Devils Temptation
Super-Earth
- Joined
- Jan 14, 2021
A good hunter knows his prey's habits better than his own

CRUNCH.
SNAP.
CRACK.
Blood littered along the forest floor, bodies mangled and left to rot in the undergrowth. The way the hunters had been dispatched was never consistent. Some had been strangled to death with wires cutting into their throats. Others had their arteries torn out with claw or fang marks. Some had been caught in traps that looked no different than the ones that they had brought for this hunt. What was it they had been hunting...? Wolves? Deer? Birds? People. Or - rather - they certainly would not refer to them as people. Demi-humans. Demons. In the eyes of those hunters, they were nothing more than expensive animals to be poached. There was no difference between a pig being raised thick and fat just to be slaughtered and a demon growing older and mature such that their bodies could be harvested more lucratively. Horns, hearts, tails, fangs... everything from medicinal properties to jewelry to weapons - there was always a use for a demon. Those in particular that were exceedingly rare had, likewise, been hunted to near extinction... in fact that was one such case for a specific breed of demi-humans.

So lucrative, in fact, that stories had begun about the illustrious breed.
Draconic Devils.
Capable of growing to immense sizes, towering over their human relatives by nearly a foot on average - they had sharper, jagged horns like onyx shards growing out of their hair and draconic, thick vestigial tails that acted more as symbols of status in their societies than anything else. Both fetched high prices but not nearly as much as the crown jewel of a Draconic Devil. Their heart. Potent resources to be used in batteries that could fuel magical artifacts and technology for centuries. Just one heart was enough to set a hunter for life, enough to make even the most veteran of hunters salivate with the prospect of getting their hands on one... but it was hardly an easy catch. Just like humans, they were capable of elaborate thought, capable of planning and fighting back. To even attempt to take one down or to attack a village of them was a tale that oftentimes ended in complete and utterly annihilation for whatever hunter had been mindless enough to attack. The only ones who had any chance against opponents like them had been specialists, hunters who trained their entire lives to take down those beasts. Even though seldom succeeded... but in the case that they had --

Men, women, children - none of them were spared. The former two were always slaughtered first and extracted immediately. The latter was raised in captivity until they were capable of being harvested at which point their miserable lives were promptly ended by their captors. Humans that had bothered living alongside those beasts would follow the same fate. Homes taken and slaughtered on the spot... children taken to be indoctrinated into the same society as the ones that had torn apart their homes. That was the inevitably brutality of hunting. So long as there was a profit to be made, people would always find a way to make it. One of the most lucrative hits had been in a small, sacred forest village by the name of Aeston that was home to a mixed community of demons and humans.
Stories just like any other village were abundant here.
Children racing down the cobblestone paths, laughing, drawing along them while being chided by their parents...
Elderly storytellers huddled around fires telling tales of ancestors long before that founded the village...
Young men and women escaping out the watchful, prying eyes of the villagers to rendezvous privately in the woods surrounding Aeston...
Perhaps even a fussier pair of childhood sweethearts, one clinging all too eagerly to the other in spite of their differences in breed, or size, or age, or experience --
It was nothing different to what anyone else could have expected out of a human village. Nothing that could not be sympathized with, nothing that could not be understood by the hunters. Yet it was all burned down all the same. Aeston had an especially potent breed of Draconic Devils. Magical capacity well above even the most average of the demons and as such the constant attacks were too much. Inevitably, the village fell. Inevitably, everything was razed to the ground. Inevitably, all of the demons were slaughtered and the children taken... inevitably, it was just a thread buried in time with no survivors.
ɴᴏᴡ ᴘʟᴀʏɪɴɢ: ʙᴏʀɴ ᴏꜰ ᴀ ꜱᴛᴀʀ
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CRUNCH.
SNAP.
CRACK.
Rumors of a stray Draconic Devil had attracted the attention of a wandering group of specialist hunters... it was meant to be a hunt like any other. The younger huntress had been groomed to be an ideal killing machine but something about that particular incident was... off. A group of four hunters had gone in to scout the area and none had arrived back. No signs of their tracks, no signs of any struggle, just a deep emptiness looming over the bulk of the forest as if inviting the remaining dozen to tread in. One isolated demon was far too big an opportunity to pass up and so, against their better judgement, they sought to overwhelm him with numbers. What a mistake that had been. The deaths had begun to pile up almost instantaneously. A hunter that had been plucked off the vanguard with a sudden trapped noose snapping down upon his neck and immediately breaking it before the others could even look back to cut him out of it. Those that tried to escape were met with the same fate, of what felt like something inside their heads knowing every move they would make. Legs torn into by spikes, a sudden looming and shadowy figure lurching out to tear chunks of flesh out with surgical precision before vanishing, or for some terrified, screaming hunters to just vanish without a trace into the shadows. The corps began to whittle down until all that was left was... her. Someone who hardly should have been in a group like that.
With people like those.
Maybe she had memories of her own that did not seem to match the indoctrination she was forced through...



Familiar.
In that moment of pure terror and instincts, maybe it was not so readily obvious but something about him was familiar. Darker hair, piercing red eyes. Black-touched horns that spilled out from the top of his head... he would look familiar, but also not. It was not her he would recognize him first, but rather - "...You --" - the demon spoke, mouth trembling and hands going momentarily slack as an utterly crushed expression would overtake those glaringly hate-filled red eyes of his. Dropping the woman onto the floor before he had completely wrung her neck, he would take a step backwards. His vision was getting blurry. Faint, wetter nestles of droplets accumulating along the edges of his eyes while he took the sight of her in fully.
Her statue, the color of her hair, the shade of her eyes, the curves of her face.
"Why...? Why are you here...? No -- it doesn't make sense... there was nothing left there so why the hell are you alive here?!" Aeston had been a genocide. A complete eradication of the population. Everyone who was once from there had now laid dead in the dirt. All except for... a demon boy who had miraculously survived the slaughter - and a human girl taken in by the order that had murdered her entire family and everyone she had known just to raise her to be the very same cruel, sadistic hunter that had ruined her own idyllic life. For a few moments he could do nothing but stare. Throat tightening and an insufferable itch erupting at the root of his sharper nails and the drip of gore and blood that were nestled underneath them. He wanted to throw up.
"D-Don't..." No. No, it was not the time for hesitation. She was dressed like them, moving like them -- "DON'T FUCKING MOVE IF YOU WANT TO LIVE -- your name... tell me what YOUR name is!" Slipping low, he yanked the dagger out of the scabbard of a lying dead hunter-- holding it right in front of himself at the far smaller woman. Please. If there was any God out there, he hoped... he hoped that he would not hear her name out of that woman's mouth. An ugly coincidence. He didn't want to know that she was alive, that they had taken her -- that they had turned her into one of them. He didn't want to end the girl who mattered more to him than anything else in the world from back then...