Some of the guards that were passing by the entrance to the alleyway I was standing in were starting to pay attention to me. I turned and casually walked further down. When I got twenty meters in I heard the first steps from plated boot feet coming towards me because I was specifically listening for it over the noise of the foot traffic.

I put my hand in my pocket and drew out the thread Pocket Dimension portal and placed it against a doorway in the nearby wall. I turned off the lights in my Pocket Dimension to make my actions as unsuspicious as possible and reshaped the thread into a doorway one meter wide and two meters tall.

As I stepped through I heard. "Hey you, stop." From a low ranked winter priest with a city guard next to him.

Now in my Pocket Dimension I collapsed the thread portal I'd come through making it form a single line of thread and turned my lights back on. I locked the two edges together by fusing the material of the thread together. I could break the loop and remove the portal but I was hoping the priest and guard would assume I used the door. The thread should be overlooked.

My second thread portal was a ball of thread sitting on the ground in my Pocket Dimension. I pushed my power through it, which was a bit tricky as the Pocket Dimension side of the portal was bouncing my power off of it. After I got a thin stream of my power through to the thread on the other side I was able to follow it around to fill the entire loop.

After that it was simple to expand the loop into a doorway. Which from the side I was looking at opened directly into a dark tile roof. I walked around to the other side and could see the slope of a tile roof opposite and the sky at an angle.

The doorway on this side was vertical, but the world side was at a forty five degree angle. My stomach lurched as I stepped through and my body sense was telling me that down was in two different directions at once.

I was standing in the valley between two peaks of the roof of the keep, to my left twelve meters away there was a ridge rising to another peak, and to my right twenty meters away was a clear area before the roof started up again on the other side.

I collected the thread of the thread portal, collapsing it back into a small form and placing it in my pocket, and headed towards the clear area.

Chantelle was fifty meters away, down and to the side of where I was. My power wouldn't soak into the building, so I would need to find another way in. I did start to make a replacement sword in my Pocket Dimension, but it would take a few minutes to finish. In the worst case scenario I would be able to cut down through the tiles.

I reached the end of the roof and looked over the edge to see a balcony two stories directly below me. An eight meter drop. Higher than I'd deliberately dropped from before, though I ran the calculations and the force from the fall would be a lot less force than the several times I'd ran through ice walls.

I reinforced my body and dropped onto the balcony, which let out a crack of stone. There were two glass doors in wooden frames that led into the building. I pushed hard on them, bending the metal latch that held them closed until it snapped, flying into the room.

I stepped into the room expecting the balcony to fall away behind me. Though after a moment of consideration I realised that if it was going to do that it would have done it when I was pushing hard against it to force the doors open.

The room I was in was a simple small room, two and a half meters wide and long, with a stone floor. It only held a bed, a wardrobe, and a desk with a chair. I felt a little bad about breaking the room owner's doors, as he was obviously only a low ranked priest.

I closed the glass doors and put the chair against them to hold them closed. The wooden door in the wall was locked shut with a simple latch that could be opened with a key from outside but was easily lifted from inside.

I opened the door and stepped out into a carpeted hallway three meters wide and almost ran into a priest in a gold trimmed robe. I snapped my hand up into a fist, intending to hit him in the head and at least knock him out, and maybe kill him.

Thankfully my reaction to shock is to drop my perception of time, and I recognised him as Ryan, the spokesman priest from back at my fortress.

Ryan looked at me in shock. I raised my finger to my lips, indicating that he should be quiet.

"Is your room nearby?" I asked.

He nodded and pointed to a door four doors back from the direction he had been coming in. I gestured for him to lead the way and followed him as he took out a rectangular card. He pressed the card against the door and swung it open. It was the same layout as the room I'd broken in from, he took a seat on the bed and I took the chair, turning it away from the desk.

"You got promoted." I said.

"I survived speaking with you, twice." Ryan said. "And you've been killing a lot of the priests that were higher up. I'm in the top tier now, actually."

I smiled. Maybe he'll get the top job after I'd killed the head priest. There is one thing that would bother me if I didn't ask...

"How did you get here so fast?" I asked.

"I'm not sure how much I should say." Ryan said. "The church has an associate who can teleport, and he was already there and making the trip back."

"Ah, of course." I said. "He tried to kill me not too long ago."

In the awkward silence that followed I noticed that I was being nudged again. I'd isolated the channel that it was being done by on my digital side, and wrote a program that would detect future nudges and alert me. I'm not very happy with the winter priests right now, but I had only ever attacked them after they had attacked me. The outside interference that I was getting was telling me that Ryan was good people and I didn't disagree.

"Well, it looks like you are going to survive a third encounter with me." I said. "But I can't leave you awake to sound the alarm or try to stop me. You can tell whoever needs to know that this all could have been avoided if they hadn't abducted Chantelle and her people."

"I understand." Ryan said. "But I don't think they care."

I stood up from the chair and rapped Ryan on the head, knocking him out. This was becoming a thing. I should ask the druids if they have anything for knocking people out. It would have to be nicer than hitting people in the head, even if I could calculate the force exactly so there wasn't any risk of accidentally killing them. It still had to hurt.

Before leaving Ryan's room I opened his wardrobe looking for a spare robe to borrow as a disguise. I didn't want to get him in trouble by asking for it when he was awake. I would make it up to him at some point, I hoped.

There was a single spare robe hanging in the wardrobe and it had the gold trim of a high ranked priest. I changed into it, moving the pocket portal into its pocket and storing my black robe in my Pocket Dimension.

I exited the room and turned left heading towards the stairs down. There were two lower ranked priests coming up the stairs when I got to them, but they ducked their heads and stood to the side until I'd passed them. They were just teenagers, which made me feel better about the disguise. The other option would have been to kill everyone on my way to Chantelle.

I made it down ten flights of stairs before I was on the same level that she was on, passing priests occasionally. The only time I saw another higher ranking priest I turned down a hallway off the stair landing and waited until he had gone past.

On the floor that Chantelle was on, which I assumed was the ground floor, the hallway that led from the stairs in her direction was narrow and short, a meter and a half wide and ending in a right angled turn after only ten meters. I followed it and just after the turn it branched in two directions, and I took the one closest to Chantelle's direction.

It quickly got dark, so I pulled out my thread portal to my Pocket Dimension to use as a light. I didn't know why they had a maze down here, but after several more turns that was exactly what it felt like this was. It was only after going up a short flight of stairs and then back down again that it occurred to me that I was in servant's passages within the walls of the keep.

The stairs were there to go over a hallway. When I got to fifteen meters away from Chantelle and the hallway I was on branched off in either direction I noticed that there were latches on the wall in front of me at about eye height. Flipping it open I looked through to see the head priest of winter with his hand around Chantelle's throat.