We reach our destination, the Algough mountains, though it has taken double the time that was needed. Now I need to scout out a good area for building my safehouse. On another note, I have been abstaining from bullying Aelynthi, but I feel like a drug addict in withdrawal. Otherwise everything else is good, no surprises or accidents since the bear incident. It takes us another 4 days to find a cliff face with a sufficiently large open area in front of it for me to set up a defensive perimeter. I setup the security camera perimeter in a half circle with a 30m radius. The plant life is somewhat dense around here, it will be the first to go as I start the construction of our new home. I start clearing out the area, stacking up the plants and trees for carbon conversion, next I expand the security perimeter to a half circle with 50m radius and start digging into the cliff face at a 5 meter height from ground level. The digging itself will probably take me weeks due to the overall size of my ambitious design.

An entire week passes by, I have dug out the corridor but I am already getting sick of lugging stone. I guess I can reinforce the corridor first before I continue on to digging the rooms. The corridor is 30 meters long which I think is sufficiently short for our convenience but long enough to make it into a death trap for those who dare enter.

I use 2 days to solve the problem of my new demand for CNTW by making an artifact to spin CNT threads and an artifact to weave large single piece CNTW sheets by feeding it CNT threads.

It takes me another 3 weeks to dig out everything up to my desired specifications; luckily I can use the local flora as a carbon source to make the interior decorations and structural reinforcements otherwise I would have to use another material as gathering carbon from air would take too long. I put diamond pillars in the corners and every 3 meters along the walls, for the roof support structure I make a square with a criss cross using 10cm diameter CNTW cylinders and on top of it are multiple sheets of CNTW. I spend another 4 days building the inner structure and covering everything with CNTW, so now I am no longer forced to look at stone walls and diamond pillars. Behind the CNTW covering I run a few ventilation shafts and water pipes for the future water system. I let Aelynthi play with the room colors via the enchanted walls as I concentrate on making the water system and bathroom.

Within 3 days we have a working bathroom and hot water. Even though Aelynthi is very happy with the large bathtub I have built, I am told she has something similar back at the royal castle, she wishes for me to dedicate less time towards work and spend more time with her. Spending a day on making a perfectly soft bed, that reminds me of my own home, completely diverts the princesses attention from me and towards enjoying the first soft bed in what has most likely been months for her. Getting back to work I often times find myself happy, the reason being an elf that is radiating contentment from our bed. It makes me wonder was she really happy after our love confession, as her current contentment due to the unnaturally soft bed is similar to what I experienced back then. Well... she is a simple creature... furthermore she is a woman, maybe that has something to do with it or...

"Darling thank you for the bed, I love you." Or, I am the simple creature in this relationship that can not figure out how this soul bond works and how it affects a woman's intuition. She hugs my arm and looks up into my eyes.

"You're welcome, enjoy it to your heart's content."

"Come enjoy it with me!" Um… Although that sounds tempting I am sure she does not mean sex nor do I have the time laze around just yet.

"I am not done building our home, so I can not join you in doing nothing, yet." Aelynthi is not surprised by my answer, she does not say anything about my refusal as she walks off back to the bed.

I can finally concentrate fully on making a rank 3 weapon. The weapon design will be based on my AMR, upscaled 5 times and a shorter barrel length of 2 meters. Within the day I have a stationary 100mm turret. The first test fire was successful and a few calibration shots later I have a functional rank 3 weapon. The part that was previously responsible for smoothing out the combustion expansion now has a 180 degree twist that will give the 100mm shells a nice spin. The shells are based on the 20mm bullets, the only change is the proportion of the cylinder part to the cone tip. The 100mm shell is a 20cm cylinder followed by a 15cm cone, it also has 2cm of fins on the bottom of the cylinder that will allow the combustion chamber smootherer to spin stabilize the shell. I make a note to myself to add this spin stabilization to my AMR and 20 mm bullets to improve long range accuracy. I also develop, after a few hundred failures, a 100 mm HE (high explosive) shell which is filled with pressurized oxygen and hydrogen, in other words an upscaled copy of my grenades designed to exit a 100mm barrel at supersonic speeds. As crazy as that sounds I performed all experiments behind two meters of rock, though it is less than 2 meters of rock now… The only downside so far has been that Aelynthi no longer comes to watch me work, or is it an upside. Back on the topic of 100 mm shells. For now I do not touch the topic of APFSDS shells as that is much more complicated as I will need many more experiments to find what works and what is optimal. Furthermore diamond is not suited for APFSDS and developing a HEAT shell is beyond my current ability as it would need insane amount of experiments to compensate my limited knowledge on topic and a different type of explosives than I have available.

With the addition of the 100 mm turret I can sleep more soundly but I am still weak to an attack that overwhelms me with quantity as I do not have any ability to kill hundreds of targets in an acceptable manner. Tomorrow I will work on another turret, this turret will be 4 AMRs mounted together for a total of 240 rpm and this turret will probably be my main combat turret for the foreseeable future, thanks to its lethality and efficiency per kill.

Most of the next day I spend on mana shaping multiple AMRs and very little time is spent on mounting them together to form a 20mm quad turret. I can now truly sleep comfortably and soundly at night knowing that I have a means of protecting myself and Aelynthi. The projects I have planned for the future include an inbuilt detection system for the base, a large omnidirectional camera, a long distance directional camera (telescope) and finally a radar system.

The omni camera will most likely out range all of my currently setup small cameras, it is quite large with its size of 2/5 of a 1m diameter sphere. I do not need a full sphere as I will place it on top of the entrance to the bunker, it only has to see what is infront and over it and not under or behind it. Its resolution is 6.4 gigapixels, I have calculated it to be accurate enough to spot a person a kilometer away and make out the details of a person's face from 200 meters.

The directional camera is more difficult to develop as I can not bend the view pathway of a mana sensor like a lens bends light in a telescope. To solve this problem I make a giant plate with a radius of 1 meter and 16 megapixel resolution. I mount the plate on the top of mountain as otherwise it would not be used to its full potential, as at ground level the forest and landscape would hinder it. I program a circular search pattern for the default working mode of the directional camera. Its main use will be manual remote viewing of objects of interest and maybe occasionally spotting something through the forest canopy.

When I get thinking of a radar system I realise that I do not need to use radio waves, how could I forget, I can use LIDAR instead. I do not need the extreme distance observation granted by using radar or the inherent lower accuracy of radar, I just need to map a few kilometers and with enchanting I can solve the engineering problems of constructing such a device. I immediately re-enchant my omni and directional camera to include LIDAR. The only problem is how do I visually represent this data, as each pixel gives me not the intensity of light but the distance from the object it reflected off. I can not use a 2D screen to effectively represent this data without making a computationally intense program to make the 2D image comprehensible and right not I do not have much to go on with computational power.

The solution I find is to use a metric cube of diamond (1m x 1m x 1m). I could use glass but I would need to extract silicon from dirt and rock and the idea of a 3 tonne diamond sounded nicer. The most important part is that I can color each cubic pixel within the diamond to get a perfect 3D image of the surroundings. Additionally I make a 100x100x10cm screen to use for the directional camera.

After setting the omni camera as the center, coordinates (0,0,0), I assign each pixel on the camera its own coordinates. Now I know the vector of each pixel and the distance to the object, translating this into pixels on the hologram is just a matter of multiplication.

I test out the program using the directional camera by looking at a tree and I am seeing the tree but most of it is on the background layer so that means I am not getting all of the distance data... The tree leaves are absorbing the infrared light my LIDAR emits... A few hours later I have a multispectral LIDAR and I am looking at a beautiful tree that is 99% accurate 1/2 scale model of a tree outside my base. The enjoyment of looking at a tree inside of a diamond is cut short when the image disappears... the camera ran out of mana. I resist the urge to bang my head on a 3 tonne diamond and start optimizing my LIDAR enchantments.

I connect all of the cameras up to a control core that will be responsible for identifying intruders. All that is left to do is connect the turrets to the control core and add an automatic target tracking ability to the turrets, which is easily solved as I know the coordinates of the turrets. The core just needs to calculate the vertical and horizontal angle of the firing vector and relay this information to the turrets, for distances longer than 100m bullet drop will be taken into account. With a functioning targeting system I can increase the number of turrets as they no longer require manual control. When I get a good turret count, of lets say 10 turrets, it will be safe to say that an army will not be able to get anywhere near my door.

After finishing setting up the tracking system I realised a weakness, fog, smoke and dust clouds, as they reflect and scatter light & IR light. This can be solved with a radar system, which I previously thought was unnecessary. Another oversight would be how to designate new friendly targets. So far me and Aelynthi are seen as friendlies by the control core so there should not be any accidents, especially so considering the turrets are in standby mode by default to further minimize the danger of friendly fire, but for it to see us as friendlies requires manual registration of a small core that tags us as friendlies and constantly relays our position to the base control core. I leave these problems for later and decide to increase the turret count before worrying about the visibility loss caused by fog, smoke, dust clouds and the friend or foe system.

After another week I have 12 turrets. 3 on each side of my door, a 100mm cannon between two quads. Two quads on the cliff face half way up to the mountain. Finally 4 quads on top of the mountain surrounding the directional camera. To make the whole system more robust I setup a small omni camera and a directional camera on each turret, in the case of main camera loss they will switch to their own but I will keep the control core centralized which I can remotely access through a mobile core on my person. Next, I plan to armor each of the turrets and make them all retractable before returning to the topic of radar.