Whistling arrow Miyuki- so long as the creature she shot was still alive, her arrow would make a horrifying whistling sound. So horrifying, it scared the monsters. The more monsters she nailed in place with an arrow, the louder the noise would be.

Which led me to wonder- what would happen if she shot a giant monster? I doubted she could pin it to the ground at long range, but would the extra size and vitality have the same effect as pinning several monsters? It turned out that the answer was “No.”

It was even louder.

Like an air raid siren on a sunny day in August. Like a scorpion crawling over your eye. Like waking up paralyzed and feeling the rats starting to eat you. The dogs are chasing you down the alley, and there is no way you can jump that fence. Terror. Not horror, but terror- the active need to flee, to escape what was coming. It reached through your ears and squeezed the hindbrain. All those juices, all that adrenalin flooding your body. Numbing the pain and telling you to run while you still can.

It worked on me. I can’t imagine what it was doing to the lesser monsters. Miyuki’s long arrow caught it just below the clavicle. The two headed giant wasn’t calm about it either. Tiger and bird both screamed and started bolting away from the Tower. I smiled, but only for a moment. The giant didn’t get far. I could see the unwillingness in its body language. Something was compelling it. Whatever instinct drove the monsters to attack the Tower was driving it too.

“Miyuki, I didn’t say only shoot it once! Keep firing until it’s dead or I say otherwise.”

“Yes, my Lord!”

No way the wave is just one monster. Is the sound really driving away all the others? Or was this guy supposed to be a wall-breaker and way-maker for a wave coming behind him? Got to be the latter, right?

Miyuki’s next arrow slammed into the beast. I thought it was going to catch the bird head dead on, but the monster slipped the shot and caught the yard long arrow right between the two heads.

This was not received well by the monster. The hideous thing collapsed on the ground and thrashed. Trees exploded into clouds of splinters, into shrapnel that scythed through the woods. The beast clawed at its body, trying to rip out the arrows, or at least distract itself from the noise.

God, the noise!

Loud. Shockingly, shatteringly loud. Overwhelming any nuance or variation, the screaming whistle of the arrows were agonizing. The urge to run from the sound electrified my muscles. I could feel myself twitch. Feel my body trying to escape before my brain could overrule it.

I heard the artillery fire. I cranked my head around and saw Steelheart Pomoroi firing with her usual elan. There were targets marked in the woods. She had her orders. What’s a bit of noise to an old cannoneer?

“Give ‘em Hell, Pomoroi!” I shouted to keep my spirits up, to stay in the fight

“Pomoroi, by Imperial Decree!” Pomoroi agreed. She hadn’t ever run from a fight in her life. Or in death. She had a cannon beneath her. Her Emperor was behind her. The enemy was before her. Everything was just how it should be. She tugged the lanyard, and her little cannon roared. I roared with it.

“Contact front left!” Rakim shouted, her carbine up and in action. I swung my head around, trying to see. Were they murder baboons? No. Something I had been expecting for a while but hadn’t seen yet. Speedy units. They looked like they got more of the wolf in the wolf-bat hybrid that made up the faces of the basic monsters. Bigger than the murder baboons, but a lot smaller than standard monsters.

I watched them zip around and felt a sudden sense of calm.

“Boy, you guys picked the worst time to come over, huh?”

They zipped through the scattered barricades, looking for all the world like the winners of Satan’s Own Agility Contest for pure-breed Monsters. A few ran into traps and were killed on the spot, but most were able to dodge around the obstacles. I felt like quietly applauding. They were working hard.

What a pity there was now a giant, perfectly smooth stone wall to get over. Not to mention the unreasonably deep dry moat. Unless this thing had the proportional jumping capabilities of a flea, I wasn’t worried.

One of them ran up to a wall and without breaking stride, hurdled it. It was impressively casual for a monstrous offense to all living things. I had a brief freak-out until I realized that it was only clearing ten feet. And my wall/moat? That was a much, much bigger jump.

Calm and serene. Calm and serene. Calm and…

My God. There are hundreds of them.

My eyes couldn’t keep track of all the dog-sized monsters. They swarmed in from the sides, keeping as far as possible from the giant. Moving with eerie grace, they filtered through the obstacles. The few lost to pit traps hardly put a dent in their numbers. More and more and more of them every second.

“Miyuki, never mind the giant, start nailing together some of those quick monsters. Alternate edges of the field, drive them to the middle. Artillery! When you see a big clump of the speedy guys, shoot it! Hold your fire until then.”

Deep breath.

“Corporal Mika, the second those fast little guys start hitting your extreme range, pop Tower Wall and go full speed! Do not wait on this! Carousel, Glass Arrow until we have a lot of targets at the base of the wall, not before.”

Deep breath. Long exhale. Let the old habits soothe you. God, there were so many of the fast monsters. They ripped across the battlefield, kicking up puffs of dirt behind them. They leapt over obstacles with an uncanny grace. Smooth. It looked like water arcing out of a hose. All these rivulets of monsters, running down towards me.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

None of them were exploding, at least. Or spitting acid or anything like that. Just fast.

“Anybody seeing any of those murder baboons? Any stealth units? Anyone?”

I got lots of shouted “No’s” in reply, in varying forms. One less thing to worry about. No armored units either. Or normal monsters, for that matter. I was getting worried about Versai. She was Hell on wheels against single targets, but she was vulnerable to getting swarmed. There were an awful lot of those fast monsters around. Sure sounded like a swarm to me.

There was a flash of gore at the edge of the clearing. More like a traveling line of exploding blood and viscera, winding its way through the barricades towards the two headed giant. I blinked. Squinted. Blinked again. Then slowly rested my head against the railing of my balcony. I consider myself pretty smart. But I will admit. Sometimes. Rarely. I do, occasionally, miss things.

Versai’s speed hack relied on her making an attack from outside of its normal range, and missing. She had been working at overcoming her mental limitations on things like how fast a human could move. I’d bet the notion of deliberately attacking from too far away had been doing her head in too. But now she was in a target rich environment. She understood my tactics. That she didn’t need to kill each monster, just wound or slow them.

There were hundreds of speedy monsters, which meant there were hundreds of opportunities to accelerate. And each swing would be a hit.

Like a scene in a movie where someone lights a trail of gunpowder or gasoline. She was moving too fast for me to track when she finally hit the giant. She went for the fingers. I only found that out because the two heads screamed and jerked upright, one mutilated hand spraying blood over the field. Then she went for the back legs.

I swear I could hear those heavy hamstrings snap from across the clearing. I sure heard the monster’s voices find new octaves of pain. The monster was simply too big for Versai to land a single killing blow on it. She had to work her way up and over. So she did. Red-black blood went flying in arcs around the huge body. Chunks of meat. Monstrous skin and bone left scattered on the battlefield.

Versai was enjoying this. I could tell. Whatever the psychological pressures were, the sheer fact that she could now make the monsters the victims of an one-sided slaughter brought her true joy. And if they knew pain and terror before they died, so much the better.

I looked away from the giant. The only question now was if the wave was going to send in a second big guy, or stick with even more speedy types.

It was fascinating, in a horrible way. The dog sized monsters were rushing in and filtering through the barricades in such insane numbers, it looked almost like a mathematical model. A graph demonstrating distribution, or how things will sort themselves into a Bell curve.

“Mika holds the line! Mika holds the line!” Corporal Mika had the Shield Tower up and running. She had a target rich environment, a squad of Mikas, and no hesitation whatsoever about putting a bolt in a monster’s face. The bolt-storm just shredded the speedy monsters.

Corporal Mika understood my tactical doctrine- you don’t need to kill the monsters immediately, you just need to wound them. So each speedy monster got one bolt apiece. This did actually kill most of them, and the ones it didn’t kill were barely crawling afterward. The Mikas went on cooldown all too soon, but they left a nightmare of strewn bodies and crawling heaps of mutilation behind them. And hundreds more to come.

The dog-sized monsters weren’t very heavy. They still managed to trample some of the wounded to death.

“Carousel, when they hit the moat-”

“Yes, my Lord.”

It didn't take long for them to reach us. They ran, springing with each step. Galloping closer and closer. They reached the edge of my now alarmingly deep moat, and jumped forward into the void. The moat was pretty damned wide too, but the monsters had a hell of a jump. There was a solid rain of thuds as they slammed into the wall- and bounced off again.

My heart went into my throat for a minute as they started to climb. Metaphorically, anyway. I managed to breathe again when they started sliding down the wall. They couldn’t stick to the wall, and while they could get worryingly far jumping and scrabbling upward, the power of friction wasn’t unlimited.

I laughed. Gottem. A whole wave and they were helpless against my walls. A feeling of unprecedented safety washed-

Is that little creep… digging, the monsters are digging!

“CAROUSEL, FINAL REVEL RIGHT THIS GODDAMN SECOND!”

The occult, wailing chants from the Blue Roses were already rising in full throat, their dresses spinning madly and their long sleeves flying as they orbited Carousel. Carousel was drawing down the magic with long, elegant fingers and waves of her magic staff. The shimmering gasoline slick magic formed, as though it was leaking from some outside world into the clean air around my Tower.

The monsters kept launching themselves into the moat as the spell spread out. The wounded died pretty quickly- the spell had a way of necrotizing wounds, making them rot and collapsing the muscles and fascia around them into sludge. Festering. There’s a word I only associate with wounds.

Final Revel made the monster’s wounds fester as they spun and shambled around, howling and biting at each other. Around and around and around, as they got sicker and weaker. Even the ones that weren’t injured eventually rotted to death in a burst of ecstatic madness.

Every second, more and more of the wolflike horrors with their too-human hands for paws rushed into the moat, hit the cloud of magic, and died. Rakim was shooting down into the mix, with my blessing. Miyuki was building screaming fences, driving the monsters together in the middle of the field. Where my Pomoroys and Radz butchered them. It was a charnel house, industrial in scale.

Two enormous heads, hideous, twisted in pain and horror, landed with dull thuds on the Rampart.

“Rakim! Throw Versai a rope!”

I couldn’t believe we were still using a knotted rope. At the very least we should have a rope ladder. Even a wooden ladder on rails we could raise and lower. Something, anything, better than a rope! Well. That could be a later-tonight thing.

Final Revel wound down. Just in time for the Mikas to shake off their weakness and start picking off the wounded. I looked across the field, trying to find Rache and Rikka. They would usually filter in once the woods were clear. No chance of spotting Rikka directly, of course, but you could see where a monster both stepped into a pit trap and got their head smashed in by a sling stone. Inferring presence without seeing it directly.

They weren’t in yet. There were still smoke plumes rising all over the forest. That was not good. I was used to the monsters coming in clumps, spaced a few minutes apart. This was more like a steady stream of monsters. Weak monsters, comparatively, but a lot of them and they were fast. The digging didn’t just worry me, it flat out terrified me.

Is it time to test the exploits Judith’s new costume provided? Test out the Judith/Rakim wombo-combo? It felt too soon. Right now we were clearing out chaff, and unless they swarmed my scouts, they really couldn’t reach us. Digging notwithstanding. Dropping a load of rocks on their heads seemed like a waste.

There was another hideous double shriek coming from the woods. I sighed. “Same plan as before. Miyuki- put a couple of arrows into the giant. Headshots are great, but don’t worry if you can’t. Versai… you know what? More heads, please. Just make sure the swarming vermin can’t surround you.”

“Yes Tower Master!”

I hesitated- should I micro my artillery? Give Miyuki more pin-point instructions? I forced myself to ignore the urge. Nothing worse than getting an instruction and then having the instructions change on you just as you start to do your job. I won’t be that boss.

The cooldowns on Mika’s Ult and Carousel’s Ult didn’t exactly line up perfectly, but between the two, I could clear big swaths of monsters every few minutes. Versai was doing her one-woman blender routine. Things were somewhat stable. So… either I was missing something or they were cooking up something particularly nasty for a wave-ender.

I gently rapped my forehead. Both. It would definitely be both.

“Rikka, cripple two and come back to the battlefield. Rache, wide sweep! I want to know if there are any targets moving anywhere around my Tower! Search, then report back! Pop smoke if you see a big group.”

The magic carried my words to my scouts as though they were standing next to me. I absolutely love that. I tightened my grip on the scepter. Fingers crossed that the efficiency bonus meant a faster search. I still haven’t found a good way to test that.

I looked out over the battlefield, trying to spot any problems. And… so far… there weren’t any. My little war machine was grinding away well. The two headed giant horror remained straight nightmare fuel, but now that I was used to the sound the whistling arrows made, I could see its flaws.

It was, in a word, trash.

My gamer brain chewed it over. Big hit box. Two heads that could attack independently but, crucially, not on the same target at the same time. No AOE’s seen so far, so unless it had a really quick turn, it was vulnerable to being surrounded and jumped. Its basic attacks were just plus sized versions of the standard monster attack. It wasn’t anything, really. A custom model and a crap ton more hit points and reach because of its size.

Versai had killed bigger.

I nodded slowly. Send in the big one first, as a wall breaker. Then flood the gap with fast monsters. That would remove any chances of surrounding the big guy, and force the defenders to fight him head on. And if the defenders were on foot, then they would be the ones surrounded and dragged to the ground. Then send a second one in case the first got dragged down by traps or something.

Rache came in hot and fast, dodging around the scattered fast monsters.

“Boss! We got banditos coming in from the back forty! And there are a lot of ‘em!”