"No, no, no! That's just not how it works! You're pushing back with your back foot, that's why you're having trouble, you need to push with the front foot and slide the back foot backward, and it all has to flow in the same motion!"

  What was happening?

  I was teaching a bunch of people how to dance. But not just any dance, no. I was teaching them the most powerful dance move, which surpasses logic and destroys reason, the move that denies gravity and breaks causality, the ability to step forward, and yet, move backward, the fabled, the legendary-

  Oof, that's gotta hurt, someone just faceplanted while I was having my internal rant.

  "The Moonwalk is not a technique that the orthodox dancers would tell you about!" I spoke, trying to speak as gravelly and seriously as one could possibly manage. Which is a lot considering I'm a huge lizard. "It shall open the gates to many more such forbidden techniques, such as the Anti-Gravity Lean, the Seven-Twenty, the Zombie Creep and of course, the ultimate forbidden Dance Move, the Crotch-Grab!"

  Okay that last one might just be a little bit too silly.

  But hey, if a giant freaking lizard that can breathe fire, fly and manifest toilet paper into existence says it, people'll take it seriously. Dragon Privilege! I love it!

  Before me, a contingent of my Dragon Guard, six ladies whose armor had been refitted and modified to be more conducive to dancing, by which I mean I had dressed one of them in a white suit, one of them in a badass leather biker outfit, another in a red and black getup featuring a jacket with huge lapels, an old school black tuxedo complete with obnoxiously huge cravat, another in a black getup featuring golden bands across her chest and the last one in a red leather jacket, black jeans ending at the ankle and silver accessories.

  Accompanying them were a dozen men and three more women, non-Dragonguard, for a total of twenty one people who had come to participate in my dancing lessons.

  Truth be told, the dance lessons are just how I'm spending my time while my lower half regenerates. The battle with the Storm wyvern was swift, the food afterwards was delicious, and unfortunately someone had the bright idea to serve Strananas to Aqua so I'm waiting on my regenration to kick in now.

  I clapped my hands to call attention to myself.

  "Alright, we shall put the Moonwalk aside for the time being and instead concentrate on the conditioning exercises," I began, "remember to always perform your stretches every day, even if there is no instruction on that day, a limber body is a healthy body! Just because I can heal your torn muscles doesn't mean I want to do it, and you know if the Priestess does it, she'll make it horribly painful!"

  She was VERY insistent that healing should only be painless when the wound wasn't the product of stupidity. I couldn't really present an argument against her logic so I pretended I didn't have objections to it.

  "Now... let's get a move on," I narrowed my eyes and looked at the Dragonguard I had dressed in the black and red outfit. "You'll lead everyone on the exercises, please start with half of Level 1, and then go up to level 1 within the session if possible, if not, make sure that they are at least able to endure a full Level 1 workout before the next session!"

  "Sir, yes sir!"

  "Ah, also, henceforth you are promoted to the rank of Dance Lead."

  She was by far the one with the most talent, I'd make sure to instruct her in the art of modern dance as much as I could so that she would then be able to lead everyone else and train them herself, so I didn't have to do it, but could still enjoy the performance later.

  "Someone bring in the Musician's Guild Master, I wish to hear about the progress regarding the instruments I requested!"

  While I could make the sounds myself, that was annoying, needed me to concentrate to do it and it was also fully dependent on how well I remembered what a song sounded like, which meant the best way to go was to instead reproduce the instruments, as best as I could, and let my people improve them to maybe get closer to what I remembered than what I could produce.

  "Yes Great One!!" someone responded, and one of the Dragonguard peeled off of the rest of the group to go fetch the Guild Master.

  Well, things were getting better.

  I haven't overslept in some time, I haven't gone around in a while either, haven't caused a natural disaster, everything was looking up!

  My senses were tingling, however, it was about time for something I had done and then forgotten about to come bite me in the ass. I can just taste the comeuppance in the air, I've become wise to the ways of the world, and I won't be caught off guard-

  I was caught off guard by the entirely non magical rock that was falling like a meteor directly on top of me. Off guard, but not entirely unprepared! Like that one green snake in that one videogame I played a long time ago, I looked up, opened my mouth and let loose a beam of unfiltered power, blasting the meteor and turning it to dust, in a display of my awesome might!

  Shit I forgot about debris!

  Beating my wings fiercely I blew the debris high into the atmosphere and well away from the forest and to where it wouldn't bother my people. Hopefully I didn't just ruin someone's day by hitting someone I didn't mean to.

  The next step was to discover who was attacking me. My back legs and tail were still a little weak but strong enough that I could stand and then kick off, mostly with my front claws taking the brunt of the force, taking to the skies and extending my awareness as best as I could, trying to sense anything around me. Sensing living beings' presence was a crapshoot, the forest was huge, every single fucking tree had a living presence, and the monsters were extremely populous as well.

  Luckily, the absolutely humongous presence of a dragon dwarfed everything else and my head snapped in the right direction just in time to feel the power of magic as a spiraling beam of what looked like toxic green sludge and purple poison barreled towards me at incredible speed.

  No time for doubt, I just opened my mouth and blasted the most powerful thing I could think of, breathing white lightning directly into the path of the attack, causing a massive explosion in the air that sent a shockwave of force strong enough to actually force me back and even knock down some trees in the distant forest below me.

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  Another beam was coming, but by this time I can already see it, and I know what I can do to stop it, blasting a thinner beam, more concentrated, that punched right through the enemy's attack and then continued on, hitting thin air all of a sudden and causing it to crack into a thousand pieces, shattering the illusion that was keeping my foe hidden.

  Lengthwise the enemy was smaller than me, but his... its wings were bigger, and it had six of them.

  That's fucking cool as shit. I want to have multiple wings too! Why don't I get to have awesome wings like that?!

  Ah shit I got distracted, it's attacking again, this time rushing forward. The black scaled dragon attacking me also had extremely sharp edges to its wings, guess it has multiple because it uses some to fly and the others to attack?

  Dodging in mid air is actually kind of easy at first, but as the enemy attacking me speeds up, slowly I'm starting to lose track of its movements, as it sort of circles around me, making me think of those old cartoony images of an atom-

  Wait, Atom, that gives me an idea, if it's moving so fast that I can't hit it, then I just need to use a wide area attack!

  I concentrated and then, using all my knowledge of how a nuclear weapon worked, by which I mean I just pushed into the air with all the force I could thinking of splitting the Hydrogen atoms directly around me, I managed to trigger an explosion!

  ...

  It was more of a fart than a nuclear detonation. That was disappointing.

  And then that asshole cut one of my eyes out with its wing, that wasn't very polite!

  It went in for another attack but thanks to it being a predictable direct attack going for my other eye, I caught it, getting cut up as I took its small, sleek and hornless head in my claws, its wings going wild and slicing at me as I grabbed the enemy with both my arms, front legs, whatever, I grabbed it and then dove to the ground and brought us both down like the meteor he had thrown at me, making sure to smash the little fucker into the ground with all of my strength.

  Naturally, as it was a proper Dragon, that was not enough to put it down.

  So I punched it in the face, and when that didn't work, I punched it again. When it tried to slice at me with one of its wings I blasted my breath and erased three of its wings and kinda might have created a hugely deep pit. I'll deal with that later.

  "Throw rocks at me why don't you, cut my eye out why don't you, see what you get!"

  I was then whipped by the black dragon's tail, it had a freaking sword for a tail tip, this thing's so freaking cool, how dare you be cooler than me, I won't allow it!

  The second time it tried to hit me with the tail I caught it and then kicked off, ignoring the trees that went flying and the destruction I caused by doing that, taking my enemy with me all the way up past the thick atmosphere and to the point things got really cold and the atmosphere was thin enough we could see space...

  And then I furled my wings and began to spin myself around like a top that just went mad, taking a cue out of a show about dudes that punched each other, spinning my enemy around by the tail and then tossing it to the ground, following it with another blast of my breath weapon.

  Missing three wings and disoriented by the spinning, my enemy could only barely and scarcely manage to push itself out of the way of my breath. I'll once again pretend I didn't just blast a massive hole in the ground as my attack carved its way probably way deeper than it had any need to.

  Of course, my enemy hadn't managed to fully avoid my attack, its tail, two of its last three wings, part of its torso and one of its arms and legs had been obliterated, and it crashed to the ground.

  Alrighty, that was that.

  I crashed down, a little beat up, but hey, I have depth perception again, so that's a bonus. On just my back legs, I approached my enemy, spreading my wings to show this thing just how little it had managed to do, even the torn up membranes of my wings had healed already.

  Writhing and barely clinging to life, the enemy looked up at me, still looking fiercely, even though it was obviously defeated.

  The absolutely pathetic blast of its breath that hit me was just the last bit of resistance it could offer, and it obviously realized it was going to die pretty soon.

  "Well, well, well, there we go. You're gonna get what you deserve."

  Spitting some blood and poison, the black dragon looked up at me.

  "Defiant to the end, huh?" I asked.

  "Even if you slay me - there will be another. You attacked my people... your path of evil will be your undoing some day. Even the Mightiest Dragon will fall prey to their own villainy! I may fall here today, but a hero will rise to avenge me!!"

  "Hold up, hold up time out!" I called. "The fuck are you talking about path of evil, I was minding my own business until you showed up out of nowhere and threw a rock at me! It was a big rock too!"

  "You attacked my people! Destroyed their possessions! Killed their animals!"

  This sounded familiar, but, I cannot for the life of me imagine just what she could possibly be talking about. There was no way I did something like that, I mean, I would have to be drunk-

  Oh.

  Oooooooooh.

  "Oooooh shit," I muttered, "say are your people some humans who were living like, that-a-way, in like the middle of a desert as nomads or something?" I asked, gesturing in the vague direction I remembered that desert was in.

  "You- you don't even remember?"

  "Do you remember every giant gorilla you eat?" I asked, rolling my eyes. "Look, I didn't attack your people, it was an accident, I apologized and even gave them a gift."

  "You destroyed the weapons I gave them!!" the dragon protested.

  "Well maybe if you gave them stuff worth a damn it wouldn't have broken on my skin," I huffed. "Have you thought about that, huh?"

  Actually this dragon kind of reminds me of the people now, yeah, I remember, that rosy cheeked young boy I left the spear with! Maybe they were related? Could dragons and humans even be related? Thoughts for later.

  "You, you-"

  Whatever the dragon was going to say was interrupted by vomiting blood and bits of organs. Probably was in the process of regenerating them already and the wrecked bits were in the way.

  "Look I'm sorry, I screwed up, but you screwed up too! If you attack me like this, what the hell am I supposed to do?" I asked.

  "Normally, any challenger like this, you'd just kill."

  "Oh! Aqua! How delightfully convenient!.. oh right you mentioned that, huh? What was that other thing... oh yeah," I looked at the dragon. "Okay, you can fuck right off back to your lands. And don't you come giving me shit about taking you as my mate, alright?" I said. "I can barely cope with one as is. And I sure as shit don't want any heat with Aqua."

  "You better," Aqua said. "And as for you... hm- you're the Black Scale Dragon, your domain is related to Industry is it not? What in the name of all that is draconic possessed you to think you could defeat the SIlver One?" Aqua asked.

  "I have to try..! A monster that would attack humans for no reason other than their cruelty- I cannot abide such a villain to exist!"

  "We need to talk this out because this is dumb and you're dumb."

  "Good," Aqua then shrank back to her humanoid form. "You, Humanize as well. For this one time, I shall allow you the privilege of riding on my idiot's head."

  "Hey!" I protested.

  "Very well, my idiot mate's head."

  "That's better," I responded, then what she said registered, but then I realized that if I admitted that she caught me, I would look even dumber for protesting it, instead, I shall play it off as if I'm taking it in good humor. I'm a genius!

  Also as the Black Dragon shrank down, rather than look big and strong, and distinctly gendered like Aqua did, the black dragon shrank to a look similar to the rosy cheeked youth I had seen before, but more androgynous than that and with dragon claws for feet and hands, and with pitch black skin, not like, human black, but like the color of tar, without the shiny metallic tone of the draconic scales the dragon had.

  Also no more missing bits.

  "Now come. You will apologize for your reckless attack, repeatedly, before I send you packing back to your people. You might be a Lesser Force, but your domain may yet prove useful to our people."

  As I would soon find out, the Black Scale Dragon's domain was actually all about the manipulation, controlled spoilage and fermentation of organic materials...

  Essentially?

  Aqua found a living Brewery.

  There is no god that can save us from the Stranana Liquor now.