The crisp autumn breeze of late October swept across the Hogwarts grounds, but the third-year Gryffindors, Hufflepuffs, Ravenclaws, and Slytherins weren't gathered on the open grass for standard dueling drills. For this specific lesson, Professor Prewett had merged both third-year batches, combining all four houses into a massive, single session. By utilizing a double practical period, he had secured more than enough time to ensure the grueling simulation could be run twice—allowing every single student to play for both sides.
Pitched near the edge of the Forbidden Forest stood a massive, charcoal-grey canvas pavilion. It looked small from the outside, but the heavy magical hum vibrating through the ropes made it clear that the interior space had been severely warped by an Undetectable Extension Charm.
Professor Prewett stood by the tent's flap, hands clasped behind his back, his dark charcoal dueling coat buttoned tightly against the chill.
"Enter," Richard commanded as the combined class halted before him. "Leave your preconceptions at the threshold. Today, you do not face a theoretical threat. You face each other."
Filing inside, the students gasped as the bright afternoon sun vanished entirely. The air grew instantly damp and chilly, carrying the heavy, metallic scent of wet earth and ancient pine. Overhead, the canvas ceiling had been enchanted to simulate a pitch-black night in a dense, primeval forest, illuminated only by a faint, ghostly sliver of a crescent moon.
The simulated environment was split into an ingenious, vertically layered arena. The wizards were instructed to climb a set of rough-hewn wooden scaffolding to what was designated as the second floor—a sprawling network of suspended rope bridges, narrow wooden platforms, and artificial rock ledges that served as their ground. Beneath them, the first floor was a maze of towering, moveable stone panels that shifted with a grinding crunch every few minutes. Looking up from that lower maze, the underside of the wizards' platforms served as a low, suffocating "underground" ceiling.
"The class is divided into two factions," Richard's voice echoed through the artificial cavern, perfectly mimicking the acoustic isolation he had warned them about. "Team Alpha, you are the wizards attempting to cross the bottleneck of this forest to reach the extraction point on the far side. Team Omega... you are the pack."
With a flick of his wand, Richard split the massive roster. For the first run of the double period, half the houses were sent up to the scaffolding, wands drawn and knuckles white. The other half was directed to a staging area on the lower floor, where their preparation felt more like a ritual transformation than a standard lesson.
"To understand the predator, you must inhabit the predator," Richard murmured, stepping down among the Red Cap team.
With precise, non-verbal sweeps of his wand, he transfigured the students' standard school uniforms. The fabric hardened, shrinking and constricting until it resembled a thick, wrinkled, leathery hide. The surface gleamed with a slick coating of a highly alkaline, synthetic oil, perfectly simulating the curse-absorbent skin of a true Gallowglass variant.
Next, he handed each Red Cap student a pair of heavily enchanted, crimson-tinted goggles. The moment the students slipped them on, the dim, shadowy maze lit up in an eerie, monochrome landscape of heat signatures. The cold stone panels registered as deep blues, while the nervous, breathing wizards pacing on the platforms above glowed like brilliant, pulsing pillars of amber and gold.
"Your wands will remain in the lockers," Richard instructed the beast team, handing out short, blunt wooden knives. The tips and edges were heavily coated in a thick, glowing crimson paint. "These represent your keratinized talons. A single paint mark delivered to a wizard's body simulates a localized puncture or tissue tear. If you break their posture and get them to the ground, they are eliminated."
Up on the platforms, Fred, George, and Cedric Diggory peered over the edge of a wooden crate, their wands casting faint, anxious pools of silver light downward. The shifting stone panels below blocked their view, creating a shifting labyrinth of blind spots.
"Remember what he said in the theory class," Cedric whispered, his eyes darting across the shadows. "They aren't going to rush us from the front. They're tracking our footsteps. Keep your weight centered."
A low, sub-audible clicking suddenly vibrated through the scaffolding, rattling the wooden planks beneath their boots. It was the exact low-frequency vocalization Richard had described—a sound that vibrated straight into their inner ears, inducing a sudden, swimming wave of vertigo. Cedric stumbled back, gripping his temples as his balance faltered.
"They're coming," Fred hissed, leveling his wand at the dark gap between two moving panels.
But the early phase of the exercise quickly proved that teenagers handed wooden knives do not instantly become apex predators.
Down below, the newly minted Red Cap team was entirely uncoordinated. A Slytherin boy and a Hufflepuff girl, both overwhelmed by the monochrome glare of their thermal goggles, completely misjudged the distance of a shifting stone panel. Instead of executing a silent, subterranean ambush, they ran straight into each other with a loud thud, dropping their wooden knives and cursing as they scrambled in the dirt.
Worse still, the instincts of a lifetime of wand-waving proved nearly impossible to break. A Gryffindor on the Red Cap team instinctually raised his wooden knife and pointed it like a wand at the scaffolding, shouting, "Stupefy!" Nothing happened, of course, and his momentary confusion left him standing completely exposed in a patch of artificial moonlight.
"There! Impedimenta!" a wizard shouted from the top platform.
The silver bolt struck the exposed Gryffindor's ankles, anchoring him instantly to the stone floor. Another overeager Red Cap tried to charge blindly up a wooden ramp to rush a group of three wizards head-on—entirely ignoring the pack tactics Richard had emphasized. A well-placed concussive hex hit him square in the chest; though the transfigured leather armor absorbed the magical damage, the raw force knocked him clean off the ramp, sending him tumbling back into the lower maze with a disgruntled groan.
From the raised observer's platform, Richard Prewett watched the initial blunders with a look of severe, unspoken disappointment. His silence was louder than any scolding, and it didn't take long for the frustrated Red Cap team to realize that brute force and human impatience were getting them nowhere.
Gathering themselves in the shadows of a massive stone barrier, the beast team finally adjusted, forcing themselves to overcome their heavy disadvantages. They stopped running blindly. They stopped yelling spells out of habit. Instead, they actively learned to navigate the restrictive, monochrome tint of their goggles, utilizing the thermal outlines to map the narrow paths rather than fight them. Deprived of their wands, they realized they couldn't trade blows from a distance; they had to lean completely into the terrain, waiting for the stone panels to grind shut and isolate a target before striking.
The low, sub-audible clicking vocalization, which they had been using sporadically and poorly, was finally synchronized. Together, the pack began a rhythmic, low-frequency purr that rattled the wooden scaffolding above with brutal efficiency.
Up on the platforms, the wizards were undergoing their own forced evolution. Because Richard didn't mandate standard note-taking, the students hadn't just memorized facts for an exam; they were forced to recall the creature's anatomy out of pure survival instinct.
Cedric Diggory gripped his temples as a sudden wave of vertigo made the rope bridge seem to spin. "They're fixing the rhythm," he warned, his voice tight. "Don't look down! They want us to lose our footing!"
This time, the Red Cap team executed the swarm disruption properly. Two students deliberately slipped out of the shadows, making loud, scratching noises on the far left stone panels to draw the wizards' defensive focus.
"Left side! Diffindo!" George shouted, snapping his wand toward the distraction.
The compressed cutting charm sliced cleanly through the air, but hit nothing but stone. It was a decoy. Exploiting the blind spot, Fred and George's classmate, a Slytherin girl moving on all fours with terrifying, silent speed, vaulted onto the scaffolding from the right.
Fred spun around, but his wrist rotation was half a second too slow. The wooden knife caught him across the ankle, leaving a bright, glowing streak of crimson paint splattered across his robes. The magic of the tent immediately simulated a severed tendon; Fred's leg buckled under the phantom weight of the injury, and he fell back against a crate, out of the match.
"Fred's down! Fall back!" George yelled, but the pack was already closing the bottleneck.
The exercise proved to be a masterful crucible. It allowed Richard to teach not only cohesive teamwork, but also fluid battlefield tactics on both sides of a conflict. The wizards got into the habit of deploying highly specific knowledge instinctively—anchoring the floor with stasis fields and compressing their cutting charms without a second thought. Simultaneously, the Red Cap team effectively learned how to turn the dark, restrictive environment to their absolute advantage, using stealth and patience to completely overwhelm the wizards' superior firepower.
When the first hour finally concluded, Richard blew a sharp, silver whistle that echoed through the cavernous tent. Instantly, the environment reset, the paint dissolved from the students' robes, and the roles reversed. The previous wizards descended to take up the leathery armor and red goggles, armed with the immediate knowledge of what errors not to make, while the former pack climbed the scaffolding to test their own survival instincts against a newly humbled, much smarter opposition.
By the time the double practical period ended, the third-years were thoroughly exhausted, split evenly between being covered in simulated wounds and feeling the heavy physical toll of operating like actual predators. They were learning a lesson that no textbook could ever replicate: against a true predator, a single point of failure was all it took to become prey.