"What in the Sam Hill is a puma?" Isaac wondered as he sat and followed Walter's gaze. What sight befell him was a giant black cat that was naturally using the early morning sun to blind anyone trying to look directly at it. Isaac wasn't sure if the slight pang in his head was from what he had just said or the blinding sunlight beaming directly into his eyes.

Walter smirked slightly at Isaac finishing his reference without even realizing it. He walked a few paces towards the wind silenced, midnight black, emerald eyed, apex predator. The Silent Stalker eyed him carefully. It seemed mildly surprised that it had been caught before it got a chance to pounce on his meal or his horse. The large cat was not dumb enough to try and snatch away a mortal when there was a large open tray of food and an easily killed and devoured herbivore just out of reach.

"Back off." Walter told the cat sternly.

Isaac and Lenna just stared at Walter and the apex predator. They weren't sure exactly how he was going to handle it, but seeing as he was also a double platinum level adventurer, they figured that he would be able to handle one giant cat. Especially because it didn't feel any stronger than a gold level threat, maybe a platinum one if it took a group by surprise.

The cat lowered itself slightly in preparation of a sudden burst of speed in an unknown direction.

"I will fuck you up if you get anywhere near my food or my horse." Walter promised the giant cat. He shifted slightly to put himself directly between the cat and both of the things that he knew it was after. "You know that you aren't supposed to be here. This is a safe zone."

"Do you think he can actually talk to animals?" Isaac whispered to Lenna.

Lenna shrugged. "If he can, I've never seen it work like that." She commented.

The cat lowered even further and wiggled slightly as it calibrated in preparation of a pounce.

Walter's left hand settled on the pipe hanging from his left hip. His thumb rested on the button. "Don't even think about it." He warned the cat again. "Go home before you can't."

The cat's eyes went from slits to saucers and Walter slid his right foot back a few inches to better line the end of the pipe up with the cat.

"I know you've got a headache, and the wards're making things a bit blurry and confusing, but I know your kind are smarter tha-" Walter cut himself off as the cat launched its considerable bulk towards him at a speed that no creature its size could achieve without the help of magic. The wind behind its feet solidified to keep it from losing any traction which allowed it to use its full force without risk of slipping. "-shi-" Walter cut his own swear off with a crack of thunder from the pipe at his side activating.

Walter had depressed the knob while the Silent Stalker was still in mid air going straight for his face. A metal club was catapulted out of the pipe by a full force Thunder Wave. The recoil from the force of the wave being blasted back off of the bottom of the club back into the pipe made him stagger slightly to the side. With the origin point of the spell being the inside wall of the pipe and not the bottom of the metal club, there was very little recoil considering the incredibly high pressures inside of the pipe.

The metal pipe projectile hit the horse sized cat under the chin and the sound of crunching bone could be heard. The cat's momentum was instantly sent into a spin. The cat flipped nose over tail as its head was sent up and backwards while its body was still trying to go forwards. It did an entire flip almost in place before it thudded back down onto the ground on all fours. The metal club was yanked back into Walter's outstretched right hand by a magical tether. The perfectly round club was covered in silver enchantments that blended in almost perfectly with the shining steel of the main body. The handle was wrapped in leather for comfort but the entire thing was only two inches across at the widest point. It also sounded and looked hollow.

The cat's eyes relaxed into a neutral half slit half saucer. Its chin had a perfect indent of the round pommel of Walter's club. Its eyelids half closed and then its legs lost all strength and it dropped the rest of the way to the ground with a thud. Walter just shook his head. "I tried to warn you." He told the cat and walked over to it.

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"It looks like it'd make a good cloak." Isaac commented. "Unless you were planning on setting it free. I don't know how tree huggers handle these situations."

Walter sighed as he stared down at it. "If we were out on the road, I'd leave it be." He explained. "The issue is, if it's dumb or smart enough to force its way through the wards, it can't be left alone. The wards should've kept giving it mental nudges to go the other direction. Confusion and headaches 're next and then muted senses after that. It somehow pressed through all of those just to go after me, my breakfast, and my horse."

"So you are going to kill it." Isaac surmised. "Or is there something else you can do in this kind of situation."

"If it made it this far, and I was traveling with a ranger or druid, I'd've made them adopt this very large kitten." Walter informed him. "But alas, we're having cat for lunch and dinner. It's gonna take me a while to strip this thing, unless one of you can help?"

"If you can talk me through what you need me to do, sure, as long as it gets us back on the road faster." Isaac replied.

"And I as well." Lenna added.

Walter nodded. "The first issue is killing it." He explained. "Nearly every part of the creature is valuable. Thankfully the brains are just as valuable once they are turned to mush." As he said that, the large cat started to stir. It blinked its eyes and tried to raise its head. It only managed to get its head a few inches off of the ground before Walter slammed the top of his club down on top of it with another thunderclap. The large cat's head slammed back down onto the ground so hard that it bounced. Its head had taken a fully powered Thunder Wave without the force being spread out too much across the rest of it. The skull crunched under the magical impact and the jaw finished shattering upon impact with the ground.

Walter sheathed his club and let it fall the last few inches into place entirely by its own weight. Somehow, the enchantment didn't activate and it wasn't launched off the side of the mountain.

"That is a pretty neat weapon." Isaac commented as he and Lenna approached.

"It's my Jack of Clubs." Walter told him with a very self amused grin.

Isaac winced in pain as his brain tried to connect the name to something that wasn't there. "Walter, is everything you say or do going to give me a headache?" He questioned.

Walter shrugged. "Probably. At least until it doesn't anymore. Based on what I've seen, eventually your brain'll fill in the blanks around those memories and it shouldn't hurt anymore." He explained. "Wanna hear what I named the rest of them?"

Isaac waved him off. "Please, not now."

Walter chuckled. "Fine. They're all pretty good." He assured him. "But the first step, we need to figure out what parts of the fur can be cut. For a cloak, you need the back, sides, and limbs more than the belly but the belly fur is the softest."

Isaac eyed the large cat. It looked nearly as big as Copper but she wasn't exactly going to win any awards when it came to her size. Speaking of the horse, she had hardly stirred from all of the commotion. She had paid enough attention to realize that Walter had everything handled and then went back to sleep like the entire interaction was normal. "Is it even big enough to separate the belly fur and the rest of it? It isn't a very wide cat."

Walter nodded. "Cats're stretchy." He explained. "Usually big cats are better for fur armor or clothes than for cloaks because of that. We can stretch out the fur ahead of time while we are curing it though so that shouldn't be too big of an issue with the finished product. Though, I might just end up trading it when we get to the fort between here and the capital."

"How many skills do you have?" Isaac couldn't help but ask. Walter seemed to be able to do far more jobs than any one person Isaac had met so far.

"A bunch of tools, stealth, perception, horse riding." Walter shrugged. "Some combat ones too I guess. Why?"

"You can tan hides?" Isaac questioned in return.

Walter nodded. "I can tan, sew, stitch, carve, forge to a degree, engrave, plate, infuse, defuse, and even put all of those together to make a single product." He explained. "All good artificers are capable of this much at least. We gotta be able to make the object to handle the new enchantment half of the time. Sure, there are times when we are given whatever medium we are going to work with, but those cases are kinda rare once you leave the college. In fact, any wandering artificers that you see are probably out looking for the parts and pieces of their next creation."

"That's a lot." Isaac commented. "How many years did it take you to learn all of those things?"

Walter shrugged. "I dunno, I learned most of them as I went. I've been an artificer for over a hundred years, and as a former human, that's a long ass time." He said and then knelt down and tried to get his shoulder under the puma's arm. "Help me flip 'em over."

Isaac and Lenna grabbed a leg each and heaved until the cat was laying on its back. They spread the legs out and then Walter retrieved a knife that looked sharp enough to cut through steel if the multiple stacked layers of sharpness were any indication. Walter made a small incision around the cat's jugular and then plugged the hole with a vial. He had quickly ripped the cork off of the vial and then stuffed it into the hole. In the short time that it was exposed to the air, the duo could hear it sucking in ridiculous amounts of air. They watched as the cat started to shrink from all of its blood being sucked out through one of its largest arteries.

Isaac shivered at the sight. "Is that what a death by vampire looks like?" He wondered aloud.

Walter nodded. "Yeah, more or less. I haven't seen one in a long time though. I actually thought up the Blood Collection Vial after witnessing the aftermath of a vamp attack." He informed them. "Once he's drained, we can start skinning him. Then he needs deboned. Each organ needs to be wrapped or jarred for later. The teeth, claws, and rune bones will need to be separated from the rest of the skeleton. We'll need to make sure not to damage any of it while we do this. Are you up for it?" Walter questioned the duo.

Isaac shrugged. "It beats waiting around for another hour, but, Walter, what about your breakfast."

Walter looked over at his food and sighed. "It'll have to get cold." He grumbled. "The sooner we strip this, the better condition it'll be in."

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