And then: 

Uchiha Rian versus Elieyha.

Rian goes down to the arena, hand resting lightly on the hilt of her sword.

Elieyha swirls down a gust of sand, more already streaming out her gourd and piling on the ground.

As soon as the proctor calls the exam to start, Rian's body flickering back and up onto the wall, where she runs through a sequence of several handsigns - and breathes out a fireball that fills the entire arena, hot enough to turn the trees to ash.

It's suddenly very, very, very hot where her technique strikes - easily in the thousands of degrees, enough to start to melt the outside edges of the sand. The fire is hungry, rapidly stealing the area's oxygen.

(The proctor body flickers clear.)

There's no sign of Elieyha when the fireball clears, just a patch of sand where she was standing that slowly grows wider.

Can she sense her anywhere?

Somewhere behind that enormous mass of sand that just pulled out of the ground and started flinging pieces of itself at her, probably.

...She's going to have to blow most of her chakra on this fight, isn't she.

She body flickers, then flickers again, and again, and again, focusing, until there's several clones of her on the walls, each one apparently real.

The column explodes in a razor-edge disk-

-"Agh!" and Elieyha collapses to her knees, clutching her head.

(more of them taste the blood drink of it see them fall before me i am the only)

"Shut up and let me fight," she snarls.

Okay then! She darts in a few times to test the sand's reaction; any attacks pass harmlessly through the clones as she moves away, but they're able to hit briefly before she flickers to the next one.

Is Elieyha making anything close to eye contact with any of her clones?

Still holding her head, pulling the sand back in.

She'll throw some explosive note-tagged kunai towards Elieyha, mostly to try and encourage her to look up.

The sand bats them away without her noticing.

(crack the bones suck the marrow)

"We'll get to that faster if you stop distracting me." She grunts in pain.

She'll try an auditory illusion, then, a high-pitched keening that only Elieyha can hear, which should cause some vertigo.

She hasn't stood up yet, but the next wave of attacks goes wide.

Good. 

She continues testing the sand, tightening the genjutsu and adding layers - footsteps that she isn't making, the whistle of a kunai where there isn't one...

Elieyha attacks at the false signals, but there's no defense where the threat is illusionary.

Interesting. Combined with Mariko sensing two chakra signatures from her...

How quick is the sand? Could she get past it with a body flicker?

Maybe.

Elieyha begins lashing out blindly, long whips of sand streaking across the arena.

Yeah she's gonna have to risk it.

She adds a few auditory illusions to distract whatever's controlling the sand, tries to cancel out the sound of her own footprints, then pours as much speed as she can, making a few feints with the clones, then darts in (prepared to abort if the sand reacts to her in time), slamming an extremely high powered explosive tag on Elieyha's clothes, then goes to flicker away, activating the tag at the same time.

The sand catches her arm before she can pull away.

Elieyha looks down in shock.

Her after image clones fade.

Rian's gonna get caught in the side by the explosion, then. She makes a shield of chakra as best she can, tries to illusion Elieyha into thinking she's over there - 

Hopefully enough so that the sand releases her.

The area around the tag cracks and falls off. The sand holding Rian rushes in to envelop it as Elieyha jumps backwards, trips because of the genjutsu influence-

And the tag goes off, easily ten times the strength of a normal explosive tag (Mariko's idea of 'safeties' is 'what are those'). Rian tries to flicker away, but unless the sand stops the explosion, she's going to catch a good bit of it.