Chapter 126: The Peeling Mask and the Tyrant in the Abyss
I cannot keep running away.
Harry stood at the edge of the dark, cracked pipe network beneath the sink, where cold wind poured back up from the abyss, stripping away the warmth from his skin.
He kept preparing himself mentally:
Dobby risking punishment to run here and warn him was definitely not some boring prank;
The image of Cassius Malfoy tossing those elite Aurors around like rags in Diagon Alley was still vivid in his mind;
The map of the pipe network with the red cross representing danger was etched into his brain.
If Hermione was right and this was all just paranoia, then tonight would be a wasted trip.
But if he had guessed correctly, and there really was a Dark Arts bomb hidden below that could blow the entire foundation of Hogwarts into ruins, or something even more terrifying, then he was the only savior who could pull the fuse before disaster struck.
Harry gripped his holly wand, which had cracked from a previous impact, and took a deep breath of the musty air.
"What a magnificent monologue, a lone hero boy standing at the edge of the abyss, suppressing his fear to save the entire school."
The sound of luxurious velvet fabric rubbing together suddenly rang out behind him.
A sharp, affected baritone immediately exploded at the entrance of the abandoned girls' lavatory: "Stop! Potter, take your hands out of your robes and hold them above your head!"
Harry shuddered violently, his body freezing halfway at the opening as he turned his head, his pupils constricting sharply.
Gilderoy Lockhart was wearing a dazzling, brand-new magenta velvet robe, his hair sprayed with an excessive amount of hair gel and combed meticulously.
He stepped out from behind the door of the innermost dilapidated cubicle, his right hand gripping his wand, pointing it directly at Harry's forehead.
Gone was the charming fake smile he usually wore for his admirers; the corners of Lockhart's eyes were etched with fine, dry lines from the excessive force of his expression, and his eyes revealed undisguised fanaticism and greed.
"Professor, how long have you been hiding here? Were you following me?" Harry, startled, took a half-step back, his heel hanging over the edge of the opening, his fingers quietly reaching toward the inside of his robes.
Lockhart raised his left hand to tidy his meticulously styled golden curls.
"I must correct the imprecision in your choice of words. Great adventurers never use verbs with derogatory connotations like 'hiding'.
I was merely lurking in the shadows, looking for the best moment to intervene.
Ever since the book signing at Flourish and Blotts in Diagon Alley, when I saw you shrink back in the face of that thug from Malfoy Family, I concluded that you must be carrying some kind of immense psychological trauma.
To comfort my dear student, I specifically gave up my time for grading fan mail tonight to follow you all the way here."
"Since you know there's something dangerous hidden down there, we should go to the Principal's office immediately and ask Professor Dumbledore to come and take charge!" Harry suggested, pointing at the pitch-black entrance.
Lockhart waved his long, gem-encrusted wand dismissively.
"Go and ask that old man, who has nothing but lemon sherbet in his head, to come and share the fruits of victory that should belong to me?
Harry, oh Harry, although you are crowned with the empty title of savior, you have no idea what principles of interest distribution one needs to master to get by in the magicworld.
The big picture? The big picture is that I, Gilderoy Lockhart, must always stand at the high ground of public opinion in the fight against Dark Arts!"
Lockhart stepped through the puddles, slowing his pace as he approached with a splashing sound.
"You should feel honored. You are assisting a legendary hero in gathering material for his next masterpiece.
As long as my golden brand is hanging on the front page of The Daily Prophet, establishing my absolute authority, the next publishing contract with Flourish and Blotts will be signed for royalties ten times higher than ever before!
I've even thought of the title—'Lair of the Beast: Gilderoy's Thrilling Night Saving Hogwarts'."
Harry felt his stomach churn. "You're just using a disaster as a bargaining chip for fame and fortune. If there's a bomb down there capable of destroying Hogwarts, or if you're going to deal with Cassius, you can't control the situation alone!"
"Cassius?"
The muscles in Lockhart's face twitched violently and unnaturally.
The terrifying pressure that had sucked the oxygen out of the air at Flourish and Blotts flashed through his mind, and his fingers tightened instinctively around his wand.
"Don't mention that ill-mannered brute! What's hidden down there is the monster of Slytherin! It's a beast! As long as I take it out, the Order of Merlin, First Class will be mine!"
"You ungrateful wretch, you really don't know what's good for you," the smile on Lockhart's face vanished completely. "Since you refuse a toast only to drink a forfeit, we'll switch to a more direct method of administrative intervention."
"What do you want to do?" Harry immediately raised his broken holly wand.
"Expelliarmus." Lockhart cast the spell half a beat earlier, the only disarming charm he had mastered to perfection in the Dueling Club.
A red light struck Harry.
The base of the holly wand already had a deep crack from being dropped during high-pressure Quidditch training, and its magic circuit was extremely unstable.
Hit by the powerful impact, the wand flew out of his hand, tumbling and landing securely in Lockhart's left hand. The skin on the back of Harry's hand was grazed, stinging painfully.
"Look at this pathetic piece of firewood that can't even stabilize the most basic magic circuit." Lockhart casually shoved Harry's wand into his belt and pressed the tip of his own wand hard against Harry's collarbone. "Now turn around and jump down to clear the minefield ahead for me."
"You want to use me as a human minesweeper to go to my death!" Harry shouted, "I don't even have a wand!"
"That is the essence of mine avoidance. A living body without magic fluctuations is the least likely to trigger ancient defensive arrays, and that is the greatest residual value of low-level execution personnel." Lockhart pointed the way with his chin arrogantly. "Jump. Or I will use Reducto to smash your kneecaps into pulp right now and kick you down, then use a Memory Charm to wipe your brain clean. I will solemnly announce to the outside world that Harry Potter suffered a severe mental breakdown while wandering at midnight, and that I, Gilderoy Lockhart, was the noble rescuer who immediately extended a helping hand to send you to St. Mungo's Hospital."
The stinging sensation of magic at his throat was real. Harry understood that this lying clown had completely lost his mind, driven by fame and fortune. Cassius was down there, the monster of Slytherin was also down there, and he had no way out.
Harry took a deep breath and bent his knees. "I swear, your despicable actions will be reckoned with sooner or later, and you will regret this."
Leaving these words behind, Harry leaped into the dark abyss.
A strong sense of weightlessness instantly robbed him of his senses; all he could hear was the raging wind and the sickening, sticky sound of water against the pipe walls.
The fabric on his back was torn by the rough rust, and his skin stung painfully.
Two minutes later, Harry was violently ejected from the pipe opening, hitting a pile of damp, brittle objects with a dull thud.
It was bones.
Fragments of bones from rats, birds, and unknown large animals covered the ground.
Harry endured the agonizing pain of his whole body feeling like it was falling apart and crawled up.
A Lumos light shone from the slide opening above.
Lockhart stood above, straightening his wrinkled velvet hem, and cast a very flashy cushioning charm on himself.
"The protagonist of a legendary story must make a grand finale entrance to earn enough tears and applause." He leaped into the pipe with a hypocritical smile on his face, landing steadily on the pile of bones.
Lockhart stood up straight, brushed off the dust, and raised his glowing wand to look around.
"Well done, Harry. It seems there are no traps at the entrance. Write it down: 'The heroic Professor Gilderoyused his wisdom to eliminate unknown dangers.' Now, stand in front of me..."
Lockhart's voice came to an abrupt halt, the sound choked off directly in his throat.
The glow of the Lumos spell swept across the open ground ten meters ahead.
Coiled there was a massive, sickly, pale-white object, with rib textures as thick as a flashlight clearly visible.
It was a layer of shed dead skin. The skin of a giant snake seven meters long.
The color drained from Lockhart's face in a second, his pale face even outshining the color of the snake skin.
His legs trembled uncontrollably at a high frequency, his knees knocking together, making a faint chattering sound.
The true dark creature had left behind only an old piece of clothing, yet it had completely shattered the psychological defenses of this bestselling author.
"I... I suddenly remembered." Lockhart backed away slowly, his voice shaking uncontrollably, his leather shoes crushing rat skulls on the ground. "I haven't finished my lesson plans... Professor McGonagall values that very much. I must go back."
He turned and ran toward the thick water pipe.
Harry stood where he was, watching coldly as Lockhartscrambled on the smooth inner wall of the iron pipe with his hands and feet, like a giant beetle turned on its back, slipping back down into the pile of bones with every attempt to climb.
At the very moment Lockhart was scratching the pipe wall in a frenzy, falling into hysteria, at the very top of the vertical slide leading to the surface lavatory, a pure, substantial, deep blue aura of frost quietly descended.
That terrifying pressure of magic, which would make even the thousand-year-old ley lines hold their breath in submission, was pouring down along the inner wall of the pipe network, thread by thread.
The tyrant of Hogwarts, who had locked onto the coordinates of the hunting ground, had already stepped through the door.
Chapter 127: A Desperate Escape and the Price of a Clown
The wind fell silent.
Harry scrambled and tumbled onto a decaying hill piled high with countless tiny skeletal remains.
His spine slammed against the ground, the friction of the bones creating a teeth-grinding crunching sound.
Tiny, splintered rat ribs pierced through his school robes and dug into his flesh.
He swallowed the blood surging up his throat, his trembling fingers reaching up to the bridge of his nose to push up the round-rimmed glasses, which were barely held together by transparent tape.
Two seconds later, Lockhart descended from above the slide, holding up a glowing wand.
His boot soles sank into the black, rotting mud, crushing a few pale animal skulls into powder.
Lockhart immediately lifted his foot in disgust, pulled off his expensive silk gloves to cover his nose, while his free right hand expertly swept back over his forehead, attempting to coax those few strands of his signature blonde hair, messed up by the wind, back into their perfect arc.
"What kind of unsanitary dump is this!" Lockhartexclaimed, eyeing the mud staining the hem of his robes, his voice shrill. "My personal illustrator would resign on the spot if they saw such a filthy location."
"Run, great hero." Harry stood up from the bone fragments, rubbing his aching lumbar spine. "Is the great writer who battles dark creatures now starting to complain about getting his clothes dirty?"
Lockhart forced his wand high, compelling Harry to wade through the water ahead.
The standing water rose above their ankles, chilling them to the bone. The two crossed a fallen load-bearing stone pillar and were forced to stop.
A giant, translucent, glowing pale skin lay stretched out directly in front of them, seven meters long.
"Merlin's beard! What size is this carpet!" Lockhart lost the ability to organize his words, his left hand clutching the collar of his violet robes tightly, terrified of getting even a speck of bad luck on them.
Harry took two steps closer.
The surface of the skin was covered in marks where basin-sized scales had fallen off.
Harry's teeth chattered uncontrollably, making a rattling sound. "This is dead skin. Skin left behind by a monster that could swallow the entire Diagon Alley whole."
As soon as the word "snake" was uttered, Lockhart's legs shook violently. The once crisp, luxurious robes now hung on him like a tattered rag on a dead tree branch.
"The book tour... I still have an important list of sponsors to finalize in London!" Lockhart babbled incoherently, weaving excuses, and turned around, scrambling desperately on his hands and feet back toward the slide.
The tube walls were covered in slick moss; he fell back to the ground three times in a row, his fingers cut, blood flowing over broken bones.
But he didn't care about the pain at all. While stumbling and crawling, he didn't forget to reach out and pat the torn fabric of his cuffs, trying to maintain his pathological sense of decency amidst the mud and water.
"Aren't you afraid of making the papers if you run away!" Harry snapped sternly. "A bestselling author scared witless by a piece of snake skin! If this gets out, it'll be a hundred times more spectacular than when you wet your pants in front of those temperamental brothers at Malfoy Family!"
This sentence truly snapped the red line of Lockhart's sensitive and fragile self-esteem.
The stinging pain in his palms stirred the brutality deep in his bones.
Lockhart stopped climbing and turned around from the shadows.
Under the eerie green fluorescent light, that face, which had swindled massive royalties with its sunny smile, saw its muscles twitching and deforming wildly, twisting into a look of extreme malice.
"You have personally cut off your last remaining path to survival."
Lockhart panted heavily, tucked his own wand back into his chest pocket, and pulled out the broken holly wand he had just seized, aiming it at Harry.
Harry watched the murderous intent spreading in the other's eyes and quickly stepped back two paces.
"To preserve the magical world's pure faith in its heroes, I must make a minor adjustment to history."
Lockhart recited in a sickly aria, "I will personally direct this tragic epic. The bravest savior boy of Hogwarts encounters an ancient behemoth and ends up with his mind shattered. And I, Lockhart, risk my life to bring back the intel, enduring the grief to carry this historical secret alone."
A perfect scapegoat. A perfect illusion of a hero.
Harry gritted his teeth and stared at the broken wooden stick acting as a murder weapon, warning loudly, "That wand was completely ruined under the Whomping Willow! The core is snapped! If you force a high-level Memory Charm into it, it will inevitably trigger a magical backlash!"
The urge to silence him completely burned away Lockhart's sanity.
"Spare me your ridiculous textbook theories! In the face of supreme magical attainment, the physical damage of a broken stick means absolutely nothing! Obliviate!"
Lockhart hammered out the spell word by word, attempting to use an excessive amount of memory-erasing magic to directly melt Harry's cerebral cortex.
He channeled magic from his wrist, crudely forcing it into the holly wand along the flow channel.
Pale green sparks lit up at the tip of the wand.
The sparks stalled.
Inside the holly wand, which had undergone bumps and possessed a fatal crack at the base, the Phoenix feather had long since formed an extremely fragile balance with the damaged wood.
Lockhart's violent output, devoid of any resonance, directly severed the output valve of the circuit.
The green light expanded and swelled rapidly at the tip of the wand.
The damaged flow channel could not contain the massive load drawn by the high-level spell.
With nowhere to go amidst the gaps, the magic began to violently compress and collide, then completely backflowed and surged backward!
A deafening blast overturned the antechamber of the Chamber of Secrets.
The holly wand snapped in half at the waist. The manic, out-of-control Memory Charm energy did not shoot out, but instead, at a 180-degree reverse angle, transformed into an intensely blinding white beam of light, slamming directly into Lockhart's chest and face.
A flash of intense light passed, and Lockhart's protective barrier was gouged through alive.
The massive recoil kinetic energy sent him flying over two meters high.
His spine slammed heavily against the hard, slick rock wall, and then, losing all ability to support himself, he slid like a pile of mud into the foul-smelling, muddy pit.
He rolled several times, kicking up large splashes of black water, and then lay still.
Harry raised his arm to block the scorching heatwave blowing against his cheeks and stepped forward.
Lockhart lay sprawled on his back.
A charred hole was burned through his violet robes.
He slowly sat up, his face covered in black ash.
His eyes lost their focus, dull and drifting outward to the left and right, and drool flowed down his chin into his collar.
"Hello there, young man, are you here to queue up to buy my fruit hard candies?" Lockhart grinned, squeezing out a smile reeking of extreme silliness.
He fumbled blindly in the dirty puddle, grabbed a thigh bone of an unknown creature, brought it to his mouth to gnaw and chew, while his mud-covered fingers still occasionally fiddled with his curly hair, which had long since been blasted into charcoal.
Harry lowered his head to look at the wand broken in two in the mud. His only weapon was destroyed.
"Do you still remember who you are?" Harry asked, probing.
"Who am I? An old man selling roasted sweet potatoes? Or a big clumsy bear that can tap dance? Why are my biscuit crumbs so hard?" Lockhart held the bone and let out a chuckle that made one's scalp numb.
The backlash had completely wiped out his intelligence center.
Harry's tense back had just relaxed by half an inch.
An extremely dull sound of a heavy object being dragged came crushing over from the darkness deeper in the passage.
Extremely high-frequency vibrations penetrated the stone slabs.
The standing water at his feet boiled over a large area, rippling with fine concentric circles.
The temperature plummeted by five degrees in three seconds, and the hot air Harry exhaled turned into cold white frost.
An unnaturally massive living creature crushed roadblocks as it slithered closer. It smelled the scent of fresh flesh radiating from here.
Harry stiffened his neck and turned his head to look.
In the dark abyss, two bright yellow vertical pupils, two feet long, lit up.
The thousand-year-old Basilisk. The ultimate creation left in the world by Salazar Slytherin.
Its massive cylindrical body, shrouded in shadows, crushed forward, its entire body covered in heavy green scales that gave off a cold, metallic sheen.
A tongue as thick as a bucket extended from its mouth, capturing the temperature of living people in the air.
It slithered forward violently, snapping three stone pillars as thick as a man's embrace that blocked its path.
The split second before Harry's vision touched the edge of those vertical pupils, an extreme warning of death compelled him to clench his back molars and squeeze his eyes shut.
To look directly into the Basilisk's gaze meant death.
But with his eyes closed, his sense of direction was completely lost.
A fishy wind, mixed with the stench of thousand-year-old rotting corpses and toxic saliva, blew directly against Harry's cheeks.
The rustling sound of scales scraping against the stone slabs amplified infinitely on his eardrums.
The behemoth approached within five meters.
Its thick, heavy tail swept across, shattering the last half of the load-bearing pillar. Flying debris slammed into Harry's back.
His path of retreat was cut off. Harry's spine was pressed tightly against the bone-chilling rock wall.
The coordinates map that Cassius had marked was, in essence, a one-way street straight to the lowest level of hell.
The Basilisk raised its head high. Its massive jawbone split open, and four sharp fangs, as thick as spears, fully protruded.
Deadly, viscous venom dripped onto the stone slab, melting out pits and emitting pungent white smoke.
Harry clutched the back of his head with both hands, pressed his knees against his chest, and curled his body as much as possible into the cramped, dead corner between two rock walls, waiting for that bloody mouth to descend completely.
Chapter 128 A Tyrant Descends from the Sky, Piercing Through the Earth's Layers
There was no expected pain of fangs piercing flesh.
Just as the Basilisk opened its jaws, capable of easily crushing heavy steel shields, and was about to swallow Harry—who had his eyes closed, waiting for death—whole, a thunderous roar like the apocalypse erupted from thirty-seven meters directly beneath the second-floor bathroom of Hogwarts, blasting through six layers of ancient granite strata!
Cassius stood directly above the row of copper sinks on the second floor. He did not bother with unlocking any Parseltongue passwords, and he certainly could not be bothered to slide into that narrow, foul-smelling pipe network like a sewer rat and dirty his heels. It simply did not fit the hunting aesthetics of a tyrant like him.
He cranked the output power of the Dual-Soul Furnace to combat levels. Violent, dark purple magic surged from his core, pouring through the meridians in his thighs and straight into his high-grade dragon-hide combat boots.
"Tenfold Gravity Field. Hundredfold Crushing Cannon."
Cassius whispered, lifting his right leg and slamming it down onto the tiles beneath him with the force of a heavy cleaver.
The protective array, which had been dormant for a thousand years, let out a shrill wail before disintegrating entirely. Countless massive cracks spread like spiderwebs across the indestructible ancient dome, and tons of boulders, accompanied by waterfall-like groundwater, came crashing down.
"Do you think that by hiding beneath this thirty-seven-meter-thick shell, you can escape the fate of being skinned and deboned?" Cassius's cold, emotionless voice, amplified by high-frequency magic vibrations, forcibly cut through the roar of the collapse and echoed throughout the Chamber of Secrets. "The heir to the House of Malfoy has chosen the most direct and efficient method of physical dismantling to open a convenient skylight for your ancient fortress."
Amidst the flying debris and spray, Cassius let gravity and his tenfold gravity field take over, transforming into a humanoid meteor burning with a deep blue trail, plummeting through the earth and crashing down!
"Bang—!!!"
Cassius's feet smashed through the final boulder of the Chamber of Secrets' ceiling, and he landed steadily in the very center. A visible, hemispherical white shockwave erupted from his landing point, expanding wildly in a ring in all directions.
The water in the pool was instantly evaporated, and the ten load-bearing stone pillars carved with coiled serpents were severed at the waist.
The violent wind pressure swept up all the bones on the ground, forming a terrifying small tornado that knocked Harry directly to the ground.
Harry rolled seven or eight times across the ground, slamming heavily against a stone platform in the corner, his stomach churning so violently he nearly vomited.
The shockwave surged forward, directly toppling the massive, dozens-of-meters-tall bust of Salazar Slytherin. The proud, pointed chin of the giant statue was smashed to pieces, and chunks of granite crashed into the ruins.
Cassius slowly straightened his back.
His high-grade dragon-hide combat boots left inch-deep indentations in the stone floor. The inner armor, specially crafted from the core silk of an Acromantula, perfectly absorbed the thousands of degrees of extreme heat radiating from his body, converting it into a faint blue fluorescent glow.
This apocalyptic arrival completely enraged the thousand-year-old Basilisk, whose feeding had been interrupted.
The ancient beast, driven only by predatory instinct, abandoned Harry in the corner. It violently whipped its heavy, ten-meter-long tail, and its massive head—as large as a truck trailer—executed a 180-degree turn in mid-air, defying the laws of physics.
Its bright yellow, lethal slit pupils locked onto its target. It opened its spear-like fangs, dripping with venom, and struck at Cassius in the center of the arena with a terrifying initial speed that exceeded that of an arrow!
The foul-smelling wind had already severed a lock of golden hair from Cassius's forehead. The shadow of the giant maw completely engulfed him.
But Cassius did not draw his wand, did not chant a spell, and his eyes remained tightly shut.
The Dual-Soul Furnace's omnidirectional sensory network had long been deployed, mapping every contour of the Basilisk's skeleton and the trajectory of every muscle contraction into a 3D model in his mind, accurate to the millimeter.
"Taste this appetizer, blended from twelvefold gravity and high-pressure pure magic."
Cassius stepped back half a step with his right foot, his toes digging through the stone slab to grip the ground firmly.
The tendons in his lumbar spine snapped taut, emitting a crisp sound like a breaking bowstring.
His right arm was like a ballista pulled to its limit. Magic no longer radiated outward but was instead compressed to the extreme on the surface of his clenched knuckles, forming an absolute vacuum defensive film that warped the light.
Punch.
"Snap!!!"
The air was forcibly blasted apart by the force of the punch! A distinct, conical white sonic boom cloud exploded instantly at Cassius's fist.
The materialized gravity wave, mixed with crushing magic, slammed solidly into the Basilisk's massive left cheek and jaw.
A sickening, dull crunch of bone echoed as the unrivaled kinetic energy instantly penetrated the ten-centimeter-thick layer of horny scales.
A long string of thick scales scattered like they had been hit by a shotgun at point-blank range. The two fangs, which could originally cut through steel, were shattered and fell into a dry pit in the distance, sizzling.
The Basilisk's head, larger than a small car, was shoved sideways by the sonic punch. Its massive body traced a distorted parabola in mid-air before crashing into and collapsing the solid stone load-bearing wall on the right.
Debris flew everywhere, and the beast, buried in the deep pit of ruins, rolled about and let out shrill hisses.
Cassius slowly retracted his right fist.
The few drops of dark green venom on his knuckles hadn't even had a chance to corrode his skin before they were instantly evaporated into a wisp of black smoke by the high temperature of his body.
He casually brushed the small amount of dust from his cuffs, still not opening his eyes.
Harry opened his eyes in disbelief amidst the flying limestone dust.
"Cassius?" Harry hid behind a shattered stone pillar, his voice trembling with extreme shock. "You aren't here to detonate a bomb and destroy Hogwarts?"
Cassius let out a cold laugh filled with intense mockery.
"Your Excellency the Savior, in that barren skull of yours, besides those ridiculous guerrilla warfare scripts woven by your paranoia, can you fit anything that possesses even a shred of economic logic?"
Cassius delivered a harsh retort with the undisguised contempt of a superior: "Blowing up this drafty, dilapidated Castle yields no substantial profit for me. I went to such great lengths to carry out this demolition project today simply to strip-mine some high-grade alchemical raw materials that can be used to strengthen the load-bearing limit of my physical body."
Harry looked at the ancient monster, which was writhing frantically in the ruins and attempting to launch another attack, feeling his worldview shattered: "You call this hellish monster, which can kill everyone in the school with just a single glance, an alchemical raw material?"
"In the face of absolute, overbearing physical laws, the level of a life form never depends on how long it has lived, only on how many rounds of crushing and cutting it can withstand under my firepower coverage." Cassius coldly delivered his asset liquidation verdict: "This disgusting bug, which you have worshipped as a taboo for centuries, is nothing more than a pile of unclaimed, masterless fat in my eyes."
"Even if you have the ability to defeat it, why are you closing your eyes and giving up your visual advantage?" Harry tried to offer one last piece of life-saving information. "If its yellow eyes look at you even once, you'll turn into stone!"
Cassius casually put his left hand behind his back and slowly raised the index finger of his right hand.
"The high-frequency operation of the visual nerves only slows down my brain's efficiency in allocating computing power to magic because it receives too many useless reflective signals." Deep blue, high-frequency magic light points, as dense as a swarm of bees, began to emerge from Cassius's fingertips. "I am closing my eyes now purely because I disdain any emotional eye contact with a walking blood bag that is about to be drained of its essence and turned into a dried corpse."
Cassius turned his head, "looking" with his eyes closed toward Harry in the corner, as well as Lockhart, who was still in the distant pool, hugging a bone, giggling and drooling.
"How bothersome."
There was not a shred of human warmth in Cassius's tone. Under his will, the Four-Channel Shunt was fully activated.
"Potter, cover your ears. The next part will be a bit noisy." Cassius didn't even leave time for a rebuttal, issuing the kill order directly. "Forcibly liquidating this piece of old-era junk, stripping away its outer armor and venom gland ducts, will take less than twenty seconds."
Chapter 129: Humanoid Heavy Artillery and Unilateral Carpet Bombing
"Do you have any idea how stupid it is to face this monster with your eyes closed!"
Harry hid behind a shattered stone pillar, his chest heaving violently, and shouted at the top of his lungs.
His holly wand was broken in two; the wooden splinters from the break dug deep into his palm, and blood seeped into the grain.
Tons of granite debris detached from the ceiling, crashing into the deep water-filled pit, causing a deafening echo.
The Basilisk raised its head and let out a shrill, piercing hiss.
The sound waves destroyed the last remaining Slytherinstone carvings in the Chamber of Secrets.
The ancient beast pulled its massive, eighteen-meter-long body from the ruins, twisting wildly, its thick, dark green scales dragging through the rubble with a harsh, metallic screech.
Ripples spread across the distant pools of water.
Lockhart grinned, giggling foolishly; he wiped the broken rat bone clean with extreme care, holding it above his head like some precious trophy.
He waved his arm vigorously at the Basilisk, his tone light: "Wow, what a huge garden hose!"
Cassius stood in the center of the rubble-strewn ruins, his left hand behind his back.
He lifted his chin, his eyelids tightly shut.
His right thumb rhythmically rubbed against the pad of his index finger, calculating the flow rate of the magic molecules in the vicinity.
"In a confined space filled with dust and magical turbulence, over-relying on the optic nerve to track high-speed targets is extremely inefficient."
Cassius raised his right index finger, pointing directly at the churning darkness ahead, "Opening my eyes would force a flood of useless optical signals to occupy precious brain processing power. I keep my eyes closed now purely because I disdain engaging in any meaningless emotional exchange with a soon-to-be-shriveled walking blood bag."
"You call this catastrophic creature that could slaughter everyone in the school in one night a walking blood bag?" Harry roared, his voice cracking.
The lightning-bolt scar on his forehead throbbed with pain; he instinctively raised his hand to cover it, but only felt a handful of cold sweat.
The Basilisk raised its head and neck, emitting a high-frequency shriek that pierced the eardrums. Its bright yellow, basin-sized vertical pupils locked firmly onto the human in the center of the arena.
Petrifying Gaze.
Any living thing that looks directly into these eyes will turn into a stone statue.
But Cassius never intended to open his eyelids from the beginning.
The deadly yellow light crashed down upon him, but hitting Cassius was no different from hitting a weathered rock.
You simply cannot petrify a target that refuses to establish optical interaction at all.
The Basilisk was confused for 0.3 seconds.
0.3 seconds was enough.
"Potter, your chronically malnourished brain simply cannot comprehend what an absolute dimensional reduction strike is."
The Dual-Soul Furnace within Cassius switched into full-range sensory mode.
The trajectory of every speck of dust in the Chamber of Secrets, the gaps between the Basilisk's scales, and the contraction direction of its muscle fibers were all constructed in his mind into a real-time, three-dimensional model precise to the micron level.
He didn't need to see. He knew it better than if he were looking.
The high-speed torrent of magic in his meridians was split into four independent high-frequency pulse channels.
The special inner armor woven from the core silk of an Acromantula emitted a slight hum, its heat-dissipation patterns fully activated, and the high heat generated by overclocking was continuously vented outwards through the pores.
Cassius pushed his hands out flat, his ten fingers spread wide.
"Don't just stand there, bug. Enjoy your last meal."
The Chamber of Secrets exploded in a physical sense.
A unilateral carpet bombing within five seconds. Fifteen high-pressure mini-Reducto spells per second wove into an impenetrable dark blue net.
It poured out at point-blank range onto the Basilisk's head, which was larger than a locomotive.
"Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang—!"
The sound of continuous explosions blended into an unbroken line of deathly sonic blasts.
The first pulse shattered the outer keratin, the second pulverized the middle bone plate, and the third pierced the soft flesh within.
Every magic pulse carried the terrifying kinetic energy of armor-piercing rounds. Hundreds of palm-sized dark green scales turned into scattered shrapnel, embedding themselves deeply into the surrounding rock walls.
"You are destroying the oldest ruin in this Castle!" Harrycovered his ears tightly, trying to shut out the terrifying explosions.
"The value of a ruin only exists in the files of Ministry of Magic politicians!"
Cassius maintained absolute rationality amidst the chain explosions, his fingers continuing their high-frequency mechanical clicking motion, "I only care about how much substantial growth this pile of scrap metal can provide to my power reserves!"
The Basilisk thrashed its head madly, attempting to avoid the barrage by charging sideways.
Cassius's full-range perception was three times faster than its nerve reflexes. As the head shifted, the dark blue fan of fire followed precisely.
"Why run? I'm not chasing you."
The eleventh second. Over 150 mini-Reducto spells completely blasted the eyeballs, optic nerves, and the bone tissue around the eye sockets into a pool of foul-smelling, flowing sludge. The rancid slime splattered across half the Chamber of Secrets.
"It's blind!" Harry poked half his head out from behind the stone pillar, announcing the status of the battle loudly.
His brain had stopped thinking. Searching for a weapon? Summoning a Phoenix? At this moment, it was all nonsense. Faced with such absolute firepower density, a thousand-year-old legend was nothing more than a giant stationary target.
The blinded Basilisk fell into a death-throes frenzy.
Its massive venom glands contracted violently, squeezing out the deadly venom stored for over a millennium.
A deluge of green venom rained down upon Cassius, covering everything. This was highly concentrated strong acid capable of corroding a steel shield into molten iron in three seconds.
"Avoid that liquid!" Harry waved his arms anxiously, giving a warning.
Lockhart, who had been hiding in a muddy puddle, was suddenly burned through the skin on the back of his hand by a drop of splashing venom.
He let out a series of nonsensical, foolish giggles, clutching the rat bone in his arms tightly, and rolled back and forth in the dirty water.
"Dodging is an action only the weak take when facing force majeure."
Cassius didn't move even half a toe.
The hum of the spider-silk inner armor rose in pitch, and a layer of blue-purple melee magical armor composed of two-thousand-degree high heat wove itself into existence over his school robes.
The overwhelming ancient venom rain touched this thermal barrier and, without even grazing the hem of his robe, boiled and vaporized with a hissing sound, turning into large clouds of pungent green steam.
Heat waves vented, and Cassius stood in the center of the boiling green mist, unscathed.
"Hmm? Quite a bit of drool." Cassius gave his evaluation in the casual tone of someone commenting on the weather.
He raised his hand and meticulously brushed off the non-existent dust on his collar.
"What kind of monster are you!" Harry stared at the peer standing in the ruins, a deep sense of powerlessness gripping his heart.
Hermione was right; Cassius wasn't here to plot conspiracies at all. Conspiracies were things only the weak needed.
"I am merely a pioneer, having long ago seen through the underlying logic of the world while you were cheering and jumping for a few house points."
Cassius waved his left hand to disperse the poisonous mist, his ten fingers continuing to output pulses, peeling away the Basilisk's dermis layer by layer.
"Dumbledore has always tried to cultivate you into a moral beacon full of love and the spirit of sacrifice. He needs an orphan like you, without a foundation, to contend against the ancient pure-blood families."
"I won't let you insult the Principal's care for me like that!" Harry clenched his fists angrily, and blood seeped from his broken palms once again.
Dumbledore was the only elder and protective umbrella in his understanding, a bottom line he desperately craved and which was untouchable.
"Care is just an investment method that uses cheap emotions to exchange for high political returns."
Cassius watched that foolish loyalty with cold eyes, "He threw you into this sewer full of dead people today and paired you with a brain-dead fool as a bodyguard."
"Do you think this is a kind old man's care for a junior, or a politician's extreme exploitation of a political chip?"
Harry opened his mouth wide, his face covered in splattered snake blood, unable to find a single word to refute this cruel interrogation.
Another wave of venom was evaporated into green mist by the high heat. Under the baptism of the pulses, the Basilisklet out a weak, mournful hiss, its massive body spasming and twitching uncontrollably.
Survival instinct drove it to crawl toward the depths of the pool.
Cassius stopped.
Not because he had had enough.
He turned his head, his eyelids still closed, facing the direction of the Basilisk's tail.
The full-range sensory network clearly outlined the contour of an unusually active organ inside the third vertebra of the Basilisk's tail.
A secondary heart. Millennium essence blood.
"Carpet bombing is too slow to kill." Cassius withdrew his hands, slowly and methodically exercising his distinct, bony fingers.
He twitched his facial muscles, outlining a cruel arc.
"It's more efficient to do it by hand."
Chapter 130: The Art of Extreme Violence and Physical Dismantling
Deep within the underground pipe network of the second floor, only the deafening roar of the thousand-year-old Basilisk writhing in agony and crushing stone slabs remained.
Cassius stood in the center of the ruins, his eyes lowered.
He slowly retracted the deep blue high-voltage pulses dancing on his ten fingers.
The surface of his rings retained residual heat, scorching the surrounding air until it shimmered and warped.
"The firepower coverage of the Four-Channel Shunt is too slow to kill this thick-skinned beast." Cassius raised his left wrist, checked the time on his mechanical watch, and performed an emotionless combat assessment of his previous attack.
He had an extremely rigid obsessive-compulsive disorder regarding the conversion efficiency of time and magic; wasting even three seconds of useless effort would cause a surge of irritation deep within him.
The layer of two-thousand-degree blue-purple melee magic armor on his body gradually extinguished, revealing the unscathed school robe underneath.
Cassius reached out and meticulously smoothed out the wrinkles blown into his collar by the air currents.
"Have you run out of magic!" Harry shouted anxiously, huddled behind a broken stone pillar.
He gripped his battered wand so tightly that the rough wooden splinters pierced his palms, drawing beads of blood.
Only by clutching this weapon belonging to Dumbledore's camp could he barely maintain his crumbling sense of security.
The Basilisk, having lost its reason to agonizing pain, followed the air currents and launched an indiscriminate charge toward Cassius's location.
Its massive body ground over discarded stone statues, turning centuries of historical relics into worthless piles of stone powder.
A vast torrent of magic was redistributed in a thousandth of a second.
All the magic originally used for long-range output was withdrawn from his energy center and violently poured along his meridians into every inch of Cassius's muscle fibers and bones.
The Dual-Soul Furnace switched modes completely—full melee enhancement!
"The word 'exhaustion' does not exist in my dictionary." Cassius opened his eyes, staring directly at the foul-smelling, gaping maw in front of him, "To deal with an ancient loser like this, with a brain the size of a walnut and acting only on instinct, physical dismantling is the most efficient method."
The specialized Acromantula inner armor clinging to his skin glowed with a dangerous purple light under high-load charging.
The thin physical body of this twelve-year-old boy was reshaped by magic into a weapon of slaughter that exceeded the theoretical limits of biology.
Cassius took a half-step back with his right leg, his military-grade dragon-hide combat boot digging hard into the solid granite slab.
Then, he stomped down with force!
The century-old stone tiles beneath his feet did not shatter but vaporized instantly under the ultra-high frictional heat.
His calf muscle groups erupted with inhuman, terrifying thrust, raising the temperature at his starting point to the melting point of the stone.
A wisp of gray-white smoke rose from the soles of his boots.
Harry pushed up his cracked round glasses, his pupils completely unable to track the opponent's movement.
Cassius completely broke free from gravity, spanning a twenty-meter distance, crashing through the foul air currents ahead, and landing steadily atop the Basilisk's massive skull.
Having lost its eyes, the Basilisk locked onto the intruder in its blind spot using only the pressure sensors on its scalp.
It arched its eighteen-meter-long heavy body frantically, twisting wildly in the narrow space of the Chamber of Secrets.
Its massive tail, as thick as three men could embrace, acted like a steel whip, sweeping and snapping the last three load-bearing pillars on the right in half.
Half of the dome's supporting structure collapsed, and large chunks of rock poured down.
A piece of brick the size of a washbasin flew straight toward Harry's face.
Harry tucked his neck and scrambled into a mud pit ahead, the stone slab grazing his messy hair as it smashed into the ground, creating a deep crater.
"What are you doing! Get down!" Harry wiped the mud from his face, screaming at the top of his lungs.
He watched the figure surfing on top of the Basilisk's head, his brain falling into extreme chaos.
This kind of pure, barbaric confrontation overturned all the common knowledge about magic he had learned at Hogwarts.
"Shut up and stay in the safe zone to learn some real skills." Cassius, draped in a layer of dark purple light flames formed by high-pressure magic, coldly refused.
The Basilisk's writhing was extremely violent.
Its head swung wildly.
The soles of Cassius's feet were stuck firmly to the surface of the smooth scales.
The global sensory network pushed the movement trajectory of the Basilisk's skull to his central nervous system in advance; with every shake of its head, the magicattached to his soles adjusted the adhesive torque in real-time according to the direction of acceleration, keeping his center of gravity under absolute control.
Unable to shake off the parasite on its head, the Basiliskfell into a complete frenzy, resorting to its most primitive instinctive attack method.
Its massive lower jawbone folded back extremely, and its huge, tattered head completed a 180-degree turn in mid-air, bringing with it a strong, acidic, foul airflow and its remaining fangs, biting upwards at Cassius above.
A crushing force of several tons clamped down.
This was the exact sequence of movements Cassiuswanted.
He lowered his lumbar spine, following the centrifugal force of the Basilisk's roll, and dark blue magic patterns appeared on the outer side of his arm muscle fibers.
His right hand reached forward, ten fingers digging deep into the crevices of the scales at the base of the Basilisk's upper jaw; his left hand flipped down to suppress, locking onto the thickest joint of the jaw.
With two hands, one above and one below, he forcibly jammed the Basilisk's opening and closing mouth!
"The truth that Dumbledore didn't teach you, I will demonstrate with my own hands today." A low roar rolled from Cassius's throat.
Harry, hiding behind a pile of rubble, opened his mouth wide.
A twelve-year-old boy, with nothing but a pair of bare hands, was holding off the terrifying biting force of an ancient mythical beast head-on!
The Basilisk's entire body muscles contracted frantically, its massive body of over ten meters and dozens of tons twisting tight, squeezing out every ounce of potential in an attempt to close its jaw.
It wouldn't close!
The blue veins on Cassius's arms bulged, and pure magicraised his muscle density to fifteen times that of a normal person, forcibly supporting this heavy pressure measured in tons.
The Basilisk let out a heart-wrenching, hissing screech, frantically thrashing its tail, carrying Cassius as it slammed into the remains of the base of the statue of Salazar Slytherin, then crashed heavily into a deep pit of ruins.
Steel bars and gravel flew around them.
Amidst the pile of rubble, Cassius remained riding on top of the snake's head, not retreating a single step.
"Have you had enough?" His tone was without fluctuation, stating a cold physical rule.
The operating frequency of the Dual-Soul Furnace soared, and his physical enhancement power was turned to the maximum!
"The underlying logic of power lies entirely in absolute, crushing destructive force."
With a low roar, the sleeves of Cassius's arms burst into countless rags under the expansion of his muscles.
Cyan veins bulged under his skin.
His arms, at an angle that defied common anatomical knowledge, violently forced outward to both sides!
"Snap—!!!" A scalp-numbing, loud sound of bone cracking reverberated through the empty Chamber of Secrets.
The entire biological structure was violently dismantled from the root.
The muffled sound of muscle fibers tearing, the crisp sound of bones dislocating, and the cracking sound of ligaments snapping intertwined.
Relying on absolute physical monstrous strength, Cassiuscounter-fractured the jawbone joints that the Basilisk had endured through a thousand years of time!
He did not stop his movements, his hands continuing to tear toward both sides along the cracks in the broken bones.
The tear started from the corners of the mouth and extended rapidly down along the neck.
Skin, muscles, ribs, visceral membranes—all were torn open layer by layer without suspense.
The eighteen-meter-long thousand-year-old giant beast was split open from its mouth all the way to its abdominal cavity, alive and torn into two incomparably tragic halves!
The hissing roar turned into a few turbid bubbling sounds because its throat was severed, and then it stopped completely.
A sky full of scalding, deep-green snake blood sprayed wildly throughout the Chamber of Secrets.
The huge severed limbs, mixed with chunks of internal organs, collapsed, slamming into the pool on the ground and splashing blood more than ten meters high.
The pouring snake blood drenched Cassius's entire body.
The high temperature on the surface of the spider-silk inner armor completely steamed dry all the venomous blood that adhered to it within half a second, leaving a thin layer of charred residue that fell off completely.
Cassius stepped on a falling boulder to gain leverage and jumped, landing steadily on the edge of a clean high platform beside the pool.
The edge of his military boot stepped into a pool of warm visceral fragments, making a "squelch" sound.
Cassius frowned and forcefully scraped the mucus off the soles of his boots on a dry stone.
The execution was declared over.
Cassius brushed the remaining dust off his cuffs: "Dissection complete."
In the corner, Lockhart was drenched from head to toe with the scalding snake blood.
He stuck out his tongue to lick the blood off his chin, continuing to hold tightly onto that unknown large rat bone.
He used his fingers to scrape the dirt off the surface of the bone, treating it like a quill pen, scratching it back and forth on his tattered robe: "What a spectacular acrobatic performance! I must include you in my next autobiography, sir, can you sign here? A first printing of one million copies is absolutely no problem!"
Harry slumped beside a stinking mountain of flesh and blood, shivering all over.
It took him ten seconds to regain control of his body, his soles stepping into the sticky, bloody water as he walked to the bottom of the high platform.
"You could have used magic to execute it painlessly!" Harrypointed at the foul-smelling internal organs scattered all over the ground, issuing a series of accusations, "You chose this butcher-like method just to satisfy your perverted desire for destruction!"
"You Hogwarts students always like to give unknown creatures sacred titles to comfort yourselves." Cassiuslooked at the boy below, who was full of morality and righteousness, and couldn't be bothered to hide his disdain, "In the market of interest exchange, everything can be put on a scale and weighed."
Cassius jumped off the stone platform, stepped over the blood-stained ground, and walked toward the tail of the Basilisk's remains, which were still twitching slightly.
"Magical decapitation would destroy the blood circulation of the secondary heart in the tail." Cassius explained as he walked, "To ensure that this batch of thousand-year-level alchemy materials maintains the highest activity, I can only choose the physical dismantling plan. The loss of a single drop of essence blood is a crime against Galleons."
"You see a life as an ATM!" Harry swallowed big gulps of foul air, stubbornly holding onto the last bit of moral bottom line in his heart.
"Potter, you have just experienced a life-and-death crisis, and your brain still cannot contain even a bit of an economic model." Cassius shook his head in comment.
He stopped.
The global sensory network locked onto the target position.
Inside the third vertebra at the tail end of the ancient giant beast, that fist-sized special organ was pulsing weakly under the scales.
Cassius pulled out an anatomical knife and skillfully stabbed it along the gap between the scales.