#while diavolo is spiralling he's there puffing out his chest like 'YES isn't she so talented'

[journey-to-the-attic]

Hello, anon who talked about monster hunter IK here.

Thanks to the teaser trailer for the next monster hunter game being revealed at the game awards and beating the "main storyline" of Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak (with the lead up to the final boss filling me with genuine shock, dread, and a bit of horror) last night, I'm now back to having monster hunter IK on the mind.

So, in monster hunter, there is a classification of monsters known as "Elder Dragons" that if I remember correctly, while many do resemble dragons, is what they classify monsters that don't really fit into any other category of monster. Many elder dragons are (at least lore-wise) able to alter entire ecosystems just by existing in them, while others are so dangerous that they need to be killed as soon as possible after they show up because they're so dangerous they could be considered world-ending.

They also are smart enough to not be caught in traps, so the only way to deal with the non world-ending ones is to hurt them enough to chase them off or kill them.

My question is, do you think this IK and Noctifer would have ever slayed an elder dragon? Would it be one of the weaker ones or one of the "kill on sight" ones? Is this something that ever comes up in conversation with any of the others?

i was thinking that the concept sounded kind of familiar and then i realised that it's actually similar to how i envision the role of the 'strange creatures' in that evolution line mock-up thing i made... ohoho what if in this au they are one and the same thing

on the one hand it'd kind of break the whole power distribution of the whole thing if ik & noctifer were to have slain one, but on the other it'd also be really funny... i mean, it goes with the whole 'video game logic' line of reasoning, since it's fairly common for game heroes to slay universe-breaking beasts either by some quirk of the plot or by sheer raw power (and it's not like we haven't had cosmos-breaking strength in an au before - take the traveller ik au for example)

i feel like they don't bring it up since it's just sorta "oh, just another day's work!" to them at this point. demons as a whole aren't super versed with their own evolutionary history, but diavolo and barbatos (and probably lucifer) would at least be somewhat familiar with it...

maybe diavolo shows them some mural of "the coming of the creatures" which depicts them shaping the devildom's mountain ranges or something similar, and ik points it out to noctifer - "hey we killed one of those guys before!"

diavolo of course is just like "what." it's one of those makes-you-question-your-entire-existence moments