Aeraja is an Air and Earth-type creo that weakens its prey with a venomous bite and comes back to collect the meal days later.
Aeraja is best known for a patient, two-stage hunting strategy that lets it bring down prey many times larger and stronger than itself. By staying low and biting at ankles, it gets around the defenses of creo that could have knocked it out of the air long before it ever got close.
Biology
Aeraja has a violet serpentine body and bat-like wings. Its head and the small wing-shaped membranes on either side of its tail tip are a deep indigo.
An Aeraja bite is not meant to kill outright. It starts a slow breakdown of the victim's immune system that takes several nights to run its course.
Aeraja hunts in two stages. First it folds its wings against its sides and worms its way just under the surface of the soil, within biting reach of most prey, then strikes with lightning speed and sinks its fangs in. Having marked several meals this way, Aeraja takes to the air. For the next few nights it roams the sky freely, pulling off impressive maneuvers with its wings and tail membranes. Those acrobatics work up a respectable appetite. By then its walking meals have immune systems so far gone that Aeraja can simply swoop down and devour them, facing little or no resistance. Too heavy a meal would cost it the airborne mobility that Aeraja love so much.
Aeraja prefer places with rich loamy soil or layers of fallen leaves they can burrow under. They rarely stay anywhere for long, choosing instead to range far and wide on their nighttime flights. Even so, they always circle back to the prey they marked, because the Aeraja that injects a creature has first claim on its flesh. Afterward it is perfectly acceptable among Aeraja to pick at a carcass left behind by a fellow hunter, and a large carcass commonly feeds several of them.