Mage-Hunting Monster

The sheer size and ferocity of a Cygor is terrifying enough to mortal men, but those who know of their terrible hunger fear them above all. To a mage a Cygor is unutterably fearsome, for he knows that of all the warriors on the battlefield it is him alone that the Cygor wants to catch up in its gnarled and calloused hands, his flesh it wants to tear apart, and his soul it must devour to slake its unending thirst.

—Warhammer Fantasy 7th Edition: Beastmen

In fantasy, wizards, witches, and assorted mages are usually some of the most powerful beings around, as their reality-bending arts allow them to easily overwhelm most foes or obstacles. However, threats can exist that will threaten even, or especially, such powerful individuals. One of these is the Mage-Hunting Monster, a creature that specializes in hunting and killing magic-users.

Mage-Hunting Monsters usually have a number of tricks up their metaphorical sleeves in order to subdue their dangerous and wily prey. They are often magical themselves, matching their targets' supernatural powers with their own. They otherwise typically have Anti-Magic in some form, either being immune or resistant to magical attacks or having some way to suppress magical powers around themselves.

These creatures are often Magic Eaters of some sort, hounding their targets due to seeing them as prey. It's also common for them to be Bioweapon Beasts that were deliberately created to kill mages. In this latter case, the monster's creators can range from Muggles or an Anti-Magical Faction trying to get a leg up on the mages to magic-users looking for an edge against their rivals.

Compare/Contrast Mage Killer, where a normal human is the one going after mages. See also Food Chain of Evil, for monsters that prey on other monstrous beings; both tropes describe magical predators of beings who are themselves more powerful than ordinary humans. These beings can the bane of a Mage Species. This is also one possible reason why Magic Is a Monster Magnet. Overlaps with Supernaturally Delicious and Nutritious.

Note that, despite the name, this trope can equally well apply to monsters that hunt people with any kind of supernatural ability, such as psychic powers or superpowers.

Not to be confused with Witch Hunt, which refers to paranoid searches for infiltrators or outsiders that may or may not exist.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Bleach: Hollows absorb the spiritual power of those they eat, and as such are strongly drawn towards attacking people with a lot of spirit energy.
• Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn: The Unicorn Gundam and its sister units are Giant Mecha incorporating the NT-D System (officially "Newtype Drive" but really "Newtype Destroyer"), a Super Mode which activates when it detects the presence of a Newtype pilot on the battlefield. In its "Destroy Mode" the Unicorn exposes additional thrusters and deploys a Brain/Computer Interface in order to let its pilot keep up with Newtype reaction speeds for a short time; it is also capable of hijacking funnels (Attack Drones which rely on Newtype telepathy to control) and making them turn on their owner. Ironically, the NT-D System places so much strain on its pilot that Newtypes are the only ones capable of using it for sustained periods.

Fan Works

• Mendacity: Bugganes are Fae creatures resembling enormous blind moles. Like all Fae, they need magic to live, but cannot produce any of their own and get instead by hunting down and eating other magical beings. Spells are effectively useless against them, and other Fae fear them immensely.
• Quantum Castaways: Twilight Sparkle has to deal with a giant insect that seems to have evolved to hunt unicorns, and has several abilities intended to counteract their innate magic. It has Aura Vision so that she can't hide from it and, when she tries to create a forcefield to protect herself, it just walks through it.

Literature

• Mother of Learning: The grey hunter is a Giant Spider specifically adapted for hunting magical prey (which includes the majority of really dangerous beasts). It has a highly refined ability to sense and perceive magic around it, its body is highly magic-resistant, and its venom is not directly fatal, but disrupts the victim's ability to shape mana. Zorian tries using a magical floating eyeball to study one in its lair, and it responds by instantly shredding the spell and rocketing out of the cave to hunt for him. As soon as he starts casting a teleport spell to get away, it zeroes in on his location and comes straight at him.
• The Scholomance: Mals are monsters Made of Magic, ranging from tiny parasites to titanic Blob Monsters, that feed on wizards for their Mana (and/or flesh, and/or souls). Most are no match for an adult wizard, but they're so pervasive that Magical Society is built around minimizing the child mortality rate.
• Star Wars: The High Republic: The Nameless are enigmatic creatures that prey on Force users, with one particular specimen known as the Great Leveler. Their presence alone is capable of causing fear-inducing hallucinations in Jedi and after feeding on them, reduce them to brittle petrified husks with a look of terror on their faces. After Marchion Ro reclaimed the Leveler from a hidden vault, the Nihil weaponized them against the Jedi and played a key role in the fall of Starlight Beacon. 150 years before the Great Disaster, a cult called the Path of the Open Hand weaponized them against all Force users.
• Star Wars Legends: Vornskrs, Force-sensitive wolf-like predators from the planet Myrkr introduced in The Thrawn Trilogy, react very aggressively to other Force-users, and become hyperfocused on attacking them once they sense their presence. It's theorized that the ysalamiri, sedentary lizard-like creatures that parasitize trees, evolved their ability to produce an Anti-Magic field in the Force as a countermeasure to vornskyr predation.
  • Exploited in The Last Command. Talon Karrde makes use of this by using his two pet vornskrs to track down the Dark Jedi Joruus C'Baoth.
  • Also exploited in the New Jedi Order series by the Yuuzhan Vong, who used vornskrs as one of the base organisms for creating voxyn, engineered monsters intended specifically to hunt and kill Jedi. The introduction of the voxyn forces the Jedi Order to mount a Suicide Mission against Myrkr in Star By Star to destroy the voxyn queen, which ends in Anakin Solo's death and Jacen Solo's capture.
• The Wheel of Time: The Gholam are superficially human monsters that can sense channeling and are immune to it themselves. They were originally created for the express purpose of assassinating enemy channelers.

Live-Action TV

• Wizards vs. Aliens: The Nekross are an alien race that feast upon all magic, and who have come to Earth because they've consumed literally all other sources of magic in the universe. Naturally, they come into conflict with the wizards living on the planet. They're also immune to it, with only powerful spells affecting them.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Magerippers are a kind of small, swarming creatures that feed on the magic of other living beings. Swarms of magerippers who come across a wizard or a magical being will mob it en masse and start siphoning away their magical power, leaving them powerless and potentially killing them through physical damage as they try to wrestle it to submission.
  • Golems can fill this role with their immunity to most forms of magic; Psion-killers in particular have an immunity which lacks any holes, combined with the ability to cast an Area of Effect Dispel Magic once per turn (while created by characters with Psychic Powers to kill their rivals, they work just fine on other kinds of magic-user as well).
  • Gremishkas are small, catlike creatures born from unstable magic, and which compulsively hunt mages and consume magical books and objects. They tend to attack in large numbers, and react to magic being cast or near them by redirecting it to produce effects such as firing blasts of force at the caster, healing themselves, or splitting into swarms of smaller gremishkas. A full swarm of gremishka is outright immune to spells of 3rd-level or lower, and can reflect spells that miss it against their caster.
• Hunter: The Vigil: One of Aegis Kai Doru's Relics, the Witch-Candle, is a metal candlestick adorned with carved gargoyles. If a candle is placed within it and lit, any successful uses of magic, whether by witches or supernatural monsters, will cause the gargoyles carvings to come to life, climb off the candle, and single-mindedly attempt to kill the magicians that gave them life.
• Mage: The Awakening: Some entities from the Abyss are drawn into reality to feed on mages' powerful souls:
  • The most extreme Magic Misfires spawn an Abyssal intruder of variable power level. Some attack the mage directly, but others harass them as a gremlin or Evil Doppelgänger, and the worst might play the long game as a powerful corruptive force.
  • The Invisible Codex is a mage-parasitizing monster: it impersonates a Spell Book, creates obsessive interest in the mage who finds it, and drains its new owner's magic and life away.
• Magic: The Gathering: Witchstalkers are huge wolves native to Eldraine that are instinctively drawn to the smell of magic. They will ignore non-magical beings, even if these should run directly through their dens, but will viciously attack witches, fey, and enchanted beings.
• Ponyfinder: The flutterponies descend from the flutters, insect-like fey that fed on magic and descended in swarms to devour any source of it that they could find, including living beings.
• TORG: Both versions have the Mage-Killers, reptilian beasts who are immune to the direct effects of any magic aimed at them. As the name implies, they're usually summoned to assassinate troublesome wizards.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Psychophages are Tyranid organisms designed to hunt down and devour enemy pyskers, which they quickly metabolize into "psychocorrosive ash" that they project from vents on their backs.
  • Psychneuein are wasp-like creatures of the Warp that are specialized predators of psykers, in whose minds they lay their eggs. They are drawn to areas of intense and untrained psychic activity, but will barely deign to notice non-psychic individuals.
• Warhammer Fantasy Battle: Cygors are giant minotaurs whose single eye is blind to everything except magic. To them, mages and magic-infused beings such as daemons and the undead blaze brightly and irresistibly, and a cygor who spots one will stop at nothing in its attempts to kill them and consume their soul.

Toys

• BIONICLE: Marendar is a Bioweapon Beast designed by the Great Beings to hunt down and destroy Toa in case they ever posed a threat. It only hunts Toa, not any other beings with Elemental Powers.

Video Games

• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy XII:
    • The in-game bestiary explains that the series-standard Bomb enemies were created as anti-mage weapons in this universe. In gameplay, most variants start passive and only become aggressive if they detect spellcasting nearby.
    • In-game, Elementals and Entites operate on this principle. Like Bomb enemies, they're docile until somebody from your group casts magic nearby, which makes them to go ballistic. Not only the elemental magic is mostly useless against them (they can be harmed only by counter-element), they usually come packing Silencega (can't cast spells) and Fearga (Mana Burn) to quickly incapacitate your mages, then proceed to use high-powered spells.
  • Final Fantasy XIV: Voidsent are ravenous fiends from the void, a world of eternal darkness, who are constantly starved of aether. As such, they continually try to cross the rift between worlds to feed on the denizens of other worlds and possess their bodies. Mages like thaumaturges and conjurers are especially tasty snacks for voidsent, as mages are required to possess more internal aether than other people in order to cast spells. Morno, a powerful succubus and the focus of the thaumaturge questline, immediately begins murdering and feasting upon every thaumaturge she can get her hands on once she's freed from her cage. Her taste for thaumaturges is so profound that Cocobuki is able to lure her out of Cocobusi's body by allowing her to gorge upon his aether. This gives the Warrior of Light and the other thaumaturge guildmasters time to fight and kill her without harming Cocobusi.
• Knights of the Old Republic: Terentateks are monsters created by the Sith for the express purpose of hunting Jedi. To do this, terentateks were designed to feed primarily on the blood of Force-sensitives, giving them a motivation to hunt them, and were made almost entirely immune to Force effects.
• World of Warcraft:
  • Felhounds are demonic creatures with no eyes that hunt by sensing magic. They typically come with some kind of Mana Burn ability. Warlocks can also summon a specialized version called a Felhunter, which is their best Anti-Magic pet.
  • Warp stalkers can teleport short distances, the process of which disrupts all spellcasting in the area around where they appear. Although they don't have any natural inclination to hunt magic, they are frequently trained for use as mage hunters. However, for balance reasons, if a Hunter tames a warp stalker it can neither teleport nor disrupt spellcasting.

Web Videos

• Critical Role: Aeorian Hunters are biological weapons created by a society of Nay-Theists, designed to hunt spellcasters and servants of the gods like celestials and fiends. Absorbers can absorb magic and release it as a deadly attack, Nullifiers can innately cast Counterspell and Antimagic Field, and Reversers can invert the effects of healing magic, causing it to harm instead.

Western Animation

• Aladdin: The Series:
  • Mukhtars are reptilian humanoids who actively hunted and ate genies for centuries. They can sense magic and possess Anti-Magic gadgets which allow them to nullify the power of their targets. The one who goes after Genie in "Genie Hunt" was hired by his former master to bring him back into servitude.
  • "The Citadel": Mozenrath summons a thirdac, a magic-eating creature from another world, which he wants to use as a weapon against other magic users. Because the Thirdac targets everything that is even remotely magical, Mozenrath can't capture it himself, so he ensures that the thirdac sets its eyes on Genie and Carpet, forcing Aladdin to help Mozenrath capture the thirdac with a special collar. At the end of the episode, Aladdin has Iago free the thirdac and sics him onto Mozenrath, forcing the sorcerer to quickly send it back to its home dimension.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: The is how Lord Tirek initially worked. When he first escaped Tartarus and was in a weakened state, he could only drain the magic of unicorns and wasn't a threat to any of the other pony species. As he stole more magic however, he eventually got powerful enough to drain pegasi, earth ponies, and eventually even Physical Gods like alicorns and even Discord.
• The Owl House: One episode has the magic school menaced by a basilisk — a shapeshifting, reptilian monster that can suck the magic out of witches, leaving them helpless.

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