Hellhounds

Hellhounds are the original special round, and the rhythm they set on Shi No Numa in 2009 still beats: every few rounds the fog rolls in, lightning cracks, the announcer howls for souls, and packs of burning dogs replace the shambling horde. They arrive in twos, threes and fours depending on how many players are standing, sprint low and fast, and lunge — and the last one of the round drops a Max Ammo, which is why experienced teams treat dog rounds as a resupply, not a threat.

Two variants share the round: the ordinary hound, which simply dies, and the flaming hound, which explodes when it does — the reason you back away from every kill. On later maps they stop respecting their own round and mix into ordinary waves; Moon’s No Man’s Land spawns them endlessly once its alarm trips, and Firebase Z strips the roster to the exploding kind only, whose lone attack is a suicide detonation that leaves a pool of fire.

Fighting them

A pack fixates on one player and stays fixated, so the calmest answer is a wall at your back and a shotgun or fast-firing weapon at the ready — let them come to you, and never kill the final dog during an Insta-Kill, which forfeits the Max Ammo. They appear roughly every four to six rounds on the maps that host them, from the classics through Kino, The Giant, Der Eisendrache and Blood of the Dead to the modern era.

Who they are

The first Hellhound was Fluffy — Samantha Maxis’s pregnant German Shepherd, fed into a Der Riese teleporter by a Group 935 test that went as badly as tests there ever went. Der Riese’s radio logs document the transformation; the pack that has hounded every crew since answers to whoever holds the announcer’s chair — Samantha, then Richtofen, and stranger masters after them.