Infinite Farmer-Chapter 167: Level Gate
That was reasonable enough as requests went, but Tulland was far too occupied to do anything with it. Just keeping out of the range of trees meant constantly moving, and the vines were coming at a faster and faster pace now, like they had been holding back their true speed until they got a better idea of what Tulland and his group were capable of.
Finally, when a tree got close enough to burst several yards towards them at ten times the speed it had moved before, Necia was forced to jump out ahead to keep it from disrupting Tulland’s flow. She knocked it clean out of the ground with a shield bash and managed to kill it with several strikes from her club, but her distance from Tulland prevented him from keeping the vines off her as well as he could have. By the time he fought his way back to her, she was covered.
He raised his Farmer’s Tool to cut the vines off of her only to be ambushed himself and more than half of them sprung from her towards him. He ashed most of them, but a few luckier vines managed to get through to his arms before he could neutralize them. A few moments after that, both he and Necia were struggling under piles of the blighted plants, maintaining some level of freedom but unable to get completely out of their grasp.
“Bad.” Necia gasped. “Really bad.”
“Should I hit you? Revenge strike?” Tulland asked.
“I used it on the tree. And Yuri is… where is Yuri?”
“Over here, idiots.” It took Tulland a moment to realize Yuri was talking to the plants and not him. Her hand was glowing, holding on to a spark just like the ones she usually pressed into Necia to enable her to fight more. “Come and get it.”
That might work. It depends on what the plants want. If they only sense the magic force… they do. They are moving. Make the most of it, Tulland.
Necia looked positively sick, but the vines quickly retracted from her in favor of chasing after Yuri and freed her enough to stand.
“Necia. Protect Yuri. Sorry. I have to…”
“I understand. Give them hell,” Necia said.
Tulland trusted Necia would be able to get to Yuri, but she wouldn’t be able to hold off the blighted plants for long. If he wanted to come back to anything besides one or more drained corpses, he’d have to make this quick.
The other System had already given him the key. He chopped a tree clear in half as he ran towards the treeline where most of the vines had been coming from, not waiting for it to dust out as he moved at his new, absurd top speed. If what the other System had said was true, there was a source of these things somewhere.
It took no time at all to find one. He could have hardly missed them. Now that they had revealed themselves, the source of the vines looked like writhing masses of snakes or worms on the ground, sending out streamer after streamer of constricting death towards the grove.
Tulland got the hoe out and struck at the center of it. He figured if he could chop enough of it, he wouldn’t have to look for the delicate stalk that held it all together. He was wrong, at least in the sense that he assumed he’d be able to chop a lot of it. The stalk didn’t break in one hit, instead stopping his hoe mid-swing. He had got better than halfway through it, though, and another swipe took it out of the ground entirely. The streamers fell limp, making it halfway to the ground before they dissolved into fog.
The second tangle of brush didn’t take nearly as long. He pumped more energy into Primal Growth, pushing his chimera vines to their limit but busting the stem in a single hit. After that, it was a race against time. He was sure Necia and Yuri were giving it their best, but this was an enemy that was simply beyond them. Every second, he ashed a new plant to nothingness, and prayed it would be enough.
Quicker than he could have imagined, he made a complete cycle around the grove. Most of the plants had been huddled on one side, and the second half was more of a sprinting, spotting, and destroying game. It felt like an eternity. By the time Tulland hand neutralized the last plant, he had worried himself so sick about Necia that he felt like he was going out of his mind.
When he broke the treeline to the clearing again, he saw Necia and Yuri huddled on the ground, the latter completely motionless while Necia weakly cradled her in her arms. Around them were several dozen trees, all of which were seconds from getting into their attack range.
Something in Tulland broke.
He felt a bone in his foot crack from the force of his lunge towards the fight, something he hadn’t known was even possible. The Chimera Sleeves should have been maxed out, but for some reason were responding to his need and overdriving further than he thought they could. Several of them registered as damaged in his farmer’s sense, but it was all worth it as he moved faster than he ever had before. Somewhere, some monster was roaring. Tulland realized, with a shock, that it was him.
By the time he realized what he was doing, three trees were down, and the others had all changed their targets from the two girls to the healthier, more energy-packed madman that had burst onto the scene. The way Tulland was feeling right now, that turned out to be a mistake. He overdrove the Chimera Sleeves again, stabbing through two of the trees at once and sending them tumbling into a third.
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Just like that, the battlefield was cleared.
“Scary.” Yuri slurred on the ground. “Serious. You weren’t kidding.”
“No.” Necia flopped into the grass, which ashed from the collision with her armor. “I wasn’t.”
WARNING
The battle is not over. The plants are regrowing. The grove is the enemy, not the plants. It uses them as weapons. Somewhere, there’s a power source. A core. Something. Don’t stop fighting.
“No.” Necia tried to stand, but collapsed under her own weight as her arm went wobbly and fell from under her. “Can’t be. We haven’t seen anything like that.”
“Nothing in the forest, either.” Tulland spun in place, looking for clues. “Can you run?”
“No. And we don’t know how far they can chase.”
“We have to find the core then. It’s just I don’t know how.”
From the edge of the forest, Tulland saw the vines begin to creep back into the clearing, thinner and weaker but clearly growing. Soon they’d be under full attack again.
Farmer’s Intuition. Use it. Remember how it recoiled from the evil of this place before?
Yes, but that’s the whole place.
Fine. Good. Look for hotspots. What feels the worst?
The vines felt plenty bad. The trees themselves were still horrible, with the new, undergrown moving trees feeling even worse than that. None of them felt like the core of anything, or any worse than they had when he had first encountered them. He felt that he needed to pick up Necia and Yuri and run, until the idea of doing that gave him a clearer idea of what he was running from.
Near the center of the clearing was a patch of grass that looked exactly like the rest of the horrible grass around it, except for how much Tulland hated it. It was revolting. It was the antithesis of everything he had come to be. It was an evil farm, his Farmer’s Intuition said. It was the worst possible place to plant.
He burst into motion, bringing his scythe around in almost a complete circle and timing the impact for the moment he got into range. The ground resisted the downward stab, but that attempt at defense was nothing compared to the power Tulland was pumping through his Chimera Sleeves just then.
The ground fought back, pushing the blade of the scythe upward again, gaining an inch or two of room before Tulland brought his foot down in a hard stomp, driving the blade in up to the handle. A high-pitched shrieking range out, loud and terrible beyond belief.
Then, before Tulland could do anything about it, he was falling. He heard a surprised yelp from Necia and assumed the same thing was happening to her, but was too surrounded by a sudden cloud of blight to do anything about it. He retracted his Farmer’s Tool from a pitchfork, hoping that would be enough to keep himself from getting impaled on landing.
The worries ended up being mostly unjustified. After much less time than expected, he hit the ground, slid a bit, and found himself standing on a bare, loose-dirt slope that was rapidly becoming more visible through the dissipating blight-fog.
“Well, looks like you got it,” Necia said deadpanned after also regaining her bearing.
“Yeah, I’d say so. Think all this was revenge?” For a quarter mile in every direction, the clearing and surrounding dungeon had been replaced by a massive, gaping crater in the jungle floor. It was barren and empty, even devoid of the less than dangerous blight plants that carpeted the rest of the terrain. “A little overdramatic, if so.”
“I don’t think so. It was a blight enemy, right? In the form of a grove. A living grove that you killed, and then it went poof.” Yuri motioned around the now-empty space in the ground. “See? Poof.”
“That’s a little much to take in. It would make it the biggest beast I’ve ever seen. Bigger than the turtles, even,” Tulland said.
“The blight has had a long time to make weird things. It’s been years since anyone was in here. Now start looking around, okay? We need to move on as soon as possible if I’m going to keep my promise to you two.”
“What are we looking for?” Necia was struggling off the ground, only then starting to recover from the drain of the blight. Tulland guessed that Yuri was feeling even worse, having been nearly unconscious only a few minutes ago. She was pale and unsteady as she moved around, stomping on the earth. Necia slipped under Yuri’s arm, and together they walked around hitting the soil in various ways. “Not that this isn’t fun. I just might also throw up.”
“The door. Remember what the System said? The whole clearing was alive, and linked in ways it didn’t understand to some sort of floor gate. We need to find that gate.”
“Right away?”
“Before anything else attacks, yes, that would be nice.” Yuri turned and looked at Tulland. “You are still fresh. Necia is recovering fast. I saw you moving back there, and you don’t even need a break. Most of your problems back there came from protecting us.”
“It’s true, Tulland. I’m better at bigger, stronger things. Like the turtles. Or making openings for you against tough things, the way you fight these days. If we end up fighting a lot of fast things without you there to take them down, we’re toast. We have to get through this dungeon before you can’t help us anymore.”
Wordlessly, Tulland pulled out his shovel and started poking around. The women had a point that he wasn’t about to just ignore. It took him a good minute before he contacted something stone and sturdy in the dirt, then another minute or so to uncover it. It was a familiar site.
Level Gate
Stepping through this gate will transport you to the next level of this dungeon. Due to local interference, the System has no idea what awaits you on the other side. Be cautious and prepared for almost anything. You may just encounter it.
“Ready?” Tulland looked back at Yuri and Necia, who both nodded and got into prepared stances. Without any further ado, he walked through the gate, ready to clear the stoop for them and trusting they’d follow.
