Hunter’s Hunger [STORY]
Deviljho are so scary! They’re absolutely massive, always stomping around like they own the place, with those jaws that could snap a hunter (or me) in half without even trying... Big thank you to
volentis for giving this terrifying walking hunger some well deserved recognition, and for drawing one so beautifully terrifying! My fight or flight response is confused and a little into it...
The canopy split apart in a blast of flame and fire.
“Clear!” roared the hunter, his greatsword still glowing with the residue of a wyvern’s fire round. He stood amid the smoldering remains of a Deviljho nest deep within the Rotten Vale.
Chunks of Deviljho egg and acidic bile sizzled in the mud around him, the thick, humid air stil stained by the beast’s lingering stench.
Months of tracking the unpredictable brute wyvern had paid off. The Guild suspected the Deviljho population was mutating. Smarter, stronger and nesting. That was never their nature. Everyone knew that Deviljho lived to do two things. Kill and eat.
He’d torched the nest using the best blastnuts he could find, rigged with a flame sac for ignition. The explosion had been massive. The clutch was destroyed.
Most of it, anyway.
One egg had landed close to the blast, cracked wide open and seared against a rock. The membrane had ruptured, and the yolk, thick and gelatinous, had cooked in the nest’s own burning heat. The explosion had seared the outer layer to a dark brown crisp, but the inside had set like a giant fried egg, still steaming and hissing at the edges.
The hunter staggered forward, holding his side. His health was low, dangerously low, armor dented, potion supply empty. His last mega potion had been downed fighting off a furious Girros pack drawn to the Deviljho scent trail.
And his Felyne... poor thing had been knocked out in the initial blast, crumpled in a heap under a broken vine trap.
He groaned and dropped to one knee, panting in the rising heat. Victory had been brought for him and the Guild, but there was no way he’d be able to trek back like this. The adrenaline was wearing off, and now every inch of his body screamed with bruises, burns, and exhaustion.
His stomach growled.
“Of all the damn times…”
There was no meat. No steak. No rations left. But that yolk… still steaming, golden and massive… was food.
It reeked. Rich, musky, faintly acidic. But it also smelled hot and alive, like sulfur and cooked blood. It triggered something deep in his gut, something hungry.
He fumbled at his gear, pulling out his collapsible rotisserie spit. The same one he’d used to roast Aptonoth meat on long hunts. It clicked open with a satisfying snap.
He approached the fried Deviljho yolk, the spit stabbed cleanly through the center, dragging a line of molten yellow with it. It wobbled slightly, but held. It was big enough, easily the size of a roast, to be eaten right from the skewer.
He raised it toward his mouth, hesitating for only a moment. This wasn’t sanctioned rations. No Guild approval. No knowledge on what Deviljho embryonic fluid might do to a human system.
But his body didn’t care.
His jaw locked. He took a bite.
The outer crisp cracked between his teeth. The inside was soft, searing hot, like eating a fire blasted custard soaked in blood and bone marrow. It coated his tongue with a strange, tingling heat that slid down his throat like liquid muscle.
He paused. His vision blurred for a second. The trees wobbled. The world twitched.
Then his stomach lurched.
He doubled over, gripping his gut. The egg dropped, half eaten, into the mud. His insides burned, but not with pain… with heat. A heat that throbbed from his core outward. His heart began to pound faster, harder.
His fingertips trembled. The hair on his arms stood on end. It felt like he’d just drank pure Might Seed extract mixed with Fire Herb and Dragonfell Berries.
“Ugghuuhh… w-what the hell was… in that thing?!”
He tore at his collar, desperate for air, but even the Vale’s noxious fog felt cold compared to the molten pressure building in his chest.
His veins bulged. Muscles clenched. And somewhere, beneath all that heat, something inside him… shifted around.
His body shook violently, the taste still smeared across his tongue… feral, earthy, something beyond monster eggs. A pressure started deep inside, crawling up through his ribs like magma. His heartbeat slammed into his ears, hammering faster and faster.
He tried to rise but staggered to all fours.
His mouth hung open as saliva started to pour between his lips, thick, viscous strands leaking past his chin and dripping through the lower grates of his helmet. He gasped, panting, tongue too thick in his mouth. Each breath steamed the inside of his visor until it was a blur of fog and drool.
Then… CRACK!
His left pauldron popped loose, thrown off by the bulging of his shoulder. Muscle rolled beneath the skin, inflating like a tide surging. He could hear it… flesh stretching, armor creaking, bones thickening.
“Gghhhraa-!” he choked, but it came out as a low, bestial growl.
The creaking armor around his chest split open along the ribs. He grabbed at it instinctively, but his gloves tore apart as his hands swelled, fingers thickening, joints warping.
Crimson claws burst through the ends of his gauntlets with a wet shlick, dripping with heat and saliva as they twitched in time with his racing pulse.
The hunter's breath rattled in his throat as he hunched forward, weight shifting dangerously on his swelling frame. He staggered sideways, his foot punching deep into the soft earth, now tipped with claws too large for his ruined boots.
The remaining fragments of his greaves shattered like brittle bone under the sudden pressure of expanding calves. Snap- ping! The waist plates of his armor gave next, one after the other, popping loose and spinning off into the underbrush. Leather straps tore free as his hips widened, pushing out with a thudding throb of mutated mass.
His gut surged forward, pressing against the chestplate until the entire upper section groaned under strain, bulging outward, warped with unnatural curvature.
“Nggh… F-Felyne… help-” he gurgled, voice muffled, thick with saliva. He choked on the words.
“Fe…Fel… y’hh- rhrghk-!”
It came out wrong. Twisted. Half growl, half meat-thick snarl. His tongue felt too wide. The syllables stumbled on it like prey underfoot.
He twisted to look toward the Felyne’s limp body just yards away, its small paw twitching in unconscious recovery mode. A flicker of recognition burned in his glowing eyes.
“Fuh… felhh…!”
But even trying to form the word hurt now. His throat bulged, cords twitching, thickening into something that barely resembled a human larynx anymore. He tried again -
“Nghrrr-HHHRRRK!”
It came out as a full throated, earth rattling growl, spit flying from his jaw. His throat flexed, vibrating with a hungry bass that carried through the trees like a challenge roar. Nearby birds exploded into flight.
He lifted a trembling, clawed hand and clutched at the helmet, now useless, crumpling against the widening shape of his skull. With a final, feral yell, he ripped it free, revealing a face somewhere between man and monster…
Muscle continued to swell across his body, violent and unstoppable. His biceps ballooned outward, ripping his undersuit at the seams.
The veins beneath his skin were turning dark… almost black, and pushing up against the surface like glowing cords.
His torso heaved forward as more mass piled onto him, his chest pushing out, belly firming up, then inflating further with unnatural bulk.
Another set of shoulder plates crumbled as massive deltoids swelled beneath them, cords of muscle bunching and rolling. Spike like scales pushed up through the skin of his back, armor from within overtaking the man made shell outside.
Pieces of crafted gear, the carefully layered armor of a master hunter, lay scattered around him now, half buried in mud and yolk.
Another burst of heat. His spine snapped, but not in pain. It stretched. Grew.
His tail erupted.
Thick and heavy, it exploded from the base of his spine, slamming into the earth with a violent, muddy crash. Scales bloomed across it, olive green streaked with darker plating, tipped in pale, bony ridges like Deviljho’s unmistakable hide. The tail twitched as it grew, curling behind him with a mind of its own.
He fell to one knee, panting, drooling thick ropes of saliva into the ground.
His eyes never left the Felyne.
Some part of him… remembered. The weight of years. Shared hunts. Campfire naps. Cooked meat and shared victories.
But that part was being smothered. Drowned in heat, in hunger, in the thrill of growing more. Stronger. Wilder.
His teeth doubled in length, then tripled, jagged and thick, forcing his jaw wider and wider. His snout pushed forward, armored plates forming from the bridge of his nose to the top of his skull.
He opened his mouth once more, forcing the words.
“Fuh… hhuhhh… felh-”
RRRRRRRRRRAUUUGHK!
He tried to take a step forward, but his legs no longer moved with a human’s grace. Each motion was heavier now. Denser. More primal.
The plates of his torso armor cracked next, unable to contain the widening girth of his torso. His chest pushed forward, barrel like and heavy, and his gut, once lean from years of training, now hung heavy and taut, taut with power and twitching muscle.
His legs expanded next, thighs ripping through his greaves as scaled hide pushed out in ripples. Clawed toes burst from his boots, flexing in the mud as his weight shifted forward.
The once human voice was gone.
Only a hungry, rumbling growl remained.
He tried to speak, to scream, but the words dissolved into a feral roar muffled by flesh and transformation.
His thoughts scattered, disjointed flashes of hunts, tactics, Guild postings… dissolving in a flood of instinct.
He tried to hold onto them. The fine details. His first carving knife. The Guild master’s voice bellowing across Astera’s walkways. The time he limped back from an Anjanath ambush with nothing but a broken sword.
But they all came fragmented, like memories submerged beneath a torrent. Blurred. Distant. Wrong.
Guild… what was a Guild?
His breathing grew faster.
Tactics… what tactics? His mind pulsed with simpler ideas now. Shapes. Motions. Smells.
Where was the next scent trail? Where was the meat?
Even his name… his own name… slipped away.
Gone.
A fresh growl rolled in his throat, deep and trembling. He clenched his clawed hands into fists, but the gesture didn’t feel right anymore. Too calculated. Too… human.
His vision swam again. For a moment, his world darkened.
CLIK.
The edges of his vision shimmered and then snapped. His pupils pulled into narrow, predatory slits. The irises flared yellow gold, ringed with a reddish tint.
Everything looked different now. No longer hues of green and brown, but movements. Heat. His senses twisted to prioritize prey detection.
He turned his head, eyes darting to the barely-breathing Felyne again… not as a friend anymore, but a target profile. He knew this shape. Weak. Fragile. But not food. No, not that. Too small.
The final snap came from his back, as jagged dorsal spikes burst through his shoulders, dark sharp, and crowned in a faint red glow. Just like the image etched into Guild records: Deviljho. The World Eater. The brute wyvern that hunted even Elder Dragons.
But this was no Deviljho born in the wild. This one was reborn.
Mutated.
Part hunter.
Part apex predator.
For power. For dominance. For the hunt.
And somewhere, in the sludge of instinct and muscle and rage, a single flicker of memory remained:
He had come here to destroy Deviljho’s nest.
Now... he was all that remained of it.
The Felyne stirred with a low groan, tail flicking as his whiskers twitched to life. The jungle canopy above swayed gently, dappling the clearing in moonlight. Every muscle ached, every joint popped as he slowly rolled onto his paws.
He blinked once.
Twice.
“...Meowster?”
No reply.
He sat up slowly, ears perked…
Tracks.
Massive, gouging footprints clawed into the mud, the kind he’d only seen in the worst field guides. Each one deeper than his entire body, trailing away into the trees.
Deviljho.
He mewled in alarm and scrambled toward the blast site, eyes darting.
That’s when his heart sank.
Scattered across the scorched clearing lay the remains of armor… his Meowster’s armor… ripped, broken, warped from the inside out.
A chestplate split wide. A helmet twisted beyond recognition. Splatters of saliva and yolk clung to what was left of the gear, steaming slightly even now.
“N-no… no, no, no…”
The Felyne dropped to all fours, paws trembling. His Meowster was gone. Not just missing, gone!
His stomach growled. Loudly.
The sound made him jump.
He hadn’t eaten since dawn. And the last thing he remembered before blacking out was the boom of the blastnuts igniting and…
His eyes found it.
The egg.
Or rather… what was left of it.
It lay cracked open, steaming in the jungle heat. A thick, glistening pool of golden yolk still shimmered, part fried, part raw. A single bite torn from the side, like someone had eaten straight from it with savage hunger.
It smelled incredible.
The Felyne stepped closer, eyes wide, nose twitching. His paw hesitated over the sticky edge.
“J-just a nibble,” he muttered. “I-It’s already broken anyway. Can’t let it go to waste…”
He dipped his claws in, scooping a bit of the yolk onto his pads and slurping it greedily. It was warm, thick, and insanely rich. His pupils dilated instantly.
A second bite.
Then a third.
Then he dropped to all fours and devoured.
A low rumble bubbled in his gut. His fur bristled.
Veins bulged. His chest heaved. His back arched.
A sickly green scale flickered through the Felyne’s fur.
It glinted off his dilated, reptilian eyes.
Another breath.
He growled.
Then he smiled, fangs glinting…
- and kept eating.
volentis for giving this terrifying walking hunger some well deserved recognition, and for drawing one so beautifully terrifying! My fight or flight response is confused and a little into it... The canopy split apart in a blast of flame and fire.
“Clear!” roared the hunter, his greatsword still glowing with the residue of a wyvern’s fire round. He stood amid the smoldering remains of a Deviljho nest deep within the Rotten Vale.
Chunks of Deviljho egg and acidic bile sizzled in the mud around him, the thick, humid air stil stained by the beast’s lingering stench.
Months of tracking the unpredictable brute wyvern had paid off. The Guild suspected the Deviljho population was mutating. Smarter, stronger and nesting. That was never their nature. Everyone knew that Deviljho lived to do two things. Kill and eat.
He’d torched the nest using the best blastnuts he could find, rigged with a flame sac for ignition. The explosion had been massive. The clutch was destroyed.
Most of it, anyway.
One egg had landed close to the blast, cracked wide open and seared against a rock. The membrane had ruptured, and the yolk, thick and gelatinous, had cooked in the nest’s own burning heat. The explosion had seared the outer layer to a dark brown crisp, but the inside had set like a giant fried egg, still steaming and hissing at the edges.
The hunter staggered forward, holding his side. His health was low, dangerously low, armor dented, potion supply empty. His last mega potion had been downed fighting off a furious Girros pack drawn to the Deviljho scent trail.
And his Felyne... poor thing had been knocked out in the initial blast, crumpled in a heap under a broken vine trap.
He groaned and dropped to one knee, panting in the rising heat. Victory had been brought for him and the Guild, but there was no way he’d be able to trek back like this. The adrenaline was wearing off, and now every inch of his body screamed with bruises, burns, and exhaustion.
His stomach growled.
“Of all the damn times…”
There was no meat. No steak. No rations left. But that yolk… still steaming, golden and massive… was food.
It reeked. Rich, musky, faintly acidic. But it also smelled hot and alive, like sulfur and cooked blood. It triggered something deep in his gut, something hungry.
He fumbled at his gear, pulling out his collapsible rotisserie spit. The same one he’d used to roast Aptonoth meat on long hunts. It clicked open with a satisfying snap.
He approached the fried Deviljho yolk, the spit stabbed cleanly through the center, dragging a line of molten yellow with it. It wobbled slightly, but held. It was big enough, easily the size of a roast, to be eaten right from the skewer.
He raised it toward his mouth, hesitating for only a moment. This wasn’t sanctioned rations. No Guild approval. No knowledge on what Deviljho embryonic fluid might do to a human system.
But his body didn’t care.
His jaw locked. He took a bite.
The outer crisp cracked between his teeth. The inside was soft, searing hot, like eating a fire blasted custard soaked in blood and bone marrow. It coated his tongue with a strange, tingling heat that slid down his throat like liquid muscle.
He paused. His vision blurred for a second. The trees wobbled. The world twitched.
Then his stomach lurched.
He doubled over, gripping his gut. The egg dropped, half eaten, into the mud. His insides burned, but not with pain… with heat. A heat that throbbed from his core outward. His heart began to pound faster, harder.
His fingertips trembled. The hair on his arms stood on end. It felt like he’d just drank pure Might Seed extract mixed with Fire Herb and Dragonfell Berries.
“Ugghuuhh… w-what the hell was… in that thing?!”
He tore at his collar, desperate for air, but even the Vale’s noxious fog felt cold compared to the molten pressure building in his chest.
His veins bulged. Muscles clenched. And somewhere, beneath all that heat, something inside him… shifted around.
His body shook violently, the taste still smeared across his tongue… feral, earthy, something beyond monster eggs. A pressure started deep inside, crawling up through his ribs like magma. His heartbeat slammed into his ears, hammering faster and faster.
He tried to rise but staggered to all fours.
His mouth hung open as saliva started to pour between his lips, thick, viscous strands leaking past his chin and dripping through the lower grates of his helmet. He gasped, panting, tongue too thick in his mouth. Each breath steamed the inside of his visor until it was a blur of fog and drool.
Then… CRACK!
His left pauldron popped loose, thrown off by the bulging of his shoulder. Muscle rolled beneath the skin, inflating like a tide surging. He could hear it… flesh stretching, armor creaking, bones thickening.
“Gghhhraa-!” he choked, but it came out as a low, bestial growl.
The creaking armor around his chest split open along the ribs. He grabbed at it instinctively, but his gloves tore apart as his hands swelled, fingers thickening, joints warping.
Crimson claws burst through the ends of his gauntlets with a wet shlick, dripping with heat and saliva as they twitched in time with his racing pulse.
The hunter's breath rattled in his throat as he hunched forward, weight shifting dangerously on his swelling frame. He staggered sideways, his foot punching deep into the soft earth, now tipped with claws too large for his ruined boots.
The remaining fragments of his greaves shattered like brittle bone under the sudden pressure of expanding calves. Snap- ping! The waist plates of his armor gave next, one after the other, popping loose and spinning off into the underbrush. Leather straps tore free as his hips widened, pushing out with a thudding throb of mutated mass.
His gut surged forward, pressing against the chestplate until the entire upper section groaned under strain, bulging outward, warped with unnatural curvature.
“Nggh… F-Felyne… help-” he gurgled, voice muffled, thick with saliva. He choked on the words.
“Fe…Fel… y’hh- rhrghk-!”
It came out wrong. Twisted. Half growl, half meat-thick snarl. His tongue felt too wide. The syllables stumbled on it like prey underfoot.
He twisted to look toward the Felyne’s limp body just yards away, its small paw twitching in unconscious recovery mode. A flicker of recognition burned in his glowing eyes.
“Fuh… felhh…!”
But even trying to form the word hurt now. His throat bulged, cords twitching, thickening into something that barely resembled a human larynx anymore. He tried again -
“Nghrrr-HHHRRRK!”
It came out as a full throated, earth rattling growl, spit flying from his jaw. His throat flexed, vibrating with a hungry bass that carried through the trees like a challenge roar. Nearby birds exploded into flight.
He lifted a trembling, clawed hand and clutched at the helmet, now useless, crumpling against the widening shape of his skull. With a final, feral yell, he ripped it free, revealing a face somewhere between man and monster…
Muscle continued to swell across his body, violent and unstoppable. His biceps ballooned outward, ripping his undersuit at the seams.
The veins beneath his skin were turning dark… almost black, and pushing up against the surface like glowing cords.
His torso heaved forward as more mass piled onto him, his chest pushing out, belly firming up, then inflating further with unnatural bulk.
Another set of shoulder plates crumbled as massive deltoids swelled beneath them, cords of muscle bunching and rolling. Spike like scales pushed up through the skin of his back, armor from within overtaking the man made shell outside.
Pieces of crafted gear, the carefully layered armor of a master hunter, lay scattered around him now, half buried in mud and yolk.
Another burst of heat. His spine snapped, but not in pain. It stretched. Grew.
His tail erupted.
Thick and heavy, it exploded from the base of his spine, slamming into the earth with a violent, muddy crash. Scales bloomed across it, olive green streaked with darker plating, tipped in pale, bony ridges like Deviljho’s unmistakable hide. The tail twitched as it grew, curling behind him with a mind of its own.
He fell to one knee, panting, drooling thick ropes of saliva into the ground.
His eyes never left the Felyne.
Some part of him… remembered. The weight of years. Shared hunts. Campfire naps. Cooked meat and shared victories.
But that part was being smothered. Drowned in heat, in hunger, in the thrill of growing more. Stronger. Wilder.
His teeth doubled in length, then tripled, jagged and thick, forcing his jaw wider and wider. His snout pushed forward, armored plates forming from the bridge of his nose to the top of his skull.
He opened his mouth once more, forcing the words.
“Fuh… hhuhhh… felh-”
RRRRRRRRRRAUUUGHK!
He tried to take a step forward, but his legs no longer moved with a human’s grace. Each motion was heavier now. Denser. More primal.
The plates of his torso armor cracked next, unable to contain the widening girth of his torso. His chest pushed forward, barrel like and heavy, and his gut, once lean from years of training, now hung heavy and taut, taut with power and twitching muscle.
His legs expanded next, thighs ripping through his greaves as scaled hide pushed out in ripples. Clawed toes burst from his boots, flexing in the mud as his weight shifted forward.
The once human voice was gone.
Only a hungry, rumbling growl remained.
He tried to speak, to scream, but the words dissolved into a feral roar muffled by flesh and transformation.
His thoughts scattered, disjointed flashes of hunts, tactics, Guild postings… dissolving in a flood of instinct.
He tried to hold onto them. The fine details. His first carving knife. The Guild master’s voice bellowing across Astera’s walkways. The time he limped back from an Anjanath ambush with nothing but a broken sword.
But they all came fragmented, like memories submerged beneath a torrent. Blurred. Distant. Wrong.
Guild… what was a Guild?
His breathing grew faster.
Tactics… what tactics? His mind pulsed with simpler ideas now. Shapes. Motions. Smells.
Where was the next scent trail? Where was the meat?
Even his name… his own name… slipped away.
Gone.
A fresh growl rolled in his throat, deep and trembling. He clenched his clawed hands into fists, but the gesture didn’t feel right anymore. Too calculated. Too… human.
His vision swam again. For a moment, his world darkened.
CLIK.
The edges of his vision shimmered and then snapped. His pupils pulled into narrow, predatory slits. The irises flared yellow gold, ringed with a reddish tint.
Everything looked different now. No longer hues of green and brown, but movements. Heat. His senses twisted to prioritize prey detection.
He turned his head, eyes darting to the barely-breathing Felyne again… not as a friend anymore, but a target profile. He knew this shape. Weak. Fragile. But not food. No, not that. Too small.
The final snap came from his back, as jagged dorsal spikes burst through his shoulders, dark sharp, and crowned in a faint red glow. Just like the image etched into Guild records: Deviljho. The World Eater. The brute wyvern that hunted even Elder Dragons.
But this was no Deviljho born in the wild. This one was reborn.
Mutated.
Part hunter.
Part apex predator.
For power. For dominance. For the hunt.
And somewhere, in the sludge of instinct and muscle and rage, a single flicker of memory remained:
He had come here to destroy Deviljho’s nest.
Now... he was all that remained of it.
The Felyne stirred with a low groan, tail flicking as his whiskers twitched to life. The jungle canopy above swayed gently, dappling the clearing in moonlight. Every muscle ached, every joint popped as he slowly rolled onto his paws.
He blinked once.
Twice.
“...Meowster?”
No reply.
He sat up slowly, ears perked…
Tracks.
Massive, gouging footprints clawed into the mud, the kind he’d only seen in the worst field guides. Each one deeper than his entire body, trailing away into the trees.
Deviljho.
He mewled in alarm and scrambled toward the blast site, eyes darting.
That’s when his heart sank.
Scattered across the scorched clearing lay the remains of armor… his Meowster’s armor… ripped, broken, warped from the inside out.
A chestplate split wide. A helmet twisted beyond recognition. Splatters of saliva and yolk clung to what was left of the gear, steaming slightly even now.
“N-no… no, no, no…”
The Felyne dropped to all fours, paws trembling. His Meowster was gone. Not just missing, gone!
His stomach growled. Loudly.
The sound made him jump.
He hadn’t eaten since dawn. And the last thing he remembered before blacking out was the boom of the blastnuts igniting and…
His eyes found it.
The egg.
Or rather… what was left of it.
It lay cracked open, steaming in the jungle heat. A thick, glistening pool of golden yolk still shimmered, part fried, part raw. A single bite torn from the side, like someone had eaten straight from it with savage hunger.
It smelled incredible.
The Felyne stepped closer, eyes wide, nose twitching. His paw hesitated over the sticky edge.
“J-just a nibble,” he muttered. “I-It’s already broken anyway. Can’t let it go to waste…”
He dipped his claws in, scooping a bit of the yolk onto his pads and slurping it greedily. It was warm, thick, and insanely rich. His pupils dilated instantly.
A second bite.
Then a third.
Then he dropped to all fours and devoured.
A low rumble bubbled in his gut. His fur bristled.
Veins bulged. His chest heaved. His back arched.
A sickly green scale flickered through the Felyne’s fur.
It glinted off his dilated, reptilian eyes.
Another breath.
He growled.
Then he smiled, fangs glinting…
- and kept eating.
Category Artwork (Digital) / Transformation
Species Dinosaur
Size 1600 x 1600px
File Size 866 kB
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