Rache was waiting for us when we got back to the Tower.

“Watcha got for me, Rache?”

“Riding wild and free, boss!” She tossed me a map update. And… that was that, apparently. The limits of One Stars were really starting to grate. I trudged up to the map room and hunted around trying to spot what was different.

I couldn’t spot what was different. “VERSAI!” I yelled down the tower.

“YEAH?” Versai was poking around the battlefield, seeing what had been flattened by the monsters last night.

“IS THERE A WAY TO FLAG NEW ADDITIONS TO THE MAP?”

“YEAH.”

“HOW?”

“NO IDEA.”

Well. Damn.

“Highlight new.” Nothing happened.

“Select new. Filter new. Display new only.” Nope, nada and zilch respectively. Fantastic.

“Display legend.” Nothing continued to happen. “That would have been a perfect time to let a mirror pop up, you know. Start doing something to combat the whole “Evil Necromancer” thing you devs have going on.”

I started poking around the table. There were lots of decorations around the edges. Wouldn’t be the weirdest if some of them did something. None sunk into the table when pressed, but, come on. What year is it? After only fourteen tries touching different little pictures and saying “highlight all new,” it finally worked.

I was touching a picture of a lamp. Which… sure, I guess that could work, in a symbolic kind of way.

A pencil thin column of light rose from the map, hovering over a tiny pond. It looked like there was an area around the Tower that was suddenly getting more light too. Could it be highlighting the searched areas? It would make sense.

Tiny pond? Hmm. I touched the lamp picture again and said “Highlight resources.”

The whole map glowed. Right. Trees are a resource. “Highlight all resources excluding trees?”

Nothing was glowing. Alright. Not… ideal, but fine. Rakim had been saying something about rammed earth walls and… rubble walls or something. I had two level two workers and a level three worker. That’s a lot of dirt they can move.

Now… what was the deal with the pond Rache discovered? I walked over to the window.

“HEY VERSAI!”

“WHAT?”

“RACHE FOUND A POND.”

“OKAY?”

“ARE THEY USEFUL?”

She threw her hands up in the air “WHO KNOWS?”

Fantastic. Just… fantastic. I could send an expedition there, but… I had three orders left. Needed to make them count. I went to consult with Rakim. Building defenses was a big part of her skillset.

“Rakim! What do you think of our defenses so far?”

“Well. They seem to have worked.”

I don’t know why that hurt my soul, but it did.

“Well, now you are here, and you have seen what summons I have available. I just checked- no stone. Your building materials are dirt, wood and whatever we have in those resource packs. Just to make things more fun, I’m expecting the monsters tonight to either be tougher versions of the standard monsters, or for new monster types to be introduced, or both.”

I took a deep breath. “So the big reason I didn’t just throw up huge walls everywhere, other than just not enough workers, was that most of my damage dealers are ranged units. They need to see the things they are shooting at. The Mikas need to be kept in a single block to be most effective. Other than them, I have two artillery pieces and you. For up close damage, I have Versai.”

“Got it. Plus two medics, three workers, a support and a scout. Sounds about right?”

“The scout’s main use will be spotting enemies and marking targets for artillery. She’s also useful for cleaning up the wounded.”

“Alright, not impossible. Not… ideal, but not impossible. So… any particular reason you have left the front door wide open?”

“Didn’t want to spend the resources on something that won’t make a big difference, compared to just building more walls, more stakes and more abatties. Although that does remind me- JUDITHS!”

“Yes boss?” They came trotting over.

“Here- weapons upgrade kits. Use them well.”

“Thanks boss!” Their toolbelts glowed momentarily, and then absolutely nothing else changed. Fantastic. Thank you game devs.

“So. Door?” I asked.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“Your call, but you know you can stand up in the tower and shout down orders, right? Speaking strictly for myself, but the further the Commander is from the front line, the happier I am.”

I… regrettably… had not thought of that.

I went to college, you know. I run my own company, sort of.

Pressing swiftly on- “Would the doors have to be their own order, or could they be included in another order?”

Marci, the Judiths and Rakim spoke with one voice. “Separate order!”

Well there’s a triple-time-for-overtime crew if I ever saw one.

I thought it over. “Rakim, let's say they throw something at us who’s whole function is to smash through the stakes and the branch-barricades- how do we stop ‘em?”

“Solid walls, trenches with spikes lining them, shooting them a lot, traps, or ideally all of the above.”

I slowly nodded. “Hear me out- we have three orders left for the day. Order one would be building the doors and making them as strong as possible. Order two would be replacing the wooden barricades near the door with rammed earth propped up by the existing palisade. Order three would be repairing the existing fences and installing all the traps you can. Does that sound like a three order job?”

They looked at each other, and wordlessly came to an agreement.

“Can do,” They chorused.

“Would there be extra room in those orders that I’m not making use of?”

“No.”

God damn it. “Do it.”

The workers got to work. The first happy surprise was the doors. I figured they were just going to be wood. I was wrong. Between the four of them, they managed to make rebar reinforced concrete doors. They were somehow able to cure, install hardware on, and mount these huge doors inside of “one order.”

I mean, there is magic, and then there is whatever the hell that is. I watched them do it, and I still don’t know how they did it. They were moving those doors around like they were hollow Home Depot Brand interior door special offers. They even used a big chunk of iron as a door bar, to keep it shut from the inside.

I tried to eyeball the ratios- how much was each “attack” stat contributing, how much were the Judith’s weapon buffs helping, how much more work was Three Star Marci contributing compared to the Two Star Judiths? How much more “order space” did different materials take up?

I mean, concrete. Just got to mix it up and pour it, right? But where the Hell did they get the water they mixed it with?! They sure didn’t go over to the pond with barrels.

Goddam. Gacha. Logic. Marci did a hell of a lot more than one Judith, but not more than two. They all worked very fast. The game said they could make concrete doors, so they did. And that was that.

I found myself squeezing the hilt of my new knife. Very soothing thing, squeezing the hilt of my specialized stabbing knife. Just squeezing it. Giving it the ‘ole squeezaroony.

I remember Christopher Lee described someone getting stabbed in the back as making a sort of sudden exhale. A kind of “Ah!” noise. Which makes sense, as air was just knocked out of them. As the steel blade was knocked into them. One of those fun history facts. Or a science fact. Medicine fact?

The reinforced wall around the palisade was somehow even more mind melting. The workers just ripped up the dirt, shovels and mattocks moving the earth at a speed that would do a JCB proud. It looked like there was a standing explosion going on within forty feet of my newly fortified front door.

The Judiths and Marci had tampers. Literal long sticks with blocks of metal on the end, for tamping down dirt. Because of course they did. The five foot long tools were pulled out of the same tool belts as everything else. I felt like my sanity was being tested again, but… the results made the mental harm worth it.

The end results were downright grotesque. Where there had once been a glorified fence, there was now a serious military fortification. The wall height had been raised to thirty feet, ten feet deep, given an almost perfectly smooth front surface, it completely boxed in the front door area, AND it had bumped out corner bastions for the artillery. Any future ranged DPS we got could set up “enfilading fire” from those bastions too. Which was apparently army talk for “shoot them from the side and the front at the same time.”

I supported this. Especially since the workers had made one tiny improvement on my plan. All that dirt? Came from the foot of the wall, on the far side. Our wall now had a sizable dry moat. So my new walls might be thirty foot tall on this side of the moat, but on the far side? Hope the monsters are ready for a long, long climb.

“You said you were worried about wall-breakers, Sir? Well, anything trying to run at the wall will have to slow way down if they want to attack the wall. Gives us plenty of time to shoot down or across at them. Or just drop stuff on their head.” Rakim explained.

“We have things we can drop on their heads? Boulders? Boiling oil?” Three Cheers for Rakim! Three Cheers for the Army Corps of Engineers!

“No Sir. But theoretically we could.”

Fly High, kids, join the Air Force. God this game inspires so much joy.

“Alright, so here’s the firing step for the Mikas… and you?”

“Yessir.”

“Great. Ladder to get up and down, no problem there, nice little sheltered area for Pammy, Maria and Kim, which is also good. How does Versai deploy? She will need to get in and out at speed?”

“Rope ladder, sir. Literally just a rope with knots in it. She’s strong enough to get up or down in a couple of seconds.”

I nodded slowly. That worked.

What they had done with the existing defenses was actually a little scary. Not because it looked incredibly lethal or anything- it didn’t. It twas subtle. I didn’t spot it until Rakim explained it to me.

“We fixed up the existing barricades- those are actually pretty good. But on the basis that there may be more of those Alpha types or similar monsters that can just climb over or bull through the hedgehogs, we changed the contours a bit.”

“You dug more trenches.”

“Didn’t have time for real trenches, Sir. We did make a few height adjustments by shifting soil levels, but probably not more than a few decimeters in any given direction. The idea is that you subtly discourage monsters from even trying to climb over the hedgehogs. Everything looks that little bit harder to do. It encourages them to run into the traps.”

And Rakim knew her traps. I was downright looking forward to the chaos that was going to erupt shortly. I looked across the field. Were we done? I had a nagging feeling I was missing something. Something more than the interior decoration of the tower, I was saving that for after the wave.

RIGHT! The seeds! We had recovered seeds from the dungeon crawl. I rushed over to the bed that I had already dug. The first crop of seeds were just barely starting to poke up out of the soil. I couldn’t wait to see what they grew into.

I dug like mad, trying to get the bed made as quick as I could. I was unreasonably excited about the flowers. Not so much because they had a game effect, but because they were pointless. I could grow flowers. What was the definitional pacifist club in Anime? Above and beyond even the literature club, it was the gardening club. It was the special healing place in the violent world of Japanese highschools. And now I had my very own.

I got my fingers right into the dirt, dragging furrows for the newly acquired seeds. I watched the water splash on the turned earth, as the watering can poured out its endless waters. It was a single, beautiful moment. I took the time to enjoy it. Then I went into the tower. Shut the heavy cement doors, dropped the bar in place, and found a window with a good view of things.

“Rakim- finish the final order. Then make ready! Tonight, we give them hell!”