Both of my arms were exhausted. I could use their entire energy in a burst over several instants, unleashing a devastating attack, but I could only do it once. I soaked my power into my arms and started to refresh their energy.

I lost all perception of my model of the battle when the pain hit. When the pain stopped I was forced to open my eyes to rebuild my model. Relying on my sound sense was too slow without an existing model to update. Dael was settled back into a defensive stance. A glance downwards to my sword showed that the tip had hit the ground and the hilt was falling forwards within easy reach.

I had spent almost two seconds in refreshing my muscles. Dael could have won the fight in those seconds if he hadn't reacted defensively. This is why I needed to test things, in my simulated fights I had never pushed my muscles to their limit in the first exchange, if I had done it in a fight where the opponent wanted to kill me I would be dead now.

With my perception of time sped up I had the luxury of being able to be distracted by analysing what had happened without any consequences, but I should return to the fight.

Dael would likely submit if he lost his staff, so I would need to test my sword with that rather than his bare hands. I reached down and caught the hilt of my sword, bringing it horizontal to stab at Dael's heart, moving much slower than my maximum speed to conserve energy.

He swung his staff across the front of his body to parry the blade, aiming to redirect it to his left side. I detached the last third of the blade, where Dael was parrying. Dael was redirecting that part of the blade and I continued the strike with my now short-sword. I pulled the force of my strike to touch the blunted end of the blade to Dael's chest.

That would be the end of the fight, I thought, as it would obviously be a killing blow even with the blunted blade if I had continued the strike at full force. Dael obviously didn't think so, as he reversed his staff's swing to parry the blade again.

Right, the fight was to first blood. As the staff made contact with my blade I detached the end portion again, letting it be pushed to the side, leaving me with a dagger.

I half-stepped forward and placed the blunted tip of the dagger in the same place against Dael's chest. The sword had completely proven itself to my expectations, and so long as I wasn't trying to move ridiculously fast I could last longer than just one exchange of blows. Dael was moving his staff to parry for a third time, and this time his staff would also connect with my front leg.

Time to finish it, then. I swung my left hand up at my maximum speed, slicing through the top layers of the skin at Dael's throat. Just deep enough to draw blood. I then reinforced the soil at my feet, leaping back to stand at the edge of the sparring ring, digging a furrow where I landed. My left arm was dead, and my legs were tired. Dael stepped forward to attack, but I raised my hand to stop him.

"It's my victory." I said, returning to normal speed. "Thank you for your help in testing my new weapons."

"We are fighting until first blood." Dael said.

I nodded. "Your throat." I said.

He raised a hand to touch his throat, coming away with a small amount of blood. He'd already stopped bleeding from the cut I'd made.

He stood back in a normal stance, resting his staff on the ground. "How?" He asked. "I didn't see the strike, or whatever you did to my sword-staff."

"I copied the type of muscles that Ian has." I said. "But where he has seventy percent of his muscle mass dedicated to speed, I tweaked mine to be one hundred percent. It has some risks associated with it, but it allows me to strike quickly. And my nails, with reinforcement, are both extremely sharp and durable."

I was refreshing my muscles as I was talking, going slow to keep the pain manageable.

"The entire fight lasted less than ten seconds." Dael said. "I thought you were going to match yourself to my ability?"

"I told you I wanted to test the weapons I'd come up with." I said.

He nodded, looking toward where the two halves of the blade of his sword-staff were buried in the soil.

"That was my favourite weapon." He said. "I didn't want to face you with anything less than my best."

"I'll fix it for you when I get back." I said.

"You're leaving soon, then?" He said. "Could you help us with food before you go? Our first harvest will be done in a week, and we will be self-sufficient from then on. But until then we are eating what we could bring from our old village, and we are almost out. We will survive, but we'll be going hungry."

Chantelle was still fine for the moment. And I couldn't let my people go hungry, I was responsible for their well-being. I sighed.

"Show me to where you are storing your food." I said.

They were using one of the dwellings off of the entrance hall as a storage room, and it was stacked floor to ceiling with wooden boxes. I didn't remember them having any wagons, but I guess there were several types of beast people that would be able to carry large amounts of weight.

Enough food for one hundred people for any amount of time took up a lot of space. It was mostly made up of nuts and dried fruits, with a smaller amount of hard biscuits. Plant-sourced travel rations. I went and got some spare stone from my Pocket Dimension to use as a source material and spent the next hour duplicating the food and boxes to store it in.

I ran out of space in the first storage room and moved out into the entrance hall, box upon box appearing from the stone I was working with. I half expected to have a crowd watching me work, but Dael was keeping people away. I didn't really know what the druids were doing with their time. I would need to do better with that.

"Thank you, my lord." Dael said when I'd finished. "That will easily last us a few weeks. Brutus told me you were interested in learning our language?"

"Yes." I said. "He seems to be in charge of your security, and has taken it upon himself to guard the entrance to the fortress. But he doesn't speak this language very easily."

Dael brought out a book from his coat pocket. "This is a dictionary for the language of the People." He said. "I thought if you could learn a language just by speaking it briefly that you could use a dictionary."

I would have time to decode it while I was running, I guessed. It was worth a few minutes invested. I took the book and quickly flipped through it, committing each page to memory.

"Could you read the first page for me?" I asked Dael. "And then translate it into this language?"

"Of course." He said, and did so.

Given such a starting point I would be able to learn the entire language. Without it there would be no way to convert the symbols to sounds, or the sounds to meaning. I set a subprocess to decoding the language, said my farewells to Dael, and headed to the entrance of the fortress.

Mal'Thorn was in the guard room, waiting to speak with me. I frowned at the potential extra delay.

"Greetings again, Lord C.C." Mal'Thorn said.

"Greetings." I said. "I was just leaving."

"I won't take up much of your time." He said. "I wanted to mention a possibility for the future that we could discuss upon your return. The days are getting shorter, the nights longer, and the winter is getting increasingly worse. There was only an hour of daylight yesterday, and it was heavily overcast."

"My information says that the winter god is trying to end the world." I said.

"I feared it was something like that." He said. "The Forest is suffering. A lot of the trees can survive even these extreme temperatures, but they won't survive an eternal night. They need sunlight. I've seen the fields that you have, the enchanted sunlight isn't something within our powers. And the sunlight needs to come from above the trees or they will grow poorly, which would also be difficult for us. With the scale of your buildings, I was hoping you would consider a solution to save some portion of the Forest. And the Forest Keepers, as winter is now apparently coming for us."

... A fifty meter tall room, with roof access... Mal'Thorn wanted me to build around and over the forest where it was, I guessed. I wouldn't be able to move the trees without damaging them. It would increase the area I needed to defend. Would it be worth the trouble to have the Forest Keepers as my vassals... Having more diversity in my people would be a good thing, but I didn't know what they had to offer. Should I be trying to save as many people as possible from the end of the world? I didn't know.

"This would need to be a longer conversation than I have the time for right now." I said.

"That was my understanding, yes." Mal'Thorn said. "But it is within your abilities, in theory?"

"I can see a way that I could do it." I said. "But, to be blunt, I don't know if it would worth the extra risk I would be exposing myself to."

"You are unquestionably in the position of strength, so it would be to you to offer terms." Mal'Thorn said. "This would also be outside of my authority to negotiate, I was just enquiring as to the possibility. Our Queen would be the one negotiating with you. May I, and my guards, join you in breaking through the winter priests?"

I nodded. Something to think on. But now I needed to go get to Chantelle and her people.