One must never simp in games or life. The pay-pig is a figure of profound contempt, one of the few universal exceptions to the ban on kink shaming. And yet. For some reason. For some absolutely disgusting, universally reviled reason, people think it’s okay to spend money on gacha games. Gacha games were invented in Japan. A place where whales are hunted and eaten. Something to think about. Wisdom keeps chasing these people, but somehow, despite all the blubber, they are faster.

Me? I don’t run for a goddamn thing. Which is why I decided that, since I was playing with the game’s money, there was no real shame in relying on the cash shop to pass this wave. One must not be rigid in one’s thinking, after all.

Not like I had any IRL currency at the moment anyway.

Plumes of smoke rose in the forest. I smiled unkindly at them. I have three artillery, and while two of them have much shorter range, it was still more than a kilometer. I had no real way to know how many monsters we were killing out in the forest, but given how many we were slaughtering with each shot when they finally reached our clearing, it wasn’t a small number. Free kills- essentially no risk to my people. At least until they deployed units fast enough to keep up with the scouts.

Focus focus. Keep burning them down out in the woods. Those smoke plumes were now spread out over an oppressively wide angle. Ninety degrees? More? Don’t know, but assuming the monsters were traveling in a near-straight line through the woods towards my front door, a lot of them would be hitting the clearing from the sides. The old track model wouldn’t hold up anymore. Not unless I could really seal off the whole area with high, unclimbable, unsmashable walls.

I smiled. Kindly. I can’t look unkind all the time. I’m sure it was a kind smile. Welcome to the minefield, monsters. We have all kinds of things waiting for you.

Now, was I stacking the battlefield to funnel them straight down the middle? You bet. My much abused hedgehogs were much more densely clustered on either side of the clearing. Things could get in from the sides, if they really wanted, but it would be much, much easier to navigate all the pits, trenches and barricades in the middle. At least, I hoped it would look that way.

“Miyuki sees the snake hidden in the grass!” There was a heavy twang next to me, and a baboon was pinned to a tree on the edge of the clearing. I shot a glance back out towards the woods. The smoke plumes were still a good distance out.

The nasty things were trying to bait us to focus on the war in the trees. They were switching up the timing and coming at us from the sides. Yeah, I’m really not loving the improved AI here.

“Miyuki sees the snake hidden in the grass!” Another THUNK. I know perfectly well she isn’t getting all of them. Her rate of fire is less than two shots a minute. Now, since she is posted up on the right hand side of the wall, and she’s shooting to the right-

“Rakim! Eyes left! Keep the left side of the wall clear!” Rakim, unfortunately, couldn’t spot Murder Baboons until they were practically on top of her- less than ten meters. Maybe more like six. Which, given that she was shooting a rifle, is horrible. On the other hand, since I had few summons that could see the Murder Baboons at all, I’d take it.

“Carousel, by any chance can you see the stealth units?”

“Not really, My Lord. I can see them once they are damaged or struck by the Final Revel.”

Damn. Well that doesn’t help me at all. “Glass Arrow at will.”

“Yes, My Lord.”

Sebastian said she was in the Mage Corps for twenty years, but she only knows two spells? That can’t be right, surely. It sounds like a soldier who only knows “Stab” and “Chop” but not “Quick March” or “Block.” Was that actually how Gradden March operated, or was this more developer shenanigans at work? And why the Hell did she need the Blue Roses to support her when she cast Final Revel?

Miyuki nailed baboons as the artillery made its thunderous welcome. None of the big fellas had reached the clearing yet, but that fire was creeping closer and closer. I saw motion on the left, looked over, and started smiling. We had our first trap victim.

I had a look at the baboon thrashing around in the little pit trap Rikka had made. The trap wasn’t very big, but what it lacked in size, it made up for in pointy wooden stakes. Carousel made the monster’s head lose a big chunk with a seemingly casual wave of her staff. One down.

The traps didn’t have to kill the enemy. They just had to make the enemy visible. Baboons were a one-to-two bolt problem for the Mikas. Less for Rakim if she has time to aim properly. And if they caught a full sized monster, armored or otherwise? Then we would have a monster with a limp. And a slow target meant more time to get shots on them.

Slow them down, shoot them up. The eternal truth.

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There was a small explosion off on the left. Seems one of the baboons landed poorly in the pit. A howling scream came from the woods ahead of me. Trees were smashed to the side, knocked down, clawed apart. The armored monsters were here.

My attention narrowed, and my vision tunneled in on the incoming band of monsters. There were six coming in from the woods. Heavy with bone armor, they didn’t move as frantically as their unarmored variants. They galloped on their too-human hands and feet, their slower speed letting them maneuver more easily around the scattered barricades.

“They are staying clumped up,” I murmured. “Good to know. Is it a pack thing, or are they all sharing the same pathfinding?” I couldn’t think of an easy way to check that, and for the moment, I didn’t really care.

“Steelheart Pomoroy, take out that clump!”

“By Imperial Decree!”

It took a few seconds, but I had timed it pretty well. The monsters came charging through a gap in the barricades and were met with a cannonball made of light going the other way. Results- two dead, two badly injured, two untouched. I frowned.

“The gaps in the fences are too big. But we are running out of wood. Never thought I would say that, but we are.” There was a limit to the range my workers could harvest in, and each battle saw my hedgehogs, my spiky wooden barricades, getting damaged. We were in the middle of an insanely vast forest, and we were running out of wood.

It might have to be more walls and trenches, but I was getting a real headache about how to slow the monster’s advance while still being able to shoot them. There was no point in digging trenches if they just gave the monsters cover from my long range fire. I never thought having more artillery and a sniper would be a headache, but here we are.

The two untouched armored monsters kept scrambling forward, leaving the wounded behind. A dozen more were coming out of the forest already, and I could see the trees shaking behind them. The main body of the wave was on us now.

“Pomoroy, Radz, change to targets within the clearing. Prioritize the largest groups, don’t shoot at a group with less than four monsters in it!”

“Contact Left!” Rakim barked. Her rifle snapped a few shots off, but I couldn’t see at what. Must be Murder Baboons right on top of her, then. If they weren’t climbing the wall yet, they were in the dry moat.

Time to pick up the pace on the slaughter. For once, I would pay to win.

“Activate the Mutilator 3K!”

All along the base of the Rampart, entry priced gnomish weaponry came on line. They cost two thousand Runed Bones a piece, but they could kill Murder Baboons just fine.

I’m sure there is a perfectly wholesome reason the Gnomes chose to violate the Geneva conventions by developing lazer tripwire activated buzz saw launchers. I can’t imagine what it was, but at the moment, I was prepared to ignore their unseemly motives in favor of Murder Baboon slaughter.

There was a ripping chain of explosions going off in my moat. Looks like some of the explosive variety were clumped together, and when one went, they took a bunch of their friends with them. What a pity. What a goddamn shame.

They were really pouring out of the trees now, coming by the score. My scattered barricades and pits were having the intended effect of slowing them down and clumping them up, but it didn’t force them into a single narrow path. Rakim and Rikka’s traps were taking their toll. Legs were breaking, paws were being pierced, and on one memorable occasion, a small incendiary went off, coating five unarmored monsters in sticky flames. Those monsters then ran into other monsters and the barricades, creating absolute chaos until Radz dropped a mortar on them.

It was a grind. We were grinding them down. The gnomish horrors were keeping the Murder Baboons off our backs, literally, and the constant pits, traps and ditches were causing occasional wounds. A broken finger doesn’t sound like much, but when you are a four hundred pound monster running on his hands, it’s a real hindrance. The few that made it to the moat were handily mopped up by the Mikas.

It was all going quite well. I didn’t even have to order Carousel to start the Final Revel. Yep. Nice easy win.

“ON YOUR TOES PEOPLE, SOMETHING EXTRA NASTY IS COMING!” I searched the woods frantically, trying to spot the awful thing the Devs were doubtless cooking up.

*DING* SPECIAL CHALLENGE- KILL THE MONSTER ALPHA.

Wait, the same alpha? That… couldn’t be right, surely. We still had his head up over the door, applying a fear debuff on the monsters. Hell, I reckon it’s a good piece of why the pits are so effective- they want to go slow.

I still wasn’t seeing anything too unexpected in the woods. No big swaying of trees, no sphincter clenching bellows of pure hate. What wasn’t I seeing? I blinked, rethought that thought, and felt my blood freeze solid.

“RIKKA, MIYUKI, FIND AND KILL THE MURDER BABOON ALPHA! CAROUSEL! FINAL REVEL RIGHT GODDAMN NOW! VERSAI, PROTECT CAROUSEL!”

I had temporarily abandoned the forward Bastion. The idea of forcing the monsters to spin around Carousel while they got mowed down by my direct damage summons was appealing, but after what happened to Kim? No way. The Bastion was just too isolated.

Carousel was on the Rampart with her Blue Roses and a lot of support. Rakim was up there covering one flank, Miyuki had the other, and the Mikas were holding down the middle. And patrolling along the length of it was Versai. Ready to quite literally jump in where needed.

She was needed.

“VERMIN!” Versai roared as she leapt over the crenelations and smashed into something below. Her glowing shield seemed to pull her forward, smashing into… something. Something a hell of a lot bigger than a baboon.

There was something in that shield strike, some hidden force that slapped the monstrous thing down hard. Versai landed on the thickly furred back, her sudden presence breaking up the camouflage. She whirled her blade over her head and stabbed down. Then again. She was shuffling, I noticed. A tiny step forward with each new stab. Versai quickly sped up past what my eyes could follow.

You ever imagine a fifteen foot tall monkey being cut in half by a bandsaw operated by a stunningly beautiful woman? No? I salute your mental health. I wish I hadn’t seen it. But I did.

Well. Not all the way in half. Kind of like opening a book or something. The baboon was screaming in pain, the nerves flaring before the brain could really process the damage. I know that’s what happened, because it tried to roll over and crush Versai. Its ribs were sawed off the spine at the top and it just… rolled over…

Never thought I’d order a mercy killing for a monster, but Miyuki burying an arrow in that thing’s ear absolutely was. Versai… well. I’d need to talk to her. Guess I’ll find out if the game will let me.

The rest of the wave got handled tidily. Well, no, that’s a lie, it got handled like baboons being fed into automated gnomish circular saw launchers. It was anything but tidy. It was preschoolers getting into the glitter bin at the glue factory levels of mess. Torn apart bodies were stacked one on top of the other, entrails festooned on broken legs and twisted neck. But there were no more surprises.

Carousel with Final Revel up and running is a menace. The cooldown is uncomfortably long, but for mopping up mid to late wave heavy clusters? It’s fantastic. Watching the monsters slowly shuffling slowly through the path of the saw blades was horrific, but oddly vindicating. Like somehow, all the pain and horror we suffered in Gradden March was worth it.

“Reporting to the Lord, the only monsters that remain are prisoners.” Rikka was doing the one knee kneel with a single fist pressed against the ground and the other fist against her hip as she reported. I firmly controlled the high pitched whine of pleasure that tried to escape. A ten-out-of-ten classic pose for a ninja. This wasn’t the moment. I nodded and accepted her report.

“Marci! Take your building team out. It’s going to be a long night.”