Tricks Oni Lee

Come on, I thought at him. You’re not gonna get me like that. Take the bait.

He was too fast for me to hit him between teleports, or at least, he teleported so quickly that he was already gone by the time I was reacting to his appearance. In that case, I needed to force him into a situation where he couldn’t teleport immediately, where he was there long enough for me to land a decisive blow.

For another long moment, Oni Lee observed me, again. I didn’t dare take my attention off of him long enough to check on how things were going inside the warehouse.

Then, he vanished again, only this time, he didn’t reappear around me, like he had before, and my heart leapt in my chest —

CRACK

There was a sound like thunder, the sickening crunch of something hard and sturdy snapping and breaking, and suddenly, Oni Lee was lying face down on the rooftop in front of me. I felt my lips pull up into a grin.

Success.

I glanced over to my hidden duplicate, the seventh one who had slipped away while Oni Lee wasn’t paying attention to her, and gave her a nod. She gave me her own grin, then promptly vanished, and the gravel she’d been holding in one hand as ammunition fell back into place.

The only direction he could attack from where I’d be sure he was the real thing, at least long enough to hit him, was above me. With six of me huddled close enough to protect me and each of them fast enough to take out one of his before they could pull the pin on a grenade, if he wanted to hit me at all, he needed to come from a direction I wouldn’t be watching moving at speed with enough time to arm his grenade that I couldn’t prevent it. The alternative would have been trying to swamp me with clones — except he had no idea that I had a limit on how many I could summon, either.