Weeaboo's Unfortunate Isekai: The Necromancer's Gacha

I know what I think Defense in Depth means. I also know that it is a phrase with an actual, official, definition. A definition that I don’t know. I feel like what I am doing is Defense in Depth. On the other hand, as someone who traced an idiot’s IP address just to make sure even their alts got roasted for calling Eden of the East a shojo anime instead of a josei anime, dare I be so casual in my nomenclature?

I mean, a girl’s anime instead of a woman’s anime? Are we animals? Are we mere dumb, insensitive beasts? No! No, we are people who take pride in our obsessions. Using the right words for things separates us from the seething, ignorant maggot swarm that is the uncultured.

Whatever you called it, the monsters started to encounter death way out in the woods. Rache was ripping through the undergrowth, marking the monster bands as they arrived. Initially, it was just Radz firing. I knew that would change soon enough.

For now, my eyes were on Miyuki. I needed to see her range, her stopping power, her rate of fire- all the good stuff. Right now, she was just standing perfectly vertical and still on top of one of the tall posts, longbow in hand.

If I made a repressed groaning noise looking at her, at least nobody heard me.

“Oh God. Oh God. Is he perving on the monsters?”

“I just hope it is the monsters. You know. Someone on his level. Honestly, he shouldn’t even be allowed to, like, look at other people? It could, like, be, like, super bad vibes or whatever?”

I SAID NOBODY HEARD ME!

Why, why did I keep letting those witches pollute my precious throne room? Why?! I kept trying to remind myself that they were the key to a new six-star, that they were likely crazy powerful when they were properly unlocked, that they were, individually and collectively, searingly hot.

Versai was awfully far away right now. And there was nobody looking out the back side of the Tower, right? Nice, big holes in the walls where fancy windows should go. An accident. So tragic that it happened four times in a row.

No! No. I must be strong. Just… think about the six star. Think about all that power, and security, and having someone other than the most excruciatingly beautiful woman in the entire world available to talk to. You can endure this.

Remember that time one of your clients bragged to the chatbot that his Hungarian lingerie model girlfriend was bankrupting him by insisting on cocaine and champagne fueled yachting expeditions with him and her hot model friends through the Adriatic and the Ionian coast of Turkey? And then you checked, and it was all true? Even going to pirate sites to verify that their Only Fans really did provide what the Instagram pictures promised?

Remember how neither the FBI nor the Hellenic Coast Guard were willing to act on your tip, even with all the pictures you sent them? Remember how those Coasties sent you back their own, better pics of themselves with hotter models?! You could endure that, and you can endure this too!

Just… focus on the job at hand. Monster killing. Focus on the monster killing, and your smoking hot new summons who you cannot wait to play dress up with.

Did I have cosmetics unlocked for her? Shameful. I didn’t even check. Truly disgraceful.

“Radz raining death.” Then the almighty BOOM. Oh yes. My little knockoff wehrmacht artillery officer was in her happy place.

“Pomoroi, by Imperial Decree!”

Wait, what? Surely it was far too soon-

My eyes swept through the woods. I could see the long streamers of bright smoke rising. But Pomoroi wasn’t shooting anywhere near the smoke. Monsters were coming in from the edge of the woods.

I knew it would happen. The monsters would come from too many directions, too spread out for Rache to keep track of. Splitting my fire even worse than it already was, and denying me the opportunity to even try ‘Defense in Depth.’

Well. No matter. Because part two of my DiD strat was about to start.

“Miyuki never misses.” Her voice was a cool whisper that managed to reach clean across the battlefield, and into my heart. Also the monster’s hearts. Kagome wished she could drop monsters like my Miyuki.

She pulled back the bowstring, an esoteric geometry of vertical and horizontal lines emerging, fronted by the curved bow. As the bowstring was pulled back, an arrow made of glowing white light came into being. I could see its proud fletching and broad head from the Tower. Her slender fingers loosed, and a monster died. Easy as that.

The yard-long glowing arrow stuck out of the monster’s eye for a few seconds after it penetrated. Like she was sticking a flag in a soon to be colonized bit of dirt. It wasn’t an armored variant, but a promising beginning anyhow. I started counting under my breath.

“Miyuki never misses.” Thirty five seconds after the first monster died, the second monster followed. Another yard long arrow buried in its eye. Even Miyuki’s otaku-bait beauty couldn’t stop my frown.

Thirty five seconds. That put her between Radz and Pomoroy for attack speed. Which was absurd. Those two had a range measureable in kilometers. Miyuki could clearly outrange the Mika’s, but she wasn’t nearly on that level. More importantly, she was a single target attacker. Even though she was one-shotting the monsters, two monsters in a little over a minute made her less efficient than Mika.

So why was she rated Two Stars? Aside from the aesthetics.

“Miyuki never misses.”

Well. I’d figure it out. Right now, Mikuki had plenty of time to thin the line of monsters, because a certain someone was holding up the queue.

Versai looked like she was having a wonderful time. While the leading elements were filtering into the lines of walls, she was dropping into the trenches around them, hacking at their limbs, then hopping out again. She used the Crow’s Nests and the rope bridges to race around the clearing, never staying in contact with the monsters for more than a minute.

Well. ‘Racing’ might be pushing it. ‘Carefully creeping along the rope bridge, holding on to the support rope quite firmly,’ lacked the same energy. The spirit was there. She was using as close to a wall-hack as I could manage.

It was awkward, and a lot slower than I would like, but so long as the monsters kept charging straight for the front door along the path of least resistance, we could control their movement to some extent. We could control, or at least influence, the timing of their attacks. And we could let our most effective melee combatant show her stuff.

Versai dropped in behind a small clump and hacked into them. The narrow channels between the walls didn’t give her much room to maneuver, but it also meant that they couldn’t easily turn around or surround her. A few quick chops to sever legs and feet, a few quick stabs, then she falls back to the nearest rope or cut step in the wall, jumps to the top and from there grabs a rope up to the rope bridge and the crows nests.

In Versai’s case, it meant a lot more time in transit than in combat, but that was fine. It meant she could hurt them and get clear well before they entered into Mika’s range, and let the Artillery concentrate on really distant threats. As for Miyuki-

“Miyuki never misses.”

Miyuki was making it look easy. Monsters were coming out of the forest in twos and threes, so she just stood on a reasonably central pillar and, every thirty five seconds, a monster died.

“Miyuki!” My beloved. “Versai! Let a couple through. Time to test out the Crossbow Squad.”

“Yes, Tower Master!”

“Miyuki hears the whispers in the wind.”

Sniper. Ninja. Waifu. Goddess, thank you. Thank you for looking out for your devoted follower this way.

It took the monsters a delightfully long time to reach the killing field in front of the moat. The switchback path filled most of the clearing in front of the tower, and while the walls were a bit thin and a bit low for my comfort, they worked well enough to keep a few small bands zigzagging.

The woodchip pits were a mixed success. I noticed their hand/feet-things were long enough to let them walk over the wood chips without too much difficulty. It did slow them down some, I think, but my first impression was that the pieces would need to be a whole lot smaller if I expected them to slow down the monsters much. Maybe once they had been pulverized by artillery a few times.

Right now, the biggest help the pits provided was that they were pits. In that they were deep, and the sides were steep enough to slow them down a moment. The plan to use them as kettles and clump the bigger waves into nice, artillery friendly targets still seems viable.

I didn’t activate any of the traps, naturally, but it was interesting to see how the monsters navigated the path they were forced into. I could see them scrabbling at the wall as they went. Not majorly deviating from the path, but definitely testing the boundaries a bit.

Not as dumb as they looked. I sucked in a slow breath. Not as dumb as they looked- they knew a setup when they were jammed into it. They just couldn’t shake loose of their programming any more than the Mikas could. The monsters attacked the Tower and Tower Master directly, moving along the path of least resistance. Even if it meant running through a gauntlet.

Back and forth, back and forth. Until they reached the killing field in front of the Tower. The Mikas used to have a range of around forty yards. Corporal Mika was flexible enough to tell me that the new killing field needed to be a lot larger than that.

The first monster through the path jumped out into the open space in front of the Tower. It’s awful, horned head swung around, the batlike nose tasting the air. Looking for its prey.

And then it died.

Sixty yards out, its head exploded like a pumpkin on the internet. A half dozen glowing white bolts hit almost simultaneously, all hitting the head.

Then the next monster popped out, and died. Then the next. Then the next. Two came at once. Three headshots each meant two dead monsters, no waiting. I looked down on the roof of the pillbox and grinned. I hoped it was a sufficiently nasty grin.

A bigger clump came through this time, five at once. No more insta-kill headshot clusters, but I was seeing a lot of shots still landing in faces and upper chests. The rate of fire was nasty too, having also increased by a third.

Corporal Mika was no joke. My pointy-sticks defense had evolved into as close as I could manage to a machine gun set in an armored hardpoint. The Mikas were no longer my final, only, line of defense- they were the anvil. I looked out at the smoke plumes rising over the forest, and the stream of monsters pouring into my lines.

I couldn’t wait to start hammering.