“That was a rough ride. No in-between room. Just teleport. I feel sore from it,” Necia complained.

“Same.” Tulland took a look around finding that they had arrived in an unnaturally flat kind of place, growing little but short grass that almost looked like it had been trimmed and populated with nothing visible besides that, himself, and Necia. “Weird environment.”

“Weirder once you read the description. Take a look.”

Sixth Floor (Cooperative)

You have entered the sixth floor with a single companion. Every relevant parameter of the floor (size, monster count, potential gains, etc) will be doubled.

The sixth floor is meant to be an easier than average rest stop in an adventurer’s journey through The Infinite. The floor is a battle of attrition of sorts, a fight between you and the reproductive rate of the resident slimes. Each slime is a massive, single-celled organism which falls apart once a moderate amount of damage has been applied to their delicate bodies. They possess attacks of a basic, predictable sort. They are not especially strong, nor are they especially fast.

They can, however, split. Each slime will divide itself after a set amount of time and absorbing a certain minimum of nutrition from the environment. Each new slime will be weaker and smaller than the slime from which they descend, but only for the few minutes they require to catch up.

Success on the floor is a matter of simple eradication. You must kill the slimes faster than they can reproduce, until none is left. If you cannot accomplish this task, you will be trapped until you either find a way to do so or die.

Objectives:

Eliminate the slimes

“So, divide and conquer?” Necia pulled her sword and sighted down it. “I go my way, you go yours?”

“For now, yeah. We can meet back here tonight. If there’s a night here,” Tulland said.

“Got it.” Necia turned and walked, waving over her shoulder. “Good luck with your plants.”

Tulland had a limit to how many plants he could grow in his farm area, mostly determined by the practical needs of the plants themselves. In theory, a farmer could only own, till, and maintain so much land. But the monster briars were easy to grow. Too easy, in fact, that their natural propagation ability had been limited by the Dungeon System itself to keep every floor from becoming Tulland’s playground. As compensation, he gained a skill that strengthened all of his plants based on the quality of his farm.

But outside of the farm, he had no limits. Sure, the plants he grew other places wouldn’t contribute to his overall strength, but they’d grow. They’d still be his, in a way the Dungeon System recognized. And most importantly, they’d still attack just about anything they could find.

Tulland reached into his bag and grabbed a small handful of briar seeds and cast them around him, then moved several yards off and did it again. And again. And again. It was boring work, but each throw represented another patch of deadly briars growing in a random spot in the wilderness, looking for anything they could kill and bleed for their own nutrition.

For the next 48 hours, the strength and growing rate of those briars would be pinned to the strength of his garden back home, which was the best he had ever grown. That combined with his Primal Growth skill meant a development rate he could almost see. These briars would be full-sized within hours, hunting and bearing fruit.

Necia wouldn’t be circling back this way for some time, but when she did, she would break apart any fruits she found growing to get at their seed, then toss those to an unpopulated place. In a day, they’d have an army covering huge swaths of the area they were in. It wasn’t as good as normal propagation, but it was the next best thing they could do.

Normally, this would be all but useless. The briars Tulland carried with him for personal protection were hand-grown, strong-as-possible affairs he spent time and resources on. And even they weren’t that strong compared to the monsters he had been meeting. These new briars were essentially disposable, the kinds of plants that any half-decent monster on the new floors would rip apart. The Dungeon System described them in unsparingly unimpressed terms, as if they were an outdated product that should have been replaced ages ago.

But it also talked about the slimes that way. Which meant a very old hunting tactic of Tulland’s was making a reappearance. He was creating a hostile environment, one throw and one application of Primal Growth at a time. There was no shortage of seeds. At this point, he had thousands of them, both enhanced and unenhanced, ready to go. And he had only been walking and throwing for an hour when he got his first indications of success.

Remote Victory!

You have killed an enemy you can’t see, hear, smell, or otherwise sense.

Remote Victory!

You have killed an enemy you can’t see, hear, smell, or otherwise sense.

Remote...

Tulland moved on, once again glad that this type of notification was pretty easy to ignore. He was also beginning to suspect that the slimes themselves hid from people. He had yet to see one in this place, despite traveling pretty far.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

When night began to fall, he doubled back on the same trail, finding Necia at his briars picking apart a fruit and chucking the seed.

“Any luck hunting?” Tulland asked. “I haven’t even seen one.”

“I’ve seen a few dozen, and killed them. I’m moving faster than you because I don’t have to stop to plant. But they don’t give much experience at all,” Necia complained.

“Too bad. For what it’s worth, I think we are fine. I’ve been getting notifications all day. I think they are going after the fruits. It doesn’t make sense that I’d be killing so many otherwise.”

“Well, good. In any case, there’s not much use trying to find them after dark. Are you cooking, or should I?”

“Your turn. I’m wiped.” Tulland flopped backwards. “I’ve thrown thousands of seeds. I just want to close my eyes for a bit.”

A half hour later, Necia woke Tulland up to eat, after which it was good and dark outside. They set up camp in a particularly thick patch of briars, one that Tulland had grown just for the purpose of a makeshift fortress. Each of them put out their bedrolls and climbed in. They weren’t really tired enough to sleep, but they had plenty of food and the sun would wake them up soon enough.

“Tulland?” Necia asked after a stretch of silence passed.

“Yes?” Tulland was looking up at the stars, which were in patterns he had never seen back home. There was something oddly beautiful about looking at someone else’s heavens. He kept looking as he heard Necia roll over next to him. “What is it?”

“I’m scared.”

Tulland shifted in his bag. “Of the slimes? They can’t get through these vines, I promise you.”

“No. I mean…” Necia sighed and rolled back over, joining him in looking up at the stars. “It’s just sometimes I remember we are going to die in here. That’s the point, right? We go as far as we can, but really we’re just marching towards the end.” Her arm flopped over towards Tulland, and she made her index and middle finger take little steps across his sleeping bag above his chest. “Just Tulland and Necia, walking towards doom.”

“Ah. Yeah.” Tulland was surprised about how little he thought about that kind of thing, but he did think about it sometimes. “I guess I’m scared too.”

“You hardly show it.”

“I think that’s because…” Tulland thought for a bit. He didn’t want to lie. “Did I ever tell you about being caught in the briars? The original briars, the ones I didn’t grow.”

“No,” Necia said slowly. She rolled closer.

“I was running from monsters on the first floor. They were called Razored Lungers. I didn’t stand a chance against a single one of them. And the only way to get away from them was to go somewhere they wouldn’t go. Plunge into that place really.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did. I was stabbed all over, and those needles hurt. I couldn’t see. I was just broken. And I got ready to die in there. And then, I just didn’t. I decided not to. I couldn’t let the System win. I couldn’t let myself lose.”

“You know that’s not a decision you can make.”

“On some level, sure. But before that, it was all futile. My world won’t benefit from me dying, like yours will. If anything, it might hurt things. But now… I don’t know. I think I just decided I won’t die. I might get proven wrong at some point, but until then, I’ll just do everything I can do to stay alive. To win.”

“Huh.” Necia laughed. “Arrogant of you.”

“That’s me. Arrogant, stubborn Tulland. Just doing what he can to beat the gods at their own game.”

“Well, keep it up. I’ll stay with you as long as I can.” Necia rolled back to her side. Even in the dark, Tulland could feel her eyes pointed at him. “Beating the gods, right? That’s something I want to see.”

—

In the dream, Tulland was in the church. Ouros only had one. Sure, there were meeting halls and locations for certain rituals. But this was the church proper, a small stone building with a massive statue of a four-pointed star surrounded by the wooden buildings the clerics lived in and worked after.

A cleric, at least on Ouros, was a job that burned a lot of footleather. Their job was mostly done at sickbeds, with grieving families, and at seaside altars, not in structures. But when something important happened that had to do with the Church, it happened here in the church building.

Today, that thing was Tulland. He would have liked it if he was being lauded for some impressive act, but instead he was being scolded. Officially scolded, by an actual officiant, one who was visibly frustrated to have to take time out of his day to deal with a fourteen-year-old problem.

“Tulland Lowstreet, I presume.” The cleric collapsed into a heavily padded, wooden chair. “I should tell you I was up very late last night with a very, very upset infant. I am not quite myself. Let’s make this quick, alright?”

Tulland nodded. That sounded great.

“Good. Now, you have been brought in front of me today regarding several well-known banned heresies, as well as a full blaspheme. Blasphemence. Blaspheming.”

“Is there really not a verb?”

“Unimportant right now.” The man yawned. “Now, as you know, you get a full pass on these very serious crimes because you are a child, and most children are brutally stupid.”

This was not as much like a sermon as Tulland expected.

“You don’t sound very cleric-like right now,” Tulland pointed out, perhaps to his own detriment.

“I don’t feel it. Now, normally, we’d just solve the problem at its dumb source. We’d have your parents correct you, you’d be less of an idiot, and we’d move on. However, in this case, it was deemed inappropriate. Do you know why?”

“My uncle probably didn’t want to do it.”

“That’s true, but also not the reason. The actual driving force behind this meeting, Tulland, is that you are not an idiot. This would be much easier if it were.”

“So I don’t get immunity?”

“You do. For now. But not forever. You have two years until manhood, Tulland. Two years seems long to you now, but it’s precious short time to fix a bad habit. Now, please, for the sake of hurrying this along, please repeat the blasphemies for me. Summarize them. I grant thee dispensation for any verbal crimes you commit while you tell me.”

“Basically I was asking why the Church deserves the power it has. It earned its power… I don’t know. Forever ago. And now it makes everyone’s decisions. It has unlimited classes, but it only gives out a few. It could give out unlimited power, but it doesn’t. And nobody gets to fight them on it, or even argue about this,” Tulland said, trying to keep his answer as positive as he could.

“Ah. All true. I suspect you didn’t say it quite like that,” the cleric said.

“I may have used different words.”

“Yes, that would do it. The answer, Tulland, is two-fold. The first is a question of balance. In the days of the System, when the fields ran red with the blood of men, everyone did get a class. The good, honest folks. The liars. The cheats. The war-like and the murderers. The flat-out insane. Everyone. And do you know what happened?”

Tulland squirmed in his seat. “People misused them. But keeping classes away from the murderers is one thing. Are you telling my uncle is that? That he’s power-mad?”

“I certainly don’t think so. He’s a good man. And I certainly don’t see any signs he’d become a dark lord of a dark land if he had, say, a hunter class. But the point is that this is what I think, Tulland. Not what I know. When the Church gives out a class, it does so to people who meet certain qualifications. When we create a Captain class, it’s because we need one. And we are very, very sure in a way it’s very expensive to be that they won’t misuse that class.”

“And so you maintain a balance.”

“Frozen hell, boy. No. We absolutely do not. We demolish the balance as much as we can, in favor of good. In favor of stability.”

“But never growth,” Tulland said. “Every border the same, forever. Every war already fought.”

“I pray so. But that’s the second answer, Tulland. And the one you have to accept. Is that people who have seen war, who have records you have not read, who have had time to think about those records longer than your entire life so far, might know something you don’t.”

The cleric did something Tulland did not at all expect, just then. He reached out his arm as if to cross Tulland in the pattern of the star, but instead smacked him, just hard enough to hurt, in the forehead.

“And that’s something you’d be better to understand sooner rather than later, Tulland. Because the Church does not just have wisdom. It also has every bit of the force. If you were a man sitting in front of me today, Tulland, we’d be having a very different conversation. And one I’d much rather avoid, if I can.”