The Deviljho was a creature of savage temperament — but unlike the Rathalos, which held a fixed territory, the Deviljho belonged to the Brute Wyvern class and claimed no ground as its own. Driven by an insatiable hunger, it wandered wherever food could be found, and it had a reputation for crashing other creatures' battles to poach whatever was left over.
Lin had just finished hunting a Rathalos here. That a Deviljho had been drawn in by the scent of blood was, on the face of it, entirely reasonable.
Faced with the Deviljho's baleful glare, Lin's mind raced through his options.
He knew the Deviljho was a greater threat than the Rathalos. His hunting party had only brought down the Rathalos by exploiting an elemental weakness, and even then they'd taken one casualty and one disappearance. They had nothing left in the tank for a Deviljho attack.
But he didn't necessarily have to go head-to-head with it. The Deviljho's ravenous metabolism — the very thing that drove its mindless gluttony — was itself something he could exploit.
Compared to a metal-framed skeleton like Lin, the Rathalos carcass was obviously what the Deviljho had come for.
In theory, if he simply yielded the Rathalos's flesh and retreated, the Deviljho — which prioritised feeding above all else — would have no reason to chase him. It would stay and gorge itself on the kill.
That would buy him the window he needed to slip away...
He had already stripped most of the materials he needed anyway, and he had no use for the blood and meat that would appeal to the Deviljho. Lin slowly rose to his feet, pocketed the portable materials, and left the bulkier pieces — the ones too unwieldy to carry and that the Deviljho likely wouldn't bother with — in a separate pile to one side.
With that done, he turned to face the Deviljho and began backing away slowly, adopting a posture of deliberate submission — a clear gesture of yielding his kill.
Lin had expected that to be enough. He had not expected the Deviljho to show absolutely no interest in the Rathalos's flesh.
Those terrible eyes remained locked on Lin — on Lin, who barely had any meat worth eating — and its head tracked his every movement with calm, patient attention. Its focus was entirely on him.
The situation was diverging sharply from what he'd anticipated, and that unsettled him.
Was this Deviljho different from the ones in the Monster Hunter world? Or was its strange behaviour being driven by some kind of external pull?
Surely it couldn't be that the Deviljho's abnormality was because... something was controlling it?
Lin's thoughts swept rapidly through the possibilities — but the Deviljho had already begun stamping its powerful hind legs, and Lin didn't hesitate for a single moment. He had no intention of fleeing on foot. He fired his jet engine directly and launched himself into the air.
The Deviljho's inability to fly became immediately, painfully obvious — it could only circle furiously beneath him, snarling its frustration. But the fact that it chose to keep circling rather than turn toward the fresh Rathalos flesh right beside it only deepened Lin's unease.
The lore had long established that the Deviljho was a creature that needed to eat constantly just to sustain itself. Even setting the lore aside entirely and applying the biology he'd absorbed from his Warhammer knowledge, the conclusion was the same.
What possible reason could compel a Deviljho to override its own biological imperatives and treat him as the higher-priority target?
He had been about to circle the Deviljho for a closer look at what was driving this behaviour — when a faint, razor-thin whistle from close beside him set every alarm in his head screaming.
That sound — like a bomb dropping — dragged up memories he would have preferred to leave buried.
He twisted aside instantly. A teardrop-shaped scale sliced past him and buried itself vertically into the earth near the Deviljho!
Lin snapped his gaze upward — and saw a Flying Wyvern covered in teardrop-shaped scales along its neck and tail, gliding silently into the arena, already swooping fast toward Lin where he hung in the open sky.
A Bazelgeuse too?!
Lin cursed inwardly from the depths of his soul and wasted no further time. He fired his jet engine at full thrust and attempted to break away from the battlefield at speed.
The Bazelgeuse occupied a similar ecological niche to the Deviljho — both sat at the apex of the food chain and neither held fixed territory — except that where the Deviljho was bound to the ground, the Bazelgeuse, as a Flying Wyvern, ruled the skies.
Its appetite was nowhere near as terrifying as the Deviljho's, but the Bazelgeuse was ferociously aggressive and never let a perceived threat escape unchallenged.
Those teardrop-shaped scales along its neck and tail were, in essence, enormous explosive rounds. The moment it scattered them, whatever they touched became a lifeless sea of fire.
Under normal circumstances, a meeting between two apex predators like the Bazelgeuse and the Deviljho would inevitably erupt into a full territorial and resource conflict. But given that even the Deviljho was defying its own nature and refusing to eat, Lin's engineering-trained rationality refused to let him bet his escape on the two of them turning on each other.
And exactly as he'd feared — the scale that had embedded itself near him exploded right beside the Deviljho, yet the Deviljho showed not a shred of hostility toward the Bazelgeuse in response.
It simply ignored the Bazelgeuse entirely. It tilted its head back and began charging — and moments later, a sweeping beam of black-red energy blazing with an aura of utter annihilation came raking toward Lin.
Forced into it, Lin climbed for altitude to evade — but the moment he climbed higher, he entered the Bazelgeuse's dive range. The Bazelgeuse showed no mercy, swooping into a gliding dive and extending its wings to try to bat him clean out of the sky. Lin could do nothing but throw himself through a desperate sequence of evasions while fighting to hold his balance, with no opening to mount any meaningful counterattack.
The two apex predators working in concert drained Lin in body and mind alike. He couldn't fly too high. He couldn't drop to the ground. He was stuck in an awkward low-altitude band — the one zone where neither the Bazelgeuse above nor the Deviljho below could easily hit him.
The problem was that this same altitude left him exposed to both of them simultaneously. He was calculating how to break out of this stranglehold — and mid-calculation, he looked up and found himself flying headlong toward Sergeant Arlo, who was still out searching for the missing Astartes.
"Chaplain Lin — are you being hunted?" Sergeant Arlo, with his wealth of combat experience, read the situation instantly. "Do you need me to bring the others?"
"Run — and go a different way from me!" Lin's warning was clipped and urgent; the calculations running through his head left no bandwidth for a longer explanation. "Tell everyone to stop searching for the missing brother. Keep looking and we all die!"
Sergeant Arlo blinked, not yet fully grasping what had happened — but the note of danger in Lin's words was unmistakable. He acted on the order without a moment's hesitation.
Lin, fully aware now that these two monsters were locked on him and him alone, understood clearly: this escape was his to handle by himself.
He still didn't know why these two creatures had formed any kind of partnership to hunt him, but right now that question was irrelevant.
He could only think about it if he first managed to shake one of them off and carved out even the narrowest margin to breathe.
There were no absolutely safe choices — but as it happened, Lin was someone who was very good at bold gambles.
His gaze fell on the cliff that had just come into view ahead of him, and something crystallised in his mind. The one bet that could shake the Deviljho off his tail — it was right there in front of him.