Infinite Farmer

Waking up to a notification was always a bit scary, like being shaken awake where you didn't expect anyone to bother you and trying to figure out what had gone wrong. This time, it wasn't a wrong thing, or a right one. It was simply The Infinite telling Tulland something had changed.

Well, I knew it was coming. I don't feel nearly enough stronger to be confident right now.

How has your farm been coming along?

Fine. Not quite where it was, but fine.

Actually, hold that thought. Something happened.

Tulland took another look at his stats. Nothing had really changed since he got to the floor, including his total experience and stats. That was true right until he got to his gene splicing skill, which had jumped an entire level like it wasn't even a thing.

It was hard to feel truly bad about his stats at that moment. They had risen a ton. But since everyone else's had as well in The Infinite's great equalization efforts, it was a bit like they were all at level zero again. Guaranteed to be temporarily up to the difficulty curve, but in some ways as if they were all starting from scratch.

"I'm going out to check the farm. Want to come?" Tulland asked.

"Sure." Necia shifted up off her bedroll and stretched. "Let's go."

If there was one place Tulland could pull away from the pack, it was by pushing his farm garden to the utmost. And the fact that his score was just a little bit higher than it had ever been before with an only half-grown garden meant there was a lot of potential for that. He just had to confirm why it was so high, and move forward from there.

It didn't take long to find the culprit.

They were so good at enhancing the farm, in fact, that it almost didn't make sense to pay attention to anything else at all until he had a solid two dozen of the vines growing away in their own little patch. Eventually, the sheer amount of them chipped away at the point gain enough that he could go back to applying his farming enhancements to the whole staked area again, spreading out his power to other plants and helping them catch up.

He spent one more day fighting with Brist before pulling out all the stops for the next day, harvesting everything he could see himself needing for the fight ahead. It was brutal watching his point-count nosedive as he took away the vines, but he knew they'd be mostly recovered by morning when his newly planted replacements started to reach maturity.

And with his plant-storage skill fully loaded with unpleasant surprises, he finally went to bed, visions of a badly beaten Brist dancing in his head.

—

"You look peppy." Brist grinned and rose from his usual spot on the ground. "Glad to finally be getting done with this?"

"Oh, I don't know about that." Tulland dropped his bag and weapon and began to stretch. He had found that it helped him feel ready for the fights, which in turn helped him fight a little better. It probably wasn't doing anything practical to his body, considering how tip-top a high vitality stat and a good regeneration skill kept things running. But if it helped even a little mentally, the free routine was worth it. "I've been learning a lot, you tell me."

"You actually have. It might be hard to see because I, you know," Brist pantomimed launching Tulland into the sky with an uppercut. "But it's been harder for me to do that. And as far as baseline skill goes outside of the class, I'm pretty good."

"How does that work, anyway? Say I was an acrobat, or something. And I got pretty good at it, without a class at all. Then I got an acrobat class on top of it." Tulland reached down and touched his toes, pushing into the stretch until he was able to get his palms flat on the ground. "Wouldn't the acrobat skills from the class just outdo anything I had learned on my own?"

"You aren't wrong," Brist said as he rubbed his chin. "I'm much better at boxing than any non-classed boxer could be. But I still trained with non-classed boxers when I could. Because understanding it matters. I don't know how much, but I know once I learned what the skill was actually doing to make me hit harder and spent some time thinking about it, I could hit even harder. Especially after I practiced it."

"And yet you've still not taught me a single thing about hitting harder. I'm just as weak as I was at the beginning of the week."

Brist grinned.

"Oh, we both know that's not true. How much have you been holding out on me, kid?"

Tulland bent down and picked up his Farmer's Tool. It would only be a few moments until Brist attacked now.

"A bit." Tulland smiled back. "Come here and I'll show you."

Brist didn't need to be asked twice. He pushed off the soil hard, keeping his head low and every part of him that Tulland could significantly hurt with his pitchfork covered up. Tulland had learned the hard way that part of the boxer's class was giving his arms a much greater defense than the rest of his build. Hitting him there still hurt him, but never enough to matter.

Tulland hit Brist in his arms anyway, trying to get both of his limbs pinned down by the tines of his Farmer's Tool. He had been purposely letting the materials in the tool degrade over the past few days of fighting, and had just reupped them this morning. He hoped that he might be able to penetrate the skin on both arms and hold them in place long enough to hurt the man.

He only got one. Brist seemed to understand what Tulland was trying to do at the last second, and moved out of the way just in time to keep the other tines from gaining any purchase on his left arm. One incredibly fast punch streaked out towards Tulland's face, almost faster than Tulland could react to.

Tulland wouldn't have been able to do anything about it if he hadn't known it was coming. If one of Brist's arms was pinned down, it not only disabled that arm but hurt his ability to control the pivoting of his own body. Brist, Tulland had learned, would not take a risk that would lead to him over-committing. That meant attacks like hooks and uppercuts, which relied on the pivots, were out of the mix.

Which left straight punches. Tulland leaned in on the pitchfork as Brist threw the first blow from the left, forcing him to over-pivot. At the same time, Tulland cranked up the handle of the Farmer's Tool in front of where he imagined the punch would land. This was something new. He wouldn't have been able to do it at all without the new weapon-handling speed he was getting from the feedback of his farm. He knew it worked when he saw the surprise register in Brist's eyes a split-second before his fist clanged off the metal of Tulland's weapon.

Another thing Tulland had noticed about Brist was that he never left his arm out a moment long than he had to after a punch. He would simply retract it, in the same way the sun simply never failed to rise and set on Tulland's old world. That gave Tulland a moment. He wasn't much slower than Brist in terms of reaction time, and had started moving before Brist could react. As the big man's arm came back into punching position, Tulland's own left followed it, scraping down the skin of the man's arm and forcing it outward as he summoned one of his plants to his hand.

Light glinted off of the Silver Star as it entered Tulland's grip. He didn't have any skills that made these work, really. Outside of just being able to grow them better and better on his farm, the Silver Stars were supposed to be used as building materials and nothing else. Even so, the suckers were sharp. Really sharp. He had yet to encounter anything that could fully stop the spikes that these seed-structures grew, although better armor and more durable beasts he had encountered could slow them down.

Where Tulland was aiming, Brist wasn't nearly as durable. Tulland would have liked to have stabbed the star straight into the man's neck, but there simply wasn't time. Brist always moved in straight, efficient lines on that kind of punch, and having time to follow it back meant he couldn't deviate the course of his own blow even a fraction of an inch.

"Ugh." Brist slid back as the spines from the big, metal seed penetrated his shoulder. "I'll…"

Tulland wasn't fooled. Just because Brist had started talking didn't mean he had stopped punching. Tulland shifted his stance to allow for him to attack quicker from the left and started pummeling as many targets as he could reach on Brist's damaged side. The boxer could still move, of course, and most of them didn't hit. But a bunch of big metal spikes through his arm hurt him just as much as they'd hurt anyone, and some of the blows glanced through.

In the meantime, Brist was trying to get the star out, but Tulland wouldn't allow that, either. Every time Brist shifted his right arm across his body, he left himself open for more and harder hits. Tulland was more than happy to deliver them.

He's a finely oiled machine. I figured he wouldn't like sand in the gears.@@novelbin@@

He doesn't seem to, no.

The best part is he's hurting himself more trying to keep me from hurting him. I win either way.

For now.