"My lord, we have accomplished the mission you set us," Jeff said. "There are no more snow men on the plains that we can detect. We swept along the entire frozen line from the beaches at the south of the biome to the beaches in the north, two hundred and fifty kilometers. We are heading back to the portal at the Plains Keeper city now, which will take us another day."

They were planning to run the whole way back, just to recover the portal I'd given them. There must be a better way... I went back through the material I had been studying. There. Flight enchantments, with a notation that they could only efficiently be used for creatures that weighed less than five kilograms.

I created a model of one of my thread portals, two meters high by one meter across, and pulled up its statistics in the simulation to get its weight. One and a half kilograms. Add an extra half a kilogram for the hardware to run it all, and the flight enchantments would easily be able to fly a portal around. It could even get a decent speed from them, being much lighter than the wisps that it was taken from.

"My lord, are you there?" Jeff asked over the still open channel.

"Yes, sorry," I said. "You made me think of a solution to the problem. Good work clearing out the snow men."

"What problem, my lord?" Jeff asked.

I sent him an invitation to join me in the magic testing simulation I'd set up and he appeared next to me, looking around. I reshaped the thread portal model, collapsing it into a single line so that the portal would be closed, and then wrapping it around itself in a spiral to leave a flat circle of thread. Then I began pulling sets of physical parts that created enchantments together, mana absorption, manipulation, control, and flight.

The whole thing was an unprotected mess of what could be considered brain matter, and would need to draw its energy from my Matter Manipulation power. But the good news was that it weighed significantly less than my first estimate, only coming in at fifty grams, and less than one cubic centimeter in volume. I wrapped the whole thing in a protective shell of my construction stone, and then added the masses of micro-portals that would connect to a limited Mind Link to control the whole thing.

Jeff had wandered over to the table that had the whole model of the marksman weapon on it, and had even gone so far as to pick it up and put his finger on the trigger, sighting down the tube.

It was a complete working model, and we were in a simulation that would model everything including pain from injuries. I could see the explosive enchantment had already triggered and was just waiting for the signal from the trigger to cut off. I put up an impenetrable barrier to protect the rest of the tables and then walked through it to approach Jeff, who turned to me.

"This is the weapon that we were being attacked with from such a long range?" Jeff asked. "Jenny has been talking about it a fair amount."

"That's it," I said. "The complete model, exactly as we found it. I've put up a barrier, so you're free to fire off a few rounds. I'm sure this is exactly what Jenny would have done when we found it."

Jeff turned and pointed the tube towards a space that didn't have anything in it, and then held down the trigger. The ice shards exploded out of the tube every half a second with a crack.

Jeff let the trigger back out after ten shots that disintegrated against the barrier around us.

"It's very loud," Jeff said. "Anyone would be able to hear where you were whenever you fired."

"That's the shard breaking the sound barrier as it leaves the tube," I said. "It should be possible to slow it down so that it can be more stealthy. Of course now you come across the problem of picking up an enemy weapon and using it against them, though I think this particular countermeasure was designed to eliminate anyone who tried to study the weapons."

Jeff tilted his head at me and frowned. He kept looking at me for ten seconds, waiting for something to happen, before putting the weapon back on the table and finally letting go of the trigger. The simulation was set to render things in normal time, so all we saw was a momentary flash and then the black death screen.

I resurrected myself, placing my model back in the simulation outside of the barrier. I hadn't set any properties for the tables that I had been using, but from the remains of the one inside the barrier it looked as though it had defaulted to stone. There were small pebble sized pieces left.

Jeff reappeared within the barrier and I banished it so I could hear him, the pebbles that were once the table spilling out into the room.

"What was that?" Jeff asked.

"The weapon self-destructs violently when the trigger is released," I said. "As soon as you touched the trigger it was armed. I thought it would be a good lesson in not playing with unknown artefacts without protection."

I cleared the debris with a thought, and replaced the table and model of the weapon with another, and then began walking back to the table I had set up for the flying portal setup. Jeff followed after me.

"This is what I wanted you to see," I said. "It's a bit thrown together, and I will probably need Chantelle or Maaata to help me hook it all up properly, but it should work as a first prototype."

"Is this one safe to pick up?" Jeff asked.

"It is," I said.

Jeff picked it up and turned it over in his hands. It was a disc one centimeter thick and twenty eight centimeters wide, and on one side had a one centimeter cube in the center of the spiral.

"Is it a weapon?" Jeff asked. "Do you throw it, maybe?"

"It's a thread portal," I said. "Watch."

I didn't have any of the control interfaces set up for it, so I faked it by manipulating the simulation directly. The disc lifted out of Jeff's hand where he was holding it like he was going to throw it and zipped a quick circuit around the room before coming to hover in front of us. I unrolled the spiral into a straight line of thread, and then opened it into a portal. The blue stone that was controlling the mana side of things in the center of the top of the portal frame.

Jeff was looking at it with a thoughtful expression.

"You can come back to the Fortress through the portal, and I will fly the portal wherever its needed," I said. "You won't have to run anywhere."

"Thank you, my lord, I will tell the others," Jeff said. "Stalia in particular will be very grateful. The others were able to work in shifts, but she needed to be out running with whoever was on duty for her foresight to be of any use. She saved us from several ambushes along the way, and it was only due to her that we were able to finish the mission so quickly."

Jeff looked over to the marksman weapon on its table, and then back to the flying portal in front of him.

"Will we be getting new weapons, or will our force be replaced with autonomous flying ones?" Jeff asked.

I thought through all of the different options available to me now that I had access to magic on top of all of my other abilities. Portals, magic, and Matter Manipulation. Jeff waited patiently for the few minutes it took.

"You will all be getting new weapons, though I expect you and the others to design your own," I said. "Use the primer from here to get an idea as to what is possible. Flying ice shard launchers will definitely be on the list of things I make, but it will be members of the Fortress Army that control them. And I expect the Fortress Army to keep the peace within the Fortress as well, you aren't just going to be used against outside forces."

"Yes, my lord," Jeff said. "Thank you."

Jeff bowed to me and disappeared from the simulation and I went back to the portal flight implementation, putting it back into its disc configuration.

The first step would be actually hooking up the micro-portals. Right now they existed in the model, but they didn't link up to anything, so I created a small Mind Link for the other end and linked them all together. And then I linked the virtual Mind Link as an input to my digital platform.

I had to tweak the Mind Link several times, frying the whole thing twice before I got the electrical inputs right. And then it melted down from drawing too much mana without me activating the containment enchantment strongly enough.

Finally I put the whole thing into a training mode where it gave me an indication as to what was going wrong without actually damaging anything. After that my progress improved greatly and I got the hang of the balancing act that was mana absorption.

Mana detection was actually a hard-written detection ward that gave feedback as electrical signals, and being able to control the mana in the environment it only took a few hours of testing before I had the interface perfected for that. Mana manipulation soon followed, being able to see what I was doing simplifying the process greatly. Then the flight controls.

I was modifying the layout and mana flows of the physical design as I was bringing more components into it, making sure it all worked without conflicts. And then it was done.

I took a test flight around the room and immediately came across a problem. The only sensory input the flight system had was the mana sense, and that wasn't enough to fly by. I modified the design to put a presence behind it, which gave sight and sound inputs, and tried again.

I had to fly with the disc facing the way it was flying so that I could see in front, which slowed the top speed it could go, but it worked much better.

I finalised the design and then queued up several to be constructed, having the background process that was in charge of building ping me when it needed my input for the micro-portals.

I switched my focus back to my physical body where it was resting on my bed and enjoyed just laying there waiting for the first flight cube to be done. A few minutes later I got a ping from Shade, followed by a mass of pings and an overload of data flooding me from the common simulation.