Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon

Chapter 81: Progression

“Ughh. I was afraid of that. Sorry, Clubber vine.”

It won’t be useless.

“It doesn’t have to be. The vines were helping. I can still take them down, it’s just going to take… I don’t know. Three or four times as long if they can deal with my Clubber Vine. And only then if I don’t make a mistake.”

You have no choice but to try. It has seen most of what you have, now. Every change from here should be incremental.

“You think?”

“No, I mean you really thought this was all I had?”

Of course I did, Tulland. You haven’t told me any of your plans. And here they come again.

Tulland managed to survive a bit longer without making any huge changes. By the end of the sixth round, he was almost completely nullified in every respect.

Every form of physical attack Tulland could make barely hurt the things now, including chops from his hoe and pokes from the Lunger Vines. Worse, he couldn’t even rely on his armor to tank the inevitable hits he took as he worked as close to the herd as he dared now. By the time he put down the sixth wave. He was badly bloodied and torn, exhausted, and without any hope that he’d ever survive the next wave absent some major change.

And yet his farm also had plenty of time to grow now. With most of his plants doing only minimal damage, he was able to push a lot of his magic towards growth, loading up his Clubber Vines as heavily as he could before sending all of the rest of it to making a stock of violent plants to reload his arsenal with.

His Farmer’s Tool was holding up well, and the twenty minutes of wait he got between the sixth wave was just enough time to get him back to fighting condition before things got crazy again.

Okay. Ready for the fireworks?

I don’t see how you could pull through this, but sure. Please show me.

Reaching into his pack, Tulland made a very minor adjustment to his Market Wagon storage, something he had been thinking about for a long time and finally found the perfect moment to try.

The beasts were bigger, tougher looking things now. Every enhancement they had picked up for defense had made they stouter and more muscular, while every attacking-based adaptation had made them look sharper, faster, and more dangerously alive. They were fearsome, not least of which because, seven waves in, they moved as a cohesive, tightly packed whole.

Tulland smiled as they ran in, reached into his dimensional plant storage, and started spending all of his magic on enhancements as he suddenly threw flower after flower. Plants worked better when he designated them as combat variants. He had never done it with the Acheflowers, but that was only because they worked so poorly after the third floor that he had begun to think of them as more of a distraction or smokescreen than legitimate attack.

These beasts, however, explicitly had no defense to this kind of thing. They also, he loved to note, grouped up together in a way that made every single flower count for ten times its usual value. With a limitless supply of them growing on his Wolfwood trees, he started chucking the first of the dozens of flowers it turned out his dimensional storage would let him keep for combat purposes.

By the time that the fourth flower hit, the formation of beasts fell apart, with each of them going in a different direction besides those who, confused, began to tear into their compatriots. Tulland threw several more for good measure, just taking them out of his pack and tossing them as a group from a short distance before moving into the chaos like an agricultural storm.

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The animals never recovered. He was in no danger at all the entire time, simply mowing down the defenseless beasts like chaff until there were none left on the field besides him. The next four groups were the same, leaving him dominant over the entire wave and well rested by the time the newest and least surprising animal update yet rolled out.

You… hm.

Impressed?

I’d like to say I’m not, but that was a one-sided slaughter. Why did you wait until now to try to enhance the flowers?

It never made sense before now. The Stumpers hardly minded them. The Mass Hares could dodge them. The rogue hardly cares about poison unless he gets a ton of it at once. And even then, it’s a gamble. He has poison resistance and is on the lookout now that he knows I can use the flowers.

Of course, the same is true of the beasts. You should have seen that adjustment coming.

Oh, I did. It hardly matters, though. Watch this.

The interesting thing about all the adjustments so far had been that the Dungeon System could only do one of them at a time, and none of them truly removed a weapon from Tulland’s arsenal. They very much made it so he couldn’t rely on just one tactic, but everything still worked, even if much worse.

Which meant that a few handfuls of flowers wouldn’t immediately disable the entire group on an effectively permanent basis, but also meant The Infinite couldn’t adjust for the flowers and the herding behavior in a single round, if it could adjust for the herding behavior at all. Five flowers thrown at the group and a pile of flowers that Tulland detonated as they ran over them still confused the hell out of the beasts and gave him more than enough opportunity to take a few down before the group started recovering.

After that, it got a little trickier. He had to hit each beast he wanted away from the group multiple times to make it happen, but he could still do it, and the collateral damage from the spreading cloud made sure the response from the group itself was muted as well. The only issue with keeping it up indefinitely was his ability to get more of the parasites from his Achewood trees. His dimensional storage made this easier than it should have, jerking them off the trees as he made a quick run through the farm between waves and encouraged more of the parasites to grow with his skills as he left.

Soon enough, it was time for the ninth wave.

“What do you think?”

It’s about what I’d do, in the same situation. Your flowers are still effective largely because you can hit the entire group with them. This allows them to split, and nullifies that advantage. Do you have anything else?

“Just two more things, one of which I’m not sure is going to work.”

Let’s hope it’s enough. Two more waves, Tulland. Survive them, and you are on your way home.

It was true. What had seemed like an insurmountable challenge had turned out to be pretty okay so far, all things considered. Not being great at any one thing meant that Tulland was decent at a lot of weird things, and had to be just to survive. He had been able to adjust to an extent he didn’t believe anyone else in a similar challenge would have been.

System. A quick question.

So long as there’s time, sure.

The… difficulty curve, I think people say. Would the difficulty curve of this floor be different if I had done worse?

It follows the pattern of a challenge floor, so normally I would say yes. An adjusting difficulty that favored survival would be common in any normal dungeon, something that tried to keep up with your skill level while never putting you at serious risk so long as you were careful. It’s the normal way to test someone’s progression, or drive them to the next level of growth.

That’s a normal dungeon? What about here?

Here? All bets are off. It might even work the opposite way.

Tulland didn’t have to ask to know what the opposite way probably was. In a normal dungeon, he’d get grace if he couldn’t quite keep up. Here, in The Infinite, you were supposed to be more and greater than a simple adventurer from an average would would be. It wouldn’t adjust the difficulty downward for bad performance. It would simply let him die.

But that was just different, not opposite. The opposite thing was something he had been worried about for waves now, and part of the reason why he had never shown his entire power until it was absolutely necessary.

If he did too good, it made sense that The Infinite might actually make things harder, just to put him in his pace and keep the pressure on. As uncertain as he might be about surviving the normal progression, the thought of a harder one absolutely terrified him.