Infinite Farmer-Chapter 181: Designations

After another round in the steam room, Tulland slept like a hibernating animal before Brist dumped him out of bed and beat him for a full day again. This time, he started to really see the cracks around Brist’s dominance. He still couldn’t stop anything, but with three days left, it at least seemed possible that he might block a shot.

“You’re starting to get it.” Brist had dragged over an entire tureen of soup and was sharing it with Tulland. They both had their own spoons. “Now all you need is a bit more practice and to start thinking about tricks. Remember, I’m not invincible. I’m just hitting from places you can’t see.”

The next day, Tulland drew a scratch on Brist’s arm. He got slammed clean through a stone wall with a war-club for his troubles, but he managed it. After that, he was gaining bit by bit.

“You’re a natural, you know that?” Brist said after one particularly intense bout.

“A natural would not have just lost a fight with a man swinging a bench,” Tulland replied.

One of Brist’s many classes had been an Environmental Brawler, which apparently was someone who could hit other people with whatever was handy. In this case, it had been rocks, a bench, a broken piece of wall, and a broken fragment of Tulland’s armor. The bench had been the most embarrassing thing, somehow.

“No. You’ve made years of progress here. Maybe months if we judge by talented folks. Either something is wrong with how learning works in this dungeon, or you get stronger faster than other folks should.”

“I have to think it’s the first. Some kind of bonus?”

“Maybe. Now go hit the steam room. Tomorrow is our last day of training before you have to beat me. Do you have a plan?”

“Some of one.”

“That’s as much of a plan as you can have. Most of it goes away after the fighting starts, anyway. Get some rest. I’m going to burn out all that I have, tomorrow. Show you everything. It’s going to hurt a lot, I think.”

Tulland was sure it would. He hit the steam room, which by then had become his best friend, and then settled into bed. The phantom pain wasn’t as bad now. The more he understood why he couldn’t win,the more his body was willing to accept he wasn’t really being hurt. It was terrifying, of course, but no longer in a way that burned down to his very soul.

He got a bit less out of his sleep that night, but it wasn’t because the sleep was less effective. He just needed less. For the first time, he felt a little bit of hope that he might beat Brist.

That hope was poorly placed. The next morning proved that, at least as it concerned that day and a Tulland who was fighting without any tricks. Brist was light itself, flitting from grain of sand to grain of sand with perfect balance, perfect placement, and a bewildering set of attacks that Tulland only slowly realized were variations on his normal controlled chaos.

That day, Tulland lost more teeth than he had in his entire mouth. They counted. He broke every arm and leg twice, and some of them as many as four times. He was unconscious for at least a moment during or after every fight. It was a demoralizing, hideous mess.

But he understood it. He understood it very well, by the end of the day. And that meant he had the fighter where he wanted him, regardless of whether Brist knew it or not.

“You don’t hurt anymore,” Brist said. “I can tell from the way you move.”

Damn. I was hoping to hide that.

The System was not present. It hadn’t been from the beginning. Whatever this challenge was, it was for him alone. The experience of having thoughts without someone responding to them was almost novel.

“I don’t.” Tulland held up his arm and looked at his own fist. “I don’t know why.”

“It’s because your body understands why it keeps getting hurt. Which might mean you are going to do just fine.”

“You think?”

“I do. And then you can have your next training. Do you think you can put as much into whatever that is as you have here?”

“I don’t know. But I’ll try.”

“Good.” Brist sat back in his chair, looking tired for the first time that week. “Do you know what I get out of this deal?”

“Weapons? I bet it’s weapons.”

“No. That was part of it once. But The Infinite tells me I get something like a deepening of my soul from it. Whatever I experience here, it makes who I am life-to-life different in the same way something real would.”

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“Is that worth it? For a week of time every now and again?”

“Usually? Probably not. It doesn’t really cost me anything, or I wouldn’t have agreed to it. This time, I think it will be different.” Brist’s shoulders drooped a bit. “I hope so, anyway.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. Sorry.” Brist shook his head, bringing back some of the old Brist Tulland knew in the movement. “It’s just this time I think I’ll get a little bit more out of the week than you’d expect.”

The next day, they didn’t fight until noon. Brist made Tulland sleep a little more, eat a little more, and overall ready himself better than he had up to that point. He claimed, and Tulland thought he was right, that Tulland wouldn’t get two shots at this. Once Brist knew what was coming for him, he’d have countermeasures in place whether he wanted to or not.

Brist would want to. That had never been a question between him and Tulland. He just wouldn’t lose a fight like this on purpose, even if The Infinite would have allowed it.

“So are you ready, then?” Brist smiled and raised his fists. They had metal plates across them and it meant the fighter had a distressingly short range, but Tulland wasn’t stupid enough to think that they were less dangerous than a bench. “You have plants?”

“Some,” Tulland said. “Let’s see if they make a difference.”

Brist charged then, his fists tucked in tight to his face. Tulland could see subtleties in the placement of his elbows along his torso that would passively block a dozen types of blows and could be moved in a fraction of an instant to block dozens more. That was a problem he couldn’t surmount, but he could at least see it now.

Tulland charged back, thrusting his pitchfork forward towards Brist’s neck, only to have it effortlessly slapped aside. That didn’t matter. He had never thought the attack would hit. That kind of attack had always gone the same way. Brist would slap the pitchfork, move inside the space he had just created while scraping his shoulder on the weapon’s handle as he approached, and then send Tulland flying with a hook. freewёbnoνel.com

This time, for the first time, Tulland managed to get his arm up in the way of the punch before it knocked him clean out. There was nothing he could do about flying away under the force of it, but that was expected too. Midair, he sent a Primal Growth charge out to some Clusterbulb plants he knew were still buried safely under the sand, and then told them it was perfectly fine to explode.

Even in Brist’s last life, he hadn’t known a single thing about these new exploding plants. He was a vitality build, and Tulland didn’t expect for the attack to do much to him outside of minor injuries. What it did do, however, was something Brist couldn’t have expected. It filled the air with sand.

Brist could see through sand better than Tulland could, at least in the sense he would predict where Tulland would go in it. His boxing skill gave him a sort of blind-fighting sonar, something that told him where incoming attacks were aimed. He could then, in Brist fashion, block almost any attack that anyone could throw. What he couldn’t do was see what was flying towards him.

He might expect bombs. He won’t expect two separate sets of bombs.

Brist didn’t. These bombs were not weakened by the sand covering them like the first set, and were intermixed with acid bulbs of the normal, non-combat-primary variety. Tulland did that because the acid bulbs flew faster and straighter. Brist had taught him that different blows coming in swarms were harder to block, but Tulland didn’t think he’d actually be able to get him to miss much in terms of blocks here.

What he could do was get him to block everything without thinking about it much. The way things were set up, that meant he was covered in acid and fire all at once, taking the full brunt of the attack straight to his center mass.

Brist was still not seriously hurt, but he was beginning to get worried and now covered in sand and acid. He jumped at Tulland, who turtled up to protect his vital areas as Brist barraged him with short, stiff punches to anywhere he could reach. Tulland’s armor stopped most of it, but enough damage snuck through to make him woozy. He focused as much as he could, drawing on the last few days of beatings as experience in staying awake under harsh punishment.

There’s no way he expected three separate bomb attacks. Go, Chimera Sleeves.

As Brist finally pushed him back far enough to get in range of the Chimera Sleeves, Tulland had his vines pop upwards with all the force they could, tipping Brist’s body back and robbing him of his stability just in time for Tulland to summon every remaining bomb he had, blowing them up between them. Tulland’s armor was as good as Brist’s vitality, but the sheer force of the blow sent both of them reeling. Brist’s lesson on that kind of both-combatants-are-destabilized scenario had always been that the person who found their footwork again ended up winning. They both raced towards that goal desperately, but it was Brist who won.

Tulland saw a look of sadness in Brist’s face. He knew he had won, that he’d now beat Tulland into unconsciousness and all hopes of victory would be gone forever. As much as it had taken to teach Tulland to hold someone like him off for a minute or so, it just wasn’t ever going to be enough to beat him. Brist had always seemed to know that, on some level. Nobody knew how impossibly strong Brist was better than him.

Tulland had never known it for sure, though, and he had secret knowledge of his own. One of those pieces of knowledge was exactly how his plant storage worked. He could store and designate as combat-ready any of his plants. Although the number varied, it was always at least one. Tulland had planted a sort of bare-bones garden at the beginning of this experience, one that he never staked but that he had put every one of his combat plants into.

Up until today, some of those plants were things he had only grown for their fruits. Achewood trees, for instance, were only good for growing Acheblooms. The System did not treat them as one plant because they were two entirely different species that just tended to occur together.

That wasn’t true of everything like that, though, which Brist learned as Tulland stuck out his hand, grinned in a way that almost broke Brist’s charge by itself, and dropped an entire Silver Sun tree on the fighter.

If the weight of the tree hadn’t been enough, the surprise of suddenly being under a tree and what it did to footwork would have probably done it. If that hadn’t been enough, simultaneous piercing damage from several suns that just happened to be aligned with Brist’s body would have.

Tulland watched for a split second as Brist tried to navigate an escape from an entire tree, then reared back and nearly took the fighter’s head off with a full-strength swing of his hoe.