I didn't shove off just because Eileen told me to. What I did do was try and get her to tell me about the parchment she gave me, getting nowhere until I remembered I had ink and a quill. She gave me a curious look as I set up the inkwell on the floor next to her and scratched out a sentence. It became understanding when I shoved the message in her face and she read it.
What are these?
"That's the mark of a hunter." Eileen told me. "It's etched into all our minds, the mark only serves as a reminder. It lets one envision the rune with clarity and awaken. It's of no use to me anymore."
That confirmed we were speaking the same language. Or trying to. I quickly started writing out more questions.
Why?
"For the hunt." Eileen told me, as if that was the most obvious thing.
I sighed and moved on to other things.
Do you know of Earth Bet?
"Is this where you're from?" Eileen asked. I nodded. "I haven't heard of it. It must be very far away for that to be so."
Confirmation of what I already knew, but it didn't hurt to ask.
Are you a cape?
"No, I should think that I am not a garment."
I rolled my eyes and amended it to 'parahuman', which got a similar but more serious response. It was a little disappointing that I hadn't met someone with powers, but I pushed past it and wrote my next question.
Flesh hungry beasts?
"Are you daft?" Eileen asked pointedly. I shrugged and stared, trying to get her to answer. Eileen gave a short sigh, like she was hiding how exasperated that made her, but couldn't conceal it entirely. "This night takes its toll on the humans brave or stupid enough to wander the streets. Their minds are gone. Only bloodlust remains."
Why?
"Why do we breathe?" Eileen rebuked. "Some things are unexplainable. Our job is to end them before they end us."
Well, breathing was actually the method by which the human body supplied itself with oxygen, which was necessary to maintain bodily functions. But if science hadn't caught up, it hadn't caught up. Eileen's point had been made regardless.
Bridge Beast.
"What do you mean?" Eileen asked. I pointed up at the bridge and mimed something big. Then I felt stupid, so I stopped. "Oh, that thing? Is that your quarry?"
I thought about it, then shook my head.
"You don't seem sure."
I wrote down: It killed me.
"Then I should think it is."
I rolled my eyes again. Advice?
"Don't let it kill you again." Eileen said, making me want to roll my eyes a third time. "Kill it before it gets the chance."
I went to write more but found I was out of parchment. The fact that I was using a quill and ink, on top of using my non-dominant hand meant my handwriting was atrocious for someone whose mother was an English teacher. That the scraps of parchment were as small as they were just meant I ran out more quickly.
I opened my mouth to say goodbye.
Eileen cut me off. "I should think you still have dreams? Tell the little doll I said hello." The words were dismissive, and she turned her head back to overlooking Yharnam. Or what she could from this low position.
That she knew about Doll gave me so many more questions, but I gave up asking them for now. It was pointless and so damn frustrating. The marks went next to the other reminder that I was carrying around and I moved on after saying farewell.
Eileen had shivered when I did.
Soon I was crouched in the rafters and looking down at the situation below me. My range covered the majority of the building, but that was it. Even that small amount of coverage told me a lot, however. The number of bugs tripled as my swarm moved down.
Starting at the bottom was a canal that split the room in two, and there were two floor between that and the rafters where I was crouched. Wrecked boats lay in the canal and I looked at them, thinking of home while my bugs told me the rest.
The first floor was for storage and spanned either side of the canal. Several barrels held good that had long since gone bad, and there were several dog like creatures hiding under the storage areas. I coalesced some bugs near one and got a better view.
It was a rat, but swollen to a size I hadn't ever seen in a rat before. The rat was easily twice the size of the dogs I had put down, and had several patches where fur had ceased to grow, revealing swollen patches of skin that stuck further out than the fur did. Its eyes had grown so much that they looked like bubbles ready to burst.
The rat leaped at the bug cloud and I let the bugs scatter.
Above that was a platform that ringed the room. There was another man with a top hat and a gun watching over the room, but hadn't looked up and therefore hadn't seen me. He was the only human looking one, there were three other humanoids in my range.
Bugs coalesced near them and I observed the things. They were humanoid, but not human, and each was different. I felt my vigor in opposing Eileen's take on the hunt start to slip.
The beasts wore clothes and held torches, two person saws, or metal poles that looked like it had been ripped from the ground. Each was at least seven feet tall, with arms and legs that had grown to twice their natural length. Some had slightly longer arms, others had more misshapen heads or torsos, each walked with a hunch and was covered in coarse fur.
They even had fleas.
Those fleas were more swollen than the fleas on the dogs. I would have had the fleas start biting to agitate the transformed men, but I was wary of doing so. Last time when the fleas tasted blood, I had started craving it. With Iosefka's blood vial in my belt I didn't want that temptation.
Finally, in the attic space with me were two chained up bodies hanging from the ceiling. One had a weapon reminiscent of my saw cleaver tied to the body as it dangled, swinging gently. The other had expired clutching two red rocks close to their chest.
There was a problem with all that which I realised quite belatedly.
How do I get down?
The way I had entered wasn't accessible to me, given that I had dropped down from a windowsill. There weren't any stairs, ladders, or elevators for me to use. It looked like even dropping to the nearest floor would take out my legs.
There was an old, rickety crane that looked easily accessible from above. If I dropped down on that, it would be like halving the fall distance, but doing it twice. That is, if I could get a proper footing on it. If I tried and if I failed, I would break my legs anyway, or fall to my death since the crane was on the edge of the canal.
This was all moot. The solution was to drop down the full way to the next floor, then immediately take a blood vial. Not Iosefka's, though I would want to. Any would do and I knew from the tinker that blood could heal broken bones. The problem then was where to land?
The four of them had pretty good coverage of the warehouse, and while I was confident that my bugs could incapacitate top hat, I wasn't so sure about the others. My take on things was that they were transforming into beasts, and beasts had this nasty habit of ignoring my bugs when they were gouging their eyes out. Even disregarding top hat, the three remaining beast-men still had a pretty good patrol of the place.
I picked a spot and waited until there was a good distance between there and the nearest patrolling beast-man, then sicced my bugs on the three within range. The furthest beast-man had left my range by the time I started moving.
Top hat started screaming while the other two started killing my bugs en mass by slamming themselves against the wall and generally throwing their claws all around themselves. I dropped and held my tongue against the inevitable scream when both my legs broke with a sickening crack.
It was a near thing.
I may as well have not bothered, since my bugs told me that the two beast men snapped their heads in my direction when my bones audibly snapped. Like the beasts, they ignored the bugs as soon as they sensed larger prey and started moving in my direction. They weren't moving as quickly as the beast in the clinic or the beasts on the bridge had, but they were approaching.
That was bad, I still had two broken legs to deal with.
Setting the bones was a painful experience, but I had been through worse and told myself that this time things would get better in a moment. I knew it could, so it helped. This time when the urge to yell in pain arrived, I let it do its thing. The bugs attacked more aggressively when I did.
Once the bones were set, I picked a blood vial, almost taking Iosefka's, and jammed it into my thigh. A rush akin to falling down the stairs overtook me as that rustic taste appeared in the back of my throat. There were two beasts approaching to kill me. That's one more than that time.
I giggled. A beast-man roared. They're still men, kind of. I reminded myself as the euphoria reached its peak and my legs returned to their functioning selves. The bones fused the way they were meant to be, and were as healthy as the day I was born.
Both beast-men had picked up speed when they heard me giggling. I needed to do something about that habit.
The first reached me and slammed down with a farming tool, but I had regained my senses and was already moving. I was quickly on my feet and aiming my gun at the other one who was rearing back with a torch in hand.
I pulled the trigger as his muscles tensed and shot him the shoulder, throwing him off balance and letting me get behind him.
"Can you talk?" I demanded. "Please tell me you can talk."
I got a roar from the one that hadn't been shot. The other was turning towards me with murder in their eyes.
"I won't kill you if you can talk." They would be more beast than man if they couldn't talk. That's what I was telling myself.
Doll had told me that I took the echoes of the ones I killed, giving me reason to justify killing them. I didn't want that to be enough, but it was looking like I didn't have a choice. The off balance beast finished recovering as my bugs finished loading my second to last bullet into my gun. I directed part of the swarm to start confiscating bullets from top hat as it roared.
Beast, then. I was going to kill these two.
Three. I reminded myself. The third one had walked back into my range, and had deviated from its route. It had heard the commotion and was approaching from behind me. If I didn't do anything, it would be able to pincer me with these two. That wouldn't do.
Both beasts attacked simultaneously, and I evaded backwards, then strafed towards the wall. The one that was now closer to me kept up its assault, forcing me to keep dodging. I kept my distance from that one as I tried to make my way around them again, succeeding in that, but letting the other beast get close and prepare to attack.
I shot him before he even pulled his arm back and dropped the gun, pulling on the handle of the saw cleaver and ripping into him while the other beast recovered their breath. It was a short lived assault, and I backed off when a torch hit my shoulder. The burning of the fire being icing on the cake, since the torch itself had been swung so violently.
It winded me, and I was unable to properly dodge the next two attacks, getting tagged on my waist and stump. I dropped the saw cleaver and scrambled with my blood vials, pulling a random one and jabbing it in. I realised too late that I hadn't checked if it was Iosefka's, but the worry was for nothing since the infusion was weaker than it would be with the orange blood vial.
The rush actually helped me focus on dodging the attacks of these two beasts. I was pulling them around the room, trying to lengthen the amount of time before the third one caught up to us. At the same time I was splitting bugs from the assault on the three of them to carry my weapons with me. They couldn't move as quickly as we were when I was dodging directly backwards, so I was zig-zagging in a desperate gambit for time.
My gun caught up to me first with it's last bullet already loaded. I swept it up when the beast-men gave me a moment to catch my breath. I was starting to figure out their movements through my bugs. Their fleas were very helpful to that end.
I kept evading until one had finished stringing attacks together for the time being, and the other was just winding down. I shot the second one, putting it off balance. Then, like I had with the beast on the bridge, I spun the gun in my hand and pistolwhipped them in the temple. I tried to time it so the beast would fall down the canal when I hit him, and for a moment it seemed like he wasn't going to.
Then one of his clawed hands went to his head as his knees failed him and he toppled over the ledge. My bugs watched as he landed head first.
One down. I faced the second beast and holstered my gun. It howled and kept swinging, heedless of his dead friend. Now that I only had one beast to dodge, I was able to evade him easily. When he stopped to catch his breath, I picked up my saw cleaver again and prepared to strike the next time he tired from attacking. Normally it as three or four consecutive strikes, sometimes followed by him slamming his farming equipment into the floor five or more times to round it out, followed by a single second where he stood up and caught his breath.
I didn't get the chance, the other beast caught up before I could try because of course he did. Considering what happened last time, I wasn't about to try going melee with the two of them and started backing up again, having my bugs bite with abandon, but holding back the fleas because they got more into it than the rest. My bugs had confiscated two bullets off of top hat, I started maneuvering towards them and dropped my gun so the bugs would have better access to it.
Then I sprinted around the room, causing the beasts to howl and chase after me. I made sure to jump over top hat, but the beasts had no such reservations. Top hat was scrambling desperately, trying to get the bugs off. One of his maddened struggles caught one of the beasts and caused him to trip.
The beast howled and slammed his farming tool into the ground five or six times. Top hat was no more.
With that distraction, I was able to collect my newly loaded gun and prepare for the beasts approaching me. They had split up, so they were moving to pincer me again. I moved towards the closer one and instigated a fight early.
This time I didn't waste time dodging. I shot him off balance, despite going for a killing headshot, then pistolwhipped him the same way I did his friend. After delivering the blow, I dropped the gun and slashed at him with the saw cleaver. Blood spattered on my face as he fell. I wiped it away to find he hadn't fallen like his friend, so I kicked him over the edge and checked with my bugs to make sure he was down.
He was. I made his fleas jump away from the spreading puddle of blood.
That left one beast in the fight. The one that killed top hat.
The man-beast approached and I shot him when he started winding up. He took the bullet, but didn't stagger. It glared at me with a low growl. Was this one tougher, or had he learned to expect the bullet? That was a first for beasts. Unfortunately, that meant I had to go at him with the saw cleaver. I was out of bullets again, so I holstered the gun.
Saw cleaver out, I evaded and waited for an opening, taking the first one I saw. I slashed him once, twice, then dodged back in time to get out of the way of his counterattack. I caught my breath, waited for another opening, and repeated.
This time I got greedy and went for a third attack, and caught a sharp steel pole in my thigh for my trouble. I almost dodged back, but sensed an opening by virtue of bug sense as he reeled back for a bigger strike. I leaped forward, ignoring my leg's protests, and swung the saw cleaver overhead into his chest. Blood sprayed back on me as the serrated blade sunk in. More left the beast as I dragged it back out.
The beast shoved me away with a claw, scratching at my face and making me bleed from the cheek. I considered using a blood vial, but wasn't feeling enough pain. There was another opening which I used to tackle the beast. It was tired and weakened, so I was able to take it to the ground and found myself straddling the thing. It tried to push me off.
I smashed its face in with the saw cleaver and it stopped trying. There was silence as I made sure it was dead. Eventually I was satisfied that it was.
Panting, I rolled off the beast. Moving away from the drop into the canal.
I touched a finger to my cheek and looked at it, seeing blood. Of course it was covered in blood. That fight had made me bleed seven ways to Sunday, but the motion made me pause.
My cheek hadn't hurt.
Moreover, my thigh didn't hurt.
I hadn't healed with blood, why didn't they hurt? I sat up and winced. There it was, the pain I was expecting. The hole in my thigh had partially closed up, but not completely. Was this a residual effect of the blood? If it was, awesome, I'll take that Brute rating. But I didn't know the whole story. Blood usually restored me to perfect health. That it was acting this way was… unnerving.
I jabbed a blood vial in there and brought it back to working order. There were as many full blood vials as there were empty ones on my belt now, I was going through these things fast.
Once healed, I stood up and brushed myself off. Then smirked and repeated the motions Eileen had done, making my cape and cloak billow dramatically. It was lopsided, given my stump, but it helped.
Then I looted the place, finding several blood vials and recovering the weapon and two rocks that I noticed earlier. Retrieving them by using my bugs to chew away at the support of the chains until they fell and collecting them personally. The rats acted like the beasts of the bridge did, and were easy to put down. Shortly I had everything the warehouse had to offer.
I deigned not to use the new weapon. It was similar to the saw cleaver in that it was a saw spear. If anything, it was even more unwieldy than the cleaver. It was left behind.
Then I moved on. There were more beasts to hunt.
~Drip~Drip~
I blinded the statue toting brute and climbed the ladder while he charged through the metal fence, over the ledge, and plummeted into the depths below. That hadn't been what I intended for him, but there wasn't anything I could do about that now. It was either he charged at me, or he charged randomly, then eventually at the ledge.
Idly, I wondered if that counted as me killing him for the purposes of Doll's echoes.
It was a meaningful distraction that I was grateful for, since I was terrible at climbing ladders now. The musings only distracted me for half the climb, though. Then I was back to being bitter about the whole thing.
I made it to the top, though. One small victory for Taylor Hebert.
Immediately, I glanced at the lit window to my right. My bugs had informed me that someone was living here long before I could see it myself, and I fully intended to at least knock. Also in front of me was a lever that presumably opened the adjacent gate. It lead back to the dried up water fountain, which was news to me. I had looped back on myself.
Since I didn't want to open the path to the brute I knew was down there, I moved to the window first and knocked. I waited. There was movement within.
"Who… are you?" A young and nervous girl asked, making my heart just… melt. She was all alone. I couldn't sense anyone else in the house with my bugs.
"I'm Taylor." I told her distractedly. She sounded familiar, but I couldn't place it.
"What?" The girl sounded confused.
"Where are your parents?" I asked, hopeful that she might understand me.
Her next words dashed that hope. "I- don't know your voice, but I know that smell…" She said, prompting me to take a whiff of myself. I just smelled blood. Blood and gunpowder. "Are you a hunter?"
At this point… I thought dejectedly, "Yes."
"Then please, will you look for my mum? Daddy never came back from the hunt, and she went to find him, but now she's gone, too…" There was a moment where I didn't know what to say. "I'm all alone… and scared…"
My heart melted all over again.
