Chapter 76: Firenze
"Hagrid patrols the forest at one in the morning," Norasaid.
She closed her sketchbook, pulled her wand from the ground, and extinguished the light at its tip.
"It takes about seven minutes to walk from his hut to the forest entrance. He heads south first, circling the Hippogriffpaddock. Then he goes north, following the path to the stream where the Unicorns drink. The whole circuit takes about forty minutes."
Cassius's eyebrows rose slightly.
This was a very detailed patrol schedule.
"You've been here many times," he said.
"Since last September." Nora stuffed the sketchbook into her bag.
"About twice a week."
"Never been caught?"
"Hagrid's footsteps can be heard from two hundred meters away. Filch doesn't leave the Castle. As for Madam Norris—" She paused. "Felines don't like the smell of the Forbidden Forest."
Cassius glanced at her.
This Ravenclaw had done more meticulous preparation for this than most adults.
"You've never gone inside?" Cassius asked.
Nora shook her head.
"I only stay on the edges. I go as far as that dead alder tree—the one with the lightning scar—and then I turn back."
"Why?"
"Any further in, and I can feel something is wrong."
Her phrasing was restrained.
It wasn't an exaggerated description like 'I'm so scared, it's terrifying, run away.'
It was a form of self-restraint based on rational judgment.
"The air changes," Nora added. "The creatures deep in the woods are far stronger than those on the outskirts. My level isn't enough to handle accidents. So I don't go in."
Having finished, she stood up.
She brushed the grass clippings off the hem of her robes.
She was about half a head taller than Cassius.
She was a year older, after all.
"You didn't come here to draw." She looked at the dark buckles on Cassius's black bodysuit and the leather pouch at his waist.
"You came here to fight."
Cassius didn't deny it.
He walked past her.
His feet stepped onto the muddy ground at the edge of the Forbidden Forest, which was arched by tree roots.
"There are Centaurs deep in the Forbidden Forest."
Nora's voice came from behind him.
"They can talk. They can read the stars. They have bows and arrows. And they can feel that thing on you."
Cassius paused mid-step.
He looked back.
"You can feel it too?"
Nora didn't answer directly.
She slung her bag strap over her shoulder.
"I grew up in Norway. My family raised seventeen kinds of magical creatures," she said. "I learned how to tell from the air if a Norwegian Ridgeback was in a rage when I was four."
She looked into Cassius's eyes.
"The aura on you is very similar to an angry dragon. Not the direction, but the concentration. Every creature in the forest will treat you as an apex predator."
"Their judgment is not wrong," Cassius said.
He turned around and stepped over the boundary stone at the edge of the Forbidden Forest, which bore a warning sign: 'DANGER - STRICTLY NO ENTRY'.
Nora stood where she was, watching his back as it was swallowed by the darkness.
She stood for a few seconds.
Then she leaned down to pick up an oak leaf that had fallen on a rock.
She tucked the leaf into the last page of her sketchbook.
She turned and walked toward the Castle.
Her steps were light.
She soon dissolved into the moonlight and frost mist.
The temperature inside the Forbidden Forest was another two or three degrees lower than outside.
As soon as Cassius stepped into the tree line, the surrounding light plummeted to nearly zero.
The canopy was too dense.
Even the clear light of the half-moon couldn't seep through.
He didn't light his wand—because he didn't have a wand.
Nor did he cast a lighting spell.
The Dual-Soul Furnace operated at low speed within his body.
Extremely low power.
About one percent.
But it was enough to give his vision an effect similar to thermal imaging in the pure darkness.
Every tree trunk was a faint, cool-colored silhouette.
The fallen leaves and humus on the ground were a uniform dark gray.
Occasionally, the thermal heat source of a small creature flashed in the bushes—likely a field mouse or a fairy.
The air was thick with the scent of damp, decaying leaves.
There was also a faint smell of mold.
The ground beneath his feet was very soft.
A thick layer of dead leaves and wood chips felt like stepping on a rotting sponge.
He made no attempt to hide his tracks.
Dry branches snapped under his feet with a crisp 'crack'.
The sound carried far in the deathly silent woods.
He didn't need to be sneaky.
Being sneaky was the behavior of the weak.
What he needed was for everything in his way to move aside voluntarily.
He walked for about five minutes.
He crossed three animal paths blocked by fallen logs.
The surroundings became even deeper and more secluded.
The distance between trees narrowed.
The trunks of some old trees were so thick that three people couldn't link arms around them.
Roots arched from the ground like the backs of giant serpents.
Several pairs of eyes lit up in the shadows.
Very low.
Close to the ground.
Glowing with a dull yellow light.
Red Caps.
Cassius recognized these things.
They were a type of small, humanoid creature.
About two feet tall.
They wore blood-stained red pointed hats on their heads.
Their nails were very long.
They usually held rusty iron nails or stone fragments in their hands.
They weren't particularly dangerous.
At least not to a normal adult Wizard.
But they liked to attack solitary, weak-looking prey.
In the darkness, several Red Caps poked their heads out from behind the bushes.
They tilted their heads, sizing up this human who had walked into the Forbidden Forest alone.
Not very tall.
Smelled like a child.
Looked easy to bully.
Three Red Caps lunged out from different directions.
They weren't slow.
In the dark environment they excelled in, their movements were far more agile than an ordinary person would imagine.
Cassius didn't even raise a hand.
He simply expanded the protective magic circulating close to his skin by a foot.
It wasn't an attack.
He just slightly increased the magic density on his body's surface.
From one percent to two percent.
Just that much.
When the first Red Cap pounced to within thirty centimeters of him, it slammed into the boundary of the magic field.
Like a fly hitting a high-speed fan blade.
A dull thud of breaking bones.
No blood mist.
Because the speed was too fast and the force too great, the Red Cap's entire body was compressed into an irregularly shaped lump of meat the moment it hit.
The second and third met the exact same fate.
Thud, thud.
Two extremely short, dull sounds.
Three piles of shredded meat lay on the fallen leaves.
Blood seeped into the humus.
A metallic, fishy scent rose in the air.
The glowing eyes in the surrounding darkness, which had been about to move, all extinguished at once.
"Get lost," Cassius said to the surroundings.
He didn't shout.
It was a normal volume.
Flat, even.
But the words were clear enough in the quiet forest.
All remaining auras retreated.
They moved away from him as quickly as a receding tide.
Cassius continued deeper into the forest.
His direction was clear.
He wasn't wandering randomly.
Before coming, he had studied the hand-drawn map of the Forbidden Forest hanging in Hagrid's hut—which he had scanned and recorded from a distance during Flying Class.
The precision wasn't high, but it was enough to identify major landmarks.
The Acromantula nest was in the deepest part of the Forbidden Forest.
To get there, he had to cross three zones.
The first was a common low-risk zone.
Weak creatures like Red Caps, fairies, and Bush Lizards.
He had already passed through it.
The second was the Centaur territory.
A relatively flat valley in the middle of the Forbidden Forest.
There was water and meadows, suitable for the Centaurherds to live.
The third was the spiders' territory.
The deepest, darkest, and foulest-smelling area of the Forbidden Forest.
He was now approaching the boundary of the second zone.
The ground beneath his feet began to feel firm.
The layer of decaying leaves thinned.
Revealing soil packed hard by hoofprints.
Hoofprints.
Centaur hoofprints.
Very fresh.
The edges hadn't been softened by dew yet.
This meant that less than two hours ago, a Centaur had passed through here.
Cassius slowed his pace.
Not out of nervousness.
But because he was adjusting the state of the magic within him.
If possible, he didn't want to clash with the Centaurs.
Although these creatures had limited combat power, they were the original inhabitants of the Forbidden Forest.
They knew the forest's terrain like the back of their hands.
If he could pass through peacefully, he would rather save the time.
But things rarely go according to the most efficient plan.
Twenty meters ahead, the bushes were parted from the middle.
A massive figure stepped out from behind the thicket.
The upper body was human.
The lower body was a horse.
A silver-white horse body.
Platinum-blonde long hair.
In his hands, he held a crudely made but tightly strung longbow.
Nocked with a feathered arrow.
The arrow tip was pointed straight at Cassius's chest.
Firenze.
Chapter 77: A Bloody Disaster
"Halt, human cub."
Firenze's voice rang out in the darkness.
Ethereal.
Deep.
Like the resonance of some ancient musical instrument.
His silver equine body shimmered with a cold, blue, soft light under the faint starlight.
His four horse legs were planted firmly in the mud.
His front hooves were tilted slightly forward in a semi-alert stance.
The longbow was drawn back to one-third of its full string distance.
Not pulled back with full force.
Just in a state of "being ready."
The arrow tip was incredibly steady.
So steady that it seemed nailed into the air.
"This is the territory of the Centaur," Firenze said.
"You should not have come here. You should be sleeping in your Castle."
Cassius stopped in his tracks.
He sized up the half-human, half-horse creature before him.
He stood about seven feet tall—if you counted the horse body.
The muscle lines of his upper body were distinct under the moonlight.
Not the kind of muscles humans had.
They were longer, smoother, and the proportions of the joints were different too.
The bow was made of wood.
Alder wood.
Judging by the grain, it had been in use for over ten years.
The arrowheads were black.
Ground from flint.
Not metal.
The Centaur did not use metal products.
This was their tradition.
"I am just passing through," Cassius said.
His tone was flat.
It was no different from the tone he used when speaking to Draco in the common room.
"My destination is deeper inside. Just clear a path for me."
Firenze did not move aside.
He raised his head and glanced at the sky, which was mostly obscured by the tree canopy.
There wasn't much faint starlight leaking through the gaps.
But it was enough.
The Centaur's ability to observe the stars was not affected by light pollution.
When Firenze gazed at the starry sky, his pupils faintly shimmered with a pale blue layer.
That was the astrological perception unique to their kind.
"Mars is exceptionally bright tonight," Firenze withdrew his gaze.
He looked at Cassius.
"The stars show that the Forbidden Forest is about to face a bloody disaster."
He pulled the bowstring back another inch.
"And on you..."
Firenze's nostrils flared slightly.
"You carry an extremely dangerous aura of destruction. I cannot let you pass."
Aura.
Nora had used the same description.
"It's like an angry dragon"—that was what the Ravenclawgirl had said.
It seemed that it wasn't just trained humans who were sensitive to magical fluctuations.
The inhabitants of the Forbidden Forest could also perceive the overflowing pressure radiating from him.
Cassius glanced at the bow in Firenze's hand.
"With that broken wooden bow of yours?"
He didn't even raise his voice when he said this.
It was just like evaluating a substandard product.
The muscles in Firenze's face tightened.
The Centaur were a proud race.
Extremely proud.
They believed their wisdom was superior to that of any Wizard.
They believed the stars were the truth of the universe, while Wizards were nothing more than ignorant savages waving wooden sticks around on the ground.
To be judged as having a "broken wooden bow" by a human cub who hadn't even reached his chest in height—this was an unforgivable insult in the social logic of the Centaur.
Firenze pulled the bowstring to full draw.
The arrow tip locked onto Cassius's throat.
Cassius raised his right hand, palm facing Firenze.
It was a very casual gesture, like raising his hand to answer a question in class.
The Dual-Soul Furnace did not accelerate.
It didn't even switch output modes.
He simply used the core logic of the most basic Expelliarmus—forcing the object from the target's hand.
But he skipped the incantation.
Skipped the wand.
Skipped the gestures.
Skipped all the wind-up.
He only kept one thing.
Magic.
A beam of blue light, compressed to the extreme, shot out from his palm.
It was less than a centimeter in diameter.
Its speed far exceeded that of an arrow.
It accurately struck the very center of the alder wood longbow in Firenze's hand.
It wasn't the gentle operation of "Expelliarmus" that just knocked the weapon away.
It was physical destruction.
The bow body exploded instantly at the point of impact.
Wood splinters flew in all directions.
The sound of the bowstring breaking was like a whip cracking through the air.
The feathered arrow that had been nocked lost the support of the string, flew crookedly for two meters, and stuck into a nearby tree trunk.
The impact did not stop at destroying the bow.
The residual magical fluctuation hit Firenze's chest like a heavy punch.
The seven-foot-tall, half-ton silver equine body was flipped over directly by this impact.
Firenze's four horse legs left the ground.
His massive body flipped half a somersault in the air.
His back slammed heavily into an old oak tree trunk five meters away.
The tree trunk emitted a dull thud.
Firenze slid off the trunk and fell to the ground.
His hands were still in the position of holding the bow, but only the broken remnants of the bow arms remained in his hands.
There was a blue scorch mark on the skin of his chest.
It wasn't deep.
It wasn't fatal.
Cassius didn't need to kill him.
He just needed to let this horse know—reasoning with you is me giving you face; if I don't reason, I'll take matters into my own hands.
The forest was quiet for about three seconds.
Then, the dull sound of hoofbeats rang out in the darkness.
Not one.
Many.
Four Centaurs charged out from different directions.
They were larger than Firenze.
Their coats were darker.
One brown-red, one pure black, and two multicolored.
Their weapons were all different—longbows, bone spears, stone throwing axes.
Their expressions were all the same.
Anger.
The kind of primitive, collective rage born from having their territory violated and their companion harmed.
The black one led the charge.
It lowered its head, raised its bone spear, and thrust it toward Cassius.
The sound of hooves hitting the mud was heavy and rapid.
The three behind followed closely.
A fan-shaped pincer movement.
A standard Centaur hunting formation.
Cassius stood in place, unmoving.
He cranked the power of the Dual-Soul Furnace up to twenty percent.
Still not very high.
But for what he wanted to do, it was enough.
The mud beneath his feet began to crack.
Not because of temperature.
Because of gravity.
A terrifying downward pressure field spread out from Cassius's body as the center.
A radius of fifteen meters.
Not a large range.
But within those fifteen meters, the gravity experienced by all objects increased by about ten times.
When the black Centaur charging in front was still six meters away from Cassius, its front hooves seemed to step into an invisible quagmire.
Its speed plummeted.
It couldn't hold onto the bone spear.
Under ten times gravity, the weight of a bone spear was equivalent to a railroad track.
The bone spear fell from its hand, slammed into the ground, and embedded deeply into the mud.
The Centaur's four legs all bent within three seconds.
Its knee joints emitted an unbearable creaking sound.
It knelt down.
Not voluntarily.
Physically, irresistibly, it knelt down.
The fate of the three behind was exactly the same.
The moment they charged into the gravity field, their bodies felt like they were being pressed down from above by a giant hand.
Their bones emitted a continuous, teeth-grinding friction sound under the high pressure.
The four Centaurs, along with their iron-like hooves and thick forelimbs used for combat, all knelt down in the mud in unison.
They were still letting out angry roars, but their bodies were completely beyond their control.
Chapter 78: Initiating Firepower Coverage
Cassius stood on the ground covered in spiderwebs.
Black bodysuit.
The silvery moonlight was filtered by the canopy into scattered, fragmented spots of light.
He raised his hands.
Palms facing each other.
"Four-Channel Shunt."
He issued the command in his mind.
"Activate."
The Four-Channel Shunt activated simultaneously within his body.
There was no delay in the switching of his magic circuits.
Cassius had spent three full weeks refining this system; the charging interval, pulse frequency, and output power of every channel had been simulated hundreds of times.
The theoretical model had been run thousands of times.
The data had been revised through seventeen versions.
At this moment, it was finally undergoing its first real-world test.
A ghostly blue magic surged from the ten fingers of his hands simultaneously.
It was not one beam, not two—it was ten continuous, miniature Reducto spells, pouring forward at a frequency of ten shots per second.
The blue curtain of light tore open a fan-shaped area over ten meters wide in the dark Forbidden Forest.
The Acromantulas charging in the front row didn't even have time to hiss.
The first one was hit in the chest by three pulses simultaneously; its black carapace exploded from the front, fragments scattering everywhere, and green body fluid splashed four or five meters away, hissing as it hit the nearby tree trunks.
The second one was hit in the side; its eight legs kicked spasmodically in mid-air before its entire body split into several pieces down the middle.
The third, the fourth, the fifth—
Over a dozen Acromantulas turned into green blood mist and carapace fragments on the ground in less than two seconds.
Explosive sounds echoed through the forest.
One after another.
It was as dense as if someone were setting off a whole string of firecrackers.
The vaporized venom turned into white smoke, forming a choking mist in the air.
The smell was sour and fishy, like a vat of rotten fish soaked in vinegar and left to bake in the sun for three days.
Cassius's nose twitched.
Unpleasant.
But it didn't affect his operation.
The Acromantulas in the back row were stunned.
These creatures had lived for decades; they had seen Unicorns, they had seen Centaurs, they had seen werewolves, and they had seen all sorts of unlucky fools who stumbled into the Forbidden Forest as easy prey.
But they had never seen—prey that would turn around and open fire on an entire pack of predators.
And firing so fiercely.
The hesitation only lasted a second.
A spider's brain was too small to hold complex decision-making logic.
Instinct drove them to continue the charge.
From the left, the right, and the front, dozens of Acromantulas launched a second wave of attacks simultaneously.
The ground was densely packed with long black legs and grayish-white eyes, looking like a bowl of wriggling black noodles.
Cassius did not move.
He adjusted the angle of his arms slightly, and the fan-shaped area of the blue pulses shifted accordingly.
His left hand covered the nine to twelve o'clock direction, and his right hand covered the twelve to three o'clock direction.
Crossfire.
Seamless transition.
The Acromantulas charging from the front were hit by the pulses from both hands simultaneously, their bodies splitting into pieces under the dual impact.
Carapace fragments embedded themselves into the nearby tree bark, half an inch deep.
The Acromantulas flanking from the sides were slightly smarter, attempting to use thick tree trunks as cover, hiding behind them to spray venom through the gaps.
High-pressure green jets of liquid shot over from three directions, at quite tricky angles.
It was useless.
Cassius's pulse penetration was strong enough to shatter military-grade bronze targets.
What was a tree trunk?
Two shots went right through it.
Blue points of light shot out from the bullet holes, pinning the Acromantulas hiding behind the trees to the spiderwebs.
The spider's eight legs were splayed open, like a mounted specimen.
There was also a sound coming from overhead.
Rustle, rustle, rustle, rustle.
Hasty.
Dense.
Getting closer and closer.
Cassius looked up.
Six Acromantulas were hanging on the webs in the canopy, their eight grayish-white eyes staring at him in unison, mandibles open, ready to launch a diving attack from above.
They knew how to pick their angles.
Cassius flicked his right index finger upward.
Six blue pulses rose into the air with precision.
The trajectories were straight and the spacing uniform, like six parallel blue pillars of light thrusting into the canopy.
Six muffled thuds.
Six spider corpses dragged lines of green blood as they fell from the canopy over ten meters high, hitting the ground with a dull thud, splashing up a circle of spiderweb fragments and dirt.
One happened to fall right on top of another, piling up like a stack of bodies.
Front, back, left, right, high, low—360-degree coverage without any blind spots.
This was not a magic duel.
This was area clearance.
Cassius shook his wrist.
The high-frequency output had caused some heat to accumulate at the wrist joint, traveling up along his forearm and forming a warm area near the crook of his elbow.
Not much.
It was within a controllable range.
It basically matched the data from when he did stress tests by the Black Lake.
The synchronization rate of the Four-Channel Shuntremained at 99.7 percent.
It was 0.1 percent higher than when he calibrated it before setting out.
The feedback in a real combat environment was more stable than in the simulated projections.
Interesting.
He looked down at his feet.
The ground was covered in green blood, carapace fragments, and still-twitching severed limbs.
Stepping on them made a crunching sound, much like crushing a piece of shrimp shell.
The fishy stench in the air had grown stronger.
Cassius stepped through the carnage and began to advance forward.
The direction was very clear.
The direction where the spiderwebs were densest and the smell of body fluids the strongest—the core of the nest.
He took a step, fired a round.
Ten shots per round.
For every ten meters he walked, a patch of scorched earth and wreckage was left behind him.
A few Acromantulas attempted to launch a sneak attack from underground—the soil of the Forbidden Forest was soft, and Acromantulas could dig temporary tunnels in the shallow surface layer.
Cassius's perception range had expanded to twenty meters around him under high power.
The vibrations beneath his feet could not escape him.
An Acromantula drilled half its body out of the soil on the left, its mandibles opening to bite at his ankle.
Cassius didn't even look.
He pulled his left foot back half a step and stepped onto the Acromantula's head carapace.
There was no suspense in the contest between his magic-reinforced sole and the half-ton spider skull.
Crack.
Shattered.
He pulled his foot out of the spider's brains, and the temperature on his body surface automatically evaporated the stains on his sole.
Keep walking.
The blue light flickered in the depths of the Forbidden Forest, like an inextinguishable signal lamp.
It marked a straight path paved with death—stretching from the edge of the Centaur territory all the way to the outskirts of the Acromantula nest.
In the distance, in the deeper darkness, those dense rustling sounds changed their tune.
They were no longer the drumbeats of an attack.
They were the clamor of panic.
The Acromantula pack was scattering.
By spider standards, they were "screaming."
The clicking sounds made by their mandibles rubbing together changed from dense attack signals to short, irregular, high-frequency vibration-laden signals of escape.
Cassius listened to this frequency.
Spider language was very simple.
Basically, there were only three types: eating, fighting, and running away.
Now it was the third kind.
He adjusted his breathing rhythm, his ten fingers continuing to maintain a steady blue glow.
Three hundred meters ahead.
The core of the nest.
Time to arrive.
Chapter 79: The Slaughter Machine's Advance
The Acromantula swarm was retreating.
It was not an organized retreat.
It was an instinctive flight after their formation had been shattered.
The front line died too quickly and too cleanly; dozens of spiders did not even have time to release pheromones—they were directly vaporized by the high temperature.
The Acromantula in the rear lost the chemical guidance from the front, and obvious gaps appeared in the encirclement.
Cassius treated these gaps as channels for his advance.
He maintained an output frequency of ten shots per second, grinding his way step by step toward the nest.
His pace was neither fast nor slow, with a rhythm similar to an after-dinner stroll.
The only difference was that one usually does not fire blue light orbs while strolling.
The spiderwebs along the way were thick and dense.
In some places, the silk threads were as thick as ropes, layered and woven into a translucent wall.
Under normal circumstances, the stickiness and toughness of these webs were enough to trap an adult deer, or even withstand the struggles of a horse without breaking.
As Cassius walked past, the webs began to carbonize half a foot from his skin.
His mana field was not released intentionally.
It was the natural overflow from the operation of the Soul Furnace.
In a high-power output state, his body surface temperature far exceeded that of an ordinary person, heating the layer of air against his skin to a degree sufficient to ignite the protein in the spider silk.
The webs turned to ash the moment they touched him.
It was like walking into a paper house, where the paper walls automatically split open to greet him.
Quite convenient.
He did not even need to clear the path himself.
But Cassius noticed a problem.
The leather boots on his feet had already shown slight material degradation under the continuous penetration of high-temperature magic.
The soles had hardened, and their flexibility was decreasing.
These boots were made by the best leatherworker in the estate at the request of Narcissa, using scraps of dragon hide; their heat resistance was already at the ceiling of what was available on the market.
Yet, they still could not hold up.
This further confirmed the necessity of his trip to obtain those spider silks—he needed a natural material that was sufficiently heat-resistant, magic-resistant, and flexible to craft a close-fitting heat-dissipating undersuit and a full set of tactical gear.
Three exceptionally large Acromantula lunged out from the side.
They were at least twice the size of their ordinary kin.
Each leg was as thick as a small tree trunk, and the ground would sink slightly whenever they stepped.
The color on their carapaces was deeper, not a plain black, but a dark brown with a metallic luster.
Elites.
These were the elite individuals in the Acromantula swarm responsible for guarding the core area.
Among the direct descendants of Aragog, only the strongest few could develop this kind of metallic-colored reinforced carapace.
The three elite Acromantula did not charge mindlessly like their ordinary kin.
They had learned to be smart.
They hid behind three ancient trees that required ten people to encircle.
They used the tree trunks, which were over two meters in diameter, as cover.
They sprayed high-pressure venom at Cassius through the gaps between the trunks.
The green jets of liquid shot from three directions simultaneously.
The angles had been calculated—one in front and two on the sides, a triangular crossfire, leaving no room for the target to move.
The speed was not slow.
An ordinary Wizard would have to use a shield spell or dodge under such a pincer attack.
Cassius did not even change his pace.
He turned up the output power of his left hand by one level.
He switched from the standard Reducto pulse to an enhanced version.
Four enhanced pulses struck the waist of the ancient tree directly in front.
The tree trunk, which required ten people to encircle, instantly exploded with a horizontal crack at the point of impact.
The speed at which the crack expanded was too fast for the naked eye to follow.
The upper canopy, carrying several tons of branches and leaves, tilted to the side, emitting a huge creaking sound of breaking wood.
Then it crashed down.
The elite Acromantula hiding behind the tree did not even have time to dodge.
The several-ton canopy crashed onto it.
Although the carapace's compressive strength was decent, it was completely inadequate against this magnitude of physical impact.
With a dull crunch, it cracked open.
Green body fluid gushed out from the fissure, flowing all over the ground mixed with wood splinters.
The second and third elite Acromantula turned and ran the moment they saw this.
They ran very decisively.
Their eight legs operated at full speed, at least twice as fast as ordinary Acromantula.
They ran three steps.
Six pulses caught up to their backs.
Carapaces shattered.
Legs broke.
Body fluids splattered.
The entire process took less than a second.
From spotting the target to killing it, it was faster than a sneeze.
Cassius continued to advance, treading on the scorched, black soil.
Occasionally, he would step on twitching spider legs under his feet; the crunching sound sounded like he was eating melon seeds.
He noticed an important detail.
As the high-frequency spellcasting continued, heat began to accumulate inside his body.
It was not physically obvious—the Dual-Soul Furnace was a high-temperature reaction system itself, and his body's tolerance for heat far exceeded that of an ordinary person.
But the data would not lie.
The synchronization rate of the Four-Channel Shunt was very accurate after the correction just now, but the metabolic heat brought about by long-term full-load operation still needed an outlet.
The temperature of the inner walls of his meridians had risen by about seven degrees in the past five minutes.
It was still within the safety threshold, but the trend was upward.
If he continued full-power output for more than twenty minutes, the meridian temperature would approach the critical value.
He needed a heat dissipation solution.
Or rather—he needed a piece of equipment that could help dissipate heat.
A wisp of white smoke rose again from the soles of his leather boots as he stepped over the charred marks of the spiderwebs.
A tiny crack appeared on the surface of the shoe.
This further solidified his goal.
The closer he got to the core of the nest, the higher the density of the Acromantula, and the larger they were.
But size was meaningless in the face of absolute firepower.
The ten-shots-per-second Reducto was not picky.
A five-foot-wide spider—one shot was enough.
Eight feet wide—two shots.
A ten-foot-wide elite—three shots to shatter the carapace, and a fourth shot to finish it off.
The process was standardized, the operation normalized.
Mechanical.
Precise.
Efficient.
There were no flashy explosion special effects.
No earth-shattering spell-casting shouts.
No dramatic crises or plot twists.
Only the continuous, dull, rhythmic blasting sounds.
Like a smoothly running machine processing parts on an assembly line.
Five minutes later.
Treading on the scorched earth covered in green body fluids and carapace fragments, Cassius arrived at the edge of a huge bowl-shaped depression.
The depression was about eighty meters in diameter.
Five or six meters deep.
It was like a huge bowl pit dug into the ground of the Forbidden Forest.
The surroundings of the bowl pit were covered with dense spiderwebs, extending from the ground to the high point in the center of the depression.
At the bottom of the depression was a giant dome-shaped nest piled up with decades of spider silk and soil.
The highest point of the dome was about four stories high.
The grayish-white spider silk emitted a faint cold light under the moonlight.
The surface of the nest was densely dotted with fist-sized ventilation holes, and something was crawling inside—small Acromantula hatchlings.
He had arrived.
Cassius stood at the edge of the depression, looking down at the heart of this Acromantula empire.
He stopped the output.
The blue light on his ten fingers extinguished simultaneously.
The surroundings went quiet.
Not a normal quiet.
It was the kind of quiet where all living things had stopped breathing and moving.
The surviving Acromantula no longer attacked, nor did they flee.
They lay on the slopes of the depression, their eight legs gripping the soil tightly, motionless.
Uniform and orderly.
Like dogs lying on the ground.
A heavy scratching sound came from the depths of the main nest.
Something was moving.
Very large.
Very slow.
Each step caused the ground beneath his feet to vibrate slightly, and gravel jumped on the muddy ground with a tapping sound.
The corners of Cassius's mouth moved slightly.
"The boss has come out."
Chapter 80: Aragog's Fear
An Acromantula crawled out from the entrance of the dome.
No. The word "Acromantula" was completely insufficient.
This thing was larger than a medium-sized carriage.
If it were to fully extend its eight legs, its footprint could cover half of the Quidditch Pitch.
The color of its carapace was no longer a simple black, but a mottled shade of alternating grayish-brown and dark green—the result of moss and lichen growing on its surface after decades of life.
All eight eyes were covered with a layer of cloudy white film.
It was blind.
Years of aging had caused its eyesight to completely degenerate.
Yet its massive body and those door-sized mandibles still radiated a heavy sense of oppression.
Aragog.
The leader of the Acromantula colony.
It had hatched from a spider egg that Hagrid had bought from a traveler half a century ago.
Growing from a black egg the size of a goose egg to its current size, it had consumed countless prey in the Forbidden Forest.
Its mandibles slowly opened and closed.
A hoarse voice squeezed out from between those rust-stained teeth, like a rusted-shut iron gate being forced open.
"Hagrid is our friend, human. You have intruded—"
Cassius rubbed his right middle finger and thumb together.
A very light movement. Like he was about to snap his fingers but didn't make a sound.
Aragog's words cut off mid-sentence.
It wasn't interrupted by any external force.
It was because it felt what was condensing behind that movement.
Hagrid was its friend, yes. But Hagrid was not here.
This presence before it, radiating a scorching aura—Aragog's sense of touch and hearing were both telling it the same thing: danger.
Extreme danger.
More dangerous than all the threats it had encountered in its entire life combined.
Cassius compressed his dual-soul magic to its limit.
The mode of the Four-Channel Shunt was switched to single-point convergence.
The output from all channels merged into one, forming a resonance at the convergence point in his palm.
His palm lit up.
It wasn't the scattering pulse of ten shots per second from before.
It was a deep blue orb of light, condensing the entire output of the four channels.
Less than a fist in diameter.
But the density was so high that the surrounding air began to be sucked in, forming a visible vortex at the edge of the orb.
The gravel beneath his feet shifted slightly within the orb's gravitational field.
Spider silk and ash were swept into the vortex and burned away after just two rotations.
"Too much chatter," Cassius said.
He released his fingers.
A deep blue beam of light shot out from his palm.
Half a meter in diameter. Extremely fast. The beam didn't even make a sound as it streaked through the air—because where it passed, the air molecules were directly pushed aside.
The beam did not hit Aragog.
It struck the wall of the dome nest, three meters behind Aragog.
The entire upper half of the nest collapsed the moment it made contact with the beam, like a sandcastle hit by a wave.
Decades of accumulated spider silk, soil, stones, and old remains mixed with gray-white dust splashed in all directions.
The blast wave from the shockwave uprooted the shrubs at the edge of the hollow. Gravel flew tens of meters away.
The soil was completely overturned.
From the collapse of the dome structure to the debris hitting the ground, it took about three seconds.
When the flying stones rained down, a few pieces struck Aragog's back.
It flattened itself to the ground.
Not because of those few stones. Given the thickness of its carapace, those stones were at most a tickle.
It flattened itself because of fear.
Pure, instinctive fear that even intelligence could not combat.
Just like an ant seeing a falling boot. It couldn't understand it. It couldn't resist it. It could only lie flat.
Cassius looked at the scene before him.
Half of the dome nest was gone.
Only a steaming crater remained in its original location.
The walls of the crater displayed a vitrified texture from the high-heat scorching, refracting a cold, blue-white light under the moonlight.
The soil at the bottom of the crater had been scorched into a ceramic-like hard shell.
Heat waves surged up from the crater, hitting his face like opening an oven door.
Energy utilization—about seventy percent.
The remaining thirty percent was wasted on heat loss through air conduction.
It could be optimized.
He memorized this data. He would adjust it when he had time later.
Aragog's massive body lay prone in the rubble. Although its eight eyes covered with white film couldn't see anything, it could feel it.
That magic. It was so scorching that its entire carapace was burning hot.
It was so heavy that its leg joints were creaking.
It radiated from thirty paces away.
It had lived in this forest for fifty years.
It had eaten Centaur bone spears, endured Wizard spells, and fought territory wars with Werewolf packs.
It had never been afraid.
Now, it was afraid.
Aragog's eight legs began to tremble.
Not a slight quiver.
It was that uncontrollable, violent shaking emanating from deep within its joints. Its leg muscles were spasming.
It stopped speaking.
It didn't even dare to rub its mandibles together. It even breathed as lightly as possible.
Around the hollow, all the remaining Acromantulas lay flat on the ground in unison.
Not daring to move at all.
A few smaller spiderlings even turned their white bellies up—not dead, but so terrified that they triggered a feigned death response.
The feigned death mechanism of spiders is a self-protection method under extreme circumstances. When the fear value exceeds a threshold, the nervous system shuts down directly.
The entire nest area fell into a deathly silence.
Only the gravel in the nest ruins was still crackling, along with the crunching sound of Cassius's shoe soles stepping on the scorched earth.
He began to walk down the slope.
Heading toward the depths of the blasted-open nest.
When passing by Aragog, the old spider lying prone pressed its body desperately into the soil, as if trying to bury itself underground.
Cassius glanced down at it.
"Your children are disobedient," he said. His tone was similar to when he told Draco at school, "Double the training volume today." "I'm taking some things and leaving. Don't let them come here to die again."
Aragog's mandibles trembled violently.
That counted as a response.
Cassius withdrew his gaze and continued walking into the depths of the nest.
Behind him, the Acromantula leader that had lived for half a century and ruled the largest colony in the eastern part of the Forbidden Forest lay in the rubble, trembling like an autumn leaf.
The depths of the nest were warmer than the outside.
Not because of high temperature. It was because there was no ventilation here. Decades of spider silk and soil had formed a natural insulation layer, blocking out the night chill of the Forbidden Forest. Coupled with the metabolic heat from the Acromantula colony and the heat released by the slow fermentation of spider silk proteins, the internal temperature was maintained at around twenty degrees year-round.
Suitable for spider survival.
But the smell, well—
Cassius almost retched.
Fishy, sour, moldy, rotting animal protein, sulfides produced by fermentation, spider excrement that hadn't been cleaned in who knows how many years—
The worst thing he had ever smelled was the pudding Dobby had failed to make. The stench it emitted kept the windows on the third floor of the manor open for an entire day.
Compared to this, it was practically high-end perfume.
Cassius used his magic to form a filter membrane in his nasal cavity. It blocked all gas particles with a diameter larger than a specific molecular weight.
Much better. At least he didn't want to vomit anymore.
Only the upper half of the blasted-open dome nest had collapsed. The structure of the lower half was still relatively intact—although the arched support columns made of mixed spider silk and soil had developed some cracks, the main frame had not collapsed.