Even before the flames of the explosion resided, Anya slashed twice in quick succession, left and right. Yuriko parried both strikes easily even while her vision was covered by smoke and flame. Another bullet flew towards her head and she ducked down, avoiding it rather than deflecting.
Her Anima was unscathed and not even a hint of a fissure appeared as a result of Zanji's exploding bullet. Getting hit repeatedly would be annoying, however. Having lost the initiative from the surprise hit, Yuriko smoothly retreated while fending off Anya's continuous attacks. Her perception was spread over the battleground and she kept tabs on the other four. Zanji separated from the others while Glenn, Alyssa, and Wyllan moved counterclockwise, widdershins, though all three kept their distance. Glenn had pulled out a maul from his storage space, and like Anya's it was oversized and filled with runescript lines.
Anya reared back and pulled her weapon over her head in a rather exaggerated move that opened her up to a counter, but Zanji plugged the hole with a barrage of bullets. Like her Da, Zanji's projectiles curved around obstacles which added to the difficulty of dodging them, and when she deflected, the things exploded on her blade.
Alyssa started creating a thin fog around the three, and Yuriko noticed her perception was affected, if only slightly. She frowned at the unpleasant sensation as the mist twinged against Anima. The mist formed icicles and thick snowflakes that flew in a complex pattern, and wary that the woman was forming a runescript array, Yuriko kept some of her perception trained on her and her antics.
Wyllan kept behind Glenn, keeping out of her direct line of sight. That didn't really do much, and she knew he should have known better, so what was he up to? A heatsource formed on his hands and while she fended off Anya's cuts, thrusts, and slashes, she started to shape a sunblade on her left hand.
The five of them noticed and stepped up their attacks. The other four were roughly a dozen paces from her, with Zanji almost twice that distance. She thought that was the limit of their reach, but she wondered why they didn't stretch and deform their auras to extend their perception, especially for Zanji, but witnessing the way he manipulated his bullets, he probably needed the proximity. The bullets were interwoven with Anya's attacks such that they covered her openings and took advantage of whenever the swordswoman managed to pry open Yuriko's guard.
She ignored the other three for the moment and focused her counters on Anya while reading Zanji's bullet trajectories. She countered his guided shots by compressing the air along the bullet path which forced the projectiles off his initial pathing. It was like a puzzle, Yuriko grinned. Thicken the air here, make it thinner there, add a little bit of a gust this way or that way, the bullet, instead of weaving around Anya's blade, smacked into it instead. The swordswoman staggered at the unexpected sideways force, and Yuriko stepped into the guard and stabbed the Arclight Sword into her wrist. The armour blocked her attack since she didn't put much force or Anima into it, but it threw the woman further off balance.
She recovered quickly, however, and retreated before Yuriko could strike her a couple more times. At the same time, she kept obstructing, and eventually redirecting the bullets towards the other three. She couldn't hear them communicate but that didn't mean they weren't coordinating. As soon as the bullets ricocheted, Glenn threw up an earthen guard, while the other two circled around.
Since the start of the duel, ten seconds had passed.
As Yuriko paused to take stock, she allowed the varied shockwaves born from their quick movements and strikes to escape her control. The earth around them erupted with dust clouds but all of them instinctively used their Animakinesis to disperse the clouds. Yuriko let them do as they wished and she took a few seconds to finish materialising her sunblade.
Anya started when she saw the glowing golden blade, and she reared up defensively. Yuriko smirked, then threw the sunblade to Zanji, who leapt out of the way even as he shot the sunblade with his pistols. The sunblade spun and cut the bullets which would probably have curved towards her position had they missed the sunblade. The explosions did nothing to the construct as the heat and kinetic force were easily absorbed and used to bolster its Radiant energy. There wasn't much in there as she didn't want to kill anyone just yet.
Seeing that his pistols weren't doing anything to the sunblade going after him, Zanji dropped the weapons, which then magnetically moved towards his hip, then retrieved a heftier weapon from his armour. At the same time, he boosted himself out of the way using Animakinesis and manoeuvering jets embedded into his leg and boot armour. The carbine sprayed a fusillade of bullets, and when they hit the Flying Sword, instead of absorbing the energies, the weapon was knocked back. Yuriko hummed, noting that she couldn't see or feel the Ennoia energy the gunner was using. It made sense since she hadn't touched any projectile or firearm-related Ennoias.
Still, just because she could sense the energies didn't mean she couldn't react to it. It didn't mean she couldn't predict how it would act. She had more than a hundred different strands of consciousness at her disposal and she dedicated a dozen or so to analysing and predicting Zanji's shooting pattern and how he guided his bullets. Even when he sprayed lead, he was able to meticulously guide each bullet so that they hit her sunblade in quick succession, each one adjusted to hit the weapon's new position after being knocked back. Each hit only pushed the blade half an inch away, but with nearly thirty hits, that was nearly half a pace, more than enough room to manoeuvre. More than enough time to reload his firearm's magazine.
When she threw her sunblade, Anya reacted quickly. Not to run, but to attack. She swept her massive sword into a low horizontal blow, and when Yuriko leapt over the attack, she used the momentum to spin around and have the blade come back at her at a different angle. Not that Yuriko would let the woman get away with showing her back to her. She lunged towards the woman by kicking off against the air, her Anima briefly latched onto the fabric of reality to give her purchase. She stabbed towards Anya's back, but the woman's left hand let go of her massive sword's handle, caught a parrying dagger that popped out of her thigh armour, then intercepted Yuriko's Arclight Sword.
Yuriko grinned mischievously, then powered through the deflection. She forcefully realigned her sword and deflected the deflection. She could just imagine the other woman's widened eyes as the tip of her sword just about touched her side. But she didn't press in or shatter the armour, instead, she laughed loudly and jumped back to her original position.
Anya stiffened for a long moment, but then shook her head, returned to a basic guard and nodded her head. In the meantime, Yuriko's sunblade closed in on Zanji. While he was able to precisely calculate the amount of force to knock her weapon back, it wasn't as if the blade couldn't change its flight pattern. Even if she didn't control it directly, her Will and Intent were infused into it along with her Ennoia energies.
As for the other three, they seemed content to wait things out. Hmm? She could sense bits of powerful energies gathered around them, but it was as if she was seeing through a smoky glass. Alyssa's clouds, of course. Yuriko pressed her perception against it, brute forcing through the obstruction. Such a method wouldn't work against someone at her own level, so perhaps she should work on anti-obscurity techniques. She had no inkling on where to start though, unless she just used Radiance to burn through the defenses. Such a move would be blatantly obvious, but probably quite effective.
Regardless, her perception penetrated the light obstruction and she couldn't help but whistle in surprise and anticipation. Wyllan had gathered or created a dense orb of superheated plasma, or rather, several dense orbs of plasma. They were orbiting around his body and she counted seven ready. He must have sensed her intrusion since he pointed at her position and sent the orbs flying.
At that point, Anya continued her assault. But Yuriko had already seen all of her basics and while she measured well against herself, the difference in strength and power was too wide a gap for the swordswoman to even have a sliver of a chance to prevail. Yuriko stopped matching her strength to the woman and began to press her back using the same foundational techniques.
Anya wasn't using the Four or Five Phases of the Sword, though Yuriko could compare and contrast her style easily enough. Momentum was the name of her game, and with a weapon like that, it was rather understandable. She wasn't as well versed with that kind of swordplay considering that Fri'Avgi toyed with both momentum and weight. There was no need to learn how to manage it when a simple thought allowed her to act as if it didn't exist in the first place. An advantage when it came to wielding her Anima Telum, but a disadvantage when it came to her education on the sword.
As she pressed Anya, she sent pulses of her Animakinesis to intercept and burst Wyllan's plasma orbs. The things turned into huge explosions that covered at least three paces across. The flames were suppressed by the clouds and they flowed back towards Wyllan, where he compressed them into more orbs and sent them back at her. Seven orbs, eight, nine…with every attack and explosion, more orbs were created. It wasn't a problem for now, as her Animakinesis could easily compensate. The question was: could he eventually conjure and control more orbs until he could overwhelm her defences or would he run out of steam first?
She continued to press Anya while conjuring another sunblade. Before she could finish, Glenn rushed in, eerily silent, but she thought he was probably screaming a warcry behind his helm. He swung his maul overhead, though the attack wouldn't reach her even if she stood still. The weapon struck the ground. A line of earthen spikes erupted from the ground, but she stopped it cold with a shockwave induced by her Animakinesis. The ground shattered around him and he staggered back.
Getting into the rhythm, Yuriko finished the sunblade and flung it towards Wyllan. She started another one with a grin. She could have made hundreds of sunblades at the same time, but that would be unsporting, and would probably end the game quickly. She gave them time to try to stop her and found the point at which she pressed them enough that they only had the leeway to defend and not quite attack.
Still, Alyssa proved to be rather elusive and Wyllan relied completely on Glenn to defend. Clouds continued to gather around her and had also begun to spread across the battlefield. In fact…
Yuriko frowned when she noticed the mist. How long had they been there? She allowed a bit of Radiance to surface from her Anima and the mists receded.
It's been a couple of minutes since the start of the fight, and Yuriko wondered if there was anything else left that the Conclave Ancients could show her. They were struggling against her sunblades even though she only let her Flying Swords move at a speed consistent with an Actualised Ancient. Perhaps the novelty of fighting a weapon that seemed to wield itself threw them off.
"Oh?" she murmured as she witnessed Wyllan and Alyssa weaving their Ennoia energies together. She smirked as she waited for them to make a move, but it wasn't only the two of them that did so.
Zanji evaded her sunblade long enough to send a fusillade of bullets, Glenn threw the maul at her while it was covered by a boulder the size of the Voidship fighter, Wyllan somehow turned Alyssa's clouds into smoke and embers, and Anya yelled, "Mountain Cleaving Blade!" as she swung vertically downwards and sent Swordlight arc ten paces high.