After the first several seconds, it became clear that the Razored Lunger wasn’t following Tulland into the briar thicket. It was what he had wanted. It should have been good. It should have been an unquestioned win.

The victory would have been easier to remember if Tulland’s entire body wasn’t being perforated by thorns. He was cut in far more places than he could count, stabbed in others, and completely immobilized by the pain and terror of moving any further. For a few long minutes, he sat there in agony and tried not to writhe. He was completely filled with fear that he’d just die there, impaled by thorns as he slowly bled out.

Quite the showing. I’m very impressed.

Oh, god, shut up. Be quiet. Tulland refused to talk out loud so the thorns couldn’t work their way further into him. Don’t you have enough from me?

What’s enough? As it stands, I’ll barely get enough energy off you to subvert a small territory, or to push a few divisions of monster troops through the ever-cursed shield that your precious Church put in my way. I was hoping you’d at least show me the tiniest bit of competence.

Rich, considering what you gave me to work with.

It is a poor soldier who places the blame on his sword. You’ve already given up. Believe me, there are those who would still be pushing through the pain.

Oh, yeah? Who?

Altreck, for one. I considered him for your role, you know. The only reason I didn’t go for it is he had a certain simplicity to his moral fiber that would have prevented me from making much headway. But he certainly wouldn’t resign himself to death without even trying.

It shouldn’t have worked. It was a simple, transparent ploy aimed directly at Tulland’s pride, meant to make him act where he otherwise. The System was throwing a cheap shot, a jab with a jagged knife at an already open wound. Tulland should have dismissed it out of hand.

But he couldn’t. As unfair as it was, Tulland couldn’t stand to imagine Altreck doing better than he was. He risked his eyes by opening them, only to find one of them already didn’t work. And, a few feet in front of him, there was a small gap in the thorns. Not a big one, but a place where he might just be able to lay down with only a few thorns in his body instead of hundreds, and give his vitality-induced regeneration the hours it would need to patch him back together.

The small distance looked like it was a thousand miles away, and he would still be trapped when he got there. But the System was right. Altreck would try to get there. The terror of the pain to come wouldn’t matter to him because he wouldn’t even be able to imagine it. He’d just do it. And he would survive, at least for a while.

Tulland closed his eyes again, braced himself, and shoved his body as hard as he could towards the clearing. The thorns tore away chunks of his skin as he screamed again and again. They couldn’t stop him from pushing forward with his feet and pulling with his arms wherever they could find purchase. The leather boots and his now ragged cloth garb stopped some of the thorns, and if they had been conventional plants, Tulland thought his gear might have stopped nearly all of them. But against the monster briars of the dungeon, there was only so much that they could do.

He never knew when he made it. Tulland woke up a while later on ground soaked with his own blood, but out of the worst of the thorns. Almost immediately, he started pulling fragments of the spikes out of his skin, passing out from the pain and blood loss more than once before he finally woke up, feeling terrible but mostly healed. His left eye still didn’t work, and he had no idea if it ever would again. And he was still bleeding from more places than he could count. But all in all, it seemed he would survive.

Tulland laid there, watching the world spin as his body tried to replace the blood it had lost and was still losing. He made no attempts to move as the hours passed until he finally felt more or less himself.

Only then did he open his right eye and took a look at his surroundings. There wasn’t much to see, but the System gave him descriptions for the few things it could latch onto at that distance.

Hades Briar

The Hades Briar is the most basic and common of barriers to movement in flora-heavy tower floors. Its near omnipresence has spelled the doom of monsters and adventurers alike, as it presented them with a painful distraction or blocked an otherwise open avenue of retreat.

The stiff and strong needles of the Hades Briar are lined with thousands of almost invisible hooked barbs that maximize a single prick’s damage and greatly magnify the pain they inflict. They bear a venom that further amplifies the suffering of their victims.

Hades Briar Fruit

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Technically edible, the Hades Briar’s fruit is a heavy, nutrient-rich affair. It makes no attempts to be appetizing, as the animals stupid or desperate enough to look to it as a food source simply do not care about that kind of thing.

Gently and ever so slowly, Tulland reached out his hand for the fruit. He had realized something about his regeneration when he woke up. It didn’t work for free. His wrist was half the size it once was, and looked like a twig amid the briars. He imagined the rest of his body in the same state, especially with his stomach so empty that the ache of it was radiating through most of his body. The new slimness worked in Tulland’s favor as he only manged to prick his hand a few more times before he broke the dry fruit loose from a stubborn, malicious thorn branch.

Carefully, he brought it to his mouth, popping the whole fruit in and chewing carefully. The system description was true. The fruit was technically edible, but it also tasted like a mouthful of sand mixed with bile. He chewed it anyway. Something about being ripped to shreds by a thousand needles had put a new sort of perspective on things like unpleasantness and hardship. If he could handle that, he could handle this.

At least the System wasn’t lying about it being nutritious. That was… dense.

Tulland’s stomach was now complaining for different reasons instead of crying out for food. He was slightly queasy, but the influx of sugar to his blood was doing good work within seconds.

He was fed, for the moment, and safe from anything but the most thorn-resistant enemies. All he had to resolve was the small problem of being trapped in a patch of sharp botanical death, and he’d be doing okay.

Very, very carefully, Tulland began to bunch up his body, making as much room in the cavity near his head as he could. Enduring the pain from several thorns, he reached deep into the thicket where he had landed after his first dive in and retrieved his Farmer’s Tool. After a little bit of wiggling and yanking, his once again bleeding hands held the tool to his chest, free and ready to get to work.

Reacting to his intent, the tool shifted forms, turning indistinct for a few moments as the tines retracted, reformed, and expanded into the shape of a scythe. The briars were thick, but there was still a bit of air between each branch and the next. If he could cut and pack them, he could slowly expand the space he was lying in.

For an hour, Tulland suffered as he slowly chipped away at dozens of thorns and branches with his scythe. He cut away the stuff to his side first, then carved away at the roof above him, packing them into a compressed stack of sticks. For a while, it was an open question of whether or not it would work. He was making a small amount of breathing room for himself, but sooner or later, he would have packed the branches down to as compact a space as his inadequate leverage would allow.

If I don’t have enough room to move better by then, I’m stuck. I’ll be able to choose between starving to death in here, or bleeding out on the other side until a monster comes by to end things.

By some miracle, Tulland managed to finally clear enough branches to sit up. Just that was a major improvement, allowing him to finally get something that could almost be called a swing into play. In another half hour, he had managed to clear out enough space to stand. Converting his tool back to a shovel, he was able to use it as a sort of impermeable step, stand on the piles of briar he had made, and use his weight to crush them even flatter.

And then, in a way that would have felt silly to him back at home, Tulland used his newfound room to take revenge on the plant. He spent hours clearing out space, finding places that the Hades Briar connected to the ground, slicing them, and putting them on the pile. As he found the disgusting fruits, he ate them to hurry along his healing process, and eventually had about twenty square feet of room in which to exist, mostly clear of thorns or anything that could hurt him.

Exhausted, he collapsed on his backside on the ground, tossing his scythe over towards the stack of briar branches that made up the far side of his prison. He absentmindedly picked at one of the fruits in his hand, considered eating it, then decided his stomach just couldn’t take any more of the acidic flesh at that moment. He tossed it forward, idly, letting it slam into the ground.

He was still probably dead, really, or at the very best trapped in the briars for the foreseeable future. And yet, he had seen no changes to his useless status screen at all. He had a skill that helped seeds, a skill that helped plants, and no use for either surrounded by a plant that had no other purpose than to kill him.

Smiling in a kind of wry despair, Tulland pointed his arm at the fruit on the ground and thought about his Enrich Seed skill. That was all it took to activate it. He felt something pass out of him, found himself dimly more aware of the plant, and gained a new level of fatigue beyond his already deep exhaustion.

There’s nothing more I can do while feeling like this. I’ve survived. I’ve eaten. I’ll try again in the morning, Tulland reasoned.

Tulland crawled to the most clear patch of ground he had, laid down his head, and found himself asleep before he had time to worry about whether future survival would be possible.

—

There was no morning on the first floor of the dungeon. When Tulland woke up, it was the same kind of light as when he had fallen asleep. And as made sense for his new life, he woke up violently ill. The fruits had not agreed with him in more ways than one. He wasn’t exactly poisoned, but his body was treating the food much like it would treat spoiled meat, with the same messy consequences.

Somehow, he made it through that too. An hour later, when there was nothing left to come out of him, Tulland found himself weak and broken on the ground, having lost whatever benefit eating the fruits had given him and some besides. The stuff wasn’t quite poison, but only just missed the mark.

That settles it. It’s only a matter of time now. Tulland coughed weakly as he laid on his back on the ground. No way to get food, and not enough energy left to do anything else. You win, System.

I hate to say this, but perhaps not quite yet.

No?

No. Look to your left.

Tulland did, if for no other reason than he had nothing else to do while he waited for the end to come. There, growing peacefully, was a brand-new briar, just as spiny and brutal-looking as all its brothers.

But, somehow, this one was a different color.