Tulland retreated to the relative safety of his living, writhing plants as he aimed his pitchfork squarely at the center of Necia’s chest. Although his explosion of plants had caught her off guard, she quickly tore free of the briars constricting her. But she was too slow. His tines closed in, a bit closer and faster than she could realistically block.

And then Tulland realized an arrow was aimed directly at his eye. He hadn’t even been aware that Licht was on the attack until it was too late.

“Okay! I’m out of plants. That’s a loss.”

Licht burst out laughing, withdrew his crossbow, and then flopped over on his back, chortling and holding his ribs.

“He’s fine.” Necia panted and wiped the last of the vines away. “It’s just that it’s hard to call what you just did a loss.”

Tulland looked down at the shredded arms of his farmer’s shirt and the dozen cuts that came along with the general change in his wardrobe. “You sure? Because I’m pretty beat up over here.”

“Yes, but.” Necia looked exasperated. “You’ve noticed there were two of us, correct? I kept a few things in reserve, and Licht didn’t hide until the end there. But we also didn’t simply slaughter you. That’s good.”

“Very good, even. One on one, you might have gotten lucky and taken down either of us. Of course, there’s no chance of that now.”

“No?” Tulland sat up and fanned his own shirt to displace dust. “Why not? My plants are going to get stronger.”

“Stronger, but not different. We both know a bit about fighting them now. With me, at least, you had some surprise. I didn’t know you could make a whole carpet of them like that. Now that I know, I wouldn’t let you use them as effectively. And since your weapon skill isn’t very good…”

“Then I wouldn’t be able to hit you. And you could take your time. So after all that, we didn’t accomplish much.”

“Well, no.” Necia sat and bumped into Tulland from the side, affectionately but with so much of her battle-form weight that he was almost thrown to the ground. “Again, you held off two thinking, trained people for minutes. And while you did that, you were holding back, waiting for a moment to strike. In a battle, you have options. And now it’s our job to find out how best to use them.”

Necia rocked her weight against Tulland again, then stood and pulled him to his feet.

“First, let’s go back and restock. Then, we’re going to eat again.”

“And this training made a difference?”

Necia and Licht both nodded.

By the time Tulland was done restocking his plants and setting up their dinner, Licht was nowhere to be found.

“He went to the seventh floor, something about tackling it while he was still full,” Necia explained when he looked at her questioningly.

“How long do you think he’ll be gone?” Tulland asked.

“From what he said, several days. I guess he only just had the sixth cleared when he ran out of food last time. He seemed confident about the seventh, but it’s going to take him time.”

“And we’ll be in the sixth by then. I hope I don’t drag you down.” Tulland poured some water from a bucket into his cooking pan and set it boiling. “Hopefully this particular farm helps with that.”

“It will,” Necia said. “And in the meantime, we can gather what information we can. Eight or nine days is a long time to be the bad guy, but I’ll make it.”

—

Seven days after the planting, Tulland was busy optimizing what he could in his garden. Grasses, it turned out, were dumb, cheap, waste-of-space plants. They took a lot of resources to grow without providing much at all in the way of benefit. He was sure there would have been a different story to tell if the grasses were in some way magical or useful, but these were only good for filling in the spaces where nothing else would grow.

The weeds and shrubs were only a little bit better. The first few of each were a big, noticeable difference to his overall power, and then quickly stopped being worth planting as he piled on the duplicates. In the first few days, he had pulled a bunch of them and planted more of his better trees, something he was now almost absurdly glad to have gotten a lead on. Those trees were growing well, while the trees from his original planting were almost tall enough to be visible from outside the house’s mostly ruined walls.

And on all of those trees were mosses and flowers. Which exactly was growing where varied tree to tree. The Acheflowers steadfastly refused to grow on anything but the low-quality Achewood trees, while the various mosses he had assembled through his travels were willing to grow on anything but the Wolfwood. In fact, nothing seemed to like the Wolfwood, which Tulland almost understood. It was a tree that grew a furry quasi-hide. As much as he needed that hide, it was a tree you could pet, and he was far from used to that.

The way he thought about it, Tulland had three types of plants at the moment. The first type were battle plants like the Lunger Briar, Giant’s Hair, and Acheflowers. These were plants that actively contributed to his combat ability. The second type were equipment plants like the Ironbranch, Giant’s Toe, and Jewel Moss. These weren’t plants that could hurt enemies directly, but Tulland could use them to enhance or build his armor and weapon. The third type were support plants like the Wolfwood, ones that didn’t have a direct utility but could be leveraged in ways that benefited Tulland’s growth.

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

Even when he planted the third type of plant, he was getting stronger. He could feel it, especially since his Farmer’s Intuition was a big part of what made that kind of thing feelable in the first place. As the trees had filled out and the shrubs and briars had piled higher and higher around them, he had felt that power seeping in, able to quantify it more and more granular until finally, when his new orange-like-fruit-tree bore its first fruit, some barrier between him and knowing broke down, finally and permanently.

Skill Function Enhanced!

Your Farmer’s Intuition skill now can, on request, provide you with a system pop-up window displaying a count of all plants growing in your staked farm area, complete with a numeric quantification of their effects on the quality of your farm.

The window itself was incredibly boring, looking more like a shopping list or a florist’s inventory than something that could keep him alive.

Farm Status

Total Plant Power: 552

Trees:

Ironbranch x4

Giant’s Toe x2

Achewood x4 (Parasite load: 42 plants)

Wolfwood x2

Mundane:

Mosses (See detailed breakdown)

Grasses (See detailed breakdown)

Shrubs (See detailed breakdown)

Briars:

Lunger briars x153

Giant’s hairs…

The list went on and on. Having no reference point, it was hard to know how good or bad five hundred plant power points were, or how much an additional point would do for Tulland. Most of the detailed breakdowns for various plants were useless, listing information about the plants he already knew or stats he didn’t need.

But the ability to pull a shrub and replace it with a transplanted Lunger Briar and really know for sure how much stronger or weaker he was by virtue of the adjustment was invaluable. He had spent days now almost in a trance, barely sleeping or eating, adjusting his garden until it was perfect.

And it is that now. Perfect, I mean.

How much stronger did it make you? If you had to guess.

I don’t have to guess. Probably 20%, compared to when I started. Not that much.

Foolish. I’ve seen thousands of fights where a single grain of strength might have tilted the balance, and you stand before me, complaining about a full fifth.

It may be that sometimes I just don’t get how this works. I’m sure there’s been a rare close call that would have been prevented with a small margin of strength. But any given day, how likely would it be that I’m going to run into a case where that strength matters?

More than you think because you don’t understand the over-sized effect of being overpowered. You see…

“You talking to your System again? I thought you said you were going to do that less.” Necia walked into the house and sniffed the air. “You can’t smell what went on here anymore, for the record. Good thing too. I’m tired of sleeping in the yard.”

“Yeah. Just for a bit. It still knows things I don’t, you know,” Tulland said.

“Sure, but how can you tell any one of those is true? It could be lying through its teeth.”

“My System? Maybe. But so far, it hasn’t. Not once.”

Necia looked up then, concerned. “Truly?”

“Really.”

Quicker than he could really have prevented, Necia was next to him.

“That’s bad, Tulland. Really bad.”

“Because I can trust it?”

“No, you idiot.” Necia looked like she was resisting the impulse to shove Tulland. “Because you seem to think you can.”

Tulland opened his mouth to argue, then reconsidered. He really had started to trust the System more over the past months. Some of that was undeniably justified. He wasn’t aware of a single time the System had been dishonest with him, in this place.

It had acknowledged its betrayal right away, and had never once tried to minimize what it had done or made any attempts at keeping up a false appearance of innocence. When it had given him advice, the advice was good. When he had got pieces of information that he was able to verify later, the information had proved true. It had even arguably saved his life once or twice, getting him to stumble home when he would have otherwise been ripped apart by wolves or getting him to eat when a starvation-hobbled regeneration rate would have otherwise been insufficient to keep him alive.

But it was also still a System that an entire planet had banished, and one that had tricked him into diving headfirst into a sacrificial altar of a dungeon that would kill him, one way or another, sooner or later.

She isn’t wrong. At least on paper, I’m your enemy. You have no reason to trust me, even now.

So do I trust that, or what? Because it seems like that way of thinking goes around in circles.

It is a paradox of sorts, admittedly. But I am, fundamentally, someone who lured you to your death. Every move I make could be simply to push you further in this dungeon, to fatten you for the eventual slaughter.

Or it could be something else. As long as we are reversing roles here.

It could be. And if you live long enough to truly allow me to become bored, I may even tell you some day.

“See, there. You are talking to it.” Necia poked Tulland in the chest. “Instead of me. What’s it saying?”

“That I should by no means trust it, and that everything it tells me could be a complex, long-term trap.”

“See, I told you…” Necia stopped and furrowed her brow. “Actually, I guess that complicates things.”

“Yeah.”

“And it’s not like I really know what’s going on here, Tulland. Whatever you have with your System is a very odd thing. Since I’ve been here, my System has talked to me once or twice, just after big accomplishments and always in… I don’t know what you’d call it. That dried-up way system descriptions are. It’s not like it’s hanging out,” Necia said as she laid back.

“Oh. I wonder why that is.”

I’ve already explained this to you, although you had bigger concerns at the time. Most Systems, Tulland, have access to a portion of the energy budget of an entire world’s exploits. Every class, every adventurer, every adventure feeding power into them. I have you. It is, you are, underwhelming.

“Gee, thanks,” Tulland said out loud.

“What’d he say?”

“He called me unimpressive. Compared to an entire planet, but still not a nice thing to say.”

“Oh, Tulland.” Necia waved her arm over the total of his entire garden, which was now starting to test the limits of what the Dungeon System considered a house for the purposes of keeping people from seeing it. “I’d say you are plenty impressive. In your own way.”