the time we noticed, it was in a whirlwind that nobody could pierce.”

That certainly shouldn’t be the case. Anything should be able to be pierced by something.

“I don’t see how that’s possible.” Tulland pressed on the story. “Nobody could stab through?”

“It eats weapons. Or at least it did. Anything you put into that whirlwind would crumble to dust. There were a few legendary weapons in the kingdom, at that time. Things that could resist the rot. But any damage they did, the whirlwind just took it out of the environment. By the time the environment around it was drained, nobody could get close anymore.”

“Why didn’t they build more containment around it?”

“It sucks up everything, Tulland. Any power of any kind, anything related to the System at all, it eats.”

Believe me, I’m having words with the System about how much it left out of its story here. No wonder it was mad about your prizes. It must be starving.

“So the dungeons. That’s this thing… eating?” Tulland asked.

“Something like that. Every time one pops up, it wipes out miles and miles of territory. It doesn’t seem that interested in people, and the monsters don’t go far from the dungeon. It drinks up all the energy in an area with the dungeon itself, protecting itself and expanding the drain with the monsters the dungeon produces. Then, once an area is cleared out, it collapses.”

“You can’t ward towns?”

“You saw a warded town. It works a little. It can’t work completely. These days, things are just about as bad inside the wards as outside of them. The only thing it really does is keep the dungeons from coming up inside the wards. Point is, Tulland, that as soon as that thing destroyed the capital, we were doomed. It was just a matter of when we’d grow our last potato.”

—

The walk back was mostly quiet. Tulland had imagined he’d be fighting something strong, but understandable. Maybe a death knight, or one of those bear things Necia had mentioned. Instead, he was fighting an unnatural natural disaster, something that he could sense he couldn’t even get near without melting away.

Oddly, he didn’t get that sense farther away from it. Once he was out of sight of the swirling mass of decay, all the dangerous feeling of the thing went with it. That shouldn’t have been the case if its power was everywhere.

“Rand. Why aren’t we getting eaten up? I was in two of those dungeons. I got up close and personal with those monsters. Why wasn’t I drained?”

“No idea, except it only works through the soil. Nobody really knows what the thing was before that scientist added the blight to it. Could have been some kind of agricultural pest, some sort of worm. But everything you see around you is because of the effect it has on the soil. It’s only able to do other things close to its main body. Or the dungeons.”

“I was in one.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t die in one. I can tell because you still have a body.”

They didn’t talk much after that. Tulland still had plenty of food, which Amrand wasn’t shy about laying into like a starving man should. By the time they made camp that night and finished dinner, the old man had outpaced Tulland’s food consumption by more than double.

It was when they got up the next morning with a few hours to go before home that Tulland got the bad news.

Necia says there’s trouble back at the town. A nearby dungeon break. She has it handled for now, but…

Got it. Tell her I’m expediting things on my end.

Tulland stood up, stowed what little he had to stow, then grabbed Amrand and ran, throwing him over his shoulder. The old man let him without asking too many questions, which felt a little too trusting until Tulland remembered how little of a choice he had in the matter. It was a few minutes before Rand managed to get across that he was perfectly capable of making the run himself, by virtue of his trainer benefits and how they applied to running. He wasn’t quite as fast as Tulland, but he was fast enough compared to Tulland carrying another adult human to regain his dignity and make the trip on his own feet.

They managed to make the two or three hour trip back to the town in a little under one hour, pushing themselves to their substantial limits in the process. When Tulland arrived, he was aware of being entirely out of breath for about a second before what he saw filled him with so much rage he forgot.

“I thought you said they didn’t go after people.” Tulland’s glare fell on Amrand like accusatory fire. “It looks like they are going after people, Rand.”

A half mile away, the town’s fortifications were completely surrounded by what looked like some kind of blighted wolf, save a small circle of death in front of the gate that had been thoughtfully provided to the invaders courtesy of Necia’s club. That was going fine for now, but there were a lot of wolves on the ground. It wouldn’t take much for her to get in trouble.

“They don’t, usually. Something changed here. What are you going to do?” Amrand asked.

“This.” Tulland held up his pitchfork. “This.”

Five minutes was all it took for Tulland to do a lap around the town, killing everything in sight. It was clear enough that the wolves must be coming from Necia’s side of town, given how few were on the other side of the fortifications in comparison. When he got back in sight of her, things got much more intense for a bit as he slaughtered every wolf in sight.

“I’ll go get them.” Tulland looked around for the dungeon, finally sighting it a few miles off, a massive crack in the ground visible against the uniform barren terrain even from a distance. “It will just take a minute.”

“No, you won’t.” Necia put her hand on his shoulder. Something in her eyes warned him off from arguing very much. “I just had to stand here killing them while they restocked from some endless bucket of crappy little dogs. I will be back in a few minutes. You hold down the fort for me while I’m gone.”

Tulland felt a little bad for the wolves, especially when Necia took much longer to clear the dungeon than he suspected was necessary. Eventually, she came back, almost skipping down the road back towards them.

“I’m in a much better mood now. So what’s the plan? We are going to kill the big bad guy now?”

“No. The System didn’t tell you?”

“It’s been in some sort of arguments with this world’s System all day. Most of yesterday, too. You didn’t notice?”

“I was running here.”

“Right. Anyway, it didn’t give me much besides telling me the thing was big, ugly, and ripping apart this realm in some weird way.”

“Yeah. Not that that’s all wrong, but it’s worse than you think. You’d sort of have to see it to know, but it’s not something we can fight. We need to have a talk.”

“You and me?”

“You, me, the System, and one other person. I’m pretty sure it’ll know what’s going on.”