Tulland spent the next two days pouring all the energy he could into his farm, encouraging every plant to add just a few more point to the cause of him staying alive. At the same time, he was running his splicer as often as it would allow him to, even after he ran out of interesting fertilizer and was resorting to ridiculous things to keep it going. Fingernail clippings were not the roaring success he hoped for, but they were worth a shot. More importantly, the farm had progressed anyway, pushing his score just north of seven thousand and five hundred.

On the third morning, Tulland was just through his breakfast and figuring out something more productive than lazing around with the heavily-armored girl he loved when he was rudely interrupted.

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Gate travel was always disorienting, but it had never been so bad as now. With no warning at all, it took Tulland a few seconds to understand why his vision was swimming with blobs of color. Right when Tulland expected to be dumped into some kind of wild terrain, he was thrown into a room, not entirely unlike his white room he normally went to between big places, except with much more color and set of two small pillars rising out of the ground.

Tulland didn't spend a lot of time thinking about the problem. He expected to do well enough to survive here, or at least hoped he would. That didn't mean he thought he was in the top fifty percent of everyone. Even if he had, betting on himself here after the time they spent on the safe zone floor had been stretched out for his benefit seemed like a betrayal of what had turned out to be the only group of mostly-decent people he had known since he reached this level.

He went and stood by the right pillar, which apparently was all he needed to do.

After another minute or so of waiting, he was teleported again. This time, the view waiting for him was much closer to what he expected to see.

—

Tulland was gratified to see that although this particular rapid-fire sequence of warps to different places had left him feeling a little sick, the others were handling it much worse. A few of the warriors standing around puking at the moment were people he had previously been intimidated by, and for some reason, the fact that he held on to his lunch while they lost theirs was comforting.

"You made it." Necia found Tulland before he found her, coming from behind him to give him a hug around the shoulders. "I wondered."

"It was just a simple selection. Even I can't mess that up. White, do we see anything yet?"

"Nothing yet. Big space, though. They could come from anywhere," White answered.

The ground was grass, fitting the usual pattern of what The Infinite seemed to think of as good fighting terrain. The space was essentially flat, even if there was terrain in the distance they may or may not be able to get to.

"Should we go looking for the monsters?" Tulland looked around, trying to figure out if any of the directions of possible travel were better choices than the others. "Is that better?"

"With this many people? No. No way we could move everyone in formation," Licht said. "It would give whatever we are going to run into the advantage."

"Ah." Tulland looked around. "So we just wait?"

"We do." Potter had ambled up in the meantime, still wearing his robes and looking not even a little more ready for a fight. "And we bemoan the fact that our short-sighted teammates opted for the individual achievement path on the rewards. Although it won't be that long befoer they come, I think. There's some magic gathering over there in a concerning way. I'd imagine that might get things moving."

Tulland and the others looked, although there was nothing to see. That changed as the soil started to stir, rising up into countless mounds a mile or so off.

"Are we fighting bumps?" Brist wandered up, fully armed in his spiked gloves and yawning. "I haven't done that before, but I guess I can."

"No, look. They're forming into something." Tulland pointed. "You can see the little swords and shields."

"All right. Everyone see that? Good." White had taken over now, his law enforcement experience being put to use as he organized the lines. "Everyone in the shield line, get ready. Remember to leave gaps for the fighting line to withdraw. Fighting line, step forward."

The strategy had been set over a half-dozen boring reasons, some of which Tulland had skipped since no one wanted to see their only source of food perish. The practical upshot was that, outside of a few specific skills that were being held back for strategic moments, the fighting line would unload everything they had on the charging mass of enemies.

After that, they'd pull back and let the shield line take the rest of the charge, doing whatever bashes and counters they had available. Then the fighting line would surge forward, attacking through the gaps in the line and taking down as many enemies as they could before being forced to fall back again. The hope was that the initial charge and secondary attack would take down enough of the monsters that they could then break ranks and chop down the remaining enemies without much risk.

At least before the shield blast wave, that seemed to be going to plan. Tulland watched as all the archers let loose of their best attacks, not least of all Licht, who shot out three bone-based bolts in the same time it took Tulland to let a few of his Chimera Sleeve vines loose to hunt. The bolts exploded into fields of bone-based spikes, taking out two or three Earthen Warriors apiece as the bones penetrated their forms and collapsed them into loose loam.

In the meantime, Tulland's chimera vines were slithering across the battlefield faster than any snake, jumping up enveloping the little dirt warriors before killing them with their thorns and moving on. They were surprisingly good at it, in their way. Tulland suspected it helped that the dirt monsters were both shorter than average and working off a pretty low damage threshold before they fell apart, maybe even some primitive counter of the number of wounds they had taken. His vines were triggering it in one go by pounding them with row after row of thorns covering their entire body. It was weird, but in the absence of any better way to fight at range, he'd take it.

In the meantime, the charging front of the Earthen Warriors reached them. Tulland watched as one of the little guys leveled its tiny clod sword at him, showing so many more openings than Brist had during his quasi-abusive sparring program. He caught the warrior on his pitchfork easily. Cranking back on the tines hard, he broke the monster apart, taking two cuts from other warriors for his troubles.

Boy! Don't be a fool. Pitchforks aren't for that.

Well, what else do you think I would use? Oh. Oh no. That's so stupid.

This isn't my fault. It's not any system's fault. You humans invented the tools you invented for the purposes you invented them for. It's your own fault.

Tulland sighed. He didn't really know if common farming tools predated the System, but he couldn't prove they didn't. Full of secret shame, he converted his farming tool to a hoe. As soon as he was using a tool that was actually meant for breaking apart dirt, he immediately dropped to single-shot kills, hitting the warriors with chopping and pulling motions that destroyed them in one go.

The right tool for the right job.

Shut up. For the love of whatever gods can hear me, shut up.