How does Steel Wind Strike interact with Heated Body special trait? [duplicate]

Question

Eddy the mage is facing 3 Azors, which are 15, 25 and 10 ft far away from him. Azors have the special trait Heated Body (emphasis mine):

Heated Body. A creature that touches the azer or hits it with a melee attack while within 5 feet of it takes 5 (1d10) fire damage.

Eddy casts Steel Wind Strike (emphasis mine):

You flourish the weapon used in the casting and then vanish to strike like the wind. Choose up to five creatures you can see within range. Make a melee spell attack against each target. On a hit, a target takes 6d10 force damage.

You can then teleport to an unoccupied space you can see within 5 feet of one of the targets you hit or missed.

hits all of them, and he does not teleport from his current position.

Since a melee spell attack is a melee attack, does Eddy take the fire damage given by the Heated Body trait? Is he considered to be within 5 feet during each attack?

Answer 1

Steel Wind Strike does not trigger the Heated Body trait of the azer(s).

The Heated Body trait activates when (emphasis mine)

A creature that touches the azer or hits it with a melee attack while within 5 feet of it

The spell steel wind strike does not move the caster close to each target: the (melee) spell attacks simply happen when the spell is being cast. The spell proceeds by saying that the caster can then (only after having resolved the attacks) teleport within 5 feet of one of the targeted creatures. The Heated Body trait is not retroactive: the caster was not within 5 feet of the azer when making the attack.

If the caster were to be within 5 feet of one or more of those azers when casting the spell, the situation is different: the caster would already be within 5 feet of the azer when making the melee attack, thus activating both conditional clauses in the azer's Heated Body trait.

Unless the spell's intention was to prevent this scenario completely by saying "and then vanish". There's nothing in the rules telling us what this means, so it might just make you immune to the Heated Body trait from the last example I made.

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As a footnote: melee attacks, with spells or weapons, do not entail having to be within 5 feet of the target. There are other spells that can make you roll a melee attack from farther away than 5 feet, amongst which spiritual weapon and thorn whip. Likewise, weapons with the reach property allow for melee attacks from a safe distance against azers or other creatures with a similar trait to Heated Body.