The storm unleashed by the tactical meeting was still rippling through the locker room.
The buzzing voices of excited discussion filled the air as every player tried to digest Alan's subversive "Quidditch-as-Warfare" doctrine. The Chasers, who usually only knew how to charge headlong, were now fiercely debating "flanking feints" and "strategic depth"; the Keeper gestured toward the goalposts, muttering under his breath as if calculating the "optimal defensive sector."
The entire room radiated with the scorching heat of ignited intellect.
Alan did not join the frenzy.
His gaze cut through the crowd and locked precisely onto two figures in the corner.
The Weasley twins.
They would be his future "strategic weapons of mass destruction."
It was time for a private, classified session of precision-guided training.
He raised his hand. A subtle gesture — yet it caught Fred and George's attention instantly. They exchanged a knowing glance, slipped out of the group without a sound, and followed Alan to the deepest shadows of the locker room. Piles of abandoned practice gear lay around them, the air thick with the strange smell of old leather mixed with potion fumes.
Charlie Weasley had once trained them alone, too.
That legendary former captain had taught them how to twist their waist for power, how to flick the wrist to strike Bludgers with a vicious spin — the pure, violent aesthetics of a Beater.
But Alan clearly had no intention of repeating that.
He didn't bring out bats. He didn't summon Bludgers.
Instead, he drew from his cloak a roll of fresh parchment and unfurled it against the mottled wooden wall.
Fred and George leaned in, expecting some sort of battle diagram — only to freeze.
What stared back at them was nothing less than a mind-breaking riddle.
The parchment was covered with dense, multicolored curves, a chaotic mesh of parabolas crossing and colliding. Beside them were annotations of numbers and symbols they couldn't begin to comprehend: vector analyses of collision angles, distribution charts of probability density functions, and diagrams resembling the trajectories of stars.
This didn't look like a Quidditch playbook.
It looked like a ripped-out page from the secret journal of some mad alchemist.
"Fred, George."
Alan's voice was calm and clear. His fingertip rested on the tangled scrawl of diagrams.
"As Beaters, your primary duty is not brute force."
The twins blinked, stunned by that opening.
"It is precision."
Alan traced a bold red arc across the parchment.
"What you need to learn is the secondary ricochet probability model of Bludgers."
"The… what probability?"
Fred's brow knotted. Each syllable of the long word strained his mental limits.
George scratched his head, utterly lost.
"In simple terms," Alan explained patiently, knowing he had to decode this into their language,
"after you hit a Bludger, it doesn't always fly straight. Everyone knows that. But when it collides with the field boundary or another player's body, it can rebound — a second, even third ricochet. And those ricochets aren't truly random. They can be calculated, predicted… even deliberately controlled."
To make the concept tangible, Alan tapped the parchment with his wand.
A glow pulsed.
The chaos of curves and equations vanished, replaced by a clear, simplified battlefield model: a Quidditch pitch, three goalposts, and glowing dots representing players.
Alan gave the model a suitably striking name:
"Triangle Ricochet."
He lit up one dot representing an enemy Chaser.
"Look. When their Chaser cuts in from this angle at high speed, your instinct would be to hit the Bludger straight at him, right?"
The twins nodded.
"Wrong. Stupid choice."
Alan's rejection was merciless.
"Direct attacks are obvious. Easy to dodge. And because you want to guarantee a hit, you'll swing with full strength — a waste of power."
He drew an elegant arc in the air with his wand.
"The right move is to give up aiming directly. Hit the Bludger here, with just seventy percent strength."
The Bludger's dot shot forward, colliding with the goalpost at a 37° angle.
Fred and George frowned. That looked like a miss.
Then — it happened.
On impact, the Bludger ricocheted violently.
Not randomly, but with mathematical inevitability. It curved into a vicious new trajectory, one no Beater could ever strike directly. From behind, it slammed straight into the sprinting Chaser's blind spot — his undefended flank.
The glowing dot flickered out.
Minimal effort.
Maximum disruption.
A strike from the impossible angle.
The twins froze, breathless. Their pupils gleamed like fire in the dim light. They had just witnessed mischief elevated to an art form.
"Merlin's beard!"
Fred's voice trembled with excitement. He clutched George's arm so hard his nails dug in.
"This is… this is ten thousand times better than just knocking someone off their broom!"
"Exactly!"
George's face was red with exhilaration, nodding furiously.
"And it makes us look smart!"
Violence was the game of brutes.
They would become artists.
To prove Alan's theory, they dredged up one of Gryffindor's most embarrassing scars — a fiasco that had made them the laughingstock of Hogwarts.
"You know how our Beater lost us the final last year?" George whispered conspiratorially.
"That idiot tried to stop Slytherin's Seeker. He swung with everything he had, went for a home run…"
His face twisted with a mix of disdain and glee.
"And the Bludger ended up hitting — accidentally — our own Seeker. Knocked him right out."
"Yep," Fred said with a sigh both bitter and amused.
"We became the first team in a hundred years to get eliminated by our own Bludger."
That conversation shattered their last shred of doubt about Alan.
They looked at their younger schoolmate with pure, unreserved admiration — almost worship.
~~----------------------
Patreon Advance Chapters:
[email protected] / Dreamer20