“I want to congratulate everyone! I am congratulating everyone! We did it! We built ourselves an absurdly over-fortified gatehouse and wrapped our wall around the base of the Tower. We even included bastions for cross fire. We have even-even rebuilt and restructured the existing fortifications! Which, given the amount of concrete and rebar we had already used, only hurt my soul a little bit! Everyone, this cheer is for you.”

“Yaaay.”

“Good. Dismissed.”

I had to let them go after the ‘yaaay.’ It took ages to rehearse it, and another age to make them say it on cue. I’m dead. The wave hasn’t even started and I’m dead.

The construction part went fine. Most of my Awakened were of minimal use, as expected. Even things like carrying bags or tamping down dirt were accomplished at a snail’s pace. There was literally no part of the construction work that Worker-class awakened couldn’t do hundreds of times better. But that was okay! Teamwork was the goal, and teamwork I achieved. I think. I hope. They couldn’t do all that much, but they helped out.

The fortifications had been expanded, but simplified. Did this eat up most of my remaining orders? Yes. Was the trade-off completely worth it?

Well. I guess we’d find out soon. Or someone would. I was dead.

The walls. Oh dear sweet nine pounds seven ounces Baby Jesus. The walls.

Let me briefly describe the final product, before explaining how we built it. The “Tower” now truly does have a heavily developed defense. The outermost ring of that defense is the clearing itself. Every yard we push back the tree line is another yard we have for snipers to spot stealth units and for artillery to put rounds on big units. Or anything, really.

The next rung is the defenses in the clearing. This was definitely more of a work in progress, because having to build a three hundred and sixty degree defense that was effective against stealthy, fast, armored, and giant units was… a challenge. So I stuck with the short barriers and potholes scattered around. It wasn’t really random- the barriers were much denser in front of the front and rear entrances. They seemed to be doing some good, but honestly? I’d rather have my hedgehogs back.

Moving along to one thing I was very happy with- the moat! Originally just a trench in front of the wall that would become the Rampart, it was now a certified menace to navigation and, possibly, the structural integrity of the Tower. It was a little eerie not hitting anything like bedrock even after digging more than twenty feet down.

Closer to thirty now. Monsters take fall damage.

Anyhoo, the moat now formed a rough oval around the entirety of the walls. No water source yet, so it’s still dry. But I have to wonder- Do monsters float? Not a whole lot of fat on them. Lots of dense muscle and bone. It would be interesting to find out. Because I bet that if we can build roads, we can build aqueducts.

Which leads us to the last defense before the Tower proper- the wall.

To visualize the wall, I want you to imagine a legally distinct, but visually reminiscent, Thwomp from Mario.

It’s not really that exact. We don’t have a frowny face. But what we do have is a square with triangles pointing out of it. Big, thick walls, with a protruding bastion at each corner, and a bastion in the middle of each side. The idea was to maximize the cross-fire potential, as well as ensuring there were always good firing angles.

Another consideration was the thickness of the walls- they were stupid thick. Like… unreasonably thick. You could have at least two guys riding horses side by side up there thick. Maybe three? I’m not a horse guy. My logic was this- China.

China had Mongol problems. What did they do? They built the Great Wall. They mobilized the equivalent of all of Europe’s population at the time to build a big dirt wall covered in stone. How thick? Thick enough for mounted troops to move around on. I mean, if you are scrapping with Mongols, you need to be highly mobile. Troop movements were always going to be a big thing.

Did the Mongols break down the wall? No, they did not.

Did Chinese corruption and infighting let the Mongols walk through the wall like it wasn’t even there? Unless AI generated internet shorts have lied to me, that’s exactly what they did. So what can we learn from this?

You can make very tall walls very thick and very long if you have a lot of dirt and unlimited labor.

Mobility on top of the walls is a key consideration.

Pay your people better, and don’t have so many civil wars.

There are probably more lessons there. Probably a bit more nuance. But frankly, I was feeling pretty robbed since the bits of anime girls that were in the thumbnail were quickly revealed to be AI generated slop. Horrible stuff. I refused to watch any more videos on principle. But I did remember the dirt wall thing, and I’ve been using it religiously. Although it is not complication-free.

The sheer volume of dirt required to build the thick, tall, walls that I wanted was insane. It is absolutely insane. The moat project gave us a lot of dirt, but we had already dug out a lot for the earlier walls. Which led to us turning a problem into a solution- recycling.

What were our old walls made out of? Dirt, covered in highly polished stone and/or concrete. What is our new wall made out of? Correct.

Nothing went to waste. It wasn’t possible to un-concrete the concrete, but it could be smashed up into rubble and added as fill. The polished stones were carefully removed one-by-one. A fairly difficult job as the level of polish made them ‘sticky’ with each other. But once the new walls were formed, they went right back on there- no additional effort required.

I mean, separating them, making sure they weren’t damaged during the process, keeping the surfaces clean and polished, then reassembling them was an enormous amount of effort, but we didn’t have to go and quarry them again. Which led to the next problem. Not enough stones.

I now had two places I could mine stone from- the Bluestone quarry where I had gotten the first batch of stone from, and Hidden Moon Mountain in my Sky Realm. But that would cost an order that could be spent building walls. What to do?

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Another Youtube short to the rescue- A project can be fast, cheap, or good. A well run project gets you two of those things. I couldn’t stretch the time, and I definitely couldn’t neglect the quality. That left money.

And today, the Gnome Market was carrying resource packs. In the true spirit of Gacha, I bought a stack and ripped them open, praying for Cement. And for once, I got it.

Cement could crack if something blew up near it. Stone could too, of course, but the lesson of what happened to Kim was still very fresh. I didn’t have a good solution to that. All I could do was try and make sure the “boom” happened well away from the wall.

Moving to the back of the Tower, we have the gatehouse. And it is glorious. Many, many resource packs had to die for me to get enough steel for the project, but we did it.

Drawbridge? You know it! Big heavy concrete door? YUP. With a big heavy locking bar? That too. Then we had the portcullises, perfect for long pikes to be stabbed through. Or crossbows to shoot through. The more I looked at the portcullises, the easier it was to understand why they were a castle staple. Slow them down and shoot them up had been my strategy since literally Day One. A portcullis was practically the platonic ideal of that.

Murder holes were thoroughly debated, and we ended on a kind of trap door in the ceiling arrangement, where the murder hole would be covered with, yes, more cement, but cement that could be lifted away when it was time to dump something nasty on the trapped monsters below. This too has a heavy steel locking bar. Just in case.

Now, what exactly could we drop through the hole, given that I had zero boiling oil, boiling water, or scorpions? Not much, actually. So it would be another opportunity for our stabby-shooty types to excel.

And to top it all off, we put a roof over the whole damn wall. The front rampart didn’t need changing in that regard- it was already pretty pillbox-like. But the rest of the new construction got whatever sort of hodge-podge missile protection I could throw together out of the remaining cement, structural wood from the resource packs, bits of iron, a few hundred tiles that RNG produced, dirt heaped over wood… whatever I could do to keep my people alive from the inevitable threat from above.

My idea to put spikes on the underside of the drawbridge so that we could drop it on monsters standing on the other edge of the moat and squish them was apparently “Dumb” and “Bad” and “Perhaps a touch impractical, Tower Master.”

Which is fine. It’s fine. I’m fine.

Sure, it would be very cool and satisfying to squish monsters. And it would look metal as Hell. Just dropping that gate and SQUISH! Then raising it up again as the blood and gore drips off, getting ready to do it again. That’s just art. That’s what we should be working towards.

But no. NO. Apparently, there are reasons drawbridges aren’t built that way, including but not limited to breaking the bridge and letting speedy little monsters in. But that’s fine! I can be a tyrant that listens to his advisors. FINE.

But they still had to listen to my speech. More than that, they had to participate. It… devolved into a North Korean style exercise where the applause is pre-scripted and everyone knows to clap or else. But that too was fine.

We had just done a team building exercise. We had completed a huge defensive undertaking, in just four orders. Mostly because we could recycle a lot of old material and re-jigger old defenses, but still, it was a huge achievement, worthy of a speech.

And what do I get for my efforts? Crickets. Crickets, and criticism of my vision from visionless philistines. I am a magnanimous tyrant, but there is a limit to my tolerance. We had the speech, and everyone applauded. As they should. I was still hollowed out by the whole thing. The dead-eyed stares of those forced to attend unpaid team building events apparently were a multiversal constant.

We didn’t manage to make trebuchets. Nobody, Sebastian included, actually knew how to make them. Or ballistae or anything. Apparently, there are more moving parts to it than I imagined, and an awful lot of math. Soon enough. I’d figure it all out soon enough.

I lay on the wall in a moody heap until I felt a bit better. Then, out of sheer curiosity, I tried to do that thing where someone lying on their back curls their legs up towards their chests, then kicks out and sort of jackknifes up onto their feet.

I kicked up, and I kind of got off the ground but coordinating the sit-up movement into the kick was… well I didn’t pull it off. I tried again. Better but no luck. You probably needed to practice it a lot, even with a muscular doll body.

Versai, Othai and Carousel were all giving me odd looks. “You guys never saw that trick where someone is lying on their back and they kick up and get to their feet?”

They all shook their heads.

“It’s a thing. One I don’t know how to do, obviously.”

They nodded, eyes a bit too wide.

“You know what? You don’t get to bring me down. Today has been a great day. We got a ton accomplished, and even if we didn’t make optimal use of time, we are in a strong position for tonight’s wave.”

They nodded again.

“I hate you all. Marci, wait ‘till you see me on the balcony, then drop the last block in. After you do, all the workers go back to the Tower. Everybody else, to your newly assigned battle stations!”

Marci nudged the last bit of stone into the gap waiting for it, completing the final order. At this point, the sun usually fast-forwards its way through the sunset and twilight, dropping us into deepest nighttime in a minute or so.

Not today.

The clouds rushed in, covering the setting sun. A bell rang, low and deep and slow. Lightening snarled and snapped in the clouds, and I could smell rain coming.

“Miyuki- eyes up. Rikka, Rache-” I stopped for a second. Then another. I forced myself to grind out the order. “Scout. Mark targets. The instant you see anything remotely out of the ordinary, return and report it at once! Do not, under any circumstances, allow yourself to be surrounded or trapped. Rache, if there is anything that even looks like it would prevent you from moving at full speed, return to the Tower immediately.”

“Chromed lighting.”

“As my Lord commands.”

The rain started. A few heavy drops, shockingly cold, smacked into me. My balcony didn't have a roof. I’d have to command the battlefield from the wall if ranged units started shooting up at me. The raindrops blew right in. Just a few at first, building up to a deluge. You could hide anything in a rain like that. I could have tanks rolling up on me, and I wouldn’t see them coming.

The Tenth Wave. It was never going to be fair. It was never going to be an ordinary wave. The rain was blinding. Deafening. And the monsters were creeping closer with every second. I felt fear wrap itself around me. Fear of the unknown, of promised violence, of not being good enough, of watching people I cared for die. I felt the skelleton’s embrace, wrapping its hand around my throat and squeezing my heart.

“I’ve been scared before. I ate my feelings then. But you took that away from me.” I cupped my hands and caught the rain. It looked normal, running cold through my fingers. I stuck them out again, and caught more. Then I brought it to my lips and drank.

And just for a moment, I felt the world trip. Just a smidge. Just a quarter-cupful of code gone wrong. But just for a moment, there was a glitch, and I tasted the rain.

It wasn’t New York tap water, but it still managed to be the best water I ever tasted. It tasted like life itself.

I didn’t try to drink more. I don’t even know what that little mouthful would do as it was. Not like I could digest it, or pee it out for that matter.

I heard the muffled whomp of the mortar firing. I looked around trying to see the rising signal, but the rain blocked my sight. My Awakened can see the flares through the rain, but I can’t? Is this some sort of fog of war thing?

“Versai, can you see the signals from the Scouts?”

“No, Tower Master.”

Interesting. Maybe it was because the signals were part of the Artillery's targeting system.

“Artillery- fire at will, prioritizing the closest targets.”

The bell tolled again. Muffled by the rain, but still there. There were occasional thuds coming through too, like slow, irregular beats on a Taiko drum. The blue-white lightning formed dragons and shattered trees in the clouds, the thunder descending and prowling around the clearing. Blind, deaf, distracted, it’s no wonder the funeral music was playing.

“Pomoroi, by Imperial Decree!” The cannons began to roar. Radz, my mortar operator, had almost four times the range Pomoroi had. So the monsters were getting a lot closer, and I still wasn’t seeing a blasted thing!

A howling rose from the darkness. Not the foley artist call of a cartoon wolf but the long, piercing cry of an animal hunting. More and more voices joined, some yipping, barking, yowling, making sounds I don’t have words for. A grad choir of monsters. The caroling of the blood-hunt.

“For whichever of my Awakened can understand what I am saying, let me tell you something about my home country. We tell our kids stories about monsters, and especially horrible monsters called dragons. And at the end of the story, the brave heroes kill the dragon. The point isn’t to teach kids that dragons and monsters are real. Kids know that already. We tell them the stories so they know that dragons can be killed. And that one day, the one to kill the dragon will be them.”

The rain drenched me. My stupid slip dress of a tunic was glued to me, my Robin Hood hat drooped, my little leather slippers were soaked. I was cold. Scared. People all around and feeling all alone. I squeezed the knife in my right hand and the scepter in my left.

“This is going to be a nasty one. But that’s fine. Because we are monster slayers. We hang their heads over our gates, and use their hides for rugs. We trade their bones like we were slipping our change to the waiter. Their dead make our potions, our weapons, our armor. We kill them and stack them so high, their corpses make walls and reefs around our Tower. So let them come. Let them send their dragons. Our job won’t change. Awakened, hear my order- KILL!”