Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon
Chapter 192: Weird Hero

Tulland dismissed the System’s advice and did the opposite, letting a big group of them gather around him before twisting, spinning, and striking in an almost perfect circle with the point of his scythe. The little guys stacked up like meat on a kebab before dusting out.

I wonder if they could even hurt me now.

I’m not sure. They certainly couldn’t hurt the armor without a lot of individual attacks, but they have those to spare. You could let one of them attack you, I suppose.

Tulland baited one of the small warriors into range, which was only hard in the sense that he had to get just one of them off by itself. It went to work stabbing at his legs and torso. Up until the middle stages of The Infinite, he wouldn’t have stood a chance against the thing. It had weapons skills of some kind, indicated clearly by the flashes of darkness coming off its spearheads every so often.

Tulland could sense his armor taking damage, but it truly wasn’t much. Between ultra-high levels, his farm, the new and powerful plants growing on his farm, and his impossible armor, they really couldn’t sneak much damage past. What little hurt got through to his health was mitigated by his farm-based regeneration.

He spent longer than he needed to clearing the dungeon, pretending that each of the barragers he took down hurt the blight. It probably did, in some small insignificant way. The real advantage was that cutting them down cleared his head. Each one gone was making the world a little better in a small way, and eliminating the dungeon would do even more. Tulland worked his way slowly and methodically through the dungeon, emptying out each space as he went. The monsters emerged from everywhere, even burrowing out of little tunnels in the wall in a vain attempt to get the jump on him.

Eventually, he reached the pillar and seeded it with grass and briars, reclaiming the dungeon for Aghli’s System. It wouldn’t do much besides giving it a little bit of extra power to work with, power he knew it would try to give him back.

Tell it I don’t need anything special for upgrades. Save it for some future farm thing, I guess.

Are you sure? It could probably make you a stat potion.

I’m sure. Is a stat potion even going to do that much for me, anymore?

No, not really. Your class is complex enough and your stats high enough that it would be a small bump, if anything.

Then let’s just skip it.

Tulland jogged towards the entrance of the dungeon as everything began to crumble around him. Aghli’s System really couldn’t use the dungeon as-is, so the experience was pretty much exactly the same as if he had destroyed the pillar outright. When he breached the surface, he found Necia waiting for him.

“It’s done. Pretty much. I think there are some details to be ironed out, but they sent me to find you.” Necia’s eyes settled on the crumbling dungeon with very mind interest. “Do you feel better?”

“A bit. It made me feel useful.” Tulland ignored Necia’s eye roll and accepted her hand as she held it out to him. “That feels important right now.”

“Well, you’re going to be very useful soon. Or else there will be a big disaster. Are you ready to see which?”

Tulland smiled and shrugged, and they both jogged back to camp. When he got there, he saw that everything had quieted down even further. Most people weren’t involved in the relevant discussions anymore. Yuri was still hard at work with one of the more authoritative seeming lobbers, but even she broke away when Tulland showed up.

“All right guys,” Yuri announced. “Tulland’s back, so let’s go over the plan one more time. You all have a pretty good idea of the general battle plan by now, so just watch me and Necia for details and orders. As for Tulland… I’ll leave the next part to him.”

“I need to get close,” Tulland said. Necia had let Tulland know that simpler was better here. He didn’t need to give a lot of details. “But before I get close, I need to give this the best chance to work I can. More time would be better, but I understand if you don’t want to hold out for hours and hours.”

“You’ll need hours to sneak in anyway. What else are you trying to accomplish?” Yuri asked.

“We’ve figured out that the grass stops the flow of the blight, at least temporarily. If I can get through and get a bunch of grass planted and grow it all at once, then…”

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“It will cut off some of the blight’s power for a moment. Brilliant. Yes, do that.” Amrand looked around. “He’s gonna turn the old capital green under the blight’s nose. I think we can spare some hours for that, even if it doesn’t work as intended.”

“The only problem is I don’t know how I’m going to get the power to do that.”

Yuri raised her hand then. “We’re going to send you in there with a bunch of buffs for just that purpose. You’ll be overloaded, far beyond what you could normally carry. Multiples of your normal magic pool.”

“That’s great, but it’s also still a problem.” Tulland pulled out one of his new seeds. “See this? I don’t know exactly what it’s going to need, but it feels hungry. If I spend too much of my magic on grass, I might not have the means to power this.”

“Oh, Tulland. That’s why we have lobbers. Do what you need to do, then get into the air somehow. A tall building or a ruined pillar should do it. We’ll see you and hit you. The only thing is you might want to do it some place far from the blight’s troops because you’re going to have stand still for a little bit for us to do that.”

“Ah. I guess that works then.” Tulland looked down at his seed. “That’s assuming this thing grows. I want to make sure you all know I’m not entirely sure what this does, just that I created it with the aim of destroying the blight.”

“What would you put your chances of it actually working at?” a man in the audience asked. “If you had to put a number on it.”

“Honestly? Maybe one out of ten chances. But I don’t really know.”

Various warriors in the audience looked at each other and smiled. A few gave subdued cheers.

“What? That’s good enough?”

“A one out of ten chance of saving the world?” the guy said. “That’s a lot better than no chance. You think we all just want to sit around until we starve to death?”

Tulland smiled. It did help, that reasoning. No matter how much he was asking of them, it was still better than certain death. That tended to put a certain shine on things.

After everyone had said their piece, Tulland found himself wandering around the space. Checking people’s names, listening to their stories. He had never had enough time to talk to all of them, although most of them had at least shared a few words of conversation with him. After the show of support he was getting, he knew he owed them at least that much, to know who it was that was putting their lives squarely in his hands.

It wasn’t a surprise that so many of them were combat or combat-adjacent classes. A lot of non-combat classes could fight, but those that couldn’t had been whittled away by the constant dungeon creation of the blight. Even those that hadn’t fallen in that way had been subject to starvation as humanity had scrambled to hunt, grow, and otherwise gather the last few scraps of food available to them.

Scouts had done well, he found, especially scouts that could shoot a bow. Hunters had done well. Speed classes that could chase down food were over-represented.

At some point, he faded off into the distance a bit, overwhelmed. There just wasn’t a lot he could say to any of them. They had all been through too much. They were the toughened survivors of watching a world die, an experience that was even worse than most terrible things he had been through. When Necia found him, he was crying.

“It’s hard.” Necia rubbed his back without even asking what was going on. “Lots of pressure.”

“It’s not even just that I might die,” Tulland said. “That’s always a problem.”

“It’s that if you die, this world won’t do so well. You know that The Infinite would eventually send someone else, right?”

“Would it? Who else could do what I can? And if he had them to send, why wouldn’t he have sent them?”

“I don’t know.”

Tulland bounced his pitchfork in his hands. It was so much a part of him now that even handling it was a small comfort, and comforts were rare and valuable at the moment.

“We know planets die sometimes. I can’t even imagine it. Just… here one day, gone the next. Dust, mixed with the dust of everyone who ever lived there.”

“That’s pretty dark.” Necia drew Tulland into a hug. “You know what you can do about it?”

“What?”

“Be Tulland at the problems.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. You’ve never, ever failed. You’ve had to run and regroup a few times, and sometimes you only won part of all there was to win. But fail? Tulland? Never.”

“I’ve been lucky.”

“Have you? I’ve been thinking about that. Because everything you’ve told me about what The Infinite said points to existence being a sort of reinforcing cycle, for a soul. That they get stronger and better every time around. More themselves.”

“I couldn’t have been around many times, considering.” Tulland held up the pitchfork. “I’m not much of a farmer.”

“If you were ever a farmer before at all, I’d be surprised. But think about it, Tulland. What kind of guy gets a pitchfork and beats his way through the walls of The Infinite with it? What kind of guy sees weeds and uses them to become invincible?”

“You always say a weirdo.”

“Yeah.” Necia squeezed him a little tighter. “And I mean it. But also a hero, Tulland. A weird, weird hero.”

—

There wasn’t much prep left to do, as things turned out. Tulland found himself standing opposite every single other person he knew who didn’t live in his head, taking in at one glance everything he liked or loved in this world that wasn’t a hitchhiker in his own mind.

“I’ll do my best,” Tulland promised.

“That’s all anyone can ask, Tulland.”

“Amrand’s right.” Yuri walked up and put a small light into Tulland’s chest, something that made him feel a bit lighter and happier than before. “Don’t worry. That wears off almost as soon as you get it. It’s not even a skill.”

“What is it?”

“Just a little ray of happy. Are you ready for the rest of it?”

“Sure.”

Every buffer in the joint separated into a group and opened fire, and for a time all was chaos. Tulland had tried to get a list of everything they’d be doing to him, but it was more complex than that. Some buffs were direct, and other buffs had effects while they were running and then other effects after they wore off. The first batch of buffs were things that the next batch would cancel, but that left residuals in their place. Eventually, he’d be stacked not only with dozens of buffs to his body, magic, and defense, but the still-twitching remnants of dozens of others. From what Yuri told him, it was the most extensive buff any person had probably ever had.

It was also, she said, completely beyond his ability to understand, no matter how hard he tried. After trying for just a bit, he came to believe her.

Once the barrage of lights, rays, and various touches to his head, heart, and arms finished, he was a new man. He was quite literally glowing, for one, and had to take several experimental steps before he was able to walk and run steadily. It was a crazy amount of physical power to have, and that paled in comparison to what was happening magically in him. He felt like if he was poked, he’d pop like a balloon and wash out several acres of land with sheer energy.

“Go, Tulland,” Yuri said. “I mean it. Everyone say goodbye to Tulland.”

Everyone present did. Tulland nodded in response.

“Now you need to really go. No drawn out individual stuff. This buff won’t last forever, and we have no idea what might happen down there.”

Tulland ran over and gave Necia a peck on the cheek, then started walking. The blight’s horrifying territory wasn’t far. What took longer was to find the exact angle he was supposed to approach from, a scouted and re-scouted starting point that almost never saw patrols and led into the exact kind of winding, spiraling route he thought had the best chance of making the plan work.

Even out here, he was in pain, and that was only going to get worse. His improved regeneration was more than keeping up with the damage the blight was doing, but this close to the capital it felt like some kind of invisible fire was melting him. He was growing back as fast as it could work, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t feel the damage as it happened.

Finally, he was perfectly lined up with his route and ready to run. When the rare patrol that actually went that way had cleared his path and he was sure he wouldn’t be seen, he ran faster than he knew was possible for him, and ducked behind a pile of rubble. From there, he regained his bearings and dashed again, taking cover again and again until he finally reached a place thick enough with houses that it was unlikely he’d be seen.

Search the lightnovelworld.cc website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.