Readying her fist in that split second, she uses the lightning-blitz gauntlet style and goes for a quick gut punch while the clone is caught off guard.

Surprisingly enough, the clone reacted to her, not to her mirage; it reacted to her. This caught Deimos greatly off guard because this really hasn't happened before. Before she could think too deeply about it, the clone used its fingers like a sword and slashed at Deimos without much technique, probably intended to be similar to poking a sleeping bear.

Deimos saw the attack from the clone coming, side-stepping, and leaving an afterimage, creating a mirage that was only 1 second behind her movements while removing the one that was further behind. She stopped being invisible because she knew that the clone blocking couldn't have been luck.

She uses the trippy look of the mirage to try and catch the clone off guard. Closing the distance between them as fast as she could, feinting a punch directly at the clone's face, creating a third mirage that is attacking a slightly different spot, and pulling back the punch at the clone's face to roundhouse kick it's side.

This advanced combination is all in one move. It looks like three simultaneous attacks at once; the clone wasn't able to tell which was the real one, so it released a burst of Qi to slightly tip off Deimos' balance. The mirages remained unaffected by the burst, making the difference between Deimos and them quite obvious.

The clone followed up with a kick aimed at Deimos' leg. Seeing this, she tried to mimic what the clone had done, sending a burst of Qi outwards, but she centered it only from her leg. It dampened the blow from the clone to the point where it had little effect on her footwork.

She dashed backwards and re-centered herself; the clone obviously didn't waste this time either, drawing its sword halfway before Deimos began to attack once again. She put all her strength into her movement and used the lightning-blitz gauntlet style to discharge a powerful thunderbolt-like attack.

*CRACK*

She bashed the head of the clone in, or at least she should have. The clone was very durable, covering itself with some sort of energy barrier where she was about to hit it. She shattered the barrier, but her punch was much weaker than it would have been.

The clone twists its head slightly, so her first, while slamming into his face, would slide off faster and not have as much of an effect. A chunk of the clone's face was taken off, but that left her vulnerable to the incoming attack from the clone.

It took advantage of her movement to fully unsheathe its sword. It slammed the hilt into her stomach, and she retched from the impact. The shock of the strike almost made her vomit. It gave her no time to recover and executed a brutal combo on her; using a peculiar and unusual style, the clone kneed her head.

Throwing its sword into the air, it threw a flurry of punches directed at her chest to keep her down. As soon as the sword was in reach, the clone grabbed it, sliced her shoulder by throwing the sword behind her, kicked her into the handle, and Roundhouse kicked her head, sending her to the side.

Deimos was durable for her cultivation tier, so after all of this, she could stand up. She took the relentless beating like a champ. It still really hurt; after all, she did just get the ever-loving shit beaten out of her.

The clone grabbed hold of the blade and ripped it from the earth in one smooth stroke. He centered the blade, aligning it straight up and between his eyes. The strange part about the stance, though, was how the main hand, meant to keep the sword steady and guide it through its movements, had an extremely loose grip.

The wrong hand had a tight grip.... He had to be planning something. Deimos took note of this as she raised her fists and tucked her head behind her arms to protect it. He could tighten that grip at any point and reverse to a normal sword style, but for now it seemed like he was aiming for another hand-to-hand flurry.

Deimos pushed some of her hair to the side, lightening her feet and making most of her weight balance on the front of her feet. She was about to attack when the clone got impatient and swung the sword??

Deimos saw it swing the sword, She thought to herself in that split second, 'Does that mean it wasn't going for a punch?' as she raised a gauntlet to intercept the blade.

In response, the hand, which was very loose, spun in the opposite direction. The clone's grip instantly tightened and redirected the blade to slash from the other direction. Deimos anticipated the attack incorrectly.

She realized she still had time to react. While the sword was being redirected, it was slower than before. She realized that she had only a moment to react. The time it took for the clone to redirect the strike gave her just enough time to create a shield of Qi around her other arm and block the blade.

However, the real goal of the clone was to trick her. While she was moving to block the strike, it let go of it's sword and very swiftly struck at her leg. But it's fist ended up slamming into a sturdy wall of Qi put in place as a failsafe.

She prepared it in advance, which allowed for the first blow to not knock her off balance or anything. She was not knocked off balance as it made contact; instead, she speedily smacked her elbow into its head, causing a dent to appear in the Qi it was made of.

She brought the leg, which was just attacked by the clone, straight up to meet its face, slamming her shin swiftly into its nose. Making use of the lightning-blitz style, her attack was so fast that it blurred even to herself. She easily sent the clone flying backwards.

She smacked the clone's sword far away, approached it in a flash, and threw a palm strike at the upper right shoulder of the clone.