The training wheels were officially off- ranged units were now in play. We now had stealthy, explosive stealthy, thrown stealthy, speedy, basic, armored basic, armored throwing basic, armored heavy, and now acid spitting toads. Which, from the sound of things, looked like toads. That would be a change from the design language used by the monsters so far. I’d be interested to see what the enemy came up with.

  Yes, interested. Not afraid. Because these acid spitting uggos blew up into puddles of acid when killed. Judging by the flashes of light in the forest where the mortars landed- big explosions.

  And most of my field obstacles were already beaten down to little nubs of raised earth and shallow pits. Not a lot of cover, but a lot of things that can be filled with acid.

  Sometimes life is just so beautiful, you know?

  The artillery went silent as the monsters closed in. Rikka was still marking targets in the forest, but I wanted to wait. The clearing was now pretty huge. Not a mile across huge, but big enough that even a speedy monster took some time to cross it. Between that, the moat, and the walls? We had time to see what the first batch of monsters looked like. They didn’t keep us waiting long.

  “Carousel… am I seeing… What the Hell am I seeing.”

  “I don’t know, my lord. Hell seems like a good guess to me.”

  The toads hopped into the clearing. I could understand why Rache called them toads. They had no visible necks, mouths that stretched across half their head, wide fat eyes that bulged out and to the side. Their hind legs were massively developed, with much smaller little legs. They moved like frogs and toads. They did.

  But they had human hands where toad feet should be. Their face was inhuman, amphibian, but there were echoes of humanity there. Some alertness in the bulging eyes said that they knew more than they could express. Their distorted faces twisted with pain as they started sucking in and bulging out their throats. A vomit yellow ball glowed from inside their translucent skin. They generated the acid inside themselves. It looked like it hurt.

  When they hopped closer, the ball inside of them jiggled. I could see their eyes narrow and their cheeks twitched. It hurt them to move like that. But they did it anyway.

  “Miyuki, as soon as one of the toads is in range, put an arrow through that glowing yellow ball inside of it.”

  The arrow was off the bowstring before my brain processed “As my Lord commands.” The results were excellent. She pinned the toad in place, but we barely got the start of a whistle from it when the ugly thing exploded. Yellow acid blew out in a rough circle around the toad, coating the two toads nearest to it. They immediately started corroding, the acid burning holes through their leathery skin. It took about a minute of them thrashing in agony, but they too exploded.

  None of the other toads had stuck around to check up on them, so the chain reaction stopped there. Still. Very promising.

  “All units, fire at will. Miyuki, if you can string a few together without killing them, do so. Otherwise, just shoot when there are several near each other. Carousel, only use Glass Arrow until instructed otherwise. Let's see what kind of range our new enemies are working with.”

  The toads came swarming in, and… didn’t achieve much, really. They didn’t make it remotely near our walls. They moved in clusters, and one cannonball or mortar blast would set off a chain reaction that would see a dozen dead. Miyuke never really pinned more than one or two- they were so fragile, their thrashing killed them in seconds. Then there was another explosion.

  “This is dumb.”

  “Tower Master?” Versai looked up at me.

  “Not what we are doing- how the toads are being sent in. Artillery! When you have cleared the targets in the clearing, start aiming for the ones marked in the forest.”

  I thought about it for a minute, then shook my head.

  “It would make more sense if they were paired with, say, the armored monsters, my Lord.” Othai suggested, and I agreed.

  “Yeah, something to close into melee, or to distract fire away from them. Must be a fairly short range on the toads. At least, they haven't started spitting at us yet. Something closer to Mika’s range than Miyuki. Hell, they are inside of Glass Arrow range, which I’d classify as mid-range. Still no spitting.”

  I thought about it. “Everyone- let one of the toads approach the moat. We want to see what its range is.”

  I got a chorus of barks back. I don’t know how they decided on which toad was the ‘lucky’ one. Maybe they just picked whichever was the closest. The artillery started working the back of the clearing, meaning it was only Carousel and Miyuki getting shots off. Then Rakim joined the mix, her carbine barking steadily. It was one of the contradictions of the game- Rakim’s gun wasn’t nearly as effective as it should be.

  I’m not a gun guy. I know she’s using a carbine, because that’s what the costume card described it as. I do know that a basic semi-auto rifle can dump out thirty rounds in less than a minute. Magazine and/or reloading speed permitting, which it generally does. One of those little facts you pick up living in a country where ‘active shooter’ drills are considered a regrettable necessity. Another tidbit is that while a lot of urban combat takes place at tens of feet, the effective range of most rifles is a few hundred yards. Exactly how many, I don’t know. Far enough away that I might not see the person who shot me even if I was looking in their direction.

  And yet here was poor Rakkim, firing a round once every few seconds and at ranges that put her between “medieval crossbow” and “actual wizard.” It didn’t seem fair. If you are going to give her a modern rifle, why not let it be a rifle? Let her drop… wait…

  “Hey Rakkim, if you are taking your time to aim and resting on something, can you shoot further or more accurately than when you are standing up?”

  “No Sir.”

  “Really?”

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  I swear I heard her sigh. “Really, Sir.”

  Damn. Well so much for that. The lucky toad was in Mika’s range now, speaking of crossbows.

  “Alright everyone, duck behind cover when it’s about to spit, then wait. I want to find out its range and how fast it can fire!”

  The toad hopped into a pit about ten yards from the edge of the moat. It was using cover. Can’t say I’m happy about that. From my angle, I could see the glowing yellow inside of it suddenly blaze into a shocking luminescence.

  “Everybody DOWN!”

  A thick jet of acid spat from the toad’s mouth. As thick around as my arm, and stretching more than five feet long, it burned like sulfur in the dark. It had aimed at the Mikas, which made sense inasmuch as you had a bunch of targets clustered together. On the other hand, I personally wouldn’t shoot at a wall of pavise shields behind thick stone and earth crenelations.

  That’s just me though. Contrary to what I was told, verbally and in writing, by a representative sample of my classmates, I am not a mutant toad.

  The acid hissed as it hit the wall. It hissed as it hit the shields too, that thick spray splashing and spreading where it hit. The acid looked like a tight jet, but I should think of it like an area of effect attack. Important to know.

  “Corporal Mika, report! Are you damaged?”

  “No damage, Tower Master. The shields are holding up. I am concerned that the acid is spreading towards our feet, though.”

  “Fall back and reset somewhere away from the acid.”

  “Yes, Tower Master!”

  I didn’t look over at the Mikas. Corporal Mika had them well in hand. My eyes were laser focused on the pale white belly of the toad. There was a sudden explosion of yellow light from my left. I looked over and saw Rakkim ventilating a trio of toads that had come up behind our ‘lucky winner.’ No other units in the clearing, though there was a veritable forest fire of smoke markers coming up from the forest.

  The toad was slowly expanding, its belly and throat glowing brighter and brighter, swelling as the ball of acid got bigger and bigger.

  “Miyuki, hold your fire. The instant before that toad is about to spit acid, kill it.”

  “Yes, my Lord!”

  The belly swelled and grew, hitting peak brilliance roughly forty five seconds after the first round of acid. Miyuki gave it an arrow in the head as an appreciation of its efforts. The results were beautiful. The walls of the pit it was hiding in channeled the acid burst straight up, creating a brilliant pillar of yellow light thirty feet tall. Then it slowly fell down again, filling the pit.

  “ORDERS. Unless no other option presents itself, no one is to engage the toads with melee weapons. Retreat if at all possible.”

  The chorus of replies sounded unusually fervent.

  “All ranged Awakened, fire at will. Artillery, prioritize targets at your extreme range and work inwards.”

  No sense in letting them get any closer than we had to. That thought hung out for a moment all on its lonesome before I slapped my head and hurriedly added- “All ranged Awakened- if you see the Toads moving with other units, always prioritize the toads. Kill them first.”

  I had a happy moment imagining the Murder Baboons screaming as acid rain fell on them. No amount of camouflage would be able to protect them from the spray. Ah, happy, happy thoughts.

  Othai was wrong. They didn’t try to use Armored Monsters to soak up our fire- the next batch of attackers was a storm of Fast Monsters. They came from every direction, pouring out of the woods. In a moment I was returned to my nightmare. The billions of army ants sweeping through the jungle, coming to eat me alive. In my nightmare, I could only run. Here, though?

  “LET THEM COME! Carousel, wait until they fall in the moat then use Final Revel. Start working your way around the perimeter until you have them all cleaned out. Mikas, go all out! Miyuki, I want to see lots and lots of monsters nailed together. Melee, STAY ON THE WALL! Nobody, and I do mean nobody gets into melee until we know exactly what we are up against.”

  It was an awful sight. The sheer number of the beasts made me think of water rushing up a beach. The monster’s flowing gait helped sell the illusion that what was coming wasn’t something a human could confront. It was a natural disaster. As inescapable as the comet coming for the dinosaurs.

  My awakened poked little holes in the wave. Like a child beating back the tide by kicking their feet. Making a momentary splash and achieving nothing. I had a lot of confidence in my moat, but the Fast Monsters could sometimes survive that fall, and they dug. We had started lining the moat walls with stone, but that would only slow them down.

  I forced myself to breathe. “Slow them down and shoot them up” has been my motto from day one. This was exactly that. No need to get all panicky. The monsters poured into my moat from every direction. Some melted in the leftover acid puddles from the exploded toads, but even in death they helped the horde. The dead monsters’ comrades ran over the bridge their corpses made.

  The Mikas opened up with their Ult, the white shield tower rising as their bolts chewed up the monsters. For a moment there was a gap in the oncoming tide. Miyuki was doing her bit, skewering two or three of the smaller beasts at a time to make barricades of terror, forcing the monsters to clump together and become easy targets for artillery.

  It was an utter slaughter, and it wasn’t enough. The leading edges of the hoard hit the moat at a dead sprint, lept forward, and fell to the bottom. The first to come were the first to die. Even if they survived the fall, they couldn’t survive the rain of monsters that fell on top of them. Soon the monsters were surviving in greater numbers, the bodies below cushioning their fall. They started spreading out, moving closer to the base of my wall. Leaving more room for the rest.

  Carousel had been waiting for them. The Blue Roses knew all about timing, and they nailed it. Carousel dropped the swirling gasoline slick magic into the moat, and watched the monsters go insane.

  There was no other word for it. Insane. The monsters started shuffling around in circles, and when there wasn’t enough room, they pressed into each other, tried to climb over each other. If they bumped into an unaffected monster, they attacked. Sometimes they attacked each other for seemingly no reason. All the while new Fast Monsters fell into the zone of the spell.

  And the longer they were in the spell, the more necrotizing wounds opened up on, and in, their bodies. They shuffled, danced and howled themselves to death.

  I could see the ragged edge of the Fast Monster horde now. It was easy to spot- it was marked by a change over to hopping Toads.

  My smile was quite wholesome. I’m sure it was wholesome. Definitely not sinister, or mocking, or cruel. Wholesome.

  The toads were ‘charging’ in, and immediately getting packed together as they avoided the screaming Fast Monsters left skewered by Miyuki’s whistling arrows. And once a nice clump of them were gathered together, another yard long arrow raced out across the clearing, making one-two-three toads go pop-pop-pop.

  It was like watching the most morbid game of tetris imaginable as row after row exploded in mini-geysers of acid, coating the row behind it. It seemed too banal to call it a chain reaction. I kept thinking of nuclear fission, the atoms dividing, impacting other nuclei, then triggering another division. All ending in a big BOOM and a messy cleanup.

  And then the next wave of toads came hopping in, mixing in with ordinary monsters and, at long last, a few squads of armored monsters. It was already a comically huge wave in terms of absolute numbers, and they just kept coming. I checked on Carousel. She was steadily making her way around the wall, but it was like bailing out a leaking boat. No matter how many she slaughtered, more came to die. I shook my head. The numbers should be dropping off sharply now.

  I hesitated for a moment, wondering if I should turn Versai loose to blenderize the mob below. I quickly dismissed the idea. She had always been vulnerable to getting jumped by a mass of monsters, and particularly getting jumped from behind. This was not the right battlefield for her. Mrs. Hungry and Othai were out for the same reasons.

  Patience. Just be patient. They would all die soon enough. No reason to be stupid and make an unforced error.

  We reached the end of the fast monster wave. They had filled the bottom of my moat edge to edge, and up nearly six feet. Which was… terrifying, given the width of my moat. There must be thousands of them. Tens of thousands. This was clearly balanced… ‘balanced…” for someone with multiple Six Star Awakened and serious defenses. There was simply no other explanation.

  I tried to imagine what a field battle against a force like this would look like, and the only word I could think of was “extermination.” It would be a one-sided slaughter. The Toads would break up your formations with sprays of acid, then the fast monsters would flood the gaps, breaking the formations up even more and bringing down the soldiers with sheer numbers. Your only hope would be field fortifications and the equivalent of several machine gun nests.

  Maybe for our five machine gun nests. The big fifty-cal Ma Deuce, with plenty of replacement barrels and operators who knew how to do the change-over fast. Maybe that… I don’t remember what it’s called. The machine gun that shoots grenades and gets mounted on Humvees. That would be great too.

  Even flamethrowers wouldn’t cut it. You couldn’t kill them fast enough. They would just charge up, on fire, and now your troops had flaming monsters in the middle of them, speeding up the collapse.

  I could tell my mind was skittering away from what I was seeing. The numbers were just too huge, too unreal. I was winning, but it was horrifying. How many monsters were there? How were they coming here? Were portals opening up in the woods? Was the underside of this demi-plane a festering hell of quick breeding monsters?

  Carousel and the Blue Roses had made a complete circuit of the wall at this point, but they didn’t stop. Carousel understood the assignment perfectly. And she was right, too. Every time Final Revel was cast, more monsters died. It would be horrible trying to clear out the moat later. I wasn’t going to bother trying to save any corpses for our industrial base either. I just wanted them all gone.