Moriko shook her head at Mordecai's casual display of power as he continuously fed shaped mana into his ice guns to create living ice. While she couldn't see the precise weave of magic the way that Mordecai could, she could still tell that he wasn't casting spells into the ports on the gun the way that she'd have to. Equally impressive was the raw amount of mana he was dumping into them with little impact on his reserves.

Of course, it helped that his capacity had been steadily increasing the entire time they'd been delving into Svetlana's territory, and Moriko had noticed that the size of his aura had been slowly growing too.

Even when they had been delving into Dersuta's territory, Mordecai hadn't grown this fast, but she had at least figured out part of his secret. Moriko had been curious how he was keeping his aura pushed out to his limits, but also hadn't asked lest they be overheard. So instead, she had observed as best she could, and had finally been able to notice the eddies of loose mana that he had been gathering to himself.

She wasn't entirely certain why those were there, or how he was gathering them up so efficiently, but she had a few guesses and would ask about it later.

While Moriko didn't have her aura extended out to its maximum, she was keeping herself as sensitive to the environment as she could, while blocking out the discomfort and mild pain the light and heat were causing her. She had even pulled her hood up to fall in front of her eyes, and she could still see through both it and her mask.

Far beneath their feet, Moriko felt the slightest ripple of electricity as something moved rapidly through the sand, while at that same moment, Mordecai called out his warning. She wanted to help out with the group of creatures coming up from below, but she could also feel air beginning to move in organized patterns at the edge of her senses. So she let go of her grip upon the ground and flung herself into the sky and heat. "Sparks, help them out!" she shouted to her familiar. Moriko did not want the dragon hatchling anywhere near the massive movement of air she was detecting.

One of the sand drakes breaching the surface below exhaled a blazing stream of molten sand at her, with the leading edge of it turning into shards of glass as that edge cooled. Moriko didn't dodge; instead, she used wind to grab the stream, whipping it about herself as she added her own will to the molten sand and charged it with electricity. Then she hurled it into the mass of moving air in front of her that was still invisible to her eyes, but easily detected by her attunement to air.

The combination effectively detonated when it hit the wind elemental's turbulent streams, but based on what she could feel of its spiritual pressure, that had not done nearly as much damage as Moriko thought it should have. But she had hurt it, and it reacted by diving sharply toward the ground, as did two other elementals, but all at different angles.

Moriko dove after the one she'd injured as she flung a pair of black lightning balls to chase after and cling to the other two, marking their location. "Mordecai!" she shouted, pointing at the more distant elementals. He glanced up at her, then to where she was pointing, and nodded.

Satisfied, she ignored him as she focused on her target.

The air elemental spun as it skittered across the sand, pulling up a whirlwind of superheated sand, and as it did so, it appeared to grow larger, while electric discharges started to play along its surface. Moriko knew something was off, but it took her a moment to realize what trick had been played on her and the rest of the party.

These were specialized hybrid wind and sand elementals, living desert storms known as sirocco, and these were particularly powerful ones. They'd been hiding part of their nature before, but now with their sand restored, the three elementals were at full power. And that was a problem.

Whirling sand lashed out at her, trying to steal her moisture and her breath, and Moriko dodged back, away from the now advancing whirlwind of potentially lethal sand. If it were a real storm, Moriko could probably walk through it without the sand being able to scratch her skin, but here the wind-driven, superheated sand was backed by the power and will of an elemental. If she wasn't careful, it could scour her bones clean.

Another blast of sand lashed out at her, spreading out more, but this time she chanced an experiment. All that hot, churning sand created brief sparks of electricity, so she created a matching, shifting aura as the elemental's attack came close. It wasn't perfect, but she had matched well enough to get pushed away without the devouring sands ever touching her. However, she doubted that she could reflexively match well enough to trust it to be a barrier for her.

A bellowing roar echoed out from behind her, which included some disturbingly wet sounds. Moriko danced backward in the air to give herself the room to take a quick glance at Mordecai.

Overall, he seemed fine, in that he was moving smoothly and continuing to fire his guns while flying in his battle form. However, there was half-frozen blood dripping from his jaws, and the giant field of weird-looking ice had even darker flecks spread throughout it. She'd have to ask what he'd done later, but she was slightly disturbed by the fact that his exhaled breath appeared to be cold fog in the aftermath of that attack, despite the superheated air he was drawing in. At least it seemed to have had a massive effect on his two sirocco elementals, though it had not destroyed them outright.

Focusing back on her battle, Moriko drew out her own pair of ice guns from their storage in her bracers, though she wasn't planning on using them just yet. She had a little more testing to do first.

Darting in toward her target, Moriko maintained a constant series of sharp, erratic turns as she lured the massive elemental into attacking her while she was at the very edge of its range. This also meant that she had to keep falling back, as it continued to advance on her.

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Black lightning was what she wanted to test, lashing out with it to see if she could use it to grapple the elemental's form in any way. It sort of clung for a moment, but the sand she grabbed onto was constantly trying to move and shift, and this swiftly dislodged her black lightning leash.

Hmm.

Moriko tried again, only this time she pulled hard on the leash as soon as it attached. The patch of sand was yanked free, along with a tiny portion of the elemental's vitality. Perfect. Now she knew what her dance was going to entail. And it would be a wild, beautifully vicious dance.

She spun and leapt through the air, kicking out black lightning to grab onto portions of that giant whirlwind and yank away bits of its essence. As she moved, Moriko also started finding opportunities to fire her ice guns at the sirocco elemental, but she considered them entirely secondary to attacking it with her lightning.

While she wasn't sure her lightning did more damage than an enchanted bullet of ice did, it was the weapon she knew how to use better by far. The guns were simple enough to aim and fire, but the lightning acted like an extension of her will and body. It was the one she had the most confidence in using effectively.

Her tactics did not come without cost. While the elemental's strikes were not too difficult for her to dodge so long as she stayed alert, there was a second layer of whirling, heated sand spinning up in an aura around its body. This sand was trying to scour her constantly while baking her to a husk, and the aggressive vitality that saturated the level caused injured flesh to regrow in ways that sometimes made the damage worse. She could deflect a portion of the sand by charging her body with a field of electricity, but this was tiring, and she couldn't spend the attention to create a perfect barrier while also attacking.

The over charged vitality disturbingly reminded her of the corruption she had encountered with Kazue and Bridgette, though the similarity was mostly superficial. For one thing, the corruption had not caused flesh to heat up from the way it was being pushed into healing quickly.

Thankfully, the armor and other protective items provided by Dersuta's rewards were proving their worth during this expedition. Her cloak's enchantment was helping to hold off the heat, while the scaled armor worked with everything else to keep the sand from immediately abrading her skin away, and when the semi-alive armor started to wear thin in spots, the mask enabled her to murmur a healing prayer without choking on the same shredding sands.

The vitality provided by her prayer was less effective on the armor than it would be upon living flesh, but Moriko was not feeling inclined to take any chances. She could tell when the armor started to thin because her skin immediately started getting hotter in that spot. The aggressive vitality had a minor benefit here, as the living armor was inefficient in its use of vitalizing energy. This prevented it from being overcharged by the zone's aggressive vitality.

Now that she had a feel for the fight, Moriko added a battle prayer to aid in the accuracy of her strikes, followed by a prayer asking for an elemental aura of ice, both to increase her protection against the heat and to add a cold effect to her attacks. That spell could be attuned to any common element as it was cast, but ice always felt strange to ask for when Sakiya was known for the heat of her passions.

At this point, it became a battle of attrition, and Moriko had a clear upper hand. No one was calling for any help, and her earring could pass on voices even over the roar of the sirocco storm, so steady and safe was the best option rather than trying to rush.

For all that they could be incredibly dangerous, most elementals had limited forms of attack, and this one had no battle experience. By the end of the fight, it had at least learned how to manipulate its grinding sands to create deliberate electric discharges of mini lightning, but these were not nearly strong or focused enough to be a real threat to Moriko, given her level of mastery over electricity.

When she had ripped the elemental's last wisps apart, Moriko turned to examine the battlefield. It was a little annoying that Mordecai had finished his pair already, but she also knew that this was not a great match-up for her, and Mordecai had a wider set of options. It was also a good thing that he had; more creatures had burrowed up from the sands to attack the main group.

Moriko landed hard to stomp on a strange snake or worm-like creature with a tri-segmented mouth and a wicked-looking barbed stinger on its tail that she assumed carried poison. She immediately followed that with a burst of lightning into a swarm of oversized, nasty-looking wasps. Or rather, yet another swarm, given the number of dead wasp bodies already littering the ground. There were also the remains of some wasps adorning the mouths of Carnelian, Lightning, and Thunder, but the voracious hatchlings were always hungry, and snatching a few wasps to eat mid-flight was exactly the sort of thing she'd expect out of them.

She caught sight of Fuyuko hurriedly loosening a piece of Amrydor's leg armor to expose an open patch of scaled leather armor that looked like it had been chewed open, and an ugly wound beneath that open section. Fuyuko swiftly and roughly cut out the flesh around the wound, followed by pouring acid onto the open wound. The burning light seared Amrydor's flesh, drying it so that it reacted less with the acid, while funneling the acid further into the wound so that it could better do its work. Amrydor didn't flinch and managed to stay steady as he maintained his guard and made sure that Fuyuko wasn't attacked while she worked on him, but the tight expression on his face revealed the reality of how much pain he was coping with.

Moriko could only assume that the wasps were good at laying eggs in living flesh; wonderful. She dashed over to channel a healing prayer into both Amrydor and Fuyuko, who was also looking a bit ragged.

More creatures were still surfacing to attack the party in waves when Moriko felt something really big moving through the sand. "We have a big one incoming!" she called out, though the crackle of electricity forming on the surface as it circled upward gave that much away.

It avoided the main mass of living ice when it explosively breached the surface of the sands, revealing the strangest take on a dragon Moriko had yet seen, and that included Mordecai's dracobits and other creations, along with Dersuta's dragon-moose.

While it had the same basic body shape of a wingless dragon, instead of scales, it had bulky, segmented plates of thick carapace. It also had shorter legs and disproportionately long claws, which Moriko assumed helped with digging as much as with disemboweling. There were three holes near the upper area of each segment, on each side of the dragon, which created the appearance of three lines of holes running down its body length.

But strangest of all was its head. The overall shape had been changed to that of a long, tri-segmented mouth filled with lots of nasty teeth, but even weirder was that there was a matching upper section of a dragon head for each segment, creating three pairs of eyes, three pairs of nostrils, and three sets of horns and whiskers.

It reared back and opened its mouth wide, and Moriko had a sinking feeling that she knew what was coming next.

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