Infinite Farmer-Chapter 154: Argument

“Pushovers, you said.” Tulland huffed and complained for the third time that hour. “I guess it’s true for each one of them.”

“To be fair, I wasn’t thinking of what it would be like to push over a whole army. From what I know on my world, this is an abnormal amount of enemies to get out of a wave.”

It was ten hours into the dungeon break now. Which meant ten full hours of bashing, spearing, and hoeing his enemies into submission with no end in sight. According to Necia’s experience, dungeon breaks like this would eventually wane before they finally petered out, and even that hadn’t begun yet.

“And your System friend doesn’t know what’s causing this?” Necia asked.

“It said it was thinking. About an hour ago. I’ll try again,” Tulland said.

Don’t bother. I’m done thinking.

And?

And all bets are off. I watched the flows of power into this dungeon, and there’s a small surge every once in a while. I couldn’t figure out why until I started counting the kills. Every fifty, and the dungeon restocks on power.

Ugh. So we’ve been doing this for nothing?

Something somewhere is paying for the power this dungeon uses, so I wouldn’t say for nothing. But it’s certainly not going to be enough to stop this dungeon break before whatever is paying those costs decides it’s so.

So what do we do? I’m not inclined to just run from this. Seems like that makes this someone else’s problem.

Just choose the normal option. What’s the problem?

Tulland suppressed his frustration until the System realized its own mistake, then another few beats while it found the confidence to rectify that.

I apologize. I forget sometimes that a high level doesn’t mean experience. Very simply, some dungeons are persistent. They spawn around cities and never leave. In your world, those were sources of wealth for those who raided them. Now, normally, those would be a small minority of dungeons. The exceptions.

I hate to hurry you, but every word you say is two ogres I have to kill.

Fair enough. The point is that in a healthy world, one with a System, one of the functions of that System is to build dungeons that can be raided and cleared. One time treasure-troves combined with the possibility of disaster. I had ceased to make them in your world for centuries, for obvious reasons.

But here they are standard. So we just go in there and… what?

Kill everything you see until you reach the end. Destroy the dungeon pillar, destroy the dungeon, and move on.

“The System says the break will never end unless we clear the dungeon,” Tulland said.

“I hardly believed that was possible, but it does seem that way. It’s sure?”

“It’s sure. Says the only way out is to destroy a column.”

“A pillar. Not the same thing.” Necia swung her mace three or four times, clearing out the rest of the ogres on the surface. “I can go first, or you can. Or we can walk side by side, but you’d need to be on my left so I can swing.”

“To the left, just behind you. I’ll switch to my pitchfork.”

“Great.”

Tulland wasn’t sure what to expect when they crossed the border into the dungeon, a place represented as a sort of pitch-black curtain of nothingness between them and the dangers beyond. It turned out to be pretty boring. It was larger than made sense, but overall looked like an earthen cave, something that made sense to be carved out of the local terrain. No huge forest stood in their way, and no gigantic stone labyrinth blocked them. Necia must have noticed him looking, and smirked.

“Bored?” Necia smiled at him, a little taunting. “Not good enough for you?”

“I expected more, yeah. First dungeon on a new world and it’s just ogres and dirt.” Tulland put down the three ogres in front of him with well-aimed shots to their necks and faces, then strode forward. “Are they always this boring?”

“No idea. My-father-the-king would only let me into the royal dungeon with guards. That one looked a lot like the castle. Which was the worst.” Necia swiped several ogres down as she remembered her former life. “Here I was, a young lady who wanted nothing more than to see the world, and the only thing that dungeon would show me were more castle walls and Clockwork Knights.”

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“Those sound fun.”

“They weren’t. They were like knights, only tiny. Lower than my knee in battle form. Not hard to kill, until you got to lower levels, where I wasn’t allowed to go.” An unfortunate ogre chose that moment of annoyance to charge and got a shield to send it into the ground, followed by a chop with the lower point of the shield at his throat that put him down for good. “Compared to that, this is fine.”

“Fair. And I guess it’s just a baby dungeon. Maybe it will be better later. Now, how should we handle this? Because if we just step forward a few times every dozen ogres it’s going to take forever,” Tulland said.

“We could do that. Or we could use me as a snowplow,” Necia said.

“A what?”

“A big wedge on a wagon you use to clear snow. We had classes just for that. I could charge forward, you could follow. These things can’t stop me from pushing forward, so you’d mainly just be following in my wake and keeping them off my flanks. We might have to fight our way out once we are done, but we could probably sprint straight through this thing.”

“You won’t die?”

“Not likely. At least it’s much more likely we get into trouble because I get tired and make mistakes. This at least gets us done quick.”

Tulland nodded and Necia got to work. Pushing forward hard, she had ten or twenty ogres knocked off balance and to the sides in the next few seconds. Something about her shield skills made them careen away in almost the exact direction she wanted them to, leaving a gap in front of her perhaps twice as wide as they actually needed. Tulland’s job was to follow and protect her flanks, but he found he didn’t even really have to do much of that. The other ogres in the vicinity were so busy dealing with checking the momentum of their flying friends that they didn’t have much of a chance to actually push in for swipes with their big, slow clubs.

The dungeon ended up not being that big, anyway. After a few miles of bulldozing their way through the opposition, Tulland and Necia found themselves on the safe size of a small, earthen hole that led to a room with no ogres at all.

“They don’t guard it?” Tulland asked.

“No. Usually there’s some kind of boss, though. I think it’s there, still forming,” Necia said.

Tulland looked where she was pointing and saw a rapidly forming ogre-shape rising from the ground. It was both bigger and stronger than the ones he had seen before, a darker shade of black and overall giving off a much stronger sense of danger.

“It still doesn’t seem very strong.”

“That’s why I’m going to block the door and let you kill it. Get to work before it’s up and running. It should make things easier.”

It did. Tulland let loose all his combat plants on the floor next to the enemy as he started stabbing with his pitchfork again and again. It wasn’t quite enough to keep the ogre coming fully online. After several seconds of unrevenged pounding, the boss was finally fully formed, standing erect with a much more dangerous war-club aloft, howling in rage.

Tulland stabbed it again in the face for good measure, and it exploded.

“There’s another one. This one is stone. Or something.” Tulland watched a cylinder of gray material rise from the soil. “A golem?”

“The pillar. Just knock it down, okay? I’m hungry. I want you to catch me a fish.”

Tulland shrugged and hit the pillar, which crumbed after three smashes with his hoe. Outside, the loudest collective howl he could imagine sounded out as a wind of dark, shadowy vapor rushed past the room.

“Oh, wow. Looks like that took all of them out.” Necia pulled her shield back and started inspecting it. “About time, too. I wasn’t expecting this shield to take so much damage fighting them.”

They walked outside to a wasteland. For miles on every side of the dungeon, a large, circular field of death was in place, containing nothing but wilted grasses and suddenly dead-looking shrubs.

“The dungeon did all this? It’s horrible.” Necia kicked at some grass, which crumbled to dust at the slightest of pressure. “Ask your System how it did this. And why we aren’t getting any rewards.”

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System, why….

Busy. The System’s voice sounded strained. Having an argument. Back in touch soon.

“It says it’s having an argument.”

“With who?”

“No idea. But it’s nice to see it making friends, I guess?”

It took a few miles of walking to get out of the effects of the blight dungeon, something they could feel as soon as they got out of the range entirely. The air felt cleaner and better on Tulland’s skin, and that improved with every step of the next mile or so.

“I’m going to rinse off in the river. Armor and all.” Necia looked down at all her gear. “It looks like it finally recovered, by the way.”

“Good.” Tulland’s armor had healed up, too, though his Farmer’s Tool wasn’t recovering from the minor amount of damage it had taken. All his plants that had been involved in the battle still looked a little worse for the wear than he would have expected, but the living Chimera Sleeves seemed to be doing a little better the longer he had them follow along in the sun. “I’ll join you.”

They both sat in the cool, running water while Tulland’s free vines went fishing, eventually catching a couple big, beautiful but ultimately unfamiliar freshwater fish that glinted in the sun. From experience, they both knew they were good eating. After they were as clean as the water would get them, they kicked back on their bedrolls, cooked a simple kind of fish-and-vegetable soup with a bit of salt, and rested.

“So not a hard dungeon,” Necia said. “But I’m troubled.”

“How so?”

“This shield should not have taken that much damage. And I’ve seen how concerned you’ve looked for your plants. They didn’t do well either. And that was fighting badly underleveled enemies. Once I get some metal on my armor, I don’t think that will be much of a problem. But it means these blight things are particularly well suited to fight you.”

“Maybe. I’ll admit none of my plants liked them much. It’s scary to think what they’d be like for me if I was anywhere near their level. If we eventually run into any that are, it’s going to be much, much harder.”

“And that, Tulland, is why we’re going to prepare. I’m not sure how, but every single opportunity we have to fight those things needs to result in some new lesson.”

“What’s today’s lesson?”

“Don’t let them touch you, and kill the dungeon as fast as possible. We’ll have to figure out something different in the next one.”

The System chose that moment to finally wrap up its negotiations, something Tulland learned about through a series of notifications. It had not gone unnoticed that him and Necia had got no rewards at all for destroying the blight dungeon, and it made some sort of backwards sense that this turned out to be why.