Chapter 85 - #85: Death Really Brings Growth

Chapter 85: Chapter #85: Death Really Brings Growth

The Cleric Beast was a monumental terror, but as the community quickly discovered, it was technically an optional boss in the early game.

The towering gothic cathedral looming behind it was an exquisite architectural marvel, constantly teasing the player with the promise of sanctuary. During the boss fight, the audio engine pushed Terra’s hardware to its limits. The orchestral score was deafening, layered over the genuinely horrific, ear-piercing shrieks of the beast, elevating the realism into pure, unfiltered survival horror.

If it’s covered in fur, burn it with fire. If it’s massive, cheese it through a doorframe. This was the despicable, golden rule of survival that the global player base was rapidly mastering.

The beastly mobs could be incinerated with Molotov cocktails, and the massive Executioners could be trapped behind environmental geometry.

The Cleric Beast itself was a towering mass of corrupted muscle covered in thick, matted hair. If it weren’t for the word "Cleric" boldly stamped above its massive health bar, it would be physically impossible for a player to guess that this hideous, screeching demon had once been a human priest of the Healing Church.

After dying countless times, Silver finally managed to slay the massive boss. His hands were physically shaking as the golden PREY SLAUGHTERED text flashed across his screen.

But his triumph was violently short-lived. He eagerly sprinted to the end of the Great Bridge, expecting to finally enter the Cathedral Ward, only to discover that the massive iron doors were permanently locked shut.

Defeated, he teleported back to the Central Yharnam lantern. He walked over to the glowing window, only for the coughing NPC to casually mention that the actual path to the Cathedral Ward was down through the aqueducts.

Silver: "..."

Stream Chat: "..."

[

Toxic_Timmy: I’m so sorry, but I just laughed so fucking hard.

shroud: All that suffering for a literal dead end. Nova is a menace.

LoreMaster: Nova: Just another day of impeccable level design.

GamerDad88: It’s okay bro, at least you leveled up your skills, right? At least you know fur is weak to fire now! LMAO

PixelRonin: The pure, unfiltered malice of this developer is actually staggering.

]

Unlike Silver, Ruby hadn’t even attempted to cross the Great Bridge.

From the very beginning, she knew her mechanical skills weren’t on par with the hardcore FPS veterans or fighting game pros. So, she adopted a different strategy: extreme grinding.

While the other top streamers were endlessly bashing their heads against the Cleric Beast, Ruby was meticulously exploring the lower sewers, safely farming blood echoes to over-level her character’s vitality.

Deep in the aqueducts, climbing a massive ladder up to an isolated courtyard, Ruby encountered another NPC.

Behind the iron bars of an illuminated window, she found a young girl.

In this grim, cursed world—a playground for the ancient, eldritch Great Ones—there were no happy endings. No one in Yharnam died a peaceful death.

And that included this little girl.

Yharnam was famous for its "blood ministration," a miraculous practice of curing diseases through blood transfusions. But those who partook in the Old Blood were eventually corrupted, their minds and bodies synchronizing with the twisted dreams of the ancient gods, slowly mutating them into beasts.

Initially, the xenophobic residents of Yharnam believed the plague was brought by outsiders. In the early days, the sane locals took up arms, forming mobs to hunt down the beasts in the streets.

But as the long nights bled together, a horrifying realization set in: the beasts they were butchering were actually their own neighbors, friends, and family. The city was hunting itself. When the locals finally broke under the psychological weight of slaughtering their own kin, the Healing Church was forced to summon foreign Hunters to finish the job.

Behind the locked gate, the little girl’s voice trembled. She explained that her father was a Hunter. He had joined the hunt earlier that night, but he hadn’t returned.

Consumed by worry, her mother had gone out looking for him, and now, she was missing too.

[I’m so lonely... and scared,] the little girl whispered, her voice breaking in the dark alleyway.

She begged the player to find her mother.

When Ruby selected ’Yes’ on the dialogue prompt, the girl handed her a Tiny Music Box. She explained that it played one of her father’s favorite lullabies.

[If daddy forgets us, play this for him... so he remembers,] the little girl sniffled.

[My mum wears a red jeweled brooch. It’s so big and beautiful. You won’t miss it. If you find her, tell her I’m waiting.]

"When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you."

This famous quote was the first thing that came to mind when a player finally encountered the father.

He was the very first mandatory, mainline story boss of Bloodborne. Unlike the Cleric Beast, there was absolutely no avoiding him.

When Ruby first walked into the flooded graveyard of the Tomb of Oedon, she found Father Gascoigne standing among the tombstones, frantically hacking a beastly corpse to pieces with a massive Hunter Axe.

At first glance, she just thought he was a crazed, hostile NPC muttering absolute nonsense.

[Beasts all over the shop...] Gascoigne rasped, slowly turning around, his eyes wrapped in bandages. [You’ll be one of them, sooner or later.]

Gascoigne was heavily panting, his voice laced with an intoxicating, deranged bloodlust. It was a terrifying premonition: anyone who participated in the hunt would eventually be swallowed by the eternal night, losing their humanity to the slaughter.

From the fragmented item descriptions scattered throughout the game, players could piece together his tragic lore. Gascoigne was an outsider, just like the player. He had traveled to Yharnam, married an old Hunter’s daughter, and fathered two lovely little girls.

But the endless nights of butchering beasts had taken their toll. The intoxicating allure of the blood slowly corrupted his mind.

On this night, he had finally succumbed to the madness. And in his blood-drunk confusion, he had slaughtered his own wife.

Normally, she would have played the music box to pull him back from the brink of insanity. But in her panicked rush to find him, she had forgotten it at home.

When the player encountered him in the graveyard, he was violently hacking the corpses apart, a twisted, subconscious manifestation of his suffocating grief and remorse.

He was the father the little girl was waiting for.

As the cinematic ended, a thick, impenetrable wall of white fog erupted from the ground, sealing off the graveyard gates.

Ruby panicked, frantically jamming her controller. "Wait, what?! I purposely avoided the giant beast on the bridge!"

She had deliberately skipped the first boss to grind, only to walk blindly into a complete nightmare.

The traumatic memories of playing Hollow Knight instantly flooded her mind. Back then, the Crossroads had featured two early bosses: the Gruz Mother and the False Knight.

To a veteran player, those early bosses were a joke. But to a terrified beginner, they were absolute brick walls that required dozens of agonizing deaths to overcome.

Yharnam was unapologetically lethal. Even the basic mobs were a nightmare. As Ruby famously complained to her chat: "I’ve died so many times, every single stray dog in Central Yharnam knows exactly what my shins taste like."

Seeing the boss title flash across the screen, the chat, who had been heavily monitoring other streams, immediately began clapping for her "incredible" luck.

[LootGoblin99: Good news: you avoided the optional Cleric Beast. Bad news: you walked straight into the mandatory story boss.]

[NeonSamurai_X: Gascoigne is an absolute menace. Prepare to suffer.]

[CozyGamerGirl: Oh god, the lore with the little girl makes this so depressing...]

[IronVanguard: Death is not terrible. Giving up is terrible.]

[xQc: GET READY TO LEARN YHARNAM BUDDY]

[LoreMaster: In this game, there are no meaningless deaths. Death actually brings growth.]

The chat was right. Players threw themselves at the bosses over and over again. They lost their blood echoes, woke up at the lantern, and marched right back into the meat grinder.

But with every single death, something changed.

When the Hunter’s trench coat was completely soaked in blood, the player’s brain began to physically adapt. You started seeing through the enemy’s attack patterns. You learned how to expertly time your quickstep dodges. You learned how to perfectly execute a gunshot parry.

It was impossibly difficult at first. But as the adrenaline spiked and the player’s eyes turned red with hyper-focus, the lines between man and beast began to blur. The heavy Saw Cleaver suddenly felt lighter. The pistol parries became instinctual. The brutal, mid-combo trick-weapon transformation attacks flowed like water.

During the chaotic graveyard duel, Ruby remembered the Tiny Music Box in her inventory. She triggered the item.

The haunting, delicate chime of the lullaby echoed over the clash of steel. Hearing the melody, Father Gascoigne clutched his head and staggered backward, completely paralyzed by the agonizing resurfacing of his lost humanity.

But it was only temporary.

When his health dropped to the final threshold, the beast blood completely overwhelmed him. In a terrifying explosion of fur and gore, Father Gascoigne violently mutated into a massive, towering werewolf.

The blood had completely erased the boundary between man and beast, his humanity finally exhausted in the long, tragic struggle against the nightmare.

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I forgot to publish the Chapters here... lol. Mb mb gng( ?° ?? ?°)

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