The bowels of Central Pthumeru were not a welcoming place.
Balyn had coped with spindly-limbed, slack-faced horrors, giant muscled brutes, a sword-wielding fire witch, and flame-hurling ritekeepers with varying degrees of success. Sometimes the hunter had been triumphant, and other times he had been charred ashes on the floor, but he had won through by skill, cunning, and stubborn persistence. Mostly the third one, if he was being honest.
But this!
The Pthumerian he faced now was tall, far taller than the stick-like manikins that made up most of the watchers. But it wasn't a lumbering, bloated horror in rags. On the contrary, it wore rich robes, red and gold finery that seemed weirdly out of place in the crumbling tomb-labyrinth. No mere watcher this, but a descendant of ancient Pthumerian lords, perhaps some priest of the sleeping Great Ones.
Not being a scholar, Balyn was more concerned with the fact that whatever its role in society, the Pthumerian was relentless in its attempts to eviscerate him with a hook-pointed shotel.
Balyn tried to dodge, roll, and counter as best he could, but he just couldn't seem to catch a breath. The slashes and swipes were constant, coming in flurries. And if he tried to create space between them and dash out of range, the Pthumerian would just throw its weapon at him like a bladed boomerang.
The shotel all but ripped the hat from Balyn's head as he ducked, and by nervous reflex rather than any plan his finger tightened on the trigger of his blunderbuss. He'd shot at the Pthumerian numerous times already to no effect beyond leaving himself open to get slashed, but this time he fired just at the right moment so that the quicksilver pellets blasted full into his attacker's chest. Taking advantage as the Pthumerian staggered back, Balyn hit him with a massive overhand swing.
The Pthumerian did not seem fond of this. The long growl of rage was an entirely predictable response.
For it to tear its shotel in two lengthwise wasn't quite so expected.
If given a little time to think it over, Balyn would doubtless have concluded that the two halves of the shotel were designed to fit together into a single weapon or be separated into two lighter, faster blades as the situation warranted, much like a hunter's trick weapon, possibly using magnetic siderite like Eileen the Crow's dagger.
He was not, however, given that time. Indeed, he wasn't given any time at all. The Pthumerian descended on him in a whirlwind of steel, the razor-sharp hooked blades sending a shower of blood flying in every direction as they sliced the hunter into gobbets.
~X X X~
"Welcome home, good hunter. What is it you desire?"
One would have expected the Doll to have learned better than to ask such questions by this point. Perhaps she was simply devoted to her duty.
Balyn groaned as he sat up.
"Well, every time I come back here, it fixes my clothes, so I guess nothing at the moment?" He checked his hat and found that it was indeed back in pristine condition. He didn't know if it was a side effect of the eldritch warping of reality as he passed between dream-worlds, or if it was just that the messengers would have made really good valets and lady's-maids.
"That is unusual. Most often, when you return from a place after the eighth time, you tend to begin searching for some alternative means of defeating your enemy."
"Well not this…did you say the eighth time?"
"Sometimes it is the ninth."
"…You count how many times I get killed?"
She shrugged. Balyn supposed she didn't really have a lot to do when he wasn't there; if the number of gravestones really did represent the number of hunters who'd visited the dream and each had had a night of the hunt that had lasted as long as his, then she'd probably read every book in the workshop twice over.
"Anyway, no. I mean, I do have a problem with that descendant of the Pthumerians slicing me open, but I already know what I'm going to do about it: I'm going to call on one of those Healing Church tomb prospectors to help."
"Oh? Do you believe they will be useful?"
"Well, I hope so, at least. They say that the Church's hunters fight the scourge in a medical capacity, and I think that's the kind of assistance I need to slow down the blood loss that Pthumerian's shotels are causing me. I've heard of sickle-cell anemia, but this is just ridiculous!"