"I can block these eleven shards," I said.

I coloured the trajectories of the eleven shards coming from directly in front of us black. Jeff and Jacqueline were discussing something between themselves, then every shard coming from the left had their trajectories changed to a dark red.

"We can destroy these fourteen," Jeff said. "Using my fire and Jacqueline's air magics."

"You can cast that quickly?" I asked.

"A single simple symbol from each of us, burn and gust," Jacqueline said. "It will be an uncontrolled explosion of fire that will move away from us and dissipate quickly. But it should be hot enough to destroy the shards. An air shield would take too long, and I'm not confident that it would hold up against the attacks."

"That just leaves fourteen from the right," I said, lighting them up in white. "They're pretty tightly clustered, how confident are you all in dodging them?"

We were all wearing our armour, but I didn't want to take the chance that any of the shards were enchanted. It didn't seem likely with the amount of projectiles that were coming towards us, but it would only take a few of them on target to tear through us.

Everyone was running through movement simulations, transparent ghosts showing how they would move. Most opted to just fall down on their stomachs where they were, though the Mountain Keepers were both going to be stepping forward to raise their wall. They would be stepping into the shadow I would be casting with my shield. Once everyone's simulations settled down into a final sequence of movements I nodded.

"That should do," I said. "I'm going to bring this simulation up to one tenth of normal speed. If you need to go faster or slower split off an instance of the simulation. Let's go."

We came back up to a speed that we could interact with our bodies and everyone moved at once. I had my shield up and moving to block my designated shots. I had my hands at the edges of the thread portal pushing it into a shape that would cover more of the shards, and then the shards began arriving. They were pretty small, five centimeters long and one centimeter wide, and were cylinders that sharpened to a point in the front. With the speed that they were moving they would have a lot of force behind them, even at such a small size.

I had my shield in position and ready when the simulated movements of the two Mountain Keepers behind me differed from what they were actually doing. Their wall was rising in front of us successfully, but their spell casting was slowing them down. Right into the path of four of the incoming shards. Even if they dropped to the ground immediately they wouldn't move fast enough to clear the line of fire.

I split off my own instance of the simulation, a process that separated me from the others in the simulation so that I could manipulate it without affecting them while still taking all of the data inputs from them. I soaked my power into my body and armour and dashed hard to the right, sending a message to the two Mountain Keepers to continue as they were. I sent another message to Ursula who was on the right.

From my perspective I drifted slowly in front of the shards and watched as they impacted against my armour, penetrating it even with my reinforcements on it. The armour did slow them down, and the reinforced muscles of my stomach stopped them before they could go all of the way through me.

I was hit by six of the shards, four in the stomach that would have hit the Mountain Keepers and two in the chest that were just on the path I had to take to intercept the others. I made it to where Ursula was laying on the ground and she reached up with one hand and pulled me down next to her, sliding a few centimeters as she absorbed my momentum. I was bleeding from the holes in me and my right lung was beginning to fill with blood. And my power wouldn't work on the shards that were within me. I closed my instance of the local simulation, returning to the master copy.

"Well that could have gone better," I said.

"We didn't know that casting would slow us as much as it did," one of the Mountain Keepers said.

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"We are very sorry," the other said.

I waved that off. "It's not your fault," I said. "Our simulation is only as good as the rules that it is running on, there is always going to be uncertainty in new situations. Good work getting the wall up so quickly."

I had shared the data on the damage my body had taken, and one of the Plains Keepers, the healer, was studying it.

"Your wounds have the potential to be lethal," the healer said. "Are you able to heal them, or do you require assistance?"

"I could heal them," I said. "And if I couldn't then I could at least keep my body alive. The problem is that the shards are enchanted and I can't affect them directly. Your assistance would be appreciated, thank you."

The healer crawled over to me within a few seconds and placed a hand against me. Symbols began to form from mana inside me, linking together like a ward but using him as the mana source. I was able to see the drain the healing was putting on my body's energy and began replacing it, which allowed the healer to speed up the healing, dumping more mana into the symbols inside me.

It was much more pleasant than my method of healing, even with the pain of replacing the energy it was taking. The shards were being pushed out through the holes they had made as my body knitted itself back together behind them. It took about ten seconds of normal time for me to be completely healed and I used my power after that to clean away the blood that had gotten over everything.

While I had been distracted the Mountain Keepers had raised the wall over a meter high, but the constant torrent of over a thousand shards every few seconds was eating into it. There had already been several breaches where the Mountain Keepers weren't quick enough to repair the wall, but there hadn't been any injuries from them.

We were under cover so I sank my power into the wall and began converting it to my reinforced stone, starting from the bottom and closest to us and moving up and out. The stone was strong enough that it was barely affected by the enchanted shards hitting it. With the Mountain Keepers no longer having to repair the wall it went up to two meters in height over the next minute, and it took me a few more minutes to convert the whole thing to stone.

I made a section of it transparent to give us a viewing window out to the army. More of the tripod weapons were arriving, including two that were bigger, two meters long and double the width, and the entire line was moving toward us freezing the plains as they went. They had already moved twenty meters closer.

Within the simulation an outline of two one meter platforms appeared at either end of the wall.

"Could those be made so that we can easily fire over the wall?" Conor asked.

The Mountain Keepers both nodded, and the soil began to shift.

"If you stand up there, won't the top of your bows show above the wall?" I asked.

"They will, but they're a small target," Conor said. "And almost all of the shards are impacting on the wall. We should be able to see and avoid any that would hit our bows."

That made sense. If they did try to suppress us we could simply move further back to get a better angle without exposing anything.

The leprechauns both began firing. When they fired their first arrows one of the larger tripods let off its first shard. It was enormous compared to the other shards, ten centimeters wide and thirty centimeters long. Where the first one hit it chipped off a chunk of the reinforced stone. The firing rate was much lower than the other launchers, only one every second compared to fifty. It only did so much damage because it was a direct hit, the second shot glanced off the top of the wall without doing any damage.

I redesigned the wall, getting the Mountain Keepers to build a steep angle from soil that I then converted to stone. Three of the larger shards destroyed sections of the new design before I could get the stone thick enough to counter them. And I didn't get it done in the second and a half those attacks took, the leprechauns had targeted the operators of the larger tripods first and the arrows went right through the shields that were being used to cover the snow men.

I continued converting the wall and we built it up on the north and south sides as well only leaving the east open. The fog wall had moved east following the border of the frozen area that was expanding, and we could see snow men setting up their tripods on either side of us. We weren't slowing them down at all, except in that the leprechauns were killing them by the hundreds.

I was considering what we could do when I got a job approval request. Chantelle was submitting a job for the god banishment ward, which I accepted. A few moments later the job was fulfilled and it was in my inventory.

"I made it with controls you can use, and a visual display of the power left in the mana crystal," Chantelle said. "Stay safe."

I took the warded mana crystal out of my inventory and a hologram of a green bar appeared over it. There was also an indicator for a range that was currently set at one kilometer. It didn't seem to be stopping the snow men from freezing the plains, as there was a line of them three hundred meters to the east freezing the two hundred meter gap behind us. About all that it had stopped was the reinforcements phasing in to man the tripods.

"My lord," Jenny said. "Look."

She highlighted a ball of mana that was hovering above us.

"I've got it, my lord," Jacqueline said, casting a spell that solidified the air around it.

She brought it down in front of us. A wisp.