The Murder Baboon’s camouflage was as impeccable as always. I could only vaguely sense they were on the battlefield by looking at how some of the monsters moved- the occasional dodge for no reason, a few moving a touch awkwardly, as though they were carrying something. It was subtle. Invisible if you weren’t looking for it.

I mean, the ones nailed to a bigger monster and then the ground via a yard long glowing arrow were also a bit of a give away, but I will firmly defend my right to pat my own back here. Honing my powers of observation, developing a keen sense of the battlefield. These are good things.

“Come on, you evil little things. Aren’t you filled with repressed rage for all your dead comrades? Aren’t you furious? Send everybody. EVERYBODY!”

I was almost bouncing up and down with excitement. So many things coming together at the same time. A costume upgrade. The Sky Realm. The fact that the world didn’t really apply its rules to ‘trash.’ The way the baboon’s camouflage worked. So many, many systems, all coming together.

The monsters had reached the moat. The Mikas were adorably savaging them. Cold eyes aiming to wound rather than kill, to keep the monsters pinned up in the moat while Final Revel was cast. The white floppy beret and short skirt of ruthless military discipline would remain unstained by the suffering below. Nor would even a flicker of emotion touch their charming eyes as the monsters, with broken legs and bolts through their hips, were forced to dance themselves to death.

The Mikas had seen worse. They had lived through worse.

Actually, they hadn’t, had they?

I shuddered away from the thought and turned my attention to my scouts. Still plenty of smoke going up in the woods, which meant that it wasn’t quite time yet for the big reveal.

The cannons thundered. It was… surreal, seeing Pomoroi in her shiny boots and tight trousers pedaling her cannon into place. You could see the ghost of what should have been- a bronze twelve-pounder, crew serviced, in battery with a dozen other cannons. You could see her standing off to the side, telescope in hand as she called out range and elevation. Then- “FIRE!” and the battery roared their defiance, the lion of the Empire dominating the battlefield. None more loyal. None more resolved.

And here she was now, in her fancy dress and tug-along cannon, still holding the line. Still unwilling to take even one step away from her guns. She was famed for her ability to defend, but watching the Pomorois at work, I knew the order they really wanted to hear. “The artillery is to advance!”

“One day, Pomoroi. I swear. One day it will happen. You will wheel out your guns and your battery will tear down the enemy’s walls. You will sweep the field, leaving only scraps for the cavalry to pick up.”

I didn’t look over at Radz. I don’t want to visit her world, or a Relic Site from it, for that matter. Girls und Panzer notwithstanding. I may have an American-Grade grasp of history and non-Japanese foreignness, but I knew that central and eastern Europe got stomped nine-tenths to death during WWII. Whole cities were just gone. Divisions of troops vanished like water into artillery churned dirt. They have been pulling unexploded ordnance out of the ground in Europe for a hundred years now, and absolutely nobody thinks they’ve found everything.

I don’t know that Radz came from exactly that kind of world. But the way she watched her explosions, the way she calmly announced she was raining death… She had fallen in love with it. I could see it. She felt like she was making the world a little more right with every ruined body and blast of dirt. Making it more like what she saw in her head. A world that was only ruin and destruction, a real world, a world that wouldn’t torment her with the illusion of safety and comfort and memories of a time before the explosions battered her ears and brain.

“Radz raining death.” and then there was the chumf sound of the mortar leaving its tube, and a few seconds later, the blast that always made me flinch and want to dive for cover. Did she send each one off with a little blessing, wanting to watch it blossom into the greatness she knew it possessed?

Radz was a vital part of my military force. But, damn, I wish she wasn’t.

Still lots of smoke rising from the forest. I forced myself to stay calm. Nobody was hanging out by their lonesome, and Miyuki had orders to periodically sweep the back of the Tower. Even if the Murder Baboons had the wit to use their explosive variants as breaching charges, or the fast guys started digging to undermine our walls, it would take them a long, long time. We wanted as many targets as possible to crowd in.

In the meantime, Carousel was thinning them out in the moat. It was a pretty deep moat by now. Lots of broken limbs. Forced to dance on broken feet- that’s something out of a fairy tale right there. And not, you know, Fairy Tale. Hiro Mashima was on a serious Power of Friendship kick with that one. Final Revel was something more up Kota Hirano’s ally. Or maybe Tatsuki Fujimoto- I could totally see Makima forcing someone to dance themselves to death on broken limbs.

Seems very… her.

There was a burst from the left side of the tower- a genuine column of wall-breakers. Must have been thirty of the armored, ugly things.

“Artillery! Smash that column! No, wait! Keep firing at targets in the woods.” I wiped my forehead. I wasn’t sweating, just force of habit. I’d forgotten what happened the last time these guys rushed my Tower. Broken bones for everyone. My artillery was better used on other things.

Still a lot of smoke rising from the forest. Were the plumes going up a little closer now? I really couldn’t tell. Looks like they were refining the mass rush from the last couple of waves.

There was a sudden explosion off on the right. It took me a moment to piece it together- an armored monster fell into a small pit and must have crushed an explosive Baboon, resulting in one dead baboon and one crippled armored monster. Glorious. You love to see it.

I kept my eyes moving around the clearing, occasionally zipping to the other side of the Tower to check on things over there. So far, it was just a few monsters that came from the side of the Tower and wrapped around from the back. No drama. They weren’t even trying to climb up or anything. Miyuki would zip around every now and then, pinning stragglers to the ground and triggering her fear effect.

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It was on one of those occasions, looking out over the back of the Tower, that I spotted it. The trees were shaking and swaying, but there were no monsters popping out. Murder baboons, and a lot of them. Somehow they evaded my scouts.

I wouldn’t catch everyone in one fell swoop, but it was time.

Once every two Waves, Dreams of Paradise Rakim can move an amount of material present within her range of the Tower equal to the amount of material she and all Worker Class Awakened controlled by the Tower Master could move in one order, for any distance equivalent to how far they could shift that mass with the tools and equipment available to them, instantly.

I had memorized the description at this point. My mind circled the word “instantly” over and over. The more I looked at the description, the more… imprecise it felt. There was a lack of clarity in thought and language. But the word instantly was seductive. And even if it was my “worst case scenario,” I felt like it was manageable.

I have three Judiths, (one of which has a costume upgrade) and one Marci for my worker corps. Each worker has received Stone Tapes to increase their lets-just-call-it-level, as well as weapon upgrades to improve their work speed. I have my scepter to buff work efficiency. I have my Perfect Clear bonuses. In short, I have a whole lot of production available to me.

Now. Let’s see how this superpower works.

“RAKIM! Execute Plan- Brown Storm!”

“... May God forgive me. Yes, Sir!”

There was a gust of wind. And then- a stench.

Stench seems to polite. Too refined for what I inflicted on the battlefield.

Instantly is a fun word. In that almost nothing happens that fast. “Instantly” usually means “very, very fast,” or “imperceptibly fast.” But we aren’t dealing with anything as mundane or sensible as physics. We are operating in an artificial system. So if something arrives somewhere instantly, that means “without any intervening steps.

Steps like my workers loading up wheelbarrows and barrels and anything even vaguely water tight, filling them with game-designated garbage, transporting them from Gradden March to the battlefield, then using shovels to fling the liquid at head height over every inch of the clearing.

No, all of that just happened. Instantly, as it were. All that liquid, those solids, those things that were horribly neither and both. All of that just appearing in the air. And no need to worry about the monsters! The special move granted by the costume didn’t say the workers would do it- they were just the unit of measurement. The system did all the very upsetting, dangerous work.

So I really wanted to know. Just what happens if several hundred liquid tons of the most rank, sun fermented, besieged, poverty stricken, lousy diet, rat infested, corpse rotted, leach filled, writhing worm laden, purely diabolical sewage was flung into the air and coated every monster in worker-walking-range of the Tower, including all the hidden ones?

Chaos. There is chaos. Smelly, God-awful, sinus destroying chaos.

It was glorious.

Hundreds of Baboons seemed to just… pop into existence. Did you know that they don’t like being dirty or smelly or covered in human-ish excrement? I didn’t. But they don’t. They really don’t. They tried to roll around to get it off. Sadly, very sadly, it just meant that the awful, goopy mess was now really ground into their fur.

Oh it was an awful sight. Nothing, not even Garbage Day in the summer outside a row of restaurants, NOTHING in New York prepared me for this intensity of stomach emptying smell. Some sick instinct drove one to contribute, to explode out either end and join the universal foulness. Instinct, but only a remnant instinct, the haunting of an ancestral impulse in this doll's body. I could only endure.

The monsters? They… couldn’t even manage that. They retched. I could see them trying to throw up too, but only spilling thick saliva and bile. Some collapsed, or worse, slipped, on the sewage. The number of faces rubbed in a burgher’s droppings was beyond easy counting. Those wide noses were pure suffering to them now, as was their wide eyes.

Under other circumstances, you would really worry about infection. Fortunately for them, I had a cure. Death.

“Miyuki, now that our Baboon visitors are visible, focus on nailing together as many as you can. I want screaming shish kabobs covering my clearing if you please. ARTILLERY! WIPE THEM OUT!”

It was going to be a Hell of a job cleaning up the battlefield. All that sewage would need to be buried, and buried deep. I have no idea if it would break down in the soil. Plants could grow, but who knows what biological systems were carried over?

What followed next was pure slaughter. The heavy units fell into the moat and broke their too-human hands and legs. The quick units survived a little better, but they were as kettled as the rest. As for the sneaky units? The trophy made them scared and slow. The whistling arrows corralled them into smaller and smaller areas. And the filth of thousands of unwashed bungholes made them very, very visible.

And smellable. My God. I could shoot them with my eyes closed, never mind the actual pros on the wall. Rakim was working her carbine with a dead-eyed, and dead-souled, precision. I think she viewed it as mercy killings. Was it possible to burden a Four Star with the consciousness of sin? I suppose this could be a test case.

The slaughter quickly blended with the sewage. I had thought I was immune to gore by this point. I was wrong. The smell of it all, of course, but the way the sewage just… slipped into open cavities. The way organ meat blended with spilled ribbons of half dissolved effluvia. I could feel my sanity start to slip. This was the stuff of madness.

I had a sudden flash. The world of Lovecraft- not his mythos, but that early twentieth century, with its memories of World War One and dreams of the scientific horrors to come. Broken men staring at walls, drinking rotgut or smacked out of their mind on morphine. Sometimes screaming at things only they saw, inescapable memories of awful places. This was where Radz lived. This is what she saw, all the time.

This is what I would see, all the time. This horror. This nighttime slaughter. A meat grinder in the sewers, forever. There was no escaping this. There was no end to this. Nobody ‘beats’ a gacha, the point is to milk the players forever, or until the end-of-service. I would do this, until I died or the game ended, and the universe with it. This wasn’t even Hell. Hell was God’s intention. This place has nothing of the divine in it. There is only fear, and pain, and defilement, before a humiliated death.

Then a soothing wave fell over me. Then a second, and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth. I don’t know why. Usually that only happens when you move to the next day.

I shook my head and locked back in. Absurd to lose concentration like that in the middle of battle. That’s how people die. And this was too much of a done deal to lose people now. I wasn’t seeing more smoke from the forest, but I was sure that that Operation Brown Storm missed more than a few. That was fine. As long as we broke the back of the wave, we could take our time mopping up.

“Rikka, same as usual- keep a couple crippled but alive. Carousel, Corporal Mika- maximum speed on cleaning up the moat. Use your Ult as often as practical.”

Chip, chip, chip away. Chip away and see if there are any last minute surprises.

There weren’t. My guess was that they were cooking up something intensely diabolical for tomorrow. Waves that end in five or zero- guaranteed to be a nightmare.

“Alright, great work everybody! Rakkim, put yourself down for some quality time in the dorms tomorrow. Actually, you know what? Go right now.”

“Thank you Sir.” Was her voice a touch more wooden than before? I hoped she shook it off soon. Horrible thought- did she live through what I experienced as “instant?” I have no reason to think things would work that way. It would be wildly more complicated than necessary. But maybe.

I’m proud to say that we have deluxe dorms for our Awakened. I like to think it helps with the… everything.

“Alright! WORKERS! Listen up. Tonight’s the night we build the gatehouse for the back of the Tower. That means thick reinforced cement doors. That means a portcullis if you can manage it. It means a drawbridge to cross the moat. I want to see lots and lots of the thick, low earth walls with narrow, but deep, pits around them. We have plenty of stone and all the rammed earth our hearts could desire. Let’s use them.”

I coughed, maybe a touch theatrically. “Also, clean up the battlefield. Fingers crossed the filth vanishes when you touch the body, but if it doesn’t, we need a big pit for disposal. Just… so big.”

I was grinning a lot. The battlefield was still… fragrant… but that would be okay for today. Worst case scenario, we have to replace the top soil. Which is, yes, a bad worst case, but when your work crew never gets tired, it’s a manageable one. No, I was grinning because as soon as I ordered the last few monsters killed, I’d be getting a new Six Star. And some rando summons, but… new Six Star. Proof that I was no longer “Just starting out.” I was established. A force.

The sky started to throb. I didn’t wait for the countdown. “KILL ‘EM ALL!”

And then it was morning. Bright and beautiful. I was ready to paint the sky red all over again.