Chapter 16: Ironbranch Sapling
The only thing standing between Tulland and getting speared on a half dozen antler-points was his fragile, mindlessly loyal vines. They weren’t very strong. Even though one member of the briar corps had killed dozens of Razored Lungers, that only meant Tulland had a slightly less mooky mook fighting on his side. He had only created a weapon that could consistently take out the lowest-level threat living in the first floor of a supposedly infinite tower.
The Forest Duke was probably the weakest boss the tower had to offer. Compared to the Cannian Knight that Tulland would find on the fifth floor, it was like fighting a down-stuffed pillow. But the big deer-like thing was still a boss, and an optional challenge boss on top of that. It was strong enough to effortlessly break even the strongest of Tulland’s briar army. It charged past the first one, then past the second, and then the third. As they grasped on, it slowed only slightly and only took the shallowest of scratches from the thorns.
And not that it was a good bet, not that it was how Tulland wanted to find out exactly how far the whole biome density concept could go, but there were a few things the elk hadn’t thought about while it accurately assessed that each individual briar wasn’t a threat. The first was pain.
Stings, huh? Tulland grinned through the bloody teeth he had gained from getting smacked around by the elk, not pitying it one bit. One characteristic of the briars was that they hurt like hell, something that probably didn’t add much to their general lethality but was, in Tulland’s direct and personal experience, distracting as hell. Annoyed and slightly agonized by the newfound pain, the Forest Duke stopped to retaliate against a few of the briars, trumpeting and snorting as it did.
That was a mistake. The elk hadn’t considered that Tulland kept hundreds of briars in the deep hallway he had built around his exit. While both the Forest Duke and Tulland fully agreed that it could take on as many individual briars as it wanted, this wasn’t a one-on-one duel.
Tulland had been paranoid that some smart monster would sneak in during the night, and his solution had been to overpopulate his home camp to an extent that it would kill a Razored Lunger a hundred times over. The math didn’t necessarily make sense when comparing one very large, very strong enemy against what amounted to a bunch of very sharp badgers, but it was still a lot of briars, much more than he suspected the boss had any kind of experience with.
When the Forest Duke moved to retaliate, a dozen more briars found themselves in position to strike. When the monster broke away from those too, it got into range of a dozen more briars, all ready to spend out their life force trying to take him down. The monster wasn’t stopped, exactly. It was making slow, steady progress towards Tulland. But it had slowed down to a crawl as it fought with thorn briar after thorn briar in an endless hallway of annoyance and pain.
Tulland decided to make it worse for the elk. Struggling back to his feet, he rushed around the complex cutting down his oldest and toughest Hades Lunger Briars, dropping his tool after each cut to use his good hand to pick up the harvest and chuck it either at the Forest Duke or in the way of its advance. As he did, he felt Strong Back very slowly working to reorient his bones and get him back in shape for what the skill likely thought of as a hard day’s work on a normal, completely conventional farm.
After the first fifteen chucked vines, something shifted hard in Tulland’s shoulder. The bone clicked back into place, almost knocking him out with pain but also bringing his left arm back to some semblance of function. He roared, letting the agony drive his adrenaline as he cut and chucked as many briars as he could get his hands on.