Caltyr’s eyebrow ridges rose when he heard he was the one who had been selected. He looked immediately to Miss Tavren’s face for a reaction, but T’allyandria had a more visceral one than his teacher.

Her dark upper lip curled to reveal a set of long white teeth. “Don’t kill him,” she commanded with a bark.

“I’m going to kill him,” the white-haired human stated with a laugh, shrugging off the second attempt to magically control her actions.

Caltyr knew firsthand how difficult it was to disobey T’allyandria’s spells. He wondered for a moment how she had gotten so powerful, but seeing the corpses of his classmates being piled into a sack gave him all the answers he needed.

“T’allyandria Morriganha D’Llarkhen demands that you not kill him,” T’allyandria tried again, more forcefully this time, a clear frustration cutting through her usual veneer of cool.

“Just watch me, princess.”

The human began to move her arms in a flowing, dance-like set of motions as she drew more power from inside her mana channels. Her forearms hummed with black energy, a dark smoke puffing from out of her fingertips and palms.

In the following moments, the battlefield exploded with activity.

Miss Tavren fired another set of searing spotlights from her eyes, sweeping them from left to right. They scraped across the ground, leaving the tips of the grass alight. Caltyr guessed that she had been avoiding hitting the saddled dragons thus far, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

The ground wasn’t the only thing she hit. She caught several of the remaining mages across from her in the beams, and they hissed as blisters formed even on the skin under their clothes.

T’allyandria sent out a cloud of writhing darkness at the same time, the black smog curling around the feet of her enemies.

Caltyr formed razor sharp spikes of ice and tossed over thirty of them into the field with gusto, smirking when they hit someone and could hear their sharp inhale of air.

Malika even joined in, casting orb after orb of light and floating them out into the field. While they didn’t crash into anyone, people did crash into them as they kept them hovering there, stationary but damaging.

But none of it was enough to stop the white-haired mage from gathering the shadow from the ground, forming it into a fearsome lance of pure darkness, and then launching it at Caltyr like a bullet.

He saw it headed straight for him, but his limbs didn’t listen to his brain’s commands to leap out of the way fast enough. Just as he was pushing off the balls of his scaled feet, the tip of the spear pierced his draconic hide and bore into the soft, pink flesh underneath.

The shadow felt cool like ice turned into vapor as it moved through his body and singed his flesh with frostburn. He felt it move through him, driving into his lungs and attacking anything it could reach that was attached. He sucked in a breath of air and found that nothing came.

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Pain rippled through his nerves, not quite making it to his brain, as if the connections had been cut off somewhere. He fell to the concrete and winced at the force, not pain, of his face smacking against the hard surface unimpeded.

Caltyr saw, from outside of himself, his own body crumple to the ground.

A lattice of sickly-looking black veins invaded the usual blue and red of his scales, traveling from his neck and chest to his haunches. A long, pointed spear disappeared into his flesh, boring into the middle of his ribcage and beyond.

He looked dead, even to his own eyes.

A deep, guttural panic clenched his core and overtook him. A flickering memory began to play behind his eyes like a movie.

Miss Tavren was standing at the front of the class, a pitifully tiny stick of chalk balanced between the tips of her claws.

“Now class,” she started, scribbling something noisily across the faded emerald green of the board, “what happens when a dragon dies?”

Sara’s hand was in the air immediately, shooting up as quickly as her element implied. But Miss Tavren called upon Caltyr instead, upon the patient third or fourth hand that rose and waited patiently. This had been before his show-and-tell presentation, of course.

“The dragon’s most dominant form of mana flows out of them, right?”

“Yes,” Miss Tavren cooed happily at her pupil. “Depending on the strength of the mana core, it can be truly devastating when it’s unleashed from the dragon’s flesh. Dying dragons have leveled entire cities before, and ones with extreme magical potential have shattered continents. The latter is from a myth, but it’s interesting to think of, no?”

Caltyr blinked back into the present, his memory fizzling out. He watched his fallen body in anticipation as he wondered how much water or ice he would flood the field with when he passed in earnest.

But as he watched his corpse’s chest begin to glow, it wasn’t blue light he saw.

It was a tar-tinted crimson.

His mana core swirled and exited through his ribcage as his skin folded out of the way. It began to twirl in a manner he could only call calculated.

The humans, upon seeing the color of the emerging orb, became speechless. Their collective skin paled, and they began to scurry away, racing for the backs of the dragons and abandoning even the sack of bodies.

Miss Tavren saw the redness that had tainted his mana source and gawked. “It’s not blue,” she whispered to herself in shock.

It was then that the ball of pure mana reached out with its influence and began to peel Caltyr’s classmates and enemies, much like he had done to the mouse that fateful day. Everyone in the radius let out a guttural, fearful wail as their flesh tore into ribbons and blood exploded from their forms.

He saw three things before his vision blurred beyond comprehension.

Kraven was swooping in from the other side of the school grounds with his two giant wings—he had only ever seen them curled around him on his hill, so to Caltyr they were massive—only to see his own body beginning to separate at the fingers.

The humans were tearing apart easily, like butter or soft mochi. His exploding ball of flesh mana worked wonders on the veins without scales coating them.

And lastly, he saw Miss Tavren’s silvery eyes, which found his lifeless ones moments before she tore her claws into her own chest and forcefully unleashed her own core.

And then everything went white.