Hello everyone! It's AnthosW for a new chapter.
Before reading this story, I would like to warn you that English is not my first language, so if there are any mistakes, errors with my grammar, feel free to let me know about it, I'll fix them.
Next week I'll be releasing two chapters, the first on the 26th on Another Day in Hell, the Arknight fanfiction and the second on the 28th on The Hunt Beyond The Dream.
I'm still proofreading the previous chapters, chapter 1 should be out in a couple of weeks.
Chapter 7 : Last Encounter.
Ashton navigated the dungeon. The floors were getting wider and making it difficult to know where to go to find the next floor. Honestly, it was true to say that he was quite impressed with the Princess of Swords. She was quite impressive in her own way.
Her strength? Certainly not. He knew with certainty that in a fight to the death, he would take her down. It was her demeanour that gave him a strange sense of familiarity, the similarity between their mask and his.
"We are born of blood, made men by blood, defeated by blood." He remembered the prophetic words spoken by all the hunters.
Why did he care? He swung his weapon to clear his blade of the blood that had clung to it. The Hunter felt nothing as he watched the canines gather in packs.
He hated packs; they were always the most problematic for a hunter of hunters who specialized in fighting humans. It was lucky that most of the monsters in the dungeon were weak and stupid, he didn't have to worry about being caught off guard.
He drew his pistol and dropped the bullet on the nearest one, cutting it down.
"Too bad dogs run so slow..." he quipped as he saw it try to dodge.
The dog's head exploded on impact, spilling out all around. The great cleaver swung through the air, cutting two dogs in a swift, brutal arc. Blood spurted around and one of the corpses dissolved into the air once its stone was broken. Panic set in among the beasts who tried to flee.
It was a vain and suicidal gesture to turn one's back on a hunter. He was the hunter; they were the hunted: the simple and absolute rule of any hunter of hunters.
Ashton let out an annoyed sigh as he swung his cleaver down, folding it into a more compact form as he sheathed the pistol on his belt. The bodies of the other six dogs now lay all over the hallway. The walls were covered with a bloody mural telling the story of this battle in the bloodiest way possible.
The Night of the Hunt had taught him many skills. Skills that made him a nightmarish enemy to those who opposed him. And in this hallway, the monsters had just experienced it.
But... His skills sometimes made him hate himself.
Finally, he had managed to reach the rest of the dungeon after two hours of unbearable wandering through the corridors. Behind him, dozens of untouched monster corpses had been left behind.
As he descended the stairs, a bad feeling came over him, a feeling that something abnormal was going to happen, that a creature was watching him.
The large room he had just entered was completely empty, except for a sort of large white wall at the back of the room. The cold went up his back. He turned and tried to go back up to the upper floor, aware that a beast was approaching, but he realised that a sort of wall of mist had appeared on the stairs.
He ran his hand along the smoke, feeling it solidify under his touch. The dream, there was the similar feeling to the workshop and Yharnam as a whole, this strange cold and mist running along the floor. He recognised it from a thousand places.
A long roar sounded. From the back of the room a massive figure began to form.
Dark skin and black hair. A body several meters high, green with muscle. Ashton immediately recognized the creature as a Goliath.
He had heard about it from Ryuu and had found a paragraph in a bestiary about the creature.
"Why..." Ashton asked aloud.
The Goliath was only supposed to show up every fortnight, so what was it doing here? The last one had been killed two days ago... Hadn't the team responsible for killing it done their job?
The beast looked at him with red eyes full of hatred. The creature was new to him, even more so than the infant dragon he had heard about in the legends. He had little idea of how the creature fought.
Once it was completely out of the wall, the beast roared madly.
The hunter understood, the moment the creature put its two feet on the ground, it charged forward. Ashton reacted immediately by drawing his cleaver in a controlled gesture and as the beast was about to reach him, he started at full speed using the Quinckening hitting him in the ankle.
It was much faster than him and much better prepared. Withdrawing his blade from the monster's leg as he felt the bone block the attack, he stepped back. The giant roared and tried to crush him with his foot but failed to hit him. Taking advantage of the failure of the attack, he swung his cleaver at the tendon above the heel to cut it.
The Goliath roared again, standing up to receive a second blow directly into the previous wound, driving the blade further in and breaking part of the leg bone.
The monster recoiled with a yelp of pain and lunged at the hunter again, throwing his huge fist directly at the spot where he was standing. His blow fell in a cloud of dust on the ground. Ashton noticed the squat form of the monster's arm through the fallout and grabbed onto the arm, running forward, and scaling the monster with agility.
The dark creature shook its arm violently to get rid of the parasite, but the hunter thrust his sword directly into the flesh to hold on, continuing his inexorable climb towards the monster's head.
He reached the eye level. The huge white orb stared at him with a bloodlust of a strength rarely equalled. He thrust his cleaver forward, piercing the eyepiece in a red and white explosion.
Just as he was about to attack the second eye, he saw the creature's huge hand approaching. He threw himself to the ground and landed in an agile pirouette, half-sliding on the blood that had covered the ground.
An infernal crack sounded down his body. His leg had just cracked from the impact with the ground. The hunter held back a grunt of pain and grabbed one of his vials of blood, shoving it into his hip, letting the liquid slide into his veins.
"CRACK... SCHRIK..."
The sound of his bones reforming in his body made him let out a painful hiss. It was never pleasant to feel his legs repairing fractures.
Ashton wasn't worried. He knew that if he controlled himself well and kept his wits about him, he would make it. He had been through much worse. He smirked under his scarf as he recalled the lessons, he had learned from his time in the living madness.
"The enemies will not wait for you to be ready! You must always stay on the move to avoid being hit."
Obeying his wise words, he began to run around the Goliath activating his Quickening without fail.
"You just have to wait for the right moment to strike. A simple, well-placed thrust can finish it all off," he thought as he rolled forward to avoid a vicious attack from the monster's foot.
His mind was as cold as it had been during each of his hunts, empty of all thoughts not related to the present moment. His broken leg, though healed, was still pulling at him, but not enough to bother him.
As the Goliath swung his fist at the ground, Ashton jumped behind the titan and struck the second tendon, tearing it off. He might be able to stand with one leg gone, but how would he do without the second?
As the blade passes between the muscles, the monster falls heavily to its knees. Its bestial roars echoed through the room. The beast turned in a last effort and swung its hand across the floor in a sweep hoping to kill the hunter.
Ashton broke away from the ground and rolled about thirty yards before landing with his cleaver planted in the ground. Several shards of stone had flown towards him, one of which had torn a long strip of flesh from his cheek.
Turning his hand, he used the power of his roll to get to his feet before throwing himself at the collapsed Goliath.
Using the same method as before, he climbed up the titan's arm, quickly reaching its face. Instead of aiming for the second eye, he dodged the hand that tried to grab it and slammed his cleaver into the monster's cheek, sliding down until he reached the titan's defenseless throat.
The colossal tried to throw his hand at Ashton, but it didn't reach the hunter who moved his blade all along the monster's neck skillfully separating the throat.
The Goliath roared, struggled and put his hands to his throat trying to stop the bleeding, but could not. The beast released its throat and used its hands to get up. He collapsed to the ground barely a second later unable to move without his missing tendons.
Still on guard, Ashton let the beast charge with hatred trying desperately to get back into the fight. The hunter easily found himself moving to finish off the enemy. He passed behind the back of the beast unable to turn around and dragged his long saw-cutter up the titan's spine, pulling the weapon noisily upwards.
The Goliath almost immediately let out a roar, screaming in pain, trying to crush it as if it were an insect on its back. The teenager's eyes remained squinted as he moved up its back, his weapon pulling flesh, bone and blood as he stopped on the beast's head.
Withdrawing his cleaver from the Goliath's body, he raised it above its head, letting it hover like the guillotine of a just punishment. A single sound echoed as he dropped to the ground.
He listened as the beast behind him let out a final howl, the sound of pain, agony and death was a requiem the hunter knew well.
Ashton touched his cheek, feeling the blood flowing from his wound, nothing too serious. The fight hadn't been particularly hard, but it was a welcome change of pace from the simple dungeon monsters.
The time had come to get his due, he approached the corpse and planted his cleaver towards where the mana stone should be.
Shredding the monster, he found it, it was strangely dark, as if it had a special energy.
The corpse dissipated in a cloud of ash.
"What do I do now?" he asked himself.
He doubted. If he went to report the appearance of the Goliath, there was a good chance that it would end up being more in the sight of the gods and adventurers, while if he did nothing, there was the risk that the reappearance would be at a location that would put other adventurers in danger.
After several moments of reflection, Ashton decided to say nothing. The event was supposed to be an isolated act and if it happened again, a group of adventurers sent by the guild would manage to take down the Goliath without too much trouble.
For the moment, the most important thing was to get back to the surface.
He would have to thank Ryuu sometime. Since his arrival, she had been a great help in getting used to the dungeon, especially the monsters and what awaited him on the lower floors. Honestly, he found it easier to talk to the stoic and calm elf than to the other nervous adventurers.
He could admit that the young woman had often come to his aid to get the "common" information from Orario...
As usual, he was dazzled by the sunlight, which he was still not used to. The eternal night had left its mark... The sun was incredibly low in the sky while the moon was beginning to rise and dazzle the sky with its pale glow.
"There is nothing more beautiful than light." the hunter muttered as he walked towards the Hostess of Fertility.
The night was full on Orario. The whole city was in a deep sleep. All of it? Certainly not. In a room on the upper floor of the inn, sitting cross-legged on the floor, Ashton stood motionless, staring at the dark-coloured stone.
The hunter looked at the crystal with apprehension, pondering what to do with the artefact. Its origins and the reasons for its appearance were so peculiar that selling it to the guild would be tantamount to assisted suicide.
As he examined the stone for the umpteenth time, he ran his hand along the rough surface and felt a strange sensation. It was strangely familiar, a distant and addictive call that he had not felt since his arrival in this world.
He raised his palm and picked up one of his blades and ran it gently along his skin. A trickle of blood flowed from his closed fist and settled on the stone, which absorbed it with a terrifying sucking sound. The once black stone turned into a corridor that lit up a little more with each drop of blood drunk.
A faint whisper began to ring through the room.
"Beware the frailty of men. Their will is weak, their spirit is young. If there were no fear, death would not be regretted. But we can go beyond the limits imposed. Born by blood, forged by blood, undone by blood.
"So it is, so it has always been, and so it will always be as long as the Great Ones are..." muttered Ashton.
The crystal cracked and a deep red liquid flowed onto the floor, forming a stain that seemed to have a will of its own. The liquid slid to the floor without Ashton moving to escape it. Slowly, he felt an unusual warmth in his frozen bones before all the blood was absorbed into the hunter's body.
"Echoes of blood." he said with pleasure as he felt the impulse that had passed through his being.
He absorbed the energy and let it move through his bloodstream passing through his arms, legs and stopping. His bones seemed to crack and grow stronger, a pain passed through his eyeballs blocking out the colours of the world before it all came back.
The warm feeling in his body was wonderful. He felt as if he was able to do something more.
The last time he'd spoken to Doll, he'd been on the verge of being able to use his blood echoes to improve himself.
"How?" he asked himself.
Without Doll's help to transform them, the blood echoes should have been worthless... So how?
And why had this crystal been able to absorb his blood and convert it. He grabbed another monster crystal and tried the same manoeuvre again, only for nothing to happen.
It seemed that only certain hearts of monsters could produce blood echoes. An interesting and particularly useful discovery. If he could get more of these crystals, he could become more powerful and improve his weapons further.
"What for?"
As he stood up, he looked out the window at the full moon high in the sky. He had no purpose in this world, no reason to fight.
To survive?
No... He could certainly hunt for a few weeks and harvest enough to live in peace for his whole life.
For duty?
Even less... He wasn't even sure there were any elders. His oath as a hunter of hunters was worthless when there was no prey to stray from. Adventurers would not make good targets because of their membership in Familias and guilds...
All his knowledge was useless in killing monsters that rarely left the dungeon.
He sighed. His eyes drifted to the star in the sky as a flashback of what had happened in the dungeon replayed. The four girls he had met, the monsters he had killed. He had arrived just in time to save the elf and felt a small sense of personal pride.
A simple feeling that he had never felt in Yharnam.
There had been no thanks, no ceremony, even some hostility from one of the women. But the simple idea of having come to someone's aid made him happy.
"Gehrman was wrong," he thought. "Maybe we're there to clean up when the situation is desperate, probably no one will remember us, but one thing is for sure, we sometimes save people from their fate and do our job knowing it's necessary.
For a long time, he felt he had something to do.
A real goal that he could achieve. He could do something that would have a real impact on the world around him, not a wild goose chase where his presence was just a foolish joke of the gods.
He crawled under the sheets, looking through the curtains at the peaceful glow of the moon that lightly illuminated the room. How good it was to see the cold, soothing eye of the night cradling him in its gentle will.
The next day passed in a routine quite similar to the day before.
Entering the Tower of Babel, he slowly made his way down to the first floor of the dungeon, countless adventurers surrounding him, some glancing occasionally, but less than usual. Today his goal was to get to the room where he had fought the Goliath to see if there was anything special.
Reaching the fifth floor proved easy enough, as his only opponents were Kobolds, goblins and the occasional dungeon lizard. Since he knew the path, which had not changed since his last visit, it was easy.
As he descended deeper into the seventh floor, he heard a cracking sound and watched with curiosity as the dungeon gave birth to monsters before his eyes. There were a dozen of them, consisting of six war shadows, two greengrocers and a horned rabbit. Having already come across them, the hunter was happy to kill them.
Within a minute, all the monsters were dead, unable to put a scratch on them.
The harvesting of their cores was of practical interest today. Ashton decided to see if he could find someone capable of making bullets for him.
He doubted he would find any quicksilver bullets in Orario, as none of the adventurers used gunpowder weapons, and he didn't really want to rely on the Bloods Bullets, which cost him money every time they were used.
His carving knife fell on the flesh of a monster tearing cleanly through the leather in search of the mana stone. He was beginning to understand more and more the usefulness of fans to collect all the shit left by the monsters.
Not that he would take one, too much work for little gain.
The ninth floor up to the sixteenth floor was an uninterrupted walk, getting rid of the few monsters that occupied the path. He still found it difficult to understand how adventurers had difficulty in advancing to the upper floors.
He finally reached the seventeenth floor. The boss's room had not changed since the previous day. Still the same white wall at the back of the room. Ashton grabbed his saw and carefully moved it along the edges of the room.
After a while he calmed down, noticing that nothing should happen.
Keeping his guard up, he approached the white stone wall that was supposed to make the Goliath appear. It was made of the same white stone throughout and was surprisingly simple. He ran his hand along the stone surface, not feeling any particular energy.
He continued to walk along the wall, remaining in the shadows with discretion. There seemed to be nothing special about the place. So why had a Goliath appeared. As he was about to leave, he saw a strange green mark in the corner of the room.
Etched in stone, he approached it.
The mark looked exactly like the hunters' mark and showed a light white smoke like the mist of Yharnam. He did not know why, but he felt drawn to it.
Gently he placed his palm on the symbol and felt himself being drawn in. He closed his eyes and when he opened them again, he was no longer in the dungeon. He was in a very special place, the hunter's dream. He would always recognize the place by its quiet atmosphere. The only place of peace in the madness of Yharnam.
His instincts took over as he searched for his cleaver and found it missing. He opened his cloak and noticed his missing sword. He looked down and finally realized that his body did not exist. It was made of some kind of smoke and seemed to be unseen.
As he walked up the path to the workshop, he saw a familiar figure.
"Doll," he muttered.
The doll was standing there in the same place as before. In front of her was a hunter that Ashton recognized.
"The Good Hunter."
The Good Hunter was a man recently arrived in Yharnam. Like others, he had been thrown into the dream by a blood minister and found himself forced to hunt.
But unlike the other hunters in the dream, he knew nothing of hunting. He had never been through the period when he had only one life and had had the good fortune or misfortune to be immediately injected with old blood.
The Good Hunter turned and walked over to one of the lamps, touching it with the tip of his hand before disappearing back into the hunt. Ashton turned and saw that Doll was staring at him. The dream creation walked slowly towards the hunter unable to move and when she was beside him whispered in his ear.
"Silent Walker, the Great One will soon be no more. Others will follow and walk the same path to the dungeon. Which road will you choose?"
As he wanted to answer, to ask more questions, he felt himself being pulled back. As if a thousand chains were catching his body, he was thrown to the ground.
A huge hole opened in the ground and began to pull him towards the shadows. He tried to pull away, only to be pushed into the ground by the force of the power. He dug his nails into the mud and felt his whole-body resist as he tried to escape the fate that awaited him.
When he realised that it was all in vain, he shouted a single question to Doll.
"Was the monster from you?"
As he fell into the abyss, he heard a whisper from Doll as a warm, almost human breath passed into his ear.
"Your connection to the dream has been permanently cut but, you still answered my call. We will probably never meet again, but it was a pleasure. Goodbye Silent Walker."
When he opened his eyes again, Ashton was in the same place where he had found the mark, but it was gone, leaving the white wall free of dirt.
The hunter hesitated for a moment. Was everything he had just seen a dream? A sick vision of his mind? The dirt under his fingernails, the traces of mud along his sleeves. It was all very ar-rivate.
He turned back. The vision was still fresh in his mind. He had come and got the answers he was looking for.
A rather combat oriented chapter and the evolution of Ashton's abilities, due to its purely action nature, I'll be releasing a "quieter" chapter next week to better develop the interractions between the characters.
My goal is to make the characters evolve and this is done through less violent chapters (which will become a kind of norm in this story with more chapters focusing on Orario).