A faint pain had shot up Arcturus' arm when his saber had come to an abrupt and unexpected halt against the beast man's shin. It felt as if he'd just tried to strike a tree! It was not the creature's unnaturally tough bones that had caught him by surprise, however. No, it was what had followed the ringing of that accursed bell, as his grotesque foe was seemingly possessed by an otherworldly rage. Again he leapt into action as it let out an ear rending roar, wrenching his weapon from its leg in order to defend himself, but he had not anticipated the speed of its furious strike. Not reacting quickly enough to evade, Arcturus had reflexively swept his sword into the path of the oncoming strike, muscle memory taking over as his body tried to prevent a serious blow.

However his hasty attempt to parry had never met the oncoming blades. The beast's fearsome strike had been interrupted by another man, jumping into the fray just in time. Not that Arcturus had much time to appreciate his new ally. In place of blades the frenzied beast had instead sent its foot, impacting him squarely in the stomach and launching him backwards. He felt his breath knocked from his lungs as a sharp pain shot through his abdomen, followed shortly by the distinctly uncomfortable sensation of crashing into the cots behind him. He landed on one cot in particular, sending both him and its occupant tumbling to the floor as the force of his impact overturned it.

Arcturus was no stranger to having his breath knocked from him. He had fallen from a horse more than once in the line of duty, made to choke on gunsmoke amidst the fire and carnage of the battlefield. After but a few moments taken to regain his bearings, glancing back in the direction of the fighting to make sure the beast wasn't trying to press its advantage, the young man had pushed himself back up into a kneeling position. Taking a deep breath as he did so. 

Almost immediately he felt a sharp pain above his stomach, causing him to exhale that air in a grunt of pain. Taking shallower breaths, he had knelt there between the cots, clutching his abdomen with his left hand and gripping the hilt of his sword hard with his right. It was then that he had noticed something odd about the other person whose bed he had overturned. Something unnatural, something sickly. The patient was a woman, her pale skin laced with an unnerving web of blackened veins. Arcturus had never seen anything like it.

Any thoughts of the pain in his torso faded as his unsettled mind briefly wondered what had happened to her. What sort of disease could have caused such a condition. Unless...

Arcturus almost missed the end of the fight, his attention swiftly returning to the beast as their newest comrade managed to snap the neck of the gnarled [i]thing[/i] that had opened the encounter. An event that seemed to coincide with the silencing of that infernal bell. A sigh of relief slipped from the foreigner's mouth when that all encompassing din had finally ceased, peering over from his position among the cots to evaluate the aftermath. The man in charred clothing was still alive, the 'echo' was nowhere to be seen, and the beast man seemed to have finally fallen. Although there was now a mess of blood and viscera around one of the cots where he had heard the nightmarish shade rampaging around. A sight that brought a grimace to his pale expression.

Cautiously he turned his piercing blue eyes back to the now dead beast, watching as his savior rose from beneath its corpse and... Introduced himself? Presumably? Arcturus already had a little trouble parsing the Yharnam accent, but this man was downright unintelligible. Was it some sort of archaic local dialect? He overheard a name, T-... Torkill? Tourkil? Tourquill? Something like that. 

Regardless, the beast didn't look like it was getting up. So there [i]was[/i] a way to kill them. Satisfied that they were no longer in immediate danger, he turned his attention back to the body next to him, pressing two fingers against her throat to check for a pulse.

All the while Arcturus had failed to notice as the pain in his stomach slowly faded. Each breath easier than the last until it had completely vanished.