“So~ I just thought of it and had no time to test; now be my lab mouse and let’s run a proper experiment~”

Her voice slipped like silk, playful yet glinting like a blade in moonlight.

At that dangerous tease, the blue dragon head felt alarm bells hammer in its chest, like iron gongs in a temple. It twitched to bolt like a hare. The thought never crossed the bridge to the red dragon head, whose rage burned like a bonfire in a storm and refused any talk of flight.

Alicia ignored the way one head kept burrowing backward like a snake retreating into a burrow. The other head fixed her with a stare like a nail, pinning the fleeing head in place. It was the ripest moment, a peach ready to fall; two heads at odds, one strike like thunder would catch them flat‑footed. Yet Alicia didn’t take it.

She spread both hands before her, eyes drinking the palm lines like rivers on a map. Through the thin skin like rice paper, she felt currents of mana slide beneath.

Why?

Frustration hit first, like a heavy sky before rain. She asked herself why she’d caged her thinking inside known rules, why she hadn’t turned the wheel just a bit, why the fog only now thinned enough for her to see.

The bizarre two‑headed dragon had already shattered human chalk lines in the sand, breaking the tidy axioms we wrote on clay tablets. “Fire mages can’t use water magic.” “A mage should stick to what suits them.” Maybe those were only guesses scratched by human hands.

To this day, how many mages have found the true marrow of magic, opened the final door at the end of the corridor? Most grope along the road paved by our elders; if that road bends wrong, then groping is just reaching for the sun in the midnight dark—hands full of nothing but loneliness.

So she turned the compass. Think. Try. Believe the seed of a fact: fire‑aspected mana can wield water spells.

Every pore drank the ambient mana like parched earth drinking rain. In the first heartbeat, most of it flashed scarlet, turning to fire mana. That vicious, corrosive blaze swelled inside her like rising lava in a kiln, and her skin grew hot as heated stone.

Not enough...

She didn’t know what part wasn’t enough, only that her skin pulled in mana faster and faster, like a whirlpool drawing in leaves. The blue head’s inner bell clanged louder, its red pupils flicking like embers toward the safe ground behind. The red dragon head, blue eyes locking onto Alicia like frost over steel, pinned its twin and spat a tongue of fire at the “spacing‑out” girl.

Like a bratty kid barging into a craftsman’s focus, Alicia’s red eyes went wide, staring down the fireball like a hawk pinning prey. Her mouth twisted with rage until it looked like a knife cut in clay, terrible to behold.

“Get lost—!!”

Her shout cracked like thunder over dry hills.

She ordered the fireball as if it were a stray dog, a thing that should never obey her. Yet the rule bent like reed grass in wind; the fireball popped like a balloon—pop!—and vanished.

Only a few ember petals drifted in the air like fireflies, and they too winked out soon after, swallowed by the night.

“Hey! Don’t squirm! You made my spell fail!”

The red head hurled blame like hot coals at the blue head that kept inching back.

Seeing a single word from the enemy bat a fireball back into smoke, the red dragon head shoved the fault onto the fleeing blue one, cursing the wobble that fouled its casting. One body, but two minds: no neat trick where one person drives the left brain and another the right. Each head carried a full brain like a separate lantern. That kept their thinking clear, yet broke the fastest bridge of the heart between them, like a river cutting a road.

Right now, the red head’s fury had flooded its heart, set to fight to the last drop like a boar at bay. The blue head, less a brawler and more a survivor, knew life’s weight like a pearl and saw this clash as a path to pointless death; it had to flee.

As for persuading the red head to drop the fight and run, the blue head had never believed stone would sprout leaves.

The quarrel between the two only grew, a storm brewing inside one neck; for Alicia, that storm bought more time, like moonlight lengthening a traveler’s shadow.

The mana she was drawing already started to spill, like wine sloshing over a brimming cup. She was forcing the intake; if she didn’t use it fast, once it filled her vessel of a body, one breath could make her burst like an overfired clay pot. But—

Not enough!

Greed can strip you of everything—that saying holds. Yet Alicia wasn’t a moth to flame; she was an owl, eyes open in the dark.

She listened close to the flow inside her, like a river at night, and set a phantom hand upon its center. She split the current into two fine rivulets.

One stream ran into her left hand; a red flower of flame bloomed and wreathed her arm, licking like a tame fox, doing her no harm.

The other stream slipped toward her right hand, but something shifted mid‑flow. Scarlet mana flickered like a signal and turned blue, cool as deep water. Blue surged into her palm, and a spinning water vortex blossomed at her right side, a whirl like a newborn spring.

By rights, Alicia should have felt joy right then; this was the very thought she’d chased—red to blue, fire to water. Yet her face held no smile, only widening surprise and doubt, like clouds piling high over a quiet lake.