The basics of the basics of tactics- disperse your enemies’ strength, concentrate your own. This maxim has been proven by time. Consider the legendary techniques of “Let's you and him have a fight,” or “You hold him, I’ll hit him.” One must also consider the corollary “You go high, I’ll go low.”

Napoleon marched his men in columns, beating drums and looking scary. Wellington put his men in thin lines and made them neck a pint of gin before battle. One of these two strategies maximized firepower, concentrating all the bullets on a target rich environment. The other strategy saw a Coriscan kicked off the throne of France by an Irishman and a Prussian who thought he was pregnant with a baby elephant.

There was probably more to it than that, but I was already scraping the bottom of my barrel of tactical insight. Light novels and my brief exposure to strategy games could only do so much. Empire Total War was just so janky, you know? Shogun 2 was WAY better, and not just because of the Geisha animations.

I can’t be the only one who thought the Foreign Veterans in the Fall of the Samurai DLC were basically proto-otaku making a pilgrimage to the holy land, right? Right?!

Accusations of me being a degenerate weeb, while true, are also hurtful. And will be ignored.

“Hedgehogs. Basically a thick central axis with big wooden stakes coming out of it. Think of it as the next evolution of the stakes we have been using already. We set up interlocking fields of them, building on top of, and around, the existing stakes.”

I stood on the firing step of the palisade with the Judiths, pointing around the cleared, fortified area in front of the tower. There were already enough stakes out there to give Alucard a warm, homey feeling. Just needed bodies to impale on them.

We’d have more than enough before dawn came. I’d make sure I was still alive to admire the garden.

“I basically want them in three dense lines in front of the wall. Each should have a V shape, pointing towards our front door, with a narrow gap in the middle. Very narrow. Less than one Mika wide. The closest one should be forty meters from the Palisade. The other two should split the difference between the first and ten meters from the tree line.”

The Judiths nodded slowly. I think they got what I wanted.

“We put the fire traps in the middle of each V. Use more hedgehogs and stakes to make functionally impassable thickets around the V’s, to encourage them to funnel through the “opening.” If they try to force their way through, they get hung up on the spikes and are easy meat for our hitters. If they go through the gap, they get to enjoy fire and artillery. Rache will flag them for Radz to bombard as they approach.”

I nodded decisively. “The monsters will be few and weak by the time they reach the palisade. Easily cleaned up by Versai.”

The Judiths scratched their heads “It’s a big job, but it’s a can-do from us, Boss. It’ll take Two, though.”

Damn. I was afraid of that. “Can you make sure that the fire traps won't spread to the hedgehogs when they are activated?”

“Not really? We can make sure they are far enough back that they won’t set the hedgehogs on fire directly.”

“Alright, that sounds good. What about adding trenches, would that increase the time needed?”

They nodded.

I sighed. Figured.

“Any nearby sources of water?”

They shrugged. I sighed again. No, there were not. I had confirmed with the map room. The forest near the tower was devoid of even little streams. The nearest water source was the big lake, but who knows how long it would take to get there.

Lucky none of us needed to drink. Or eat. Or sleep.

I briefly contemplated controlling an out of control fire with buckets of sand. I checked my magic inventory pouch for buckets.

I had zero. Which was fair, because I don’t think I had seen a bucket anywhere since I got Isekai’ed. I don’t think the Judiths could make buckets. Trying to put out an enormous fire with buckets of sand from tens of meters away was a stupid idea anyway. It was probably stupid even if you measured in sane, rational units like Paces or Mikas.

I sighed. Ideal world, what would my defense here look like? Well, a castle. Big, BIG stone walls, with the Tower in the middle of it. I read somewhere that real castles could be defended by a ridiculously small number of people in the event of an attack. Maybe it was a Shadiversity video?

I just needed to find a quarry, mine a castle’s worth of stone, find someone that knew how to build a castle, and then build it. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

While I’m at it, I might as well wish I had a few machine gun nests. Get ‘ole Ma Deuce on the job.

Was… was she ever in that one manga where all the girls were actual guns? What was the name of that? It was pretty mid, but I kind of wanted to know if the M1 Garand ever made an appearance.

Ping.

Yeah, probably should stop running away from the decision. It was a hell of a roll of the dice. Was there something else? Theoretically I could gamble. Send Rache out exploring again, maybe find more herbs, or a hidden shrine or something. I couldn’t raid the dungeon again, that was strictly once a day. The option to launch the expedition was grayed out when I checked.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

I sighed. I had played enough gacha and poker, to know how that all worked. Hell, I had sold NFT’s and my client base was, like, 50% crypto-bros of all genders. I could gamble. But I needed fixed defenses to make up for my lack of numbers.

Maybe I’d find something amazing in the forest. And maybe this picture of a monkey smoking a cigarette will buy me three yachts.

“Do it. Build it. Make those hedgehogs as dense as you can manage on the sides. That is your number one priority, above everything else. By the time evening rolls around, there can be only one way the monsters can come at us, and it’s from straight ahead.”

“Yes Boss!”

Here’s hoping I didn’t just kill us all.

________________________________________________________________

It kept coming back to the same damn things. It takes more than one shot for Mika to kill a monster, unless she catches it in the head at close range. It takes Radz GODDAMN FORTY FIVE SECONDS, a time which was fine and definitely not infuriating, to reload and fire. I have exactly six ranged combatants, and they would be doing ninety plus percent of the killing.

I have one and, counting generously, a half, melee combatants. Versai is death on two lissome, lickable legs, but she routinely got overwhelmed when serving other Tower Masters. Even with the upgrades, she couldn’t solo a wave. And Rache was strictly for picking off the stragglers. Later she might be useful for running down ranged attackers, but for now? Her main use would be marking targets for Radz. However, despite their limitations, they were the only things that could really keep the monsters off my hitters.

I, therefore, needed the monsters to move slowly. I needed them clumped together. I needed them weakened as much as possible BEFORE they got into Mika’s range. Kim would debuff and buff. The fire would hurt the monsters. The spikes would slow, injure and funnel them. And it would have to be enough. It would be enough!

This was meant to be beatable. We weren’t even out of the tutorial yet, damnit! I had kept all my summons alive. I had cleared part of a dungeon. I had made aggressive use of all my resources. If I was missing something, I couldn’t imagine it. It WOULD be enough! Those other guys?

Bad luck. Bad choices. The Great God Pachinko is capricious. Don’t confuse a rare lucky pull for mercy. Me? I hoped for luck, but planned for no-luck. I could do it. I would do it!

“You did all you could.” Versai’s voice was conversational. “More than most. I think you discovered more things than any one Tower Master I can remember. You treated your summons decently. Didn’t spend our lives stupidly. It might not feel like much, but… well, it makes you better than many.”

“I’m that doomed?”

“Oh, this could work. But you have to remember, I only ever saw this wave beaten once, and it ruined the Tower Master who did it. I find it easier not to hope.”

“And on that cheery note-” I muttered, “Here comes the sunset.”

The sun set unnaturally fast. It raced across the sky in minutes and sank behind the mountains in seconds. The west was dyed in fire- then extinguished. I refused to think of it as an omen. The monsters would be extinguished in fire, not me and mine.

“Rache- Ride ‘em! Get out there and find me some monsters to shoot!”

“CHROMED LIGHTNING!” Rach cried, her ghostly steed galloping over the forest of stakes. Between one stake and the next it transformed into a motorcycle, and she raced off into the gathering darkness.

“Radz, are you ready?”

“Radz reporting. What needs to disappear?” Her mortar was deployed. Her long white legs stretched around the jutting barrel, feet on the pedals. The darkness of her eyes seemed to glitter with the coming explosions.

“Don’t take the herb until I order it. ONLY ON MY COMMAND!” I barked. I had seen enough anime to know how to bark at a subordinate.

“Orders received.” She nodded.

“Same for everyone. Wait for it. The description says one battle. Let's not test just what it means by ‘battle!’”

“Yes, Tower Master!”

The monsters didn’t keep us waiting long. In just a few minutes, a thread of bright smoke rose from the forest.

“Kim, buff Radz. Radz, fire on target. Let’s get the warm up going.”

“Targets marked. Radz raining death.”

There was a click and a whoosh. A long pause. Then a distant, but still shockingly loud, boom. It looked brighter tonight. Was it… lingering a bit?

“Kim, does your buff inflict burning when weapons hit?”

“No, Tower Master, just extra fire element damage.”

Hmm. Might just be a cosmetic effect then. Going to… not think about how something can inflict “fire element damage” without “setting things on fire.” I am sure the game developers had a perfectly logical, coherent explanation for that. Mmhmmm. Sure of it.

“Targets marked. Radz raining death.”

Rache, bless her, had picked up the monsters at the extreme edge of her range. She was giving Radz all the time she could to work.

Radz, for her part, seemed to take a mechanical joy in what she was doing- a part fulfilling its purpose in a terrible machine. So utterly burnt out by the horror of her labor, she had come to love the results.

I could sort of understand it. Someone so broken by the psychological pain of their lives that they could only find relief by giving in. By converting entirely and wholeheartedly to the thing that had broken them.

“Targets marked. Radz raining death.”

I had never been there, thank god. Never been… that gone. There are more kinds of violence than just the physical. Never been in a fistfight, but I’d say I’d caught more than a few beatings. It’s not the same, but…

I got where she was coming from. There were all kinds of stories about people like her. Sometimes the heroes, more often the villains. People who understood destruction as the truth of the world.

It was a sort of messed up Buddhism. Life is suffering. Peace can only be found in obliteration. On that basis, Radz was spreading the good news. The triumph of peace is inevitable. One round at a time.

God damn the developers for putting all their effort into backstories, and none into mechanics!

More smoke popped up in the woods, far to the north of the first stream. Then, a minute later, a third streamer rose.

“Here they come! Stand ready! Tonight, we crush the Third Wave!”