Motif · Book 7, This Inevitable Ruin

The hunters

Tourists on the sixth floor, the Hunting Grounds, as Mordecai first describes them on the third: 'brave and insane' people who pay to go down and hunt crawlers — expensive and dangerous, with no protections for the hunters, so that 'every season a handful of rich dumbasses get themselves killed.'

Segment appearances

• Chapter 1 — Porthus; Welcome to Faction Wars
• Chapter 11 — Tipid; fifty thousand
• Chapter 15 — The Rolling Battle Formation Ball
• Chapter 18 — The minor quorum; code red
• Chapter 25 — Empress, you have visitors
• Chapter 26 — Milk; the Empress marked
• Chapter 35 — Volteeg; the dwarves' tunnel
• Chapter 40 — Little Günter; a dragon chain
• Chapter 42 — The warlord council; Princess Vinata
• Chapter 44 — The Beautiful Place; Blood Hunter
• Chapter 72 — Diah
• Chapter 79 — Tart
• Chapter 80 — Inside the dragon
• Chapter 82 — Ursensus

Progression

'The hunters killed everyone,' Porthus says of Larracos — every NPC in the city (ch. 1). The Posse's troopers wear the sixth-floor hunters' purple on the minimap, with a pink outline, and the credit chit came off an orc hunter (ch. 11); Prepotente has a score to settle with the lead producer of the Blood Hunter program (ch. 18), which the Blood Sultanate made (ch. 44). Carl's hunter-seeker automatons find D'Nadia's guards (ch. 25, ch. 26), and he reflects that the hunters, at least, never hid what they were (ch. 26). Vinata's honour guard are former hunters (ch. 46); Lucia has killed twenty (ch. 72); the Reavers run hunter-seeker dogs (ch. 80).