Outside, spring was in full swing. Sunbeams insolently pierced the windows of the classrooms — not those located in the dungeons, of course. And it was precisely in the dungeons that my training room was located, where I had been practicing for over a year and a half now. Yes, I conducted my magical training sessions in one place and seemed to have settled in for the long haul — at least until I found the Room of Requirement.
With March came the flying season, or rather, the Quidditch season for many students. Teams had resumed training, and fifth and seventh years were panickedly poring over their notes, preparing for upcoming exams. But one trait was noticeable in everyone: it was as if they were all under the influence of Amortentia — the love potion. Everywhere you looked, there were couples, whispering, and silly smiles. Oh, those hormones... I think Hogwarts needs to introduce a separate subject on the matter... A fact frequently hinted at by the Marauder's Map, where, thanks to the boot-shaped footprints, one could observe interesting couples... in interesting positions...
I tried to ignore it all, especially considering my own puberty. Hormones were acting up, and emotions were all over the place — I had started to notice this distinctly since September. And when my voice began to crack... I had to admit, that was it. Just awful...
At least I had the memories of my past self who had gone through all this, so now I at least knew all the intricacies.
I pushed away the stray thoughts and focused. Mentally, I visualized magic condensing around one of the unlucky desks that had endured my experiments more than once. Slowly, I raised my right hand. The desk obediently lifted off the floor; with a movement of my hand, I raised it quite high. Without a single wand gesture or whispered incantation. Just pure willpower and my hand as the conduit. I remember that at the start of the year, I could barely lift a desk high and with great effort; now it was easy enough to work with such weights regularly during telekinesis training.
I began to rotate the desk, first simply in front of me, focusing on the sensations — how magic flowed along invisible threads connecting us. It was akin to conducting, where each movement of thought elicited a response. Then I threw the desk several meters away and, forming something akin to a Flipendo at my fingertip, released a vague, loose clump of energy. It flew towards the already fallen desk and, despite its pitiful appearance, made it scrape across the floor.
Over this time, I had advanced significantly in wandless magic. This became possible thanks to Flitwick. For Christmas, the professor had sent me a stack of parchment with handwritten notes — his personal thoughts on the subject. There were no spells there, as wandless spells didn't exist in the conventional sense. Rather... principles. Instructions on shaping raw magic. Flitwick, as promised back in the winter of my first year, had given me the key to progressing towards the master level of magical art. At least, among currently living wizards, wandless magic was considered the domain of the strongest — which wasn't entirely... accurate.
As I'd said before, before the invention of wands and other foci, all wizards could only use their bodies to create magic. Therefore, magic was much weaker then, and a rare wizard could demonstrate visible, tangibly world-affecting spellcraft. Sure, one in ten could launch a fireball from their hands or slice a bull in half, but the other nine might only manage to light a fire, push something magically, lift an object with telekinesis, or ignite something from a distance. And that was only after long training.
Nowadays, wands themselves were considered the best foci and were used in Europe, South and North America, Australia, and elsewhere too, though not as universally. Among other popular foci were staffs, canes, and, of course, rings — an integral part of magical traditions in China and other Asian countries, as well as the non-European part of Russia. Although in Russia, the situation was ambiguous: there, they used both equally, and even staffs were widespread.
Wands gained greater worldwide prevalence due to their versatility, relative affordability, ease of manufacture, and — most importantly — flexibility of use. They combined the focusing efficiency comparable to staffs, while casting magic with them was easier due to their size and weight, almost like with rings. And that's not to mention that wand-based charms were more extensive thanks to the simple control through the wrist, the ability to weave movements into the spell. The main factor, however, was the advancement of magical science in the countries where they were now widespread.
Amusingly, the secrets of wandmaking were lost with the fall of the Roman Empire and only recreated in the 11th century. During that gap, they used either already created wands or staffs. Meanwhile, China used rings throughout that entire time, so magical traditions there were highly developed, but the trouble was that magical traditions varied from clan to clan, and all knowledge was orders of magnitude more closed off from society than even ours, with private libraries.
Nowadays, thanks to wands, many wizards didn't even attempt to train in wandless magic, which was why they considered any such magic something special. But only in the case of truly tangible spells, as I had often noticed adult wizards using magic without a wand for mundane needs — but they weren't the majority. And their manipulations were at the level of: moving a spoon with magic to stir coffee, which wasn't the same as the ability to create, say, a fireball.
I needed Professor Flitwick's notes to grow from simple tricks to using somewhat useful spells akin to their wand-based counterparts. For example, I would now never be without light — creating a beam of light was a simple matter. And if needed, I could break imposed enchantments without a wand or even protect myself from a stray spell or a bullet.
Yes, yes, I'm talking about protection. Regarding protection... I had worked on that even before the notes. I had even figured out how to create a protective half-dome similar to Protego. Having received knowledge from a more experienced wizard, I managed to optimize the workings of my homemade magical shield.
Now, I decided to refine a wandless variation of Protego. Of course, for this task, I used a wand — a focus was needed not only for ready-made spells but also to facilitate manipulations with raw magic, making them "cheaper" in terms of cost and stronger. That's why I began any experiments with raw magic first through a focus, and only then moved to using just my hands.
So, I decided to develop this idea and eliminate the only drawback of this simple yet effective protective method, like Protego.
The thing is, thanks to the spherical propagation of Protego, the spell, like other types of dome-based protective magic, not only protected with a magical layer but, due to its spherical shape, attacks slid off the shield's surface, especially physical attacks. This meant the full force of an attack never struck the shield head-on, let alone at a single point. The drawback was that if the shield was pierced in even one place — it collapsed, because the weave was destroyed. And here, I decided to approach the issue from an interesting angle — to complicate simple charms.
After long efforts, I now had a partially ready project for magical protection with facets. Essentially, it should become a completely different principle for spell creation: the shield is woven from magic into something like honeycombs, which act as facets dividing sections of the shield. The more such cells, the easier it is to restore a part of the shield if it's pierced. This principle doesn't remove the effect of distributing the impact across the entire surface, as in basic Protego, but under excessive load, only one out of dozens of sectors bursts, and the spell doesn't collapse but instantly restores the missing piece.
Of course, this all didn't work as a standalone spell — everything was controlled by me, but the mere fact that I had managed to create such a multi-structured defensive magic was astounding. The only drawback of my modification was that creating the honeycomb structure took time. Therefore, a shield was first created, and then, thanks to an algorithm I devised, a graph with connected vertices was formed. Thanks to this construction, the shield's aerodynamic properties hardly suffered if the triangles were sufficiently small.
Ideally, I needed to automate the entire process to the level where one simply had to feed the created magical construct, but for now, through manual fueling with a specific intent, I managed to create an interesting development.
My shield wasn't a monolithic sphere but a discrete structure. I divided the protective field into triangular cells, creating a hexagonal lattice — a hexagon consisting of six triangular cells. Each cell was an independent magical module with three anchor vertices. Upon damage, only one cell (or several, depending on the impact area) was destroyed, not the entire structure.
Mathematically, I described this as a connected planar graph G = (V, E), where:
V — the set of vertices (magic anchors),
E — the set of edges (magical weavings that connected everything like threads).
Each face was a hexagon. I had to recall Euler's formula for connected planar graphs: V - E + F = 2, where F is the number of faces. This ensured structural stability during creation.
The recovery algorithm was supposed to work on the breadth-first search principle: when a cell was destroyed, its neighbors instantly redistributed the magical load, restoring the damaged section. Thus, the probability of complete system failure decreased exponentially with the increase in the number of cells.
The only disadvantage was the initialization time with a large number of cells. However, after creation, the shield was supposed to work autonomously, requiring only minimal fueling. That was the ultimate goal. For now, I had an algorithm for creating the shield itself, but I didn't understand how to weave an automatic recovery mechanism into the construct. More precisely, I understood the principle of the algorithm's work but couldn't see a way to implement it practically.
Currently, I could create a Protego analog without a wand, which transformed in a second into a complex structure of small triangles woven into the magical fabric of the shield. This allowed me to almost retain the sphericity of the protection with all its advantages. The whole process took one second without a wand and was 30% faster with a wand. All thanks to an optimized algorithm: I concentrated magic in a central node of three vertices, then, by an act of will, like using a computer mouse, I forced the magic to replicate this pattern in a circle. This resulted in a section of six triangles forming a single hexagonal honeycomb, after which the magic quickly duplicated this fragment across the rest of the shield's surface.
But even one second was an unaffordable luxury in a duel. Therefore, the practical application of such a shield remained limited. However, outside of duels or in special cases, if the protection was created in advance, one could confidently withstand magical attacks, promptly restoring damaged sections without a complete shield collapse.
The same principle could be applied to any spell — for example, to create a wandless analog of Petrificus Totalus. To explain why, we need to delve into the mechanics of counter-curses.
Take Finite — a universal spell for removing jinxes and simple charms. Thanks to its simplicity and wide range of action, it's studied in the first year at Hogwarts. Before, when trying to break a charm like Petrificus Totalus without a wand, I simply circulated magic. I tried to damage the imposed charm as much as possible, essentially mindlessly dumping a stream of my own magic onto it. Of course, thanks to training, I reached a level where this method worked quite well against charms cast on you, but it frustrated me because it wasn't enough. And only with the professor's notes did I realize that elegant solution I couldn't have figured out on my own, despite all my intellectual abilities. I had even started doubting the latter, but not for long.
Now I acted differently. Any spell had a structure, a pattern — you could call it anything, the main thing was to understand the essence. Breaking a structure from the outside was difficult, but if you concentrated the attack at one point, magic would penetrate the solid wall, right into the structure's interior, and quickly begin destroying it from within, like a domino effect. Like a locust that got inside a tree. You could also give the example of a river where a small hole is dug. Over time, another river will flow through that hole if you're lucky. So, thanks to the increased sensitivity to magic after the rituals, I literally felt these flows and understood the logic of this principle.
This didn't work with Protego, which had a physical manifestation of magic — there, it was enough to breach the protection at one point, which was its vulnerability, and then the protective spell would resolve itself.
It's a pity I hadn't thought of this myself. The principle is so simple... then again, like everything ingenious. Now, armed with Flitwick's hints, I saw possibilities everywhere. Based on this principle, I created a shield protected from the "Achilles' heel" of the classic Protego, where a pinpoint breach collapses the entire defense.
Having mastered the defensive method, I understood how to create offensive jinxes resistant to quick destruction when counter-curses were applied. If you protected charms by simply creating them with those same hexagonal contours, basic counter-spells would prove ineffective. For example, I could now instantly remove a standard Petrificus Totalus by concentrating magic for a pinpoint breakthrough followed by a cascade destruction of the structure.
I approached the fallen desk and pointed my wand at it. Telekinesis came easily to me even without it, but with the ebony twig in my hand, everything changed. A slight movement of the wrist, and the desk shot into the air, beginning to whirl rapidly, like a leaf in a whirlwind. It traced figure-eights, looped, froze, and resumed its dance. The focus... Whatever they said, it was a powerful tool. It didn't replace power but honed it, like a whetstone honed a blade.
I added two more desks to the first and, controlling them with just one wand, easily spun three massive objects as I pleased. There was something soothing in this flight.
Thoughts raced through my head. It was amusing to realize how much I had accomplished this year, not even counting all this wandless wonder. Knowledge gained during the second year of study: dozens of new spells, delving deeper into Transfiguration, studying mental magic, and practicing spells with both hands. I continued training not only my right but also my left hand — both with and without a wand. Ideally, I should acquire a second wand, but I could manage without for now. The main thing was to incorporate equal use of both hands into my combat style, giving me an undeniable advantage. And I needed an advantage because, despite all my efforts, I doubted I could not only defeat an Auror but also prevail against a strong and experienced upperclassman.
But the feeling that with each day, each month, each year I was becoming only stronger pleased me and helped maintain discipline. Discipline, thanks to which I had advanced far ahead of my peers — both physically, where I had a well-developed body, and magically.
I could calmly hold my own in a duel not just against the best in our year, but even against Blackwell and Cassius simultaneously, which was no longer particularly difficult. And this considering that both guys were very good at dueling and had long since learned to work together.
So, two top duelists of the second year, who constantly trained separately and together, and I stood easily against them... well, if I redirected spells. And when we trained not in the dueling club but here, I used the redirection skill to its fullest. Not that we trained like this every day, but once or twice a week we preferred this method. It was fun and useful.
In the dueling club, I also demonstrated the redirection skill; after all, Flitwick understood I was ahead of the others and only allowed me to spar with older students, which was more challenging. Although I easily defeated all third-years even without redirection, which, by the way, I had become proficient enough at to sometimes not use protective magic at all at the school level. But against the best fourth-years, I had to actively redirect spells.
For now, Flitwick hadn't allowed me to face fifth-years, but I think that would change soon.
And it was precisely at this embarrassing and unpleasant moment, as three desks whirled around me, circling and rotating on their axes while I was lost in thought, that the alarm charms triggered. Someone had breached the door I had locked with a rather reliable enchantment.