The warding room was completely cleared. They even took the stands I had made for the mana crystals to rest on. I looked to Chantelle, this being her area.

"Did they take anything important?" I asked.

"Just small mana crystals." She said. "We had enough warning that I packed everything into my backpack. I only need my clan's warding book and mana crystals to rebuild the wards. They couldn't even take the mana crystal pillar you made, it's about a quarter full, if they'd damaged it it could have exploded and flooded the room with mana."

"They took the claim ward." I said. "Is that going to be a problem?"

"It was the same ward as I have in my warding book." Chantelle said. "The claim is specific to the area, I will just need to set the ward to the same size. There wasn't anything unique or identifying in the ward that the Forest Keepers gave you."

"We could really use the detection ward being back up." I said. "I don't want to leave you by yourself if there could still be enemies around. I want to fix the holes in the fortress before they come back for another try."

"Okay." Chantelle said. "After the fortress is repaired we will go and rescue the people from my village, yes? Your preparations are obviously complete, you just fought off an army single-handedly."

"My personal preparations are at the point that we could attempt it." I said. "There are some unknowns, I don't know what sort of defences a god would have set up. But I will have to come up against them to know how to work around them, and I'm confident I can figure something out. I want to increase the defences of the fortress before we go, though. Strong thick walls aren't good enough protection if the wards that would stop magic from carving through them don't work. The fortress isn't strong enough to withstand what the god of winter is throwing at us now, let alone what he will do to get the people of your village back after we take them from him."

She nodded reluctantly. "We will rescue them soon, though?" She asked.

"Yes." I said. "My first priority is your safety. Once I can guarantee that, I will go and get your people back from the Fortress of the Gods."

Chantelle nodded again, and set about setting up the wards. Which to outward appearances involved a lot of staring. I soaked my power into the mana crystal pillar and tried to detect any changes in it while she worked. Nothing was happening, at any scale, that I could detect.

"Could you make me some small mana crystals?" She asked once she was done staring at the mana crystal pillar.

She passed me her original small mana crystal and I got to work making small mana crystal orbs, pulling the material for them from the walls of the room. It gave me something to do, so I made a dozen small orbs, a dozen medium orbs, and one large orb. I made a shelf along the wall opposite the door at chest height to hold them, forming small raised cups for them to sit in so they couldn't roll off.

I was contemplating replacing the top of the table entirely as a mana crystal and forming pockets inside it that mana crystals with wards attached to them could sit. If breaking large mana crystals was avoided by everyone, it seemed like a good way to defend smaller mana crystals.

I was about to start transforming the table when Chantelle must have gotten the detection ward working. A deep tolling, as though a large bell was being hit, started rolling out from the mana crystal she was working on and a hologram appeared over the table.

Chantelle stopped the tolling and we both looked at the table. On the tracking half of the table the last of the winter army was leaving the area covered by the ward. The other half of the table showed a shrinking list of contacts. When the last of the winter army had left there were still three contacts showing. Some of the snow worms had stayed. They were spread out equally apart, one hundred and twenty degrees around the outside of the circle of the detection area. I hadn't had to fight any snow worms in the battle, so I guessed they were there to do something if we left the fortress.

With it confirmed that there were no enemies in or around the fortress I left Chantelle to her warding and went to look at the hole that was left in my fortress. Outside ground level was two floors down from the warding room floor, and Chantelle had said the wards were being attacked from the west during the battle so I headed that way first.

There was no light away from the stairway in the center of the fortress. I pushed heat into the edge of my sword's blade until it started to glow. I would need to figure out how to create a light source better than melting my sword at some point.

I made my way west and came across the tunnel through my walls about where I expected it. It was four meters high by three meters wide and went straight through the ten meters of wall. The snow outside was thin and trampled, the edge of the forest coming right up to my walls.

It was a simple matter to fix the hole, the rubble that remained from the tunnelling was strewn about just outside. I soaked my power into it and rolled and pushed it back inside, fusing it to reform the walls perfectly. I started from the inside out, and ended up standing outside my walls on the western side of the fortress when I finished.

I headed south around my fortress, away from the stairs up, to check on the rest of the walls. There were corpses of spiders, yetis, and etins around the base of the wall where they had fallen from the battle at the peak, and as I made my way around the fortress I converted their remains into a rich soil.

I made a full circuit of the walls, and then headed back to the stairs at the north, climbing them to the entrance. I brought up a model of the fortress and modified it. I put a pyramid on top of the sphere, cutting the top off of it to give a ten meter by ten meter platform at the top. I extended the stairs outside up to the platform, and the stairs inside up through the pyramid.

Adding doors that opened upwards from the stairs, I only made them thirty centimeters thick, so a strong person could open them from within. Loops in the stone on the inside allowed a bar to lock the doors shut. With the doors shut the top of the platform was a flat expanse of stone. A perfect place for me to fight if I needed to.

It took me some time to build it out and repair the damage done to the original entrance. I tried converting air into stone, but it ended up being faster to go down the outside stairs and bring dirt back up. The platform ended up being ten meters above the peak of the sphere, and I had to adjust the slope of the stairs to match the new height.

"The new entrance is outside of the wards." Chantelle said when I went back into the warding room.

"That's fine." I said. "It's mostly there so that I can have a place where I can fight where I can reach everything with my power. How are the wards coming along?"

"They're coming along well." She said. "I set up a series of cascading wards, if the first set fails or is broken then the next set in the series waits ten seconds and then activates. I set up four sets of the wards, claim, detection, recharge, and physical. I had to use medium mana crystals for the recharge, I ran out of small ones. It would be helpful to have stands for them all."

"I had another idea." I said.

I converted the top of the table, half a meter thick stone, into a single mana crystal. I made sixteen pockets in the top.

"People won't break mana crystals, because they explode, so we can store the warded mana crystals inside a bigger mana crystal." I said.

She placed the warded mana crystals in the pockets and I covered them over.

"That seems to be working." She said. "I can still access the wards through the table. How are you modifying the stone with my physical ward on it?"

Huh. I didn't think I could manipulate anything with a spell on it, or anything living other than myself. I sank my power into the stone of the room, and there was some initial resistance now that I was paying attention to it. It was like it resisted for a moment, and then recognised me and let me in.

I pushed my power into Chantelle and it was the same thing, although the recognition only lessened the resistance and it increased the deeper I got. I could completely fill her with my power, but it was like pushing against a strong current.

"I'm not sure why." I said. "But I can use my power directly on you, and the things you have spells or wards on."

Chantelle bit her lip, and I felt a flutter of desire from her.

"You can fill me with your power now?" She asked. Then shook her head and pushed her desire down. "The fortress is upgraded now, we should rescue my people."

"There are some more things I want to do." I said.

Razor sharp studs on the outer walls, pressurised cavities in the walls that would explode if they were mined into.

"And we don't know where the Fortress of the Gods is." I continued.

Chantelle opened her mouth to argue, but the detection ward's alarm went off. We had visitors.