The Hunt

Lore & Background

The Company's charter, as far as any living soul can reconstruct it, speaks of 'the management of supernatural incursions through sanctioned violence.' In practice this means the Company identifies a Beast—a creature born of the bayou's curse, a thing that should not walk on two legs or breathe without fire in its throat—and then sells the right to kill it. The Hunters are not employees. They are expendable instruments, dropped into the swamp with a rifle, a map drawn in red ink, and a bounty that will make them rich or leave them as another nameless stain on the mud.

The rules are deceptively simple and absolutely lethal. Every Hunter in the night is a rival. The Company does not care who wins; it cares that the Beast dies and that the killing is witnessed. The fog rolls in, the cypress canopy swallows the moon, and the only light is the flare of a muzzle or the sickly glow of a Beast's eyes in the dark. There is no retreat. There is no second night. The bayou keeps what it takes, and the Company keeps its ledger balanced.

Over the years, the Hunts have grown stranger. The Beasts have grown larger, more intelligent, more cruel. Survivors speak of hearing the water whisper names, of seeing footprints that lead in circles, of a fog that does not lift until every Hunter is dead or one is left to face the thing in the dark. The Company sends no one to check. The Company sends no one at all. The bayou is its own judge, and the Hunt is its own law.

In Their Own Story

The flare went up at the edge of the water, a thin red thread stitching the fog to the sky. Mara watched it die, watched the colour bleed out of the night, and felt the bayou exhale. Somewhere past the second bend, past the drowned church and the cypress that grew in a spiral like a broken spine, the Beast was waking. She could feel it the way you feel a fever before the heat breaks—a pressure behind the sternum, a wrongness in the air that tasted of copper and rot.

She checked her rifle. Three rounds. She checked her knife. One nick in the blade from the last Hunt, the one where she'd buried a man up to his neck in the mud and listened to him stop breathing. The Company's letter was still in her coat, the wax seal cracked, the words still legible: *The bounty is doubled. The Beast is named. Come, or rot where you stand.*

She shouldered the rifle. The water lapped the bank, patient and black. And in the dark, something vast turned its head and looked at her with eyes like two slow-burning coals, and the Hunt began.

Reader's Guide

FROM THE COMPANY'S ARCHIVE — FILE 7-C, REDACTED

The Curse took hold in the year the river ran backward and the cypress wept black sap. The land was marked. The water was marked. And the Company, in its infinite and patient wisdom, saw not a disaster but an *opportunity*. The charter is brief: to identify, contain, and dispatch supernatural incursions through the application of sanctioned, competitive violence. The Hunters are the means. The Beast is the end. The Bounty is the fuel.

The rules of the Hunt are few and absolute. First: every Hunter is a rival. The Company does not distinguish between friend and foe; it distinguishes between the living and the dead. Second: the Beast must die. Not be wounded, not be driven off. *Die.* The Company will know. The bayou will know. Third: there is no extraction, no rescue, no second night. What enters the fog stays in the fog until the killing is done or the killing is done *to* you.

The Company sends no observers. No medics. No mercy. The Hunters are given a map, a weapon, and a name for the thing they must kill. The rest is the bayou's business. And the bayou, as any survivor will tell you over a cup of black coffee in a town that refuses to name itself, is a patient and hungry god that has been waiting a very long time for someone to bring it a fight worth watching.

Did You Know?

• The Company's involvement in the Hunt is framed as a form of 'sanctioned violence' against supernatural threats, blurring the line between employer and predator.
• The bayou's curse is treated as a living, almost sentient force in the game's lore, with the fog, water, and wildlife all responding to the violence of the Hunt.
• Hunters in the game are drawn from a wide spectrum of outcasts—each with their own personal reason for walking into the fog—making the Hunt a crucible of desperate, individual stories rather than a single unified faction
• The Beasts that serve as the Hunt's ultimate target are depicted as uniquely supernatural entities, each with distinct behaviours, suggesting the curse produces a different abomination each night.