Jenny and I were four hundred and fifty meters away from the rest of my people. Easily within the set one kilometer range on the God Banishment ward I had in my inventory, which I took out.

"That worked for the phasing, my lord," Ursula said. "Now we just have to worry about freezing to death."

The indicator over the mana crystal with the ward on it was showing it to be three quarters full, but it was visibly dropping where in the neutral realm it barely moved. I manipulated its range to drop it down to just covering everyone. It was still configured to project the ward in a circle around me, so it was working over four hundred and fifty meters of useless space, but I didn't have the controls to modify the shape or center of the ward.

The mana usage had dropped a lot, and that would have to do for now. On to the other problem. I really wanted to get the weapon that the marksman had left as not having the range advantage was annoying. But I needed to warm my people up before they died from exposure to the severe cold of the winter realm.

I checked on the portals that I had available, and there were several around the Bags of Holding storage area with different sensors looking through them. The security system that I had set up for it and assigned a low priority to was only about half done, but the portals that were set up gave me access to move my power through to the Bags of Holding that my people were holding.

Ursula's inventory space was the closest, ending up being fifteen meters away from the center of my digital power through several portals. I sank my power through and into Ursula, Stalia, and the two Mountain Keepers, pushing warmth into their bodies. Even the Mountain Keepers, who liked cold, were suffering from the extremes of the winter realm.

"Thank you, my lord," Ursula said. "I don't know how you managed it, but that is much better."

"You're welcome," I said. "We'll be back in a minute or so."

I picked Jenny back up and headed to the northeast where the long range ice launcher was. Stalia sent me a warning when my portal shield drifted to the side and opened me up to the marksmen now behind me, but I was easily able to shift it back in position. There was a crack a few seconds later when the ice shard hit my shield.

We made it to the ice launcher without any issues and I put Jenny down to examine it. It was a two meter long tube five centimeters long, it flattened out in a shoulder rest at the back and had a trigger underneath it a third of the way forward from that. At the front it had two thirty centimeter long legs that held it up off the ground.

Jenny reached out to touch it, but I stopped her with a raised hand.

"If I had designed a magical weapon of that sort I would have trapped it to do something nasty to anyone who picked it up who wasn't supposed to," I said. "And your inventory isn't large enough to hold it either. I want our people to look at it and see if we can't reproduce something like it."

My inventory was only a small one as well, but I was planning on just dropping it directly into my Pocket Dimension. It was enchanted, so my power wouldn't work on it to move it directly, but that was simple to get around. I took my pocket portal out of my pocket and sank it into the ground in front of the launcher and moved it down and over it. I ended up with the launcher and a strip of hard snow inside, and my pocket portal back in my pocket.

I picked Jenny back up and headed back to the barricade, running at a comfortable pace. There was the crack of several ice shards that either hit my portal shield or passed just in front or behind me as I ran, arriving in pairs.

We had made it halfway back before I figured out what they were trying to do, and then only because Stalia warned me that I was about to be hit in the chest. I planted my foot and slowed down slightly and the prediction went away. They were aiming to hit the edge of my portal to disable it and then at the same time aiming the second shot at the center of the shield to hit me when it failed. And it would have worked if Stalia hadn't maintained her focus on keeping us safe.

They got in another two lucky shots that would have disabled my portal shield before we made it back to the barricade, but Stalia warned me both times. I leapt over the now two meter high wall of the barricade as we reached it, landing in an area that my people cleared for me and placed Jenny back on her feet.

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The spare thread portal had finally made its slow way to the army room and I collected the broken portal from the ground before pulling the new portal through my pocket portal and setting it up on the wall of the barricade. And I took a moment to enqueue a background task to store a small stockpile of thread portals in the army room for redundancy purposes.

I had just finished that when the God Banishment ward flashed red and made the sound of breaking glass. And Stalia warned of a shot coming in from the south, from the open side of our barricade.

I turned to look and saw one person standing and another laying on the ground four hundred and fifty meters away, which quickly sharpened in focus as Jenny looked with her mana enhanced eyesight. It was the Instructor and another marksman. Ursula stepped to the side out of the trajectory of the incoming shard easily dodging it before it arrived.

I looked at the interface for the God Banishment ward, it was showing that it was still active but the range had halved to two hundred and twenty five meters. Chantelle had obviously made it a cascading ward that halved its distance when it broke. I shrank the ward down further to just twenty meters around me. If the Instructor wanted to come that close to us we should be able to kill or maim him to stop his interference.

The wisp was still huddling close to the ground in the corner that the walls made. I gestured for it to come closer and sank my power into it to keep it freezing as it landed in my palm.

"The snow man progenitor's base is to the west?" I asked.

"Yes," the wisp said. "Almost exactly due west from here, fifty kilometers."

I nodded, stepping to the side to avoid another shot from the marksman behind us. That was going to get annoying quickly.

"Okay, let's reshuffle who is outside," I said. "We're going to be running west through the snow men."

The Mountain Keepers left through the portal to the army room and Taur came out.

"I will carry the portal," Taur said. "That way we can keep it at full deployment and quickly get people in and out. And if projectiles are slowed going through it I can use it as a shield."

"I'm not sure it stops projectiles going in," I said. "Clear a path."

I summoned a throwing blade and threw it through the portal, aiming to sink it into the far wall of the army room. It went through without slowing down.

"If we're going to be testing things, I'd like to be sure it does slow arrows exiting," Conor said, equipping his bow.

I nodded and stepped aside to give him a clear shot at the wall. He drew back fully and loosed the arrow, which arrived at the portal and then fell to the ground just outside of it. I played it back slower and as the head of the arrow hit the portal the entire arrow slowed down to only a few meters per second and then dropped to next to nothing once it was all of the way out.

"Sorry, my lord," Conor said, bowing his head and looking dejected.

I frowned at him. "What are you apologising for?" I asked.

"For doubting what you said," Conor said. "For being disrespectful."

"No," I said. "I don't ask blind obedience from you. I am not always going to be right and I welcome you, any of you, to test anything that I claim."

Conor looked up and nodded firmly. "Thank you, my lord." Conor said. "I will join the group outside. Jenny and I will thin the army in front of us so we can get through."

I nodded and we set out around the wall to the south, a wave of five shots coming towards us as I stepped out into view of the marksmen.

We easily avoided the shots and began running to the west at twenty kilometers an hour, the top speed of the Conor and Jenny. The Instructor began dropping marksmen in all directions, to no great effect. It didn't matter what direction the shots were coming from, Stalia was always able to detect it and give a trajectory as the shot was fired.

After thirty seconds and his strategy not working at all, the Instructor began moving the marksmen closer so we had less time to react. The first one to be dropped within three hundred meters of us slowed us down to ten kilometers an hour as Conor and Jenny slowed to shoot at him. Three hundred meters gave a flight time of five seconds for our archers, and only six tenths of a second for the marksman.

The first marksman went down, but the Instructor teleported away before the arrows landed. It would take the Instructor teleporting a marksman within one hundred and fifty meters before it became a problem, most of my people's bodies could only react so fast. But that was simply solved, I just expanded the God Banishment ward to two hundred meters. If it took the Instructor more than three seconds to break the ward then he would be shot.

It was slowing us down to have Conor and Jenny shooting the occasional marksman so I began to form a two meter long stone stretcher that Ursula and I could carry between us. When it was done Conor and Jenny jumped up onto it to use it as a shooting platform and we sped up to twenty five kilometers an hour.

Shortly after that we got them within range of the snow men marching toward us and our archers began firing a constant stream of arrows. Fifty of the five hundred snow men were down half a minute after they began firing, decimating the enemy force and continuing on to obliterate them. By the time we were at where the front line would have been there were one hundred snow men down and there was a wide channel for us to run through the center.