At first, Smith was stuck speechless, not by what had been said, but by the resulting inner conflict. Half of his brain wanted to laugh in the mage's face, while the other half wanted to unload a clip of lead into him and then walk away. If nothing else, the guy had broken several basic tenets of a standard business transaction, which meant working for him would be a no-go. For one, he hadn't named a monetary sum as payment. He'd instead mentioned a 'reward', of unknown value, without even a hint at what it really was. For two, he'd framed the job like it was some sort of holy crusade, and that sent up eight different kinds of warning flag. Working for fanatics was always a bad idea, and Smith had learned that the hard way. 'Fanatic' and 'lunatic' were synonyms, as far as Smith was concerned. Finally, he'd used magic to communicate with them, without an obvious reason. While Smith's trinkets kept his mind from being read, it was a one-way filter, and if nothing else, it made him extremely weary to even be around the guy, as people who used magic that nonchalantly put Smith on edge even more than Russians.

He was about to mention of all this, when he remembered something. Something very important, about something the mage had said. He'd mentioned the eleventh hour, and how things would change. Something about it had triggered a memory, and that meant a couple of seconds of Smith standing silent, trying to figure out what was so important about the eleventh hour. While his memories from the sword were flawless, they were still memories, and required a bit of effort to search through, as much as any person needed help drudging up old memories, but even more so because of the shear number of memories Smith had to drudge through.

Something was important about the eleventh hour, but not just because of the time. There was something else, something about the date. What day was it? Smith had seen the date, on the newspaper he was reading. He hadn't picked up on it at the time, but something about it had seemed important to him. That wasn't unusual, though, basically any given date had been important to one of the swords owners for one reason or another, but this suddenly seemed much more urgent, now that the eleventh hour had been mentioned. A certain mage, who had held the sword once, had been doing a study on magic, and how it seemed to slowly change over time, stretching the bounds of reality as it did so, until finally...

"You're... You're talking about the convergence, aren't you? That's what this is about." Smith didn't need an answer, he knew that's what it was. The dates all matched up perfectly with the research notes he remembered, everything falling in to place with the memory as it came rushing back to him, for the first time in this case. The research was old, so the chances were that the name of the event was off, but what it represented had been a cause of concern several hundred years ago, when mages had first started theorizing about it. Now, it seemed that it may finally be coming true, and if that were the case.

"Son of a-" And with that, Smith began a string of curses and fowl language that spanned centuries of history, speaking in tongues that hadn't been heard for centuries, using phrases that had lost their original meaning before anyone there's grandparents had been born, all the way to modern slang, touching on every language from English to ancient Egyptian, speaking in multiple dialects of each, with French and Russian both included at one point or three, and didn't stop until he was breathing too heavily to form words around gasps.

And after all of that, he still didn't feel that he had accurately depicted his level of frustration with how thoroughly boned they all were. If he'd had even the slightest hint of a notion that shoving his sword through the hick would fix his problem, he'd have aimed up and starting from the groin out of spite. The one event in all of predictable history he had taken drastic steps to avoid getting involved in, he had suddenly stepped right in the middle of, and all because he made a single slip and decided to check on a job on the exact wrong fucking day.

"Well, isn't this just freakin' peachy!" He continues after he can finally breath again, pointing a finger at the mage in suspenders. "You've got two minutes to convince me that putting a bullet in you will somehow make me more fucked than I already am, or I'm going to do it just for therapeutic reasons. And don't think I won't. Magic may be about to go wonky, but I've got enough time to activate the Ptolemian Gateway I've got strapped to my thigh, and you've just given me reason to believe that's a reasonable alternative." A Ptolemian Gateway, named after its creator, the Egyptian warlock Ptolemy, was a suicidal spell that sacrificed the life of the wielder at a moment's notice to summon a gate way that momentarily overlapped a thirty foot radius centered on the caster with complete void, simultaneously making any magical defense impossible while tearing everything in the area to shreds.

It was a powerful, complicated, and extremely dangerous spell that was well known among the experienced magical community. The secrets of its creation had been lost millennium ago, and only a few preconstructed versions still existed. Smith had been informed of their existence via the sword, and had actually managed to obtain one. It was presently locked up in a huge safe surrounded by guard spells in the basement of his underground bunker, completely inert and even partially damaged-not beyond repair, but beyond his ability to repair-and Smith knew all of this.

However, the Hick did not, and Smith had centuries of experience in how to run a bluff, and what magical items he did have were more than enough to keep even a level 2 from divining the truth through magic alone. Smith knew all of this, and was bagging on that fact to get a little more information before liquid fecal matter hit the proverbial rotisserie air-circulation apparatus.