With everyone back in the army room I held the wisp in front of me and set off down the valley. I was keeping the wisp chilled actively with my power as I ran this time, which was much more comfortable than freezing the glove I was wearing.
"Which way should we be going?" I asked after a minute.
"Down the valley will work," the wisp said. "The direct path would be over the ridge to your left. You seem to go faster going downwards though, and we can make up time once we get out of the mountains."
"We will be heading straight at whatever was making the screeching sound," I said. "Do you know what would make that noise?"
"Ice cats," the wisp said. "They're highly intelligent, and they don't tend to bother us wisps at all. They like their prey warm."
Great. I picked up my speed as the snow became more compacted. It wouldn't be solid enough to run on by itself, but it became easier to compress it further than to dissolve it as I ran past. The valley wandered back and forth and eventually joined up to a wider one, the heights of the ridges coming down from fifty meters to under twenty.
Five minutes after entering the larger valley several things jumped out of my path with a hiss. There were also several swipes with sets of claws that I dodged by being able to see them with my sound sense. Ursula passed me a light crystal through the army room portal and I held it up as I looked over my shoulder and continued to run. Ice cats. There were eleven of them that I could see behind me that I had passed and five still in front of me that were carrying kittens on their backs.
Most of the adults were a meter and a half long, but the one in the lead was over two meters long. And they were all made entirely of a white ice which made them look like bald cats. The ice cats in front of me moved to the sides as I went past, crouching and keeping the kittens as far from danger as they could manage. I passed the light stone back to Ursula and went back to navigating by my power soaked into the snow in front of me, running down the valley. The further down the mountains I was getting the less I had to compact the snow.
A moon began to rise large and white as I left the mountains entirely, revealing a forest of ghostly white trees. The snow was compact enough for me to run over without having to compress it any further as I entered the trees. I came to a stop at the first tree to ask the wisp for directions and turned to look back the way we had come. A little over five hundred meters away the ice cats were following me, running at a sprint.
"Are the ice cats intelligent enough to be spoken with?" I asked.
"They are," the wisp said. "Though not as complicated as with you."
"You will translate for me when I ask you to," I said.
I jogged out one hundred meters from the beginning of the forest, the wisp hovering a few meters above me, and waited for the ice cats to arrive. When they were still one hundred meters away they split into two groups to circle around, with the alpha cat coming straight towards me. It took them less than a minute to surround me and to begin slowly closing in towards me. While they were doing that I was moving a thread portal to the back of my helmet with a presence behind it, allowing me to see and hear behind me.
When they were ten meters away from me the alpha cat began wiggling its back hips, preparing to pounce. I had doubts as to how intelligent they could be if their leader was telegraphing its attacks so much, but perhaps it was a feint. I dashed forwards before it could pounce, and it shifted its weight back in surprise.
It swiped at me with one of its front paws when I got within range and I blocked it with my left forearm. With my right palm I pushed against its chest, lifting it and slamming it onto its back in the snow. It brought both of its back paws up and tried to gouge through my side with its claws while also swinging at me with both of its front claws. My armour stopped the first set of attacks, but on the next set its claws began glowing blue and they began sinking through.
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I concentrated heat on the outer layers of the armour where the claws were sticking into and they lost their sharpness, beginning to melt. The ice cat had been yowling ever since I had it pinned on its back, and now it was putting its ears back and hissing at me.
"Translate this," I said. "I am not prey."
The alpha ice cat went silent, and then made a loud screeching sound. Which was meant to cover the sound of another of the cats that was leaping at me from behind, where it thought I couldn't see it. It was leading with its jaws open, aiming to bite around my neck and snap my spine. I timed it perfectly and raised my left hand, gripped it by the throat, and threw it over and past me.
My right hand remained on the alpha ice cat's chest, pushing against it to counteract its attempts to get up. It had stopped trying to claw me and was now just trying to get away.
"You will stop attacking me and leave me to my business, or I will kill you all," I said.
The alpha ice cat went still below me.
"They are hungry," the wisp said. "All of the easy winter prey animals have gone to the neutral realm, and they have kittens they need to feed."
I pulled up my Fortress Storage, pre-filtering it to show any meat that was there.
Fortress Storage - Meat Beef Twenty Kilograms Pork Nineteen Kilograms Dhagul Twenty Kilograms Chicken Twenty Kilograms Wolf Twenty Kilograms Snow Burrower Twenty Kilograms Human Twenty Kilograms Leprechaun Twenty Kilograms Forest Keeper Twenty Kilograms Plains Keeper One Kilogram More
That was a little bit disturbing, it looked as though someone had submitted a kilogram of the meat of each of the people within the fortress. And then my automatic duplication had made more of it. Though perhaps it wasn't any more disturbing than having beast people that were cows and pigs as well as having beef and pork.
I made a gap in my armour and removed my bag of holding with my left hand. I opened it up and held it upside down as I summoned all of the beef, pork, chicken, wolf, snow burrower, and dhagul, whatever that was. That was all of the types of meat that I was comfortable offering. The pile ended up being just under one hundred and twenty kilograms of meat in neat cuts, which should be plenty for the sixteen ice cats and numerous kittens.
"He says that they will stop following you," the wisp said. "And that they will honour you for the meals you have provided them."
I took my hand off of his chest and stepped back. He rolled to his feet and began sniffing the meat, letting out a chuffing sound. He turned to face me, ducking his head before letting out a yowl as one of the ice cats leapt at me from behind, its claws glowing.
I turned and backhanded the ice cat out of the air just hard enough to rattle it, sending it tumbling in the snow.
"He said 'look out!'," the wisp said.
"Thank you for the translation," I said. "It was a bit late, but its the sentiment that counts. What direction is the archwisp?"
The rest of the ice cats had begun crowding around the pile of meat, though they seemed to be taking pieces in a very specific order. The wisp drifted to the east, parallel to the forest, and I jogged after it. Once we were one hundred meters away from the ice cats I took the wisp in my right hand, holding it in front of me as I picked up speed.
After I had settled into my running speed I got a mild ping for attention from the war room simulation, so I switched my focus to there from my local simulation. All of the members of the army were there watching the inputs from my senses and power.
"Why didn't you just kill them all?" Taur asked. "It would have been faster and a lot less effort, they were obviously no match for you even without you having a weapon."
"I am very good at killing," I said. "A combination of being a Demi-AI and having modified myself so that I can move faster than anything else with a comparable muscle layout. But I prefer not to. I know that I am stronger than any typical group of enemies that I come across, and even the top elites of the world that can match me can only exchange a lethal blow for a lethal blow. And I can heal from their lethal blow. Without the fight being a challenge it isn't worth ending lives. I am on this world to be a protector, not a destroyer. Though I will admit to occasionally having the urge to kill everyone in front of me, usually when guards are doing something stupid like trying to stop me."
"Everyone we come across is a potential person of the Fortress," Jeff said. "More people joining the Fortress betters the Fortress, and one of our sworn goals is the betterment of the Fortress and its people."
The others all nodded at that. It did seem to match my outlook on things pretty well, and it would be a good mindset for the army to adopt, with one slight adjustment.
"That sounds right," I said. "But the priority is the existing people of the Fortress, which includes yourselves. If our people are threatened, your task is to eliminate the threat."