Chapter 156: The Destruction Formula for Chasing the Strong
The door to the Room of Requirement opened and closed on the blank wall of the seventh-floor corridor; this was already the fourth time this week.
From the outside, it was just an ordinary wall.
From the inside, Hermione had completely transformed the room into a heavy industrial demolition workshop that didn't belong in a magic school.
All four walls had been reinforced with three layers of Shock-absorbing charms, the floor was covered in two inches of special sand to absorb shockwaves, and she had forcibly requested the ceiling height be raised to six meters.
In the corner lay a pile of over a dozen brass cauldrons deformed by explosions. The most wretched one had been twisted into a spiral and was wedged so deep into the rubble of the wall that it couldn't be pulled out.
Hermione Granger was kneeling on the floor, both hands buried in a pile of brass residue. Her school robes had been removed and hung on the doorknob.
Her white shirt sleeves were rolled up to her elbows, and her right forearm bore three parallel burn scars—souvenirs from the twenty-ninth experiment—while a faint scorch mark marked her left cheek.
Most of her hair had escaped its tie and was stuck to her forehead with sweat; her fingernails were packed with brass powder, making her look like a disheveled miner.
On the insulation pad of the workbench lay a fist-sized brass sphere.
It weighed about a pound and a half, feeling unnaturally heavy in the hand. The sphere's surface was covered in extremely fine rune arrays, with spacing precise to 0.3 millimeters.
Hermione had hand-carved them one stroke at a time, aided by an Enlargement Charm.
The sphere was hollow, filled with a mass of dark red gelatinous substance.
This was the "unstable magic condensate" formed by Seamus Finnigan during the thirty-fifth experiment after infusing his entire magic supply into a specially prepared solution.
Hermione had given it a codename: C4.
Seamus Finnigan sat behind a sandbag three meters away, only half his head showing. His face was pale green, and his brow bones were bare.
"Granger, can we stop now?" Seamus asked, his voice weak.
Hermione didn't look up. Her left eye squinted as she held a silver needle as thin as a hair, tinkering with the final set of runes inside the fuse slot at the top of the sphere.
"Why stop?"
"Look at my eyebrows, they're gone!" Seamus pointed at his bare forehead. "When I was infusing magic just now, the temperature in the whole room rose by at least twelve degrees. Twelve degrees, Granger. Even the walls of the Room of Requirement were shaking."
"Thirteen point four degrees," Hermione corrected him. "The walls were shaking because the magic sealing efficiency of the seventh rune group is only ninety-one percent. There's still a nine percent leakage. I made a record of it."
Seamus gaped. "Isn't ninety-one percent enough?"
"Not enough." Hermione pulled out the silver needle and stood up, walking to the blackboard. It was covered in formulas that had been crossed out and rewritten.
She picked up a piece of charcoal and drew a simplified mechanical model. "Your magic output isn't stable. Every time your spell goes out of control, the waveform is completely chaotic, with the difference between peaks and valleys exceeding sixfold. Do you know what that means?"
Seamus shook his head.
"It means that nine percent leakage will create resonance on the inner walls. Once the resonance accumulates to a critical point, the shell will shatter prematurely." Hermionedropped the charcoal. "In other words, this bomb will blow your hand off before you even throw it."
Seamus shrank back, his face turning even paler.
"So I added a set of voltage-stabilizing circuits and adjusted the spacing." Hermione crouched down again, held up the brass sphere, and handed it toward Seamus. "Come here. Infuse another shot into this shell. Just cast a simple Wand-Lighting Charm, but control the intensity to about fifty percent of your usual cauldron-exploding level."
Seamus didn't take it. "You want me to put magic into something that's going to blow my hand off?"
"With the voltage-stabilizing circuits added, it won't."
"Are you sure?"
"Ninety-three percent sure," Hermione said flatly.
"And the other seven percent?"
"Losing three fingers on your right hand."
Seamus's lips trembled. "Granger, have you come to your senses yet?"
"I'm perfectly lucid." Hermione stood tall. "If we don't do this fifty-percent test run, I won't get the actual data to calibrate the parameters. The failure probability for the next full-power detonation will skyrocket to twenty-three percent. By then, it won't just be fingers getting blown off, but your entire arm. Take your pick."
She placed the sphere on the ground, stepped back three paces, and drew her wand to cast a Shield Charm between them. "Cast the spell."
Seamus swallowed hard and reached out his right hand. It was shaking violently.
He pointed the tip of his wand at the sphere's injection hole and mumbled a few syllables. A clump of orange-red sparks flew out crookedly and slammed into the hole.
The brass sphere let out a muffled thud and vibrated twice. It didn't explode.
Hermione stared at the changes in the rune patterns, counting three seconds in her head. "Alright, put it down."
Seamus's hand froze in mid-air. "It didn't explode?"
"Leakage rate is three point one percent." Hermione used the silver needle to pry open the edge of the hole for observation. "Acceptable."
She picked up the sphere and placed it back on the microbalance. Once the needle stopped swaying and stabilized, she recorded the value in her notebook.
She flipped to a previous data page to make a comparison.
"Your magical talent isn't suited for precise spellcasting, but your explosive yield is the highest I've ever seen." Hermione turned and tapped the blackboard. "The peak output in the previous few trials reached 7,230 joules per second. You are the finest explosive material I've ever encountered."
Seamus didn't know whether to be proud or terrified. "I'm a material?"
Ignoring him, Hermione used the charcoal to write a basic equation on the blackboard: F=M×C² (magic Output = magic Density × Spell Efficiency Coefficient squared).
After drawing a thick line, she wrote a second line: E=ΔT×V×ρ/t.
"This is the heat displacement equation." Hermionepointed at the formula. "I showed this to Cassius during the summer break, and he sent it back for revisions with a single comment: 'You missed the gravitational collapse effect.' After adding the compensation coefficient K, I derived this—the 'Chain Collapse Model of Unstable Magic within a Closed Container'."
She spoke extremely fast, pointing at the C4 on the workbench.
"Seal your extremely unstable magic inside. Trigger the fuse, and the containment runes will collapse inward layer by layer. The explosive force cannot spread, so it can only collapse inward. Once compressed to the limit, it's all released within 0.003 seconds. Implosion turns into explosion."
She drew a circle at the bottom of the blackboard and wrote down a number. "The yield of this sphere, in terms of measured stored energy, is equivalent to seven standard Reducto spells stacked together. The estimated total yield is 47,000 joules."
"What's the context for that?" Seamus crawled out from behind the sandbags.
"An Auror's enhanced Blasting Curse has a limit output of 10,000." Hermione counted on her fingers. "Cassius's single-shot high-frequency Reducto is about 800; at fifteen shots per second, that's an output of 12,000 per second. But this—47,000, released all at once."
The room went deathly silent.
Seamus's throat bobbed. "What can it blow up?"
"Half a Quidditch Pitch," Hermione said. "If your power is maxed out and two more sets of amplification runes are added, the entire forest along with the stands would vanish. In a confined space, the destructive power increases by another forty percent."
Seamus stared at the metal sphere, sucking in a breath of cold air. "You're crazy."
Hermione wiped away sweat with her sleeve and tucked a stray hair behind her ear. "I'm not crazy. I've just figured things out."
She picked up the C4. "Cassius's magic reserves are fifty times mine, and his physical endurance has been reshaped. I'll never catch up to him. Not in a hundred years."
Placing it back, she looked up. "But there's no upper limit to my mind. I can use your lack of control as raw material to create a bang just as loud as his."
Seamus scratched his head. "What do you plan to do with it? Blow up the Slytherin common room?"
Chapter 157: Yield is Truth
"I need a live-fire test." Hermione stuffed the box into her bag. "The Room of Requirement has magical interference; the error margin is too high. I need to find somewhere with no interference and enough open space."
"Where?"
"The Forbidden Forest. Tonight at eleven, after the moon sets. Meet me at the back door of Gryffindor Tower."
"I'm not going!"
"If you don't go, there'll be no one to calibrate the detonation parameters in real-time, and the next fuse design will be a total waste." Hermione slung her bag over her shoulder and walked toward the door. "Tomorrow morning, I'll just have you try it at full power. Whether you keep your fingers or not will depend on luck."
"That's a threat."
"It's information symmetry." Hermione pulled the door open and looked back. "If you're late, I'll go by myself. If an error causes it to spiral out of control, it'll probably set half the Forbidden Forest on fire."
The door closed. Seamus sat in the sand, staring at the scorched marks on the ceiling, and shuddered. Finally, he picked up his wand and trudged out.
...
That night. Eleven-ten.
The moon hid behind the clouds, and the grass outside the Castle was as black as an iron plate. Hermione carried her bag, Seamus hunched his shoulders, and the two of them slipped out the back door, hugging the wall.
Following the dirt path behind Hagrid's hut, they plunged into the edge of the Forbidden Forest.
They avoided the Centaurs' red-line warning zone and picked a patch of abandoned woodland that Cassius had once cleared with Reducto. The tree trunks here had long since been cleared away, leaving enough space.
"Right here." Hermione set down her bag and took out the dragon-hide box. "Open terrain, safe distance of one hundred and twenty meters."
Seamus was shivering from the cold. "How far back are we going?"
"Back behind that granite rock one hundred and fifty meters away." Hermione placed the C4 on a scorched tree stump.
The two retreated behind the rock. Hermione set up her measuring instruments, her left hand clutching a small copper remote control engraved with triggering runes.
"Get ready. Release your magic perception and keep your eyes on the center. Tell me the millisecond the collapse occurs."
Hermione's thumb pressed against the rune.
"Three, two, one."
Press.
For the first second, the night was silent. Seamus thought it was a dud and was just about to speak.
In the second second, the air around the stump underwent a visible, extreme distortion, as if water were being drained away.
A piercing high-frequency ringing penetrated their eardrums as all light shrank frantically into the brass sphere.
"Implosion! Zero point zero zero two seconds!" Seamusshouted.
The next second.
Implosion turned to explosion.
There was no fire. A mass of pure white air blasted outward with unstoppable force.
Soil was thrown half a meter high, and the remaining thick tree trunks were snapped in half like paper by the blast wave.
The deafening roar slammed into the granite a beat late. The massive impact caused the two-person-tall boulder to shift back two feet. Shrapnel and dirt rained down on the Shield Charm above their heads, crackling and popping.
The ground shook violently, the tremors surging from the soles of their feet to the tops of their heads.
Five seconds later, the shockwave dissipated.
A thin trail of blood trickled from Seamus's ear. Hermionepushed aside the clumps of earth pressing down on her and poked her head out.
The stump one hundred and fifty meters away was gone, replaced by a scorched crater ten meters in diameter and three meters deep. The edges of the soil showed signs of vitrification from high-temperature melting.
"Forty-nine thousand two hundred joules..." Hermionewatched the red, pulsing numbers on the measuring instrument, her voice trembling, but her eyes were frighteningly bright. "Exceeded the error margin by four percent. I didn't account for the magic oxidation bonus caused by the external cold air. It's a success. We can mass-produce them."
Seamus slumped on the ground, his words slurred. "M-mass-produce?"
Before he could finish, the sound of a dry branch snapping came from the shadows at the edge of the crater.
It was very faint, but in the dead silence following the explosion, it was extremely jarring.
Hermione immediately gripped her wand and cast a Flashlight spell, sending a beam of white light toward the sound.
At the edge of the ruins, a tall figure stepped out from the darkness of the canopy. He carried no wand, his hands tucked into the pockets of his school robes. His boots stepped onto the smoking, high-temperature soil at the edge, yet showed no signs of melting.
A deep blue magical hum swirled around him, forming an absolute isolation vacuum layer. When the air touched that blue light, it parted automatically.
Cassius Malfoy.
He stopped half a meter from the edge of the crater and looked down at the vitrified crystals at the bottom. He looked up, his gaze crossing the hundred and fifty meters to fall unerringly on the two people behind the granite rock.
His gaze was cold and hard, like a blade scraping down Hermione's spine. The temperature in the entire Forbidden Forest dropped to the freezing point at that moment.
Cassius pulled his right hand from his pocket, his fingertips pinching a deformed piece of brass shrapnel—the wreckage of the C4's casing.
"Heat displacement equation." Cassius looked at the fragment. His voice wasn't loud, yet it pierced through the night wind across the distance, striking their ears clearly. "The Compensation coefficient K was calculated quite accurately. The rune stacking logic for the Implosion collapse is also barely a passing grade."
He closed his fist. Under the extreme pressure of his magic, the brass fragment was crushed into a pinch of golden powder, which spilled through his fingers onto the scorched earth.
Cassius stepped forward, crossing the crater and walking toward the granite. With every step, the gravel beneath his feet was ground into powder by an invisible gravity field.
"However," he said calmly, "setting off explosions in my backyard in the middle of the night has disturbed my sleep."
Seamus's legs went weak on the spot, his teeth chattering.
Hermione's palms were soaked with sweat, and she bit her lip hard.
All the yields and thermodynamic formulas in her calculations were crushed into scrap paper as this monster with his own destructive magnetic field approached.
Cassius stopped ten paces away. His deep blue pupils stared at Hermione.
"Granger. Take your egg-laying demolition material and get out here."
Behind the granite rock, a hundred and fifty meters away, there was a deathly silence.
"What, do I need to invite you?" Cassius's voice wasn't loud, but it had the texture of a blade scraping against glass in the night wind.
Seamus's knees hit the gravel, his legs shaking like sieves; he couldn't stand up at all.
Hermione took a deep breath of the ozone-heavy air and forcefully pried away Seamus's hand, which was death-gripping her school robes.
She clutched her parchment notebook filled with thermodynamic formulas and stepped out from the shadow of the rock.
No wand. No Shield Charm.
Hermione stepped on the scorched fallen leaves, facing the Slytherin monster standing in the center of the ruins.
Cassius was shirtless, the muscle definition reshaped by the Basilisk's essence clearly visible under the faint blue magical halo. Extreme heat radiated from his skin, heat that even the night wind could not dissipate.
"Cassius Malfoy." Hermione stood still twenty meters away from him, her voice tight and her back ramrod straight. "We didn't mean to provoke you. We chose this place because it's a safety zone you cleared."
Cassius gave her a cold sideways glance. He opened his right hand, letting the pinch of powdered brass C4 wreckage spill through his fingers.
"Forcing a mass of chaotic, inefficient magic into a metal shell, using internal runes to force it to implode, and finally reversing it into an explosion at the critical point." Cassius's tone was flat as he precisely dismantled Hermione's half-month of hard work word by word. "A decent idea. But this isn't magic."
"This is engineering," Cassius defined it.
Hermione bit her lower lip. The frustration of having her trump card exposed made her clench her fists. "So what? With forty-nine thousand two hundred joules of destructive power, yield is the truth!"
She threw caution to the wind, staring directly into Cassius's deep blue pupils, pouring out all the desperate data she had hidden in her heart: "I know this doesn't compare to you! Before the test, I saw your so-called 'warm-up' over there."
Hermione pointed toward the vitrified clearing to the southwest, her voice beginning to tremble. "Ten-channel simultaneous output! Twenty Reducto spells per second! Light spreading in a 180-degree fan! I've calculated your firepower—sixteen thousand joules per second equivalent!"
Behind the rock, Seamus nearly fainted upon hearing this.
Chapter 158: A Penetration Above Rules, and the Accelerating Corruption of the Savior
"You only need three seconds!" Hermione stared intently at him. "In three seconds, the energy you fire while standing still can match the ultimate weapon I cobbled together at the risk of blowing my hands off. And that monster-like body of yours can keep firing for six hundred seconds without shedding a single drop of sweat."
"This is simply not fair!" Hermione's voice echoed in the clearing. "I use engineering to push the limits, while you only need to breathe to trample over the rules!"
Cassius looked at the Gryffindor overachiever before him, whose eyes were red but who refused to back down an inch.
Instead of being angry, the corner of his mouth twitched, curling into a faint, mocking arc.
The effects after merging with the Basilisk essence bloodindeed far exceeded everyone's understanding.
His meridian capacity had more than doubled; during those six hundred seconds of ten-channel continuous bombardment he had just maintained, the heat accumulation in his body hadn't even touched seventy percent of the safety threshold.
"Fairness?" Cassius's voice turned cold.
He raised his right hand.
His ten fingertips did not split into pea-sized blue lights like before.
This time, all the magical halos converged and contracted into a single point on his index finger.
The originally pale blue light, under extreme compression, turned into a blinding deep purple.
The smell of ozone in the air instantly grew ten times stronger.
"Look closely. I wasn't just warming up earlier." Cassiuspointed at an old oak tree over a meter in diameter, fifty meters behind and to the side of Hermione. "I just thought the efficiency was too low."
A single point.
A beam of light shot out. It was less than two centimeters wide.
There was no deafening explosion, only an extremely piercing sound of microscopic physical tearing.
The blue-violet light beam pierced through the old oak tree. No wood chips flew from the center of the trunk; the wood fibers and moisture within a half-meter radius were instantly vaporized by the two-thousand-degree high temperature upon contact, leaving only an absolute void with edges sintered into glass.
The light didn't stop. After penetrating the old oak, it plunged into the ground behind it, slicing through the granite bedrock with ease until it finally extinguished deep underground.
Hermione stood there, stunned.
Cassius walked slowly to the thumb-thick hole in the ground. He bent down, picked up a charred pebble, held it between two fingers, and casually tossed it into the hole.
"Nine."
"Eight."
Cassius looked at the hole, counting down calmly.
Hermione even forgot to breathe. Forty-nine thousand joules of C4 only blasted a three-meter deep pit. But this strike, with its narrowed caliber and pressure increased hundreds or thousands of times—how deep did it penetrate?
"Two."
"One."
The nine-second countdown ended. A very faint "ting" sound came from the bottom of the hole.
This was true single-point penetration. A top-tier Wizard's ten-layered shield would be more fragile than a soaked tissue in front of this finger.
Cassius's gaze moved past the stiff Hermione, looking deep into the boundless Forbidden Forest. The sensory web of the Dual-Soul Furnace opened at full power, sweeping across every inch of the ley lines within a two-kilometer radius.
To the northeast, two magical signals. Granger's extremely stable straight line, and Finnigan's tangled mess of yarn.
The sensory web continued to push southward.
About 1.3 kilometers away. To the south.
Cassius's deep blue pupils suddenly constricted.
He captured a third signal.
It was very weak, yet extremely eye-piercing. On the edge of the pure golden core that originally belonged to Harry Potter, a thick layer of dark red interference was now clinging. That interference was like a living, shriveled leech, tightly suctioned to the outer wall of the core and wriggling with increasing speed.
That was the most primitive, decayed scent of the Dark Arts.
At the same time, deep in the southern part of the Forbidden Forest.
Fang at Hagrid's hut was snoring like a saw cutting wood. Harry had long since avoided Hagrid's patrol area, bypassed the abandoned greenhouse on the east side of the Castle, and was walking alone on the thick humus of the Forbidden Forest.
The moonlight was completely blocked by the clouds. Harry didn't light a Lumos. He didn't need to.
Since that Dueling Class three days ago, his night vision had undergone a complete mutation. Darkness was no longer an obstacle in his eyes; the outline of every branch appeared in a dismal grayish-white. That voice entrenched in his mind told him this was a cheap gift that came with soul awakening.
Harry stopped under a broken dead tree. He took out the obsidian he had bought in Knockturn Alley from his pocket and placed it in the center of the cleared soil.
Then, he pulled a wand from the inside of his robes. Not that broken Holly one. This wand was pitch black all over, its surface covered in a layer of extremely fine, cold scales.
The moment he held it, the magic in Harry's body didn't even need subjective guidance; it rushed toward the wand tip like water from a burst dam. Smooth. It was too smooth. So smooth it gave one the illusion that their self was being pulled away.
Harry pointed the wand tip at his left index finger and grit his teeth as he sliced open a bloody gash.
A dark red droplet of blood emerged. A certain suction attached to the wand instantly pulled the drop of blood onto the surface of the obsidian, where it flowed into a complex, twisted ancient magic circle.
The lightning scar on his forehead began to burn intensely, as if someone had lit a fire inside his skull.
That flat, cold consciousness descended again, guiding him to recite a long string of dry, reptilian syllables. Harryclosed his eyes and pressed his bleeding left hand firmly against the obsidian.
In the ruins a hundred and thirty meters away.
Cassius withdrew his sensory web. The indifference on his face was replaced by an extreme sense of danger.
The change in that signal to the south was too fast.
The last time he detected this parasitic interference, the erosion area only covered eleven percent of Potter's core. Now, it was nineteen percent.
In one week, it had risen by eight points.
This wasn't passive infiltration. This was the host actively opening his core, using blood and magic as catalysts to exchange for that pitiful bit of surface power.
"Utterly foolish," Cassius whispered.
If allowed to continue at this erosion rate, before the end of the term, the fragment living in his forehead would forcibly cross the threshold. The tenant would become the landlord, and Hogwarts would face a fully revived evil spirit in its prime.
Cassius bent down, picked up the special combat armor shirt he had tossed on the pile of rubble, and shook off the ashes. He put it on unhurriedly, fastening three buttons from the bottom up. The collar was slightly open, revealing the blue light circuits at his collarbone that had already faded.
Hermione watched his movements and unconsciously took half a step back.
Cassius didn't give her another look. He put his hands in his pockets and stepped onto the cooled, vitrified ground with his right foot, making a crisp sound. Then, he changed his direction back to the Castle and walked straight toward the south.
His steps were even. It didn't look like he was going to kill someone, but rather like he was taking a stroll in his own backyard.
But with every step he took, the low-frequency vibrations deep within the ley lines of the Forbidden Forestintensified. Even the branches of the dead trees in the distance silently bent and gave way under this terrifying pressure.
Hermione stood where she was, staring at the figure growing more distant. The tremors from the ground traveled up through the soles of her shoes all the way to the top of her head.
"Granger..." Seamus scrambled out from behind a rock and grabbed her arm. "He's gone. Thank God he didn't kill us. Let's go, let's get back to the Tower!"
Hermione didn't move.
She looked at the deep hole where the pebble had just been dropped, then toward the darkness where Cassiushad disappeared. That direction wasn't the way back to the Castle at all. It was the unknown core area of the Forbidden Forest.
Images of that two-centimeter beam of light piercing the ground flashed frantically through her mind. That was a full-power output that transcended all engineering. In the theoretical deductions in the Room of Requirement, she had calculated it countless times but had never obtained true full-power measurement parameters.
Hermione stuffed her notebook back into her bag and tightened the strap on her shoulder.
"Go in that direction," Hermione said, pointing toward the south.
Chapter 159: The Path of Glaze and the Crimson Ritual
Seamus's eyes widened, looking at her like she was a lunatic. "What did you say? You're crazy! That's Cassius Malfoy! Why are you following him?"
"To collect extreme value data." Hermione had already stepped out, her tone showing no compromise. "My voltage stabilization circuit needs his peak parameters as a reference. Without them, the next version of the C4 won't even reach the passing grade."
"Granger, there's no safe distance!" Seamus's voice cracked. "He could wipe us out with a single finger without leaving a trace!"
"You can go back if you're scared." Hermione plunged into the darkness without looking back. "I'll go by myself."
Seamus stood in the cold wind of the ruins, watching that stubborn back. He gritted his teeth and cursed a foul word in an Irish dialect, but eventually pulled out his wand and followed her with trembling legs.
The night wind tore at the canopy high in the Forbidden Forest. There was no moonlight.
Three routes.
A scientific research lunatic holding bomb fragments, a Savior being gnawed by a dark remnant soul, and a Slytherin tyrant who could level mountains and rivers with his eyes closed.
In tonight's silent resonance of the ley lines, they were closing the net with precision at different speeds toward the same coordinates of death. Deeper in the Forbidden Forest, the lifeless ancient trees seemed to be roughly pushed aside from the middle by some giant invisible hand.
Cassius did not deliberately restrain his magic. The background noise of the Dual-Soul Furnace emitted a very low-frequency hum in the quiet night. Wherever he passed, those old oaks and ash trees that had lived for centuries with roots deep in the ley lines made an overburdened creaking sound, tilting and leaning back toward both sides, roots and soil alike.
This was not spellcasting. This was the lowest biological instinct of nature—avoidance.
Cassius stepped expressionlessly over the thick layer of humus, the two-thousand-degree heat-insulating layer on his soles instantly carbonizing the damp fallen leaves.
In his mind, the global perception net covering two kilometers was updating Potter's status in real-time.
"Twenty-one percent."
Cassius sneered. He tapped his index finger twice against the inner lining of his trouser pocket.
That old fox Dumbledore sat in his office every day playing with his silver instruments, staring at a few broken needles to deduce the overall situation, but never realized that the 'bait' he used for fishing had already actively swallowed the hook into his stomach and begun to enjoy the pleasure of the iron hook tearing through his internal organs.
Potter's self-consciousness defense line collapsed faster than paper. The Basilisk torn apart by hand in the Chamber of Secrets, combined with Draco's one-sided physical crushing in Dueling Class, had completely trampled the Savior's pathetic self-esteem into the mud. Now, as long as he could win, this kid dared to shove any filthy thing into his veins.
"Trying to rely on blood-sucking for revival?" Cassius raised his eyelids, his gaze piercing through the layers of darkness to lock onto that nauseating dark red light source several hundred meters ahead.
He didn't care if Potter lived or died, but if Lord Voldemortused a shell to return to life under his nose, spawning a full-load adult Dark Lord's body at Hogwarts, it would somewhat affect his peace for the next two years.
Trouble should be stepped on and killed while it is still a cluster of parasites.
At the same time, two hundred meters behind Cassius.
Hermione held a small copper dial, staring at the jumping needle while hurrying forward with uneven steps.
Seamus followed closely behind her, the wand in his hand shaking as if it were electrified.
"Granger, what exactly are you looking at? This forest is so dark there isn't even a mouse!"
"Looking at the footprints." Hermione didn't look up, the copper dial in her hand pointing to the ground.
Seamus lowered his head, and by the extremely faint starlight, he saw the abnormality on the ground.
A long string of clear footprints extended straight into the depths of the Forbidden Forest. There were no traces of overturned soil at the edges of the footprints; instead, they presented a smooth, reflective texture.
Hermione crouched down, not daring to touch them with her hand, and instead brought a glass test tube near a footprint.
The red temperature-measuring liquid at the bottom of the test tube instantly soared to the peak and shattered with a "bang."
"It's glass." Hermione stared at those footprints, the light in her eyes frighteningly bright. "Where Cassius walked, the silicates in the soil were directly sintered into glaze by his overflowing passive magic."
Seamus took two steps back, almost tripping. "Passive magic? He hasn't even pulled out his wand!"
"This is the data I want." Hermione stood up, her tone carrying a hint of fanatical obsession. "The C4 must have a physical heat insulation layer design. His magic is not only high-voltage, but also comes with extremely lethal waste heat radiation. If we can't push the detonation temperature of the bomb above his safety threshold, all explosions will be nothing more than a warm breeze to him."
"You really want to build something that can blow him up?" Seamus swallowed, feeling that this Gryffindor top student was even crazier than the tyrant ahead.
"No. I want to build something that can make him stop and listen to me." Hermione threw away the shattered test tube and quickened her pace. "Hurry, he's slowing down, the target is just ahead."
Due south. A clearing with broken old oaks.
The blood sacrifice ritual had reached its final stage.
Harry's left hand was pressed hard against the obsidian, the sharp stone surface cutting more of his skin. The blood was no longer dripping but gushing out in streams, seeping into the ground along the ancient Druidic runes.
A burst of dark red pulses erupted from the obsidian.
Harry let out a muffled groan, his entire body convulsing violently. But he did not let go. The pitch-black-scaled wand held in his right hand was continuously feeding back a cold, viscous, and destructive power into his body.
The lightning scar on his forehead cracked open with a tiny bloody slit.
That flat voice echoed in his mind, no longer a soft whisper, but carrying a kind of sovereign arrogance.
"Well done, Harry. Power needs no pity, no morality. Open your eyes and look at your magic now. Are you still afraid of that Malfoy madman now?"
Harry snapped his eyes open.
His originally clear green pupils were now covered with a web of bloodshot veins, and even a faint crimson gleam showed from deep within the pupils.
He clearly felt his magic reserves being forcibly pulled up several times at this moment.
The sound of wind blowing fallen leaves and the tracks of insects crawling in the soil were all infinitely magnified in his mutated senses.
He raised the black-scaled wand and aimed it at a huge rock ahead. Without even chanting a spell, he just moved his will.
A ball of pitch-black corrosive magic smashed into the rock like a cannonball. There was no sound of explosion; that multi-ton hard rock was silently corroded into a huge hole through it, the surrounding stone melting and dripping like rotting mud.
Harry watched this scene, a sickly excitement appearing on his pale face.
"This is... true power." He looked at his hands, his knuckles white from excessive force.
This illusion of controlling everything made him completely forget the weakness of having his life force drained.
"That's right. Continue." The voice in his mind enticed him. "Feed the rest of the blood to the stone, and we can—"
The voice stopped abruptly.
As if someone had choked its throat out of thin air.
The sense of full arrogance in Harry's mind vanished without a trace in an instant, replaced by an extreme trembling from the deepest part of the soul, belonging to the remnant soul!
"Who's there?" Harry turned his head sharply, the black-scaled wand pointing dead at the darkness at the edge of the clearing.
There was no answer.
Only a heavy, extremely oppressive sound of footsteps.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
With every step that fell, the withered trees and vines around the clearing that had been polluted by Dark Artsand were originally baring their fangs and claws shrunk frantically into the soil like a group of snakes encountering a natural enemy.
The dark red decaying magic that had originally filled the air was forcibly pushed aside and torn apart by an absolutely domineering and unreasonable ghostly blue field!
A tall figure walked out of the darkness.
His shirt collar was open, and his hands were in his pockets. His ghostly blue pupils were like two clusters of extremely cold ghost fires in the moonless night, coldly scanning the obsidian on the ground before finally settling on Harry's face.
Cassius Malfoy.
Chapter 160: Crushing the Black Scales, A Death Warning to the Fragmented Soul
Harry's hand, gripping his wand, trembled uncontrollably.
The humiliation of being crushed by Draco in Dueling Classand the terror of the Basilisk being torn apart alive in the Chamber of Secrets exploded simultaneously the moment he saw that face.
But he immediately gritted his teeth, forcibly suppressing his fear.
He was different now. He had just obtained that immense power; he could punch through rock, he didn't need to run anymore!
"What are you doing here, Malfoy?" Harry's voice turned hoarse, carrying a vicious undertone he hadn't even noticed himself. A dangerous, dark red light ignited at the tip of the Black Scale wand.
Cassius stopped ten meters away. He looked at Harry's still-bleeding left hand, then at the broken stick covered in scales.
"Not sleeping in the middle of the night, running to the Forbidden Forest to slit your wrists." Cassius's tone was flat, carrying a condescending mockery, as if watching a monkey show. "Potter, even if you want to find a quiet place to hang yourself, don't pick my territory."
"Don't speak to me in that tone!" Harry was thoroughly enraged. His magic, amplified by the Black Scale wand, surged out violently. A dark red halo even formed a visible, tangible shield on his body. "Do you think I'm still that loser who could be casually humiliated in class yesterday? Malfoy, your crude magic that only knows violence doesn't understand what true heritage is at all!"
"Heritage?"
Cassius let out a short, cold laugh.
He took his right hand out of his pocket.
He didn't draw his wand.
To deal with such a defective product, whose very soul was being treated as a marionette by someone else, drawing his wand would be an insult to his own power.
"Using your own blood and magic as feed to nourish a parasite hiding in your forehead that doesn't even have a physical form.
And in exchange for a few scraps of Dark Arts leftovers chewed by someone else, you dare to talk to me about heritage here?"
Cassius took a step forward.
Boom!
Without needing any spells, a vacuum field with ten times the gravity expanded violently outward with him at the center. The soil on the ground, carved with Druid runes, instantly collapsed half a foot under the pressure.
Harry groaned, his legs trembling violently. The dark red shield he had just condensed emitted a teeth-grinding cracking sound the moment it touched that deep blue gravity field.
"That broken stick covered in scales makes you think you've got what it takes, right?" Cassius took his second step.
The heavy magical pressure turned into tangible physical force.
The soil under Harry's feet exploded, and he was forced back three meters, his back slamming hard against a broken tree trunk.
Harry's eyes were bloodshot, and he hysterically raised his wand: "Avada—"
He desperately wanted to mobilize that power which had been enough to melt rock just a moment ago.
He was frantically calling out in his mind to the fragmented soul that had lent him power, attempting to release the Killing Curse that could end everything.
But he couldn't even finish the last syllable.
Cassius's figure blurred in place.
One-tenth of a second. This was the speed of extreme physical burst combined with magical propulsion.
Harry only felt a blur before his eyes, and a terrifying pressure that could crush even his breath was already right in front of his face.
Cassius's right hand had crossed the distance between them, grabbing Harry's wand-holding wrist. The movement was faster than the limits of Harry's mutated dynamic vision.
There was no flashy spell confrontation, only pure, extreme physical violence.
Cassius didn't even look at Harry's face; his gaze was coldly fixed on the Black Scale wand exuding an ominous aura.
"Does borrowed power feel good to use?"
The moment his words fell, Cassius's five fingers tightened abruptly.
"Snap!"
The crisp sound of bone fracturing was clearly audible in the clearing.
Harry let out a shrill scream, his right wrist dislocated by the terrifying grip, and the Black Scale wand slipped from his hand and fell.
But before the wand hit the ground, Cassius lifted his left leg, his combat boot encased in a layer of blue magical armor with a temperature of two thousand degrees, and stomped down.
"Crack!"
That specially crafted wand, which Harry viewed as his trump card and which was filled with ancient Dark Arts, was crushed to pieces like a brittle, withered branch under Cassius's absolutely overwhelming physical stomp!
The pitch-black scales exploded, and the dark red magicsealed inside let out a strange sound like a scream. Just as it tried to overflow and backlash, it was instantly vaporized by the deep blue high temperature at the bottom of the boot, leaving not even a speck of residue.
Harry collapsed to the ground, clutching his broken wrist, staring fixedly at the debris on the ground, his mind completely blank.
The trump card he was so proud of, the cheat he had exchanged his soul for, hadn't even lasted a second in front of this unreasonable tyrant.
Cassius looked down at the Savior, who was like mud. He didn't continue, because he sensed the approach of two other rats in the shadows.
Behind a bush one hundred meters away.
Hermione's hand holding the copper plate froze in mid-air. Seamus covered his mouth tightly, fearing to let out even the slightest sound.
The entire sequence of movements just now had no light or shadow of any spells, only a physical crushing that instilled despair.
Hermione looked down at the measuring instrument in her hand. The red needle representing the peak of magichadn't even moved.
"He didn't even use magic…" Hermione muttered to herself, her voice carrying a dryness as if her worldview had been forcibly torn apart. "He just relied on pure physical explosive power and the passively attached magical armor to crush a top-tier Dark Arts weapon…"
Forty-nine thousand joules of C4?
In the face of an absolute disparity in power, that was just a firecracker exploding at one's feet.
In the center of the clearing, Cassius lifted his foot and crushed the last remnants of the wand into dust.
He squatted down, grabbed Harry by the collar, and forcibly lifted him up.
His deep blue eyes pierced straight into Harry's green eyes, which were already beginning to fade from the red glow.
Cassius didn't look at Harry, but stared at the bleeding lightning-shaped scar on his forehead.
"You cripple hiding in a minor's brain." Cassius delivered a cold warning to the fragmented soul inside the scar, in a voice only the two of them could hear.
"You'd better slow down the speed at which you are gnawing on his core. An erosion rate of twenty-one percent has already crossed my bottom line of tolerance."
Cassius applied slight pressure with his fingers, and Harrywas choked to the point of near suffocation.
"I don't care what political bargaining chip the old fox is using him as. But in this school, no one is allowed to set the rules except me. If you dare to take over this body before I graduate, causing trouble and disturbing my leveling..."
A highly condensed, high-frequency shattering glimmer lit up at Cassius's fingertips, pressed less than a millimeter above the scar.
"I will shove you, along with this Savior's body, into an alchemical crusher and squeeze you into fertilizer to water the man-eating flowers at Malfoy Manor."
The voice in Harry's mind that had always been arrogant, at this moment, let out an extremely shrill, extremely terrified soul wail.
It was afraid. It was truly afraid of this Slytherin monster who was even more tyrannical than the Dark Lord.
Cassius let go, letting Harry crash to the ground like a broken sack.
He stood up and glanced at the bushes on the left.
"If you've seen enough, take him and get back to the infirmary. Remember to tell that biased old man that his Savior needs a new brain that isn't so easily broken."
After speaking, Cassius didn't even look in the direction where Hermione and Seamus were hiding, put his hands back into his pockets, and turned to walk into the heavy darkness.
The ancient trees of the Forbidden Forest creaked in lamentation again, automatically yielding a wide, smooth path for this sole tyrant of Hogwarts.