"Tch... that spatial ability of hers is treacherous," Yorimitsu muttered as he dislodged himself from the shattered beams of the pavilion wall, a fierce, azure aura of raw Reiryoku flaring around his silhouette to shield him from the impact.
"Ohhh? Not bad at all, mortal," Aya purred, drifting effortlessly through the air once more. She glanced back over her shoulder toward the courtyard, only to find that Shion and the rest of the group had completely vanished from the shifting mud.
'Did they slip deeper into the Sanctuary while I was distracted?' she wondered, tapping a pale finger against her temple in mock thought.
But within that exact heartbeat, a monstrous arc of white-orange flames tore through the twilight. The blade-wave sliced deep into the ground before leaping violently up into the sky toward her.
"Hmph!" Aya sneered, twisting her torso sharply to the side. The sheer heat of the passing arc singed the tips of her pink hair. "Hot?!" she exclaimed in genuine shock.
But the flame was merely a decoy. Yorimitsu was already gone. In a blink, he materialised behind her blind spot.
"Uhhhhhhhhh..."
He exhaled a single, incredibly sharp breath that seemed to crackle and spark with electric static in the cold air.
Spppt! Sppppt!
"Minamoto Style, First Form: Inazuma!"
"Ah?!" Caught off guard by the blinding velocity of the lightning-fast strike, Aya barely had a fraction of a second to act. She desperately pulled at the empty space around her, compressing the atmosphere into a dense shield.
Yorimitsu's borrowed blade flared with a blinding, incandescent light as he brought it down. Instead of a clean bisection, the edge was caught in a highly pressurised cushion of warped air, suspending the blade for an agonising microsecond.
"Ahhhhhh!"
But his momentum was too absolute. With a fierce roar, Yorimitsu broke through the distortion, the blade tearing past the cushion and launching Aya, crashing violently into the golden tiles below.
Yorimitsu flipped gracefully through the air, landing lightly on a high roof ridge. He looked down at the borrowed katana, a slight crack forming on it.
"Hmph. It was a bit tricky to grasp," he murmured to himself, testing the ambient pressure, "but it seems I can mimic her distortion method. Albeit... not nearly as potent as hers."
Yorimitsu glanced down just in time to see Aya vanish a mere fraction of an inch before striking the tiles. In a seamless fracture of the sky, she materialised directly above him, one side of her Hagoromo ribbon calcifying into a rigid, razor-sharp blade of dense silk.
Clash!
Blinding sparks rained over the roof ridges as their weapons collided.
"You... how the hell did you do that?!" she hissed. Her face was entirely deranged now. The golden pavilion below was a roaring sea of orange fire, and the intense heat was causing her porcelain skin to warp and blister, looking almost as if it were melting off her skull.
'Hhhhptttt?!, This is even better, I need to stall for time,' the strategic realisation flashed through Yorimitsu's mind.
The unstable blue platform of compressed space he was standing on collapsed beneath his sandals. He floated gracefully back down to the courtyard as their blades dislodged, both combatants gliding to opposite sides of the burning garden.
"Whatever do you mean?" Yorimitsu responded lazily, casually closing the distance between them with slow, measured steps.
"Don't you dare play the fool with me!" Aya shrieked, her voice losing its melodic perfection. "You copied my Omnoyodo! That shouldn't be possible, wh-" She abruptly choked on her words. A patch of flesh near her jawline loosened, slipping downward. With a sickening click, she caught her own face with her left hand and violently forced it back into place.
'Damn it... I severely underestimated him,' she thought, panic finally bleeding into her mind. All this heat... this isn't normal fire. It's actively consuming my Reiryoku.
Her realisation was the absolute truth. One of the fundamental reasons the Minamoto sword style was whispered of with such sheer terror throughout Nihon was their legendary Flames of Kita. These fires possessed a predatory instinct, latching onto an opponent's unique Reiryoku signature and burning relentlessly, reducing the potency of whatever Omnyodo was used in front of them.
"Hmph. If I enlighten you, will you grant me my life?" Yorimitsu asked, his voice dripping with unmistakable sarcasm.
"Tch... it matters little to me anyway," Aya spat, her eyes returning a maddened crimson. "I will simply have Mya investigate your charred corpse after I tear you apart!"
Her arms snapped open wide, and she clawed at the empty air with a desperate, violent force. The sky groaned. In a cataclysmic display of spatial manipulation, an entire multi-story golden pavilion hall was ripped from its foundation and sent flying directly toward Yorimitsu's head.
"You cannot escape this in time!" she chuckled maniacally, leaving Yorimitsu standing beneath the shadow of the falling fortress.
"Ahhh!"
Yorimitsu dug his sandals deep into the fracturing floorboards, centring his weight as the gargantuan shadow of the multi-story palace consumed him.
"Minamoto Style, Reversal Second Form: Takiotoshi!"
With an explosive burst of Reiryoku, he leapt straight into the teeth of the falling mountain. His borrowed katana slashed upward in a violent, incandescent arc. The sheer, concentrated power of the strike bisected the colossal wooden structure clean down the centre. Yet, even as it split, the twin halves of the fracturing fortress maintained their crushing downward momentum.
"Third Form: Ukenagashi!" he roared.
Mid-air, his blade blurred into a rapid, defensive net, parrying the massive tumbling timber and stone away from his body. Gilded debris shattered into millions of flaming splinters around him as he began to drift back toward the ground.
Down below, Mikage no Aya was waiting. The space directly surrounding her body was warping like water over a heated furnace.
"Sakasama no Sekai (Upside Down World) ..." she whispered.
Instantly, reality fractured. Within a localised radius, gravity and perception were violently inverted.
"Ha?!" Yorimitsu's eyes widened. Up became down; sky became earth. His inner ear screamed as his brain struggled to decipher if his body was falling toward the heavens or floating into a void.
In that microsecond of complete sensory disorientation, the fiery debris he had just deflected reversed its trajectory, caught in the spatial vortex. The massive, burning timbers slammed into him from every conceivable direction like a barrage of shooting stars.
"Khhh—!"
Yorimitsu coughed up a sharp spray of crimson, his ribs groaning under the immense concussive pressure. Reacting purely on instinct, he violently flared his azure aura outward, constructing a dense sphere of raw Reiryoku to fortify his defences against the crushing weight of the impact.
For a brutal, agonising minute, the relentless barrage of stone and fire battered his barrier. Then, with a sickening snap, the inverted space dissolved. Reality returned to its natural axis, and Yorimitsu's body smashed violently into the cratered courtyard below.
Shing!
Before the dust could even settle, the cold edge of a calcified silk blade bit into the stone, pinning the earth a mere hair's breadth from the side of his face.
Aya stood directly over him, her smug, malicious smile returning as her melting features slowly fused back together. "I won," she declared, her voice shivering with victory.
Yorimitsu didn't move. He simply lay in the centre of the crater, his chest heaving as he ignored her blade and stared straight past her shoulder into the silver night sky. High above, thick, unnatural storm clouds were rolling in at a terrifying speed, blotting out the moon.
"They are finally here..." he murmured to himself, a small, bloody grin tugging at the corner of his lips.