Patrick spent the next whole day redoing the walls.

  He had the Casters pad the inside of all the walls with vines, then made a second wall behind that. The result was that when the Pine soldiers got thrown at the walls, the secondary walls were still standing, which protected all of the people hiding behind the walls.

  When they finally went back in to fight, each person who couldn’t use had someone assigned to them who could. When the Pine Soldiers got thrown, everyone was back behind the second wall, and then they were able to go back out without having anyone injured.

  They’d spent the next two days clearing their side, and then they waited for Rae’s team to finish 28J the next day. Instead of trying 29E that afternoon, they waited until the morning.

  Penelope checked the clock in her menu.

  Even with all the delays, they were still on track to finish way before the timer. There were 19 squares left, so if they only did one a day, they would still finish with almost two days left to prepare for the Dungeon to break.

  I still don’t like that idea. Penelope dug her fingers into the soft grass on the other side of the barrier. She usually stood with her hand through the barrier so that her orbital network would be able to cover them from the get-go. This morning, Patrick had been called away for a moment, which left Penelope with the choice of either taking her hand out of the barrier and letting the wink out or staying there. She’d chosen to sit on the ground.

  “What was wrong?” Circe stood up as Patrick jogged back towards them.

  “King tried making pipes out of stone and busted one of the water tanks, then the fool decided to try to irrigate the water out of the building he’d just flooded and collapsed half the building!” The older man growled. “I swear, sometimes I think that boy has more enthusiasm than he does sense.”

  “He really is accident prone.” Jeru laughed. “But he’s a pretty good kid.”

  So it’s not intentional? Penelope hoped.

  “A few of the loopers thought he might be intentionally sabotaging things, but I can definitively say that he is the most accident prone and unluckiest person I’ve ever met.” Jeru sighed. “And what he lacks in good luck, he makes up for in enthusiasm. Which usually leads to some pretty bad messes when he tries to clean up what he just broke.”

  Gotcha. Penelope took a deep breath. It’s just one more thing to keep an eye on.

  “Nah, he’s a good kid and if someone dies because something he tries explodes, you can always just reset.”

  He’s accidentally killed people?

  “Usually just himself.” Jeru chuckled as he shook his head. “Which is why we concluded that he’s just that unlucky.”

  That’s a whole different category than unlucky.

  “Yeah, Lo said that King could’ve filled an entire book of Darwin Awards by himself.” Jeru chuckled.

  Of course someone told you about those. Penelope stood up so she’d be ready once Patrick walked through the barrier.

  The older man stopped and looked over Penelope. “You good?”

  “Yes, sir.” Penelope wasn’t sure why she was suddenly so formal. When Frederica spiraled, Patrick had taken over as the main leader and he’d settled into the role more and more the deeper they’d gone into this floor. It shouldn’t have mattered, but there was an edge in his voice that felt like he was checking in on her in more of an official fashion, like someone else asked him to check on her.

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  “There’s no exploders in this one.” Patrick gave her a thumbs up, then pulled out his sword. “It’s going to be fine.”

  I hope so. Penelope grimaced. After the chaos that had been the last column, she would welcome an easy array of monsters.

  Patrick grunted, then walked into the square. He hefted his shield as he walked into the tower that he’d built. There were extra supports in place to keep it from collapsing completely if the monsters had some way of severely damaging it that they hadn’t thought of yet.

  Penelope walked through after him and the moment Circe and Riva were through, she touched both of them and the three of them on top of the tower.

  “Belze’s INCOMING!” Circe pointed at the flying bugs. Her face contorted in confusion. “And the apples?”

  Penelope focused on the flying Tanks. Their Recovery stat was too high for her to kill them with a single barrage, so she had to focus on two at a time. But at 24 mana just to take out a single Tank, she didn’t have enough to take out all the flying bugs at once.

  They weren’t the only pink-furred monsters in the column, which was confusing to see on a man-sized creature that looked like a fuzzy ant. The Belze’s fibrous wings changed colors as they flapped at the speed of a hummingbird, leaving a psychedelic afterimage as they flew towards the roof.

  The Demon Apples were only three feet tall, but they had bat wings and their mouths split their bodies in half as they chomped while flying behind the Tanks. To see the Healers move into the front lines so soon was concerning, but there wasn’t time for Penelope to wonder what the monsters were trying to do.

  The ground rumbled as the Speed and Power monsters charged the opening in the tower where Patrick stood guard. The Demon Rhinos were the Speed monsters. The massive red creatures had three horns on their noses and a pair of horns coming out of their foreheads. They were almost seven feet tall at the shoulder, dwarfing the rhinos that she’d seen in the zoo back home. They also moved with a speed that would have made a cheetah jealous.

  The Power monsters looked like a four-foot-tall walnut with arms and legs. Like the Demon Apples, the Hard Nut’s bodies split in half as their mouths opened, letting tongues that were far too long spill out over a row of very large and very sharp teeth.

  Behind them, the Demon Gaters lumbered. The other pink-furred creature in the column, the massive Magic monsters stood as tall as a wolf but was as long as a bus. Green energy built in the massive maws of the horned reptiles that looked like perversions of the alligators form back on Earth.

  Penelope let herself look at the ground assault for a moment before turning back to the aerial one. If the Tanks took the top of the tower, then the people down below would get attacked from the air while they were trying to move up from the ground. Or it was possible that the monsters might have a way to bring down the tower from the roof.

  What they needed was to be able to hold out until the others got there. So Penelope switched from offense to crowd control.

  Two of her spat out , taking out the lead Belze. Once it fell, Penelope activated , the spell she had because of her sandals. Each black chain wrapped around the body of one of the Belze and pulled it higher into the sky, leaving nothing between the Demon Apples and Circe’s arrows.

  “I’ve got you!” Riva pointed her hand at the suspended Tanks and threw out a wave of . The insect monsters stopped trying to break the chains; instead, the closely gathered swarm pulled the tethers tight, trying to flee from the origin point of the

  SKREE!

  The Demon Apples dipped in the air, twisting as they tried to flee. Circe’s arrows bit into their backs, dropping five of them before they were able to get out of her range.

  The tower shook as the Demon Rhinos slammed into it. With the occupied holding the Tanks, there wasn’t anything Penelope could do but watch as the monsters slammed into the wall again.

  “We’re here!” Stephan onto the roof with Whitney.

  The blonde Archer pointed her bow at the ground and fired an arrow at the monsters. She turned back to the group. “Their hide is too thick! I’m not going to do any damage!”

  Stephan pointed at the chained insects in the sky. “Can you drop those in front of Pat?”

  “Sure?” Penelope didn’t bother to question why. With a thought, the pulled all of the Belzes down to the ground.

  The Demon Rhinos halted their next charge as they turned to avoid trampling the Tanks. Some of them got very close, though, and that was when Stephan let out his stream of fire.

  The nice thing about was that it did damage to everything it hit. So when the monsters were gathered together in a tight cluster like this, Stephan could kill way more monsters than Penelope while using a fraction of the mana.

  “You got em!” Circe pumped her fist in the air.

  Stephan grinned as he turned to Penelope. “I was wondering if that would work.” He motioned at the monster backing away from the tower. “Think you can draw those onto the pyre?”

  “Yep.” The fire spell had destroyed her , so Penelope recast and sent it after the retreating monsters. She lashed eight more with and dragged them into a tight group where Stephan could hit them with a spell.

  This column looked like it was going to be easy after all.

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