Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon

Chapter 82: Ninth Wave

Tulland started out the ninth wave entirely committed to not doing a single thing differently. He had picked up a lot of damage during the last wave, sure. But if he knew The Infinite, whatever was coming in the tenth wave was going to be a step beyond what he had gleaned from the pattern so far. He needed to avoid showing his hand as much as he could. He wasn’t going to pull out a single stop unless it was absolutely, positively required.

It took less than five seconds to break his resolve. Tulland threw his Acheflower, as usual, but watched big gaps in the beast’s charging formation open up to the perfect size and at the perfect timing to minimize the effect of the explosions. There were still a few beasts catching just a little bit of the powder around the edges, but just barely and not nearly enough to count on to make a real difference.

In response, Tulland only had a few choices on what to do. The first was almost painful considering what was to come, but he dumped out the entirety of his stock of flowers on the ground in front of them as he jumped back just out of their explosion range. He was confident that the beasts could get out of the way of anything he threw, but was almost as sure that they wouldn’t give up chasing him entirely just because there were some unexploded flowers in their path.

Sure enough, they followed. And as they did, he let the flowers go, covering the better part of the group in a thick cloud of hallucinogen. It barely slowed them down. Despite scoring a direct hit, there was only so much time they spent within the cloud, and it did much less than if the flowers had hit them all at once.

You were asking about other tricks. Tulland dodged away from the group, watching as fully half of the animals split off in an obvious attempt to work around his flank. Obvious or not, it would work if he couldn’t stop it. Are you ready to see one?

Of course. If you really have one to show.

Tulland smiled, thrust his pitchfork out to gain a bit of distance, then summoned the second of the two Clubber Vines he could store right now.

That’s actually… more than I thought it would be.

Right? Two whole Clubbers at your service.

Tulland’s Market Wagon skill was a dimensional storage that only allowed him to designate two plant types as combat ready and only a limited number of each plant, but it was a skill that leveled and had steadily been leveling since he got it. Normally, that had meant just a few more Giant’s Hairs or Lunger Briars, which was fine but usually not a make-or-break difference in Tulland’s fighting capability.

The most recent level-up he had gained was different. It had increased the carry capacity of his Clubber Vines by one whole unit. For a plant that more than justified its existence at the previous one-briar carry limit, this meant Tulland just became twice as dangerous.

In his previous clashes with the herd of beasts, the Clubber Vine had done a great job watching his left side and hitting targets of opportunity. He was still open to attack for a few reasons, though. The first was that the vine could only attack so fast, and the second was that it only could cover so much of the effective circle of combat vulnerabilities around Tulland’s body.

That went both ways, though. There were only so many of the larger, stronger beasts that could be adjacent to him at any given time. Now, even if they completely surrounded him, the Clubber Vines would give them a run for their money as they tried to get close enough to hurt him. And in that gap, he could use his pitchfork to actually put them down, or at least hold them in place long enough for the Clubber Vines to do it.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

It was, Tulland realized, a shift in formation. He might have had more total battle power with Lunger Vines, or more constriction with Giant’s Hairs. But with one of the Clubber Vines on each wrist, he was essentially a damage dealer standing between two tanks, each fully capable of standing up to the best.

Which wasn’t to say he wasn’t getting hurt.

Shouldn’t Strong Back have leveled by now? I’ve been taking constant damage since we got here.

Maybe. One of two things is true. It might be a skill that levels when you take a lot of damage at once. Grievous injuries, near-fatal blows. That sort of thing.

Except it’s originally a farmer’s regeneration. They don’t get hurt at all.

Which does not prove anything, but I think you are correct in doubting that a lack of intensity of hurt is the problem here.

So what is? Tulland backed up from the surging group of beasts, keeping them from surrounding him and waiting for an opening. Do I need to take some kind of special damage? ?ÅN????

Hardly. More likely, The Infinite is holding your rewards until the end of this round.

Cheap!

No, you fool. Not cheap. The Infinite never takes what it cannot give back in return. Even when your class was approaching a disruptive shape that couldn’t be allowed, you were granted much more than I believed at that time. Even you are beginning to see it here, in this place.

Yeah. Tulland was starting to realize it, for the first time. It’s not that bad of a class. Farmer. Now that I’m beginning to understand it.

It was true. This level was supposed to be a challenge. And it was, in a way. But it was a challenging level in the ultimate dungeon, and he was clearing it without ever being in dire straits. He was fighting and killing and surviving, just like a proper combat class, but also doing things more like a magic-casting class would, supporting himself with area-of-effect confusion, or laying traps in the earth like a hunter class might.

If anything, the weakness he was dealing with right now was guidance. Someone like Necia had generations of experience with tank classes to draw off, to use as inspiration for their next attempts at growth. Tulland had a vague idea of what farmers actually did, and a System that couldn’t give him enough help to actually matter. He was making a lot of progress, lately, with one innovation coming right after another. Though that might have been just because he had been so very slow and unfocused at the beginning.

I’m making up for lost time now, anyway.

The way that battles tended to work was that if you were losing, you were getting hurt. If you were getting hurt, you were getting worse and worse at fighting, and then you were losing faster than ever. Unless you had some kind of specific plan to turn things around, getting hurt meant you were dying. The same went for spending your resources without a clear gain. If you were getting worse, you were losing more.

The flip side of that was that so far, Tulland had been able to stay just ahead of the curve on this level, even when he wasn’t showing every single capability he had. Even though he was getting hurt, they were all minor injuries that didn’t change the outlook of things. That meant that here, just as in the last several waves, he was just safe enough to keep going indefinitely unless something went wrong. Or if not indefinitely, at least to the end of this particular wave.

And nothing went wrong. One group of ten monsters fell, then another. With every side of his defense well-covered and every bit of the strength of the herd split among its individual members, the math just worked out in his favor. Soon enough, he was recovering on the ground once more.

Don’t rest. At least not before you assess your equipment. Rest is a thing to be prioritized, like everything else.

He sounded oddly like Tulland’s tutor, in that moment. Tulland hated that he was right, just as he always had when the old man was. He went and harvested two fresh clubber vines, and shifted his hallucinogens flowers to something else he hadn’t packed into the Market Wagon before. After pumping some power into both his secondary and primary gardens, he finally sat down for a breather.