Chapter 86: Temporary Alliance of Rivals
11:20 PM.
The third-floor restricted area. Behind the locked door at the end of the corridor, the dull snoring of Cerberus drifted through the wooden planks.
A strong, pungent smell of dog permeated the air.
Harry crouched by the door, holding a bamboo flute in his hand. Ron was right beside him, his knuckles white from gripping his wand.
"I'll play the flute, you open the door. Don't stop once we're inside, just go straight for the trapdoor." Harry's voice was extremely low.
Ron nodded. His lips were chapped, but his eyes did not waver.
They had practiced Expelliarmus for two months. Although Ron's wand was terrible, at least it wouldn't explode anymore.
The lock was opened by Alohomora.
Harry put the flute to his lips and blew out a disjointed sound that could hardly be called a melody.
The huge wooden door pushed open slowly.
Cerberus's three heads were resting on its paws, snoring like a tractor. As soon as the flute music sounded, those half-open eyes became unfocused, and the massive body shifted on the stone floor, sinking back into a deep slumber.
Harry squeezed in sideways. Ron followed closely behind.
Just as the two stepped over one of Cerberus's front legs, which was as thick as a bowl, a third set of footsteps came from behind them.
Footsteps that were visibly controlled and slightly heavy.
Ron turned around faster than he could draw his wand.
Green light shone in from the end of the corridor, illuminating the newcomer's face.
Blonde hair. A pale face. Lips pressed tightly together. There was visible tension in his grey-blue eyes.
Draco Malfoy.
"You—!" Ron's broken wand pointed at him with a "swish."
Harry's flute playing almost stopped. He forced himself to keep playing, but his eyes had already turned to stare fixedly at Draco.
Draco did not sneer or mock as usual.
He didn't even look at Ron.
His gaze swept over Cerberus, quickly locking onto the orientation of each of the three heads, and then he spoke coldly.
"Weasley, put that broken stick of yours down. You're standing within the attack range of the left head. If it wakes up and opens its mouth, you won't even have time to run."
Ron was stunned.
Not because of how scary Draco's words were, but because—he was right.
Ron looked down and saw that he was indeed standing directly in front of Cerberus's left head. The mouth was less than two meters away from him.
"What are you doing here?" Ron's voice was full of suspicion, but he didn't put his wand away.
"It's none of your business." Draco squeezed past him, his steps deliberately kept light and slow.
He paused when he passed Harry.
The two made eye contact for less than a second.
Harry saw something in Draco's eyes that he had never seen on this person before.
Not contempt. Not arrogance.
It was seriousness.
A kind of seriousness born from being backed into a corner and deciding to bite the bullet and charge forward.
Harry didn't ask him why he came. The flute music couldn't stop. He just gestured toward the trapdoor with his eyes.
Draco saw it. He nodded.
Three people. Two were sworn enemies. One had been bickering for half a semester.
But at this moment, amidst the snoring of a three-headed dog, they had reached a temporary ceasefire agreement.
When Ron put his wand away, his face clearly read, "I must be crazy."
Harry played the flute while carefully crouching beside Cerberus's claw, using one hand to pull open the iron ring of the trapdoor.
Just then—
The flute let out a harsh, off-key note.
Harry's lips slipped because of his nervousness.
The off-key sound lasted less than half a second. But for Cerberus, that was enough.
The right head woke up first.
A yellow, plate-sized eye snapped open. The pupil contracted.
Immediately after—three rows of fangs were revealed bit by bit from behind the closed lips.
This head was facing Harry's back.
A low growl rolled out from the depths of Cerberus's throat, like a grinding stone turning.
A chill ran down Harry's back. He heard it. But he was bent over facing the trapdoor and couldn't turn around in time.
Ron's hand was shaking as he drew his wand—he was standing too far away, and any spell cast would need to pass over Harry's head, lacking the precision needed.
Cerberus's right head opened its mouth.
Sticky strands of drool stretched between the two rows of canine teeth, and a wave of hot, foul-smelling air rushed toward him.
It bit down.
Draco moved.
He didn't draw his wand.
What Cassius had instilled in his mind for half a semester—was not "cast a spell when you encounter danger," but "act when you encounter danger."
Spells have a wind-up time. Physical actions don't have to.
Draco raised his right hand, aiming at the jaw of Cerberus's right head.
What surfaced in his mind was not the spell theory from textbooks. It was those nights in the dark dungeons, fingers bleeding from repeated attempts.
Magic surged from his fingertips. A rough, imprecise, yet brutal lump of invisible force.
Gravity Interference Charm.
Wandless. Silent.
The force field exploded directly beneath Cerberus's jaw.
A massive, invisible pressure slammed into the dog's head from below with a muffled "thud." Cerberus's right jaw was forced shut, and the upper and lower rows of fangs bit together.
At the same time, the entire head was pushed half a meter to the side by the pressure.
The tips of the fangs grazed Harry's scalp. They were close enough to cut off a few of his spiky black hairs.
The severed hairs floated in the air for a moment before landing on the ground.
Harry froze in place. A burning pain came from his hair roots, but his head was still attached to his neck.
Ron stood with his mouth open, his wand raised in mid-air, having forgotten to lower it.
Draco withdrew his hand. His hand was shaking, but his expression was hard.
All three of Cerberus's heads were awake. Six large yellow eyes stared at the three intruders simultaneously. Deafening roars erupted from all three mouths at once.
"Jump!" Draco roared.
He took a step forward and jumped into the trapdoor first.
Harry followed close behind. Ron threw the flute at Cerberus's face—hitting the nose of the middle head, causing Cerberus to wince in pain—and then he dove headfirst into the pitch-black opening.
Behind them, the "snap" of Cerberus's three mouths closing simultaneously exploded overhead.
Half a second too late.
The three people were in freefall in the pitch-black shaft for about two seconds.
"Bang!"
Something soft and slimy caught them.
It was pitch black.
The kind of black where you can't see your hand in front of your face. The air was damp and cold, carrying a muddy, fishy smell and the sweet, sickly scent peculiar to rotting plants.
Harry fell onto a pile of soft things. It wasn't cotton. Nor was it a mattress.
The texture was a bit like... plants.
Wet, cold, living plants.
He tried to move his arm. He couldn't.
Something was crawling along his wrist. It wasn't fast, but it was very strong.
Vines.
As thick as fingers, with surfaces covered in tiny suckers. They wound up silently from all directions, like dozens of slow, determined snakes.
"What—what is this!" Ron's voice came from the left, filled with a terror capable of piercing eardrums.
He began to struggle. Struggling hard, frantically. Arms flailing, legs kicking, his whole body like a fish pressed onto a cutting board.
This was the worst possible reaction.
The nature of Devil's Snare—the more you struggle, the tighter it binds.
Every time Ron writhed, three or four new vines reached out from the darkness to fill the gaps. In less than five seconds, his legs were already tightly bound. The vines began to spread toward his chest, and his breathing space was rapidly being compressed.
"Don't move! Weasley!" Draco roared in the darkness.
His voice was much calmer than it had been above. Perhaps because the Wandless Magic he used on Cerberus had drained most of his nervous energy, he had now entered a state of exhausted, dry calmness.
"Don't wriggle like a worm! The more violently you move, the tighter it constricts!"
"Then—then what do I do!" Ron's voice had begun to change pitch. The vines had wrapped around his ribs and were advancing toward his neck.
Chapter 87: Tearing Apart the Devils Snare
Harry barely managed to keep his composure.
He didn't move.
He was desperately trying to remember. Herbology Class. Professor Sprout had talked about it. Devils Snare. It likes the dark and damp. It fears light. It fears fire.
It fears light and fire!
"Use fire!" Harry shouted. "Lumos—no, that's not right, the Fire-Making Charm! Anyone—cast a spell—"
His hands were already tightly bound to his sides by vines. Although his wand was clenched in his palm, his wrists were completely locked. He had no way to wave his wand.
Ron was worse off. His wand had been flung somewhere unknown during his struggle.
In the darkness, only Ron's increasingly rapid breathing and the wet, rubbing sound of the vines tightening remained.
"Malfoy!" Harry shouted into the darkness. "Can you move!"
Draco could move.
To be precise—he was bound too. Just like the other two, he had been wrapped up by dozens of vines the moment he landed.
But he didn't struggle.
He kept the same posture he had when he landed, not moving an inch.
His breathing was steady.
This wasn't because he was naturally calm. God knows, his heart was beating as fast as a kettledrum.
It was because Cassius had taught him.
"When you are restricted, don't waste your strength fighting the restriction. Use the restriction."
"If your hands are tied, don't think about untying the rope. Think about how to turn the rope into your weapon."
When rules restrict you, just break their physical structure.
Draco's right hand was clutching his Hawthorn wand. The vines were wrapped around his wrist and forearm, pressing the wand tightly between his palm and thigh.
He tried to rotate his wrist.
It wouldn't budge. The vines were too tight.
Then he wouldn't rotate it.
He started to try a different way. Instead of fighting the vines, he followed the force of their tightening, twisting his wrist bit by bit in a specific direction.
Every time the vines tightened by a millimeter, he used that force to deflect his wrist by another degree.
It was like playing chess with a python. You can't force it open. But you can steal a tiny bit of space in the gaps between its breaths.
Ten seconds. Twenty seconds.
Draco's wrist had been chafed by the vines into a ring of purplish-red bruises. The pain made his teeth ache.
But the tip of his wand finally turned to a barely usable angle—pointing diagonally outward at forty-five degrees.
It wasn't a standard casting stance. It was far from it.
But he didn't need standard.
He only needed one thing.
Fire.
Lots of fire.
"Potter!" Draco yelled at the top of his lungs in the darkness. "Cover your face! Weasley—if you haven't been strangled to death yet—cover yours too!"
"Wha—"
"Stop talking! Cover it!"
Draco took a breath of sticky, bitter, rotten air into his lungs.
Then he compressed all the magic he could muster within himself—including that magic squeezed out bit by bit by pain and humiliation in the dark dungeons, forced out from the split wounds on his fingertips, stained with the scent of blood—all of it into the tip of his wand.
It wasn't the energy level of a standard Levitation Charm.
It wasn't the energy level of a first-year Fire-Making Charm.
It was everything Draco could bring out.
"Incendio!"
There was no elegant wand movement. No standard rhythmic pronunciation.
He roared these two words with all his might.
The tip of his wand exploded.
It wasn't the gentle, orange-red flame taught in textbooks that could be used for warmth.
It was a beam of white-hot light.
Like a burning spear thrust from his hand, it tore a blinding fissure through the cramped underground space.
The temperature of the flames far exceeded Draco's own expectations.
This wasn't entirely his doing. Extreme pressure and fear had forced out the deepest layers of his magic reserves—that base-level magic usually unreachable due to lack of technique was forcibly squeezed out by survival instinct in this life-or-death moment.
The effect was catastrophic.
For the Devils Snare.
The vines wrapped around Draco reacted first. Under the dual stimulation of light and heat, they contracted violently as if scalded—then quickly loosened, fleeing frantically in all directions.
The beam of fire reflected and diffused within the cramped space. Waves of heat radiated across the entire layer of vines.
The Devils Snare let out a sharp, teeth-aching squeal—that was the sound of plant fibers bursting under high heat.
The vines on Harry came loose entirely within two seconds. They shrank extremely fast, like tentacles scalded by boiling water, zipping back into the depths of the darkness.
The few large vines wrapped tightest around Ron held on a bit longer—they twitched and twisted, trying to maintain their grip in the heatwave.
But Draco's fire continued.
The tip of his wand was shaking. The bruises on his wrist had turned purple. Magic was leaking out at a speed his body could barely withstand.
But he didn't stop.
"Not enough!" a voice said in his mind. It wasn't Cassius's voice. It was his own.
Carrying a ruthless drive that seeped from his very bones.
The color of the flames changed from white-hot to light blue—the temperature rose another notch.
This was already beyond the scope of a first-year Fire-Making Charm.
The remaining vines finally collapsed. They snapped apart with popping sounds, their broken ends charred black, edges curling, drifting down as ashes.
Ron fell from the pile of vines. He hit the stone floor hard.
"Oof—!"
The pain made him roll around on the ground. But at least he could breathe.
Harry landed as well. He was covered in a layer of ash, coughing several times before spitting out the debris in his mouth.
The flames died out.
Draco's wand drooped.
He leaned against the stone wall, gasping for air. His right hand was completely powerless, his fingers clutching the wand twitching spasmodically—a typical reaction of muscles after high-intensity magic output.
But his eyes were terrifyingly bright in the residual light of the flames.
There was no fear on his face. No exhaustion.
Only a raw, unyielding defiance tempered by pain.
Harry climbed up from the ground.
He looked at Draco. Looking at this blond boy who had disliked him since the first day of school.
The afterglow of the fire still danced on Draco. The hem of his robes was scorched, a red mark from the vines was on his left cheek, and his right hand holding the wand was shaking uncontrollably.
But he stood very steadily.
"You—" Harry's voice was hoarse, "that thing you just did—"
"Spare me the chatter." Draco switched his wand to his left hand, working his stiff right knuckles. "What else is ahead?"
Ron scrambled up from the side, rubbing the back of his head with one hand while feeling the ground for his wand with the other.
He found it.
The wand was covered in green plant sap, but it wasn't broken.
Ron wiped his wand on his robes and looked up at Draco.
He opened his mouth twice. Finally, he only squeezed out one word.
"...Thanks."
Draco snorted coldly.
"Don't get the wrong idea. I didn't come to save you. I couldn't care less if you died."
"Then why—"
"Because my brother's battle doesn't need me to participate." Draco put away his wand and straightened his scorched robe hem. "I have to find a battlefield of my own."
Ron and Harry exchanged a look.
There was too much complexity in that gaze.
Shock. Confusion. A tiny bit of gratitude that hadn't yet been digested. And some sort of indescribable re-evaluation of this arch-rival.
But now was not the time to digest emotions.
The passage ahead still extended.
The three of them—two Gryffindors, one Slytherin—stepped over the charred ashes of the vines, walking toward the next obstacle.
In the darkness behind them, the remaining Devils Snarehad shrunk into shivering green balls, clinging to the cracks in the corners, never daring to extend a single tendril again.
They remembered that flame.
And they remembered the blond, ruthless-looking boy.
Chapter 88: The Correct Usage of Violence
Passing through the charred ashes of the Devils Snare, the three of them squeezed into a stone corridor. At the end stood a heavy wooden door.
Pushing the door open, they found a vast room with an extremely high vaulted ceiling.
There were no torches. The light source came from above.
Thousands of winged keys circled and dove in mid-air, emitting a teeth-grinding metallic friction sound. It was like a manic swarm of bees. Opposite them, another heavy oak door was tightly locked.
Ron rubbed the red welts on the back of his hands caused by the vines, his gaze shifting between Draco and Harry. He still hadn't recovered from the shock of Draco using fire to save them earlier. The atmosphere was as rigid as the frozen Black Lake.
Draco brushed the ashes off his robes, his cold eyes sweeping across the air.
"Just to open a door, they made so much winged scrap metal?" He made no effort to hide the disgust in his tone. "The mechanisms at Hogwarts are designed like a puzzle for a three-year-old Troll. Inefficient. Stupid."
This familiar arrogant tone instantly set Ron off.
"Shut up, Malfoy!" Ron jumped up like a cat whose tail had been stepped on. "That's better than you just acting like a barbarian and setting things on fire! This is a test of skill and observation, not a request for you to blow this place to smithereens!"
Draco sneered, not even bothering to retort. His gaze moved downward, landing on a few worn-out broomsticks in the corner. "Yes, skill." He raised his eyebrows mockingly. "Riding this kind of broom that snaps with one bend to catch a flying key? I would rather just dismantle the door hinges."
"Stop arguing." Harry rubbed his temples, his head throbbing. Time waited for no one.
He walked quickly to the corner, grabbed a broom, and mounted it. With a push of his feet, he shot into the air.
His talent as a Seeker was evident in that moment. Harrywove through the dense swarm of keys, his eyes sharp as lightning. In less than half a minute, he locked onto his target—an antique key with drooping wings and large silver feathers.
"There!" Harry lowered the broom handle and dove at full speed.
But the swarm of keys was by no means lifeless. They had been cast with an extremely vicious interference jinx.
When Harry was three meters away from the target, hundreds of keys around him suddenly turned, like a nest of enraged hornets, crashing toward him in a deluge. Their metallic edges were sharp as knives.
"Whoosh!"
A brass key flew past Harry's goggles, leaving a white scratch on the glass. Harry pulled up the broom sharply, narrowly avoiding the collision in the main path, but the target had already vanished, mixed into another swarm of keys.
Twice. Three times.
Every time Harry got close, the swarm of keys would form a literal iron wall. Harry's breathing began to quicken. This was the only area where he could crush Draco; he absolutely could not fail.
Ron was jumping with anxiety below, waving his broken wand but not daring to cast any spells for fear of hitting Harry.
Draco stood where he was, watching Harry struggling in mid-air, extreme impatience appearing in his grey-blue eyes.
Too slow.
What had Cassius taught him?
"When numbers form an absolute defense, do not compete for speed. Use area coverage to crush them."
Draco took a deep breath. He did not go to get a broom.
He slowly drew his Hawthorn wand, his right thumb forcefully rubbing against the unhealed wound on his knuckle. The stinging sensation caused his focus to sharpen instantly.
The magic within his body no longer flowed according to the gentle circuits in the textbooks, but instead violently smashed through his meridians, surging toward the tip of his wand.
He lifted his head, staring fixedly at the densest wall of keys directly in front of Harry.
"Move!" Draco roared.
Harry instinctively tilted his head, rolling to the right with his broom.
In the same second, Draco swung his wand down violently. There was no precise aim, only an extremely savage sweep.
"Shockwave—Shatter!"
It wasn't a standard spell. It was something Draco had cobbled together himself.
A ripple of pale blue, visible to the naked eye, exploded from the tip of his wand.
The air emitted a dull "hum." It was as if someone had rung a massive bell in mid-air.
Area coverage. An indiscriminate shock of mixed sound waves and magic.
The moment the swarm of keys made contact with the ripple, they all froze. The magical glimmer that granted them life short-circuited under the vibration.
"Clatter, clatter—"
Hundreds of keys, like beads with a broken string, fell from mid-air and clattered onto the stone floor, creating a jarring, crisp sound.
The originally airtight defensive net was forcefully torn open, creating a vacuum zone five meters in diameter.
And in the very center of that vacuum, the old key with silver feathers was falling alone, its wings twitching like a drunken fly.
"Potter! What are you standing there for? Waiting for it to eat dinner?" Draco's wrist trembled as he sharply urged him on.
Harry snapped out of his daze. He pressed down on the broom, like a falcon hunting, and in the second before the silver key hit the ground, he reached out and gripped it tightly in his palm.
The metal's struggle ceased in his palm.
Harry landed steadily. He was covered in sweat.
Ron rushed over excitedly, slapping Harry's shoulder hard.
Harry turned his head to look at Draco, who was tucking his wand back into his pocket. Draco's face was somewhat pale, a sign of magical exhaustion. But he stood very straight.
"Nice work, Harry!" Ron cheered.
Draco glanced at them, then coldly looked away. "It's alright." His voice had no fluctuation. "A bit faster than Weasley's brain."
Harry froze for a moment. In the past, he would certainly have retorted. But at this moment, he didn't miss the trace of barely perceptible approval that flashed in those grey-blue eyes as Draco turned away.
That bastard. Harry cursed silently in his heart, but the corners of his mouth twitched involuntarily.
...
At the same time. The Slytherin Common Roomunderground. The hearth fire was a ghostly green.
Cassius leaned back in a single armchair in the corner, holding a book titled "Diagrams of Advanced Magical Circuits" open in his hands.
From start to finish, the pages had not been turned once.
He had his eyes closed. The Soul Furnace within his body pulsed at an extremely slow, yet incredibly profound frequency.
His sensory network was like invisible roots, piercing through the Castle's thick rock and layers of defensive arrays, extending all the way to directly beneath the Forbidden Corridor on the third floor.
He was monitoring.
Just a moment ago, two magical peaks erupted in that area.
One was hot and manic, an eruption filled with the instinct for survival.
One was a shockwave diffusion, rough but with a clear target.
Both were magic of the same origin. The unique texture of magic in the House of Malfoy's bloodline—cold yet sharp.
Cassius's cold lips curled imperceptibly for a fleeting moment.
"The combat logic has improved. Knowing to use area disruption instead of precise point elimination."
He made a calm assessment in his heart.
"But the magic control is still as rough as a Troll doing embroidery. Sixty percent of the kinetic energy was wasted."
When Zabini passed by in the Common Room, he accidentally caught the curve of Cassius's lips, shivered instantly, and quickened his pace to slip back to the dormitory. That smile was even more horrifying than the smell of garlic from the back of Professor Quirrell's head.
Cassius restrained his smile. He returned to absolute calm.
Like the most ruthless examiner, he sat on a high platform, watching quietly as the candidates underground walked toward the next test of life and death.
Chapter 89: The Knight's Price
The silver key slid into the keyhole.
With a "click," the heavy oak door slid inward.
There was no light source, only a faint glow.
The three of them stepped over the threshold.
The sight before them made them gasp.
It was a chessboard.
An absurdly large Wizard Chess board.
They were standing on the side of the black pieces.
Opposite them were rows of white chess pieces carved from black marble, as tall as a Troll.
They had no facial features, held broadswords and spears in their hands, and exuded a suffocating aura of slaughter.
The door slammed shut behind them.
"It looks like we have to cross the chessboard to get through," Harry swallowed hard.
Draco frowned.
The intuition he had learned from Cassius was sounding an alarm.
The magic remaining on these statues was extremely ancient and heavy.
"Can't we just blow up the King on the other side?" Dracodrew his wand and pointed at the tallest white King opposite them.
"Shut up, Malfoy!"
A roar exploded in the empty room.
Draco froze. Harry froze too.
It was Ron who had shouted that.
Ron stared fixedly at the chessboard.
The look of cowardice and anxiety that had filled his eyes was gone, replaced by an absolute focus.
In this world filled with squares and stone statues, he was no longer the poor student who couldn't even cast a proper Levitation Charm.
He was the King.
"You need to use your brain here! Not those underdeveloped muscles of yours!" Ron didn't look at Draco, striding to the front of the black camp. "These pieces are solidified using high-level Transfiguration and magic."
"With your current magic, you couldn't even blast through the stone skin of a pawn! You'd only end up provoking them all!"
Draco was choked into silence.
He gritted his back teeth, instinctively wanting to lash out, but seeing Ron's confident stance, he actually swallowed his curse.
The weak shut up, and the strong make the rules.
This was the iron rule set by Cassius.
If Ron was the strong one in this field, he, Malfoy, would accept it.
Draco kept a cold face and reluctantly withdrew his wand.
"Harry, you go and take the place of the Bishop."
"Malfoy, go be the Castle."
"I'll be the Knight."
Ron issued his orders.
Short, powerful, without any wasted words.
As they took their positions, the white pieces opposite them began to move with a clatter.
The battle began.
This was no ordinary game.
This was a real slaughter.
Ron's commands were extremely precise, with every move calculated three steps ahead.
"White pawn moves forward two."
"Harry, move diagonally four squares!"
"Malfoy, move straight five squares and smash that Knight!"
Draco charged according to the instructions.
The white Knight opposite raised its spear to strike. Dracodid not dodge; instead, he let the massive body of the black Castle roll past him, smashing the white Knight into a pile of rubble.
Gravel splashed, scratching Draco's cheek.
He did not flinch.
Amidst the sound of brutal physical destruction, he even felt a trace of morbid excitement.
The game entered a fever pitch.
The chessboard was full of wreckage.
Time passed second by second.
The three of them were rapidly exhausting their stamina.
Until the game reached the most fatal endgame.
Ron's face turned deathly pale.
Cold sweat from his forehead dripped onto the black and white squares.
The white Queen opposite, like a ruthless bulldozer, had cleared half the board and was now coldly holding her stone sword, sealing off all paths.
The next move, the white Queen would checkmate the "Bishop" position where Harry was standing.
There was no way out.
A dead end.
Harry stood on the Bishop square, watching the white Queen closing in step by step, his palms full of sweat.
Ron's chest heaved violently.
He closed his eyes, frantically deducing the remaining dozens of possibilities in his mind.
All failed.
There was only one path.
A path paved with a life.
"Harry..." Ron's voice trembled, but his words were heavy, "For the next move, I will move forward one square."
"The white Queen will take me."
"Then you move diagonally, and you will be able to checkmate the white King."
Harry turned his head sharply: "No! That's impossible! It will kill you!"
The images of those stone statues shattering were still vivid in his mind.
When those swords came down, people really could die.
"This is the only way!" Ron's eyes reddened, and he roared, "You are the only one who can deal with You-Know-Who! You must get across!"
Ron took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and prepared to issue the death order.
"If you die, who will command the rest of the game? You idiot!"
A cold, arrogant voice with a heavy Malfoy-style haughtiness exploded across the chessboard.
Ron opened his eyes abruptly.
A black shadow slammed in from the side.
Draco Malfoy.
He abandoned his safe "Castle" position, sprinted two steps, grabbed Ron by the collar, and shoved him hard back into his original square.
In the same second, Draco stepped into that fatal "Knight" position himself.
Ron fell to the ground, his mind blank.
Harry's pupils contracted sharply.
The white Queen's stone face slowly turned toward Draco.
Without any hesitation.
She raised the huge stone sword, longer than a person, high above her head and brought it down with a whistling sound that tore through the air.
He couldn't dodge.
He couldn't dodge.
If he dodged, the game would be ruined.
If I let a Weasley die before me, Cassius will skin me alive.
Draco cursed the foulest obscenity in his heart.
He didn't close his eyes.
He stared fixedly at the descending blade.
Cassius's words in the dungeon echoed in his ears like a thunderclap: "magic is an extension of your will! Treat it as your armor!"
Draco roared aloud.
He desperately squeezed out the last bit of magic in his body, compressing it tightly in front of his chest.
A layer of extremely thin, highly unstable, faint blue light appeared on his body.
Melee Mage Armor.
Incomplete version.
"Boom—!"
The stone sword struck heavily on Draco's chest.
Amidst a huge muffled sound, the layer of faint blue light shield held for only a tenth of a second before shattering with a bang.
Physical crushing.
Draco was like a ragdoll with broken strings, sent flying by the immense force of the stone sword.
He drew an arc in the air and slammed heavily into a thick stone pillar ten meters away, emitting a bone-chilling sound of cracking bones.
He slid down the stone pillar, dragging a shocking trail of blood on the ground.
"Malfoy—!"
Harry and Ron both let out a shrill roar at the same time.
Large mouthfuls of blood gushed from Draco's mouth, soaking his Slytherin silver-green tie.
He felt as if his chest had been stuffed with burning hot broken glass.
His ribs were definitely broken in more than three places, and every breath brought a pain that tore at his soul.
His vision began to blur.
Darkness surged up like a tide.
But he didn't pass out.
Because he was a Malfoy.
The brother of Cassius Malfoy.
He gripped the stone tiles on the ground tightly, forcing his upper body up.
Saliva mixed with blood dripped down his chin.
He raised his gray-blue eyes, blurred with blood, and stared fixedly at the stunned Harry and Ron, using all his strength to squeeze a roar from his throat, which sounded like a broken bellows.
"What are you still standing there for!"
"Checkmate!!!"
Chapter 90: Liquidation Countdown
Harry's eyes were completely red.
Ron scrambled up from the ground, trembling all over. His voice cracked, carrying a desperate, shrill edge: "Harry, move three squares to the front left! Checkmate!"
Harry dashed toward that position like an arrow released from a bow.
The White King opposite them stiffly turned its head. The trap was set.
"Clang —"
The stone sword in the White King's hand slammed onto the stone floor.
It took off the crown on its head and slowly threw it at its feet.
The heavy wooden door leading to the next room emitted a dull, grinding sound as it was pushed open inch by inch.
But no one looked at that door.
Harry and Ron rushed desperately toward Draco, who was slumped by a stone pillar.
Draco's face was terrifyingly pale, like parchment soaked in water. His blonde hair was plastered to his forehead in clumps, matted with sweat and blood. His uniform on his chest was soaked through with blood, the silver and green of Slytherin having completely turned a dark red.
His chest rose and fell extremely weakly, barely showing signs of breathing.
"Don't touch me..."
Draco weakly pushed away Ron's reaching hand. He coughed violently, and a mouthful of blood mixed with pink foam surged from the corner of his mouth. Every cough felt like someone was hammering inside his chest, the pain causing his entire face to twist.
Ron's hand froze in mid-air, slowly clenching into a fist.
This Gryffindor boy, who had been mocked by Malfoycountless times on ordinary days, now had eyes so red they looked like they were about to drip blood.
"You're a lunatic, Malfoy." Ron's voice was trembling, his throat feeling as if it were stuffed with cotton. "You're sick in the head."
"You're the one who's sick, Weasley."
Draco tugged at the corner of his mouth, trying to sneer, but the movement pulled at his wounds, turning the smile directly into a hiss of sharp pain.
"I'm just... sick of being a waste of space."
Harry knelt halfway on the ground, biting his lower lip hard until it bled.
"Listen, Potter."
Draco struggled to roll his eyes. In those gray-blue eyes, which were blurred by blood, there was no fear, no begging, only a fire that was nearly burnt out but refused to die.
"Get in there. Go finish that person off."
He took a breath, his throat making a broken sound like a bellows.
"If you die in there... I'll laugh at you for a hundred years even as a ghost."
Harry stood up.
He didn't say thanks. He didn't say take care. Everything was swallowed back down by him.
He turned to look at Ron.
"I'm staying."
Ron nodded heavily, his eyes like burning red iron.
"I'll watch him, then go find Dumbledore. You — go."
The former mortal enemies had now become people who had to entrust their backs to each other.
Harry took a deep breath, turned, and plunged into the open wooden door.
...
Behind the door was a room sealed off by purple flames.
In the center of the room stood a long table with seven bottles lined up, all of different shapes, and next to them was a piece of parchment densely covered in writing.
Snape's puzzle.
Pure logic.
Harry stared at the tongue-twisters about "poison," "nettle wine," "forward," and "backward," his brain feeling like it was filled with paste.
He was good at flying broomsticks, good at facing Lord Voldemort head-on, but when faced with this kind of convoluted word game —
He was truly hopeless.
Time passed second by second. Lord Voldemort was behind the next door.
Harry was sweating with anxiety. He rushed back to the door and shouted to the chessboard room outside: "Ron! Logic puzzle! Can you solve it? It says —"
He recited the riddle in one breath.
Ron's panicked voice came from outside the door: "What left side, right side? Harry, I can't solve this!"
Harry's heart sank.
Just then.
A hoarse, intermittent, weak voice that sounded like it could stop breathing at any moment, yet still carried a full measure of mockery, drifted over from the base of the stone pillar —
"Cough, cough... Potter."
Draco coughed up blood again, his voice sounding like a broken bellows.
"You're not just blind... you're also a pig-brained idiot."
Ron opened his mouth, wanting to curse him, but swallowed the words back.
"Danger lies before you... safety lies behind. Two are nettle wine..."
Draco closed his eyes.
The things that Malfoy Family had instilled in his mind since childhood — the elite education of pure-blood aristocrats, the deadly boring logic training, the reasoning exercises Cassius had forced him to do hundreds of times — were now running frantically in his chaotic brain.
His broken ribs poked into his lungs with every breath.
He swallowed a mouthful of rusty-tasting blood.
"Listen well, Potter."
"...The smallest bottle. Drink it, and you can pass through the black flames in front."
"The one on the far right, with the rounded bottom, is the way back."
"Are you sure?" Harry clutched the smallest bottle, his knuckles turning white.
Silence for two seconds.
"I am a Malfoy."
Draco spat out the four words coldly.
The tone was as if these four words themselves were the most unquestionable axiom in the world.
"...Get lost."
Harry tilted his head back.
The liquid slid down his throat, icy like swallowing a piece of crushed ice.
He didn't hesitate anymore and strode into that wall of purple flames.
...
At the same second.
The Slytherin Common Room.
The emerald-green flames in the fireplace exploded without warning.
Not burning — it was extinguished by something in an instant. The flames were choked out like they were held by an invisible hand, not even a spark remaining.
Immediately after, the temperature plummeted to freezing point in a single breath.
On the stone walls of the Common Room, white frost spread at a speed visible to the naked eye, like something living crawling on the wall.
"Snap."
The thick book "Diagrams of Advanced Magic Circuits" in Cassius's hand, without anyone touching it, shattered into powder in an instant.
Paper scraps slid down through his fingers.
He stood up slowly.
Deep within this eleven-year-old body, the thing he named the "Soul Furnace" was running at a speed that could burn through itself.
He sensed it.
Draco's magical signature was falling straight down like a kite with a broken string. His vitality was as weak as a candle in a storm — it could go out at any moment.
The sharp pain and the feeling of impending death transmitted in that instant were like a red-hot iron skewer stabbing into Cassius's chest and coming out his back.
The person he had protected for eight years.
His brother, who was so stupid he made one want to slap him to death.
Had his bones broken by someone, lying in the cold dungeon vomiting blood.
Cassius didn't yell.
Didn't roar.
He didn't even change his expression.
His expression was terrifyingly calm, like a stone statue just removed from a mold.
But his eyes had changed.
Pupils, irises, whites — all gone. Replacing them was a pair of pure, ghost-blue eyes without any human characteristics.
Bottomless.
Cold to the bone.
The thing churning inside was not anger, but a pure will of destruction to wipe out everything in the way.
Magic exploded out of his body.
Not released, but a dam bursting.
A blue storm spread out with him as the center. The single sofa was crushed into wood splinters, and the silver coffee table twisted like a twisted rope. Several floating candle holders were smashed by the shockwave, and the melted wax splashed onto the wall, instantly freezing into white ice droplets.
Zabini and a few senior students who were preparing to return to the dormitory didn't even have a chance to react before they were directly pressed to the ground by this pressure.
Knees and palms slammed onto the cold stone bricks, their entire bodies feeling as if they were being pressed by a mountain, unable to even lift their heads. Zabini struggled to lift his eyelids and saw Cassius's profile.
In that instant, all the hair on his back stood up.
That was not a first-year student.
That was something that had crawled out of some place that shouldn't exist.
Cassius didn't look at them.
He didn't even spare them a glance.
He stepped out.
With every step he took, the stone bricks under his feet shattered silently like biscuits, and cracks spread in all directions from the landing point.
Snape's mechanism?
Doesn't matter.
Lord Voldemort's remnant soul?
Doesn't matter.
Dumbledore's chess game?
It all doesn't matter anymore.
From the moment he stood up, these things had all changed from "variables that need to be wary of" to "obstacles waiting to be cleared."
Everyone tonight would know the price of touching his reverse scale.
Cassius pushed open the stone door.
The torches in the corridor all extinguished as he passed, and then relit behind him, the flame color changing from warm yellow to ghost blue.
The entire Slytherin dungeon corridor seemed to have been redefined by something from the inside.
A cold voice bounced between the stone walls, every word sounding like it was carved with a knife.
"Game over."
"Time to clear the field."