Zorian blinked. Raynie is a wolf shifter? That… wow. Yeah, now that he thought about it, there were some things that could point that way.
“Well,” said Zorian rising from his seat. “You gave me a lot to think about. Thank you for your time.”
“Think nothing of it,” Vani smiled. “Go kill a few more winter wolves for me, is all I ask for.”
“Wouldn’t a tribe of wolf shifters kind of dislike me for killing so many wolves?” Zorian asked.
“They’re wolf shifters, not winter wolf shifters,” Vani said. “I’m pretty sure they don’t like each other much. Winter wolves have a habit of killing their more mundane relatives and invading their territory.”
Zorian left after that, unsure how to proceed further in the restart.
“Back already?” Silverlake asked him, not bothering to look up from her bundle of herbs while addressing him. “I’m not seeing any egg sack on you, though.”
“That’s because spider-mommy is carrying her eggs on her underbelly,” he said. “The task is impossible. Why would you even send me on such a fool’s errand? Kael said you were eccentric, but ultimately harmless. This isn’t harmless. I almost died.”
“If I thought you were the sort to rush in half-cocked and get your fool ass killed by something like that, I never would have sent you on that errand,” Silverlake scoffed. “And anyway, isn’t it a bit premature to declare failure after less than a week? I’m patient. I waited for years, I sure as hell can wait for a few months more till you think of something. You’re a smart boy, I’m sure you’ll figure out a way.”
Zorian opened his mouth and then closed it. Suddenly, her logic sounded a lot more reasonable to him. She didn’t know he was on a month-long time limit, after all. As far as she was concerned, giving him a task that would take several months to complete was perfectly logical. Where was the hurry? As for the suicidal nature of the task she gave him… apparently she had more faith in his skills than he himself did. Did he really give up too soon?
“A few months is too late,” he said. “Anything that happens after the summer festival might as well not exist for me.”
Silverlake finally stopped fiddling with the herb pile and gave him a hard look, her eyes glowing brightly for a moment.
“You’re not dying,” she stated. “Not out of sickness, anyway? Someone hunting for you?”
Zorian hesitated, the image of Red Robe dancing before his eyes and opened his mouth to say ‘yes’. Silverlake cut him off, though.
“No, not really,” she stated, going back to her herbs. “You have an enemy, but then again who doesn’t?”
Zorian exhaled in irritation and rose up, deciding to leave before he lost his cool and attacked her. He’d probably get stomped into the ground, anyway. Just before he teleported away, though, a thought struck him.
‘To hell with it,’ he thought. ‘Why not?’
“Hypothetically speaking,” he said. “If you were visited by a time traveler who claimed to know your future self, what would you ask of him as proof?”
“Hypothetically speaking,” she said, her mouth stretching into a cruel grin, “I would have asked him to retrieve a grey hunter egg sack for me.”
Throwing his hands in the air in defeat, Zorian teleported back to his inn in Knyazov Dveri, the cackling of a sadistic old woman echoing behind him.
In the safety of the room he rented at the inn, Zorian was sitting on the bed, dismantling a rifle he had bought earlier. It was kind of amusing how easy it was to procure a firearm compared to high-level combat magic aids, despite them being just as lethal, but there you had it. They were especially easy to procure here in Knyazov Dveri, which was so close to the wilderness and its dangers. In any case, he was trying to see how the things worked and, more importantly, how they could be enchanted.
Firearms were notoriously tricky to enhance with magic. Like all ranged weapons, they had the problem that you could only enchant the device to be more accurate and durable, and if you wanted the projectile to have any sort of magical effect upon striking the target you had to enchant the projectile itself. Bullets were unfortunately very hard to enchant, being much smaller than arrows and crossbow bolts and usually made from some very magically unsuitable materials. You also couldn’t touch the bullet to channel mana into it once it was already in the gun… though maybe if he installed some crystal mana channels into the gun via alteration…
While he studied the device in front of him, Zorian idly considered ways to off the grey hunter from earlier. He had no intention of actually trying any of them, as they were each more implausible than the last, but there was no harm in coming up with scenarios.
Grey hunters had known weaknesses. First of all, they were purely melee opponents — if you could keep them at a distance, there was nothing they could do to you. The trouble was that they were really, really good at closing in on their target. Secondly, they were ultimately just magical animals so they could be lured into prepared traps and kill zones fairly easily. The problem here was that they were fast and tough enough to probably survive such a blunder. The magic sense the grey hunter demonstrated in Zorian’s first encounter with it probably also helped it avoid the most blatant of such traps.
He could think of a several ways to trap it, but most of them required knowledge of spells that he didn’t have. If he knew how to make a simulacrum and open portals, he could simply send in his simulacrum as bait and then open a portal leading to wherever he set the trap up. Hell, simply knowing how to make a simulacrum would make things a million times easier since he could test his ideas without endangering himself. If he knew large terrain alteration spells he could simply seal it off in its lair and wait for it to suffocate. If he knew the spells to manipulate large amounts of water he might be able to drown it. And so on, and so on…
He also considered poisoning the thing or putting it to sleep or otherwise using some kind of alchemical concoction that would cripple or kill it… but anything potent enough to kill such a beast was heavily restricted, made out of super-rare ingredients and expensive as all hell. He didn’t know how to make anything like that, and couldn’t get his hands on something that valuable and forbidden through trade.
He could try for brute force and build a golem to take the spider down. Since they were machines animated by magic, they were immune to poison and could be extremely strong — strong enough to crush the stupid spider in a head-to-head fight. Unfortunately, he didn’t know how to build a golem. Any golem at all, let alone one good enough to go toe-to-toe with a grey hunter. The art of golem making was complicated enough that several Houses were dedicated to mastering it, and not something to dabble in for a week or two. Or even a month or two.
Furthermore, even if he knew how to build it, the process of building would take at least a week and probably more, require a specialized workshop and consume a lot of expensive materials. He would likely bankrupt himself before he was even halfway finished.
Which brought him to firearms. The revolver worked well enough against Red Robe when his spells had failed him, after all. No regular firearm would do against the grey hunter, though — he needed something stronger than that. Unfortunately, higher calibers were usually reserved for the military and he would need to raid a military base and steal one if he wanted to go down that route. That could end very badly — who knew what kind of defenses a military base had, and being captured and interrogated by military investigators while drugged out of his mind on various truth serums was almost as bad as being discovered by a hostile mind mage or a necromancer. Plus, he was pretty sure they had a couple of mind mages and necromancers on the payroll anyway.