Infinite Farmer

The Ouros System wasn't trustworthy and couldn't see much farther than Tulland himself could, but this wasn't the kind of thing it would lie about. Tulland scanned the ground, missing the pit four times before he finally caught the subtle difference in the dirt-on-dirt motif of the world around him. There was a depression in the ground about twenty feet ahead, doing nothing in particular and displaying no particular activity around it.

Compared to anthills back home, it looks positively dead. Not like an anthill at all.

This is, as you know, hardly "back home." But it does follow a certain logic, if you know how to see it.

Oh, yeah? Tulland kept his responses to thought, so as not to jostle any activity out of the pit before he was ready for it. And what's that?

As a rule of thumb, the larger an animal is, the less of it there are. Bigger things take more food to feed.

But they can take down bigger prey, working together.

There is a balance to everything, you'll find. And exceptions to any rule, for that matter. But as a general thing, a wolf is around the largest animal you are likely to see.

Unless I see something else.

Indeed.

Tulland cut the channel, out of an abundance of caution and a surprisingly strong desire not to get distracted and caught in pincers or to be stung by some strange, venom-bearing needle. Creeping up as slowly as he could, he approached the edge of the hole and looked over, hoping to catch a glimpse of the ants that would give him a better sense of what he was in for.

In that, he was immediately disappointed. There was not a single ant visible when he looked over the edge. Instead, there were a few ill-kept looking tunnels branching off from the bottom of the pit, a lot more dirt, and nothing else of consequence.

That felt like an okay enough outcome, as such things went. From what Necia had been telling him, these pits generated ants at fairly regular intervals. If he could get some vines established on or in the edge of the pit before they came back, he could harvest the ants from afar without actually doing the hard work of fighting, like some sort of perverse land baron taking advantage of the peasants in his employ.

Tulland pulled out some seeds and carefully implanted them in the soil near the lip of the hole. There was no shortage of fruits to draw potential briar plants from now. Using his shovel, he turned a small amount of dirt, cut up the soil beneath it, dropped in a full but slightly mashed fruit, then turned the soil back over them as he worked silently around the circle.

After about ten minutes, he had planted something like fifteen of the briar seeds. That almost felt like enough until he remembered that his Enhance Plant magic was now best spent on groups of twenty. As quietly as he could, he prepared three more balls of briar seed and organic material, then tossed them into the pit one after another until he had three seeds close enough that they could support each other, should they reach adulthood.

In theory, this was the best thing Tulland could possibly do. He had been paying more attention to the leveling of his briars since he defeated the Forest Duke on the first floor, and his findings had been that the briars now leveled in a couple ways. The first was by being especially coddled in their seed form and being given the best shot they could possibly get to grow up strong. Right now, with Enrich Seed, just the right soil, and the best mixes of berry and meat fertilizers he had figured out, Tulland could get his briars to about level five at maturity.

Once he cut the briars, they were stuck at that level. Letting the briars eat the monsters they felled was a good way of keeping them alive and fighting a bit longer, but it no longer made them stronger than they had been in the ground in any way Tulland had been able to notice. Letting them hunt while they were still in the ground was an entirely different thing. They seemed to level and grow just like he did, if to a pattern and at a speed that he couldn't quite understand yet.

The point is that if I can get them growing in there, eventually those little guys will be monsters that grew up watered in ant-blood.

It wasn't meant to be, even though a spawn-farming death-hedge would be the coolest thing Tulland had done so far. When the seeds hit the bottom of the pit, he saw exactly why Necia was caught off guard when she set foot into the ants' real, actually guarded territory. As if on cue, four of the huge ants popped out of the sides of the pit, swinging their heads back and forth in an attempt to get the scent of the intruder on their antennae.

It didn't take the ants long to figure out the proximate source of the trouble. They rushed the seeds like they were an existential threat, tearing apart the fruit flesh Tulland had swaddled them in and sending the seeds themselves flying. The plants seemed to be mostly uninjured by this attack except for losing their jump-start nutrients, and the ants were mindless enough to fail at comprehending what was really going on.

That stayed true for just a second or so after the initial rush to defend the pit. As soon as the threat of the seed-balls was dealt with, Tulland watched the ants start to scramble up the sides of the wall directly at him.

Four ants against six vines seemed like the kind of math that could easily swing against him, especially with insects whose assembled mouth-parts looked custom-made for dealing with plant matter. Tulland decided to do his best not to find out how he would fare. Backing up, he reached into his bag to grab at the flowers, tossing two of them in a low arc.

True to his most recent commands, the flowers were stable. As they came even with the lip of the pit, Tulland let them know what to do.

Explode. Whenever you think is best.

The complexity of the command was lost on the flowers, which immediately burst into powder. Tulland kept backing up as the ants suddenly became much, much noisier inside the pit. With no way of seeing them, he had no way of knowing what was going on until a single ant managed to poke his head above the pit, looking as healthy and lethal as ever.

Tulland gripped his spear. He had no idea if these things could outrun him, and at the moment, he had as much potential upper hand on them as he was likely to get. Hoping the flowers were doing at least something, he choked up on his spear and took a step towards the one ant that had made it free of its home, ready to do what he had to.

The ant came about up to Tulland's knee, and was negotiating the dirt with pointed, chitin-covered legs that looked like they could act as weapons all their own. The entire animal was lightly dusted with the yellow from the flowers, and seemed to know where Tulland was as it moved forward, mandibles biting again and again in anticipation of their clash.

Tulland shoved his spear forward, catching the thing more or less on its nose. It was no good. The point of the spear turned away from the hardness like a needle being poked at glass, creating a visible scratch on the ant's armor but no more damage than that. The ant lunged forward, snapping its mandibles shut on a space that previously held Tulland's leg. Tulland himself only cleared it because he had anticipated just that sort of reaction. He shoved his spear forward again, this time catching the ant in the joint of one of its legs.

The point of the spear dug into the flesh just a bit and momentarily buckled the leg before the ant swung its head at the spear itself, knocking it loose and almost sending Tulland off his feet. The defensive move actually made the spear do more damage than it otherwise would have, ripping the flesh of the leg enough to get the ant to visibly hobble on it.

The momentary victory was hard to duplicate. The ant, now wary of Tulland's spear, was doing its best to attack from safer angles and distances. If the hallucinogen was having any effect on it, it was hard to see. And to the extent Tulland could tell, it had the upper hand. He wasn't going to be killing it any time soon, at least at this rate.

And at some point not too far in the future, the other ants would come.