A shout of pain informed her one of her traps had caught at least one victim. Alexandra ran into the first corridor of the fifth floor in range and hid behind a pillar.
"So who is a coward now Potter?" Snarled Sykes, emerging from the smoke alone."It's not me who is running away like a- "
Alexandra did not left him the time to complete the sentence. Sykes in his precipitation had believed she was still on the stairs, while in fact she was in the corridor just behind him.
At the moment he started to taunt her, she casted a "PETRIFICUS TOTALUS" which took him in the head. Sykes collapsed on his back, immobilised on the spot.
The other two Ravenclaws, emerging in turn from the smoky stairs and seeing their leader fall, began to rain destruction on the corridor screaming the same incantation over and over again: "BOMBARDA! BOMBARDA! BOMBARDA! "
Alexandra rolled and ran behind different pillars, throwing several "FUMOS" to hamper the visibility and the precision of her opponents. And then when the two older students stopped for a moment to catch their breath, she counterattacked.
Against the power of the spells she had just been targeted, the two Tongue-Tying curses she hit her enemies in return with lethal accuracy were quite unimpressive, but they did the job. The two boys were not able to speak, and so apparently could not do any magic to counter her last magical attack. They were defenceless. It was time for pay-back.
The next thirty seconds were a one-side fight. As her two Ravenclaw opponents had just tried to murder her, Alexandra was not in any mood for mercy. She threw a good dozen of her nastiest jinxes and hexes on her two targets, and when she was finished the two young men looked like strange orcs with boils, pustules, tentacles, mucus and different colours plastered upon their skins. For good measure, Alexandra applied the same treatment to the paralysed Sykes and then hit them again with three overpowered Petrificus Totalus.
Tired, she took the time to grab the wands of Sykes and his friends, and then left the junction between the corridor and the stairs which looked like a battlefield. While she had planned to go to Flitwick to tell him of the incident, Alexandra was exhausted and only managed to reach the Ravenclaw common room before falling on her bed, mentally and physically drained.
6th October 1991, Hogwarts, England
When she woke up on Sunday morning, Alexandra was really surprised to see the assassination on her had been completely unnoticed by the rest of Hogwarts. Not that she was kidding herself in believing she was among the students the staff of the school would mourn should the professors and the children learnt of her demise, but attacks on students tended to be notorious events even at the worst of times, and Sykes and the other boys being admitted to the infirmary should have made the news.
But as she arrived in the frequented corridors, the students whispering in low voices the names "Malfoy", "Longbottom", "Weasley" and "Black", she realised the reason why Sykes and his little plot to murder her had been missed was because the Headmaster and his staff had bigger fishes to catch. Just before passing the double doors of the Great Hall, a glance at the hourglasses showed a stunning contrast to the previous count the day before when they had been plenty of emeralds in the Slytherin hourglass and a few rubies in the Gryffindor one. Now the two hourglasses had only black, charcoal stones, in them, proclaiming to the entire populace of Hogwarts the Lions and the Snakes had dropped in the negative points for the second time of the year. Or the third. Or the fourth. Oh, well, they had dropped in the negative points again. Ravenclaw was now solidly installed in first place, with Hufflepuff a distant second. The count of the points was as followed:
Ravenclaw: 246 points.
Hufflepuff: 214 points.
Slytherin:-50 points.
Gryffindor:-120 points.
The Slytherins and the Gryffindors had lost each nearly 150 points in a single day when there were no classes! What sort of stupidity Longbottom and Malfoy had done this time?
Settling at her favourite place on the Ravenclaw table, Alexandra began to eat, listening discreetly a Hufflepuff recounting the latest exploit of the Boy-Who-Lived. Unlike the broom-and-necklace affair in the first Flying lesson, this new chapter in the struggle between Houses was far clearer in its reports. It had been another rather straightforward attempt initiated by Draco Malfoy to have his revenge on Neville Longbottom. As the leader of the first-year Gryffindor had received a brand-new broom or another thing from his grandmother, the leader of the first-year Slytherins had challenged Longbottom to an honour duel. The place of the duel? A corridor on the third floor. Specifically, the corridor where their dear Headmaster had promised the students "a very painful death" to those who dared to enter on the first night at school. Longbottom, Black and Weasley had walked there, ready to give the Slytherins a new humiliation, only to be welcomed by Professor Snape and the caretaker Filch, who took one hundred and fifty points from Gryffindor for being out of bounds and a month of detentions.
Draco Malfoy had never had any intention to go this honour duel. It didn't avoid the loss of one hundred and fifty points Professor McGonagall took from Slytherin for the "joke" of Malfoy. As Alexandra turned her eyes to the Slytherin table, she noticed Malfoy had lost quite a bit of reputation on the last day, seeing the disgusted face of some sixth and seventh-years young adults. Flitwick lecture in her private lesson had been accurate: honour duels, while absolutely illegal in the eyes of the Ministry, were quite deadly and serious affairs, where the reputation of each wizard who participated was deeply involved. Draco Malfoy had just thrown this custom away like dirt for a temporary advantage.
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