Infinite Farmer

Arriving at the appointed launching position, Tulland surveyed his tools. He had some rocks left without briars, and these he dutifully wrapped with the vine until they were just like all the others. He was left with a pile of ten or so vines, which he coiled as best he could into a package he could carry with him if he needed to.

And then, into one very special vine and rock assembly, he placed more projectiles. Loosening the vine from around the rock, he began to pack in flowers, putting dozens of them around the smaller, apple-sized rock this vine contained. He kept packing them for a while, only stopping when the overall weight approached but didn't quite reach that of his other rocks.

You should turn off my communications now. If you are to try this, you will need to concentrate.

"That's oddly considerate."

Hardly.

If the System meant anything by that, it chose not to elaborate. Personally, Tulland thought it was just unable to refute the idea that it was being considerate. Something about the System was off, this last week or so. He wouldn't quite term it remorse because he wasn't at all sure the System could even feel that. But something about how it was treating Tulland was less like an evil trickster. It was approaching how a stiff person might talk to a near-equal, almost as his old tutor used to be.

Either way, it wasn't wrong about the communication channel. If Tulland was going to do this, he would need his concentration. Switching it off, he picked up the first of the rock-vine combinations, commanded it to be very still, and began swinging it in circles.

"One, two, three, throw!" Tulland shouted. He had learned through recent experiments that the ants were deaf to actual sounds that didn't come to their feet through the soil. At this distance, Tulland could make as much noise as he wanted. And the little mantra helped keep his shots consistent, so there was no reason at all not to do it. The stone sailed along its path, with the vine still attached and trailing behind. "One, two, three, throw!"

The second stone followed the first, traveling a truly impossible distance before slamming hard into the side of the hill in roughly the same area. The ants started to stir. As they did, Tulland threw out as many rocks as he could, bunching them up in that one spot and slowly turning that side of the hill green.

That's ten. Tulland kept throwing rocks as fast as he was able as something like a hundred ants raced towards the point of impact. Twenty. Twenty-five. And there they are.

He had hoped to get more than that out, but realistically, twenty-five vines was about as much as he should have hoped for in this part of the plan. It wasn't absolutely vital that he get huge numbers anyway. That was going to be another point of diminishing return that he was fine abandoning.

As the ants hit the edge of the new patch of thrown briars, Tulland sent a command. He had carefully tested over a hundred times to make sure that the current distance really was no obstacle to this working.

Fight. Enhance Plant.

He saw the briars spring to life and become even faster as the ants made impact, getting into gear just in time to stop the clashing mandibles from massacring them. Ants began to struggle with the constriction from the briars, and a few very unlucky ants that got a particularly high amount of attention even began to lose those fights.

Numbers, however, were quite the thing. There was no shortage of ants, especially once the first few injured ants began to spray fear-and-aggression pheromone everywhere. By the time another twenty seconds had passed, there were hundreds and hundreds of ants in the area, piling not only over the vines but over each other as they attempted to eradicate the source of the attack.

But the real source of the attack was already sprinting towards them. With a few mighty spins and a closer vantage point, Tulland skidded to a stop and let the flower-packed rock-briar fly, sending the easiest command he possibly could to the flowers as they flew over the massive pile of ants.

Do what you want.

The flowers did. They immediately burst into a massive cloud of yellow, much larger than the number of flowers would have implied if these weren't, in their own way, an entirely new thing.

A week or so was a long time to be able to experiment with just a few new products, and Tulland had very little to do but get to know them inside and out. The ants had never liked the Acheflower powder, even when it was just a slightly smelly uncultivated product. This new stuff was different. It stunk. The few times Tulland had been in close contact with it, he had been amazed that the System protected his eyes and nose from burning.

And the ants absolutely hated it. They despised it. It not only blinded them physically. It now blinded them with rage. When the cloud of dust Tulland had created began descending on them, absolute chaos ensued.

It wasn't the powder killing them. With hundreds of ants blindly flailing in a pile, some casualties were to be expected. It wasn't going to get any more than a few percent of them, but Tulland was glad to see it. It represented just that much more time bought as his puny little farmer legs pumped for all they were worth towards the main entry tunnel of the hill.

He had pulled out all the stops he could, save one. As he crossed the border of the entryway, he dropped the several excess vines he had carried with him on the ground, sending a mental command for them to become fighters once more. With no prey to hunt, there was no way for him to know for sure that the command had worked, but he liked to think the guarding briars would give the ants at least a little pause.

He ran. For whatever reason, the inside of the anthill was not as dark as he had expected it would be. It made sense from a difficulty perspective. Asking people to run the gauntlet of ants was a hard enough thing. Asking them to do it in complete darkness would be a lot for an early level challenge, even in The Infinite.

Here and there, he saw ants rushing down corridors, attempting to attend the mayhem outside. They hardly noticed him, apparently overcome with the sheer thick terror of peer ant pheromone wafting in through the tunnels. He gave them what room he could and kept running through the mostly deserted tunnels.

It was a maze. Tulland was sure the ants knew where each path went, but in the next ten minutes, he hit more dead ends than he was willing to count, sometimes running into rooms full of eggs or plant matter, and other times just the end of tunnels the ants had yet to make good use of. All the time, he was deeply aware how bad of a sign that was. Every single second was another moment the ants were resolving the calamity outside and streaming back into the hill to do their normal work.

I probably have a minute to find the exit before that's a problem. Or less.

Tulland was fully winded. His legs were fire, like the ants themselves had been chewing on them. He had seconds of full function left when he burst into another room and found himself momentarily blinded not by darkness but by a brightness he had not expected at all.

In the corner, as large as a building and shining with a phosphorescent light that Tulland wasn't even close to beginning to want to understand, was a real monster that put everything he had seen so far to shame.

She had not noticed Tulland yet. Or if she had, she wasn't being obvious about it. For a moment, Tulland's legs almost betrayed him and took him away from the terror of the shining insect. Then his mind almost did the same, telling him stories about what her massive, acid-dripping mandibles would do to him if they got hold of him. And how very easy that would be to accomplish, given that each of the mandibles was as long as a swamp tree was tall.

But he couldn't run. It simply wasn't an option. The ants would be closing in behind him any time now. Knowing it would be a waste of time to even consider a direct attack, Tulland tucked his spear behind his pack and palmed two of his cultivated Acheflowers in each of his hands. It was a shame. He had made himself a brand-new spear, and had even sacrificed a fairly mature Ironbranch sapling to do it. It was, without a doubt, a much superior item with which to poke monsters. It just wouldn't help him any bit here.

He was going to have to trick this one out. Only, it was looking grim.

There would be no looking for a way around the Desert Queen, or to circumvent her royal throne room entirely. It wasn't that Tulland was too stubborn to quit moving in one direction, or that he wasn't terrified. He would have gladly chosen some other path if he could have.

Nope. There's just no choice. Tulland gulped as he looked across the room, his gaze unobstructed by her body as she sat high on her deadly pointed legs. That's the arch right there, behind her. There's no choice but to go through her. So through her, I suppose, I will go.