I tried to spot a Toad on the battlefield. It looked toad colored. A sort of yellow/green with bits of brown mixed in. It didn’t start becoming bright yellow until it built up a bellyful of acid to spit. Don’t really know what else to say about it, other than it being a horrifying chimera that directly and irrefutably disproved the existence of a benevolent, interested God.

  “Were they generating an aura of frigid cold? Or was there a particular crackling of electricity around them? Water, maybe? Was it a light blue or a dark blue?”

  “Blue like a clear summer afternoon, My Lord. I didn’t get close enough to feel any changes in temperature. I apologize for my incompetence.” Miyuki kneeled a little lower, somehow.

  “No, no. That’s good. Good to know.” I blew out with a long “hoo” sound. “Good to know. Alright, back to scouting and marking targets. Remember, your safety comes first.”

  “Yes, my lord!”

  Rikka vanished back into the shadows. I wanted to sprawl on my recliner for a minute or five. Actually, that sounded fantastic. My body ached, I could feel the level of comfort that would come from sinking into that plush foam and rich microfiber.

  The screams of the monsters and the piercing whistle of Miyuki’s arrows made it very clear that relaxing would be impossible. Besides, the ache was probably psychosomatic. Must be psychosomatic- I don’t get tired. And I have a battle to run. No more Kims. No more losing people to stupid, lazy mistakes.

  I kept an eye out for blue flashes from the forest. Nothing so far. From the northeast came the sound of falling trees. It must be the armored columns Rikka reported seeing. Guess I’d find out what they do soon enough. “Miyuki- expect to see blue toads soon. Shoot one as soon as it is in your range.”

  “As my Lord commands!”

  It’s irritating- my six stars are all melee focused. Well, alright, obviously not Carousel, but she had a very specific role and couldn’t be shifted around easily. The rest of them were pure melee, which made them bench warmers for the waves at this point.

  I prodded at that thought, admitted to myself that I was exaggerating, then further confessed that my spiteful thinking was out of frustration. What I wouldn’t give for Mrs. Hungry to have an alt-attack that was a long range harpoon gun! I could see it, totally on theme. “Just going to get a little whale for dinner, everyone.” But no, she had meathooks. Which were impressively creepy, and I was now realizing that they had some unadvertised features, but the incredible shortness of their range made me discount them.

  If you can’t kill things on the other side of the moat without putting yourself at risk, you can’t contribute much to the battle. I rubbed my nose in frustration. Even when grumping I couldn’t stop defending my dollies. She did have two excellent healing abilities. Othai and Versai defended the walls impeccably. And Carousel was a beast with both direct damage and an AOE attack.

  My Six-Stars were contributing plenty. I was the one demanding even more of them.

  A yard long arrow of light streaked across the clearing, pinning something I couldn’t make out to the ground. There was a flash of sharp blue light and a freezing ring rushed out. The armored monsters slowed, frost forming over them quickly.

  Not instantly fatal so- My thoughts were cut off when sympathetic explosions of cold burst in sequence behind the first. There were multiple toads in there. The armored monsters were wiped out a few seconds after the first toad got popped.

  “Excellent job, Miyuki! Keep targeting the columns.”

  Two more armored convoys rushed the clearing, and both got the same result. I was grinning, but my eyes kept moving. That little nagging whisper “It’s too easy. You are past the watershed. It’s too easy,” wouldn’t leave.

  Two columns came sweeping in from opposite directions. Miyuki picked off one, and the acid chain reaction was as delightful as always to watch. Less delightful was seeing all the ground the column could cover in the time between snipes. I squinted a bit at it. They were headed towards me, no doubt but they were coming in at an odd angle. Shallow- they seemed to be aimed at an edge of the Tower, not directly at me. Which was an odd choice, because their path led them directly into a puddle of acid left by a previous toad-splosion.

  When they got forty-ish feet from it, the column opened up and the blue toads started spitting at the acid pond. Then they just waited. Miyuki didn’t, she put an arrow straight through two of them and triggered a beauty of a cascade. I kept my eyes on the acid puddle.

  The ice appeared to freeze the acid. I could get that- lots of piping fresh ice stuff hitting the comparatively older acid. But why? Five seconds after the two had mixed, the puddle flashed green and exploded.

  It took me a minute to process what happened. The acid had frozen, but had also catalyzed. My best guess was that the top layer of acid had frozen solid, while the lower layer heated up rapidly. When the pressure got to be too much- boom. Except the boom wasn’t up and out like you might expect, it was directional- towards us. Somehow, some game mechanic way, the direction of the toads spit was preserved in the follow up explosion.

  The shards of frozen acid had a disturbingly long range, nearly reaching our moat from the back third of the clearing. It must be an instinctive thing with them- not so much an aimed effect as an instinct to trigger this attack every time they got within a certain range of an acid puddle.

  Actually, since they were always headed roughly towards the Tower, it is kind of aimed. And the last time we fought the Toads, there was a swamp of shallow acid puddles coating the clearing. We could be barraged by frozen acid sprays from every direction, depending on how we handle this.

  “All artillery- switch from targets in the woods to toads inside the clearing. Try to hit them as soon as they come in. If you don’t have an immediate target available, wait.”

  Downside- more risk to my people. Upside, I could be reasonably confident the toads would be killed outside of their effective range, and if they wanted to waste time launching attacks that could only hurt their side? I was okay with that.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  “Carousel, only target Toads, and hit them as soon as they are in your range. The further out the better.”

  “Yes, my Lord.”

  Armored monsters made an impressive CRUNCH when they fell into our moat. Absolutely no need to waste any extra energy there.

  The Toads had developed a sort of medium range small area of effect attack. They couldn’t aim it particularly well, but it could be freakishly lethal if we didn’t manage it right. Am I mad that they got shrapnel weaponry before me?

  Yes.

  Yes I am.

  But I’m not going to dwell on that. The columns were starting to come in faster than Miyuki could keep up with, but the artillery was doing a good job of keeping them back. Which would last right up until they started overwhelming us from the rear. I shifted Miyuki around and told her to focus exclusively on the back side of the Tower.

  A quick survey of the battlefield showed us in unusually good shape. Right now, the MVP for killing monsters had to go to the monsters. I really wasn’t getting the dense column thing. Were the armored monsters going to throw the toads once they got close enough?

  One interesting thing- the blue toads didn’t leave behind puddles of anything. When they blew up, whatever they were full off seemed to one hundred percent convert into BOOM. So. One less worry.

  “Oh, now that’s an unpleasant thought. What happens if a Toad spits its acid and it splashes on the wall, then a Cold Toad spits its… cold ball… At the same spot? Boom, but would the boom bounce off the stone harmlessly, or would we be looking at real damage?” My instinct was to say “superficial damage,” but until it happened, it was hard to know for sure.

  A load of Fast monsters, a few dozen of them, raced in. They were soundly ignored until they were almost at the moat. At which point they got chewed up by the Mikas. I scratched my head. This wave wasn’t clicking for me. They had introduced a new enemy type and a new mechanic, but it was too haphazard to be devastating. Anyone making it twelve waves in would be, definitionally, well defended. Dug in. Forted up. Now just what would armored columns packed around the explosive Toads do to change that?

  There is always a logic. It might not be a smart choice on the part of the designers, but there was always a logic to the decisions. I just needed to figure out what it was.

  The minutes ticked on, and it was just more of the same. We weren’t racking up an absurd kill-count, just because the convoys were coming one or two at a time, and each one was only escorting six to ten Toads.

  We got scattered showers of basic monsters, and a few dozen fast monsters would come try their luck, but the obvious core of the wave was meant to be this one-two acid/cold toad combo, with their armored convoys. Those convoys were meat, and obvious meat, for any defense with artillery or snipers, and by Day Twelve, if you didn’t have either or both of those things, the RNG gods truly hated you.

  The logic wasn’t there. Even if you ignored the moat and assumed whoever was on defense had much smaller walls, they would still have at least one long range effective. Sniper, artillery, whatever. At LEAST one. So sending the Toads forward in dense blocks would always be the absolute dumbest idea.

  Pretty much the only reason you would do it this way was if you wanted nice, wide bands of acid scattered around, to more-or-less guarantee the Ice Toads would have something to trigger should one of them survive that long. A theory that would make a lot more sense if only the Acid Frogs moved in the dense columns. As it was, it only worked as a spell combination tutorial, or maybe an introduction to the elemental system the character sheets had been teasing.

  I watched another triple row of monsters explode near the tree line. They had barely stuck their misshapen noses out of the woods when Pomoroi skipped a cannonball straight through ‘em. Easy W.

  My God. Could it be that simple? Was this whole round a ‘tutorial’ for dealing with monsters that combined spells and introducing elemental alignments? We had just gotten the Toads for the first time recently. Just after clearing Level Ten, in fact. Now the game opens up and gets more complicated and challenging. Having the new systems emerge through gameplay is some prime game design by the standards of Gacha devs. Bog standard for games designed by humans, but for mobile devs? This was God-Tier game design.

  Alpha Protocol had a tutorial section that was absolutely generic… but the sneaky swine at Obsidian baked in a second, hidden tutorial on how the social interaction system worked and you could game it to get some lore in advance. Hell, you could unlock content that you would completely miss otherwise!

  The Zelda games were all like that- you had new tools and weapons gated behind progression, and you needed them to solve puzzles or beat bosses. Freaking MARIO had it- you had four directional buttons and the A + B buttons. Pretty quick to figure out how to play the game by playing the game.

  Compare that to the “Point at it with a tool tip once then never mention it ever again, assuming you explain it at all, GLHF!” gacha game standard. It’s night and day. Hell, It’s night and antidisestablishmentarianism- two things shouldn’t even be in the same sentence on the basis of incoherence.

  I looked around the throne room for something to kick over. Nothing obviously presented itself. I hesitated, considering picking out a resource pack or something to kick. Unwise. And wasteful. I chose instead to cross my arms and collapse dramatically on the stone railing of the balcony in an immense sulk.

  Could this be related to whatever the hell it was that was turning up tomorrow? The two coins thing? Seems like a hell of a stretch, but who knows. Who knows anything?! Not me, that’s for sure.

  Oh look, FOUR armored columns full of ferocious- and they’re dead. Better luck next time and all that. Have you considered just running in a straight line directly towards me with no attempt at organization whatsoever? It wouldn’t work either, but it would still be an improvement.

  “I want you to know that we all worked really hard on building this fortress. It was an absolute team effort. Every night we all turn up, ready to give one hundred and ten percent to the battle. And I just feel really disrespected. Like you aren’t putting in that kind of effort. Which, sure, is good for me, but why discover the principles of game design now? Why not put that effort into balancing wave rewards, or sorting out the daily log-in system?”

  I raised my hands in supplication.

  “How about an in-game manual? That would be neat. It could be a big white and gold book in the Throne Room. You could do little gold particle effects every time I opened it.”

  The uncaring heavens made no reply. Which, given everything I had seen so far, was probably for the best.

  Oh no, they sent in fifty Fast Monsters ahead of three columns of the toads and the toads are all dead, all dead, yeah and whoops there goes glass arrow picking off one, two, threeeeee and fair play to them they are now in Mika’s range and getting shot to hell. Some of them are learning they can’t clear the jump across the moat. Did any of them live to hit the bottom?

  Carousel and the Mikas casually shot up the bottom of the trench. I had Rakim posted around back, or she would probably have done it already. Just a whole lot of oof.

  I kept an eye out. You never know if they are going to spring something nasty on you at the last minute. But in the end, Rache rode up and reported the all clear.

  “Well. That sure was a thing that happened. Hokay. Assignments. Marci, Judiths, you are on road detail. Please link everything that hasn’t already been linked to.”

  I paused as a thought struck. I hadn’t assigned any of my workers to develop Hidden Moon Mountain because I wanted to keep them for my late night construction jobs. But I was probably thinking about things all wrong. If I could draw some more Judiths or Marcis, it would be a game changer. Our economy would go into overdrive.

  We were still only getting a tiny amount of Purified Moon Forged Mithril out, and what we were getting wasn’t turning into useful products yet. Throw in the timber sites and the quarries… hell, just putting them to work building barracks and the like, or new housing…

  Well. We can but pray to the Goddess and the great Pachinko for their blessings. I gave my workers another look. “Get to it. Time’s a-wasting.”

  We got the road network finished. That was huge. We also, because I am a petty, spiteful man, started lining the bottom of the moat with fist-sized jagged chunks of rock. It was whatever scrap stone we had around, really. We didn’t have nearly enough to cover the whole moat, or even a quarter of it. But we scattered some around here and there, in the hopes that some nasty critter would fall on it and die.

  We also began PROJECT DERP, but more on that anon. Much work to be done on that front. Much work. Confront increasing complexity with increasing simplicity. Embrace the dao, flow like water. Be water, my friend.

  Alright, Bruce Lee might not approve of Project Derp, but mostly because it wasn’t badass enough. A point I would readily concede. I am not personally brave enough to argue with 1958’s Cha-Cha Champion of all Hong Kong.

  He won the Hong Kong Schools Boxing tournament that same year. It’s not goddamn fair. I’m stuck watching the sun rise in my little diorama world, and Bruce Lee was out there living the life of six extraordinary people all at once.

  “Back to Verton, my Lord?” The hidden tension in Othai’s voice wasn’t very hidden. She hadn’t said anything, but hell- Versai and I had cracked that game ages ago.

  And speaking of, it was long past time for my Six Stars to engage in some special training and self reflection.

  “A few things to do first. SIX STARS, GATHER ON ME! Now, I think all of you have seen Versai’s speed hack, but you might not know exactly how it works. So she is going to explain it to you, and then I want you all to see if you can learn it. And if you can’t, I’m hoping you can use it as inspiration for your own special… moves.”

  I smiled up at the sun. “Lots and lots of time. Endless time, in fact. Lets see what we can cook up for our new friends and enemies. I’m sure they are cooking up something for us.”