AN: I'll post the continuation to the last update when I finish it. (It's just a two-parter, so that'll be it.) That might be more than a few months, though. I'll try to get it done, but it's not a priority.

This chapter's summary: Wherein Asuna messes up so badly Gehrman actually facepalms.

About last chapter's ending: I really don't like having to explain story-related stuff outside of the story. It feels like a cop-out. If something's important to the story, then it should be in the story, and if it's not, the writer should probably fix that. But in this case, this author's note genuinely is a cop-out on my part, so I'll explain both what happened and why I wrote it so poorly.

What happened at the end of last chapter: Gehrman took out Asuna's eyes permanently.

Why it was written so vaguely: I didn't realize until I got there that I did not want to write that scene. At all. It needed to happen, and in fact it was one of the only events that I had planned from early on, but I just didn't want to write it. People murdering each other? Sure, sure, I can write that, no problem. A girl going through assisted self-mutilation in vain hopes of holding off a terminal illness? Eh... I read and watch much worse than that all the time, but apparently actually writing it myself makes me want to look away. Go figure. So, there was a gory discretion shot there, as well as earlier when she took out her eye herself to look at the pupil, both of which were entirely for my own sake. Sorry. I'd really like to change it to make it clearer, but I don't think I can bring myself to.

Other stuff: The Amygdala mess gave Asuna a huge lead—she's been squandering it, but she's still slightly ahead progress-wise. So nobody has reached Rom yet. It, uh, will be very obvious when somebody does.

3/11/18: Added in a mention of Heathcliff.

In hindsight—

Well. No.

In another life, Asuna might have been a leader. She might have walked with care into her battles, kept just as much attention on her enemies' life forces as on those beside her and moving at her order, pulled back anyone, including herself, who dipped from healthy green to flashing red. She might have had friends she would laugh with, a young man she would have died but not killed for, a clever, affectionate girl who looked up at her as if she was all the stars in the sky and called her mama.

It couldn't have been called a kinder world. In its own ways, Aincrad would have been as cruel as Yharnam. The players would know the way home, would know for certain there was a way home—and they would know that, no matter how vibrant Aincrad's colors, it would all be just a very well-wrought dream. Every achievement they accomplished would happen because their captor allowed it of them. When they made it out, nothing they had built up over their imprisonment would come with them in any form. And that was if a single miscalculation at the wrong time didn't tear it all away in an instant without them ever having the chance to make it so far.

No one who might have known the sub-leader of the Knights of the Blood Oath would recognize the hunter who shoots a dog off its feet and stomps on its head while it's snarling winded on the ground. But they come from the same roots, flourished in more or less comparable circumstances, and there are some things that don't change so easily. In any world, Asuna's never been one to dwell on the past after she's taken what she can from it. She doesn't have enough imagination to come up with infinite what-ifs and fantasies, and she's never considered that a bad thing. She goes over mistakes, finds the moments where she erred, then, their lessons exhausted, she sets them aside and rarely gives them another thought.

There won't be hindsight. As far as she'll be concerned, there's no lesson to be taken from what happens.

Or maybe just no lesson worth learning.

The other reason is because here is where her memory begins to obviously, unambiguously falter.

There have always been small things—maybe she doesn't remember killing quite so many once the rush of the fight dies down, or she looks around and realizes she has only a vague idea of where she is and how many steps it took to get here. Sometimes it's the other way around, experiences added in instead of missing—a constant hackle-raising scent that lingers even when she's alone, voices and words in her memories that she can't recall the sources of. Dismissable, all told. Nothing that affects her work.

It's the acknowledgement that exacerbates it. Before, she could rush over the cracks without pause, but aware as she is now of what they're symptoms of, she starts to catch over the leaps in her logic, to stop when she makes an assumption that, though she knows it to be correct, she can't name the source of.

She knows what she shouldn't and doesn't know what she should. It's— not something she wants to think about closely, but she'll reach for a blood vial, she'll hesitate for an instant too long when her hand closes around empty glass that she never doubted was filled, and... this does affect her work.

Which wouldn't be an issue except for the fact that time has become a factor.

Being able to take two or three solid hits at most before going down has beaten into her a fine understanding of how little she can afford mistakes, but mistakes do still happen. She doesn't mind them, even. Tracking down the ones that killed her and setting the same fate on them makes for a diverting change of pace from the usual meandering exploration.

But time matters now. Errors are too costly to allow. The leeway she had is gone, and that knowledge presses down with a physical presence, wearing at her and leaving her snapping at every shift of the wind. She tears through the Cathedral Ward with all the wild desperation of a wolf with a leg caught in a steel trap. Nothing stops her. At some point, she gets into a fight with three dogs, five beasts that still remember how to use tools, a lantern-bearer and a scythe-wielder, and one of the large, ragged, man-shaped things that haul around sacks filled with what feels like lead weights. Only the latter gives her anything in the way of trouble, and she comes out the other side of the melee without taking so much as a scratch.

She's always taken more care when dealing with beasts that were hunters. They're the most dangerous, the ones that kill her the most. She's never put any real thought into it before other than noticing it as a fact, but she catches herself on her axe after nearly slipping on blood-slicked cobbles and thinks about how she must seem from the other side.

Dully, she wonders if the beasts still feel fear.

None of the people she's killed were human but became a beast the moment they stepped onto the street. It's not an instantaneous metamorphosis. If she had a timeline of any of their lives, she wouldn't be able to mark the point when they, as themselves, stopped existing. It's more like falling asleep than dying, in that sense.

Maybe Asuna will wake up at the end, and the her of tonight will have only been a dream to the girl in Tokyo. And maybe someday a shiny prince in armor will ride in on a pale horse and a road paved with glitter to bail her out of a losing fight, like in the stories her father told her when she was young. She rolls her shoulders. Even odds, really.

When her circuit takes her back to the chapel, another woman is dead.

The retired hunter is bent over the corpse, liquid and gobbets dripping from his hands and beard. She purses her lips. Well, there's any scent trail gone. Couldn't he have waited to destroy the crime scene until she went over it?

There's something about that thought... ah. The woman died near him. There was no need to preserve the body for her, since he must have noticed what killed the woman in the first place.

He stills when she draws near. She stops and waits for him to finish, fingers tapping a rhythm she's never heard before on the handle of her axe. Before the tune loops, he says, getting to his feet, "You, heh, caught me at a bad time. This isn't what it looks like." His voice sounds deeper than she remembers, rougher, almost with an echo, but she ignores the discrepancy. She trusts her memory about as far as she can throw it.

The words are more important, anyway. She's... not sure what it looks like, but she's fairly certain about what the situation is: he's eating a corpse. Odd thing to feel the need to lie about.

"I found her like this," he says. "Leaving the chapel—she must've gone mad. It's the curse of Yharnam. Incense can't ward off the night forever." He pats his hands dry on his pants. "Oh, but I got some more. Here."

She stows away the pellet he hands her, then draws her mask down. "You didn't stop her."

"I was three blocks away. I rushed back here when she screamed, but..."

"Where is it?"

"What, her killer?" he asks. His laugh is a throaty rumble. "Good thing, isn't it, that this is your first night. The Church could have used a hunter like you. What've you been doing? Did you try to kill everyone in the Ward, hoping you'd strike lucky on one of them?"

She nods, and he laughs harder. "He went up. You could check the Grand Cathedral, see if he's there. If he isn't, might be that someone you off on the way is the one you wanted. Good luck. Not that you look like you'll need it."

The Grand Cathedral is empty. The shaggy beast's arm still lies undisturbed where she left it.

She returns to Oedon Chapel, and to Arianna's corpse.

The body is whole. Asuna pats it down, searching for the mortal wound, and finds a crushed throat. Her death was entirely bloodless. That can't be, though. Beasts don't kill like that. Was it something different this time? One of the robed things with staves?

"...I was three blocks away," the retired hunter says. He's standing close enough behind her that she has to move to the side before she can get up from her crouch. "I rushed back here when she screamed, but."

It's not anything in the Ward, is it? Central Yharnam, maybe, if it climbed a wall to bypass the chapel and then... the Ward seems more likely. A hiding place she missed, or simple bad luck that means their paths haven't crossed. She hasn't killed everything here yet. Not even close. Hundreds, but Yharnam's a city; it has—had—a population in the hundreds of thousands at least.

She can't go on whittling them down like this, one by one by one. There's not enough time in the night.

If she sets the Cathedral Ward to the torch, she'll burn out survivors too. She knows better than to think she's managed to gather every remaining human. And it didn't work, when the Church consigned the old quarter to flame. Old Yharnam was sealed off behind a bottleneck, and still they failed; if she tries to repeat it in the Cathedral Ward, it's an easy matter to flee to Central Yharnam. In Old Yharnam, the rot survived where the healthy perished. Beasts are the only thing down there now. The same would happen in the town above.

But... harmless beasts. Creatures terrified of flame. Monsters that flinch and cower under light. If the Cathedral Ward burns, she won't get all of them, but she might get most, and the ones that remain will be less than worthy prey.

"What will you do?" the retired hunter asks.

She takes the lives of every potential survivor and weighs them against the chance to stop any more of those under the chapel keeper's eye from dying. She factors in that they're not likely to survive the night on their own with the way things are going, not unless they have a tidy stockpile of incense like the chapel does, and if she hasn't found them yet there's an even chance she won't ever find them at all.

She turns away from the corpse. Through the lamp in the chapel, she returns to the dream. "You're shivering, good hunter," the doll says after her greeting. Asuna pauses. Is she? That's strange. She's not poisoned. "Is it cold?"

Asuna shakes her head.

Even if it is now, it won't be in a bit.

In the workshop, she asks Gehrman, "How do I make gunpowder?"

"What do you want to know that for?"

Somehow, it still surprises her every time he asks her why. She has to sort her thoughts into order before she can answer. "To burn the Cathedral Ward."

Gehrman sighs. "Tell me what happened."

She explains about the chapel, the keeper and the survivors, and about the deaths. She explains about how they've still been dying despite the numbers she's culled. Gehrman asks for their manners of death and the identities of everyone in the chapel, so she tells him those as well.

"You saw nothing strange in his devouring a corpse." His voice is muffled; she thinks he's talking past his hand. When he next speaks, though, it's clear: "You've been to the valley hamlet. You must know that burning the Cathedral Ward wouldn't solve your mystery. Asuna, you..."

The floorboards creak as he leans back in the chair. "Have you met other hunters in Yharnam?"

She nods.

"Earlier in the night," he murmurs. "Who?"

"Eileen—she targets mad hunters. Alfred, a Church hunter. Heathcliff; he uses a shield. Valtr, the Master of the League. ...A League hunter." A hunter in Old Yharnam; the words she doesn't say linger bitter in her throat.

"As well as your summoned compatriots. The Church hunter, which part of the Church does he serve?"

She doesn't remember if he ever told her. She describes his uniform instead, and Gehrman says, "Logarius. ...That is unfortunate. You've come across no others?"

She shakes her head.

"Oh dear." He taps his fingers on the cane's handle. Stills. Sighs. "I could tell you who the culprit is. But I cannot help you."

Bemused, she says, "If I know where it is, I won't need gunpowder."

"No. I suppose you wouldn't," Gehrman says. "Regardless, I am not going to tell you either of those things."

Asuna's mind skids to a halt. He's not going to... but he said he knew. Why would he—? He's Gehrman. He's always helped her when she could bring herself to ask. Now, when the clocks have finally stuttered back into motion, he's...

He laughs. A small sound, little more than a huff of breath, but she realizes suddenly she's never heard him laugh before. "Don't see this as a betrayal. It would be better for you to forget about Oedon Chapel."

Asuna makes a sound in her throat, a word that doesn't quite make it past her dry tongue. She swallows. Her own saliva feels thin and weak after growing used to the augur, but it's enough for her to rasp, "Five people are dead. A boy. Arianna..."

"Do you think yourself capable of saving those remaining? Do you have have an idea where to begin looking for the murderer?"

"...Cathedral Ward. Central Yharnam."

"That's nearly a quarter of the city, hunter. You won't find him like that."

"Him."

"Yes, him. Does knowing that help?"

"...You knew, once I told you what happened." If Gehrman could reason it out just from her explanation, then there should be others who can do the same. The other hunters in Yharnam have lived through hunts before. They're more experienced than her. One of them might know of a type of beast that can kill while muddled by incense.

Actually, did it kill while affected by incense? Now that she thinks about it, it seems like the beast lured them out somehow. All of the deaths happened outside of the chapel, and no one inside witnessed anything odd. That doesn't make sense, though. No one sane would walk willingly into a beast's clutches.

...No one sane.

"What about it?"

"I can..." She pulls her thoughts back to the present. "...ask someone else."

"That's a dangerous quality for a person to have, not knowing when to stop. It's especially so for hunters. Go too far, and someone else will lock you away if you don't destroy yourself first. Asuna, have you heard of the hunter's nightmare?"

"No."

"I didn't think you would have," Gehrman says. "You said there was a Crow in Yharnam? Find her. Tell her about the chapel. She can lead you to the one you're looking for."

When she's made it to the doorway, Gehrman speaks again, softly. The words don't make sense, not in that arrangement. She puts them out of her mind.

~o~o~

"For what very little it's worth, I will not forget your name. There's never been a hunter before you who burned so magnificently so quickly."

Omake - the murder mystery SAO episode, as it would be with canon Asuna swapped out for this version (the first couple of lines are quotes from the episode):

Asuna: The obvious conclusion is that the challenger stabbed the victim with that sword, put a noose around his neck, and pushed him out the window. Wouldn't you say?

Kirito: But nobody had a «Duel Winner» notification.

Asuna: That's impossible. The only way to hurt someone in a safe zone is through a duel. Do you remember who was watching? We'll need to round them all up. One of them must have done it.

Kirito: If someone's found a way to PK in safe zones—

Asuna: What? That's silly.

Kirito: But the «Duel Winner» notification didn't show up on anyone, so it can't have been a duel.

Asuna: You must've blinked and missed it. Come on, you take the north side of town, I'll take the south. No one leaves the area until we find the one who did it. And if the murderer won't fess up to it, we'll get lucky eventually if we just kill all of the suspects. If that doesn't work, we can go through the rest of the town's population. We're solving this murder one way or another.

Kirito: ...Asuna.

Asuna: What is it?

Kirito: Please write a hardboiled story someday. I can't see it being more than a page long, but it'll be an incredible one page.