If you're really worried about the techniques that we're using will hurt Guo Fu,
Nevill, keep in mind that Qi Liuwu just taught us an expansion of the Xianglong Eighteen Palms, which is non-lethal, so we could also win using that move. If we use Yuanshi Hundun and our Mad Wolf Step simultaneously to gain a speed advantage, we could win the fight by using the palm strike before Fu can prepare himself.
I'm not saying that there isn't a risk of Fu getting hurt, but aside from the fact that the guy is built like an oak tree, it's important to in mind that we have a new technique in our arsenal that we can use. We could leap up in the air with our agility boosted thanks to our
qinggong and
neigong, then hit Fu with the Sky-Soaring Dragon before he can summon up his inner strength to defend himself from us. Considering that we'd have a ridiculous AGI 10, we could certainly do this.
We've been careful about revealing moves for a variety of reasons. Earlier, we were mostly hoping to avoid revealing techniques so that we could reveal them with surprise when we showed up to fight the sects later on and act with relatively little fear of counters. This has mostly abated due to information that treave later revealed. For the time after that, it was more keeping our skills hidden from later competitors. By this point in the tournament, the only foes we are likely to go up against from here on are Yifang (who knows all of our moves anyway) and Nameless (who we wouldn't be fighting if Esquilax had his way, as he wants to bow out for that time.) Given that our skills are inevitably going to leak out to the various sects as we go about challenging them (and we've used many of our techniques in one way or another by now regardless) I don't know why Esquilax is worried about keeping techniques hidden.
I didn't say that we should definitely bow out for the finals, but we should consider it (I would still be in favour of winning the tournament, depending on the circumstances). Nameless isn't part of Zhang's challenge, she's irrelevant here, and the Persians are obviously not going to join any orthodox sects if they're foreigners who've had dealings with the Wudu Cult, so there isn't much in it for us if we beat her aside from the Shaolin technique manual. But hey, perhaps beating her will gain her respect and allow us to learn from her too, so I'm open to going for the big win here too. And it'll give more weight to our challenge, of course.
Techniques will inevitably be revealed, but completing a few challenges with that initial advantage of the enemy having no knowledge of our techniques is huge. We could get our tougher competitors like Bai Jiutian out of the way first before moving on to the schools that we suspect are weaker (i.e. Taishan). I don't think that "Ah fuck it, they'll know everything about us eventually anyways" is a good argument here, because if we manage to defeat several schools with our strongest opponents before they start piecing things together, that's still really fucking good.
