Chapter 136: False Hymns, and the Monster Unshackled
Eight o'clock in the morning. The enchanted ceiling of the Great Hall brightened with daylight.
"Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!"
Hundreds of owls dove down from the high windows, carrying a gale with them.
The rustling of paper instantly drowned out the clatter of knives and forks.
The Daily Prophet landed precisely beside everyone's dinner plates like snowflakes.
The entire front page was occupied by a single, massive, bold black headline.
"Miracle Replicated! Savior Slays Dragon Single-Handedly, Sixty-Foot Ancient Beast Perishes Under His Sword! Professor Lockhart Retires to the Hall of Heroes!"
The black-and-white photo taking up half the page was a shot of the ruins taken from high above.
At the site of the pitted and broken pipes, Harry stood in a corner, holding a fang, his eyes staring blankly at the lens.
The sausage in Ron's mouth fell right out.
He grabbed the newspaper, his face flushed red, and slapped Harry heavily on the back, nearly knocking the air out of his lungs.
"Merlin's beard! Harry! You took that thing on alone?!" Ron's excited shout exploded across the Gryffindor table.
Surrounding students swarmed over.
Colin held up his camera and pressed the shutter frantically at Harry's face.
Seamus and Dean climbed onto the long table, loudly reciting the flowery praises from the newspaper.
Rita Skeeter's writing style was extremely exaggerated, describing the battle as if it were an epic legend reborn, with phrases like "earth-shattering magical bombardment" and "sword light tearing through the darkness".
Harry sat in his seat.
The cheers and praises coming from all directions felt like someone was slapping him in the face with the sole of a shoe every time a word hit his ears.
He held the newspaper, his stomach knotting, a wave of nausea rushing up his esophagus.
Only he knew that there was no sword light in the sewer, only a monster tearing the raw meat off another monster.
He was a bystander who couldn't even put up a fight.
Hermione sat to Harry's left. She did not join in the cheering.
She put down a piece of toast and pulled the newspaper over to flatten it.
Her gaze locked onto the black-and-white photo of the scene. After thirty seconds, she tapped her knuckles on the table.
"This report is full of nonsense." Hermione's voice was very low, audible only to the three people around her.
Ron's smile froze on his face, and he retorted dissatisfiedly: "Hermione, would The Daily Prophet lie?"
"The newspaper wouldn't, but physics doesn't lie." Hermione extended her index finger and pointed at the huge gap in the granite wall in the corner of the photo.
"Look at the cross-section of this rock. The melting point of granite is over 1200 degrees. The edges here show large areas of vitrification, which means an extreme heat source of over two thousand degrees forcibly cut through the strata in a fraction of a second."
Hermione turned her head, her extremely rational gaze hitting Harry's pale face like a searchlight. "According to Dumbledore, you used a cold weapon. This is definitely not a mark that could be made by a blade. Furthermore, the Basilisk's mandible is completely dislocated in an irregular, outward-turned shape. That is the result of blunt force; to put it more bluntly, it was torn apart at the joints by directional brute force of over ten tons."
Hermione pushed the newspaper back in front of Harry, her tone steady but with deadly penetration. "This was not a magical duel at all. This was a high-spec, heavy-firepower directional demolition. In this school, there is only one person who has the ability and habit of solving obstacles this way."
Harry's spine stiffened; he couldn't refute a single word.
Hermione's mind was too clear. Even though Dumbledorehad personally laid a smokescreen, she had pierced right through it with a few points based on thermodynamic laws.
Just then, the heavy oak doors of the Great Hall were pushed open by an external force.
The aisle, which had been as noisy as a market, suddenly fell into a massive, silent void.
Cassius stepped over the threshold.
He had changed into a brand-new, high-end black robe, his platinum short hair groomed meticulously.
He did not deliberately release his signature high-density magical pressure; he even looked more restrained than usual.
But as he walked forward along the Slytherin table, the students with their backs to him felt their bodies tense up uncontrollably.
It was the alarm radar buried deep in the genes of carbon-based lifeforms screaming.
After the inhuman tempering of flesh and blood last night, the viscosity of the blood and energy in Cassius's body was terrifyingly high.
Even as he walked normally, the substantial, faint heat radiated by his muscle contractions and his steady, bell-like gait still exuded an all-encompassing deterrence belonging to the top-tier predator.
Draco sat in his seat, clutching the newspaper.
He watched as Cassius pulled out a chair beside him and sat down. His gaze swept over the back of his brother's left hand resting on the table.
The red marks from last night, burned and scabbed by the high temperature of magic, were all gone.
In their place was a layer of newborn skin, devoid of any pores or blemishes.
Draco swallowed half a mouthful of warm water.
He flipped the newspaper about the Basilisk face-down on the table, straightened his spine, and didn't ask a single word.
At the faculty table, Snape was clutching a silver fork.
The Potion master's vision was far superior to that of ordinary people.
Across the Great Hall, he stared fixedly at the slight undulations of Cassius's neck muscles as he swallowed food.
Too slow. So slow that it even violated the physiological laws of a normal living person.
That indicated an extremely high oxygen supply from a single heartbeat, with organ load completely maxed out.
"Snap." A soft sound.
Snape lowered his head. The handle of the silver-plated fork in his hand had been warped by his grip at some point.
He looked at the monster cutting a fried egg unhurriedly below, his brain throbbing.
Albus was right; if this kind of thing were allowed to walk into the sunlight, the worldview of the entire magical world would have to be reshaped.
Cassius cut off a small piece of egg white and put it into his mouth.
He stopped chewing and slowly raised his eyelids.
His gaze penetrated the gaps in the crowd between Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff, hitting the Gryffindor table precisely.
It slammed into Harry's green eyes, which were filled with humiliation and struggle.
Cassius had no extra expression.
He picked up a glass goblet filled with pumpkin juice with his left hand, his elbow suspended in the air, and raised it slightly and extremely slowly in the direction of Harry.
His lips parted slightly, without making a sound, spelling out three words.
"Great. Hero."
"Clatter."
The goblet in front of Harry was accidentally knocked over by him, and the glass shattered into several pieces on the floor.
He gripped the edges of the newspaper tightly with both hands, the paper crumpling into a rag. His chest heaved violently, his breathing becoming increasingly heavy.
The ultimate trampling is not cursing to your face, but sitting on a throne, kicking the leftovers to you, and then applauding to praise you for catching them beautifully.
Cassius had crushed the Savior's self-esteem into the mud with the most bloodless method.
...
At the same time.
In the Headmaster's office at the top of the tower.
Dumbledore had drawn all the heavy curtains tight.
On the desk lay Tom Riddle's diary Horcrux.
The old man raised his elder wand, and the tip emitted an extremely soft white light, gently touching the black leather cover.
There was no roaring, no counterattack of Dark Arts, and no whispering to bewitch the mind.
A faint, almost inaudible rustling sound seeped out from the gaps between the pages.
The sound was so miserable that it sounded like the sobbing of a fledgling bird that had been plucked of its feathers and left to freeze in an ice cellar for three days.
Dumbledore stared at the diary, his old face etched with gravity.
He knew too well the vitality a Horcrux should have.
But the current vessel, which carried the younger part of Lord Voldemort's soul, had its originally dense Dark Artsstructure inside forcibly washed into a rotten fishing net full of holes by Cassius's unreasonable, high-pressure magical light beam last night.
The remnant soul couldn't even maintain basic consciousness and was on the verge of collapsing at any moment.
For a Dark Lord who relied on stripping away his soul to pursue immortality, the most fatal nemesis was by no means some profound white magic or love.
It was another kind of pure violence that completely transcended conventions, relied on flesh-and-blood magicto push through without bottom lines, and didn't even leave room for reasoning.
Dumbledore tucked his wand into his sleeve.
He looked at the Basilisk fang left behind by Harry on the desk and took a deep breath of cold air into his lungs.
He no longer felt a headache over the Chamber of Secretsdisaster at Hogwarts.
He now had to pour all his calculations into how to appease the Slytherin Tyrannosaurus who had shed its chains and was about to start growing unscrupulously.
The ridiculous, fragile balance of the magical world must never be touched by that boy's own hands.
Chapter 137: Fictional Medals and the Abyss of Power
"Stop your foolish reading, Ron." Harry pushed back the bench and stood up. He pressed his hands hard against the grease-stained oak tabletop, the rough wooden splinters piercing his palms without him even noticing.
"This is all just a lie Dumbledore is using to fool the Ministry of Magic."
"The front page of the newspaper prints you pulling out the Gryffindor sword! There is even an official red clay seal from the Ministry of Magic here!" Ron shook the wet-ink copy of The Daily Prophet defiantly, the corner of the newspaper almost poking Harry's nose.
Ron was still gripping his taped-up wand in his right hand, his thumb habitually rubbing against the broken notch.
For a Weasley who couldn't afford new robes, such official recognition that brought prestige and prize money was equivalent to Galleons.
He desperately craved for his good brother to acknowledge these great deeds.
"That wasn't me." Harry backhanded the newspaper into the jam dish in front of him.
The thick strawberry jam immediately smeared over the large close-up of Harry's face on the front page.
The red jam dripped down the edges of the paper, making a mess of the table.
Harry's chest heaved violently, his fingers clutching the hem of his oversized old school robe.
That was clothing left over from Dudley; this ill-fitting robe always reminded him that he was actually nothing.
"Are you kidding, Harry? This is the biggest news in the British wizarding world of this century! You're actually saying it wasn't you?" Seamus leaned in half a step, holding a piece of yellowish buttered toast in his right hand, spraying greasy crumbs from his mouth.
"You have no idea what actually happened in that sewer-like gutter last night." Harry gritted his back teeth, his gaze sweeping across the noisy Great Hall and locking onto the Slytherin table opposite. The figure sitting there, slowly and methodically cutting a fried egg, was a mountain pressing down on his back.
"Malfoy did it, right?" Hermione closed the five-pound book, Advanced Rune Translation.
Her tone was not one of questioning. She held a quill, the barrel rhythmically tapping against her slightly yellowed front teeth.
Her brain had already deduced the only outcome based on the disparity in their strength.
As a Muggle-born Wizard, she valued the sense of security brought by absolute suppression more than anyone else.
"Which Malfoy? Does this kind of thing have even half a Knut to do with that pure-blood young master who only knows how to tattle to his dad?" Ron stared at Hermionewith wide eyes, the half-piece of newspaper in his hand dropping to the edge of the plate.
He couldn't understand Hermione's leap in logic.
"Shut up, Ron. If it weren't for his monster of a brother smashing through the second-floor stone slab and jumping down last night, Lockhart and I would have long since been digested into manure in the stomach of that thousand-year-old Basilisk." Harry sat back down dejectedly. He rubbed his cheeks hard with both hands, his muffled voice coming through the gaps in his fingers, carrying a tremor of extreme frustration.
"You mean Cassius Malfoy, the one rumored to have dismantled an Acromantula nest with his bare hands?" Colin opened his mouth wide in a daze, the camera hanging around his neck hitting his collarbone with a thud. He was so shocked he even forgot to press the shutter.
"He didn't just dismantle the spider nest. Last night, right in front of me, he tore that thirty-foot-long Slytherin Basiliskin two with his bare hands, then peeled back its scales and swallowed the monster's blood down his throat!" Harrylifted his head directly; in his originally bright green pupils, there was now only fatigue and an instinctive fear of absolute violence.
"Why would Principal Dumbledore cover up these facts for a Slytherin? Such indulgence does not conform to the school motto and the regulations of the Ministry of Magic." Percy straightened his back and interjected, deliberately fiddling with the reflective Prefect badge on his chest to express his dissatisfaction with the management breaking the rules.
"Because the Principal simply cannot restrain that monster. Dumbledore needs to use an absolutely politically correct, perfect lie to shut the mouths of Fudge and those politicians." Hermione's voice was extremely cold and hard. She picked up her quill and continued to quickly calculate the magic heat exchange formula on the parchment.
She desperately needed to master higher-level rules to cover up her inferiority in this cruel world.
"I don't want this kind of charity! Even if this crappy lie could let Gryffindor win the House Cup for ten years in a row, I'd still feel sick!" Harry grabbed the jam-covered newspaper from the plate, crumpled it into a ball, and smashed it hard against the silver goblet at the corner of the table. The goblet clattered onto the stone floor.
"You must accept it, Harry. At the bottom of the true pyramid of power, the weak do not even have the right to choose a decent way to die, let alone refuse the chips distributed by the powerful." Hermione bent down to pick up the sticky ball of newspaper, flattened it on the table, and jabbed her finger heavily at the red seal signed by Dumbledore.
"You're actually speaking up for a Slytherin! Hermione, have you forgotten about him smashing the bookshelf in the library and ignoring school rules?" Ron kicked over the bench and jumped up, pointing his finger at Hermione's nose, loudly accusing his companion of defecting. The Weasley's hostility toward Malfoy was carved into the marrow of his bones.
"I am only stating facts. Cassius Malfoy has broken the shackles of the wizarding spellcasting system. He stands at a height that we struggle even to look up to." The tip of Hermione's quill scratched against the parchment, ending this one-sided argument.
At the same time, on the other side of the Great Hall at the Slytherin table.
Draco forked a piece of sliced steak with streaks of blood, chewed it hastily a couple of times, and swallowed.
"Your frequency of cutting meat today is 0.3 seconds faster than yesterday. Your heartbeat is very fast, Draco." Cassiusleaned back against the mahogany chair back covered with velvet cushions.
He held a glass filled with pumpkin juice in his left hand, his gaze locked firmly on the pages of Advanced magicReconstruction Theory held in his right hand, the pad of his right index finger rhythmically scraping the edge of the hard cardboard cover.
"I've seen the newspaper that Dumbledore had an owl drop off." Draco lowered his voice. He uneasily twisted the pure gold ring of the House of Malfoy on his left index finger.
The senior students opposite the long table fearfully left a distance of five seats.
"So what?" Cassius turned a page, the rough sound of paper friction extremely harsh in this cleared-out, soundproofed area.
"That was your trophy, Cassius! You ate a treasure trove of ancient Potion ingredients as a midnight snack, yet you let that scar-head Potter show off in the entire British wizarding world!" Draco's fists were clenched tightly under the cover of the tablecloth.
His pathological desire for honor made him extremely unable to stand the glory that should have belonged to Malfoy falling on the head of his arch-rival.
"Your shortsightedness and vanity will sooner or later send you into the iron cages of Azkaban, Draco. You don't understand the law of equivalent exchange behind power at all." Cassius finally moved his gaze away from the ink text.
That pair of pupils, exuding a ghostly blue chill, locked steadily onto his face-conscious brother.
"The House of Malfoy never spits out the meat it has eaten." Draco withstood the invisible, heavy pressure and retorted through gritted teeth.
Chapter 138: The Furnace in the Palm and Crushing Violence
"That is not flesh, that is a red-hot cast-iron pot, filled with the surveillance magic eyes of the political investigative committee and the Ministry of Magic Aurors." Cassiusraised the pumpkin juice and drank half of it, his movements steady and restrained, carrying the muscle memory unique to an heir of a pure-blood family.
"You mean... Dumbledore dumped this mess onto Potter?" Draco paused for a beat, his fingers stopping their rotation of his gold ring, as he followed Cassius's logic to clear up the sequence of events.
"I drained the magical essence and blood that had accumulated in that snake for a thousand years, completing yet another breakthrough and reshaping of my physical strength. Meanwhile, Potter can only clutch a broken fang, trying to deal with that pack of greedy hyenas from the Ministry of Magic who came sniffing the scent of blood." Cassius raised his right hand.
The surface of that right hand, which had just crushed a brass gate last night, was covered with a resilient sheen that even a Cutting Curse could not scratch.
He opened his five fingers, and a terrifying, deep-red high heat faintly radiated from the subcutaneous tissue in his palm.
"No wonder you deliberately raised your glass to Potterjust now." Draco exhaled a heavy breath of foul air from his chest. The resentment in his heart dissipated instantly, leaving behind only complete admiration for such a calculation of maximizing benefits.
"Throw the empty fame on paper into the Black Lake to feed the Giant Squid, Draco. Only absolute destructive power fused into your muscle fibers can ensure that Ministry of Magic officials will always keep their necks bent and heads lowered when speaking to you." Cassiuspushed the empty glass away. He stood up and smoothed out the black coarse-spun robe that was radiating heat waves.
"I will carve this rule into my bones." Draco pushed back his chair and stood up, drew his wand, and obediently followed half a step behind and to the side of Cassius, heading towards the Potion Class classroom in the basement.
The basement corridor was soaked in cold, sticky dampness all year round.
Snape, draped in his billowing black robes, stood before the wooden lectern filled with jars of animal specimens in formalin.
His complexion was a sallow yellow from overwork.
He looked at the students below fiddling with their brass cauldrons, his peripheral vision locked firmly onto Cassiusin the corner against the wall in the last row.
Snape's right hand unconsciously pressed against his left forearm through his robe—that was the location where the Dark Mark was branded.
This highly destructive, uncontrollable power always triggered a stress response in him, causing his muscles to tense up.
Dumbledore's instructions were still drumming against his eardrums.
As long as this monster did not take the initiative to tear down the Castle's load-bearing walls, no one was allowed to touch his red line of aggression.
"Today we need to brew a Draught of Peace. Turn to page seventy-three of your textbooks and follow the order of adding ingredients for preparation strictly." Snape's icy voice bounced back and forth between the stone walls, carrying high-pressure commands.
A flurry of chaotic page-turning immediately erupted from the Gryffindor table area.
The students grabbed their silver knives to deal with the moonstone on their tables, fearing that this Professor, who favored his own house, would catch them making a mistake.
Harry's right hand, holding the silver cutting knife, was trembling.
The image of Cassius raising his glass from across the Great Hall flashed repeatedly in his mind.
With a flick of his wrist, the blade deviated directly from the fragile texture of the moonstone, cutting the precious spell-casting material into a pile of useless slag.
"It seems that the Savior of Gryffindor is not only proficient at falsely claiming dragon-slaying medals, but even his most basic stone-cutting skills are as crude as a Troll on the Scottish Highlands." Snape glided behind Harry.
His billowing black robes brought with them a current of cold air. The caustic evaluation pierced Harry's eardrums accurately.
Harry clenched his back teeth tightly, saying nothing.
Snape had stepped on his sore spot; that published battle record was indeed a facade built upon a series of lies.
Just as the classroom atmosphere dropped to freezing point, a strange sound of liquid boiling erupted from the back row.
Snape turned his head directly, his pupils contracting sharply.
There was no cauldron at all on the solid wood table in front of Cassius.
He had piled the highly acidic Hellebore and the extremely hard remnants of a Bicorn horn directly onto his fair left palm without any protection.
The Dual-Soul Furnace within his body, forged by devouring snake blood last night, entered a low-power operating state.
The temperature on the surface of Cassius's left palm skyrocketed to a terrifying point capable of softening steel.
"Are you crazy, Malfoy! Such barbaric operations of treating precise Alchemy like a blacksmith hammering iron are forbidden in the Potion Class classroom!" Hermioneshouted to stop him from across two rows of mahogany benches.
She could not tolerate this direct trampling of established academic rules; it subverted the knowledge system she relied on for survival.
"Shut your mouth, Granger. It is not your place to instruct others on brewing techniques here." Snape sternly interrupted Hermione.
Yet his own feet were nailed to the stone floor, not moving half an inch toward Cassius.
Cassius did not even lift his eyelids.
He brought his right index and middle fingers together, and a blinding, ghostly blue high-pressure beam of magic gathered at his fingertips.
This beam acted as a hot knife cutting through butter, piercing straight into the raw materials in his left palm.
Relying on pure, crushing physical grip strength, Cassiustightened the five fingers of his left hand.
His bones rubbed together with a slight cracking sound, and that piece of Bicorn horn, which even a steel chisel could barely shatter, was forcefully crushed into uniform dust.
Immediately after, the high heat on the surface of his palm, exceeding two hundred degrees Celsius, erupted suddenly.
The useless impurities and moisture inside the materials evaporated completely within half a second, rising into a plume of pungent white smoke, leaving behind only pure, potent medicinal droplets.
There was no need to calculate boiling time, and he discarded the steps of clockwise or counter-clockwise stirring.
Less than twenty seconds had passed.
Cassius flipped and tilted his left hand.
A drop of concentrated Draught of Peace stock solution, shimmering with a silver-blue luster, fell vertically and landed steadily into the bottom of the transparent crystal glass bottle on the table.
The high-order magic fluctuations emitted by this drop of concentrate forcibly calmed the violent magical turbulence in the air within three feet the moment it landed in the bottle.
The entire class stared fixedly at this operation that destroyed the common sense of Potion Class; even the sound of swallowing saliva ceased throughout the room.
Snape strode over to Cassius's table with his long legs.
He leaned down, staring fixedly at the drop of Alchemical Potion, pausing for a full half-minute.
"An extremely crude and violent crushing that lacks even a shred of aesthetic beauty; it is simply a malicious trampling of the rigorous discipline of Potion Class." Snape gritted his teeth as he spat out the first half of his commentary, but his tone shifted instantly when he saw the refractive index of the droplet at the bottom of the bottle.
"The finished product's purity is perfect. Ten points to Slytherin. A final piece of advice: do not use those hands of yours, which are comparable to steel-smelting furnaces, to burn down the school's precious herbarium again."
After dropping these words, Snape turned around with a livid complexion and walked back to the lectern.
He chose to ignore it, tacitly accepting the outrageous privilege of Cassius completely converting his internal magic into absolute physical output.
The classroom was silent.
Harry stared fixedly at his own broken cauldron, which was emitting foul-smelling black smoke, his right hand gripping the silver knife digging into his skin until it bled, red drops of blood falling down the handle into the pile of slag.
Chapter 139: Malfoy's Letter and the Ruins of Defense Against the Dark Arts
The owls outside the windows of the Slytherin common room let out a few harsh cries.
Draco had just finished a high-intensity magic water-linecutting session, and was using a clean white towel to wipe the fine beads of sweat from his forehead.
A jet-black owl, exclusive to the family, glided in through the open vent and dropped a thick letter sealed with wax precisely onto the round wooden table between the two.
"It's Father's handwriting. He must have seen that nonsense in the newspapers."
Draco tossed the towel aside and reached for the letter. As soon as he broke the seal, Lucius's voice, filled with obvious fanaticism and arrogance, echoed against the walls of the common room.
"Draco, Cassius, I've already heard whispers about the Chamber of Secrets from those fools at the Ministry of Magic."
The parchment levitated in mid-air, the ink on its surface shimmering with a faint silver light due to the infusion of magic.
"Though the newspapers are hailing that bespectacled Potter as a hero, I know very well exactly whose handiwork that scene of destruction—which exceeds all conventional physical limits—truly is."
There was no concern for his eldest son's injuries in Lucius's voice at all; it was filled entirely with extreme adoration for his younger son's crushing military might.
"At tomorrow's Ministry meeting, I will formally apply the highest level of political pressure on that useless Fudge."
"The entire Malfoy family's capital chain will be open to you. As long as you need it, Cassius, I will manage to buy up every scrap of alchemical metal in Gringotts within a week."
After conveying all its information, the Howlerautomatically transformed into a cluster of heatless cold fire in mid-air, scattering as ash onto the tabletop.
"Father has gone completely mad. He now feels the Ministry of Magic is nothing more than a wooden shack that can be leveled at any time."
Draco looked at the ashes on the table, his tone carrying a hint of unease regarding the family's extremely inflated status.
"He is borrowing my prestige to show his hand to those pure-blood families. As long as I, this monster, am still standing, no one will dare to kick the threshold of Malfoy Family."
Cassius sat in a silver snake-armchair, legs crossed, deconstructing his father's political calculations in an extremely cold and emotionless tone.
"Do we need to write back and tell Father to restrain himself a bit? Dumbledore is still presiding over Hogwarts, after all."
Draco asked tentatively; he had developed the habit of using Cassius's will as his absolute standard for any decision.
"There is no need to interfere with his actions. Blindly retreating will only make those politicians think we have a guilty conscience."
Cassius casually pulled a blank piece of parchment from the table, not even reaching for a quill.
He simply pressed his right index finger onto the surface. Relying on an outrageously powerful level of magical micro-manipulation, he directly scorched several blackened but extremely neat letters onto the paper with high heat.
"Insufficient materials. Continue purchasing Acromantulavenom. Mind your own business regarding the rest."
After writing this short sentence, Cassius folded the parchment, stuffed it into the claws of the black owl from before, and coldly dismissed it from the common room.
"What do you still need Acromantula venom for? Hasn't your physical body already finished its reconstruction?"
Draco glanced at the finger Cassius had just used to write; it hadn't left behind even a trace of a red mark.
"My magic capacity limit has been completely elevated. Although the previous armor could dissipate heat at a rate of fifteen rounds per second, there is still a risk of material fatigue when facing true multiple targets."
Cassius stood up, his high-grade black robes sliding down his shoulders, revealing an absolute sense of power belonging to a predator.
"Lockhart has been completely turned into an idiot by that Memory Charm. Dumbledore just issued a temporary notice; Professor Snape will be subbing for Defense Against the Dark Arts this afternoon."
Draco quickly shifted the topic to the upcoming class. He felt his throat go dry whenever he heard Cassius discuss weapon data that destroyed physical limits.
"Snape is a qualified pragmatist. Compared to that fraud who only knew how to use perfume to mask his inferior magic, at least he can teach something useful."
Cassius had no objection to this and walked straight toward the doors leading to the courtyard.
The afternoon sun was blocked by thick clouds, and the Defense Against the Dark Arts venue was temporarily arranged in the spacious lecture hall on the first floor.
The center of the classroom had been cleared overnight, and a long dueling platform—half a meter high and covered with non-slip stone slabs—had been erected.
The Gryffindor and Slytherin students stood on opposite sides of the platform, everyone feeling somewhat tense due to the extremely oppressive atmosphere of practical combat.
Harry stood beside Ron, his fingers tightly gripping the borrowed old wand. His holly wand had been blown to splinters in the sewers by that idiot Lockhart; he now found it difficult to cast even the simplest Shield Charm.
Snape glided from behind the podium to the center of the dueling platform like a giant black bat.
"I think you should all thank Mr. Malfoy for eliminating that massive safety hazard for us in the sewers."
Snape's very first sentence aimed the spearhead directly at Harry, his tone thick with mockery.
"Regardless of how many flowery words are written in The Daily Prophet, this classroom only cares about the purest strength in magical confrontation."
Snape's gaze swept over the row of Gryffindor students, who lowered their heads out of a guilty conscience, before finally resting on Harry's face.
"Potter, given that your fame is now so great that even the Minister of magic writes to you, I suggest you come up and give everyone a practical demonstration."
Forced into a corner by this firm command, Harry had no choice but to grit his teeth and step onto one side of the dueling platform.
"Very well. We need an evenly matched opponent to help our Savior practice."
Snape turned his head and looked at Cassius, who was standing at the very front of the Slytherin group.
He naturally didn't dare call up that monster who could disable an Auror squad in three seconds; that would be equivalent to tearing down the entire school building.
"Draco, you go up."
Cassius didn't look at Snape, simply giving the order to his brother standing behind him in an extremely flat voice.
Draco nodded immediately without a single word of nonsense, vaulted over the one-meter-high railing, and landed steadily on the other end of the dueling platform.
"No complex bowing, no redundant polite nonsense."
Snape took two steps back, yielding the entire space of the dueling platform to the two opposing underage Wizards.
"Only the Knockback Jinx and the Disarming Charm are permitted. Once someone is down or loses their wand, the other party must stop attacking immediately."
Harry looked at Draco, who hadn't even pulled out his wand, and the sense of humiliation in his heart instantly transformed into rage.
"You don't even intend to use a wand, Malfoy? Do you think I'm as easy to bully as that waste you lot trample underfoot?"
Harry raised the old wand in his hand, the tip pointing at Draco's chest, his green eyes almost spitting fire.
"Against a fake hero like you, who only deserves to pick up leftover bones to claim credit, using a wand would be an insult to all the training I've done over the past six months."
Draco followed the stance Cassius had taught him, slightly bending his legs to lower his center of gravity and holding his right hand across his chest in a knife-hand shape.
"Expelliarmus!"
Harry was completely enraged by those words. He whipped the old wand, and a blinding red light, carrying all his resentment, smashed toward Draco.
The power of this Disarming Charm far exceeded the standard for a second-year; even a sonic boom echoed in the air.
Draco didn't dodge. His gaze at this moment became as cold as Cassius's.
He didn't recite any tedious incantations, but instead directly mobilized the magic circuits in his body that had been squeezed out by brutal special training.
Highly compressed magic surged along his meridians toward his right palm, instantly condensing in the air into a high-pressure water-line as thin as a cicada's wing yet possessing lethal cutting power.
*Swish.*
Draco's arm slashed down like a heartless war blade.
That visible water blade slammed directly into the red spell beam Harry had released.
There was no violent explosion, no process of stalemate.
Relying on extreme physical cutting force, the high-pressure water blade directly split the wand-guided Disarming Charm in half from the middle.
The red magical energy dissipated into the air, while the water blade's momentum remained unchecked. It grazed Harry's scalp and flew past, cutting a long, narrow crack five inches deep into the heavy bluestone wall behind him.
Harry didn't even have time to react. He only felt a chill on the top of his head as several tufts of black hair drifted slowly onto the stone slabs at his feet.
The entire class was so terrified by this brutal scene that they didn't even dare to breathe.
Hermione clutched her mouth tightly, her mind frantically calculating the water pressure intensity attached to that strike. The conclusion she reached filled her with a deep sense of despair.
Snape stood below the stage, looking at the crack in the wall, his lip twitching imperceptibly.
This completely unreasonable method of physical magiccutting was simply a perfect replica of that monster Cassius.
Chapter 140: Harry's Obsession and the Full-Firepower Test
The dueling platform was so quiet that even a needle dropping on the ground could be heard.
Harry stared blankly at the few strands of broken hair at his feet. His old wand was still raised in mid-air, but his entire body was frozen in place as if his bones had been drained.
If that water blade, which had grazed his scalp, had been lowered by even half an inch, his entire head would have been split in two like a sliced watermelon.
"You lost, Potter. The heritage of Malfoy Family isn't something that can be erased by a few newspaper reports."
Draco lowered his right hand without even panting, announcing the result of the battle to his opponent with extreme indifference.
Snape stepped forward at the right time, waving his hand to remove the protective barrier around the dueling platform.
"I think this demonstration has clearly shown you the difference between actual combat and the flashy, useless moves in textbooks."
Snape mercilessly rubbed salt into Harry's wound.
"Ten points from Gryffindor, because Potter not only failed to defend against his opponent's attack but even lost his basic instinct to counter-attack after being hit."
Ron immediately rushed onto the dueling platform and forcefully dragged Harry, who was still in a daze, down.
Cassius stood below the stage, watching Draco walk back to him. He nodded slightly, giving him an extremely rare look of affirmation.
The lesson ended in a bizarre atmosphere of near-unilateral crushing.
The moment the bell rang, the Gryffindor students fled the classroom as if avoiding a plague. No one wanted to stay in this place full of frustration for a second longer.
Harry kept his head down the whole way, letting Ron lead him through the corridors until they passed through the portrait of the The Fat Lady and returned to the GryffindorCommon Room.
"They cheated! That despicable Malfoy definitely used Dark Arts that are beyond the second-year syllabus."
Ron slammed his bag onto the sofa in a fit of rage, trying to use this anger to mask the fear of that power in his heart.
"That wasn't Dark Arts, Ron. That was a practical technique generated by combining pure physical pressure with high-density magic."
Hermione walked out from a corner of the Common Room, holding that worn-out copy of 'High-Level Magic Deconstruction' in her hand. Her face was extremely pale.
"He pressurized the water flow enough to cut through stone. This method doesn't require an incantation or a wand to guide it. As long as there's enough magic reserve, he can cut you into pieces in a tenth of a second."
Hermione's words were like a precise scalpel, directly stripping away all of Ron's self-comforting excuses.
"I can't even beat Draco anymore."
Harry slumped into an armchair, his hands buried in his hair. His voice carried a hint of hysteria from being pushed to a dead end.
"He couldn't even use a simple Levitation Charm properly before. Why can he crush my full-strength strike now without even using a wand?"
Harry looked up, his eyes bloodshot. He couldn't accept this sudden reversal in status and power.
"Because behind him stands a monster who has completely trampled conventional magic rules underfoot. Cassius directly instilled his set of violent theories into Draco."
Hermione closed the book in her hand, her tone carrying a sense of powerless compromise.
"I'm not resigned to this. Are we just going to watch Slytherin ride on our necks and act all high and mighty?"
Ron punched the armrest of the sofa, his originally ruddy cheeks turning bright red with anger.
"If you don't want to die a painful death, I suggest you put away that resentment completely, Ron. We are no longer in the same dimension as the Malfoy brothers."
Hermione's words were extremely cruel, but it was the most rational conclusion she had reached after several data simulations.
"I need to become stronger, even if it means learning things that are not allowed."
Harry stared intently at the flickering flames in the fireplace. That paranoia suppressed deep in his soul and his extreme thirst for power were revealed so clearly for the first time.
At the same moment the Gryffindor trio fell into despair and paranoia.
On the edge of the Hogwarts grounds, deep within the Forbidden Forest.
Night had completely shrouded this primeval forest that was off-limits.
Cassius stood alone in the center of the ruins that once belonged to the Acromantula nest, stepping on the scorched earth that had been baked into crystals by high-temperature vitrification.
He wasn't wearing any warm winter clothes; he only had on that special inner armor woven from a mixture of core spider silk and mithril thread.
After the forced reshaping by the blood of the thousand-year-old Basilisk, the thickness of his meridians had more than tenfold exceeded that of a normal adult Wizard, and his organs were as robust as a tireless high-pressure steam engine.
"Test begins. Dual-Soul Furnace output power at seventy percent."
Cassius closed his eyes and whispered the command to himself. The magic within him, like a tsunami, immediately began to circulate wildly like a runaway horse.
The temperature of the surrounding air soared at a visible rate. The tattered spider webs hanging on the tree trunks even spontaneously combusted due to the terrifying radiant heat without even coming into contact with the flames.
He slowly raised his hands, his ten slender fingers fully splayed, palms facing a dense grove of dozens of thick ancient trees ahead.
"Four-Channel Shunt restrictions lifted, thermal loss threshold locked, ammunition loaded."
As Cassius's thoughts flickered, the perfect wandless spellcasting circuit diagram instantly took shape in his mind.
There was no casting delay, nor any need for extra preparatory movements.
"Fire."
Cassius snapped his eyes open, and two beams of ghostly blue light, almost material, erupted from his pupils.
The next second, a deafening sonic boom exploded frantically in the dead silence of the forest.
Countless pulses of ghostly blue Reducto, miniaturized to the size of a thumb but with terrifyingly high density, poured out frantically from his ten fingertips like a dense metal storm.
The rate of fire soared from the original ten rounds per second to over fifteen rounds per second within half a second, breaking physical common sense.
This was no longer spellcasting; this was pure modern heavy firepower saturation bombing.
The once-impenetrable grove of ancient trees was as fragile as a paper model under this unreasonable strafing of the Magic Gatling.
Wood chips flew, and tree trunks were snapped in half. Some trees didn't even have time to fall before they were blasted into dancing wood dust by the subsequent continuous high-frequency shockwaves.
Ten seconds of continuous full-power output.
One hundred and fifty high-pressure Reducto spells blasted a semi-circular vacuum destruction zone three meters deep and twenty meters wide in this area.
Cassius stopped his movements. A few wisps of white smoke, caused by the rapid friction of magic, still lingered on his fingertips.
He felt the temperature of his meridians. That special inner armor had perfectly discharged the excess heat from his body, and the organ load was completely within a controllable range.
With firepower of this level, even if Lord Voldemorthimself stood before him, he was confident he could blast that noseless Dark Lord into mincemeat before the other could utter the Avada Kedavra curse.
Just as he was about to turn and leave the ruins, a very faint sound of hooves came from deep within the bushes on the left.
Cassius didn't panic at all. He just turned his head slightly, his cold gaze sweeping in that direction.
There were four Centaurs holding longbows. They had been drawn by the earth-shaking explosion just now, but after seeing the disaster scene before them, which looked like it had been hit by a meteorite, they collectively fell into a deathly stiffness.
Firenze, the leading Centaur, still held a crude spare wooden bow in his hand, but his hands were trembling uncontrollably at this moment.
He looked at the human boy standing in the moonlight, still radiating an aura of destruction, his eyes filled with absolute fear of supreme power.
"Do your arrows still need to be aimed at me?"
Cassius didn't even lift a finger, merely dropping these words in the silent forest with a cold tone that looked down on them like ants.
The four Centaurs didn't hesitate for even half a second. They threw away their weapons in perfect unison, their front hooves bending as they knelt deeply on the scorched earth, offering their most humble submission to this Lord of Calamity walking the earth.