Infinite Farmer-Chapter 162: Battle

“Are they stronger than ogres?”

“Same general grade of strength, but not quite as bad.”

“Then yes, I think. Necia?”

“We should be fine.”

“Then we’d send you out and you’d slaughter.” Rand mimed swinging a weapon back and forth. “I’d get everyone to the parapets I could. There are a lot of places near the briar wall we can get a straight shot with arrows and the like. We can fight them off.”

“Is that a good option?”

“It’s the only option. But there’s no time. You need to go now.”

Tulland summoned his Chimera Sleeves and sent them beneath his armor to augment them, then ran with Necia to the front gate. She wasn’t nearly so strong as him, but she was more than enough to take out dozens and dozens of these bears, while at the same time he doubted any of them could do much to hurt her unless she got swarmed.

“Keep close,” Tulland said. “In case you trip.”

“As if it’s me that trips.” Necia huffed as she kept up with Tulland in her heavy armor. “I wish I could get some of those vines.”

“Me too. But they need a closer connection than just telling them to help you.”

“Sure. Keep hogging them.” Necia stuck her tongue out. “Now watch out. Here they come.”

Tulland switched from his pitchfork to the hoe, judging that these things probably wouldn’t survive even a strong blow from the handle-side of the weapon. As they closed the last few strides towards the charging enemy army, he set his lead leg forward and swung, cleaving through everything he hit before knocking several bears off their feet on the backswing.

Necia moved up behind him, smashing bear after downed bear in the head. Tulland roared forward again, swinging back and forth and using his frankly unfair amount of strength to destroy or ground everything he hit. Brist’s lessons helped a lot with getting the angles right. The trick, he figured out, was to hit everything you could in an upwards sweep. Lots of things could push back against force, but basically nothing could keep itself from being lifted.

When Amrand had used the word slaughter, he wasn’t wrong. They were killing hundreds of the bears a minute.

“Why don’t they die?” Tulland asked. “Rand said they couldn’t get far from the dungeons.”

“The smoke from the ones you are killing. When they turn into gas.” Necia huffed and put down three more bears as she talked before shield-bashing into another and sending a wall of thirty of them flying. “The others absorb it. I think they won’t start to die in big numbers by themselves as long as we are killing so many.”

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In some sense, that probably meant they could just wait out the attack. That didn’t mean the town could though. Tulland kept fighting until the next problem showed itself in the form of an animal he didn’t know and had never even heard about.

Blight Grabber

As an emissary force of the blight, this abomination is a grabber in both form and function because the blight willed it so. At its core, it is something other, a darkness representative of the illness that is the blight, following its mindless commands as it works to render the territories into which the blight wishes to expand more vulnerable.

Grabbers are as home on land and sea, walking around on several legs as they search for prey to latch onto. Once their quarry is safely in their legs, they use their sharp beaks to chew away at them while simultaneously seeping acid out of every pore in their bodies. As a blight beast, this variety of grabber eschews the acid in favor of blighted energy, with similar but harder-to-resist results.

Multiple grabbers will often attempt to work together to take down larger prey. Sufficient grabbers, legend has it, can kill even the most massive of beasts.

“Don’t let them grab you!” Tulland yelled. “Run if you have to.”

Necia nodded. For a bit, all was well for both of them. The grabbers were fast and mobile, but so weak that even the most incidental contact from either of their weapons would dust them. It kept on like that for a while, with none of the grabbers getting anywhere near them unless they also immediately died in the attempt.

It only took one lucky grabber to change that math. Tulland felt it slap into his side, gluing his arm still for a moment before he managed to rip it free, killing the grabber in the motion with the sheer force of his escape. By the time he had, he was hit by another four of them, then another two, then enough that he lost count. He managed to keep one of his arms free during the onslaught, and felt the bears ripping into the accumulated pile of Tulland and Blight Grabbers as he struggled to keep his feet under the attack.

He could see Necia off to the side, taking on less total grabbers because of her iron defense, but still holding up more and more weight as they stuck to her shield, arms, and legs. She struggled over to where Tulland was now completely frozen in place, screaming something he could barely make out.

“Hit me!” Necia screamed.

“I can’t kill all of them!” Tulland yelled. “And I’ll hurt you.”

“No you won’t! Now hit me! Hard!”

Tulland knew better than to disobey without a great reason. He wound up as best as he could and thrust his pitchfork straight at Necia.

It hit her shield, and for the first time since she had the skill, he felt what it was really like to take a full force hit from her revenge strike. Both of them went flying, smashing through bears and grabbers both for a few seconds before Tulland felt his body contact the ground, completely free of grabbers.

“Back to me!” Necia yelled. “Back to back!”

Tulland killed his way to Necia, dodging flying grabbers and bears while killing anything he couldn’t avoid. As he made it to her, he skidded and turned, letting his back slap against hers as they fought off the horde.

Tulland glanced back towards the town, seeing a growing cloud of blight-fog as the accumulated force of its survivors fought off the army that had made it past them. He wanted to go help, but it simply wasn’t an option. Any mistake would cover them with grabbers again. They just had to fight until there was nothing left to fight.

From that point, it still took hours. Eventually, the bears started to become rarer, leaving them free to separate from each other and reap the remaining grabbers like grain. Tulland returned to his running while pulling the scythe tactic, killing hundreds of them a minute as he wiped the battlefield clean like a chalkboard eraser.

Finally, long after Tulland had zoned out to the process and fell into a rhythm of swiping, running over, and crushing everything in his path, Necia found him, got a message through to him via the System, and brought him back from his personal battle to the vicinity of the town.

“There’s more of them out there,” Tulland said.

“Maybe. But we broke them. The ones around here are finally starting to die on their own,” Necia responded.

“So what now?”

“We save the town. Fast. Those monsters look awfully close to breaking through.”

Tulland’s heart dropped as they started the final phase of the battle. The town walls were intact, and the hundreds of monsters still left around it wouldn’t be hard to clear. But every single vine outside the walls was either withered or gone altogether.

He found a sudden burst of energy in all the disappointment of seeing his hard-earned greenery destroyed. It didn’t take long to take care of the rest of the beasts after that. In the distance, wisps of blight were dissipating where the last of the beasts on the battlefield ran out of gas and gave up on living.

“Heya.” Amrand waved as he made his way past the opened gates towards them. “Looks like you made it.”

“You too. Any damage inside the walls?” Tulland asked.

“One man. The grabbers got over just once when we weren’t expecting them. Took him down before we knew what was happening.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Rand grinned. “Known criminal. Not the kind that’s nice to talk about. Wasn’t helping in the fight, either. We were figuring out how to handle that before the fight started. Now I guess I don’t have to.”

“Small blessings, I guess.” Necia looked unhappily at the now-bare outskirts of town. “They really scalped this whole thing, didn’t they?”

“Yeah. Although…” Tulland bent down and felt the ground. Something lower than he could see was still down there. He didn’t have much power left after running Primal Growth on his plants all day, but he had a drop or two to spare still. He dumped the dregs into one plant, smiling as a small shoot broke the surface of the soil almost immediately. “Oh, good.”

“They made it?”

“Not all of them, Necia. But a lot of them. We won’t be starting completely over.” Tulland trudged toward the town, waving the other two to follow. “What I don’t get is how they got all of them. You would think they would have punched through, then focused on one spot.”

You would think that, wouldn’t you.

What are you talking about?

“Yeah, about that.” Amrand interrupted Tulland’s inner dialogue before it got too much further. “I’m guessing you want to get a bath. One of the new additions to town had just finished fixing the heating for the bath house today, so go work on that. I’ll be around to explain things after you get back.”