"We kill that thing right here, right now! Who knows what he's going to pull out next?!"
Matilda grabbed Fingri by the head. She didn't say a word, but the message in her glowing red eyes came through with perfect clarity.
Kill him.
Granted — those bizarre weapons weren't necessarily tied specifically to the Old Yharnam Hunter. Even taking him down here offered no real guarantee that something stranger wouldn't materialize afterward.
Fingri kept that particular thought entirely to himself. He knew exactly how terrifying his teammate became once her patience ran out. He sighed and agreed — finish this one here.
Bullets came down like a torrential downpour.
The rooftop offered a wide-open space with nothing to hide behind, and nobody had any real sense of whether the Cathedral of the Deep's roof could withstand sustained fire capable of punching through mid-tier barriers.
Sitting still and waiting to find out wasn't an option.
Matilda reshaped nearly half her armor into a massive semicircular shield, sheltering everyone behind it. Aleya threw every defensive enhancement she had, while her scarecrow body summoned a Storm — powerful wind meant to disrupt the Gatling gun's spray the same way adventurers had traditionally used wind magic against arrow volleys.
The giant shield shuddered under the relentless barrage. Craters bloomed across its surface again and again, only to close back over moments later — outwardly intact, but each repair drawing hard on Matilda's stamina reserves.
When the gunfire finally stopped, she downed half a bottle of Stamina Potion in one go.
She didn't drink the other half by choice.
She didn't get the chance — because the Pursuer's ultra greatsword had already punched through the shield and stuck fast.
"Opening! Matilda, pin his weapon!"
Fingri broke from cover, positioned himself behind the shield, and unleashed Wild Strikes.
After absorbing several hits, the Pursuer raised his own shield to retaliate. The impact drove Fingri back a step — but underneath the exchange, he'd already begun casting.
Carian Piercer.
A brilliant azure greatsword of pure magic materialized in his grip, and with a committed thrust, it punched clean through the Pursuer's shield and buried itself in the body beneath.
That single strike outdealt every prior slash combined.
"So magic really is the counter for heavily armored targets."
One of the reasons Fingri — a Magic Swordsman by training — had fallen so genuinely in love with Sein Dungeon was tied directly to his damaged brain. Outside the dungeon, he could barely cast at all; even when he forced it through, the results were essentially unpredictable.
Magic obtained inside Sein Dungeon behaved differently. His Carian Piercer worked exactly like everyone else's version, differing only in scale and raw power.
And critically — he didn't have to root himself in place to cast it.
For the first time in longer than he wanted to admit, he felt like an ordinary person again.
It moved him more than he'd expected.
Wounded now, the Pursuer surged forward with everything he had, trying to rip the shield apart and recover his weapon. Matilda released her grip in time and pulled back with the rest of the group, and the Pursuer's follow-up punch swung through empty air, throwing him off balance.
Fingri seized the opening — another Carian Piercer thrust —
Right as he prepared to press the advantage further, the familiar whirring spin-up of the Gatling gun cut through the fight. His heart lurched, and he threw himself backward on reflex.
He looked up.
Nothing had actually fired.
"Damn it — even the monsters here bluff now?!"
The Pursuer used that half-second of hesitation to widen the gap, then the giant eagle carried him skyward once more.
Only then did the real hail of bullets arrive.
This time, genuine.
Once again, everyone fell back on Matilda. Fingri tried assembling a high-tier magic barrier and didn't finish in time. Aleya deployed hers slightly faster — it held for barely ten seconds before shattering entirely.
Bloodborne's bullets carried a strange composition — mercury and the wielder's own blood, closer to something occult than any conventional firearm technology. Given that, their disproportionate effectiveness against magical barriers made a certain grim sense.
Watching Matilda burn through Stamina Potion after Stamina Potion, Aleya decided she needed to contribute something more substantial. Her scarecrow body drove both hands into the rooftop, and directly in front of the greatshield, a dense row of Ironwood surged up out of nowhere.
Ironwood's defining trait: extreme hardness. Historically, it had even been used in city wall construction. It had fallen out of favor over time, though — being purely a physical defense with zero magical resistance made it obsolete once magic-resistant alternatives emerged. Only a dedicated botanist like Aleya still bothered keeping the seeds around.
Sturdy as it was, it shouldn't have been able to compete with Matilda's armor, which carried both physical and magical protection layered together. By all reasonable logic, the Ironwood should have failed fast.
That was Aleya's honest expectation, anyway.
Then something unexpected happened.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
Bullets striking wood, over and over. Once the barrage finally ended and the Old Yharnam Hunter's platform went quiet, everyone realized —
The Ironwood had stopped every single round.
"…What?"
Fingri's eyes lit up with sudden understanding.
He asked Aleya for a slab of Ironwood, tore a strip from Matilda's armor plating, and sprinted off.
"Keep fighting! I'm testing a theory!"
Gunfire chased him as he ran. Barely two minutes later he was back, breathless and grinning.
"Got it! Those weapons deal massively more damage to anything magically constructed! Against purely mundane material — no magic infused at all — the damage cuts in half!"
Every face in the group lit up with the same realization.
Finally. A path through.
"Knew it. Sein Dungeon wouldn't throw down a genuinely unsolvable wall. There's always an answer somewhere."
With nothing on the rooftop to actually hide behind, they'd manufacture their own cover. Aleya grew a series of Ironwood rows across the open space in short order.
Then Fingri called out again.
"Every time that thing lifts off, its partner opens fire! Aleya — kill the eagle right after the Pursuer grabs onto it, but before it actually takes off!"
She didn't fully understand why the exact timing mattered, but followed the instruction anyway.
She understood almost immediately.
The instant the Pursuer's hand closed on the eagle's talons, the Gatling gun above had already begun spinning up — prepared to keep the assault going without a break in continuity.
Matilda ripped an entire Ironwood tree out by the roots and hurled it skyward with everything she had. It struck the eagle head-on, and the bird crashed hard, the Pursuer dropping with it.
At that exact moment, the Old Yharnam Hunter opened fire from above — and its targeting priority, consistent as ever, locked onto whoever stood nearest without cover.
Which happened to be Fingri, right beside the falling Pursuer.
Ratatatatat!
Fingri wrenched the Pursuer's own greatshield up and held ground stubbornly, absorbing what he could — deliberately positioning it so the Gatling fire also struck the Pursuer directly alongside him.
He'd already worked out, over the course of the earlier fight, that the towering figure across from him wasn't human at all. A suit of armor being animated — or more precisely, a puppet on strings.
"Puppets normally require magic to sustain their movement. So if that's true — those mercury bullets should be doing significant work on him too. Sharp thinking."
Inside the Lord's Chamber, Wade watched through the crystal ball with a genuinely appreciative smile.
Up until now, Leon and Luluwo had impressed him most among the adventurer pool. Fingri, apparently, was another rare find.
I'd genuinely love it if someone like him just stayed in Sein Dungeon permanently and kept putting on shows for me.
"Gold Rank for a reason. That strength is the real thing — even got Balance of Strength to pull out a Gatling gun."
Wade had granted the Balance of Strength authority direct access to the full monster resource database, allowing it to automatically deploy anything rated C+ or below and scale dungeon difficulty against whatever the challengers could actually handle.
Unfortunately, much like its creator, it had a sense of humor about the whole thing.
Somehow it had dug up firearms specifically.
Wade's original design intent had capped equipment escalation at Repeating Crossbows — at most, siege crossbows or fixed ballistae for anything requiring more firepower. If adventurers proved too strong for even that, the fallback plan had been summoning an Avatar of Light Bowgun or Heavy Bowgun.
"Firearms are too big a leap. Pulling those off the roster the moment today wraps."
If the Cathedral of the Deep had legitimate firearms sitting in its arsenal, the logical next step would be marching straight into Anor Londo to inform Gwyn personally: my lord, the times have changed.
Though he'd probably get launched straight back into the past by a Sunlight Spear for the trouble.
"Unauthorized technological escalation — noted and prohibited going forward. I really put Fingri and the others through it today. They've earned something extra for surviving what amounts to a personal industrial revolution."
Watching through the crystal ball, Wade held off making any final decisions until the group had fought clear of the bullet storm, brought the Pursuer down for good, climbed to the platform, and engaged the Old Yharnam Hunter — who, up close, wielded a Pile Bunker.
After an intense, high-speed exchange that only barely ended in the adventurers' favor —
He finalized their reward.
Beyond the guaranteed Soul of the Pursuer, he bumped the general soul yield up across the board. Each adventurer also received: one Experience Candy, a Fire Gem as a subtle nudge toward future content, and a Lake Rune from Bloodborne — a small percentage reduction to physical damage taken.
Runes carried a peculiar weight in Bloodborne's original lore — transcriptions, functionally, of the voices of the Great Ones. Using one meant engraving it into the mind through a dedicated process, and whether that came with side effects was genuinely difficult to say.
For instance: hearing a giant octopus playing recorder somewhere in the deep ocean, unprompted, for the rest of one's life.
Fortunately, Wade had already tested every rune he intended to release on one of his own clones. Anything genuinely dangerous — Blood Rapture, say, which intensified bloodlust — stayed shelved. Purely protective runes like Lake had cleared testing without incident.
This world, after all, had no Great Ones to speak of. No genuine mental contamination risk existed. And Wade wasn't about to release anything unreliable that could actually hurt his adventurers.
A strange rune flickered somewhere at the edge of Fingri's awareness. By the time he registered it consciously, it had already faded.
"…Was that my imagination?"
Something inside him felt subtly different.
Or possibly nothing had changed at all.
He let the thought go. Fighting the Old Yharnam Hunter's erratic, unpredictable style had drained him more than the entire Pursuer engagement combined.
Standing atop the platform, he surveyed the full stretch of the cathedral rooftop below.
The good news: his earlier theory had held up. The Pursuer breaking off combat mid-fight hadn't just been a mechanism to funnel harassment monsters at adventurers.
It had been actively guiding them.
Both the Pursuer and the surrounding monster population functioned as a graduated trial — something built specifically to shepherd disoriented adventurers along the correct path without them realizing they were being led.
Without the Pursuer's conspicuous overhead flight, most adventurers would have simply wandered these rooftops indefinitely, hopelessly lost.
Fingri had heard, secondhand, that Sein Dungeon's monster difficulty adapted dynamically to whoever was doing the challenging. Which meant, presumably, that weaker adventurers entering this same rooftop sequence wouldn't get anything close to this particular ordeal.
The Hollow Soldiers probably wouldn't be packing anything this absurd. The Pursuer's stat sheet probably wouldn't run this hot either.
If anything, the Pursuer's straightforward, weighty fighting style had been genuinely satisfying on its own merits — every swing carrying real committed force, the fight lingering pleasantly in memory well after the fact.
"Another Sein Dungeon original. This whole trip was worth it."
Reaching the platform that — per Wade's original design — was meant to house a ballista rather than a Gatling gun, the rooftop portion of the exploration effectively concluded. Past that point lay a balcony, and finally —
A door that actually opened.
Beyond it, a staircase descending into darkness. Cold air drifted upward. Faint whispers carried from somewhere below.
The path forward had become obvious.
They could double back and clear the side passages they'd skipped —
Or descend into the cathedral itself.
No adventurer alive could genuinely resist that second option.
They took the stairs down. Halfway through, a side corridor branched off — another decision point. After brief discussion, they chose to keep descending.
At the bottom, a small room waited, purpose unclear at first glance.
But the large door beside it looked immediately, unmistakably familiar.
"…Wait. It can't be."
Fingri raised an eyebrow and pushed against it.
The same familiar message surfaced.
[The door does not budge.]
A lever sat beside the frame. He pulled it, and the massive door swung open slowly, revealing —
A familiar scene.
The Cleansing Chapel's bonfire, crackling warm and steady, exactly as they'd left it.
Every adventurer's eyes went wide.
"We looped the entire map… and ended up right back here? What a genuinely incredible map."