Chapter 38: Gnawing Ambusher
The river being adjacent to the farm was nice, in that the soil was good and moist without being overly wet, and more water was just a scoop of his bag away. But it also represented a sort of risk, given that the river might flood at any time. As soon as Tulland had placed all the seeds in his initial planting, he got to work shoveling dirt from deeper in the forest, hefting it over to the opposite side of his staked farm area into a huge pile for flood resistance.
It took the better part of the day to do, but by the end of the day, Tulland had built something like a berm around the two sides of the farm that would protect it when the river flooded. The wonder of stats meant that the berm was almost as high as his shoulder, representing the better part of a few big craters he had dug out of forest floor unlucky enough to be conveniently adjacent to the project.
He wasn’t sure it would absolutely hold when the flooding came, but he had it packed down as firmly as he could and hoped it would prove to be enough. To increase the chances further, the entire wall was studded with briar seeds, planted without fertilizer and little hope of growing well. But they had a different advantage. Numbers. If there was one thing there was no shortage of in his pack, it was briar seeds. He had hundreds of the seeds without their fruit flesh, tucked away in their own little sack waiting for whatever use he could find for them.
Tulland had also been busy with his magic, taking any spare power he had and applying it to the plants, regeneration cycle after regeneration cycle. The recent increases to his stats were really showing their worth now. Every time his magic pool regenerated and was applied to the work, he was able to see an actually visible bump in the growth of the briars, and over time, even a noticeable growth in the usually much slower-growing trees. It was gratifying, especially as he watched the root structures of the briars take hold in his berm like a kind of organic, creeping glue that added structural integrity to the protective barrier. By the time he had reached a point of diminishing returns so small any more applications of magic power would be truly useless, he had a good foot and a half of briars. And an idea.
Command Plant, right? It has to do more than I’m using it for. I’ve had two ideas for ways it could be useful and both have worked, but I’ve hardly tried to stretch the limits. And if I could… it could be big.
Dropping his shovel into the back of his pack, Tulland sat on the dirt, closed his eyes, and focused. He basically understood what he wanted from the briars, but figuring out enough ways to communicate it to them that he wouldn’t be misunderstood or ignored was a job in and of itself.
He imagined the briars stretching out, growing past the length they were ever intended to be. Of stretching towards the sun, of reaching prey that would have evaded them before. Of spending whatever they had to in terms of their normal strength and thickness to be in all ways longer, taller, and farther-reaching.
Tulland wasn’t sure if they heard him, but after spending twenty minutes on the task and seeing no difference, he figured they either had or he was doomed to fail, no matter how much effort he put towards the task. Turning towards the high, eroded bank at the forest end of his farm, he moved on to the task of giving himself enough shelter to survive whatever the next wave of terror was that this forest had planned for him.
As much as he had pumped power into the berm, it wasn’t as if he had ignored his farm entirely. In reality, the majority of his power had still gone to the farm proper, and the back edge of the area was studded with good, strong, and soon-to-be adult briars ready for use. Just on the other side of an intentionally thick patch of the vines, he carved away at the soil, carefully removing just enough dirt to make a Tulland-sized tunnel beneath the forest floor. Luckily, the dirt was packed hard and dense past the first several inches of digging, and it would be stable in everything minus a mighty shaking of the earth.