Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon

“Dive.” Tulland and Necia both jumped out of the way, each in a different direction, just as they had initially planned. It was tempting to have Necia take the first swooping attack, but they had eventually convinced each other that it was a bad move when they still didn’t know how fast and strong this thing was outside of qualitative system descriptions.

Right now, Tulland felt the description had been understating things. Not only was the animal much bigger, but it also used that size in a much more dangerous-looking way. It was smoother in the air, much better supported by the ratio of strength in its wings to the weight of its body than the sphinxes had been.

“Heads up!” Necia yelled. “It’s almost back in diving position.”

It was. Coming out of the swoop, the Crimson Chimera had preserved much more of its momentum, using it to arc back up into the sky where it continued to rise, turned on a dime, and dove again. Tulland and Necia jumped out of the way again, but the chimera was already adapting its tactics to their plan.

As Necia moved to the left, it followed her specifically, already having favored her side of things over Tulland’s. What had been a fairly easy dodge on the first swoop turned into a desperate one on the second, and left Necia barely finding her footing again before the next swoop became a threat.

“How many more times?” Tulland called. “It’s already learning this game.”

“Four or five. We want it as used to this as it can possibly be. Adjusted to it.”

They managed to make it, although it was a close thing. Three dives in, it turned out the chimera was working a tactic of its own, finally going after Tulland once it had lulled them into a bare-minimum sense of security. It took everything for Tulland to escape unharmed. As it came down the fourth time, they regrouped in a slightly different location, off to the side.

“Think this will work?” Necia asked.

“It doesn’t need to. All we need is to make it wary.” Necia backed up a bit, getting into a more centered position as the chimera turned in the air. “We have to make it worried about what we can do. You’re great for that. Everything you do is weird and hard to understand.”

The chimera came down then, a bit faster than before. Tulland had to actually leap out of the way, rolling through the dirt and regaining his feet as part of the motion of the dodge. He just barely remembered to set off the trap before he did, vaporizing several gallons worth of yellow Acheflowers they had covered up with a very thin layer of dust and leaves before getting the fight underway.

As predicted, the chimera did not like it. As it cut through the super-condensed yellow cloud, it bellowed in an oddly human shout of surprise before wheeling around in the air and eyeing them suspiciously. It didn’t gain altitude again in the same way, instead staying only a few times Necia’s height above the ground.

“What’s it doing now? I thought it would go to ground,” Tulland asked.

“So did I. It’s doing something else. That was always a possibility.”

As they looked on, one of the chimera’s clawed hands glowed red as its talons lengthened to be almost as long as Tulland’s forearm. With an explosive beat of its wings, it shot horizontally over the two adventurers, swinging the wicked curved claws down as it did.

“Careful.” Necia caught the blow on her shield, and Tulland watched her knees buckle as she did. “One of these and it’s game over.”

“True. How long can you block those.”

“If the attacks stay like this? Damn near forever. I don’t want to bet on that, though. Think up a plan.”

Tulland nodded and started on the hard work of coming up with something as he contributed whatever he could to the fight in a non-resource-consuming way. His Clubber Vines shot up every time the monster flew overhead, usually missing but occasionally getting lucky and thunking into the claws or its wrist. It wasn’t clearly afraid of those strikes, but it also wasn’t comfortable betting that the damage from them wouldn’t add up.

Tulland watched as the monster slowed very slightly to enhance that cautious approach, then switched up its direct, linear attacks for a zigzagging pattern that seemed custom-made to eventually catch Necia at a bad angle. It was a bizarre fighting style, something that was changing all the time, even in small, non-claw-morphing ways. Tulland scowled at the uncertainty of what was coming next, but was glad for the overall reduction in speed. He now knew what he had to do to out-weird it.

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“Do you have all your shield bashes skills off cooldown? I’m going to need you to counter him, and then body slam me as hard as you can,” Tulland said.

“That’s going to screw you up,” Necia said, matter of fact, not questioning why Tulland wanted her to body slam him.

“Maybe. But can you do it? One right after the other?”

“I can.”

“Then do it.”

When the chimera’s serpentine flying style brought it into attacking position again, Necia finally countered the attack. It wasn’t a full-commitment attack from the animal, which meant Necia got less out of it. The animal looked woozy for a second, and grunted as it shook it’s head to clear the cobwebs. By the time it did, it was too late to avoid the next weirdness.

Tulland had spent the split second it took for the chimera to get its wits back whipping a Giant’s Hair vine at its neck, letting it wrap around and constrict but commanding it to leave just a tiny bit of slack between itself and the neck, just enough that it could slide around the monster’s weird hide when Tulland needed it to.

“Now, Necia.” Necia was not kidding when she said the shield bash was no joke. The sheer force of the hit sent Tulland flying, not least because he had jumped just a tiny bit off the ground in expectation of it. With no resistance, the shield bash rattled his brain but also sent him swinging on the vine in his hands, one of which was mounted to the monster-neck center-point and quickly redirecting Tulland’s momentum. By the time he completed the loop, he found himself firmly astride the back of the monster, just behind its wings and with one leg on each side of its bovine back.

The Crimson Chimera might have been a chaotic fighter, but there was no chance it was going to react in a timely manner to something like that.

Think you can out-weird me? I’ll show you how to do it.

Tulland reached into his dimensional storage and pulled out the third of his four stored objects. During their garden-growing break, he and Necia had plenty of time to experiment with the weirder of his many plants, and the flat-out winner was still the silver star fruits. After a few bouts of poking each other with the things, they had come to the realization that the fruits weren’t good at most things.

They didn’t sap overall life force as fast as most attacks in their arsenal, and they didn’t move by themselves. They couldn’t be easily thrown, and they’d poke through almost anything he had tried to use as a sling to catapult them at enemies. They took Primal Growth charges like any plant might, but seemed entirely unwilling to shunt that energy in any direction but normal seed enhancement. Or, more relevantly, getting sharper.

The only thing that made what Tulland was about to do with them possible at all was the fact that any of his almost-mundane Farmer’s Gloves were puncture resistant to his own plants. Coupling that with the fact that most of his growing things would do their best not to hurt him and a reinforcing layer of seed chain-mail over his palm was just barely enough to let him handle the things when they were reinforced, at least without skewering his hand up in the process.

“Hurry, Tulland! He’s going to figure out you are back there soon.”

Tulland hurried. Enhancing the first seed as much as it would allow, he palmed the seed, lifted his free hand up as high as it would go, then slapped the star down hard into the flesh just behind the chimera’s wing. The seed sunk in a bit more than half of the way through its total shape, pinning itself in place with long, sharp barbs that cut into the animal from several directions.

The chimera bucked to the side in the air, or perhaps just shot to one side because one of its wings suddenly worked much, much less well. Tulland pulled another star out, reinforced it, and slammed it into the base of the opposite-side wing.

It shouldn’t work.

It will, and you understand exactly why.

Stats made humans and beasts exceed the normal limits anything from nature should have been subject to. It made them faster and stronger. It shortened reaction times and bent the laws of physics in favor of attacks and evasions that wouldn’t otherwise have a chance of hitting or dodging opponents. They also prevented wounds or healed them faster than should have been possible. Tulland was academically aware that anything short of horrible, disfiguring injuries would heal in a matter of minutes, or hours at the most.

It still didn’t do away with the concept of pain, or the consequences of pain on a mind. When Necia had spent all that time going through a cycle of breaking her arm on enemy attacks, letting it heal, and breaking it again, it had taken a toll on her. Even though she knew it would heal, she was bound by a more primal psychology, one that considered that level of pain and injury to be avoided and feared.

The chimera wasn’t exactly human, but it didn’t have to be. It had two sharp, spiked metal balls shoved into a major muscle group that it needed to stay airborne. That had to hurt, no matter what kind of mind it was using. And given its high level of intelligence, it wasn’t likely it would react with the fight-to-the-death desperation most animals would. Instead, it would start to panic.

And it did, almost immediately. Just as fast, Tulland realized how little he had planned for his own psychological reaction to being on the back of a gigantic, world-ending threat that was now hurtling towards the ground like a meteor.

Oh well. It will take the brunt of the crash.

Tulland squeezed his legs down tighter on the chimera’s back, letting his Clubber Vines go to town on what amounted to its shoulder blades as it vainly tried to expel the silver stars, stopped beating its wings in the process, and slammed face-first into the ground.

“That was your plan?” Necia’s voice had an incredulous edge to it as she swept between Tulland and the chimera’s flailing feet, blocking several slashes that were each strong enough to detach multiple farmer limbs. “To go for a ride on the damn tenth level boss?”

“It worked!” Tulland sidestepped her and thrust in with his pitchfork, putting several shallow puncture wounds into the creature’s chest before it could adequately react. Necia blocked for him as he did, hitting the animal with slashes as she could fit them in. “It won’t be so smooth in the air now, at least.”

“It might not have to be,” Necia warned. The chimera bellowed in rage as it finally got a handle on what it was experiencing, found its own feet, and powered through the pain. “We still haven’t seen it fight on the ground.”

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