Charnel Lane was a good name for this place, Balyn thought. From the tumbled stones of the graveyards that filled seemingly every loose space between the buildings and paths, to the corpses dangling from hooks and chains, to the tables strewn with rusted blades and saws, to the small furnace-huts lying here and there just off the street that gave off a foul-smelling stench, this was a place where corpses were processed like some kind of crop. It was utterly dehumanizing in a way that the bestial scourge or even the unholy experiments he'd glimpsed hints of within the Healing Church were not.
Balyn wasn't a man who spent a lot of time thinking philosophically about the hunting business (or anything else, to be fair about it), but he'd savored the irony when he'd used Bone Marrow Ash to charge up his blunderbuss right before he'd used it to blow the Witch of Hemwick's head clean off her grisly, eyeball-stitched cloak.
Of course, because this was Yharnam, he hadn't gotten to sit and savor the dramatic moment. No, he'd had to duck and roll out of the way of a slashing sickle in the hands of one of the witch's ghastly servants, because as it turned out, there wasn't one witch, but two.
But he'd battled back, gotten lost in the corners of the barn-like ossuary cellar the coven had apparently been using for its sadistic rituals. The witch had, in turn, vanished behind the cloak of her magic, but her servants seemed to be blind, unable to find Balyn if he wasn't right next to them or rattling the boards of the wooden walkways.
And now I've got you, he thought, coming up behind the witch, raising his saw cleaver so as to slam it down into her hunched back and end the dreadful rites of this place.
At least that had been the plan, right until the explosion of magic that burst from her blew him off his feet. Two of the mad minions didn't need sight or sound to spot Balyn then, since his body crashed into their shins.
They thanked him for making it easy for them by quickly finishing him off with equal ease.
~X X X~
"You know, not that I'm complaining at all, but this whole thing where I wake up again after dying is ruining a lot of good dramatic endings."
The Doll who served as caretaker of the Hunter's Dream (okay, allegedly Gehrman was in charge of the place, but Balyn knew which one he'd go to if he wanted something done) tipped her head to the side, as if looking at something confusing from a new angle would allow her to make some sense of it.
It was an expression that Balyn saw a lot of.
"Good hunter, would you rather not be given a second chance to make things right?"
He held up his hands.
"No, no, like I said, definitely not complaining!"
Balyn positively didn't want any misunderstandings of that sort!
"It's just that, well, take this last time. I was so smug about how I had snuck up behind the witch, that I just knew I had her."
"Apparently, you did not?"
"No, and it was because of something really basic. If I'd thought even a little, I'd have realized that the whole time, she was keeping an eye on me."