“Versai, any idea when I should expect the first monster wave?” I lead my tiny army back towards the stairs. There was a whole rest of the tower to explore, and then trees to harvest, defenses to make, and maybe some wandering monsters to pick off. Ooh! Rache might even discover something special in the woods. That would be awesome.

“Nightfall.” She sounded certain.

“Ah. Any idea how long that will be?”

“You still have your full actions, right?”

My what? Oh please don’t tell me…

“I can only take so many actions a day?”

“You can order your Awakened Souls to perform up to five actions a day outside the tower. You, yourself, can’t travel beyond the Tower’s zone of control, which at the moment is about… ten paces? Maybe less?”

I can see that becoming a pain in the neck fast.

“The zone of control can be expanded?”

“Yes, as you make improvements, clear the forest, defeat waves, that sort of thing. I think the best I saw was-” She rested a perfect finger on the most kissable, biteable lips that ever graced the face of a valkyrie and that made me frankly uncomfortable. “Pretty sure he got fifteen paces. So it’s doable.”

“Super. And can summons go past the zone of control?”

“Naturally. Up to twenty times, unless they have a relevant ability or you have issued qualifying orders. For example, I think Rache’s scouting range is one thousand times or something crazy like that, but we would have to check.”

“Oh, can we check stats? How?”

“Right through there is the Hall of Records.” She pointed at a door. We had only gone down one floor. Convenient. I tried to open it. Locked.

“It occurs to me that this is the first door I have seen in the tower.” I said, smelling a black robed shaped rat, or his designer cousin Rosalia.

“Yes, floors you haven’t unlocked yet are locked. You get the Hall of Records after wave three.”

“I thought you said the record was three waves?”

Versai looked sad. “Yes, I had such hopes for him. The fourth wave had barely started before our defenses were overrun. I died before he did, of course, but I have to imagine his death was awful. It always is. The monsters seem to want to make it as upsetting to watch as it is to experience.”

“Fantastic. What’s unlocked before the first battle?”

“The Spirit Heart Pool, and the Throne Room.”

“That completely empty huge room at the top of the tower?”

“I believe you will eventually be able to fill it with things, though I admit I have never seen it happen.” She shrugged an armored shoulder.

Well this got better and better.

“Can Awakened Souls use their abilities in the Tower?”

“If they can, it must be locked behind some door or power I have never seen. In fact, while you can give some orders to some of the dolls here, most will just be ignored.”

“Huh.” I looked down at the rangy Rache, who had zipped ahead of the group. “Hey Rache. Can you go up to the throne room and look out the windows, do some scouting that way?”

“This cowgirl needs to ride! Mo-TOR Cit-TAy!”

“Guess that’s a no.”

“Good thinking, though.” Versai was clearly making an effort to be positive. “Unfortunately, the Mika’s can’t shoot from inside the Tower either.”

And there went overwatch capabilities.

“Stick her up on the roof?”

“No access to the roof, and no one had the time or resources to try and make a ladder or something to get her up there. Possible in theory, I guess, but I’d bet not in practice.”

Good to see that other people were thinking too. Bad to see that I was thinking of the same things that the guys who died by wave four all thought of.

“Alright, not ideal. How many entrances does the Tower have?”

“Two.

“Even less ideal. We have to split our forces?” I hated tower defense games where you had to defend multiple points.

“No, or at least, not yet. The back entrance is sealed up.”

Small mercy. “So just to confirm, the monsters want to get in and kill me.”

“Yes.” She nodded her perfectly formed head.

“And I cannot run, because I am trapped in the immediate vicinity of the Tower.”

“Correct.”

“Nor can I fight, because I am unarmed.”

“Well, that and it just doesn't seem to work. Every time I saw one of the other Tower Masters try to pick up a weapon, it just flew out of their grasp. Even punches and kicks seemed to do nothing.”

“Can’t run. Can’t fight, Can’t even hide. All I can do is rely on my Awakened Souls to do the fighting. Prior to that, I have five actions that I may order which will determine the survivability of the wave.” I said, Chadly, determined not to sound like I was about to piss myself in terror.

“You have it right, Tower Master.”

“Do they need anything to survive? Do you? Is there some absolutely vital resource we need to survive every day?”

“Err… strictly speaking no, but if you aren’t harvesting resources every day, you are going to be in a lot of trouble, very fast.”

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

I nodded. We kept walking down the tower, passing locked door after locked door. It was both depressing and monotonous. There was an empty lobby area at the foot of the stairs. A wide archway stood in the middle of a wall. Very wide. I paced it out. I never measured my pace but… ah. Wrong unit of measurement.

“Mikas, without leaving the Tower, line up shoulder to shoulder, starting here.” I put my hand in line with the door frame, a few feet inside. Just in case.

”I’ll stop them!” came back, repeated five times. The door was roughly three and a half Mika’s across. With their shields deployed… three Mikas or four? I guess it depended on how the shields were meant to be used. They… probably didn’t need to be overlapping. But a seamless wall would be better protection, right? Would they get in each other’s way?

“Is there a minimum spacing needed between summons when I position them outside the tower? Beyond the practical, I mean.”

“No.” She gave me a curious look. “Why?”

“I was thinking of deploying the Mika’s in an arch across the door, forming a shield wall. You could stab over the top of them with your sword, and Rache could race around the perimeter making flanking strikes. Pammy hangs out just inside the tower, only zipping out to heal, then ducking back in. The rest of us just… hang out, I guess. Shout encouragement.”

She gave me a different look this time. A new one. Approval. I wasn’t sure how to deal with that. It wasn’t an emotion I got exposed to much, IRL.

“That is a very good first plan. Two small problems, but manageable ones. First is that any Awakened Souls that are outside at night have to stay outside until the wave is over. So Pammy is in or out, no back and forth. Second is that the Mika’s have a limited rate of fire. They are only One Star after all, and will quickly get overwhelmed by numbers. This plan will work up to a point, but at the end of it, I might be the only one left outside.”

I thought about that for a while. I had… just a stupid amount of mobile games experience. And JRPG’s on consoles. Some PC Gaming. Even some RTS and grand strategy games under my belt. That being said, I think the biggest help was going to be all those Reddit arguments. So many discussions of what the meta is. So many meta discussions about finding the meta.

Lots and lots of discussions about reused ideas in video games. And this was fundamentally a tower defense game.

I looked over at my summons. I had some basic dart monkeys, a sword monkey, and some utility type monkeys. And a healing monkey, though I don’t think that’s exactly a thing in Bloons TD 6. So, if I was playing that game, with this line up, what would we most urgently need to do?

Ah. “We need to slow them down. And we don’t have iron nails, or ropes or anything. We just have two Judiths, their hand tools and the labor we can get from the other summons.”

“Correct.”

“Can the monsters smash through trees?”

“Eventually?”

I smiled. I might not be an expert war gamer or anything, but this one I knew how to manage. I inhaled, ready to give my first orders.

“Order number one- Rache is to deploy and scout the area around the Tower. Report back any items of interest. Be back before nightfall.” Commanding. SUMMON THE GIGA CHAD!

“Gonna ride the highway to Hell!” Rache pumped her fist.

“Come back alive instead.” Because I can’t replace you in the short term. “Order number two- The Judiths will cut down trees. Start with the ones closest to the door to the tower and work out in a fan shape. Don’t bother processing them into logs or anything. Just cut down the trees.”

“Can do!” They chorused.

I smiled and rubbed my hands. “Think I can save an order by hauling things myself?” I asked Versai.

“No. It’s been tried. Also remember you can’t get more than ten paces from the Tower.”

Blast. Well. Fine. We do this the easy way.

“Order three. Anyone who isn’t Rache or the Judiths drag the trees that are cut down in front of the tower. Branches pointed straight away from the tower.” I pointed. I remembered this from a thread where people were complaining about things that were inexplicably left out of video games. Time to steal, steal, steal.

“Um. like. You are the boss of me, but like, you can’t just BOSS me, you know? I have, like super major problems or whatever? Like, you are my boss but it’s not my job?”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear Becky.” I muttered. “Does this count as mutiny? Can I send her to the great Spirit Heart Pool in the sky?” Versai nodded understandingly.

“Completely useless, I know. I can’t let you kill her, but I do understand the urge.”

“Such fun.”

Rache summoned a translucent blue horse. There was a ghostly whinny, then the thoroughbred turned into what to my admittedly untrained eye looked like a rather handsome American motorcycle. Not a Harley, but I’m not a bike guy. Still. Liked it. She zipped off, somehow not smashing dead against the huge trees in the forest.

“These are the “normal” trees?”

“Well. Maybe a little on the small side.” She smiled, and for some reason, I felt a stabbing pain in my liver. “No, not small. Just normal. Fine size. A good size. If they were too big, it would be a pain, you know?”

I gave her a look. She had a completely straight face.

“Hmmm.”

The Judiths tore into the trees like they were angry at them. The little hatchet on their tool belt expanded into a full sized felling ax when in hand, and the trees barely lasted a few blows before they were down.

“That’s not… the ax head isn’t that big. How are they doing that so fast?”

“It’s part of their skill.” Versai shrugged. Which was as good a way of saying “magic” as any, I supposed.

Once the trees were down, I directed where they were to be put. Basically, just dragged in front of the Tower with the base towards the tower and the pointy end facing the woods. They were stacked roughly, branches intertwined and pinning each other in place. I did, however, make sure a very narrow gap was left in the middle, about a half Mika across. I figured, once they smashed through the branches it would widen to about two Mikas.

It took a bit of doing, but we quickly had a wide clearing in front of the tower that was almost totally impassible.

“Tower Master, we can’t stack them any higher. Do you want us to just keep widening the barrier?” Versai asked.

“No, order number four. Start stripping the trees of branches where they fall. Stick the loose branches in the narrow gap between the barricades. The tree trunks can stay where they are for now.”

Hope Rache can navigate through all that okay.

It seemed she could, because she drove straight over them without so much as bending a twig.

“Sweet Minithra, how did you manage that!?”

“Aww, this filly has light feet.” She patted her ghostly motorcycle. “Here’s what I found!” She handed me a rolled up scroll. I grabbed it… and it vanished in a flash of light.

“Versai? Why did the scroll just vanish?”

“Your map just updated. You don’t unlock the map room until after Wave One,” She yelled from across the clearing.

Fantastic. “Alright Rache, head on in and rest up. We will need you out there tonight.”

“Always ready for a ride.” She strode in, the tassels on her leather leggings and jacket swaying as she went.

One last order… hmm.

“Versai, am I missing anything?”

“I don’t know. Probably. Nobody knows everything, right?”

Was this a relationship locked thing? Was the game limiting her as much as it limited me?

“If you were Tower Master-”

“Nope.”

“What did-”

“Not that either.”

“You really can’t tell me anything?”

“Not in the way you want. Not beyond what I have already said. Believe me, I don’t like getting brutally murdered either. Actually, I somewhat envy you Tower Masters. You can only experience… that… once. I have to go through it again and again and again.” There was a hard, ugly look in her eyes.

A cold thrill ran through me. I had been isekai’ed. But Versai was a looper. That couldn’t be good for her mind.

“Order Number Five. Sharpen the loose branches into stakes, jam ‘em into the ground in the channel. Let’s make ‘em pay in blood every step.” I turned back towards the front of the tower, not wanting to look at Versai any longer.

They got to work. Night came on fast. Before the moon rose, the monsters were upon us.