Aha! Well, in honor of your pointing that out, I'll talk about the other— possibly more apt— character swap for Rumi, and some of my thoughts for where I see this going. (Spoilers for the end of Golden Enclaves, third book of the Scholomance.)
I mention, above, the Torment Nexus. In the world of the Scholomance, there exist these things called maw-mouths, which are unstoppable and nigh-indestructible flesh goo creatures that rip apart and absorb any living things with mana in their path, not even killing them but keeping them alive in screaming pain for ever and ever, and which play a role somewhere between global warming and WMDs, thematically.
In the world of the Scholomance, there exists a boy called Orion Lake who is very nearly indestructible, who rips apart most any inhuman thing with mana in his path, who kills and kills and kills but does not die but only feeds the hunger, deep inside him, until such a time he faces the only thing that exists in the universe with hunger equal and kindred to his: a maw-mouth.
Orion Lake is an experiment in human sacrifice and renewable energy, who is lauded as a hero (who is a hero, he really does want more than anything to help people), and who discovers far too late into the series that he's a monster, that who and what he is cannot be changed, and that (he thinks) his existence means nothing but hurt for the people around him, such that he asks the only person he personally loves to kill him instead of letting him continue.
Doesn't that sound, just a little bit, familiar?
There are some differences: in the universe of KPDH, being a demon (like Rumi's father) is only a somewhat-voluntary action; being a maleficer (like Orion's mother) requires deliberate and repetitive torture of other living things to extract power in the form of their surrendered life. Likewise, Orion is a hero because he is addicted to killing and is happy to turn over the fruits of his labor to others, and to protect them; Celine of course would rather Rumi hide who and what she is.
Orion's gift from his nature, the ability to take "polluted" life energy/mana (called malia) from murdered monsters and return it to service as mana is also so hilariously overpowered that in-universe a major faction coasted along in an extremely resource-limited environment purely using the leftovers from his wanton killing. I think the tone we're setting, here, for this crossover, relies too much on characters being scarce and scared and desperate for a translation there to stick— so I think, for the purposes of this AU, Rumi can do almost the same thing but that she has to take it from them manually, and for her it's still malia.
That means she can do it, but it'll have some serious consequences. A sickly aura, a feeling of doom, fingernails that blacken and twist, changes to her hair and eye color... Nothing anyone here can visualize or borrow convenient screenshots of, right? (Also: difficulty building or holding onto mana of your own. The high is high, but the comedown and recovery are pricey.)
So: for the purposes of this AU, Rumi and Mira and Zoey are not adult performers in the KPOP genre, but young adults in a twisted bunker-high school called the Scholomance. The Hunters are not a one-of-a-kind lineage of heroes fighting a foe that no one else in the world knows still exists, but rather an alliance of pragmatism in a stark and hungry world. Huntrix, I think, is still heroic, still saves people— but it's less part of tradition and more a choice of our trio. In the world of the Scholomance, your first priority is always keep yourself alive. (Faults And Fears Must Never Be Seen still holds, of course. As much for survivors as for paragons.)
I'm not sure whether it would be more apt to place the hunters as a wizard collective, or series of wizard collectives, or to declare them some kind of wanton enclave. They don't have the kind of institutional comfort an enclave demands— I'm honestly more inclined to place Mira as an enclaver, or Zoey (perhaps of one recently fallen?), but it does play into the "ancient line" thing effectively.
Whichever, whatever— I think their specialty was song-spells, and they're damn good ones. Enough that, once Rumi has two solid incanters backing her who can also hold their own in a pinch, it's worth singing them full-throated even when that draws more maleficaria to their location, and they have the juice to save other people as well.
I think that's how they get started, actually, as Huntrix, as more than another nameless alliance: I think Rumi saves someone she didn't need to, with power she'd already committed to spend, and Zoey or Mira worked out some kind of "insurance policy" deal with any groups who thought they might need muscle in a hurry. Yanker spells, even?
Building the mana would've been hard, and finding people who could afford to pay them harder. Once they had momentum, though, I think they could've brokered enough deals to make saving anyone they reach effective enough: the loss on one rescue covered by the profits on another. Eventually, you hit your canons-appropriate Orion situation, where they're running around saving people not for free but for just enough, subsidized, to know that they can make it.
Then... well, it's hard to justify them muscling everyone together for graduation, that's a bit much even for them, but how about a smaller catastrophe? A smaller maw-mouth, climbing through the library?
Rumi goes in first, of course. She'd have to, she's their pointer, and I think she recognizes something about this, however unhappily. She goes in— with a circle backing her, Rumi and Zoey and however many students they can coerce politely sway, and.
I think canon has a strong enough description.
Rumi isn't Galadriel, of course, and I don't think she makes it out on mana alone. I think she does what she has to, what she's been craving to and hiding— I think, to kill the maw-mouth, she has to pull some malia from the maleficaria itself, to go maleficer to end its malignance. I think she emerges, alive and scared and only somewhat hurt, and she sees— them, staring back, at what they see.
They see a monster, and so does she.
...not wholly sure where to take it from there, of course. The people who aren't their allies flee, Mira and Zoey have to decide whether they're looking at the real Rumi (and what that means), and whatever they do— I don't know that people trust them anymore. Even if they do still have that trust, they can't make good on it, not without Rumi out of casting shape. They have to rebuild the rest of their mana store themselves, slow work and hard work that Rumi can't even do right anymore until she's better and can't recover for until she's done the work, but I think that's what they do.
When graduation comes, I'm not sure how it goes for them. One in four is not a pretty number, and I don't think they're going to fight for the door when there's people to help.
Then again, they're pretty creative.
Soooo, yeah! That's what I've got in my head for Scholomance AU, and I hope it's at least a little clear even for people who only know KPDH. Thanks for the tip abt the post cuts, I sorta forgot you can use those as spoiler containers.
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