“I had expected there to be a monster hiding somewhere. It felt inevitable. But candidly, I didn’t see the Woodcutter or his Wife being it. And if one of the two was going to be the monster, I’d have put money on the Woodcutter.”

“Why? Not like you had met either.” Versai asked. She looked mummified. I had returned us to the Tower to heal up again. Since progress through the relic site didn’t reset, there was absolutely no reason to press on to the clearing in anything less than tip-top condition.

“He was the named character. Where there is a name, there is plot. Besides, a nefarious woodcutter practically seethes with dramatic possibility. Think about how much opportunity there was for playing up the cunning peasant trope. “Ah. I know things. Terrible things. Come into my very safe, very normal hut. Don’t mind my wife, she is just preparing… THE MEAT!”” I let my voice rise to a shriek at the end, capping my performance with a thrusting, trembling finger.

“Oh God, it really is some kind of rotting disease. Pammy, dear, can you bandage brains?”

“Um. Um. Um. Pammy will do her best?”

“Versai, when you get right down to it, if you aren’t crazy after who-knows-how-many deaths, then how could I possibly be crazy?”

“We are far, far beyond anything I ever experienced, Tower Master. Far beyond. For all I know, your progression is normal.”

“Crazy is normal?”

She shrugged her elegant shoulders and spread her noble hands. “Could be.”

I would usually consider Versai oppressively, even crushingly, beautiful. For some reason, the shine had gone off her at the moment. I sneered, but genteely. For I am a gracious lord, who has only briefly considered installing an oubliette, whatever that actually is.

“Moving swiftly along. We will re-enter, collect Mrs. Hungry and Yoko, then make for the clearing. We suppress or banish the Hungry Ghosts up there, which are hopefully no relation to Mrs. Hungry, and figure out what’s the what with the Heartless Clearing. Which will hopefully wrap up the conquest.”

“So we should expect another fight? On the scale of the last one, I mean.” Her expression turned grim.

“I… hope not. Did the Ghost Touch potions work at all on her?”

“Yes, somewhat, but less than they should have. And they really don’t last long. They are only a coating on the blade, after all. After a few exchanges, they are largely wiped off.

I grunted. That should have been obvious. An ointment or oil on a blade was almost always a temporary buff in games. After killing the Woodcutter and scrapping with the pre-transformation Wife, how much could have been left on the weapons? Leaving aside the ranged weapons, because at a certain point video game logic just flips you the bird and maintains firm eye contact as it pisses in your Mountain Dew.

After all, this isn’t the first time.

“Alright, let's restock them and get ready to roll out. Have any ideas about how to deal with the fog?”

“None, Tower Master.”

I sighed. “Well. Let’s do our best.”

I called up the interface to launch the expedition. The Launch button was grayed out.

“What… why can’t I?”

“Err… Tower Master, did you forget you can only launch one expedition a day?”

I wanted to cry. I really had. This wasn’t fair. The mission should be done! I should be able to wrap up everything today, start the virtuous cycle spinning today! I let the wave of self pity wash over me. Just savored the hell out of it for ten, twenty seconds. Then I exhaled explosively and firmly clapped my hands to my cheeks.

I achieved a major milestone in conquering the Relic Site, but we had taken major damage too. Versai couldn’t have been on much more than ten percent health. The others were a bit better because they weren’t tanking, but from what I could see, everybody picked up some degree of damage.

Fighting intangible ghosts in a fog on ten percent health? That wasn’t ballsy, that was suicidal. We were simply not in good enough shape for that fight.

Worst for our readiness was me- physically unharmed, but after the descent of Lord Welcome and the battle with the Woodcutter couple, I was less than sharp. I needed time to get my own head straight. The person giving the orders had to have a clear head and a firm heart, or everybody would die.

If I couldn’t remember something as important as “You can only launch one expedition a day,” then I wasn’t capable of leading a battle. No two ways about it. Coming back, healing up, getting ready for the next fight, these were all absolutely key.

No more Kims. Which meant no acting spoiled because you didn’t get your way in the Relic Site. Not one more dead Awakened, especially over something stupid. So. Grab your deeply worrying scepter, try not to dwell on how its previous owner got the name “The Pruning King” and think about how you are going to use your few remaining orders to clear the Ninth Wave.

I thought swiftly. The back door wasn’t open… yet. The game clearly wanted me to open it on my own, or at the very least, didn’t mind leaving a hidden pitfall for me. The fast monsters attacking from the rear were a bit of a give away, but it did suggest that the game wasn’t “cheating” and sending attacks based on the types of defenses we currently had.

Whether it was cheating by upping the difficulty based on results was still to be determined. And since proving it would probably require losing people, I wasn’t motivated enough to experiment. For the moment, the question was irrelevant.

Hmm. Assume enemies will be coming from the rear. Most efficient arrangement, in an ideal world, would be a perfectly circular giant wall with one door that led to a giant looping spiral that took the monsters around a trap-filled track over and over again, as my battalion of Radzs dropped mortar rounds on their heads.

Alas, I do not exist in an ideal world. Slightly more realistically then. How do I manage my defenses, given that I was now on honest to Goddess order time?

Take the back door off the table for one thing. In fact, take the whole back of the Tower off the table to the maximum extent possible. The fast monsters could dig, but investigating the bottom of the wall showed that, while they moved an alarming amount of dirt, it wasn’t like they were excavation experts. Dirt filled in from above, and they were trying to dig through yards of dirt horizontally and vertically before they could even reach my reinforced concrete door. They were a manageable problem. The issue was, as always, the never-sufficiently-damned Murder Baboons.

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

Ordinary monsters could climb a bit, but were so dumb I really wasn’t worried about them scrabbling up a wall. The Baboons, however, were little problem solvers. And that I didn’t like one bit. They were exactly the sort to find or make an opening, climb, and flank while we were focused on the front, or had split one watcher out to cover the rear.

I brooded. Not in self pity this time, it was productive brooding.

It wasn’t about fields of fire this time. It wasn’t even about slowing them down. The little horrors were quick in a burst, but they were probably no faster than the standard monster, or even a bit slower over distance. Ambush predators. We didn’t need to slow them down, we needed to break their cover so that we could shoot them up.

The back door problem was simple- just turn the dirt pile into a proper wall. Sheer thickness would be the name of the game here- make it yards thick, same as the front of the Tower. Don’t worry about opening an exit for workers for now. That’s Tomorrow Me’s problem. The wall should meet up with the existing walls and bastions, but rather than give it a flat top, make the top very sharply sloping.The wall should blend smoothly into the side of the Tower, so there was nowhere for even a baboon to stand.

I ran that thought through a second time and carefully circled the words “baboon” and “stand.” Might need a little refinement there. Maybe ring the new wall with some kind of barrier that jutted out away from the Tower like those Y shaped barbed wire tops on prison fences. Whether you were climbing in or out, you would have to get past the overhang. Except I still didn’t have barbed wire or concertina wire so other than giving baboons a fun climbing structure, what was the point?

I tried to remember what they did back in the real world when they wanted to keep people off something. Anti-Bum spikes didn’t seem relevant here. The long pigeon spikes they put on top signs did, but I couldn’t make those any more than I could make barbed wire. Sometimes they put broken glass or something at the top of cement walls, literally lodged into the cement. But I didn’t have a metric ton of glass bottles so that was…

I looked over at Versai, and a rather bright light switched on.

I do have a ton of glass bottles. Time to put an order in with Sebastian.

“Alright, that’s the wall sorted, but now we have to figure out anti-invisibility measures, given that we have no new supply of Blue Magnesium.”

“Pardon, Tower Master?”

“The Murder Baboons-”

“No, I mean, what do you mean the wall is sorted? You just stared at the Snoot of Joy for a while after I asked if you forgot about the one-expedition-per-day rule.”

She looked genuinely concerned. Which… didn’t make me feel good, to be honest. I was starting to treat them like dolls again. I could see myself bouncing between the extremes- too much empathy, and none. Finding a stable path through… I don’t know how I’m going to manage it.

“Sorry. Spending a lot of time in my head. I had forgotten, and now I’ve moved on to defeating the next wave. Keeping you all alive and healthy. You got pretty badly beat up fighting that Monster.”

Versai fixed her own eyes on the golden wiener dog. “She was as fast as I was. Even when I was using the… exploit. She could keep up. I would have been completely helpless against her without it.”

“Yeah, she was clearly someone we weren’t supposed to beat in a head-on fight. I’m not sure we cleared that mission in the ‘right’ way, but we did it.”

“Yeah. It’s just…”

I kind of smiled. I sort of understood. She felt invincible for a hot minute, and then had it yanked away. I don’t need to grasp every tiny detail of the human heart to know that feeling must completely suck.

“We will figure out something else. Then you will be speed hacking AND whatever the new goodness is. Then there will be a third thing, and a fourth, and eventually you will be strong enough to slaughter demons and behead devils.”

She had that protagonist aura. Not the little whiny manlet protag-kun aura, the real deal aura. She would get there. I could be the base commander. She would be the hero on all the game art, leading the others to Glorious Victory. I would be the hidden hand, the Eminence in…

No, no. Arrogance is forbidden. I am not atomic.

At least, not yet.

“Versai, did you know that you are good for my mood?”

“I am, Tower Master?”

“Yep. You sure are. Come on. I do have a small idea on a solution to the baboon problem. And it’s so dumb, I love it.”

We wound up skipping the inward sloping roof. We did wind up making an overhang. We weren’t dropping things on the monsters below, so why not? And given the walls in the back were now as high as the walls in the front AND were attached to the moat, well, why not? No bastions or other outcroppings for artillery or crossfire. This was just a big chunky layer of dirt armor protecting the Tower inside. The exterior layer was smooth stone, tightly fitted, highly polished and hopefully unclimbable.

The overhang and the top of all the walls was now coated with a dense layer of broken glass and ceramic pot shards. Each piece was long enough to shred a hand badly, and thick enough to not break easily. I loved it. There was also an utter mountain of “Nasty Surprise” waiting, and I couldn’t wait to deploy that too.

“Remember, it’s never a war crime the first time.” I reassured everyone.

“What’s a war crime?” Asked Carousel, far too casually in my opinion.

“It’s like rebellion- going to war illegally.” Versai explained.

“Oh, that makes sense.” The floppy hat nodded, then stopped. “No, wait, that doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“I know, I have no idea what he’s talking about. Pammy’s done her best, bless her-”

“I retract my comment about you cheering me up. Never mind all that. Everyone healed up? Everyone in place? Our hedgehogs repaired as much as possible? Battlefield shaped? Gnome Market checked for possible goodies that could help?”

“Err… only you can answer that last one, Tower Master.”

“Yeah, I checked it out. Money’s a little tight at the moment, so I didn’t pick up anything. Shame. Ah well. MARCI! Drop the last block!”

Night rolled in fast. I was feeling grimly positive about the coming wave. It wasn’t just the mountain of Nasty Surprise. It was… I don’t know. A lot of things. Systems were settling in and becoming mature. Synergies were developing. The integration between the Sky Realm and the Tower was slowly getting tighter, even if it wasn’t yet through the game’s systems. For lack of a better word, things were starting to click.

“Rache, Rikka, get scouting. Artillery! Fire as soon as targets are marked.”

I got the usual barks in reply, but I was tuning them out. Versai and Carousel had zipped down to their places on the wall, and I was overseeing the battlefield from my balcony.

After experimenting with it for a while, I could now safely say the scepter really did contribute substantially to “efficiency.” Something on the order of ten to fifteen percent. It sounded meh, but when you translated that into “Miles of road laid” or “Tons of earth moved” the difference was pretty dramatic.

Less dramatic was the scepters’ improvement on the execution of orders on the battlefield. If it was making a substantial difference, it was hard to spot. Rate of fire was up, I believe, but with the accumulated bonuses from the perfect clears, it was hard to say what was contributing what.

Soon, tomorrow, I will have more Awakened to deploy. Mrs. Hungry, Yoko, and whoever that bonus summons from the daily check in will be. I’ll also have enough Resonance Crystals for a random pull. Four new Awakened, and two of them at least will be Six Stars. I’ll integrate Hungry Moon Mountain and start goddam auto-farming resources. We just have to get through tonight.

The artillery started announcing themselves. Radz had it all to herself for three rounds, but the enemies were closing fast, and from all directions. Soon enough, the scouts were marking targets inside of Pomoroi’s range.

Even after everything, I still flinch when I hear the cannons fire. Something about that noise shakes my soul.

“Miyuki sees the snake hidden in the grass!”

Baboons already? No, it was just an ordinary monster, coming out of the woods. A whistling arrow pinned it to the ground and the terrible whistling began. It wasn’t bad, really, with just the one pinned monster. It would grow with time.

It went from one monster to a dozen monsters real quick. The second dozen was hot on their heels, and I was seeing a lot of movement in the trees. We were getting flooded this time. I could feel my face twitching in irritation. It was the simplest way to clear traps, after all, and divert fire from incoming higher value units.

“Artillery, stay focused on targets in the woods. Everyone else, focus fire on the closest enemies. Miyuki, split your fire between either side of the battlefield. Funnel them down to Mika.”

I wasn’t really worried about the basic monsters at this point. They didn’t have a way to defeat our walls. The main threat they presented was as a screen for Murder Baboons and mine clearers. They could hang out in the moat and get slowly burnt down by my Mikas and Rakim. I didn’t even send out Versai to thin them out. No point in putting her in unnecessary danger.

She’d get her blade wet soon enough.

The number of monsters in the clearing suddenly tripled. We now had at least sixty monsters in the clearing, maybe even a hundred.

“Fast Monsters are here! Everyone stay calm and keep focused on your targets. Carousel, when you get a really big mob in the moat, use Final Revel!”

“Yes, my Lord!”

“Oh, my gosh. He is still just so whatever. Like, talking to our boss like that?”

“I KNOW! Does he still perv on you?”

“I don’t give him the opportunity. I stay in the dorms, thank you very much.”

There was a moment punctuated by the screams of dying monsters.

“I do like the dorms. The dorms are good.”

There was general agreement amongst the Blue Roses about that. It had been a while since I heard them chattering. Hadn’t missed it.

Hell with it. They were doing their job. And come glorious day, they could help dredge the sewer in the Floating Quarter. One happy, glorious, beautiful day.

There were screaming skewers of monsters dotting the battlefield now. The wailing chant of the Blue Roses had begun, and Carousel’s magic was slowly unfolding, wrapping up the doomed monsters below.

The flood tactics had cleared out all of the traps Rikka and Rakim had set out, but the result was the same. My Awakened were stacking bodies like cordwood.

“Miyuki sees the snake hidden in the grass!” She fired, and nailed to a distant tree was a small, writhing form. The baboons were here.

“Come on, come on. Send more and more. I want lots of you here. Lots and lots. I made something extra special for you this time!”