I locked up. I couldn’t process what I was seeing. I knew I had to take charge, start giving orders, but I just… couldn’t. Kim. Kim got torn apart and blown up. A bunch of other people up on the Bastion got hurt too, but I couldn’t process that right now. Kim. Was dead. Before the thought could completely run through my head, I heard a distinct sound, shattering glass and an almost metallic crack, as a vision forced its way into my head.

It was Kim, surrounded by rising, almost liquid darkness. I was looking straight down on her. She looked desperately to either side as the darkness surged up around her. In the last fragmented second, she looked up at me and strained her pale white hand towards me. Then the darkness covered the terror on her face, and she was gone.

I didn’t see anything. Didn’t hear anything. Not for a little while. Couldn’t even think. Death animation. They gave the Awakened Souls a death animation.

I was useless for a minute or two, but my summons were not. Carousel rushed over to the side of the Bastion and started firing down with her Glass Arrow spell. Miyuki had a slower rate of fire, but could pin two or more at once, if the angle was good. Rakim could only see the murder baboons at horribly close range, but she still ran around the edges of the Bastion, shooting at anything that dared to get close.

They held it together long enough for Maria to heal herself, then heal everyone else. They held, killing the monsters as Kim’s body dissolved in a spray of golden sparks.

I don’t know what it was that nudged me back into action. Something slid into place. I knew I had to stop them from dying. Me. I had to save them. Nobody else could. My summons could only follow their last order. If I wanted them to live, I had to be the one who leads them out. Grieve later. Fight now.

“Rache, Rikka, fall back! Rache, pick off Murder Baboons, but don’t let yourself get slowed down and avoid the explosions! Rikka, back to the Bastion. Only kill murder baboons! Beware the explosions!”

I stood on my balcony, the magic carrying my voice to my summons no matter how far they were. I could feel my grip sealing like ice around the scepter. Improves efficiency. Come on then! Kill faster! Faster!

What else? Versai had turned into a one-woman roadblock inside the snaking murder track, and my dead-inside mortar woman was making full use of the opportunity. Radz was dropping mortars on alarmingly large clumps of monsters.

My Pomorois were clearing out the area around the Bastion. They aimed quite low, which I didn’t understand until I saw that heavy white light rolling along the ground. They were firing round shot cannon balls, even if they were made of light. They were targeting the murder baboons the detectors were revealing, but by aiming low, the rolling balls took out a lot of critters they couldn’t see. What wasn’t killed, was crippled. I didn’t order them to do that. Was it some memory of the battlefield? They had shown flashes of that before.

The Mika’s were exactly where they were supposed to be- holding down the middle of the Redoubt and holding the line against anything that slipped past the fire net in and around the Bastion. Right now, it wasn’t a ton, and Corporal Mika had her squad, and the situation, under control.

Then armored monsters smashed through the breach opened on our flank by the murder baboons, and things were once again no longer under control.

“Carousel! Use Final Revel as soon as possible! Radz, focus fire on the breach with the armored monsters coming through it! Versai, keep falling back towards the Bastion.”

We had built around using Kim’s new AOE lure and Carousel’s Final Revel combo. Without Kim pulling the monsters towards the Bastion, the monsters were able to work more intelligently. And with each wave, the monsters had already been doing just that. No, I did not like this one bit.

The armored monsters were doing their usual bullet-sponge best, eating bolt after bolt. The upgrades meant my Mikas were getting through the armor eventually, but it was slow going. Which meant more of them were surviving long enough to make it near the Redoubt. The Mikas picked up their pace.

The white bolts smashed down on the armored horrors. Rather than spreading out the damage, Corporal Mika decided to burn them down one at a time. Her technique was impressively nasty- she had her privates fire as a volley, aiming at the head or shoulder of a monster. One volley was enough to shatter the armor, but not necessarily enough to kill the monster. So a half second later, she fired her own bolt, finishing the beast.

A neat little one-two combo. It worked, but the pause in between volleys meant that the monsters were closing fast. There just wasn’t anything stopping them except the moat. It was bleakly funny watching them charge off the edge and see their little hand-like feet churn in the air for a moment. The first few monsters landed with a thud. A moment later, they started screaming.

What the Hell? We didn’t put spikes in there, or traps or anything. What just happened?

The armored monsters were writhing on the bottom of the moat. Some with broken limbs, others with broken backs and necks. The bone armor! Of course it would weigh a lot. They aren’t as heavy as the Wallbreakers, but they are still heavy.

They couldn’t hold up under the weight. Their own armor crushed them.

“Mikas! Let the armored ones fall into the moat, then kill them when they are wounded!”

The situation around the Bastion was shifting. The surviving Awakened had finally run out of murder baboons to kill. That’s always a good thing. Now they were turning around and firing backwards into the Armored monsters. The crossfire was doing a lovely job at chopping the monsters up a bit before they fell in the pit.

Rikka and Rache made their way back. Rache was easy to spot, racing around and putting the finishing, decapitating, touch on the wounded she raced past. Rikka entered the scene by jumping on the back of a limping monster and stabbing it in the throat a dozen times in less than five seconds. The diamond shaped kunai slipped right between the bone plates protecting the fragile veins.

Rikka appeared, and a monster died. Then she slipped back into camouflage again and vanished from the field. It felt fitting. Was there some way to team her up with Miyuki? To stack their abilities? It would make sense if characters from the same place had complementary abilities. Well. I think it would make sense. Who knows if the devs agree?

Kim just died. Kim just died, and I immediately started thinking about building sets and finding combos. Kim had been part of a band, Call to Arms. There’s a Banner special drawing opportunity if I ever saw one. “Guaranteed Five Star Park in the first thirty pulls!”

I could feel myself slipping again, trying to leave the reality of the situation. Dissociating. For some reason, I thought of Shinji hiding under the blankets and listening to his music on repeat. I leaned on the railing of the balcony, forcing myself to see and understand the battlefield.

Versai was slowly falling back towards me, but of everyone on the battlefield, I was worried about her the least. That speed hack was brutal. From up here, I could see limbs flying off like they were getting airline miles on the company dime.

The situation around the Bastion looked like it was coming under control. Carousel cast Final Revel, and mercy be, no murder baboons popped up. Looks like they had been cleared out, at least for now. There was something very satisfying about watching the monsters stumble around in a haze, slowly dying. I could relate, and for once, understanding did not breed sympathy.

My scouts were doing their thing, my Mika’s were doing their thing, my artillery was doing their thing. Absent another change, we would win this battle. I made some small adjustments, made sure to keep a couple monsters alive, and watched the slaughter grind to the end.

I stood on the Bastion, right at the spot where Kim died. There was no body left. Versai said that was normal. You had a few long moments, or minutes if you were really unlucky, of horror and brutality, then you just… shattered into light. She had seen it thousands of times. Maybe tens of thousands of times. I got the impression she really didn’t know.

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“I don’t have a good way to measure time, but there was one Tower Master who filled the stairs with logs and hid out in the Throne Room. I was the last one on my feet, and the monsters kept me alive until they were able to claw their way to him.” She looked sick, but shook it off. “That’s why I like Maria so much. She’s kind of a crappy medic, but her suicide pill is unique, as far as I know.”

She looked like it was the most normal thing in the world. Kim, the most upbeat, can-do team player out of all my summons just died, and Versai was acting like it didn’t matter. Like she had just found out she missed a good cover band playing at a bar she didn’t really like.

I hated Versai a little bit for that. I hated myself more for not being able to do the same.

“How did they get up here?” I asked.

“The explosions were enough to crack the cement. Turns out those little baboon fingers don’t need much of a gap to latch on to.” Carousel said, her voice soft. She hadn’t known Kim, really, but Madame had always been good at reading people. It must have carried over to Carousel.

I found myself fixating on little bits of Carousel’s appearance. Not her new body, but her clothes. Up close, the dress had a few spots where the color was subtly different. An old stain, maybe, or someone had carefully re-dyed a spot. There was a cluster of small blue roses as a decoration on her hat band. I had thought they might be magically preserved flowers or something, but they were paper. Not even silk. Paper. And her shoes looked nice and that tall heel sure did wonders for her, but I have seen cheap costume pumps at enough conventions to spot them in the wild.

The Devs had obliterated so much of whoever she had been. So much, but not everything. They left the mark of her sacrifices. One of the richest women in the city gave up everything she had in the entire world to fight monsters and give her people a chance at life. Every single thing she had earned over a long life, burned in a single night of defiance.

The Devs had done the same for Kim. That one empty sleeve drawing an invisible line under a bright smile and ‘fun’ pinkish red hair.

Was this world meant to be some kind of Valhalla for victims of the multiversal war on the Monsters? A chance for the greatest warriors to constantly fight and improve their skills? I didn’t believe it. If it was, why wipe the memories of those below six stars?

“Versai? Did you say that there were buildings and improvements we can make in Gradden March that we can use for defending the Tower?”

“Yes, eventually. I don’t know how, though.”

“I do.” Carousel smiled. “They tend to be far down the building tree. We need to build buildings and gather resources in order to build the buildings and gather the resources we need to, and so on. But we can do it. Unfortunately, a lot of those resources cannot be made in Gradden March. We don’t have iron mines, for one thing. Nor Mithril.”

“Realm War.”

“Yep.” Versai nodded. “Sometimes you just gotta go and take someone’s stuff. Way of the world.”

“Sometimes we try trade!” I said, hearing the brittle brightness of my voice.

“Sure. Trade with who? So far, the only merchants I know of outside this tower are those fairies selling berries.” Versai rolled her shoulders. “Scouts are going to be busy for a while, I’d guess.”

“Yeah.” I nodded. I looked down the side of the Bastion. The explosions had ripped up the cement around the base, exposing the rammed earth underneath. Cracks stretched over a lot of the rest. I wouldn’t have thought most of them were big enough to fit a finger in. Seems I was wrong.

“Hey, Tower Master?”

“Yes, Versai?” I kept my tone very level. I heard myself do it. Very even.

“You know she isn’t really dead, right? Or no more dead than she was before you summoned her. Look- you have five Mikas and four Judiths. If you summon Kim again, she will be exactly like the first time you summoned her. Exactly like that.”

How can I explain what I’m feeling when even I don’t know what I’m feeling?

“I know. But I don’t know it.” I tapped my chest. “I promised myself I would get all of you out. All of you. And now someone died. Except they didn’t. Except they did. And it was Kim.”

“Kim’s good people.” Versai nodded. “Always so cheerful and easy to be around. Definitely not a shirker in a fight either.”

“Yeah. Yeah.” And how much of that was her personality being carefully pruned back, leaving a carefully engineered kawaii waifu for fans to obsess over? Was the real Kim an absolute nightmare for her assistant? Did she even have an assistant?

I have heard awful things about K-Pop groups and idol groups in Japan. Maybe she was the one who was brutalized- that permanent smile begging the world not to hit her in the face.

She already spent so much time in makeup. And she didn’t dare be late for her performance.

Some things were real. She really did defend the guests at that concert, I’d bet. She really did wear that costume again and again in public. She didn’t hide from her wound, or try to hide it from the world. Didn’t even get a prosthetic. They weren’t her trauma, they were proof of her service. Proof that the show goes on. She served her country in the Army. She kept right on serving them when she went into civilian life.

Yeah. Brainwashed, mentally mutilated, trapped in a death game, and Kim was still good people.

“Versai? I don’t care.”

“Pardon, Tower Master?”

“I. Don’t. Care. I don’t care that she wasn’t ‘real’ in some sense. Or that a brand new version of her will pop out of the summoning pool one of these days. This Kim is the only one I know. It will be a new Kim, someone I don’t know, the next time. The Kim I know died. And I didn’t know her very well, and I’m the one who put her where she was when she got killed and I’m the one who made the plan that got her killed!”

And I desperately wish it was anyone else responsible. I can’t breathe, and I feel my lungs being crushed. I don’t bleed, and I hear my blood hammering in my ears. Kim was dead. Kim was dead, and I’m the one who killed her!

“Oh. It’s hitting you now. More than it was, I mean.” Versai half smiled.

“What is?”

“Command. It’s all on you now. Even the stuff that shouldn’t be, like enemy action.”

Or the Devs, and their evil ways.

“Yeah.”

“Highest I ever rose in the ranks was a squad leader in the Queen’s Own Lifeguards. After that, I made the transfer to bodyguard. I didn’t want to be a squad leader. The squad leader before me got gutted, then I got told that was my job now.”

I nodded. Versai had always made a point of not doing anything that remotely looked, sounded or smelled like exercising leadership.

“To even apply for the Bodyguard job, you have to fast for a month then undergo numerous battles while starved and hallucinating from the sacred mushrooms. One of those test-of-character things. I broke most of my bones doing it. And even with two broken legs and six broken ribs, I thought, “Beats running a squad.”

OKAY! That’s a bit-

“Once, I had my guts torn open and the instructor forced me to drink some water. I could see my belly swell as it filled, then the water and bile leaked out through the holes and started burning my intestines and bare skin. Then he healed me up with a couple of potions, and we got back on the twenty mile ruck through the swamp. No regrets. Not one single regret.”

What? No, really, what? Why? Why was she telling me this? Why did they do all this? It can’t possibly be the best way to select recruits for anything but medical trials.

“The sheer, animal satisfaction of not having to organize a latrine every single day-”

“And I’m done. Versai, did you know your country is incredibly cursed? Like, even before the monsters?”

She looked down her perfect nose at me. “You do know that I earned a Third Order Discipline from my initiation, right? Most soldiers never even get a sniff of a First Order Discipline. There are- well there were, a load of crapsack countries out there where you would have to marry into nobility to get a Discipline, and a Third Tier discipline might be reserved for royalty.”

I did not, in fact, know any of that. Also, she was nobility, so why cop an attitude? What I did know was that Kim was dead, and she wouldn’t have died with more troops to protect her, and a more robust set of fortifications to stand behind.

It was time to use the building exploit. With double the builders and a big pile of resources, I could do a hell of a lot better than this. Of course, the amount of resources was limited too. Barbed wire might have saved Kim’s life, and I’m pretty sure we still don’t have any.

“Hey Carousel, can we export resources from the Sky Realm to the Tower?”

“Eventually, yes. It requires a great deal of development, but we can. Why?”

It started clicking together. Farm construction resources in the Sky Realm, build up the Tower, strengthen my summons and use them as the backbone of my conquests in the Sky Realm battlefields as the territory provided the grunts. Slaughtering the monsters around the Tower. Slaughtering… hopefully still the monsters up in the Sky Realm. Around and around and around. Washing blood away with blood. Until that day when I died or the Devs did.

“My Lord?”

“Just thinking, Carousel. Just thinking.” And wishing I could cry.