NOVPUB“This is not working as well as I had hoped.”
Tulland kicked a rock a few hundred yards in front of him, ran to it, and kicked it again. He had started doing it as a pastime, but once it had rousted out a large group of terrifying subterranean blight insects that would have otherwise ambushed him, it quickly became a mandatory action.
You could kick it further. Or less far. It depends on whether you are maximizing for the amount of warning you get, or how sure you are of discovering a threat.
“No. I don’t mean kicking the rock. I mean this whole walk. I expected more than this.”
To be fair, I don’t think you had really thought this entire journey through in the first place. Beyond putting down the grass, what did you seek to accomplish?
“I don’t know. I think I wanted something more significant. Something I could just do to end all of this.”
You are saving up a budget with the System of Aghli. It might do something towards that goal.
“It’s hard to imagine Aghli’s System giving us much we could work with. It doesn’t seem capable of giving out rewards like The Infinite did, even if it had a full budget to pull from.”
Oh, I wouldn’t say that. It isn’t The Infinite, true. But there are certain upgrades I can see you wanting to have that Aghli’s System just might be able to afford. Remember that I’m in charge of your rewards, for the most part.
“Do you think you’ll be able to get me something good? You’ve thought about it?”
I’ve thought about little else. Imagine, if you will, that you were mostly watching someone’s life. You couldn’t move things in that person’s world to help them. You couldn’t slay monsters. But you knew every element of how their build worked. That’s how my life is. I amuse myself by looking through all the skills and prizes that might be available to me, and seeing how they match up.
“Might? I thought for sure you just worked from a big list.”
The big list, as it were, is randomized. Not every option shows up every time.
“How much is missing?”
Ninety-nine parts out of a hundred. Hardly a fraction.
“Why is it like that? How can you possibly do anything effective like that?”
It’s like that because it always had been. It makes it more difficult to show favoritism. Not impossible, which is very much to our benefit. But more difficult, to be sure. Luckily for you, I’ve selected hundreds of suitable options.
“That seems like a lot.”
Gulls.
Tulland looked to the horizon, and found the System was once again right. There was a flock of exploding gulls rising from the site of his last rock-kick.
“Do you think the blight is doing this on purpose, or it’s just about the region we are in?”
Either, or both. It could even be a coincidence. It’s hard to say. You did remember your rock, this time?
One of the bigger learnings of the last day or so had been that the gull’s attack patterns could change, but their explosion reflex was entirely involuntary. A sufficient shock, like slamming into another gull or a sufficiently sized rock, would set them off like hand grenades. Tulland had been meaning to see if he could trigger it from afar, and the scouting rock about the size of his own head was doubling for this exact moment.
This was actually the fourth time he had planned on doing this. The first two times he had missed, while the third he had simply forgotten to get a rock in time. Having been unnecessarily blasted by gulls and relentlessly mocked for it by the System, he wasn’t about to make that mistake again.
“Okay, watch this.” Tulland moved into a throwing stance and let loose the rock. “Oh, that’s good.”
It will overshoot.
“No it won’t. Stop jinxing it.” The rock came down its arced trajectory, landing dead center in the group of gulls. At that distance, it was impossible to tell if it actually made contact with any of them for a moment, until the entire group went up in self-inflicted flames. “Woo! How do you like that?”
It was oddly effective. Although you must know you got lucky. You can’t throw well.
“I don’t have a throwing skill. Although the Acheflower throw well enough.”
Likely a hidden effect of your combat skill. You could probably engineer something for this, you know.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
“I know. I’m not that bored yet.”
After taking care of the next dungeon and the dozen dungeons that came after it, he was that bored. Taking a day or so to get some Achewood trees up and running didn’t take much time, and he brought some other old friends out to play that he hadn’t used in a long time.
The acid bulbs. I had almost forgotten you had them. Why did you stop using them, again? I remember that they were effective, once upon a time.
“They were effective so long as they could burn things. They couldn’t do anything to the dirt warriors, and anything any tougher than the early bosses I faced weren’t bothered much by them either.”
So why bring them out now?
“Because they splash,” Tulland said. “That seems helpful here.”
Tulland spent the days of growing wandering through the countryside, clearing up dungeons and planting more grass. He also made a couple of trips to plants he had laid down during the early days of his trip, harvesting more grass seeds to keep his efforts going.
In the meantime, the gulls didn’t stop coming. Without a consistent way of stopping them outside of chucking rocks and Acheflowers, it appeared they were just effective enough at hurting him that the blight didn’t have any better ideas than to keep spamming the gulls. He hadn’t seen anything but that one monster type consistently pop up the entire trip, and didn’t want to go anywhere near the town and Necia until he had a working solution for them.
It took two tries with the splicer to get a combination that did work, and then another try to get something that worked well. The first version was just a bulb that exploded with acid and hallucinogen at the same time, which worked well enough to take down birds than just throwing rocks. Better yet, it was guided by his plant skills so he could actually hit them. Still, he felt there was more to do.
You can’t be serious.
I’m just going to take a peek in there. See what’s going on.
You’ll blow yourself up.
I won’t. I’m just going to look. Trust me. I don’t think this is important enough to make big risks for.
Tulland threw some Darkwood Cedar and one of the seeds from the improved acid bulbs into the splicer. He didn’t particularly think the Darkwood was a good synergy with it, but it was by far his most magical plant at the moment. If all he was doing was trying to get a look at the magic power inside the canister, it was going to give him the most to look at.
You are poking too hard at the barrier.
I’m not getting through. Besides, I’ll be careful. Just then, Tulland hit the resonance of the can just right, exposing the slightest bit of the chaos energy. It filled up his senses like night in a forest. There was just a lot going on there that he couldn’t begin to understand, yet still somehow felt like he was learning from. See? It’s perfectly safe. I’ll just…
Turn it off!
Faster than he could possibly react, the chaos energy latched onto his Primal Growth skill and sucked energy out of it. It wasn’t much, although Tulland’s light touch with the skill up to that point meant that the change in the rate of his magic’s drain hit him with a lurch he could feel. He shut it off as quick as he could, feeling rather than seeing the hole in reality that let him see inside the splicer close.
That felt close.
It still might be close, you fool! Get away from the can in case it explodes!
The idea that the can might still be roiling inside had not really occurred to Tulland. He sprinted away from it, covering a few miles and one ill-aimed gull dive in the process before hitting the dirt behind a boulder and waiting.
How long should I stay back here?
At least another half hour. Who knows what you did.
Tulland twiddled his thumbs and waited a full hour, mostly as penance for not listening to the sage counsel of the System. That did seem to calm it down a bit, and by the time he arrived back at the splicer he was mostly forgiven.
It’s open already.
Turning the heat up on an oven makes things bake faster. See what you made.
Tulland opened the top of the canister, finding a single sprout of something inside. It wasn’t a seed, exactly. His Farmer’s Intuition told him it was closer to the parasitic type of life his Achefulowers belonged to, something he should plant on a tree. The description mostly confirmed the same thing.
This parasitic bulb will grow well on almost every tree, but better on plants that are a bit on the weaker and more easily invaded part of the overall hardiness spectrum. Nothing about their growth is particularly interesting. They are neither fast-growing nor particularly hardy in and of themselves, and do not tolerate harsh climates without significant enhancement.
As a ranged projectile, they are much more interesting. Each Clusterbomb explodes with a small but significant amount of force, expelling several slightly delayed exploding quasi-seeds from their interior. In effect, they scatter explosions over several feet, catching anything within that space in the blast.
“Neat.”
I would say you should feed the splicer energy more often, but…
“But I’d explode the entire world. I understand.”
I’m glad. Now go find some gulls. I want to see this in action.
I have to grow some first. Give me a few hours.
Tulland planted the seed on his Achewood, overloaded it with Primal Growth, let it come to full size, then carefully extracted several sprout-like spores to grow a bigger batch. Once he had five on the tree and five in his storage, he went hunting.
The batch of gulls he finally found was the biggest he had ever seen.
Run.
No use. Tulland stood his ground as the birds passed in front of the setting sun so thickly they blotted out the light. I need to destroy them or they’ll get me. There’s too many for all of them to miss.
Then do it. Best to throw everything you have.
Tulland did, rapid-fire chucking each of the five bombs. One was short, falling to the ground in an explosion about the size of a wagon. The other four flew true, crashing into the miles wide flock with more spacing than would have normally allowed him to hit anything. Only the sheer size of the flock made it work.
Tulland watched as the four explosions went off, then grew into huge clouds of blight as the explosion moved from bird to bird, increasing the destruction’s speed and size as it grew and grew through layer after layer of gull. Tulland squinted against the light and got ready to run in case there were any left, but as the cloud dissipated he saw he had got them all.
“Well, that worked.”
