Infinite Farmer-Chapter 140: Unknown

Two hours later, Tulland’s magic was at rock bottom, his dirt pails were empty, and Necia was waving him over as the troops marched towards their first target.

“It’s a small one first, right?” Tulland asked.

“Right.” Necia held her hands apart with not much distance between them. “Tiny. Licht claims it’s a tent and a storage shack. I can’t tell if he’s exaggerating or not.”

He wasn’t, as it happened. They found the enemy installment being guarded by one very nervous-looking dirt man. The tent was meant to be his, Tulland supposed, and the shack was only slightly bigger, the kind of building that might be slapped up to hold farm tools or very basic supplies. Licht leveled his crossbow, carefully aiming before taking out the dirt man with a precise shot through his temples. The shack ended up containing some rudimentary weapons and armor, none of which anyone wanted.

They torched it.

Enemy installation destroyed! (Tiny Outpost)

You have bullied a guard and burned down a shack. There are no targets easier than this on the field. Your rewards are adjusted accordingly.

To make real progress, seek out larger, better-guarded targets that present more of a challenge for your team and more lost value for the enemy.

For Tulland, it was a relief. They may not have got many points, but they got some, and they didn’t have to be in much danger doing it. The rest of the warriors looked more worried than anything, like the small installation wasn’t a step forward at all. They looked like they were actively afraid they had made a mistake.

“Brist. Why is everyone tense?”

Tulland whispered. Brist responded at full volume.

“Because the installation was small, and it’s something the enemy will know is gone sooner or later. Probably sooner. If this group is simulating a real army, they’ll have ways to know they are attacked.”

“And that’s bad?” Tulland asked.

“It’s a coin toss. If they know we hit them, they’ll almost certainly shuffle troops around. That means we might meet some on the road. It means that some of the scouting Licht did might be out of date by the time we move to make use of it. Of course, it might be good, too. Might mean we take out smaller patrols and weaken or targets, or that they pull back towards more defensible positions from the places we want to attack,” Brist said.

“If it’s a coin flip, why act like it’s a bad thing?”

Brist snorted.

“Kid, on a battlefield, unknown is always a bad thing. We traded away some knowing for the chance to get an easy win, but don’t make any mistakes about why. We are betting the points are worth the risk. Not every bet is a winner.”

It was a few more hours of tromping through the woods until they ran into one of the patrols Brist had predicted. Tulland was walking when a whooshing, fast-moving object passed what felt like inches in front of his face, before slamming straight into a completely unprepared Potter.

“Potter’s down! Necia, protect him,” White bellowed. “Everyone else, roust them out. I don’t care how.”

A hail of arrows followed the first, scoring some minor hits on Tulland’s group as they either returned fire or charged into the woods. Tulland broke the brush to find himself face to face with one of the dirt warriors, a bulkier than average mace-man whose weapon he barely avoided before answering with a retaliatory pitchfork stab.

Tulland was not prepared for how weak he was. He knew all the numbers, but when his pitchfork slammed into the dirt-man’s chest and got stuck, the reality was still a shock. He leaned back on the fork hard, which should have dislodged it if only the dirt man hadn’t reached out his shield hand to grasp the shaft and hold it in.

That left Tulland with a choice between either letting go of his weapon entirely or allowing the dirt man’s follow-up strike to take him down. The milliseconds passed like hours as he decided on a third option, dropping to his knees to avoid the mace strike while he did something truly desperate.

Get over his head. Blind him and keep him off balance.

Me?

Tulland ignored the System’s confusion while his Chimera Sleeve darted off his arm, climbed the dirt man’s grasping arm, and ballooned up as it closed over his head like organic shrink wrap.

If there was one thing Tulland knew from fighting Brist, it was that angles mattered. At his level, there were thousands of tiny adjustments that Tulland’s fighting skills were making that optimized every bit of how he handled his weapon. If any of those were thrown off, as they had been when he was trying to figure out aim-assistance with Brist, it left him absolutely exposed. Back then, he couldn’t have been further from actually wounding Brist, and the boxer had been able to hurt him at will.

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The Chimera Sleeve couldn’t have been very tough right now, but a person’s head didn’t have much in the way of natural defenses against what it was doing. The dirt man now had a choice of its own. Either it could drop its weapon, hit itself in the head with the weapon, or let go of Tulland’s pitchfork to rip the vine off its head. It went with the last, as Tulland expected.

The dirt man’s hand darted towards its own covered head, but Tulland was still a step ahead. As soon as his pitchfork was free, he withdrew it, ripping the dirt man’s insides the whole way out. A second stab managed to deflect the reaching arm from destroying his vine, with the added benefit of leaving the dirt man wide open for a third stab to his neck.

That one took it down. The whole process from the order to the sleeve to the end of the enemy took about a second.

Never mind. I see. Will you flee?

No. I can’t just leave them to Necia. Every enemy that’s tied up here can’t there. Besides, I have a tactic that works.

This chapter is updat𝙚d by freeweɓnovel.cøm.

The next warrior hit him a second after that, and was even bigger. Tulland took its axe-chop head on, shoving the handle of his weapon against the haft of the axe and cranking his whole body to the side to create an opening for his retrieved Chimera Sleeve. This enemy was a higher level, and responded to the blinding much better, throwing defensive swipe after defensive swipe with its big, two-handed chopping tool.

Any single one of those hits would have cleaved through Tulland like he was made out of air, but there were other tricks up his sleeve, so to speak.

When I say, jerk to the side. Tulland waited for the dirt man’s next blow to reach the extreme of its swing, the point of no return in which the dirt man had to keep the momentum to maintain its stance and balance. Now.

The sleeve jerked to the side, pulling the dirt man slightly with it. The difference was so small that Tulland was sure he couldn’t have seen it in his original, normal-human form. It was far less than an inch, something he understood because he had been there so many times, had felt the difference every time Brist had pushed him just a little too far to his right or left.

And he knew that whatever he did next, the dirt man wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. He allowed the pitchfork to come up, rasping it across the dirt man’s head as it passed. Then, once it cleared, he turned it into a scythe, pushed off his toes, and pulled hard. It was what Brist had explained to him, now strengthened by the unstable posture of his opponent, and it sliced clear through the dirt man, every bit of Tulland’s weight pulling the blade back towards him.

This is very effective. Do you think it could be the thing?

No. It feels closer, but there have been no objections from The Infinite yet. It is not shy, and it does not think whatever you are about to do is a small problem. If you had found it, it would have told you.

Tulland managed to take out two more soil warriors with his tactic before the attack was neutralized. He ran back to where he had left Necia, who had a ring of soil piles around her and a trail of dust piles all the way from where she had faced the first attack.

“Whoa. You killed all of these?” Tulland asked.

“None of them, actually. Other people did this while I held them still. That’s my job, you know. Still, it went really particularly well,” Necia said.

“Of course it did. You should have seen her, Tulland. Every angle was art.” Potter bobbed his head in appreciation. “I did a special study on martial classes once, particularly blockers, and I can tell you that there’s an ideal set of angles for any given block. She hit all of them as closely as I’ve seen. Quite remarkable, really.”

“You lived!” Tulland hugged Potter, who looked legitimately surprised to find arms wrapped around him. “I saw you go down.”

“I have some tricks of my own, you know. I’m glad to have survived too, but if you could let go of me, I’d appreciate it. I’m still a bit perforated.”

Between letting Potter and a few others heal and burying one unfortunate rogue under the ground, it took a half hour before they were moving again. They spent most of that time in the bushes, hiding and digging. Tulland was the shovel guy, and did the bulk of that work while trying not to think about the fallen teammate.

After that, it was a few more hours of walking through the woods before they made it to the next installment. This one was bigger, right on the edge of the size that might require a wall. Instead, they just had trenches lined with spikes and a very healthy perimeter guard force that spotted them almost right away.

They still had an advantage. Their archers put down half of the ranged fighters in the dirt forces before they could get to their battle stations, then started focusing on weakening the warriors as the main force of melee fighters charged in.

Three arrows smacked into Tulland as he ran at the front of the charge, for the first time giving him an indication of just how good his armor was. He took some damage, but nowhere near what he thought he would have a week ago. Mostly he just had to concentrate on moving close enough that the enemy fighters would keep him safe from arrow fire with their bodies, making sure he didn’t break his stride as each new arrow hit him.

The last battle was a surprise on bad terrain. This one was mostly something they could prep for, something that they walked into with an established strategy and plan. It was still worse. It was more chaotic than any other battle Tulland had been in with the group, even when Potter got caught. His farm was actually a good deal more powerful now after having a few more hours to grow, and the individual warriors weren’t any stronger than those they had met on patrol. He was moving through them faster, but they just kept coming. In the meantime, teammates were falling and getting back up bloodied, and sometimes falling and not getting up at all.

Tulland eventually fell into a battle state he hadn’t been in before, going through his moves on pure muscle memory, ignoring his shortness of breath and the pain in his muscles in favor of striking out with his pitchfork again and again, letting Clubber Vines take the hits they could take while his Chimera Sleeves took advantage of the chaos and lined up his next targets for him.

Finally, even that started to fail. His arms hadn’t been tired in months, but now were wobbling. Every muscle body was hurting, twitching, and slightly malfunctioning in a way that would have killed him if his vines weren’t working overtime to make sure his opponents were in even worse condition.

Disaster eventually came in the form of something neither he nor his vines saw. One of dirt men somehow disengaged from the fighter it had been battling somewhere behind Tulland, turned, and clubbed him hard in the leg with some kind of soil-based mace. In the condition Tulland was in and with no warning, there was no chance of keeping his feet.

Landing on his back, every leg he could see was dirt. The earth warrior he had been engaging was shoved out of the way as a sword-wielding variant took his place, raised its weapon, and plunged it down towards Tulland.