The Hunters
Outsiders paid to kill crawlers, five hundred kills in, and just cut off from the outside world.
Story so far
The Hunters get their first hard numbers this chapter. The AI announces that The Hunt is on and that hunters have already claimed over five hundred crawlers — but also that crawlers are showing serious spunk, with a record number of hunters fallen this season, over fifty so far, so many that their families are starting to complain. She frames the deaths of the hunters as crawlers showing initiative, which tells the audience exactly how expendable both sides are.
The real blow comes next. Because of public concern and outcry, and because of a new court injunction the production claims to fully support, hunters may no longer communicate directly with anyone outside the dungeon. Some parties were concerned they had an unfair advantage, and the production agrees. Boy, the announcer says, this really made some of them angry — maybe it will teach them not to try to sue so much. The lawsuit and the injunction are Quasar's work, and Carl recognises it instantly, bumping fists with Princess Donut over a playing field that is suddenly much more level.
Vrah is what they look like in the field: a disciplined aerial unit of five mantis aliens dropping onto a wooded trail, beheading a cartload of crawlers, looting the bodies on camera, and wearing the heads afterward. Katia wonders aloud how The Butchers Masquerade will keep the hunters from the crawlers at all.
Appearance
Varied and alien — the ones on screen are mantis creatures who fly, decapitate in formation, and mount trophies on their carapaces.
Role
The season's antagonist class — outsiders hunting crawlers for profit and audience, now stripped of their outside communications.
Relationships
Sources — 13 recorded facts, by chapter
- Registered alien participants who pay to hunt crawlers for gear, starting this season at level 50.
- Predators of the Desperado Club, not yet unleashed on the floor but already lurking at club entrances.
- Outside players due to be released into the ninth floor to hunt crawlers when the countdown expires.
- The purple-dot participants of the sixth floor, alien predators who claim the named city and hunt crawlers for sport.
- Alien big-game hunters loosed on the ninth floor, thirty-five of whom died in Carl's opening strike.
- The 1,013 paying outsiders staged in Zockau who will be loosed on the crawlers when the hunt opens.
- Sequestered predators released onto the floor to hunt crawlers, now immune to explosions and led in part by Vrah.
- Outside hunters converging on Point Mongo, whose first casualty falls to one of Carl's traps.
- Outsiders stalking crawlers for sport, limited by NPC-style equipment slots rather than bottomless inventories.
- Outworld killers who divided the floor between them in a saferoom and are being fed live crawler positions.
- The outworlder predators the whole chapter is defended against, without one ever appearing.
- Alien predators loose on the floor, thinning out, and slated to mingle with crawlers at a ball.
- Outsiders paid to kill crawlers, five hundred kills in, and just cut off from the outside world.