Round 2: Arbor Banks vs. Janya Anders

She was one floor from the top. Arbor looked up to see the bony dragon, perched at the top, always fleeing, always watching. The girl stood there. There was a serene silence that seemed to come over the library, like the flames had stopped their climb, like the world had come to a standstill. She narrowed her eyes. Arbor was starting to get angry. There was not one point where this creature faced her directly; she covered her mouth with one arm and reached into her pocket with the other hand. Withdrawing a coin and raising her arm to aim at the dragon, she charged the magnetic in her hand, and at once, switched it. Her hand cocked back and the coin took off. Immediately, she removed her other hand from her mouth, holding her breath and going to her other pocket. Another coin, another load, an immediate fire, as fast as she could but not as accurate with her subdominant hand. The smoke had met her on that floor. She withdrew towards the stairs.

Janya saw the girl appear from the stairs, the movement had attracted her attention. The small dragon ducked her head low staring down her enemy. It wasn't only Janya on the run. This girl kept running from her, and hiding well no longer. She had finally found her, and she wan't letting her out of her sight. The first penny had struck one of her wings, getting rid of her ability to fly, or at least decently. She could still use it to jump higher if needed but she couldn't change floors as easily. The second had whizzed past. The summer began to move towards the stair well at a great speed. She placed a claw onto the wall and blew out some fire down the stair well.

Arbor was lost in a cloud of gray. She had taken a plunge into it hoping to find the stairwell, but it stayed lost as she drifted through the thick nothingness, holding her breath and trying to find her way. When her lungs ached she tried to breathe, but nothing came but bitter coughs, and she wheezed to no avail. Further she traveled desperately, the only thing egging her on the bright orange light that was suddenly chasing her from an unknown direction, and she limped away from it as fast as she could, diving through the smoke to slightly higher ground where the air was still cleaner. She breathed deeply and rapidly, and practically crawled up the final floor. Further up the stairs, longer; she grabbed a coin shakily from her pocket and upon breaking into the final floor, balanced it before her thumb. She did not shoot at the dragon, however, the beast she had yet to see. Rather, the coin was fired to the glass ceiling. It shattered on impact, a blanket of shards crashing down on the entire library. Arbor dived to take shelter under a bookshelf, crashing into a row of books and knocking them out of place, curling up and covering the back of her neck. The shelter made for no injuries soon enough, but the time she took to dive in there cost her a flurry of small shards down her arms, in her back. She ignored them. The adrenaline was too high anyway to register the smaller gashes.

Due to the enclosed environment the fire was running out of oxygen to burn. With only a little bit left which Arbor had found for a brief moment to burn. Most of the building was on fire even the top floor that Janya had set on fire earlier in hopes that Arbor would have been trapped to a certain floor so Janya to get to her but it didn't seem that was the case. The dragon ignored the dark smoke that blocked her vision. The only choice was to follow the other student up which was the only way she could have escaped.

The dragon had heard the glass shatter and watched as it rained down over the main area. The smoke started changing from it's dark color back to a gray, it was slow but it was happening. The fire also started to pick up again due to the reintroduced fuel. Though the fire didn't bother the boney dragon. Working her way up the stairs the summer turned the corner and breathed out fire at the closest bookshelves hoping to catch the girl.

She was close. For the first time since the battle started, the dragon had gotten closer, had followed her up the stairs. Fire came from its mouth, and Arbor dove to get out of its way. So the top floor was on fire. The girl was running out of chances.

Still, it was close. The dragon was close. Arbor pulled a penny from her pocket, a supply she was running low on, and loaded it onto her finger, still on the ground where she had dove. She aimed, calming her breathing despite the blazing fire nearby. She had to stay calm. She trained to stay calm. A skeleton was hollow, so if there was a way to get the coin inside of it, there was a chance. The ribcage was too hollow, though; she didn't want it coming out the other end.

Arbor breathed. She tried not to cough over the stench of smoke pouring further, further. A breath, a raise of her hand, a setting of the coin, and she shot it directly at the creature's eye socket. It had to go in. She'd been training her whole life to hit the rigid side of a dime.

She might have been training her whole life to hit the side of a dime, but the dime didn't move now did it? Stationary targets were one thing, moving targets were a whole nother beast all together. Though Janya didn't move to much. She had only lifted her head. Which changed the area that the coin was going to hit. Inside of landing in the girl skull, it hit a majority of the dragon's neck. Shattering the bone there, and since there wasn't much to support the weight of the girls skull. The rest had broken and the skull had fallen to the floor, the body falling with it.

Arbor watched the neck fracture and fall, looking on with a taut frown and sighing. Perhaps she would be able to wake up; she took a step forward, and immediately fell from the injury to her leg and the exhaustion of choking on smoke for so long. She was so close to losing. She had to make sure that wouldn't happen her next round.