Granny Ophelia choked on her blood to the side, her hands roaming her chest, searching for the missing mark of incision. Margo’s mind was a wild tangle of adrenaline and panic. Yulo stepped forward, extending one metal boot down into Granny Ophelia's back. Tentatively, the knight brought the fog blade down towards her throat.

  “I won't lie,” Yulo said with a yawn from under their helmet. “You had us all surprised. I would've given you one, maybe two casualties… But it looks like I'm taking the road back all alone. Bravo, really.”

  Granny Ophelia croaked under the pressure, her glassy eyes gleaming with hopelessness towards Margo and Treeg. Margo held Treeg tightly in her arms.

  “What’s it going to take for you to die?” Margo managed between gritted teeth. It wasn’t a threat-- the words caught with the same whine of the foxes. They had played trump card after trump card, and still, here Yulo was.

  Yulo laughed, picking up Granny Ophelia by her thinning hair and holding her out towards Margo. “I could ask the same to you. To all of you, really-- look, even the old lady’s hanging on! Didn’t realize you Blems were made of tougher stuff.”

  “R--r--” Granny Ophelia struggled, her eyes lolling back. Breathlessly, she managed, “Run… T-take Treeg, and…”

  “Run?” Yulo cackled hysterically at the sentiment, bringing Granny Ophelia back into their chestplate to level their visor with the side of her face. “Take your own advice, woman. You saw me come in and didn’t even try for the door! I mean, not that I would’ve let you… But honestly. Practice what you preach.”

  Defiantly, Granny Ophelia raised a bony hand, and shouted, “Vile creature!”

  She jammed her hand into the visor, her knuckles cramming in between the lips and catching on the metal. Granny Ophelia howled, a final war cry as a thick layer of hot metal shot out from both sides of her hand. It spread around the visor, sealing it with Yulo screaming inside. They swung blindly at Granny Ophelia, trying to push her off but her fingers were welded to the helmet now. She flew limply with the helmet as Yulo finally managed to toss it free of themself.

  The sight under the metal was gruesome. Yulo’s face-- whatever it had looked like-- was entirely unrecognizable now. Clumps of metal were dragging down the remnants of their burned skin, leaving a slimy layer of red in their wake. Their left eye had been entirely deluged in Granny Ophelia’s metal, and Margo realized with horror that protruding from the embedded silver was the old woman’s torn pinkie finger, the thin bone bobbing with Yulo’s pained flailing.

  Without the helmet, Margo could see her path to victory; there, blooming in black, bulbous marks under Yulo’s jawline were the signs of her disease taking root. It wasn’t that Yulo had evaded her magic entirely, but rather, whatever was protecting them was drawing it out just slowly enough as not to hold the voracious killer back. If she could just get closer to Yulo, and force her magic through their last defenses, the battle would surely be won.

  Margo laid Treeg down gently. She pressed a gentle kiss to his temple, and though she wasn’t entirely sure why she felt compelled to do it, she just felt in her heart she had to leave him with something soft to remember her by, just in case he didn’t have her or Granny Ophelia by his side when he awoke again. Then, she took a cautious step towards Yulo.

  One bloodshot eye snapped to glare at her, shaking with hatred. Through melted, damaged lips, Yulo hissed a string of garbled obscenities, backing away from Margo. Both of their gauntleted hands were raking through the remaining clumps of stringy black hair clinging to their scalp. Fog escaped in desperate, wispy puffs between their armored plates, but with no intended purpose they vanished into the upper atmosphere of the library. It reminded Margo of how she had cornered Bennet in the alleyway. But then again, in this moment, Yulo simply looked so much like a child to her, quivering and dribbling down their cheeks between each vile insult.

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  The notion was suddenly familiar to Margo in this way beyond her comprehension. She could feel her body snapping into place, rising and twisting and shifting into that strange form she had taken in the alleyway, but this time it felt far less immediate. The bone-shard necklace made from her own collarbone emerged slowly. Her long snout hiding away the three rows of teeth blossomed from her, just like the glowbers had blossomed for Treeg’s gentle touch. The first time it had felt natural, but this time shifting into this behemoth felt entirely euphoric to Margo. It felt like sinking deep into a stagnant lake, letting the dark overtake her every sense and removing the fight from her body. From the center of her great, wide chest, one human arm remained. The arm parted the veils of long pink hair that covered her, and she extended it forward, out towards Yulo. Yulo’s trembling ceased under her touch, the world slowing for just a moment as she flattened her palm against the ruined, creased flesh of their forehead.

  There was an inescapable sense of nostalgia to the scene for Margo. It wasn’t just recalling Bennet in the alleyway-- her mind was flooded with memories that weren’t hers, visions of other people and animals standing in Yulo’s position. Each flashed before her like an illustrated page in a book she had never read before. There were women and children, some pleading for their lives in a language she couldn’t recognize, some bearing the clothes of the wealthy and others cloaked in the same rags most of the Blems had been reduced to. There were elk who looked back at her with terrified beady eyes, bears with defeated whimpers and even wolves-- wolves who had just gone extinct in Margo’s time-- cowering defenselessly under her palm. The voice that had been alien to her before, spoken in the gurgled gibberish she had hissed at Bennet in before, it came to her again now. The cacophony behind it wasn’t a chorus of other voices, she realized, but a flourishing echo that spoke to the many lives behind the first. She hadn’t always been Margo, the voice seemed to say. Margo was a choice, a form just like the fox or the ogre. She had held a thousand forms before, hunted with a thousand faces in a thousand lifetimes. More faces flashed before, the faces of the prey that had led her here. She hadn’t always been Margo, the voice repeated, but she had always been alone on her hunt.

  Preoccupied with this revelation, Margo hadn’t noticed Yulo finally gathering their bearings. With a shrill war cry, they drove their fog blade down into Margo, plunging it where her human arm met the rest of her inhuman body. Rather than pain, though, Margo was instead blinded as the blade erupted into a grand plume of fog. It swirled around her, and soon it was soaring past her and rushing out the window. Yulo was escaping her, Margo realized with amusement. Her body hunkered forward with a series of interior groans and cracks, and by the time she made it to the window, Margo could see the cloud rushing through the abandoned streets of Guina. She couldn’t keep up with them, certainly not in this form, but not even her winged-fox form could match their surging gaseous speed. She snarled with her vicious jaw, cursing Yulo’s luck.

  But then, the ancient voice reminded her with a malevolent yearning, sometimes the best way to capture a beast was to be the beast herself.

  Margo flew out of the window. Her newly created limbs and parts cracked and twisted in the wind, pulling nearer and nearer to her center to form a humanoid shape. Becoming Yulo was painful, not because of the actual transformation but because in doing so, Margo had to take on the damage Yulo had undergone in order to perfect the form. Her eye bubbled and popped, her peach-pink layers of skin running down her cheeks and revealing her exposed connective tissues and muscles. Some of her extraneous bones burst through her chest, flattening over and replicating the armored plating protecting the rest of Yulo’s body. The process was gruesomely detailed, with not a hair spared from the change. Seconds before she hit the ground, Margo flattened out and willed Yulo’s magic to save them. Soon she was a gust of particles, connected by her will. She surged through the battlefield, ignoring the confusion it caused the rest of the Blems still wandering about the corpses of their enemies.

  Margo rolled her body together, pulling herself into a sharpened point and soaring faster and faster toward Yulo’s fleeing gust. She pierced through their cloud, Yulo’s particles startled by the movement. She could feel their panic, pieces of Yulo trying to come together to recover from the surprise attack. But she wouldn’t let Yulo escape her again. That wasn’t what a hero would do.

  Margo willed herself to expand. It started out simple; twice the size of Yulo. Then thrice, then quintuple, until her fog body became so large it pushed the thin veil of the real Yulo to the limit. Yulo’s particles shivered over hers, and she could almost hear the agony of every movement she made in the quakes between Yulo’s thinning cluster. They couldn’t return to their human body, not when so much of them was so far apart. Margo could feel their fear, every piece of Yulo aching to be closer to the other pieces.

  And then Yulo burst.

  It was silent, just a cloud dissolving into the blue sky of another afternoon. But Margo could feel the release, and as she shrunk down into her human form, Yulo did not reappear by her. She took a deep breath of the fresh air, a bright smile worn on her face as she pumped her fist high in the air. Then, she rolled back on her foot, and promptly passed out on the cobbled pavement below.