With the wards down they might be able to get into the fortress another way. I stepped back from the etin general, out of range of his sword.

"Stop him." He commanded.

I was attacked by the etins and yetis behind me that were watching our fight. I wasn't sure I could take my eyes away from the general for as long as it would take to do a full turn, so I kept it to a half turn.

Keeping my sword towards the general, I used my staff to redirect the attacks, glancing over my shoulder to see behind me. Another step back and I had enough space to whip my sword around, killing the three etins behind me, and return it to facing the general.

Stepping onto and past the corpses, I pushed them back towards him. With obstacles now in the way, I started turning in a circle, killing anything that came within reach as I walked back to the entrance. Spiders had run ropes of ice over it to slow me down, but my sword easily cut through them.

It took me some time to remove the grate I had made over the stairs, killing spiders, etins, and yetis the whole time. The general stayed back.

I finally got the grate removed, letting a tumble of ice ropes fall down the stairs. Walking backwards down the stairs while fighting spiders was much easier than fighting three different types of creatures from all directions as I had been doing. I made my way down through the ten meter thick floor only having to fight two spiders at once. Each time I killed one it was immediately replaced by another scrambling over its corpse.

I got to the open space of the first floor and found Chantelle standing at the landing area I put in front of the Pocket Dimension doorway. The doorway itself was in a meter thick stone with an opening three meters wide by three meters tall. The stairway leading down from the entrance was only one and a half meters wide. Much too narrow for the giant etins to fit down, and difficult for the yetis.

"In there." I said to Chantelle, pointing to the Pocket Dimension. "I'll hold the doorway."

She entered, and I took up a position in front of it. Three meters was easily within my reach from the center. My arms were getting tired again, though I wasn't breathing quite as heavily as before.

Spiders continued to come down the stairs, and they continued to die. The only way I could explain it was fanaticism, their god wanted them to attack, and so they continued attacking even though it was pointless. They could only attack me three at a time. Which gave me time to experiment with refreshing myself.

Slowing down the process of changing my cells and the other things in my body, oxygen and fuel, worked better. It still felt like filling my veins with acid, and it lasted a lot longer, but it wasn't a debilitating pain. I could fight and refresh my body at the same time. It took a few minutes, and thirty spiders dying, before I was back in peak condition. It was no longer a battle of attrition on my side, I could continue on indefinitely. I just needed the enemy general to realise it.

The landing of the stairs started to get crowded with corpses, so I stored them inside my Pocket Dimension. Pivot, stab, fill with power, pull the corpse behind me, through the doorway and to the side.

I got to the point that I could fight and hold a conversation at the same time.

"What is the deal with wards?" I asked Chantelle. "If they can just be disabled, what is the point?"

"The wards weren't just disabled." She said, looking out the doorway opposite from the side I was shoving spider corpses. "They were broken. It shouldn't usually be possible, but it's the same thing that happened in my village before the winter priests showed up. The usual way wards are combated is by setting up an inverse ward that interacts with the ward you want to take down, then you supply it with power until the ward fails. Mana used by the inverse ward drains an equivalent amount of mana from the original ward."

"That isn't what happened?" I asked.

"No." She said. "With the size of the mana crystal the wards are linked to, and the amount of mana it generates passively it would be difficult to take down the wards in the typical way. And they would need to build an inverse ward for every ward I put up. What they did is somehow break the threads that made up all of the wards all at once. I don't understand how it was done. And my mother who has been warding for thirty years had never seen anything like it."

While she was speaking wolves and barbegazi started coming up from the stairs leading down into the fortress.

The barbegazi didn't attack me at all. They had mining picks, and some of them, six or so, pushed past the spiders coming down the stairs, headed to the entrance. Six of them stayed behind on the stairs heading up, and started digging away at the walls with their picks. They were carving through my reinforced stone like it was butter. The flow of spiders stopped entirely as the barbegazi blocked the stairs up, but they were replaced by wolves who were just as suicidal.

"I don't want to distract you." Chantelle said. "But could you make me a large mana crystal? The barbegazi are using magic to help them mine, and I should be able to stop that if I could ward."

I thought about it. The wolves weren't pressing me any harder than the spiders were.

"If you have a small mana crystal put it on top of this corpse." I said as I pushed a dead wolf to the middle of the doorway.

She placed her mana crystal on it and I first duplicated it into a second mana crystal of the same size, then duplicated the material of the second one to grow its size. I grew it to a large mana crystal, about four times as large as the small one, and formed it into an orb.

I would have to clear a space out from the doorway into the world for Chantelle to use magic and cast the ward she wanted to do. Which would be a little bit difficult, as yetis had started to make their way up from within the fortress. I worked out an area I could keep clear consistently within my simulation.

"You can stand anywhere here." I said.

Chantelle nodded, then bit her lip. "Could you make a stand for the large mana crystal?" She asked.

I did that, placing it just to the side of the doorway, and she got to work. When I got the chance to look at her it just looked like she was staring intently at the mana crystal, occasionally waving a hand at or over it. I couldn't see the barbegazi on the stairs anymore, thought I could hear them over the racket of battle easily enough.

Etins started making their way carefully down the stairs before she was done, their feet about double the size of the steps. The mining had stopped when she looked up, apparently finished.

"Done." She said. "A recharge ward, and then a reinforcement ward on top of that. The mana crystal will need to be drained before magic will be able to cut through the walls any more, at least in the short range."

I don't know how much it would do, they had obviously already cut the entrance opening large enough to allow etins entry. Spiders had started coming back down the stairs again, rushing to their deaths. Chantelle stepped back through the doorway, and I kept up the killing. A minute later the general came down the stairs. His head almost touched the roof, four and a half meters up. He barked out an order, and the attacks stopped.

A human came down the stairs behind the general, looked at the doorway, the warded mana crystal, then turned to the general and shook his head. He turned back to look at me, looked me up and down, then smiled and left back up the stairs.

"Retreat." The general ordered loudly.

And the various creatures did. The etins and spiders up the stairs, and the wolves and yetis down the other stairs.

I turned to look at Chantelle in confusion. Some guy showed up, and now the attack was over?

"The wards that I set up, the recharge and physical wards, have been broken." She said.

"Can you make a new recharge and detection ward?" I asked her.

"I can." She said. "But it would be better to go to the warding room and use the claim ward, that way I can set it up to detect over your entire land. That is if the claim ward is still working, I could only see when my wards broke."

I could keep her safe if I could direct how she moved. It would be like dancing.

"We can do this safely, but I will have to hold you close with my arm around your waist." I said. "You would move where I moved you."

She wrinkled her nose. "No offence." She said. "But you smell awful."

It was true, it looked as though I had been swimming in blood and spider ichor. I should be able to... I soaked my power into my clothing and everything on me outside of my skin. I could change all of the undesirable... stuff... into oxygen. I did that, and it felt like being scrubbed with steel wool. I guess it had soaked into my skin somewhat. But I now smelled entirely fresh.

I held my hand out to Chantelle and she took it. I wrapped my arm around her, resting my hand on her lower back with her facing me. She wasn't comfortable walking backwards down the stairs, so I went down them backwards, drawing her after me. I kept my sword arm free, but we didn't come across any creatures on our way to the warding room. When we got there we found it completely empty. The only things that remained in the room were the mana crystal pillar and the table.