She heads through the chapel's side passage. She finds Alfred at an altar behind a cathedral. For no reason at all, before he even asks her name, he hands her three sheets of fire paper. She can use them to set her axe on fire.
She can use them to set her axe on fire.
He doesn't comment when she is too shocked to thank him, simply dives, apropos of nothing, into a history lesson encompassing the Healing Church, Byrgenwerth, Old Yharnam, Cainhurst Castle, and his Master Logarius. He winds down at some point and enthusiastically bids her a good hunt, allowing her to slink away, dazed and confused and three sheets of fire paper richer.
There's a lever on the second floor of the cathedral. She pulls it, and the altar on the first floor slides smoothly back to reveal a staircase. She has enough to deal with at the moment, so she remembers the location and pushes the lever back into place. She doesn't want anything down there getting ideas.
There aren't so many beasts in this area, but the few she does find roaming don't go down easily. She kills them and heads down the stairs. Yharnam is oddly vertical, built in levels like no city she's ever heard of. It seems at times that there are more stairs than flat walkways.
She looks over the railing. She recognizes the section on the other side of the chasm as Central Yharnam, and the great bridge... There's nothing on it, not even corpses.
The wind blows. Blood, sweet and cloying, mixed with the stench of beasts—not coming from the right direction to be her work. Farther down the walkway, something massive raises its head, a silhouette layered over the setting sun.
She wonders why she ran from the bridge earlier. She can't remember her reason. She's a hunter. She hunts beasts. No matter what manner of monster lay in wait, fleeing shouldn't have even crossed her mind.
It doesn't cross it now.
She ducks behind a wagon, close enough to hear its uneven pacing, and lights a Molotov. The pacing stops. She rolls out of cover and throws the bottle.
The explosive shatters against the beast's left shoulder, igniting its fur. The thing staggers back and screams.
The sound strikes her like a physical blow. Asuna stumbles too, pressing her hands clenched around her weapons against her ears. She snarls beneath her mask. She hates that sound. She has never before hated anything in her life, yet she recognizes this feeling in the first instant. Beasts don't get to sound like that, like something wounded and dying and hurting. They don't get to pretend that they can feel. They gave up that right when they became monsters.
It finally shuts its damn mouth. Asuna grits her teeth and charges forward as it rams its shoulder into a wall to snuff out the flame. By the time she reaches it, it's lowered itself to meet her.
It screams again.
It backhands her as she flinches. The blow sends her straight into a wall in an impact that snaps her arm. Her axe clangs onto the cobbles. She rolls away just before the beast's fists smash down and takes the brief instant before it recovers its stance to stab a blood vial into her arm. It turns to her, she shoots it in the face, and—
She is going to break its mouth and tear out its throat, and Yharnam will be a cleaner place for it.
She retrieves her axe as soon as she can. It's good that she strengthened it—even with a sharper and harder blade, the beast's hide is too tough to part easily. She cuts at its legs, trying to bring it down to where she can put steel between its twisted antlers, until eventually it drops to one knee.
She swings her axe at its head, and it catches the weapon beneath the blade, claws curling tightly around the handle. She shoots it, but the fur on its arm is too thick and matted for her shots to penetrate far enough. It wrenches her weapon away from her and flings it over the railing.
Asuna's eyes widen. She starts to follow it, but it vanishes over the edge before she can make it a few steps, and then the beast swipes at her with a scream and she has to leap back. Her rage boils over in a haze of red. She screams back. When it slashes at her with its overgrown arm, she catches its talons between her own, stopping the motion in its tracks. She squeezes and feels all the bones in its claws shatter beneath her fingers. There, now it has a reason to scream.
For some reason the air in front of its exposed rib cage starts to take on a bloody tint. Asuna doesn't care why, because that infernal sound is still cutting through her. She lights a Molotov and throws it at its head; the glass bottle explodes against the roof of its open maw. Its scream chokes off with a wet gurgle. It claws at its burning mouth, and for the first time that night Asuna laughs.
She darts forward, presses the muzzle of her blunderbuss against where the heart would be on a human, and doesn't stop pulling the trigger until the beast's weight slumps onto the gun's barrel.
She spends enough blood vials to heal herself, then refills them with the beast's blood. There's a dead madman nearby with a ball and chain. She isn't strong enough to lift the ball, so she looks for another weapon. She finds one holding what's ostensibly an axe but better fits the definition of a club. It'll do.
She trudges back to the beast's corpse and hacks off the monster's left arm. She hefts it; it's surprisingly heavy, considering how emaciated it is beneath the fur. It's much easier to handle once she cuts off everything above the wrist. She takes the claw in both hands and smashes the beast's neck and burnt jaw into a pulp.
A little ways along, there's a stairway leading down into a room full of urns. There's a chest there with something called a bloodgem inside, and a locked door beside it that, when she breaks it down, turns out to lead onto the bridge. Her axe isn't on it. It must have fallen into the chasm.
There's nothing else for her here. She makes her way back to the chapel.
A faint thread of music reaches her ears. Someone sits beside the caretaker, face buried in her knees, a music box clasped tightly in her hands. Asuna wouldn't have noticed her but for the white ribbon braided through her hair.
"Ah, the hunter," says the caretaker, turning his face up to her. "Hello. Your friend, the Crow, she brought the gal here. I'm happy, so happy, she's safe now in this here chapel, but... she's not doing so well, poor thing."
The tune ends. Without looking, the girl winds the box up again. Her family is likely dead since she's here on her own. Asuna tries to sympathize, and can't. She misses her home and her brother, yes, and her parents, but it's more nostalgia than grief. It wasn't bad while it lasted, but the world turns on. Anything she says is liable to make the girl feel worse. She makes her excuses.
The messengers greet her when she opens her eyes. They give her a trinket that her inventory informs her is a sword hunter badge. From the description, it might be a reward for killing the bridge beast. It reminds her. She asks, "Can you find my axe? It went over the bridge in Central Yharnam."
She thinks that's a yes. They sink into the ground, and she sits on the steps to wait. She considers talking to Gehrman or the doll, but they're both sleeping. It is late, after all. She closes her eyes.
The messengers return with her axe. She thanks them. The praise seems to make them happy.
The bath messenger has new things for sale. Asuna buys the hunter chief emblem and as many Bold Hunter's Marks as she can afford. Unlike visualizing the Hunter's Mark on its own, concentrating on the marks drawn onto the paper slips won't leave her blood echoes behind when they send her back to the lamp.
At the locked gate outside the chapel, she takes out the hunter's chief emblem. The lever on the other side of the gate swings over.
