One night of thinking, and the hunting plan took shape.

The central problem with killing the Six-Horned Dragon was extraction — getting it out of the crevice. Two viable approaches existed.

Option one: night hunting. The Six-Horned Dragon retreated from light, which meant darkness might draw it out. The problem was that even lured to the surface, it could retreat back into the crevice at any moment. Killing it before it escaped would require delivering enormous damage in a very short window — pouring the entire eighty-liter Pepper Water stock onto it, ideally. But the Six-Horned Dragon wasn't going to hold still, and the Activity cores on its head were exactly what he couldn't afford to damage. Miss the body, hit the horns, and the most valuable part of the operation was ruined. If it retreated underground after taking damage, it was gone.

Option two: the dragon fishing plan. Lure it out in daylight, hook it, reel it in, kill it at the surface.

He chose fishing.

"To hook it and drag it out of that crevice, I need a proper rig."

He drafted the design on paper. The finished concept was: the Two-Vehicle Five-Cable Pulley Array Dragon Fishing Rig.

Five components: ironwood stakes, steel cable, pulley block assemblies, a winch, and a hook.

The hook would be designed as a collapsible umbrella shape — closed when swallowed, detonated open by a small explosive charge once it was inside the Six-Horned Dragon's stomach. For strength, he'd fabricate the hook from the Golden Fleece Goat horns — Activity-bearing, hard, and symmetrical. The line connecting it to the rest of the rig would be made from the Swiftclaw Leopard's tail whip.

The ironwood stakes were anchor points. He'd cut a batch of evolved trees — hardness comparable to steel — and drive twenty stake groups into the hillside, five stakes per group. Each group would anchor one cable run, connecting to the winch and pulley assemblies.

The winch was a large rotatable steel drum fixed into the hillside, with handles for manual turning, used to draw in the cable running through the…