Every stick-load was a victory. Not, you note, every shovelful. The prohibition on using my summons’ tools was no joke. But you know what I could use? Sticks. I could use sticks. And you can dig a lot more than you might think with just a stick.

Did I manage in an ‘hour’ what Judith managed in eight seconds? Yes. Ish. I’d like to think. On a spiritual level, certainly. But I didn't get tired, and every speck of dirt that I shifted now was dirt that my workers wouldn’t have to shift when Order Time resumed. So. Every stick load was a victory. I dug.

Rakim’s “More walls is not more better” explanation was painful, if logical. If you have a wall, you must defend the wall. If you don’t, the wall becomes an obstacle to killing the enemy. This is a bad thing. That means traps and troops, preferably troops are needed. We cannot make more (useful) traps at this point. We only have so many troops. We must therefore limit the amount of wall. We could, however, wrap the front of the Tower in a wall, and improve the Murder-Track.

Look, I don’t know what to call it. “The Path?” What are we, Buddhists? I’m not ready to shave my head. “The Road?” What if I had more roads in the future? Something Rakim had mentioned stuck in my mind. She could build roads. Right now, she was putting her civil engineering skills to work building my Murder-Track. But since she could build roads, the odds were above decent that would become relevant in the future.

I stabbed into the dirt with my digging stick and started ripping it up. This section could be deeper. The dirt would get stacked on the Great Serpentine Wall. Name to be confirmed at a later date. Tough dirt. Definitely not giving up without a fight. But so what? I had time.

At the end of the day, I just liked things to be clearly labeled and strictly defined. My defensive structures needed to have precise names, so when I yelled “Shoot the monsters at Point X,” everyone knew where Point X was. Since this was a tower defense game, the empty space was every bit as important to define as the filled in spaces.

Consider, if you will, the related field of study called the zettai ryōiki. One might, if they were shallow, simply believe it referred to the “absolute zone” from Neon Genesis Evangelion. People of refinement know it refers to the space between the top of the thigh high socks and the bottom of the mini-skirt. The truly cultured, however, those who propel us forward as a society, know that there is a defined ratio that must be followed for the perfect zettai ryōiki. Dress to thigh to above-the-knee portion of the socks is, always, 4-1-2.5.

If you don’t believe me, ask Aqua, Megumin, Rin Tohsaka, Asuna (SAO costume because Alfheim didn’t happen,) the rest of the female characters in SAO, Shana, Louise, Taiga (Rei Kugimiya getting loads of work there), Erina, Julis, Emilia, Hatsune God Damn Miku and the list is barely started. The zettai ryōiki ratio is more reliable than gravity, and better explained.

Does this definition allow for some tolerance? Certainly. Up to 25%. But it is defined. You can measure it. People built advertising campaigns around it. They built entire franchises around it. Intellectual property empires that spanned the globe were built on that ratio. It was tested, refined, and finally, fixed permanently. The definition is built around the gap. And my Tower deserved no less.

Also, I can’t think of a better thing to call it than Murder-Track. And I’m the Tower Master, a title that is definitely not compensating for anything. So I get to decide what it is called. While desperately wishing I had been isekai’ed into the Konosuba world instead of this one.

Our current layout for the Tower was, essentially, an intestine leading to last nights’ triple-cheese-double-meat nachos. The cemented battlement covering our front door (still with no gate, because momma didn’t raise no fool, or me, but the no fool bit is more relevant here) couldn’t be easily altered at this point. All the existing walls were now big enough to be a complete pain in the neck to shift, in fact. Happily, they seemed to be tall enough as it was. What we needed now was to make them longer, and make sure we had ways to spot murder baboons.

So we just knocked out the turn points and extended the wall that bracketed the serpentine paths. My initial thought was to ring the whole Tower with a giant wall, Attack on Titan Style, but Rakim had a brutal counter for that.

“Why?”

She had a point. It didn’t help me to do that, as I couldn’t make use of the walls to attack. My artillery would blow it up, my sniper would have to stand uncomfortably close to the monsters, my Mikas couldn’t fall back in time, and Versai sure couldn’t hold a whole damn wall by herself. Neither could Rakim, for that matter. So there was literally no point. And it would take up a huge amount of time and dirt.

The damn Army Corps of Engineers fights dirty. Just snuck in and blew up my whole wall. And my dreams for my own Scout Regiment. One day, my dreams won’t stay dreams. One day.

So. The Murder Track. Snaking back and forth. I had managed to extend the track to cover a wide arc in front of the Tower. The similarity to a wifi signal strength icon was not lost on me. I wasn’t willing to make the walls too thin, as wallbreakers remained a worry. As did more Alpha sized monsters. Making matters worse, we ran out of trees.

Which was so absurd, I was honestly kind of insulted. It was true, but that didn’t change my feelings. The trees in the forest surrounding the Tower ranged in size from huge to Redwoods. The forest itself was so vast, it boggled the imagination. However, in my enthusiasm to build a mega-fortress, I had forgotten one pesky detail. The range the summons could move from the Tower.

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Versai had guesstimated the summons could get about twenty times farther from the Tower than I could, and that appeared to be roughly correct. With the exception of my scout, Rache, the other classes could only move around within a fixed range of the tower. Presumably there was a limit on how far Rache could go, but I hadn’t found it yet.

Higher Stars seemed to have a longer range, with Versai unsurprisingly having the second longest range, followed, to my utter fascination, by Corporal Mika, then Rakim.

Was… range tied to initiative and intelligence? Beyond specific class abilities, I mean?

Anyway, the volume of space that covered was enormous, and the volume of timber it generated was, likewise, enormous, BUT the length of walls needing to be topped with big, spikey hedgehogs was even more enormous. I couldn’t let the monsters just climb over my walls, obviously. Needed all those stakes. I also needed to refine my Crows Nest system.

Fair to say that the first generation had its problems. Especially in light of the whole stealthed Murder Baboon situation. Right now, only Miyuki and Rache could spot them at any kind of decent range, and Rache was a melee scout. Rakim could spot them within about ten yards, and Versai could spot them once they were in sword range, more or less. So. Not ideal.

Rakim had said she could build detectors to help everyone spot the sneaky monsters. What she hadn’t mentioned was that she couldn’t actually build any of the detectors at the moment. She needed a special material to make them called blue magnesium. Rarity- Uncommon. Best material we had yet encountered was Common.

You can imagine my deep, deep joy.

So Miyuki had a crucial double duty. She was our number one Murder Baboon exterminator, as well as our monster-death-heap manufacturer. Which meant that I needed to give her the absolute maximum amount of elevation and mobility possible, to maximize her line of sight.

I tested her ability to shoot straight down. I had read that it was really difficult with bows. She shot off our captive monster’s pinky from fifteen yards straight up. Then repeated the trick balancing on a log set up on one of the nests, a whopping twenty yards up.

Yandere super-confirmed. No matter. She would be appreciated for who she was. From behind thick walls. To show her just how much I valued her as a violence-professional, I built her watchtowers. Most of them were built over the Murder Track, but two of them were a little special. I had built them outside my walls.

It just made sense. With all the switchback turns pressed tightly together, one sniper could cover a lot of corners. Tack on the fact that the monsters would be moving their slowest at that point, and she could really clump them up nicely. Once they piled up enough, they would tip over into a woodchip-free pit, and get introduced to the wonders of artillery.

Assuming nothing climbed up the towers and ganked my ninja. Or persuaded a monster to tip the whole thing over. I didn’t know if the Murder Baboons could do that, but they were clearly a lot smarter than the ordinary monsters. It was a real worry. Just to be on the safe side, I built two more towers on either side of the giant dirt pile now covering the back door. Never knew when they might come in handy. Presumably it would be at the worst possible time.

One thing that I dismantled in a big hurry was the rope bridge network. It had worked brilliantly for Miyuki, but I was not going to tolerate the monsters, any monsters, having a way to get around my walls. Unfortunate, as Versai’s swordplay was now more than a little scary. Giving her more time to thin out the monsters was just good sense. It also meant that I had to figure out how to get Miyuki between the watch towers.

I was brooding on that exact problem when I made a crucial discovery. I was ogling *COUGH* calmly considering Miyuki’s equipment loadout when I realized that she was lacking a key piece of ninja-gear. The grappling hook.

“Hey, Rakim? Can you make a grappling hook?”

“Yes Sir.”

It took her all of a couple of seconds to bash some scrap rebar into the classic triple hook shape, wrap it in what felt like an excessive amount of wire, bend a loop on the other end of the rebar, tie a rope to it, and hand it to me.

It was heavy as hell. Totally impractical, from my perspective.

“Hey Miyuki, use this tool to climb up to that watchtower over there.” I offered the hook and pointed. I had no idea how she would react.

“Miyuki cannot… Miyuki cannot…” She looked like she was programmed to refuse it, but there was something there. Her eyes were locked on the hook and her hand kept twitching towards it.

Gently, I reached out. Fought my screaming instincts, and put the hook in her hand. Her slim fingers wrapped around the wirebound shaft, her grip firming quickly.

She turned towards the tower. A couple of fast swings, then she launched the hook up, catching one of the wooden walls. She was standing inside the watchtower a bare pair of seconds later. “Miyuki hears the words whispered in the wind!”

I collapsed, releasing a juddering laugh. They can make their own tools. They can, at least potentially, use the tools they make. We had broken the system’s monopoly on gear. My mind struggled with the enormity of that thought. Other Tower Masters had built their own traps, without much success. All those stakes I had jammed into the ground was another sort of summons made tool. This felt different.

Both those examples were Tower Masters building defenses that worked on Monsters. It was the Awakened Souls who manufactured them, but it was the monsters who were the, for lack of a better term, end users. Rakim had made equipment for her fellow summons. She gave Miyuki a capability she didn’t have before. And Rakim didn’t spend a single rune bone to do it. We didn’t have to go to the armory, level Miyuki up, evolve her, nothing.

Miyuki could use the grappling hook, because whoever she once was, that person used grappling hooks. It was part of her ninja skill set, and one that hadn’t been deleted by her programming. Miyuki, my Two Star former-darling, was running her very own exploit.

I laughed my damn head off, until the countdown started.