"Kevin! Kevin! Kevin!"
The crowd was already chanting before he'd fully cleared the tunnel. A gust of wind hit him the moment he stepped into the open air, snapping his robes sideways and carrying the roar of the stands down like a physical thing.
The arena spread out ahead. And in the middle of it, chained to the stone platform where the eggs were clustered, was the dragon.
Kevin stopped.
It was silver-blue — the colour of deep ice held up to light. Seven, maybe eight metres of coiled muscle and wing leather. Standard Swedish Short-Snouts ran yellowish-brown, like the sketches in every reference text. This one was something rarer. A colour variant that turned up once in several hundred hatchlings, if the breeding records were right.
Smaller than a Norwegian Ridgeback. Less raw muscle than a Chinese Fireball. But its fire — pale blue, burning several hundred degrees hotter than anything the common breeds could manage — was the deadliest of any flame-breathing dragon alive.
Blue dragon fire could reduce a person to ash before they'd finished registering the heat.
Kevin looked at the silver-blue dragon and felt precisely nothing that resembled fear.
A Tree Bee Dragon would have been a genuine problem. Something with physical attacks he couldn't simply absorb. But fire? He'd spent three years making fire do exactly what he wanted.
The Triwizard rules were clear: wands only. No props, no additional weapons. Kevin had left his crowbar behind without complaint.
He hopped up onto a large boulder at the arena's edge and studied the dragon.
It had spotted him the moment he emerged. It quit fighting the restraining chains, dropped from the air, and settled its bulk across the stone platform directly over the golden eggs. A living shield. Clever instinct.
Then it opened its mouth.
No warning call. No posturing. Just a torrent of blue fire, straight at him.
The heat hit the stands like a furnace blast. Students in the front rows threw up their arms. Even at that distance, it was extraordinary.
Kevin stood in it.
The flames roared around him and found no purchase — they curved, pulled, drawn inward by something the crowd couldn't name. A sphere of fire formed around the boulder, dense and spinning, the dragon's own attack feeding the vortex.
The Short-Snout pumped more into it. Whatever this was, it wasn't behaving the way fire was supposed to behave.
Kevin let it build for a few more seconds.
Then he flicked his wand and stepped out.
He was completely untouched. The fire formed a trailing cape behind him, licking around his heels, and the crowd went absolutely silent for a full second before erupting.
The dragon stared. Its most powerful weapon had done nothing. Worse — the fire was somehow still his.
It had about three seconds to process this before Kevin raised his wand.
The vortex overhead compressed. It stretched into a spear of blue flame, blazing with the same temperature the dragon had generated, and came down like a missile.
It struck the Short-Snout's back.
The explosion of blue fire that followed was volcanic. The dragon was hurled backwards into the rock wall, shrieking, its back scales blackened and torn where the concentrated heat had broken through.
Dragon scales were extraordinary things. Magically reinforced, resistant to most conventional spellwork. But there was a difference between resisting a spell cast at them and absorbing that much concentrated heat generated from their own fire.
The Short-Snout staggered upright, shaking its head, blood red in its open mouth. Then it lunged.
Kevin watched it come. At the last possible moment he swept his wand sideways — a massive boulder adjacent to the dragon's flight path dropped directly into its path, smashing into its underside. The dragon crashed to the stone, roaring in agony.
It didn't stop. It rolled, flames erupting in all directions, wild and undirected — a panicked animal burning its own tail in its frenzy. Kevin reached out with Hephaestus's Command and caught every tongue of fire before it could stray, funnelling them inward, shaping them.
The Short-Snout looked up. A fire spear hung directly above it, aimed down.
It held very still.
Kevin held the spear there for a moment — not threatening, exactly. Just present. A reminder that this wasn't going to improve.
Then he stepped lightly off his boulder, crossed the arena floor, and climbed onto the egg platform.
He picked up the golden egg.
The roar from the stands came half a second later, as if the crowd had needed that moment to confirm what they'd just seen.
"OHHHH!"
"Kevin! Kevin! Kevin!"
Even Professor McGonagall was applauding with the undisguised enthusiasm of someone who had forgotten, briefly, to be dignified about it.
Kevin walked off the platform. The fire spear dissolved upward and was gone. He didn't look back at the dragon.
In the champions' tent, Krum and Fleur looked at him the way people look at something that doesn't quite fit inside the categories they have available. Harry wasn't surprised. He'd seen Norbert fail to land a scratch on this person. A tournament dragon was a different scale, not a different nature.
Ministry handlers swarmed into the arena behind Kevin, beginning the process of retrieving the Short-Snout. The next champion was called.
Fleur went second. Her Welsh Green was subdued quickly with a sleeping charm — elegant, clean, effective. She collected her egg.
Krum followed. A Stunner to the eyes, surgical and precise. Egg retrieved.
Then Harry.
The crowd's energy shifted — different kind of noise, more anxious, more protective. Harry stepped into the arena and looked up at his Hungarian Horntail. The Horntail's neck spines flared, and it opened its mouth.
Harry didn't run. He'd spent weeks with Norbert. He raised his wand.
"Water Shield."
The Horntail's fire hit it and split apart, running harmlessly along the surface. The stands cheered — someone who could hold their ground.
Harry knew the shield wouldn't last indefinitely. Norbert had shown him that. He had maybe three exchanges before the dragon started experimenting.
He hit it with his Smoke Burst while the shield held — black smoke billowing thick and fast, blinding the Horntail before it could adapt. The dragon thrashed and breathed into the cloud, useless, while Harry moved.
He was inches from the egg when the Horntail spread its wings and scattered the smoke with one massive downstroke. Harry threw himself flat as it swooped. He came up immediately, landed the Eye-Sickness Curse directly — the Horntail went berserk, fire spraying everywhere without direction.
Harry grabbed the egg.
The crowd's roar for Harry was just as loud as it had been for Kevin, which was, Harry suspected, exactly what Kevin would have wanted.
All four champions had cleared the first task. Old Bartemius Crouch made his way through the group, shaking hands, looking official.
"The next task takes place in February. You'll want to study the clue in your egg carefully. I'd recommend waiting until you're somewhere quiet before—"
Kevin had already cracked his open.
The shriek was immediate and ear-splitting, a sound like every pitch of human distress concentrated and amplified. The champions flinched. Dumbledore clapped both hands over his ears.
Kevin gritted his teeth and held the egg open, studying it.
Then he waved his wand. The egg snapped shut.
Silence returned.
"Mr. Kevin." Crouch had recovered. His face was a study in controlled outrage. "I distinctly said not yet."
Kevin shrugged. "Too late."
The judges looked at each other. They'd arrived to deliver experience and authority to these young champions. Somehow the whole session had proceeded in the exact opposite direction.