I went back inside to watch the winter people leave on the detection ward display.

"They were here for you." I told Chantelle. "Apparently the winter god wants you specifically, and will be sending more people. The good news is that they have at least some of your people at the Fortress of the Gods."

"I've heard of it." Chantelle said. "It's a city fortress in the mountains to the north. I don't know where it is though. If we are to be attacked frequently I need to set up some more wards. Though I don't have the mana crystals to tie them to... I don't regenerate enough mana to run extensive wards even if I had the crystals, just keeping the claim ward and detection ward running is taking most of my mana."

She paused in thought for a moment, then lifted her warding book onto the table, dismissing the detection ward display.

"I could build a cycling ward..." She said, mostly to herself while flipping through the book.

"I'm going to go back to working on my preparations." I said. "I'll think on the mana and mana crystal problem."

She looked up and smiled at me, but I could see she was focused elsewhere.

Back in my Pocket Dimension I span the flywheel back up to speed. I was almost to the point of solving my electricity generation problem properly. But I was right on the edge of having AI augmented senses, which would help with most of the problems I was having. I took a moment to look out over the field of vacuum tubes I had set up, every one was glowing with an orange light, and there were tens of thousands of them. I disconnected the power line to them and watched as they faded to darkness.

The next half hour I spent recoding my program that allowed me to shape things at an atomic level, and with the memory and processing capabilities of the new chip I was able to manipulate individual atoms and sense subatomically. Which allowed my third generation of hardware.

I had gone from vacuum tubes to the very limits of silicon integrated circuits in only three steps, and I could now start building the platform for true Artificial Intelligence. I built the first chips, one for processing and one for memory, manually, and then duplicated the chips until I had a dozen of each.

I could now see what the duplication aspect of my power was doing, where I moved atoms to match a pattern, it dissolved everything into subatomic parts and reassembled them into new atoms at the right place.

Until now I had been writing code directly in the machine language of the chips I had created, but with multiple processing chips that became even less ideal. My next step was writing a compiler, and then a virtualisation layer over the distributed chips. Which all meant that I could now write higher level programs, and that I could expand with more processing and memory without having to change how the programs were written each time.

There wasn't any limit to the processing speed that my AI could have. Most companion AI, which was the direction I was going, needed to be limited in their physical size so that they could be implanted into the user.

My Pocket Dimension, with its Mind Link, and my AI knowledge that included everything about Mind Links too, both together came to a threat of eight and a half million. That was only half a million threat short of Matter Manipulation's nine million, and it wasn't counting the total threat from the interaction of the two powers.

The AI I could build was judged to be more of a threat than the Matter Manipulation power, which is completely overpowered. I was surprised that I remembered the figures so exactly. My fifth power, being able to remember my existence, apparently gave me an eidetic memory, but I had to think about what I wanted to remember to recall it.

With the hardware platform finally at the point where it could start to support a proper Artificial Intelligence I started hooking it up fully to the Mind Link. Input and output to my visual system gave me augmented vision, able to overlay rendered objects into the real world. I wrote an adaptive program that constantly took the input from my vision, and I could now measure distances, areas, and speeds and write the feedback directly onto the things I was measuring.

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I hooked up the rest of my senses, and wrote their own adaptive programs. The interesting one, almost as useful as the one tied into my vision, was the one for my sense of touch. I expanded it to include all of my body sense, and the output side of it could lock my muscles. I could now touch the objects I rendered. They had a weight, and the wall I created, virtually, stopped me from walking through it. It wasn't exactly like walking into a wall, my nose didn't flatten. But the pain was very accurate.

I created a ball of stone and a virtual copy of it, and alternated throwing one and then the other. There were some glitches early on, but the adaptive program soon started mimicking the real physics of the world.

The next step was an adaptive fighting program. I had it learn my full range of motion, bending and stretching to my limits, and then had it create a virtual copy of myself. I designated the copy as an opponent and it coloured orange with highlights at predicted weak points.

A transparent red bubble showed its immediate reach, a blur of how each limb could move. Sending an attack input into the program, I got a blue outline of proposed ways to attack. Moving at half speed I threw a punch at my copy, which blocked with a forearm and sent a kick at me.

The outline I was following disappeared, and then the kick landed. I stopped the fight to think. The ideal simulated move was probably to step backwards, and my visual system couldn't see the outline move behind me.

I spent an hour figuring out how to tap into the planning part of my mind through the Mind Link. With that done, and the input and output of the adaptive fighting program linked to it, I resummoned my virtual copy. Sending an attack input into the program, this time I was given a list of choices as to what I wanted to do.

There were multiple weightings, like avoiding pain, avoiding damage, and safety margin. There were also end goals, like disabling the opponent, killing them, assessing them, or fleeing. It felt incredibly natural, and it took no time for me to decide to disable the copy.

A plan to do that was given to me, both in the immediate action needed to progress the plan and what the end result would be.

Moving at full speed, I stepped forward and threw a punch at the copy. It blocked with its forearm, and moved to kick me. I stepped back and around the momentum of the kick, pushing the copy's leg as it went past, and stepped up behind it to get it in a choke. The fighting program registered that as a success and I stopped the fight.

Hand to hand combat was all well and good against human opponents, but I wouldn't want to try it against Arachne or ice spiders. I had my stone sword in my entranceway, but I'd gained access to metals since then and decided to upgrade. I melted down some iron and formed it into a sword. Diamond was just carbon in a strong structure, and with my new manipulation abilities I gave the sword a diamond edge.

Narrowing the edge to be one atom thick and come out in a wedge to the rest of the blade was excessive, but I wanted to see if I could make a blade that would cut through anything. My first attempt I swung it at a slab of stone, and it sank in a few centimeters before getting stuck. I also blunted the edge of the blade. Reshaping it and trying again, this time with my power reinforcing the blade, it got ten centimeters in before getting stuck again. The blade stayed perfectly sharp, it was the width of the main part of the blade that was stopping it. A blade that could cut through stone should be good enough to cut through anything I was going to use it on, so I called it good enough.

I designed an opponent in the fighting program based upon my memory of the ice spider I had seen, and another based upon the Arachne. I went up to the clearing and it was light enough to see, so I summoned up a horde of virtual ice spiders. I wanted to see how many I could fight at once, so I started with one, and added one each time I won.

They moved extremely fast, matching my memory of them, but I could handle three of them without getting hurt. Adding the fourth I could win about half the time, and I usually took them all out. A fifth and I struggled to take out two before I died. I couldn't take them on open terrain, and that was without any tricks that they were sure to have. I would have to come up with tricks of my own if I were ever forced to fight them, something to even the numbers.

Chantelle burst out laughing. "What are you doing?" She asked.

I realised it probably did look funny, running around the clearing waving my sword around.

"I'm practising my fighting." I said. "Or testing it, rather. I think I've probably done as much as I can with it, I'd need more information about what I was going to be fighting to do much more."

Personal combat, done. Next up, solving my energy problems. I still needed to cut down trees for a bonfire every few hours, but now that I can use my power on atoms, and sense things sub-atomically, I should be able to build something better.