Infinite Farmer

"Don't trust it."

Tulland's uncle had dragged him onto a boat before the sun was up that morning, forcing the thirteen year old him to help as they rowed through the icy cold-season surf to open water. They weren't fishing, it turned out. Instead, they were watching a man in what Tulland was only now starting to realize was as close to a secret fisherman coming of age ceremony as there probably was.

The man in the boat they were observing was probably only a man to Tulland. Every other observer around them was older, more worn by age, and much more likely to consider the eighteen-year-old youth a mere boy. To Tulland, the man wasn't only an adult, he was what all adults were supposed to look like. He stood wide-stanced on his own boat, bound in work-grown muscles and with a boot up against the ribs that lined the side of the boat as he tried desperately to wrangle a fish out of the water.

"He has a giant hook in it," Tulland said. "It's only a matter of time."

"Right. It was dead as soon as he got the hook in. That doesn't mean it can't live for minutes or hours. And it doesn't mean that these things could change in an instant."

Tulland looked at the boy as he steadily gained ground on the giant fish. Apparently, these huge aquatic masses of scales and teeth only swam by the island for a few short days a year, as predictable as clockwork going back generations. They weren't good to eat, and their bones and scales were useless for crafting. To the extent they had a purpose, it was this. Allowing young men to prove they were as strong as anything the sea would ever bring near the island, and thus qualified to deal with any hardship they would face in the future.

"How?" Tulland asked. Even though he wasn't a fisherman himself, he could see the conclusion of the fight.

"Like I said, don't trust it. That boy understands fishing but he doesn't know it."

It was true that the boy knew fishing. There was caution in both the boy's eyes and his movements. But when the fish would jerk, he'd give up ground to it, allowing it some rope to pull back or to the sides instead of keeping the animal directly in front of him. That was a small mistake. If he had just been able to pull it in steadily and directly, it would have taken a few minutes to get the fish into the boat. As it was, they were closing in on a half hour.

And then, finally, the fish gave up. Tulland watched its movements kick into high gear one last time before its eyes dulled and its writhing slowly tapered down to something closer to gentle flapping.

"Now watch," Tulland's uncle said.

Just as the boy took the fish's permission to heft it into the boat seriously and began to pull back, the animal's eyes lit up again as it pulled as hard as it ever had back towards the open water, hard enough to drag the boy's boat with it sideways.

"See? That fish had secrets. It might not have even known it had them, but it had those secrets. You can never trust an animal to be down and out until it stops breathing. Even then, you want to check," Tulland's uncle said.

"But how?" Tulland had caught enough glimpses of the big aquatic animal's head to know that it didn't exactly shine with apparent intelligence. "It can't be planning all this. It's not that smart. Is it?"

Just then, the animal's last dregs of strength were emptied out in a real, final way. The young man in the other boat used the last of his strength heaving against its weight, pulling it into a boat where he ended its struggles once and for all with a few stabs from his belt knife. Everyone, Tulland included, cheered. His uncle's response was delayed that much, but when the excitement had cleared he had not forgotten to answer.

"Not smart, no. And it's not planning it. Like I said, it probably doesn't even know it has that much fight left in it. Might have never known if it wasn't forced to. But when you push it into a corner, it has to check. And sometimes what it finds there is bigger than you'd guess."

—

The chimera burst forward for his first terrain-reinforced attacks much faster than Tulland had hoped. It had been so good at flying that Tulland had clung to the hope that it might be specialized for the air, less capable and quick on the dirt than it was in the sky.

It wasn't. Just as the animal was faster with wings than its lesser sphinx counterparts, it was much more capable on foot than the sphinxes had ever shown themselves to be. Its initial surge forward was towards Necia, who braced a moment too soon and allowed it to pivot to the side, bypass her completely, and head towards Tulland. He backpedaled furiously for a moment before realizing that this meant that Necia would be slower in catching up. Another moment gave him insight on the fact that the chimera probably could have caught him by now, if it wanted to.

It's mad, so it's toying with me. Or something.

Or else is cautious. Remember that you've hurt it. If it wasn't cautious before, it has reason to be now.

Either way, Tulland wasn't going to be able to take this enemy in solo hand-to-hand combat for very long, and what other surprises he was holding in reserve were not well suited for the current shape of the battlefield. This, unfortunately, was a situation that called for being brave and perhaps getting a bit injured.

Tulland had once read that system-armor worked in a couple different ways. Often, it was indistinguishable from normal armor. The kinds of damage that would destroy its non-enhanced components would still tear the armor apart. Some of the energy would transfer through, like the armor-piercing force of a swung mace, but would often be diminished by the system-granted, physics-defying magic of the System itself.

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Most of the time, it worked in a way that was biased in favor of the armor-wearer. But every System had some level of fairness in mind when it designed both armor and the weapons attacking it. In the outside world, a conventional beast was never going to rip through platemail, no matter how sharp its claws would be. In the dungeon, claws still had trouble with armors that logically should have stopped the kinds of attacks they were delivering. But when overwhelming force was in play, that resistance could be overcome.

Tulland dodged to the right and forward as the chimera closed distance with him, hoping to surprise the animal and get the split second he needed to spin around it. He didn't get either thing. The chimera easily caught him in its elongated claw-range, raking its five claws across the front of his chestplate with the full force of its galloping weight behind them.

Tulland screamed in pain as he instinctively stabbed out with his pitchfork, catching the chimera unguarded as it withdrew from its own attack and forcing it back just enough to escape a second swipe. His chest instantly began gushing blood through his mostly intact armor, still in place despite illogically letting the excess of damage it couldn't block through. The pain of it was mind blowing, sending Tulland reeling after the fact. There was nothing he could do to rally himself in time as the chimera rocked its massive weight backwards, raised its arm, and came down towards him with a shining, system-magic-soaked killing blow in tow. Its monstrous human-like face was pulled back in a terrible grin, sure it had him.

It was that certainty that saved both Tulland and Necia.

Tulland was saved as the monster's overconfidence blinded it to any other threat, and Necia's life was kept safe by the fact that it was swinging so hard and deep that she was able to get off a picture-perfect shield-on-claw retaliation block stronger than any Tulland had ever seen up to that point. Necia went flopping to the dirt, her shield smoking from a new, deep chasm the claw had dug through it. She was hurt.

It pained Tulland that he knew just how injured she must be, having seen her shatter her bones blocking things she would have otherwise dodged if he wasn't there. He would have felt bad to see anybody take that attack for his sake, but this was more than that. He wasn't stupid enough to be sure that he knew what true love felt like, but whatever feelings he had been able to develop for Necia were likely to be the closest he ever got to that kind of love. This was the most valuable relationship with anyone he had ever had outside of his uncle.

As the System had said, she was something to try to keep. And watching her getting blown away from the chimera, Tulland found he didn't care so much about the next several steps of their long plan to slowly wear down the chimera. There were several of them, all meant to do a particular thing. Right now, he was supposed to attack one of its rear legs, expressly aiming to take away some of its speed so that he and Necia could work towards a safe, sustainable ability to stay ahead of its attacks. If everything went to plan, Necia would be injured just like that, several more times, barely healing between each impact.

In the split second between when the chimera hit and both it and Necia hit the ground in opposite directions, that plan went out the window. Tulland looked at the injured woman, then back to the momentarily incapacitated chimera and felt something inside himself roar.

Moments later, he found himself running towards the chimera, the inklings of an entirely new plan building up in him. Necia could be part of it, but not as a sacrificial punching bag. Which meant he would need to keep the chimera completely distracted for the rest of the fight and somehow not die.

Which I can't do. It's too strong.

Is it? I wonder.

Either way, Tulland was going to find out. By the time he got to the chimera, he had his backup Clubber Vine out in one of his hands, and a Silver Star in the other. The beast was recovering fast and already had its legs underneath its chest as it made an unsteady effort to push itself back up into the air. Tulland responded by jumping down on its waist with both feet, generating enough impact to flatten it out on the ground again.

"I'm tired." Tulland started talking without any intent to, and that was the first thing that came out. "I'm really tired of this."

The chimera roared and began to rock back and forth to dislodge him from its back. Tulland was able to ignore that, for now, courtesy of the remnants of the stun. In the moments he had left, he ducked down, pressed seven or eight inches of the Clubber Vine against the chimera's back, then plunged a Silver Star straight through both, pinning the end of his own vine into whatever flesh the Silver Star exposed on its way down.

"Ha. It's like a new tail." Tulland stood up and regripped his Farmer's Tool, morphing it into a shovel and plunging it downward. "Let's make sure it doesn't fall out."

The pain of having a Silver Star driven even further into its back seemed to help the chimera shake itself back to full strength. Tulland reached up and gripped the point where one of its wings met its back, choked up on his farmer's tool, and started stabbing with the newly-reformed pitchfork head.

He couldn't get much force that way, but what he could do was hit it again and again in rapid fire, poking holes in it like a sewer's needle joining two pieces of fabric.

"Tulland!" Necia was recovering, too. "The plan!"

"New plan!" Tulland was jerked off his feet as the chimera attempted to turn, barely keeping his hold on the wing as he maintained his position outside of the chimera's swing range. "Keep it occupied. While my Clubber Vine hits it."@@novelbin@@

"That thing? It won't do enough!"

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"It will. Trust me." Tulland stabbed it another four or five times for good measure. "We just need to do damage while it does. As much as we can."

Necia shook her head, but charged in. Before she got there, the chimera bent forward much faster and with much more force than Tulland had expected it could, flinging him over its shoulder and towards the heavy-armor woman it saw re-entering combat. Necia didn't try to catch him, instead moving into normal melee range and engaging with the chimera's claws.

It was a much more even fight this time. Pressing the monster meant it had less time to wind up for a huge shot, and the Clubber Vine was working on its back and neck, distracting it as it did damage. Tulland rolled over from his impact point on the ground and poured a Primal Growth into all the Clubber Vines he had out, focusing especially on the chimera's new unwanted limb.

I'm going to stab this thing so hard. Tulland's Farmer's Tool had never felt better in his hand. While it's distracted.

Stop talking to me and just do it, then. You don't need useless distractions, boy.

The System was right about conversation with it being a distraction, but wrong about it being useless. Tulland could feel the weapon coming to life in his hand, or his hands working better around the weapon. Or something, at least. Something was different than he had noticed before.

When he finally thrust it towards the chimera, it noticed too. The curved tines of the pitchfork went deep into its stomach, digging around there for a moment before it swung its off-arm at Tulland and backhanded him a few steps away from the fight. Necia took the opportunity to slash it with her own sword and follow up with a shield bash, buying Tulland enough time to come back and stab the chimera in the foot, dodge another hit, then stab it again in the waist.

"Are you okay?"

"Fine. Keep hitting it."

"You are moving… like a fighter." Necia grunted as she deflected a swarm of claw strikes from the chimera. "All the sudden."

"Yeah. I think it's the farm. I'll explain later."

"Fine."