It felt good to be in a proper bed, made better by the beautiful woman with me. With an attack potentially coming at any time though, I wanted to get started on building a proper fortification. Reluctantly I left Chantelle sleeping peacefully in the bed and headed upstairs to the clearing. It was dark outside, and I'd completely lost track of when the sun would be up. Lighting the lamps on the roof of my building gave me enough light to see the clearing.

It was covered in snow over my head while I was standing on the platform around my building. Which would make it around four meters of snow over the whole area. I could melt it all and then turn the water to steam, which is how I'd done it in the past. But I had new methods available to me now.

I sank my power into the snow, expanding it as far as I could. I found the limitation for passively having my power through a substance was limited by how much I could focus on, so I wrote a quick program that helped. I pushed my power back into the snow, covering all of the snow in the clearing.

Learning from my experience with playing with atoms, I created a virtual model of what my power was doing, this time scaling it down instead of up.

I tried moving the snow at the edge of the clearing forty meters away, and nothing happened. It felt as though my power was bleeding off no matter how much energy I pumped into it. Moving ten meters closer in I tried again, and again nothing happened. At twenty meters away from me the snow twitched slightly. It seemed energy loss over distance was a percentage of the energy I was trying to use, so there was a hard limit of one hundred percent loss at twenty meters away.

The next program I wrote was to convert the frozen water into oxygen. I set it to converting the snow around me, and was immediately disappointed. Even after I increased the amount of processing it could use, the fastest it could go would take it weeks to clear the whole clearing of snow. It wouldn't even keep up with the rate that new snow was falling.

I still didn't want to melt and evaporate the snow into fog... What I wanted was more air and less snow. I soaked my power into the air and snow right in front of me, the air being difficult to hold my power in, and duplicated the air with the snow as its source material.

It took a lot of energy, but the snow quickly disappeared. Another program, and I could clear the snow to the ground from all around me to the edge of my range of twenty meters in minutes. Changing the shape of the area I was clearing to make a path in front of me roughly a meter wide I started walking forwards. I went from a walk to a jog to a sprint, and was able to keep a clear path in front of me the whole time.

I couldn't see where I was going, but I could see where I was on the model of the clearing I had made. I dropped back to a jog and did laps around the clearing until I had cleared out all of the snow. There was some tiredness from so heavily using my Matter Manipulation power, generating large amounts of energy and using that energy to remove the snow, but it was bearable.

My model of the clearing was now accurate down to the surface layer of dirt, so I went back inside out of the falling snow to design the fortification I wanted to build. My Pocket Dimension space had the best lighting, and enough space to make the model as large as I wanted.

Chantelle was still sleeping, so I left the lights dimmed and moved away into the emptiness of the dimensional space.

Of course, if I was working with a rendered model in a space without any obstacles there was no need for light. I enlarged the model of the clearing to be half of the real size and started designing in walls. I wanted them to be really strong, able to withstand things like the siege spell that the winter priests had used against me.

I didn't get a good read of how much force was in the spell, I didn't have a program written to measure force yet, but I had a good estimate based upon the size of the ice, which gave me its rough weight, and the speed it moved. Stone walls six or seven meters thick should be able to withstand it readily, less if I rearranged the lattice of atoms in the stone to be stronger.

I made walls on the model going around the entire clearing, five meters in from the edge. It made a rectangle seventy meters by ninety meters. Making the walls ten meters thick, enough to withstand siege spells twice as powerful as the only example I'd seen, left an inner area of forty-eight hundred square meters. Raising the walls up forty five meters put them five meters above the top of the forest.

"What are you working on?" Chantelle asked.

"Designing walls to go around the clearing." I said. "I want a safe place to start building up a village."

"You're making them following the edge of the clearing?" She asked. "A straight edged box?"

"That's what it is looking like so far, yes." I said. "Why?"

"The most efficient area for wards to cover is a dome." She said. "If you can build in any shape, why not match the surface of the wards with the surface of the walls?"

"The wards are in a dome?" I asked. "Not a sphere? Could you make them cover a sphere instead?"

"I can." She said. "It would take twice as much mana to run them... And I don't have enough mana to run even a dome configuration to cover the whole clearing permanently."

"Prepare the wards in a sphere." I said. "The next thing on my list, after building walls, is to work on the mana and mana crystal problems."

She nodded and headed back up to the warding room.

I cleared the walls I had been working on and made a sphere. It was much simpler to design, I placed a sphere at the center of the clearing, made the walls of the shell ten meters thick, and then simply expanded it to the size I wanted.

I ended up with the outer edges of the sphere being one hundred meters apart, which extended the sphere ten meters into the forest on two sides. The peak of the sphere would be fifty meters above the ground, a nice ten meters above the top of the forest, and the slope would make climbing it difficult. Half of the sphere would be below the ground, and that was if I had the center of the sphere level with the surface of the ground.

Moving the sphere down ten meters to line it up with bedrock, I had to extend the sphere ten meters to place the peak back above the top of the forest. Which extended the sphere twenty meters into the forest on two sides, and ten meters into the forest on the other two sides. I was happy with that.

I added stairs on the outside of the sphere, a straight line from ground level to the height of the peak of the sphere, and then a walkway to reach the center. Stairs down from the peak inside the sphere gave me a single point to defend if we were attacked. I put in floors half a meter thick every five meters, twenty four floors total, and moved the warding room to be in the very center of the sphere.

I went outside to start building. It was light enough to see, thankfully, so I headed into the forest to start clearing trees. I had the model of the fortress overlaid transparently over reality, so I cut down all of the trees that were within the walls. There were quite a few, but it didn't take me long to cut them all down, cut them into pieces, and stack them outside of where the walls would be.

Next I needed to move my existing building out of the central location so that I could build the central stairway of the sphere. Standing in the center of the stairs down to my Pocket Dimension I wasn't quite able to get the whole building within my twenty meter range, so I split it in two vertically. The top half, stairs, warding room, and entranceway, I pushed to the side by moving the dirt around it, like pushing something through water. The bottom half followed just as easily. Chantelle stayed in the warding room, even as I shuffled it around.

Moving back to where the main stairs of the sphere would be I made a small piece of the reinforced stone from the dirt, manipulating it into a perfect reinforced lattice. Then I just had to use my duplication power to convert dirt and stone into the reinforced stone where I needed it.

I built the stairway down to the bottom of the sphere first. Clearing out the dirt and stone where the empty spaces of floors would be and pushing it to the surface gave me a stockpile of material to work with when I built the stairway up to the top of the sphere. Next I worked on the floors and walls from the bottom of the sphere up, using the material from beneath the ground to build the structure above the ground.

Part of the way through doing that I moved the existing rooms to their final location in the fortress. The warding room went into the center, and the main stairs detoured around it. Chantelle stuck her head into the stairway from the warding room as I got it in place, telling me she would set the wards if I'd finished moving her around.

The entrance to my Pocket Dimension I put on the first floor down from the peak of the sphere. I wanted a place to fall back to if everything went wrong. The bathroom I moved next to the warding room, and the bedrooms that we'd barely used I dismantled. I made oil lamps for the main areas we would use immediately, but left the other places dark. Most of the sphere was large empty space, but I could divide it easily later as I wanted.

I was standing on the top of the sphere in the dark when Chantelle came to tell me that there were three Forest Keepers on their way. She pointed to the west and I could see their points of light approaching.