The beast roared and pulled back as dozens of vines grabbed onto its forelegs at once while others beat mercilessly at it. All of the plants got all the power Tulland could spare. While that wasn’t enough to keep the beast from breaking away from them by rearing up hard and tearing the plants out by the roots, it was more than enough of a delay that the beast had to replant its legs in the exact the same place.
When it came back down, it was immediately swamped with more plants, who were a bit late to the party. Some of the plants were torn so badly by the beast’s trashing that they died in the attempt, but most got some level of hold and continued to climb and bind as the monster continued to struggle against them.
Not enough, though. Tulland was stabbing any visible bit of flesh, ducking back further into his farm every time the beast freed itself for a weak attack, and doing his level best to keep it occupied enough that it couldn’t work on the plants for too long. But it was just too big and too strong for that to work entirely. It’s biting them off now. There are tons of them and it’s still biting them off.
The beast was digging through the farm trying to get to Tulland, taking damage from every plant it touched but slowly and surely making progress towards shattering the entire plot’s fighting capability. In the meantime, it was taking on damage, but almost entirely damage to its extremities, where such things affected its overall life force the least.
Tulland watched it struggle and felt like he was on the first floor, watching an extremely overpowered enemy tear through the days and weeks of planting in mere moments.
By the time the beast finally broke through to the other side of the farming plot, almost every plant in the secondary farm was destroyed. The beast’s legs were bloodied, but the body was more or less intact. The head wasn’t hurt at all.
Just looking in that moment, Tulland would have panicked and given up if it wasn’t for the fact that the beast stopped for the first time and shook its head, like it was trying to clear its vision and mind for the rest of the fight. It wouldn’t have had to do that, he figured, if it wasn’t clouded in the first place.
The second thing was that the beast was much, much slower now. Using the handful of Acheflowers he had picked from the trees during the rest, Tulland kept up a steady series of explosions into the monster’s head, just enough to keep its vision somewhat blocked and its rage at all-time highs.
Come on. If it will just follow, this is done.
Are you sure?I’m sure. It’s still taking damage from the vines it can’t reach. I just need to not give it a chance to regenerate and I’ll win.
And if it doesn’t follow?
Tulland gripped his Farmer’s Tool a little tighter. Then I go for broke and hope for the best. I won’t get a better chance.
Yelling and harassing the beast, Tulland led it forward step by step, trying his hardest to keep the beast’s eyes firmly on him and not what was about to happen. When they finally got to his primary farm, it was too angry to see what it was getting into and took the plunge. This would absolutely destroy the farm, but Tulland couldn’t care less. He hadn’t spent enough time on this floor to even need the farm for power-generation purposes.
Instead, he juiced it with an application of Primal Growth firmly aimed at power-enhancement instead of actually making the plants grow or be healthier. And by the time the first line of Giant’s Hair vines started pulling the monster’s legs down, it knew it was in trouble. It tried to rear up to break them, only to find that for the first time it couldn’t. It had whatever amount of slack the vines gave it to move around with, and nothing more. Better yet, that slack was slowly tightening in.
Tulland furiously stabbed at the beast’s legs while this happened, moving behind it to attack the joints on the mostly intact rear legs. He was just poking holes at it’s base, driving it forward as it desperately tried to evade his hits. Every inch it shuffled into his farm meant another plant wrapping it up, poking it, and sapping at its life force.
And then, finally, it toppled. The beast roared and resisted as long as it could, but when it eventually got pushed far enough into the plot for the planted Clubber Vines to hit its ailing legs, it was too much. It staggered, couldn’t recover from the movement, and then crashed into the dirt headfirst where dozens of his vines began to wrap its head and neck.
You could just leave it for the farm to finish.
I’m not taking any chances. Tulland grabbed a handful of the beast’s fur and used it as a handhold as he leapt upwards onto its back. I’m going to end this now.
It wasn’t a single hit. By the time the animal stopped moving, Tulland had driven his pitchfork down into the general brain stem area of the monster’s neck so many times he could barely feel his own arms. But it finally, truly went down, confirmed by a message from The Infinite that popped up mercifully quickly as it collapsed.
Level Complete! Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. While The Infinite was aware of the sheer destructive power of your farm, it pretended not to for the sake of this challenge. And let it be said that holding back the farm’s powers until the last wave was the right call. Compensating for what amounted to a field of death would have been buffs that were bigger and wider-ranging in their applicability. By the tenth wave, you would have been dealing with a much more resistant, resilient threat. But you didn’t. By carefully rationing your power, you allowed The Infinite to enhance each wave to the maximum fair or only slightly unfair level it considered allowable, also maximizing your own rewards. You have already noticed that your leveling has been put on hold for the entirety of this floor. This was for a purpose, and you have a choice in the exact way that progress is paid out. The first option is to accept all the experience you would normally have gotten by doing the kind of thing you’ve been doing in this level, multiplied a bit to acknowledge that the level itself was completed. It will represent a fine chunk of growth. ŖÃNố₿ΕṠ The second choice you can select is to allow the Dungeon System to take a more in-depth assessment of your overall performance on this level, and to issue you a prize from a random range of performance-appropriate options. While there is a degree of randomness to this decision, the resulting item is guaranteed to at least be useful to your class, if not necessarily the most useful item you could have received. |
System, help me out here. The Infinite is offering me a bunch of experience multiplied by the fact I completed a level.
Fairly normal.
Agreed, but that’s not the only choice. It’s also asking me if I want to forgo that and instead assess me and give me some kind of random…
Take the random option. Immediately. Before it changes its mind.
It can do that?
It can do whatever it wishes. Just take it before some sort of timer runs out. Systems reward risk and danger, Tulland.
So I can’t lose?
You can lose. You could get a hand-shovel that helps you almost not at all. But the chances of you getting something worse are much lower than you getting something better.
Necia would kill me for leaving this decision in your hands.
I acknowledge that this might be the wrong choice while assuring you, once again, that I am not lying. Neither prize will be truly bad, in any case. At least if you don’t become spectacularly unlucky.
For the first time in a long time, Tulland cut the connection with the System. It was a hard decision, another big risk coming just after another big risk. And Necia was not wrong that the System would never, ever stop having a motivation to kill Tulland, and would always have plenty of time to scope out the best possible moment to betray it again.
Which was more complex since Tulland had already asked the System what it thought and found it broadly agreed with him. The Infinite was almost what Tulland would describe as playful, in the same way an animal cub might become playful out of boredom. It liked to see chances being taken. It didn’t exactly punish boring safe choices, but Tulland was convinced that without his accidental challenge of the Forest Duke all the way back on floor one, his life would have been much worse. Perhaps, he wouldn’t even had made it up here, unable to keep up with the general challenge of the levels just as soon as he found an enemy that could get to him before he had a chance to fully terraform a big chunk of a new level.
So he thought the System was right, despite knowing the System had a motivation to be wrong. And that meant he was choosing between what he thought was correct and the chance that the System was springing its trap on him right now. It was a mind-bender, to be sure.
In the end, the thing that made the decision for him was that he simply wasn’t crafty enough. He didn’t think he’d ever be able to predict the exact moment the System would pull the trigger and take him down with bad advice. That meant that choosing the opposite of what the System recommended would be, more times than not, a bad choice. The worst choice, even.
Tulland gave The Infinite permission to do its thing. At the very least, there was no reason for the bigger, more powerful System to dislike him in particular. There was some safety in that.
Reward Calculated! Choice: Skill Enhancement Token or Passive Combination Token The skill enhancement token can be applied to one of your skills to enhance it. As opposed to an experience pack, which would merely level the skill or to a skill evolution which would change the skill’s function, this token is purely additive. It takes an existing skill and adds to what it does, increasing the breadth of the skill without penalizing any of its existing specificity. In a general sense, this is one of the few guaranteed benefits one can receive from a change to a skill. Because of the lack of risk, the benefit itself is often small, but is always significant. The passive combination token allows a person to take any amount of their existing passive skills and combine them. The levels of each skill are average together, which results in a lower skill level, and thus an immediate, temporary loss of function to one or more of your most frequently used skills. The counter-balancing positives are significant, however. The first and most dependable advantage is that all the skills involved will now level together, slightly depressing the leveling speed of the former highest-performing skills but greatly increasing the leveling speed of little-used or hard-to-level skills. The second and more variable increase in function comes from potential synergies between skills. While one might wish to restrict their combination to a limited set of skills, sometimes the addition of additional skills to the pile allows for them to combine functions in new and unexpected ways, enhancing the function of some skills beyond what they would have attained by themselves. The passive combination token is thus risky even when used conservatively, and much more risky when used to its utmost. In the worst-case scenario, it can become a shackle around otherwise well-progressing skills. But in the best-case scenarios where that risk pays off to practical reward, it can be a boon far beyond the safe guarantee of the skill enhancement token’s additive improvement. |
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