The demons of Hidden Moon Mountain were, as I expected, more like Yokai than the denizens of Hell. Think… monsters and evil spirits. Like a three tailed cat that turned into a demon by drinking its owner’s blood and is now a goddamn certifiable homicidal maniac. Or a very, very, very long-necked lady who you would think would just be weird looking, but turns out to just live for violence. The impression Saito gave me was that she was less interested in who won, and more interested in inflicting the maximum beatings time would allow.

Not my top two picks for Japanese Monsters, but since they were who was available, I took them. It cost a hundred runed bones a day to keep them employed, but that was easily offset against the daily runed bones income from the waves and from Gradden March. And they were, in addition to being alarmingly eager to scrap, very good at sneaking around in the mountains. My first two “scouts.”

Totally inadequate on their own, obviously, but I hoped that they would give me a nice surprise on the counter-intelligence front. You can imagine a conventional scout sneaking into the territory, and then out of nowhere a giant black cat attacks with literally inhuman ferocity.

There is a decent cat joke there, but damned if I can think of one that doesn’t sound like a Rodney Dangerfield bit.

We also needed watch towers. Watching for what, I don’t know. How could people attack? Don’t know. Do I want to find out the hard way? No. So. Towers. And they were items that were buildable in the Defense building tree at a very low level, and you could stick ranged units on them for a range and damage bonus, so. No brainer really. But where do I stick them?

This is where I stepped on yet another rake- territory layout. Not that I could control it, I just don’t know how to defend this weird shaped blob that would soon have more and more blobs added to it.

Your classic medieval city is perfectly circular with a wall around it and an S shaped river running through it. Most have a big castle or cathedral in the middle, maybe both. Konosuba is one famous example, but they all pretty much look like that.

Is that what I have? No. No, I have the Borg cut-out poorest bit of a magical medieval city, and a mountain fit for Japanese ghost stories stuck side by side. Virtually all the population and industry was in the city, virtually all the land and resources were on the mountain. My first instinct was to use the mountain as a buffer, fighting guerrilla battles and falling back to a fortified city. Except that means building a wall big enough to surround the entire city, still accounting for future growth of the city, AND I would still have the additional-blobs-of-territory problem.

Please Goddess, bless your follower with a newbie shield over the territory, at least until I can figure out how all this is supposed to work.

I would have to radically rethink my approach to fighting. So far, I was entirely focused on defense, and on fixed defenses. I never had enough Awakened to feel safe, so I made up for it with walls, murder tracks, traps, trenches, moats, all that good stuff.

Open field warfare is what Versai said. And she’s right, but… When I played Shogun II, it wasn’t on Legendary difficulty. It was on, at most, Normal. And I’m just not a historical Real Time Strategy guy generally. Or at all. It’s just not my cup of tea. So other than basic stuff like “Try to hit them in the flanks and rear,” or “Don’t let their cavalry mix it up with your archers,” I don’t have much to offer.

I stared at the monitor looking down at my ‘realm.’ No good ideas came to mind. “Othai, join me in the Throne Room please.”

She came on the trot. “Yes, my Lord?”

I jutted my chin at the monitor. “You know the problem we have here. Thoughts?”

“Train soldiers, build the cheapest possible observation platforms with the expectation that they will be temporary or repurposed, and understand the landscape in as perfect detail as possible.”

“I get the Towers bit, but elaborate on the other points.”

“Troops- Do you know how many you can recruit?”

“Frankly, no. I remember that recruiting any troops was locked behind certain buildings.”

“Yes and no. Yes, you need to unlock the appropriate buildings and improvements to hire a particular type of soldiers. No, in that the buildings aren’t the only limitation on recruitment. There are limitations based on the population of your Sky Realm and your ability to pay their upkeep in Sky Gold and, most concerning for us, food.”

“Ah. I see where this is going. What’s the pop-cap?”

“Pop… population, I see. Ten percent.”

“Is that high or low?”

“Compared to who, my Lord? It’s staggeringly high compared to some cities I know, which had no standing military of their own. It’s quite low compared to the savage hordes of the Steppes, where every male between the ages of ten and seventy is considered a soldier in active service.”

“How do they farm? Or build anything?”

“They don’t. That’s what raiding and herding is for. And, of course, their women do a lot of the manufacturing.”

Huh. Probably not relevant to our situation, but interesting to think about.

“But we are already running a food deficit, so troop maintenance is going to make that a lot worse.”

“Yes, my Lord.”

I rubbed the spot between my brows. Othai wasn’t responsible for the overall situation, just the military. I asked, she answered. There was a term… I groped around in my memory for it. One of my rare conversations with Sayed, my AI whisperer, talking about IT security.

You could do a few things that would protect you from a lot of bad stuff, like running regular backups to multiple places, running regular virus scans, not opening emails from unknown senders and all that. Never use a freebie USB thumb drive, that was another. But you couldn’t protect yourself against everything all the time. You could only make it more time consuming and expensive for people to attack.

“Threat model. That’s the term I’m looking for.”

Othai looked puzzled. “I’m afraid I’m not familiar with it, my Lord.”

“If you knew the enemy had a ton of cavalry and no infantry, you would prepare differently than you would for heavy infantry with crossbow support, right?”

“Naturally.”

“So you have different models for the threats you are preparing for, even if you don’t know specifically what’s coming at you.”

“Ah. Yes. I see. And we don’t know what’s coming at all, so we can’t make reasonable predictions about what we will need.”

“We haven’t even really confirmed that two realms can go to war, though everything indicates that they can. I just don’t know how such a thing happens.”

“Quite.” Othai gently tapped her halberd on the ground. “Candidly, my Lord, I was going to persuade you to invest in a drill yard, archery butts and a cavalry stable, precisely to give us this sort of response flexibility. However, without knowing anything about the type of invasion we may be facing…”

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“It might be premature to build them now.”

“No, the construction must be done as soon as possible. There won’t be time once an invasion has begun. Recruiting an army might be premature.” Othai shook her head.

“Right. Also, I have to wonder about troop training time. How long does it take to get soldiers out the door? Because basic training is…”

I have no idea how long basic training is. I looked over at Othai who smiled. It wasn’t a very nice smile.

“For the most basic units? Two orders.”

“Two orders. To take someone from untrained to, I don’t know, basic archer.”

“Yes, my Lord. Which is quite… funny… given that I remember it taking years to train up competent war archers. There is a reason crossbows are the standard, and muskets are preferred. You can show someone how to use them in an hour or less, and have them competent to use them in formations in a couple of weeks. Or less.”

“That is funny,” I nodded. “So we can basically print as many units as resources allow, up to ten percent of the teeming masses of the Floating Quarter. And, presumably, they don’t need special training for fighting on mountains.”

“No, but they do suffer penalties to movement. And you can invest in specialized training to give them advantages when fighting on mountains or hills.”

I’m just not a fan of RTS games. And yes, there were mobile games that incorporated these kinds of mechanics. I wasn’t very fond of them either. But here we are.

“Alright, coordinate with Sebastian and Carousel, get the training grounds on the build schedule some time in the immediate future. It sounds like food is the big concern at the moment.”

“Yes. Which will require conquering another Relic Site, this time one with adequate farmland.”

I sighed and looked at my potted flower. “I don’t suppose we have wheat seeds anywhere, do we?”

“If we do, I don’t know where it is, My Lord.”

“And we don’t have the water or the climate for rice, I’m assuming. Not that there was any food on Hidden Moon Mountain.”

“As you say, my Lord.”

“Guess I know what I’m spending most of my orders on.”

“Scouting, my Lord?”

“Scouting.”

I beat my brains a while longer, but I really couldn’t think of anything. I had used the nighttime build-hack to lay out as many roads as I could as well as rebuilding my defenses. I even started lining my moat with concrete and stone, just to keep digging units out. I hadn’t got anywhere near full coverage at the moment, but it was a start, and gathering more resources wouldn’t be a problem with the deployable workers from Gradden March.

No, what worried me was the mines. Building mines would absolutely be a separate, order consuming, instruction, and I hadn’t managed to send my workers to do it during the night. In fact, I wasn’t sure I could send them during the night. The sooner I got the mines up and running on Hidden Moon Mountain, the sooner I could start deploying buffed units and trading a high end metal. But the time cost…

I gently rapped my knuckles against my forehead. I was already using one time hack. I was, by any stretch of the imagination, doing well. Kim notwithstanding. Trying to go too fast was how we get Hidden Moon Mountain type problems.

Just thinking about all the loot I missed by bypassing the quests…

NO! No, we are locked in and focused on today! Our most urgent problem was food- scouting and trading were the priorities. Emphasis on scouting. I’d hold one order in reserve.

Did… did my scouts say something about roads extending the scouting range? I couldn’t remember. Ah well.

“Rache, Rikka… if I order you to look for something in particular, will that increase your chances of finding it?”

Rache shook her head helplessly. “Sorry Boss, no can do.”

Rikka likewise shook her head.

I rubbed my forehead. I’d bet Black Robe’s favorite three bones that you could do that, but it was locked behind some kind of VIP tier that cost a massive monthly subscription fee.

“Alright. Scout for four orders worth of time.”

The sun shot across the sky, moving from dawn to late afternoon in what felt like a few minutes. I stood on my balcony, looking west. There was a bit more map to the east, but most of it was westward. I say ‘a bit more-’ distance is almost impossible to measure here but we could be talking about an area the size of Wyoming for all I know. Still. Next time I’d have the scouts focus on that direction.

There probably won’t be anything too game breaking there, but sometimes devs stick nice gear in early areas as a kind of preview. Fallout was great for that, showing off combat armor or freeze weapons when you were barely out of the tutorial zone. Whether you could get them that early in the game was, of course, an entirely different question. Sometimes, you had to use (insert clutched pearls and shocked gasps here) an exploit…

Rache came ripping down the road, motorcycle roaring, the tassels on her biker/cavalry gear fluttering in the wind. There was just a moment, just a fleeting moment, but I got it. I got why she rated as a waifu design.

She was speed and motion. She was the dream of the reckless freedom, the ecstasy of being the fastest. Of being untouchable and joyfully present in the moment. Not alone, though. It was her and her horse. Two spirits moving as one, racing for the horizon.

It was just for a moment, but that lean, rawboned form looked truly beautiful. Just for a moment, I wished I could be out there with her, racing down the long road. No attachments to anything beyond ourselves and the moment.

She was Nausicca on her glider, racing over fields of poison. She was Tetsuo on his motorcycle, racing through the Tokyo streets in a streak of neon light. She was Kiki, glaring up into the sky and willing herself to fly. Because what let someone soar was the courage to face the fall.

It was just for a moment, and then it was gone. All lanky limbs and that death’s head grin floating over a whipcord thin frame. One of my Day One’s, and one hell of a great situational Awakened. And that was more than enough.

I mentally tried to compare her to Kiki, and my brain fritzed. One shouldn’t compare Studio Ghibli to other Japanese animation houses. Especially not anything making any character that could be described as a ‘Waifu.’ Miyazaki would drag his ancient hide out of the studio to personally roast you. I’d worry about him laying hands on me if he wasn’t a committed pacifist.

“Welcome back, Rache. Let’s wait a minute for Rikka to get back.”

“You got it Boss. Nice day for riding the range.” I gave her a double take. I don’t think I heard her say that before.

“I’m glad to hear it. What made it so nice?”

“Boss?” She cocked her head to the side.

I sighed. There just wasn’t much in a One-Star. You would get occasional flashes and glimmers of personality, but… not much.

It took a while longer, but Rikka emerged from Rache’s shadow saying “Rikka has completed her Lord’s mission.”

“Were you mad that Rache got back first?”

“How could this lowly hunter-”

“Got it.” She was mad. Heh. “Alright you two- report. What have you found for me?”

“Rikka has found an excellent timber site- Red Teak Forest. She has also found a fishing platform.”

“What’s a fishing platform?”

“You may stand on the platform and use the provided rod to fish. Depending on what fish you catch, you will earn points from the nearby fisherman. Points may be exchanged for Runed Bones or Treasure.”

Oh, a fishing minigame. Wait- “I have to do it, I can’t order someone?”

“Yes, my Lord.”

Huh. Usually something like that is a limited time thing. Worth investigating promptly. “Anything else?”

“No, my Lord.” Rikka shook her head. She was still in that ninja reporting pose- one knee down, one fist knuckles down on the floor. It was a rock solid look.

I nodded. That was actually a really good haul. Can’t wait to see what happens when I link them with roads.

“Rache? How did you do?”

“Found two new Relic Sites and an Animal Den, boss!”

I shook my head. “Pardon? You found what?”

“Two Relic Sites and an Animal Den, Boss.”

“Two Relic Sites. In four orders.”

“And an Animal Den, yes Boss.”

Was this the blessing of the Goddess? Had the myriad bouncing balls of the great Pachinko landed on the Lucky Doubles for me?

“That’s amazing! Great job! Any idea what’s in them?”

“Well, the Animal Den is this big ‘ole doggy what looks like he could eat a steer and still want a lil’ snack after. As for the Relic Sites, I don’t know, boss, but I did see something a mite interesting.”

“Oh? Say more.”

“The sites are side by side. I reckon they must be connected somehow. Don’t know what that’s about. But I expect it’s something.”