I lay on top of the palisade, flopped on the firing step and stared at the blue sky. The cotton-bud clouds drifted slowly, long pillow-coated barges of comfort. Did the Goddess and all her Doki-Doki Angels live on those clouds? Probably not.
This was the land of the Great God Pachinko. A capricious god, and a jealous one. I wasn’t looking too carefully, but I was willing to bet the pattern of clouds repeated. An endlessly looping skybox animation, subtly reminding you that there was no escape.
I… was doomed. One hundred percent doomed. I still had two orders left, some upgrades to dole out. Some new traps to install. Versai was healed up, the Judiths could do a lot. Didn’t matter. I was doomed.
It came down to numbers and time. I needed enough bodies doing enough damage, fast enough, so that the monsters couldn’t reach us and show us that even dolls could suffer terrifying, mutilated and degraded ends.
My last draws had been a support, who was great, a slow firing artillery unit that couldn’t drop rounds anywhere near the Tower, and three units that flat out refused to be useful in any way whatsoever. Versai had to go for a lie down after seeing them all in one place.
Not that I could blame her. The sound of them chattering had a certain piercing quality. It was almost impossible to ignore them, even if you desperately wanted to.
Was that cloud in the shape of a duck? No. It was not. Pity. A most excellent bird, ducks.
I felt an uncomfortable kinship with my fellow Tower Lords. How many of us had drawn Versai, or one of her Six Star sisters, and heard about the Third Wave barrier? How many of us really thought about the broken way time moved in this place? So long as you didn’t give that final order, night would never come.
Theoretically, you could spend an eternity in that timeless place. Trapped within a few paces of the Tower. Trapped with mostly mindless dolls. Nothing to read. Nothing to eat. Nothing to do but wait. Knowing that the only way out of that timeless emptiness was brutal suicide.
I wonder what the record is. How many days or years did someone manage, before giving in to the world? Without even sleep, or drugs. Without losing yourself in the happy dancing girls of anime and J-RPGs and, yes, gacha.
My hand patted my side again. I hardly noticed I was doing it anymore. Like the phantom limb of a phone, waiting for me to pick it up and start doom scrolling. Yes, there was no escape into fantasy from this unreal world.
If I was going to be dropped into a world with combat dolls, why couldn’t it be Nikki? Finally get a bite of all that cake running around. The costumes here were way more Kawaii focused. Real shortage of Ecchi, honestly. Real shortage. Shame, shame.
Not that I was feeling those kinds of urges. 2-D for life! It just might liven up the place.
Oh, what was I thinking? There would be a beach themed event with lots of summons in swimsuits. If anyone made it that far.
I stared up, looking for the edge of the sky. Never quite finding it. It was a way to pass the time. My mind wandered a little bit, back to Earth, back to New York. Back to my old life. I wasn’t quite at the point of needing a scooter to get around, but I had investigated canes. Something that would go well with my sweet fedora.
I don’t think I knew anyone. Not really. There was so much of me, and no one could see me. No one would spot the hole in the world I left behind.
My condo association would be the first people to notice my absence… actually, maybe not. I was paying by direct deposit, and the cash from my automated newsletter was going in via direct deposit, and my bills were paid by bank transfer… It might be a long while before anyone figured out there was a problem.
Post office? Lots of mail just piling up in my mailbox might tip them off. Or not, had to be a common issue. I was a regular on certain very private Discord servers. A regular on a variety of even more discreet imageboards. Nothing illegal. Just… private. The other regulars might notice, eventually.
Alright, some of those torrents were illegal. Not wrong. But, yes, technically, to small minded ignoramuses and intellectual property lawyers, they were “problematic.” I won’t apologize. Piracy and anime go together like Pocky and weebs! Mappa exploits its animators, we exploit Mappa. That’s justice.
I don’t think I was lonely, really. Maybe a little bit, but between the people on Discord and my various shows, I didn’t feel the bite of it the way you are supposed to. The people on my screens became my friends. I learned their little quirks, their likes and dislikes. I knew exactly what I would order if I ever sat down at Ichiraku Ramen, and just how to cheer up Haruhi Suzumia.
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It sounds cliche, but they were real to me. They inhabited the brighter, better world I was supposed to have been born into. I know it’s not a real place. I know that. But as comfortable as I was, living as well as I was, I knew the “real” world felt wrong. Sick.
I made my first pot of cash hustling NFT’s and getting out before the crash. You really mean to tell me this is the best it’s ever been? Global warming is coming down like a meteor. All us dinosaurs eating up the grass, whining, not knowing this is the best it’s ever going to be.
I stared a while longer, then smiled a little. Hadn’t I rebelled against the sick real world, if only a little bit? I fought back there, making my own little bubble of safety. I could do the same here. And if the monsters broke in?
Well. I’d have a very bad time. But it wouldn’t be forever. I might be doomed, but I didn’t have to beat myself. Depression is normal, but it can be defeated. I had done it before. I would do it now.
I gave my cheeks a firm slap, and started preparing for battle.
________________________________________________________________
I reviewed my battle supplies. I was actually in decent shape there, I hoped. I had managed to hang on to all my herbs from the first expedition. That meant that I had four herbs capable of suppressing damage received, two that improve movement speed, and one that improves attack speed.
The last one would be particularly key, I suspected. Give the movement speed ones to Versai and Rache, they were the mobile combatants. Give them the damage suppressing herbs too, for that matter. The attack speed increase though… That was for Radz.
That painfully slow reload speed was just killing me. Forty five seconds interval between shots? Are you kidding me? Far, far too long. Even if we knocked it down to thirty seconds that would be huge.
The herb (it looked like a finger of ginger, and smelled like ginger lemon tea) improved the attack speed by +15 for one battle. I have no idea how that translates into Damage Per Second, as I couldn’t check stats until after I cleared Wave Three.
Have I mentioned that I want to offer the full Hellblazer service suite to Black Robe and his developer cousin? Because I do.
Nothing like testing builds in live combat. Fingers crossed.
I had helmets for the Mikas, which would fractionally improve survivability. I also had new costumes for the Blue Roses, but given their main contribution was staying at the very top of the tower and not bugging me, I wasn't in a rush to hand those out. I also had five weapons kits, and those were a bit more spicy.
WEAPON KIT- KINGDOM’S ARMORY, VASPEVANIA: VANGUARD
+20 To Base Attack Damage Kit 1/5
WEAPON KIT- KINGDOM’S ARMORY, VASPEVANIA: DIRECT DAMAGE
+20 To Base Attack Damage Kit 1/5
WEAPON KIT- KINGDOM’S ARMORY, VASPEVANIA: SUPPORT
+20 To Support Actions Kit 1/5
If the phrase “Support Actions” wasn’t an exploit waiting to happen, then my years of gaming have been in vain. I wasn’t sure how, just yet, but it would happen. Less good was that, out of my five weapons kits, three were for Vanguards… and I only had one vanguard. The Great God Gacha giveth, and he taketh away.
I would have a DPS nightmare Versai. A… better-than-the-rest DPS Mika, Kim would literally be fire, and if the rest of my plans didn’t work, the monsters could play with the spares.
This led me to the three fire traps. KINGDOM’S ARMORY, VASPEVANIA: Special Siege Defense Tool- Fire Trap (Common) 100 Attack (Fire), can inflict Burning. A lot to pick apart there. I had… a lot of questions. Tabling them, for now. But I wasn’t forgetting a single one of them. I sure as hell wasn’t forgetting Madame. Or that… evil… Marchonesse. Funny how you can hate someone you have never met.
“Kim, does your debuff make enemies more susceptible to burning?” I yelled.
“Of course! I love a fired up audience.” She smiled sunnily, spinning her wand over her fingers. I wondered what all those medals on her chest were for. Not for Best OVA Soundtrack, I was sure of that. She didn’t lose an arm from signing too many autographs.
“Can you only target one enemy at a time?”
“For Debuffs, I can target a small area.”
Ahah. Three Star Quality, right there. Yes indeed.
I started sketching out the battle in my head. Up to this point, I had been relying most heavily on stakes to slow down the pace of battle and give the Mikas more time to burn down their targets. That’s what stakes were for in games- slowing down enemy charges.
That was still a good plan. In fact, I should do it even harder. What I really needed was to thin them out with the artillery, funnel them into the fire, have them stand in the fire for as long as possible (while enjoying Kim’s debuff, naturally) then slow them down again as they ran for the Palisade.
Assuming, of course, that they didn’t set my stakes on fire, or my wooden palisades. Because, naturally, fire would never spread to the magically kiln dried wood.
In an ideal world, Versai and Rache wouldn’t even get their blades wet.
Just a few minor design challenges there. Trivial, really. Practically not worth mentioning. The execution part would be even easier. Super easy. Barely an inconvenience.
I sighed. Oh Goddess, send your Doki-Doki angels to look after your most humble worshiper. And maybe a few smart MC’s to help design my base defense. For example…
Huh.
Couldn’t think of one off the top of my head. The MC from Irregular in a Magic High School was an engineering nerd. But not civil, military or structural engineering. Mmm. Tricky.
On the other hand, he did have maximum Onii-Sama power which made him the best at everything unless it was necessary for the plot for him to be bad at it, so it would probably work out.
Shikamaru from Naruto? No, he was a unit tactics guy. A help for sure, but not the same. I shook my head. I would think of a good base-builder soon enough. Until then, I would have to apply my own brain to the problem.
They would all be coming for the entrance of the tower. That was the one certainty. They would all aim for the front door. But that DIDN’T mean they would all come from the front. They could come from the sides, wrap around from the back, any way worked, as long as they got in and got me eventually. Had to-
Ainz Ooal Gown! How?! How could I forget the MC of the anime which gave us lewd meme legend Albedo?! I have shamed the Goddess. I must do ten Hail Moe’s and beg Saintess Rei for her intercession.
That skeleton loved building his base. It was his whole thing. Maybe that was the key- put my whole heart into every bit of my base. And if I didn’t have a guild with me, so what?
I’d always preferred the 2-D world. And while these Awakened Souls might be in 3-D bodies, they had the spirit. We could do it. We will do it!
Now. How do I set a fire trap, keep things on fire, spread the fire as widely as I can, without setting my very flammable defenses on fire?