“So,” says Eldritch, walking across the floor, “we can conclude that voodoo is useless against me.”

Gritting her teeth in frustration, Lady Club glances at her allies, the rest of The Deck’s Queens. None of them has answers for her, not against this failure. First, it was the Queen of Hearts falling prey to her own hubris as Ginger Snap caged her using a composite of metal and magic built by her and Eldritch. Unable to touch the edges of her prison due to a set of repellent spells built into the walls, the Queen can now only bounce helplessly back and forth, unable to bring her power to bear and leaving her little more than a damsel in distress.

Then, it was the light spells that Eldritch cast at Lady Diamond, rendering her super sight useless as she reeled from the unintentional flashbang. She recovered, albeit too late to save the Queen of Hearts, just in time to witness the next failure. While Lady Club’s voodoo spells work against Ginger, they melted off Eldritch like water. So now, Lady Club’s talents for magic find themselves tied down with holding her voodoo doll of Ginger in place, keeping the girl in stasis and out of the fight. It would be a good trade, the proverbial double knockout, if only the queens had another fighter to deploy!

“Alright then, just you and me,” Eldritch says, looking at the trembling form of Lady Spade. “What’s your power?” she asks as she unfurls her blade into the form of a whip. “Do you shoot ice or something? Can you fly?” Eldritch cracks the whip, closing the distance between the two unhurriedly. “Gonna tell me? Or will I have to find out the hard way?”

Spade relaxes suddenly, her nervous demeanor replaced by a cocksure confidence entirely out of place on such a young face. “No,” she replies in an upbeat tone, “I’ll tell you.”

Eldritch pauses, wary of the sudden change in her opponent. Guarded, she asks, “What then?”

“Nothing,” answers Spade with a wide smile.

“Nothing?” Eldritch asks disbelievingly.

“Me?” Spade’s smile widens. “Absolutely nothing. I’m powerless.”

“What?” begins Eldritch. But the Queen of Spades ignores her and continues talking.

“Her on the other hand, She does this!” replies Spade as her smile widens to impossible proportions.

Her smile continues to widen, extending out to the sides of her face and leaving no room for the cheeks. Slowly, it balloons comically wide, wider than her head as the teeth begin to fill in and multiply. Then, in a sudden movement, Spade’s mouth flips and reverses, biting into her head and leaving her messy growth of sharpening teeth facing outwards toward Eldritch. Again, the thing wriggling its way out from inside Spade bites in the inverse, taking away another piece of her face and replacing it with the horrid teeth and dripping saliva. Writhing and wriggling wildly in between the messy teeth is a maw of tongues, each one longer and more serpentine than the last as they spill out over her body in a mockery of a grass skirt.

The rest of Spade’s body begins to crack and break, the bones twisting in sudden contortions that cause them to burst from the confines of Spade’s flesh. Atop her head, the maw of tongues and teeth finishes it’s work consuming all of the girl’s head. Then it brays out in a sound that seems to come from a chorus of voices, each a mockery of Spade’s own. The noises it makes are not words, but beneath the gnashing and clashing of teeth, it almost seems as if the creature wants to speak. With one final roar, it forms a single, horrid, word that reverberates throughout the room, “HeadHunter!”

Screaming in agony, Eldritch and every other member of the room falls to the ground, clutching their bleeding ears. Lady Spade, with her head now fully transformed into HeadHunter, hardly seems to notice as her lower body continues the metamorphosis. The last bit of her human body to vanish is the legs as they snap into pillars of toothy flesh that ooze with unknowable puss and heave across the ground in an ungainly crawl. For all the spidery formation lacks in grace, it makes up in speed as it lurches with surprising haste at Eldritch, who still lies on the ground!

Just as one of the long-hanging tongues lashes down at her wounded figure, a metal pole intercedes between the two with devastating effect! Standing in between Eldritch and HeadHunter is Ginger Snap, now freed by the same blast of sonic devastation that debilitated Eldritch!

With a smile underneath her mask, Ginger asks, “Sonic dampeners on, right?”

“Again, Ms. Napp, this suit’s ability to filter out noises selectively is both functional and capable of eliminating the sound of HeadHunter’s voice.”

“Right then,” Ginger replies, mashing her fist, “It’s my turn to be the main heroine.”

With this, she braces her shoulder down and snaps her fingers. An instant later, her suit ripples and reshapes into the form a giant knight, replete in plate mail armor and wielding a gigantic bastard sword with impossible ease. A moment later, she forms a kite shield and drags the tip of the blade across the ground, sending a screeching noise of her own back at HeadHunter.

“Alright then! Time to do battle with whatever demon you’ve been possessed by, Queen of Spades!”

HeadHunter, recovered from the initial blow, howls in incoherent rage before lumbering back toward the two girls. It’s mangled arms stretch out, some of them elongated to sickly lengths that bend back and forth under the power of multiple elbows while still other stubbly ones barely reach more than a few inches from her skin. Angry, the fingers clench and unclench in wild anger as the arms shake in the direction of Ginger Snap.

HeadHunter’s arms pose the greatest threat, Ginger decides, and so it is against them that she strikes first. Stepping forth, Ginger brings her blade up in a swift motion, catching one of the longest arms on it’s third elbow and severing it neatly. Unperturbed, HeadHunter simply rotates, bringing her other arms across in a whip like motion that batters them against Ginger’s quickly raised shield. The hailstorm of blows pushes Ginger back a full foot before she can bring her sword back around, this time cutting from low too high and striking at multiple hands. Even as she does, she can feel the fingers trying to slow the weapon with sheer mass, attempting to rip it from her grasp soon as the momentum drops.

Ginny hardly notices when HeadHunter screams in her face, raining spittle and spare teeth down on her. But she does take notice as the sliced hands swing back, spraying a yellowish blood across her armor.

“Ms. Napp!” cries out the suit, it’s calm façade shaken, “HeadHunter’s excretions cannot be identified. They are also having a rapid negative effect on suit integrity.”

“A what?” grunts Ginny as she braces herself for another swing behind her shield.

“The substance is causing the rapid dissolving of the metals that comprise this suit, Ms. Napp.”

Reacting immediately, Ginny shrugs off the outer plate armor, detaching it with a fast command. Then she leaps back, now unburdened and able to move quicker than before. The two pause as the horrid figure of HeadHunter shakes itself and Ginny tries to assess this new threat.

“Ms. Napp,” the calm voice of the suit intercedes, “biometric scanning is now complete. Data suggests that HeadHunter consists primarily of rapidly growing and decaying cancerous tissue growing from a tumor attached to the Queen of Spades.”

Confused, Ginny replies, “That thing is attached to her? Then where is the queen?”

“Inside.”

Blanching underneath her mask, Ginny braces herself before saying, “It grew… around her?”

“Exactly, Ms. Napp. Additional scanning suggests that the tumor is de-aging the host at a rate of one year every five minutes.”

“De-aging?”

“Exactly Ms. Napp,” the suit replies. After a momentary hesitation it adds, “Is this unit unclear? Your recent queries suggest that a recalibration of information transmission protocols could assist in future communication.”

Calmly breathing in and out as she controls her reaction to the disgusting revelation, Ginny replies, “No, I understand just fine. I just don’t like it.”

Further discussion has to wait, dear reader, for as she answers the quivering form of HeadHunter screams once more before charging back into the fray!

Parrying the blow with a twist of her shield, Ginny gasps out, “Suit! Am I fighting the tumor or the queen?”

After a few tense seconds of processing, the suit replies, “Brain activity for the Queen of Spades is consistent with that of a coma patient. HeadHunter appears to be controlled by her unconscious mind, or entirely by reflex and muscle memory.”

Ginny processes this new information as she brings her sword back around in a broad sweep that pushes HeadHunter back a few precious feet. Then, with a mean smile, she braces herself and barrels forward with her shield. The sudden onslaught catches HeadHunter off guard. Instead of bracing herself for the blow, she takes it right in what would be her torso if she had a clear anatomy. Shoving back HeadHunter and abandoning her shield in a swift motion, Ginny steps back from the reeling monster and takes her sword in both hands. Then, raising it up, she drives it point first toward the beast.

Writhing, HeadHunter uses Ginny’s own shield to blow the blade, but as the metal pierces through the shield Ginny’s plan becomes apparent. Headhunter cannot spread her corrosive blood on Ginny’s vulnerable armor due to the ponderous shield. She also cannot dissolve away the shield as it is too thick for her. Trapped underneath the shield HeadHunter tries in vain to wriggle her way free. Unable, she begins to thrash and twist with greater and greater madness, spewing spare teeth and globules of blood at Ginny’s mail-clad figure.

For a tense few minutes, it appears as though Ginny has the better of the beast. Then, with a spray of blood and roar of triumph, HeadHunter splits the shield in half!

Leaping away from the spraying metals, Ginny creates space between her and HeadHunter. Pausing only to reform the tip of her blade, Ginny sweeps the weapon in front of her in broad strokes aimed at keeping her distance. But HeadHunter, initially driven back by the flashing steel and dangerous weapon, shakes with rage and in a moment of pure instinct leaps onto the blade itself!

Pressing it down with sheer bulk, HeadHunter forces Ginny to drop the point lower and lower until it scrapes the ground in a shimmer of sparks. Then, like a tide of necrotizing limbs, HeadHunter forces herself up the weapon and toward Ginny’s lightly protected figure. Ginny, realizing the creatures plan forces the hilt of her weapon high and then kicks the flat of the blade, using the recoil as a springboard to propel herself away from the fray once again.

The tinny noise of the suit rings in Ginny’s ear as the mechanical voice asks, “Ms. Napp, we appear to be weaponless. Would you like to form a new blade?”

Smiling, Ginny answers, “No, but I would like the current time.”

“I’m sorry Ms. Napp,” the suit answers, “my auditory sensors appear to be malfunctioning. Please restate your answer.”

“They aren’t malfunctioning!” Ginny shouts as she rolls away from HeadHunter’s charging form. “You said this thing de-ages the queen! She won’t last forever in there, and the fact that she didn’t die the first time she transformed means sooner or later she is going to turn back into her human form.”

“The time is twenty three hours and sixteen minutes, Ms. Napp,” replies the suit by way of apology.

Grumbling, Ginny catches and breaks one of the longer arms grabbing at her, bringing her armored elbow down hard on the fragile bone. “Now you answer!” she says. Then she adds, almost to herself, “I know looks, and that girl didn’t look a day over fourteen at most, she’s got to be almost out of time in there!”

But close is not quite good enough, dear reader! And while Ginny is holding her own for now, HeadHunter is not done yet. Without her armaments, can Ginny fend off the predations of HeadHunter long enough? Or will she find out the hard way that close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades? Find out next week in… “Oh Dear, Too Late!”