“Akuma!” They both shouted.

  While Tetsu was thinking of how to keep her secret hidden, the tengu considered the leverage they could gain on the kitsune by revealing that one of them was an akuma. If they played their cards right, then it could lead to a witch hunt on the kitsune race.

  “Filthy akuma! I will bring you in to answer for your crimes!” The tengu shouted this when everyone could see what he was really after when it was written all over his face.

  “Damn it!”

  Tetsu parried every strike from the tengu. He wondered why Lila did nothing. She just stood there like this didn’t affect her at all. He couldn’t keep calm and use his skills, as the pressure was affecting him. He was regretting not taking his training more seriously now.

  ‘Maybe I expect too much from her. Akuma’s never care about anything except violence.’ He kept defending her despite this until it dawned on him that she wasn’t attacking. Akuma never pass up a fight. ‘What is she planning?”

  As this thought came to him, a fog formed around him and the tengu.

  Lila had used the [Illusion Weaver]'s additional effect, [Mind Fog]. The power gap was too big for either Tetsu or the tengu to be affected by the illusions, but Lila still used the fog as cover to strike at the tengu's wings.

  The damage she dealt was minimal, but it kept their foe grounded while Tetsu struck at the openings. The two exchanged blow for blow while Lila struck when she could, until the fog faded and revealed five Lilas.

  The tengu got worried while Tetsu laughed.

  “You are just full of surprises, aren’t you?!” He yelled out in joy, for he was not abandoned or had sided with someone crazy.

  The flow of battle changed drastically now. While the Lila clones didn’t do a lot of damage, and the tengu was confident that he could eliminate them all, the problem was they took a supporting role in creating openings for Tetsu to attack. At the same time, whenever the tengu thought he had a clean hit on Tetsu, he would find that Tetsu wasn’t even there. Like a shadow that briefly flickered out of existence just to counterattack where he was least expected.

  Tetsu also never let up on the taunting, slowly whittling away at the tengu's mental state.

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  “I will be… VICTORIOUS!!” The tengu yelled before launching a volley of feathers in all directions. Tetsu was able to evade it, but all of the fake Lilas were hit and vanished afterward. “W-where is she?!”

  “Fuck if I know man. I was hoping to ask her some questions. Like what’s with that shikigami?” As Tetsu said this, two charred tengu bodies fell to the ground with a splat.

  When the last tengu looked up, he saw the fox was done playing with its quarry and that he was alone. A gangster protecting the kitsune and a powerful fox shikigami was here. He needed to run.

  “I found a shiny~” All eyes turned to the source of the voice and saw nothing.

  “WHERE ARE YOU?!”

  “Here~” she chimed as she activated her title skill, Madness Empowerment, and impaled her claw into the tengu’s abdomen using a wound that Tetsu gave him. “I wonder if this is just as effective on you.” She stated before she quickly ripped the tengu’s heart out.

  In his final moments, he tried to figure out when she turned invisible. It dawned on him that it was when the fog rolled in. No, he knew she created the fog and the clones and did all this while hiding. He was correct when he thought it must have taken an exorbitant amount of mana to pull it off. This left one final question for him, though. Why couldn’t he move?

  Too bad he would not get his answer. A simple answer was that he was shocked that a level 10 could pull this off. He was afraid of what that monster he targeted would accomplish if she was left to mature. What this would mean for the position of the tengu as a whole in Spiritus.

  The reason this heavily mana-dependent plan worked was that she used the additional effect [Spiritual Enhancement], amplifying her homemade invisibility technique. She toyed with this when she got [Illusion Weaver] by trying to surround herself in illusions to mimic her surroundings. It took a lot of concentration for her as she also had not yet figured out how to give preprogrammed responses to her Mirror Images and was manually controlling them.

  After the tengu fell over, Lila dropped the heart and waited for the shikigami to come down to support her as the mana expenditure left her more than a little woozy, making it hard for her to stand straight.

  “Haru?”

  The shikigami nodded, and Lila sighed at this.

  “Is he listening?”

  The shikigami shook its head for no.

  “Might as well head back since I had enough fun.”

  “Wait. Who are you? Really?” Tetsu asked. His curiosity was killing him to know more.

  “I’m Lila, disciple of Haru, and newly adopted human turned hybrid.” She answered with a smile that made Tetsu’s heart skip a beat. “And I will likely be in trouble for sneaking out. So, let’s try to keep my ‘akuma’ nature a secret for now, whatever that means. I’m a… unique case being looked after right now.”

  “Y-yeah, of course. What do you mean by ‘whatever that means’? Do you not know what you are?”

  “What is an akuma?”

  With a deep sigh, Tetsu explained what akumas were and why they were feared, but Lila just laughed in the end.

  “Sounds like you don’t need to worry as I am only one-third demon.”

  Tetsu was stunned to hear this. He wondered if that was why she seemed so different from the akumas he had heard about growing up.

  “If it doesn’t work out with the kitsune, then come find me. I will gladly take you in as a member of my Night Parade of a Hundred Yokai.”

  “Okay?”