The illusion covering two of the three so trapped pops in a puff of smoke to reveal tree branches.

Mariko herself is attacked next.

Her chains bat away most of the attacks; she's nicked once, and she's worked up enough that the wound quickly hisses closed. 

She pushes chakra towards her nose; if she can't sense him, can she smell him?

(Rian starts calling out which ones are illusions, and goes to help Sen set the main puppet on fire).

Scent is a promising avenue for tracking him. It might take a bit, he's apparently been moving around a lot.

The puppet is very fire-resistant, and starts emitting a gas if they get close enough.

Okay this is getting annoying. She'd been saving this trick for Gaara, but...

She takes a small bundle of explosive tags out of her pouch, fans them out, and catches them on her chains. "Get clear!" she shouts to her team, using her chains to slam the tags towards the puppet.

Tch. That's going to take some repair work.

Is the puppet still attacking?

The rest of it is.

More explosions probably won't hurt.

From her point of view, probably not.

She explodes what Rian tells her is real - this is annoying, it's cutting into her stash - and then waits a second. Anything else attacking them?

Nope.

His taijutsu is... not up taking on all of them at once. He'll lay low until they leave, gather up his pieces, and circle around.

"Come on, team, let's move out. Mariko, keep an eye out for him."

"Right."

And they head off in the direction she senses Elieyha.

Still they follow. Annoyingly persistent. Kill them.

They plan their approach more carefully this time, slowing down before they reach Elieyha.

Rian comes into sight first, red eyes searching for her opponent's.

pluck them out and grind them into paste

Half her face and one arm is encased in sand, twistedly demonic, animalistic. The hand reaches, stretches for Rian's face, fingertips as hooked claws.

Tries a genjutsu - it doesn't take - throws herself to the side, meets the more demonic eye, and pushes (she only needs to make Elieyha stumble - )

She growls, fangs lengthening. A tail grows from her back, sandy and striped. She swipes again.

And chains arc out, aiming to wrap around the arm.

It's caught, motion arrested. Then chakra pulses and the chains burst.

Fuck, that's not supposed to happen.

Okay. Straight to the big techniques it is.

She pulls out a truly massive wad of explosive tags - about a tenth of them her high-powered ones - and hangs back while Lee and Rian distract Elieyha, rapidly transferring the tags to new chain links as she forms them. 

Lee quickly realizes the sand's speed, and opens the first of his gates, slamming towards Elieyha's unprotected side while Rian intentionally presents herself as a target for the arm before flickering away.

Lee gets one hit in before sand grows on that side too. She growls, and spits a barrage of sand shuriken at everyone.

Mariko rapidly calculates the equations needed to knock the shuriken out of the air with her un-tagged chains, while Rian and Lee simply take cover, then goes back to wrapping explosive tags around links. She's starting to get to a rather ridiculous number. 

She gets to where she's nearly at her limit for number of chains, takes a deep breath, shouts, "Now!" and both her teammates get well clear of her opponent. Mariko then arcs her chains through the air to slam into Elieyha, aiming for thin points in the sand armor.