Caltyr practiced in every free moment he could find the next day. On the way to school? Practicing. In the halls between classes? Practicing. He even fell asleep trying to make an ice ball that was the perfect compromise between size and maneuverability. By the time he woke up, he was laying in a puddle of water, blowing bubbles into it with one of his nostrils.

Every time he saw Sara, she was also preparing. Twice, he had seen her passing by swirling lightning between her palms, so focused on what she was doing that she didn’t toss even a single quip his way.

He wished every day was like this one.

Before he knew it, the sun was hanging in the middle of the sky and it was time for recess.

Word must have spread that they were going to have a fight, because when he got outside, he saw everyone bunched up around the claw rock, even some dragons that were older and more experienced that he didn’t recognize.

“I will vanquish him! Roast him and leave him steaming like cooked meat!” He could hear Sara’s voice booming, in her high-pitched, slightly raspy way.

About half of the crowd rose up and began to clap and hoot, though a considerable number of them were Sara’s own lackeys, who thought everything she did was hoot-worthy.

A bitter part of him wondered why Sara got to talk about cooking his meat, but when he talked about flesh, it was creepy.

As he approached, he wondered if securing a victory here would actually get the blue dragon to stop her smear campaign. Dragon culture suggested that if he walked away the victor, she would have to concede that he wasn’t as villainous as she thought. Or, at the very least, she would have to shut up about it.

That was good enough for him.

“It’s going to be difficult to vanquish me from under the river of water I drown you in,” Caltyr growled from deep in his chest, making his presence known.

Some of the people dotting the edges of the arena quieted and moved away from him, indicating his threat was appropriately intimidating.

“Oh good, you’re here.” Sara grinned and began to shoo everyone away with her tail, creating a big, open space for their tussle to take place in. “Let’s get this over with, once and for all.”

A brown-scaled dragon stepped forth.

“Rex is going to judge who wins,” Sara stated authoritatively as she took her place on one side of the circle.

The dragon he now knew was Rex, rather wide with a frog-like face, nodded to confirm. “Yup.”

“We’re fighting until one of us collapses, recess ends, or somebody forfeits. If recess ends, Rex will decide which one of us won.”

Another nod from Rex. “Yup.”

Caltyr sauntered over to the opposite end of the ring, keeping his body low and his haunches up.

Sara brandished her claws, as if they weren’t always out. They were fluorescent yellow and shone brightly, like there was a little baby lightbulb hidden inside each one.

“Fight starts in three, two, one,” Rex brought his tail up, “go!” And then he slammed it down, its weight making a great thwap, even with the dampening of the grass.

Sara wasted no time. She used her hind legs to push her off the ground and leapt at Caltyr with a crackling determination in her eyes. The bitter sheen that coated them made Caltyr wonder what he had done to deserve such vicious ire.

But he didn’t have time to simmer on that right now.

He leapt out of the way, not so eager to feel what those neon claws felt like digging into his flesh, though it might make a pretty show.

Caltyr, while sailing backwards through the air, pulled a ball of water out of nothingness, froze it into ice, and launched it in her direction.

She caught the ice directly in the eyeball. Cal could hear the dry thump as it cracked against her face.

She released a wounded yowl from her fanged maw.

But even while clutching her eye, she managed to summon a crackling bolt of lightning that rose imposingly into the sky and then jolted in his direction.

And then she summoned another to join it.

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They were impossible to dodge. They surged toward him with too much anger and too much speed. They both hit him like a pen stabbing him in the side and left a vicious buzzing behind.

He clenched his teeth together, but the pain wasn’t unbearable and dissipated quickly. He was fine this time, but he couldn’t keep just eating lightning bolts like this.

With his newly acquired ice powers, he formed a thin sheet of ice that would be easy to move around. He pulled it upward in the middle, creating a makeshift lightning rod so his shield would have a greater chance of attracting her attacks.

Then, as she was reorienting herself to pounce at him again, he sprayed her in the face with a jet of pressurized water.

She gurgled something as it pooled in her mouth. “Ghrghrhgrshtop—my face!”

He moved his stream around then, soaking her scales and back. He had hoped saturating her in water would weaken her lightning or turn it against her, but she just cast it further away from herself this time.

He blocked her bolt with his shield, but in the moment it took him to aim it, Sara was already inches away. She moved swiftly, jolting toward him.

Her bright, cheery claws dug into his shield. It shattered dramatically but slowed her strike just enough that Caltyr could move to avoid her claws’ harsh edges tearing into his meat.

As Sara zipped around him, past his back end, she stomped down on the injured edge of his tail.

He had forgotten about that.

His tail was irritated, inflamed from his practice battle. It hurt like a bitch, and he yelped like one too. Instinctively, he took to the sky.

With the temporary high ground, he drew from his inner well and cast two jets of water pointing downward at once that saturated the grass, leaving the ground flush with puddles.

Sara conjured lightning that crackled menacingly as it bounced along his two streams, gunning for his center mass. Some of it tried to direct downward, but Sara stopped it.

Caltyr allowed himself to fall just far enough and created a spike of ice at the end of the two bolts’ paths, arcing the energy upward and away from himself.

Sara launched two more bolts, and again, he redirected them in a panic with icicles. She had him on the ropes, and he knew it, but how was he supposed to beat her electricity with his water?

He could see how it lagged in comparison, took five seconds to apparate when her bolts only took half of one.

If only he could use his Forbidden Power, he would be winning handily. He could picture Sara screaming about her face for many other reasons than because of a glorified snowball.

But would harming her so permanently be worth it? Would pulling her apart to show her how not-awful he was be fruitful? It seemed like a logical fallacy to him, but in the world of dragons, whoever won in a Battle of Wills had the moral upper hand. It didn’t matter how justified they truly were; power was the ultimate equalizer.

As he tried to dodge her next attack by letting himself fall, he stupidly found himself on the ground, his feet submerged in his own water. In a last-ditch effort, he began to build a wall around the other dragon to trap her, but she kicked it down handily.

One more piercing cast was all it took.

The lightning refracted across the pools Caltyr had created, shocking some of the others to take some of the heat off of him, but he still took most of it.

Caltyr whited out and woke up in a pool of his own water for the second time today.

He desperately scrambled to get back up, but he could already hear the tail end of Rex’s sentence calling off their fight.

“—aaaaand three. You’re out! Sara wins!”

Caltyr’s body ached all over from the final blow. He picked himself up slowly, laboriously, his every cell fighting against his efforts.

Sara burst into a series of ear-piercing screeches with her friends, which rattled his brain almost as much as her lightning had.

“You won, you won, you won! EVIL, EVIL, EVIL!”

The crowd around them also erupted into applause. The dragons around him stood excitedly on their hind legs to celebrate his loss.

“I knew it!” Sara shrieked triumphantly. “I knew you were bad news!”

“He’s always been bad news,” agreed a yellow dragon, another sharp-looking one of the lightning variety. “Casting non-elemental magic is unnatural. It rots your soul.”

“Why don’t we just put him out of his misery while he’s already down?” someone asked from somewhere he couldn’t see.

Some of the clapping went quiet at the suggestion, but some of the surrounding dragons went wild, hollering excitedly at the prospect.

Just as Sara was about to reply, a rumbling hiss exited the mouth of a red and yellow dragon that stepped threateningly forth—one with scales of fire and lightning.

Caltyr knew the dragon as Vermonisys.

He and Sara were second and third in his class.

Vermonysis was first.

“Don’t you dare, or you’ll have to answer to me.”