Infinite Farmer-Chapter 180: Fighting

“Dodge, Tulland!”

Old, real Brist had eventually become less of a challenge for Tulland to fight. He had started out as an unstoppable monster, but as Tulland had brought more and more tricks out and had gotten more and more from his farm, he had eventually overwhelmed Brist’s power with sheer variety and managed to fight the man on more or less equal terms.

He figured the same thing would happen here. Brist had refused to start training him that night, instead forcing him to eat bowl after bowl of nourishing food and to sleep four hours more than he normally did, sending Tulland back to bed multiple times until there couldn’t be any more fragments of naps. After that, Brist sent him to the baths with orders to get his entire body, every niche of his armor, and even his plants sparkling clean.

As a result, Tulland felt like an unstoppable force when he finally emerged from all the sleep and steam. He was spotlessly and thoroughly in tip-top condition in every way, packed to the gills with calories and an unlimited connection to his farm. He didn’t know what Brist expected from him, but he was prepared to take the fighter down on the first try, showing him every last thing he had learned with every bit of attention, wakefulness, and stat-enhancement he had on him.

It hadn’t worked that way. Brist had effortlessly wiped the floor with him. Then the man did it again, and again. He used different weapons each time, first taking Tulland down with fists, then with sticks, then with swords, maces, and even a crossbow. It turned out grappling was its own weapon category, and he used that.

In every case, regardless of how good of a matchup things should have been, it didn’t matter what Tulland tried to. He would make the moves that made sense, find they didn’t make sense at all when measured up against Brist’s own personal logic of fighting, then find himself on his back with some manner of lethal force pressed against his neck.

Tulland was more than willing to tough it out, but Brist challenged even that willingness. From dawn to the literal dusk of their illusory world, he pounded Tulland through a beach’s worth of sand, and only Tulland’s reliance on his farm’s regeneration kept him going even that long.

“I don’t understand.” Tulland was scarfing down pounds of meat and bread to try and counter the hunger a day’s worth of fighting with Brist had awakened in his belly. “I couldn’t touch you. Your stats can’t be that high. I didn’t make any of the old mistakes, so why couldn’t I touch you? What were you trying to teach me?”

Brist took a bite out of an enormous hunk of meat, tearing it from the bone with his teeth. Then he shrugged.

“You don’t get it? I was teaching you that you couldn’t touch me,” Brist said.

“You could have taught me that in the first few minutes. You did teach me that in the first few minutes,” Tulland retorted.

“Some lessons aren’t for your brains, Tulland. They are for your bones. Every inch of you hurts, right?”

“Right.”

“Wrong. None of you hurts. Check. Really check.”

Tulland did. He was exhausted, but he found that it was all mental. His muscles ached, but he couldn’t say exactly where. His bones felt like they simply must be fractured and yet, there were no breaks. He was fine except for the fact that he didn’t feel fine at all.

“Yup. That’s what I was looking for. Your body remembers getting hit. It wants to avoid it now, in a way it didn’t before. And it knows it was doing something wrong to get hit that much.” Brist took another chunk of meat in his mouth and spoke again before he was truly done chewing. Tulland was used to that. It was a habit of the Brist he had known. “Here’s the secret, Tulland. Everyone starts out learning how to avoid mistakes. If you can avoid mistakes and you are stronger, you can usually win.”

“Is that usually tricky? It sounds tricky.”

“It is. Because there’s a level beyond that. You avoid mistakes, then you reintroduce them, one by one. Because then you know why they are mistakes, you know what’s bad about them, where they make you weak and where they don’t matter. You can avoid making those specific mistakes in those specific situations.”

“I understand a little, but it’s really that powerful? I couldn’t touch you.”

“I have ten lifetimes’ worth of mistakes to draw from. More, maybe. And you were so committed to doing what was right even if it got you hit that it was impressive. Can you eat anymore?”

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Tulland looked down at his food. Like his muscles, his body was still claiming his stomach was in terrible need, but actually paying attention showed that he was so distended from his eating that he couldn’t fit another bite without hurting himself.

“No.”

“Good. Then we are hitting the steam room.”

“Are you sure? I’m exhausted. I could use the sleep.”

“Just trust an old man, alright? I promise I know what I’m about.”

They sat in a room filled with steam for almost an hour. It did help with the phantom pain in Tulland’s body, a little. By the time they were done, he almost felt human again.

“It still hardly seems worth it. I could have got another hour’s worth of sleep.”

“Could you? I wonder.” Brist slapped him on the back. “Go sleep. Tell me if you are right in the morning.”

Tulland was used to two modes of falling asleep. In the first, he was so exhausted he dropped off as soon as his head hit the pillow and slept fitfully through the night. In the second, he stayed awake thinking about everything he could be doing to be better for hours, losing precious time asleep for every minute of worry.

That night, he did neither. As soon as he hit the bed, he felt sleepy. The bed was excellent compared to a roll of Wolfwood fur on the ground, but that was only part of it. The warmth of the steam and the digesting food had worked a certain kind of magic on him, and he felt heavy as he pressed into the bed and passed out.

“Tulland.” Brist had just picked up Tulland’s bed from the ground and dumped him out of it, counting on the cold stone floor to wake him up better than words or a gentle shake of the shoulder could. “Was I right?”

Despite the frigid rock in his face, the answer to that was easy. Every one of Tulland’s muscles was flexible and slack. He had got the most out of every minute of sleep possible.

“Yes. How did you know that?”

“Lifetimes and lifetimes of experience. In almost every one, I figured out that sleep was important. You can’t learn anything until you sleep on it. Not really. And the better you sleep, the better it learns. Now let’s get out to the sand. I want to see if I can break some more of your teeth like yesterday.”

Breathing a silent prayer of thankfulness that his regeneration covered dental injuries, Tulland followed Brist out to the sand. He was hoping he’d do better than he did yesterday. What he got instead was a bloodbath.

Brist was a phantom that hit like a boulder. More than once, Tulland not only failed to block his hits but lost sight of the man entirely, wheeling around all too slow to avoid getting slammed in the head with a shield or cut across his arms with a battleaxe. He tried to be less predictable, and found that Brist could still predict it. He looked out for tricks, and still found himself tricked as Brist weaved in and out of his moves like the wind, attacking from footings and angles that would have been fatal mistakes for anyone else.

During the day, they proved and reproved that The Infinite had done something very nice for Tulland in regards to his vines, which regenerated far past the point of damage that would have normally destroyed them in the real world. Even when Brist somehow used a bottle of alcohol to set Tulland on fire and completely destroyed the vines using something he called pyrophysio boxing, they came back from mere ash to a usable form in less than a minute.

Tulland needed that. He couldn’t stop Brist from beating him up at all. When they stumbled towards the food that night, Tulland’s phantom pain was back, stronger than ever. Brist forced him to sit while he brought him several days worth of food piled high on one big plate, then monitored him to make sure he ate every bite.

“That’s our third day. Four left.” Tulland lifted his arm to bring some bread to his mouth, wincing as he did. “I can’t see myself winning this in time.”

“You shouldn’t even be trying to win. Tulland, you haven’t had a normal progression, so you don’t know. For most people, when they get to as high of a level as you are, dungeons like this are a long shot. Getting stronger than you costs an awful lot.”

Brist flexed his fist.

“I was never this strong. Not in any of my lives. I was strong, but I’ve lived who knows how many times and never got quite to this point. The difference between you and me might seem big, but I’ve seen you thrust that pitchfork at me. If you could actually land a hit on me, it wouldn’t be that big of a gap. Do you know how strong that makes you, Tulland?”

“Strong enough.” Tulland popped some vegetables in his mouth and reminded himself to chew, regardless of what his mind was telling him the condition of his mouth was. “I haven’t had much trouble back on Aghli.”

“There’s never strong enough,” Brist said. “Not for you, Not for me. You can never be sure. You must be facing something pretty powerful back there for The Infinite to be spending this much effort on you here. It’s preparing you for something.”

“Maybe. I don’t think whatever battles I’ll have out there will be won with my arms, if that makes sense.”

“Don’t knock the mental part of this. Fighting is its own way of thinking, Tulland. It doesn’t replace the other kinds, but… did I ever tell you about the time I fought a bardic swordsman?”

“No.”

Brist launched into a long story about it. He had once run into a man with a sword in a lute, one that pulled out from the head of it like a hidden blade in a cane. Brist had won the fight, but only by the skin of his teeth. Tulland listened as well as he could through the fake fatigue his body was reporting, eating his food and nodding through the parts he didn’t quite understand.

“Finally, it hit me that it was his rhythm,” Brist concluded. “He was catching me at the weakest point of every step I made, keeping his own beat and breaking mine.”

“So what did you do?”

“I threw a wagon at him. It was full of scrap iron.” Brist laughed. “A wagon full of scrap iron hits hard. It doesn’t care about rhythm. We were friends for years after that.”

“Really?”

“Really. Fighting’s another way of knowing a person, too. I guess we both liked what we saw.”