The Primal Hunter

Jake carefully studied the mana structure surrounding Eternal Hunger while taking some mental notes and getting himself into the right mindset to continue his research. As mentioned, he had been actively working on this for several months, but in truth, he had been wanting to do something like this ever since the day he first made Protean Arrow. No… earlier than that. Ever since he got the Sin weapon.

Eternal Hunger still had a problem even after it became mythical rarity, though: it remained strictly a melee weapon. This likely came to be because of the weapon’s Origin and how he’d made it in the first place. He had altered a melee weapon in the form of the transforming chimera weapon from Yalsten, and these properties had clearly been kept and only further empowered.

The majority of Sim-Jake’s Records merging with the weapon also hadn’t helped, as Jake’s alter ego had been nearly solely focused on melee combat in his final days, only further cementing Eternal Hunger as a melee weapon. Jake had consulted the description many times during the last few months, and he couldn’t help but bite onto the same thing time and time again… not once did it specify Eternal Hunger could only be used as a melee weapon:

[Eternal Hunger (Mythical)] – A weapon born of eternal hunger - a living sin of consumption, forever starving, forever seeking sustenance. Given form by the [Redacted] Hunter, this new myth still holds properties of its Origin as a weapon created by vampires from the core of a Chimera, allowing it to change shape and adapt to the will of its master. Origin has been further altered by [Redacted], giving birth to the Eternal Shadow of the [Redacted] Hunter. This weapon is eternally Soulbound to its creator; their souls are one and the same, making Eternal Hunger indestructible as long as the Hunter persists. Any attack made with this weapon will absorb energy from the target. Foes slain by the owner of this weapon will have their souls absorbed. Can consume absorbed souls. Take pride as you wield hunger incarnate. Enchantments: Curse of Eternal Hunger. Souldrinker. Soul Consumption. Eternal Shadow.

Requirements: Soulbound

Looking at the description carefully, one could even argue it should be possible to make Eternal Hunger into an arrow without any problems as the weapon adapted to the will of its master. He also knew some aspects worked when not in melee. The Souldrinker enchantment of Eternal Hunger worked on anything he killed, even if he never took out the weapon during the fight. Eternal Shadow could also be used at all times, and shit, his Eternal Shadow was made up of curse energy and could shoot with a bow and arrow.

Eternal Shadow did give one clue that what Jake was trying to do wouldn’t be easy, though… because while the Eternal Shadow was made of curse energy, the arrow it shot would still be of arcane energy, and it was only when it attacked in melee it used an exact replica of Eternal Hunger.

That didn’t mean Jake had given up, even if it seemed like an arduous task to use Eternal Hunger as a ranged fighter, and ever since he got the weapon, he’d continually experimented with it.

Jake had naturally tried to make Eternal Hunger into a bow way back, but it wasn’t made for it. And not just because he couldn’t turn the black malleable metal into a string, but because none of the properties of Eternal Hunger worked if he used it to shoot something. Yes, Jake had tried to ”shoot” things using Eternal Hunger by pretty much just using it as a catapult of sorts, but that hadn’t worked at all. The system wouldn’t recognize Eternal Hunger as a bow, even when he made it into one and tied a string himself, so it was back to the drawing board.

The thing is, Jake wasn’t the type to give up and had kept trying other things, only to get instantly roadblocked at every turn.

He’d once upon a time thought that perhaps the solution to this was easy enough: just turn Eternal Hunger into an arrow and shoot that… but that obviously hadn’t worked. If not, Jake would have been doing that all along. It had several problems, with the first one pretty obvious and why, perhaps even if he could make it into an arrow, it wouldn’t be that good of an idea: Eternal Hunger took time to change shape.

Usually, it took him several minutes to transform Eternal Hunger from one weapon shape into another, and that was while he focused intently on doing so. The weapon was malleable, but it was more like shaping liquid metal than playdough, and it took focus and time to do it properly.

One could probably easily spot the problem with Jake then trying to shoot Eternal Arrow like an arrow: he wouldn’t be able to use it as a melee weapon afterward. Jake had naturally instantly recognized this as a challenge and did have some considerations to alleviate the problem, but one thing at a time. Because he had one way bigger problem with his current idea:

Eternal Hunger couldn’t be transformed into an arrow.

Not to misunderstand, Jake could transform it into the shape of an arrow. He could make it look like a perfect metal arrow, big or small, and even make an identical copy of his Arcane Arrows just with Eternal Hunger… but it still wasn’t an arrow. At least not in the eyes of the system.

Needless to say, this wasn’t a good thing. Nearly every single one of Jake’s ranged fighting skills wouldn’t work if what he shot wasn’t an arrow. The system instead recognized Jake shooting Eternal Hunger akin to if he had just thrown the weapon. While having a mythical rarity spear thrown at you could do some damage for sure, it was nothing compared to even a regular arrow shot by Jake.

This was the primary issue Jake was facing when it came to making his upgrade to Protean Arrow, but also the reason why he was trying to make a fusion of Protean Arrow and Eternal Hunger in the first place. He recognized that he couldn’t make the system recognize Eternal Hunger as an arrow, but what if he could make it recognize it as just another ingredient that made up an arrow?

He already knew he could use Eternal Hunger as a catalyst and power source when doing alchemy, meaning it wasn’t solely a weapon and that the system had some flexibility. Was it really too much to ask to have it also qualify as an ingredient in a Protean Arrow? Jake sure didn’t think it was.

Referring to his research notes – because, yes, Jake actually felt the need to take notes to help jumpstart his memory of all the shit he had tried - he saw notes on his attempt of wrapping Eternal Shadow to a Protean Arrow with mana strings before and how that hadn’t worked. He had also tried making a simple shape and put Eternal Hunger inside of it, but once more, no dice.

So, he went to something way simpler to try and prove a concept. First, he took a dagger. Definitely not an arrow, right? Then, he took a stick. Still not an arrow. From there, he tied the dagger to the stick… didn’t quite work to make an arrow. However, when he made some more modifications, such as making it more aerodynamic, reshaping the blade a little bit, and putting it all together, suddenly he had an arrow.

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What’s more, when he took it apart again, the dagger returned to being recognized as a melee weapon, showing it was possible for something to change based on what it was combined with. However, he knew it likely had something to do with the Records of an object and how the system recognized it, which was proven right when he tried his same little experiment with enchanted items.

One tended to amplify the Records one wanted when making a magical item. Why would one bother using some of the innate Records of a dagger to also make it a good arrow? No, it was better to focus the Records solely on the weapon’s identity as a melee weapon to make it stronger where it was intended to be used.

However despite his challenges, Jake did find some success. Rather than Eternal Hunger itself, he’d several times constructed an arrow filled with curse energy, but his biggest breakthrough was when he transmuted a cheap spear by filling it with the Sin curse. It had definitely been a spear, and the system recognized it as a melee weapon with Fangs of Man, and when he tried to shoot it with his bow, it hadn’t counted as an arrow, so it definitely hadn’t been considered one.

Yet he managed to integrate it into a Protean Arrow after only a few hours of work. He had carefully constructed a formation inside the shell of the arrow, borrowing from his experience in the Nevermore Challenge Dungeon heavily. It hadn’t been his best work, but in the end, he managed to somehow push it over some threshold where it recognized the cursed spear as just part of an arrow and not an arrow by itself. All it had been was a power source for the Protean Arrow. One part of a whole.

To make things even better, the spear actually amplified the power of the arrow due to its far more durable form, courtesy of not being made of pure energy. To make it clear, it didn’t actually help him create an overall more powerful Protean Arrow to use a shitty common-rarity transmuted spear with it, as he had to spend too much time and energy on making the two compatible. But, it proved the concept, and Jake was certain that should he make an arrow successfully integrating Eternal Hunger, it would be far from weak.

It wasn’t something that could be done quickly, though. Jake had tried using the same method as with the common-rarity spear, but it had instantly failed. The problem wasn’t the idea itself but the power of the formation and Protean Arrow. The skill and how he used it simply wasn’t powerful enough to integrate a mythical weapon, so after a long time of consideration and testing, he landed on what he was currently doing:

Making the shell for the arrow… one tiny step at a time.

With Eternal Hunger as its base, Jake had very slowly begun to form the Protean Arrow around it. He did so from the bottom up, which was why the structure looked only half-complete. It had been three weeks since Jake began doing this, and the work to create the arrow was indeed long and arduous.

Hunkering down, Jake slowly got back to work in earnest. The space where he made the arrow was kept incredibly stable at all times to make sure the in-progress formation was kept intact even when Jake wasn’t there, and as he began to work on it, he loosened up the surrounding area where he would keep making the formation.

With a careful touch, he began extending the stable arcane mana he used to inscribe the formation, giving him a bit more space to work. Runes were also being infused into the surface of Eternal Hunger, once more stabilized by his arcane mana to not have the weapon absorb the energy. He needed to ensure that the arrow itself could tap into the powers of Eternal Hunger, but not the other way around, as he wasn’t looking to just feed a curse that could never be sated.

For the next hour, he worked intently as arcane energy now covered nearly a centimeter more of Eternal Hunger than when he started while still remaining stable. His mana was rapidly being drained, but a mana potion kept him going as he kept making the most complex formation he’d ever made in his life. Every single inch of Eternal Hunger would be covered in arcane energy that was infused with layers of runes and tiny magic circles, interlinked using the concepts of the Protean Arrow.

This was truly the only way Jake saw to have the Protean Arrow overcome Eternal Hunger. In pure energy and power, Eternal Hunger far surpassed anything else Jake had, so if he wanted Protean Arrow to be capable of making use of the mythical weapon, he needed to boost its Records by doing something else. Complexity was the most obvious answer and, thus, the one Jake had chosen.

All he was doing was hoping to hit that mysterious and unknown threshold where the system decided his efforts were good enough. He just needed one good push for Protean Arrow to upgrade in the direction of allowing him to encompass and use Eternal Hunger.

He also knew he only really had one good shot at this. Right now, the formation was naturally still only a work in progress and entirely dormant, and he would only know if his plan actually worked the second he activated the formation.

One could compare it to Jake currently making a large circuit board… scratch that; he was making an entire modern computer, except he couldn’t run any power through it before everything was fully complete. Should he have fucked up too badly anywhere along the way, the moment power was turned on, the entire thing could be fried. Or, perhaps even worse, it wouldn’t be able to do the job he needed it for.

Staying with the computer metaphor, it was as if he needed the computer to hit a certain performance level. Should the computer be too bad, it wouldn’t be able to run the program it was created for, and even if it didn’t outright crash, it would certainly damage itself while proving Jake simply wasn’t capable of making something able to do the job properly.

The only good thing about this kind of work was that Jake had been able to do a lot of it while injured. Now that he was fully healed, he could speed up a bit, and as he got comfortable and more confident, his construction speed also got faster.

This entire project honestly reminded Jake a bit of one of the Puzzle Cube challenges, and the gift from his Chosen ceremony definitely helped Jake make this happen. His mana control had always been impeccable, and now it was better than ever as he kept focus as more and more of the Protean Arrow took shape.

Hours passed, as Jake had to take intermitting breaks to recover mentally and restore his resources, with even these breaks there to theorize and write down the next part of the formation he had to create. The shell of the Protean Arrow had a total of five layers in most places, with each layer containing its own runes and magical scripts.

The entire structure had a spiral construction of sorts, with every layer directly connected to one another somewhere or another. Countless mana strings also functioned as bridges between the different layers, despite there only being a few millimeters between them in most places, with even these mana strings filled to the brim with small runes.

In surface area alone, this formation was utterly massive, especially when you took its small size into account. Mana-wise, the Protean Arrow would contain dozens of Jake’s full mana pool once he was done, and in truth, with just how much he’d already improved Protean Arrow just doing this process, he was confident in an upgrade… but he didn’t try to push for one yet. Not before the arrow was complete. Jake knew he skipped many steps and pretty much reached for the top from the get-go.

One thought had struck Jake during the meeting earlier regarding Ell’Hakan. They talked about how to trap him and prevent his escape… but was any of that necessary if he didn’t even get the chance to run? If the very first opening arrow dealt lethal damage, even if it couldn’t outright kill him, significantly weakened him and made him unable to put up a proper fight afterward?

No matter what, how could he go wrong with making his opening strike even stronger?

He just hoped he could finish this project before communication with the rest of the multiverse opened up once more… and with every passing day, he kept working on the Protean Arrow. His feeling it was soon time only grew, especially when he got a report from Miranda that now only three red planets remained in the galaxy.

With there being two merely a day later… and only a single one remaining not even a full day after that.

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