I stood ready, my staff in my left hand, my sword in my right. The entrance to the fortress, a hole in the floor one meter wide by two meters long, was behind me. That was my goal, defend the entrance until the enemy got tired of fighting or ran out of people to attack. If no one got past the entrance, Chantelle would be safe. And Chantelle being safe was my entire purpose for being in this simulation.

I didn't have any attacks that would work at long range or that could affect an area of the battlefield. So I had designed the battlefield to play to my strengths. Forcing the enemies to come from a single direction hadn't worked, but they still had to come to a single point and in to close range. And my powers and skills made me a close range specialist, being able to react thousands of times faster than anyone coming against me.

I built up an internal simulation of the battlefield. A twenty meter wide area, it only contained the sloping walls of the fortress under my feet, the entrance to the fortress, and half of the flat walkway towards the stairs to the ground raising above the curve. I would be updating the simulation from my senses and fighting from there where I could see everything at once. I stepped down two steps into the entrance, putting the entire hole within reach of my sword.

I started turning in a circle on the step. My sight was my most powerful sense, and I would need to keep turning to keep my simulation as accurate as possible.

Ice spiders were the first enemies to arrive. They formed a circle with me at its center, the nearest spider a little under twenty meters away, just within my simulation. They all started attaching ropes to the walls. I heated the stone to detach them, and the Arachne cast ice spells at the attachment points.

It didn't stop me from detaching the ropes, but it was causing a fog, which was affecting my simulation by lowering my visibility. I pushed heat into the stone within reach of my power. Not enough that it would be a target for ice spells and create more fog, but enough that the stone started heating the air. The heated air rose, pulling in cold air from all around, and taking the fog with it.

As the fog disappeared it revealed the forty ice spiders rushing towards me, and two yetis charging down the walkway carrying clubs of ice. Some of the spiders had to fall back into a second wave as they got closer, and there were more yetis coming behind the first two.

I dropped my perception of time to a bit under half as the first wave reached me. Four spiders and two yeti. They attacked out of sync, the first attack coming from the first spider to arrive. It stabbed forwards with its two forelegs at the end of its charge. I was standing side on to the attack, my sword facing it. I moved my sword through the legs, cutting them off with no resistance. The meter long sharp lengths continued toward me like thrown swords. I turned my sword to nudge them with the flat of the blade so they would just pass me as I turned. I continued the movement of my sword to stab through the center of its head and continued turning.

The next attack to arrive was an enormous ice club. The yeti who swung it was out of reach of my sword. I cut the club in half and stepped out of the way of the severed chunk of ice. Then I had to deal with the body of the spider I'd killed. It was still moving with the force of the charge it was making. I ducked under it and used my staff to push it up, aiming it at a spider approaching from the opposite side.

The first yeti was now within reach. I stabbed it cleanly through the heart, and then stepped slightly to the side, pushing it the rest of the way out of the way of colliding with me and into two spiders on the other side of it.

The charges stopped, and the spiders and yetis approached me more carefully. But anything that came within reach I killed. The corpses being pushed out of the way, sliding off my fortress to fall to the ground. Etins started appearing from the south, the spiders having successfully made a rope ladder outside of my range.

They were twice as tall as I was, and one of the first I saw was a head taller than that. It didn't attack, but set about organising the groups attacking me. I had a respite while it organised. I noticed in a detached way that my body was breathing heavily, almost gasping for air, and I was drenched in blue blood and spider ichor. My sword arm was heavy as well, I could barely lift it.

I hadn't noticed while fighting, I was too busy calculating the vectors of movement required to avoid dying. I soaked my power into my body. Lack of oxygen in the blood, too much carbon dioxide. My muscles were burning all of their fuel, dumping acid and carbon dioxide out. They were also slightly damaged.

Well, I knew something that could fix that. Forming a detailed model of my body in my simulated space, I tweaked it to what it should be in the ideal. Balanced oxygen levels, no acids, repaired muscles. I braced myself for the pain, locking my muscles to avoid falling down, and triggered the change.

The pain was as intense as I was expecting, but I was still able to function. Nowhere near the level of pain that messing with my brain gave, I would place it at about being boiled alive for a week rather than having molten lava poured into the brain for years.

When I was done only a few seconds had passed, and I was ready to fight again. I was still turning in a circle, keeping an eye on the things around me. The etin General looked like he was organising a rush, a wave of spiders backed by a wave of yetis with a few etins thrown in.

"Something is attacking the wards from the west wall at ground level." Chantelle yelled up the stairs. "They're holding fine."

Good. They would have to come through me to get Chantelle, and that wasn't working out so well for them so far.

The attack started up again, the spiders dying quickly and the yetis following them. They were trying something new this time, instead of pushing past the corpses of the ones who had come before them, they were pushing them forward to crowd me. The next wave of yetis piled the corpses higher. They couldn't fight me, so they were trying to bury me.

I focused on soaking my power into the stone beneath us, thinking that I could reform it to increase the slope to push the corpses off. I would rather not make a gap in the stone to do it, so I reached for a source I could duplicate the stone from. My power could affect the corpses.

I briefly tried pushing my power into a spider as it tried to decapitate me. Still an invisible wall keeping my power out. I killed it, and suddenly my power flooded through it. Living things were immune to my Matter Manipulation power, but dead things were just empty collections of matter.

I soaked my power into all of the corpses around me and pushed them against each other and the stone, forcing them off of my fortress. There were still hundreds of enemies, but I was back to killing them with ease.

It was the general that was the problem. He was standing back and planning ways to use his forces to defeat me. He didn't seem to care about losses, as he was sending waves of spiders and yetis to try to overwhelm me and they were falling by the dozens. I had to stand here and defend the entrance, if I tried to go to the general a spider could easily get through to Chantelle. So I just needed to block the entrance.

The waves of enemies were a constant distraction, forcing me to move perfectly to tangle their attacks and find openings to kill each in turn. But I slowly built up a stone grate over the stairs below me. Made of the same reinforced material as the walls of my fortress, and anchored into them, I made the bars thick enough that it would take the enemy several minutes to break through.

And then the battle shifted. For the first time since the battle started I left the step I was on, stepping up and into the enemy. I was still turning in circles, but I had turned from a blender of death anchored to one place into a whirlwind of death moving over the field of battle. Step by step, I made my way to the general.

The general cleared out an area around himself as I approached. Most of the reason that I was able to fight ten enemies at once was that I could redirect their attacks to interfere with each other. I hadn't faced an opponent one on one yet, and the general looked competent. He held two swords as tall as I was, and nearly as wide, and was settled in a ready stance.

"Come, Champion." He said. "May you find me a worthy opponent."

He was waiting for me to attack first. I had to get well within his range before he came within range of my sword. My first swing was deflected by one of his swords. I moved my sword to block his other sword that was swinging down at me. My sword sheared entirely through his, and I had to step to the side to avoid it.

He threw the hilt of the sword away, and faced me with his remaining sword. Every attack I threw at him he deflected. But he couldn't get past my sword either. My body simply couldn't move fast enough to make my sword hit him. After several minutes of back and forth I felt a spike of concern from Chantelle.

"The wards have fallen." I heard her shout up the stairs.