After a brief lecture from Shaggy, you decided to avoid recreating the “Kitsunebeam” as you dubbed it, and instead stuck to developing your crowd control capabilities. It only took a bit of experimenting for you to discover that you could just create two Kitsunebi of opposing temperatures, roll them together, and throw out the combined spirit attack as an improvised smoke bomb.

Compared to that, the Flashbang was significantly harder to create. Your time spent utilizing foxfire was minimal at best, but it was at least better than not having any practice at all. Which is exactly what you had when it came to manipulating foxfire in its pure light form. That was, until Shaggy pointed out that you could place a light orb inside of another Kitsunebi, and just throw that.

This required at least another fifteen minutes of trial and error. The pressure only built up from there, when both Ben and Deadhead emerged from the portal halfway through your training session. They didn't interrupt, and kept to light whispering while they watched, but the fact that all of them were watching you mess up only made you feel more stressed out.

After what felt like an incredibly embarrassing and unusually long passage of time, you managed to envelop a tiny bundle of foxfire inside of a larger ball of flame, and flung it at the side of a nearby building. The result was a brief, but blinding flash of light that would likely disorient anyone who wasn't expecting it. And that would have to do for now.

With some repetition, you had a feeling that you could effortlessly perform these techniques mid combat. And what better way to accomplish that than to slay an army of zombies?

You turned to face your audience. Ben had some kind of shield strapped to one arm, as well as a sword and spear on his back, and two pistols webbed to both of his thighs. And while you thought that he was more than prepared for the battle ahead, Deadhead looked like he was ready to fight an army by himself!

The man had what appeared to be a light machine gun slung across his chest! He carried multiple pistols, a rifle with an absurdly long and pointy barrel, and a wrist mounted device that housed a pair of retractable blades. Both men were armed to the teeth!

You gave them an approving grin.

“Let’s go find our friends.”

—---------

Normally, it might have taken you quite a bit of time to assemble an entire team that was spread out across a city currently being overrun by zombies. But now that you had Shaggy here, you were able to create portals to wherever Harpy reportedly spotted your allies.

Unsurprisingly, she found Ana, James, Mekara and Aegis first. The latter two being the easiest to spot from a distance. As soon as both sides of the portal connected, you leapt back out onto the streets, and started slinging flashbangs around at-

(Cont.)