Oh, well, Merc is already done for. I guess these dragonized people are not as strong as a dragon yet, or they wouldn't be such fodders compared to Brandish. She can literally just crush them by the thousands without dragon slaying magic. They seemed like a bigger menace when they were chasing Lucy around recently.
The panel of Lucy growing big inside Merc's mouth looks like she's growing against his pointy, sharp fangs but they didn't even scratch her skin so I guess her durability is above a full powered dragon god's bite. I also guess "hitting something with the body of a dragon" = "using a dragon's power" in this verse.
Next chapter a wizard from the evil third faction will arrive, Lucy will deal with it using Aquarius and Brandish will be convinced to leave the key to her. A subordinate of Ignia may also show up to further mess things up for the heroes. So a few chapters before we move to the next dragon god.
I hope the remaining dragon god encounters don't follow the same pattern as this one.
Spriggans is a very vague title.
Some were fodder like Sand guy and at the same time we had irene and august. They fuckin moved the continent and what not. Scale is absolutely huge.
Yeah, August and Irene were monsters compared to the rest of the group, who as we can see with Brandish, are in turn still monsters compared to the rest of the cast.
But even sand guy had a good hax, huge feats and a magic pool supposedly similar to Brandish' and was defeated by plot, though.
He was basically a pre-TS Crocodile with no weakness to water (since his power wasn't avoiding damage by turning to sand, but to absorb the water of everything instantly like Crocodile does through the palm of his hand) yet he was somehow defeated by a sword made of water, the literal one thing he had total immunity to.