Chapter 82: Ninth Wave
Tulland started out the ninth wave entirely committed to not doing a single thing differently. He had picked up a lot of damage during the last wave, sure. But if he knew The Infinite, whatever was coming in the tenth wave was going to be a step beyond what he had gleaned from the pattern so far. He needed to avoid showing his hand as much as he could. He wasn’t going to pull out a single stop unless it was absolutely, positively required.
It took less than five seconds to break his resolve. Tulland threw his Acheflower, as usual, but watched big gaps in the beast’s charging formation open up to the perfect size and at the perfect timing to minimize the effect of the explosions. There were still a few beasts catching just a little bit of the powder around the edges, but just barely and not nearly enough to count on to make a real difference.
In response, Tulland only had a few choices on what to do. The first was almost painful considering what was to come, but he dumped out the entirety of his stock of flowers on the ground in front of them as he jumped back just out of their explosion range. He was confident that the beasts could get out of the way of anything he threw, but was almost as sure that they wouldn’t give up chasing him entirely just because there were some unexploded flowers in their path.
Sure enough, they followed. And as they did, he let the flowers go, covering the better part of the group in a thick cloud of hallucinogen. It barely slowed them down. Despite scoring a direct hit, there was only so much time they spent within the cloud, and it did much less than if the flowers had hit them all at once.
You were asking about other tricks. Tulland dodged away from the group, watching as fully half of the animals split off in an obvious attempt to work around his flank. Obvious or not, it would work if he couldn’t stop it. Are you ready to see one?
Of course. If you really have one to show.
Tulland smiled, thrust his pitchfork out to gain a bit of distance, then summoned the second of the two Clubber Vines he could store right now.
That’s actually… more than I thought it would be.
Right? Two whole Clubbers at your service.