Chapter 14: Cards
And so the bet was set, and done in a way that Tulland suspected wasn’t reversible.
That, in itself, was the first win for Tulland. He had another piece of information about the relationship between his System and The Infinite that he wouldn’t have ever gotten from the System itself. It had to, as near as Tulland could tell, do what The Infinite said in certain situations.
At the very least, it seemed The Infinite could bind the Ouros System to certain kinds of agreements it had made. If that’s all it was, The Infinite’s Dungeon System wasn’t necessarily an all-powerful entity. But it was a way for Tulland to get things out of his System that it wouldn’t otherwise give, or to get it to pay out where it might otherwise cheap out on him.
If there was a way for Tulland to get any kind of real victory over the System, it would have to involve something like this. Some kind of clever loophole he could exploit when trying to down a literal god. He had nowhere near the power to do that alone, but by calling on the strength of another god? It just might be doable.
Of course, that’s making quite a giant assumption that their whole relationship and everything I can see isn’t some kind of cruel, elaborate prank. But if that’s the case, I’m going down anyway. This is the best bet I can make.
Tulland had turned off the System as soon as the bet was finalized. He had planning to do, and he didn’t particularly want the System influencing him with honeyed words while he tried to do it.
The way Tulland saw it, he didn’t have an absolute overabundance of cards to make his hand out of. But he had some, and if he learned one thing while watching his uncle play betting games, it was that you didn’t always make your bets when it was sure you’d win. By that time, other people would have ways to figure out the strength of your hand and wouldn’t commit. Instead, you started betting early, got them in deeper than they wanted to be, and hoped your hand would improve as the game wore on.
The first card Tulland had was an unlikely sort of ally in The Infinite. It wasn’t necessarily on his side, but it did at least seem impartial, and the terms it had stipulated for him on the bet were more generous and better thought out than any he would have negotiated himself. It wasn’t anything he could count on, and The Infinite hadn’t provided him with the rule book it used to mediate those kinds of things, but it was better than having a hostile entity in cahoots with his arch-nemesis.
Tulland’s second card was a bit harder to quantify. His new skill made his plants stronger, and it made them grow faster, and seemed to imply some characteristics plants held, like value, that he didn’t understand yet. He imagined that the actual effect of the skill would be pretty weak on a per-plant level, but there were a couple of things that made him hopeful.