AN: There are probably going to be more chapters from different perspectives after Amygdala. Asuna covers the Bloodborne side of things well enough, but she's a bit lacking on the interpersonal front from the other half of the crossover.
Like with the lecture building, it feels like she's returning to the dream. Asuna arrives in a small cave with a lamp. The sun hasn't set yet. Its light is paler than she remembers and leaves the craggy stones and scattered headstones washed out of color.
She pokes at the slug clinging to the roof of her mouth with her tongue. Ebrietas's augur pokes back. The creature doesn't seem unhappy with its new residence, though Asuna is still getting used to swallowing slime with her saliva. It opens its portals a few inches in front of itself regardless of line of sight, so keeping it there leaves her hands free without handicapping it.
And, to be honest, she misses eating and taste more than she would have expected. The augur isn't food, but it is a taste that isn't her own mouth.
There's a sinister resonant bell chiming somewhere a ways off. She puts it aside for the moment to deal with the immediate threats. Unlike the beasts of Yharnam, whose anatomy can be counted on to be of animal origin, the monsters here don't even have that much. The first beast she encounters has its head attached to its neck sideways; the toothy, gaping mouth is a vertical slash down the center of its face. It walks on two legs, although it falls to four to lunge, and carries a torch that it uses to send waves of flame forward, which is a neat trick. It curls up and sends electricity arcing from its fur when she makes it close. Not expecting it, she doesn't back away in time, and a bolt strikes her full in the chest, sending her to the cracked ground. Her body doesn't want to respond to her, shuddering from the voltage coursing through it, but she claws her way to her feet and caves in the beast's skull with her axe before it stands.
Aside from them, there are neckless beasts that lob boulders from atop ledges and larger, hard-hitting versions of the amalgamations of corpses that always carry blood stones inside them. She finds a pair of hunters and, after preparing a Molotov, hails them. They attack her wordlessly, the one with the blunderbuss and threaded cane covering for the axe-wielder. The axe-wielder rolls away from the cocktail and shakes droplets of burning oil off its cloak. It's no graveyard beast, but its partner keeps forcing her back before she can capitalize on any of its frequent openings. She lures it behind a large headstone, away from the protection of the gun, then goes after its partner once it's dead. That one takes a few tries; she doesn't have much experience against whips.
A gunshot signals the presence of a third hunter. She ducks behind a boulder, spending a vial on the injuries left over from the other two. She puts her head out of cover for a moment. The enemy is sharing space with a rock-thrower down the trail. Unlike normal madmen, hunters don't cooperate with anything aside from their partner if they have one, a rule she's only found two exceptions to. Invaders can't influence anything other than dreaming hunters, though, so they treat beasts as pieces of the environment, just as this one as is using the rock-thrower as a defense and distraction.
From the shield it's hunkered behind, it's a Knight of the Blood Oath. She's killed members of the covenant before (the graveyard beast, she's come to discover, was an anomaly; she's yet to find another mad hunter that can put up as much of a fight) and assisted others, and she… doesn't understand. They drink blood to strengthen themselves in battle, willingly allowing the scourge hold over them. Many don't fight like hunters, giving up their mobility and speed in exchange for the ability to attack from behind a slab of metal, and, for some, there's a predictability to their movements and an odd gleam about their eyes. It's not a wonder when they go mad.
Heathcliff being their leader explains some of it. He makes no distinction between madness and sanity as long as outward appearance hasn't changed. Hunters follow him because his method offers them power, but she doesn't understand how they can ignore the cost.
The Knight's shield takes the brunt of her scattershot round. The rest catches the rock-thrower, alerting it to her position without injuring it in any meaningful way. It hefts a boulder, but before it can toss it Asuna's Molotov hits the ledge, shooting glass and oil into its feet. It earns her a bullet in her throwing arm, but the beast falls to its knees, dropping the rock, which cracks into fragments and dust when it lands on the ground beneath the ledge.
The boulders the rock-throwers use break unusually easily. Whatever they're composed of, the majority isn't stone. She didn't give the oddity any thought up until she found out the hard way that the things are actually flammable—a rock-thrower tossed one at her while she was fighting a torch-wielding beast, and though she dodged the attack itself, the resulting dust cloud ignited in an explosion with both the beast and her caught inside.
Being on other side of that discovery is less painful. Her second Molotov arcs through the air. The instant it touches the dust, embers spread like lightning through a storm. The dark shape of the mad hunter has just begun to move when the orange glow blossoms into fire and heat.
The flare disperses into threads of smoke. The beast stumbles off the ledge to hit the canyon floor several stories below. The hunter is fumbling for a blood vial. It changes its mind while Asuna still has half the distance between them to cover and fires a silencing blank instead, fading away before she reaches it.
She gets another Knight invader. This one drinks two vials of blood as soon it appears, then tries to force a close-range fight with its massive greatsword. She keeps it at bay with her gun until she runs out of bullets, then, instead of wasting time reloading, she switches to a two-handed grip on her axe and extends its handle.
The enemy throws a bottle of hazy blue liquid at her, and she quickly backs away; she throws enough bottles of her own that she wants to be nowhere near its landing point, whatever it is. On contact with air, the liquid starts producing a lingering, sterile-smelling mist. The hunter skirts around it, running a sheet of paper along the flat of its blade. Crackling blue sparks skid across the greatsword. Unlike the invader itself, the hunter's equipment is audible.
A sheet of fire paper sets Asuna's axe alight. The messengers started selling the material to her once she picked up the hunter badge in the tower beside Oedon Chapel, so she's no longer wary of running out after using up Alfred's gift. It makes killing hunters much easier. The flame is hot enough to partially cauterize, handicapping their ability to heal from the blood they cut out of her. If they're going to close a wound properly, they'll have to take the time to use a vial.
She dodges its downward swing, backsteps from the second and third strikes it transitions quickly into. It leaps forward, and Asuna rolls away before its blade splits the stony ground. She catches it with her axe, the edge cutting through its boot and scraping its ankle bone before it puts distance between them. It throws itself at her again without an instant of hesitation, and again she slips to the side and breaks through its skin before it backs off.
It's strong enough to chop her in half if she lets it land a good hit. With a glancing blow, the electricity will at least numb the limb it touches. But that's only if she lets it, if she makes a mistake. Again and again it leaps and strikes, with every effort missing and earning a deeper slash from her axe as she gets better at timing her movements.
She nearly snags the artery in its wrist, and suddenly it breaks pattern. It lets go of its sword and tackles her. She's too close and it's too fast to dodge. She falls on her side, in the same motion shortening her axe's handle to swing it at the hunter clinging to her legs with one hand while the other works to push her back to her feet.
It catches the inside of her arm, interrupting the attack, and forces it to the ground. She tries to kick it off, but it pushes her down and sits on her ribs where her legs can't reach it. It starts beating at her hand, but she'll carve out her own eyes before she lets a beast disarm her again. After a few more hits, it gives up and simply presses its elbow into her arm to keep her from bringing her weapon up. Its other hand grabs for her throat; she catches it, her fingers clawing uselessly at the back of its glove and her muscles trembling as it presses inexorably down.
She bites her tongue. Ebrietas's tentacles surge out of the portal that opens in front of her face, throwing the mad hunter off her.
She rolls to her feet as the tentacles retract back into the closing portal. The enemy reaches for one of the blood vials at its waist, and while it's healing itself Asuna props her axe against her shoulder and brings out a Molotov.
It picks up the weapon it dropped and wrenches the sword out of the massive bladed sheath it's been swinging around. Then, instead of charging her, it fishes out another vial and knocks the contents down its throat. Asuna snorts derisively and makes to toss the Molotov.
The enemy throws the vial to the ground, shattering it completely, and sprints around to hit her from the side. Asuna grasps the bottle by the tips of her fingers before it leaves her hand and redirects the throw into the mad hunter's path. The thing moves to avoid it, faster now with the sheath on its back instead of throwing off its balance, so the cocktail takes it on the shoulder instead of full in the chest. Its armor takes most of the glass, but its head is unprotected. It stumbles, pressing its off hand to the burning remains of its cheek and neck, and simply stands there, hunched over with its breaths coming in short, shallow spurts. When it hacks out a cough, there are red flecks in the saliva.
Her axe is cold, but no less sharp for it. She darts forwards, and her blade eats down through its collarbone to rip apart its heart.
She spends some time searching for the madwoman ringing the bell, but it never stays in one place and she isn't a good enough tracker to keep following it. Eventually, she decides to leave it be. It's better this way. Every mad hunter summoned into her world is another mad hunter not summoned into the world of someone who might not be able to kill them.
A shallow, putrid bog lies at the bottom of the canyon. She stays away from the muck's edge and the pale, rotting, squid-like things lying in the water, and finds a trail that leads up the side of the canyon, following it out of the bog. She hears slurping and heavy steps and checks around the corner
There's something on the trail ahead. Before she can process what she's looking at, the thing turns around and sees her.
That— that can't be right. It can't be wearing the doll's clothes, reaching the doll's porcelain hands towards her. Those can't be messengers fused together in that bulbous mass of its head, their eyes stretched round and far, far too large. It's— why is it— why is it singing, why is it coming towards her, why does it— how does it—
Its blood is dark. The— body—is it a body? The thing falls off the path, out of sight. The memory of it, every contour and detail, presses crystal-sharp against her thoughts, into her thoughts; the off-tune hum burrows into her ears, her eardrums, her brain, and draws—
—blood, her own blood, turning against her, impaling her from the inside.
"Good hunter?"
Asuna sees the doll's face, every detailed brushstroke and elaborate mechanism, the strands of silver hair that hang loose from her dark bonnet. The doll kneels in front of her, hands settled on her lap. "Good hunter. Can you hear me?" Her voice is soft and accented and familiar. She glances at the messengers at her side. "Please, would you find Gehrman?"
At some point, she returns to perch on the edge of her overgrown ledge near the lower fountain. Asuna watches her.
Gehrman's wheelchair creaks on the path. "Asuna." She looks up at her name. He leans forward and peers into her eyes. He straightens. "In the cupboard beside the bookshelf, behind the blood vials, there are four small bottles, stained yellow, with a clear liquid inside. Bring one here."
The messengers return bearing a bandage-wrapped bottle. Gehrman uncorks it, pulls down Asuna's mask, and opens her mouth.
"Isn't that—" A smile creases his face. "Well. There's one way to do it."
He pours half the contents past her lips. "Swallow." She does. He pours in the rest, tells her to swallow again, and passes the empty bottle to the messengers.
"I've heard hunters call them winter lanterns. They're only found in nightmares. I don't have experience with them myself, but your predecessors' usual strategy has been to strike quickly from behind."
Her heart beats a light staccato. There's cold sweat on her palms and the nape of her neck. She forces herself to breathe at a normal pace. "Makes sense," she mumbles past the augur. She very deliberately steers herself away from picturing the winter lantern, pushing it into the same sealed-off corner of her mind as Insight and the shrouded church. If something is crippling to think about, then don't think about it. Sound advice.
She takes the augur out. It raises the front half of its body off her palm and looks around, eye stalks bobbing. "That stuff you gave me. Do you have any more?" Where there's one enemy, there's usually more. She's... not keen to experience that effect again.
"Take the rest of the supply if you feel you need it. There isn't much left, but it should serve you through this nightmare," he says. "If it isn't enough, I can make more with the materials. Although, you wouldn't be able to use it for a while. It takes some time to steep."
She takes two of the three remaining bottles. It's a sedative; not what she expected, but it makes sense. It did calm her down.
Then it's back to the nightmare frontier. She retraces her steps, cuts down an invader long before the slow-acting poison it uses can kick in, and plows onward through new territory that's no different from the old.
She reaches an opening in the stone. The frame is clearly carved. Past it is a clearing walled in by crags, with patches of tall grass and odd totems sticking up haphazardly. There's a tower across from the entrance, only keeping upright by leaning against the clearing's walls. The doorway and windows are dark and still. The host is likely there. She hasn't seen another building in the nightmare.
What is the host? She glances back, at the sun and the rock and the corpses of beasts. Something made and is sustaining all of it. If the host is mad, if she has to put it down, it might take a few tries to manage.
If a nightmare's nothing more than a dream perverted from its purpose, does the hunter's dream have a host too? The passing thought is interesting enough that she considers it for a moment before setting it aside. Something to wonder about later, after she's found the source of the nightmare.
The air seems thicker as she nears the tower. It's nothing tangible, her movements aren't affected, but… it seems thicker. There's a yellow tint independent of the sunlight. It shimmers faintly near the top of the tower, the light bending around the outline of a hand, an arm….
The host of the nightmare pushes off from the tower. The ground quakes at its impact. It shakes itself out, letting its bones swing in ways that nearly hurt to look at, then tilts the head that should be far too large for the comparatively thin neck to support. She can't tell what it's looking at—its head is a featureless porous oval with long, stiff bristles scattered between the crevices.
Then its eyeballs, hundreds of them, fall to dangle in clusters out of the holes in its head. After a moment, they're reeled back inside. A low growl rumbles, sounding from its entire skeletal body.
Her hands tighten on her weapons, but it doesn't move. She doesn't think it's paying attention to her.
Then it braces its front fists on the ground. The growl cuts off as its eyes tumble out.
What she can only describe as orange laser beams slice across the wall by the suddenly foggy entrance. In the brief instant before they hit, she catches the silhouette of an invader, and then it's lost in a storm of light.
Asuna stares wide-eyed at the host. A series of explosions jerks her attention back to the target of the attack in time to see fires blossom and rock blow apart along the paths the lasers cut. There's not even a bloodstain to mark the location of the invader.
The host turns its head to Asuna. With a roar that shakes the ground, it raises all three pairs of skeletal arms, light twisting and darkening in front of its splayed hands.