Penthuisiast
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SD: CH51 - Quafflebash
🕑 Added 2023-03-26 21:59:19 +0000 UTC“I doubt things will work the way you expect, Harry,” Amelia said as we walked through the hallways, discussing my strategy. “Even if I can corner Malfoy with this, Greengrass isn’t one to take things lying down.”
After our little meeting, Amelia had summoned Susan to her office and given her the memo. Susan’s expression had been absolutely beautiful to watch when her aunt told her I'd be spending the next three days at the Manor. Amelia wasn’t a big believer of sharing details, so she simply told her that his request would require multiple days of detailed study and discussion. Plus, as a family friend, this could open a new chapter in the relationship of House Potter and House Bones. I wasn’t sure, but given how Susan had a flushed look on her face, there was a way more subtext than either of them were willing to share with me.
And no, there were no betrothal contracts. Trust me, I checked. I’m gonna blame fanfiction for putting that idea in my head.
Not that this world didn’t have betrothals. Draco-poo, for one, was betrothed to Astoria Greengrass, likely because their fathers were business partners. Astoria was a year younger to Daphne, and both of them were sorted to Slytherin House. Tracey had been a hearth of knowledge about the Greengrass sisters.
“You’re right,” I told Amelia. “He’s the kind of person who, when asked to bend a knee, would throw a Hail Mary.”
“A what marry?”
I caught that little slip. “Hail Mary. It's uh, a term in muggle football.”
“Soccer?”
“... soccer. It’s when you throw a very long pass in desperation, even though there’s little time for a successful completion.”
“Interesting. Do you play?”
Yes. In my previous life. I didn’t say.
“Not as much as I’d like. My cousin Dudley and his friends played it. They wouldn’t take the freak to play with them, so I just watched. My uncle was a fan of the sport so he watched it on the telly.”
I loved how her face gained a tic every time I casually threw in one symptom of child abuse after another. I didn’t know if it was Occlumency or she just had a good poker face, but I was determined to crack it.
“And you watched it with him?”
“Well, peer through the cupboard door more like, but essentially, yeah.”
Another tic. Slow and steady was the name of the game. Slow and steady.
“I know Greengrass responds to pushing by pushing back. So I’ll just trap him from all sides and then offer him a way out.”
“This isn’t how diplomacy is done,”
“My idea of diplomacy is showing up with a gu — wand in one hand, and a sandwich in another, and asking which you’d prefer.”
Amelia’s mouth curved up at one corner. “Sandwich, not a gold pouch?”
“Who do I look like, Malfoy?”
Her eyebrows rose. “Honestly, I find myself confused. If I didn’t know better, I’d have said I was conversing with a seasoned businessman, not a fledgling student entering his fourth year.”
“I’ve always been an overachiever.”
“In these things, perhaps. Your academic performance leaves much to be desired.”
This time I arched an eyebrow.
“I might not have taken you in, but that does not mean I have not kept an eye on you, Harry. Besides, you’re a celebrity and the Boy-Who-Lived. There’s hardly a pureblood house out there that doesn’t have an active dossier in your name.”
“As if I didn’t have enough paranoia to go by,” I murmured. Amelia let out a wicked little laugh at that.
“Seriously,” I groaned, running my fingers through my hair. “It’s like I’m surrounded by Gryffindors everywhere. My uncle never liked it when I scored more than my cousin and he always made his displeasure known. It didn’t take me long to realise I didn’t have to score good marks to be a good student.”
Another tic. Keep them coming. Oh yeah.
“And you continued that at Hogwarts? Why?”
I gave her a half-shrug. “How would I know that Uncle Vernon wouldn’t see the marksheet? And by the time I understood, a year had gone by, and I was friends with Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger and had already been targeted by a possessed professor and Malfoy junior’s bruised ego. That and seeing Hermione Granger suffer the taunts for answering every question. Learn from other's mistakes and all that.”
“And, just how advanced is this student actually?”
“Enough.”
“Mmm… Say, would this student be willing to give a real demonstration of his skills?”
“What? You don’t believe me?” I asked, aghast.
She cocked an eyebrow. “Enough with your theatrics. Now come with me.”
…
…
…
Amelia opened the doors to a large, duelling chamber, easily the size of a Hogwarts classroom, bounded by runic enchantments on all sides to keep stray spells from escaping out of the duelling ring. To my surprise, the room wasn’t empty. Susan, clad in a sports bra and trainers, stood on one side, facing a… pitching machine? What was that doing here?
“My niece wants to outshine me as an Auror. And ever since a certain someone made a joke out of Draco Malfoy in public, her zeal has only gone up.”
My lips curved upwards. “That’s a ball pitching machine, isn’t it? How do you have a tennis ball launcher operate without electricity?”
She arched an eyebrow.
“Right. Magic.”
“And it’s not a tennis ball. That machine is enchanted to throw quaffles.”
“Quaffles?”
“Quaffles.” She confirmed. “A bit on the small side, but quaffles nonetheless.”
I looked at Susan, who was clenching her wand. “What’s she going to do? Dodge them?”
“Watch,” was all she said.
As if on cue, the machine roared into action, shifting horizontally on an axis while firing tiny quaffles from different angles at Susan at moderate speed. Susan kept whipping her wand and throwing bursts of orange light — exploding curse, I recognized, at them. Every time the curse hit a quaffle successfully, the green number on the scoreboard ahead would increase. Every time she missed, another stat — this one in red — would go up.
“A continuous drill,” Amelia explained. “It gets a measure of casting speed, movement and accuracy. There are other machines for spell power and spell selection. Standard practice for Aurors. Obviously Susan cannot maintain it for long, so she does it in short spans of five minutes, until she’s ready for more.”
“It’s brilliant!” I grinned. “How can I get one?”
Amelia cocked her head and gave me a pitying look. “You can’t. It’s for Auror personnel only.”
“What? But Susan —”
“Is just lucky enough to be the DMLE Director’s ward. I’m certain if you had similar upbringing, you’d have access to the same.”
“Now that’s just unfair. Are you trying to bribe me into becoming your ward?”
“Is it working?”
“No.”
“Oh well,” she exhaled. “In that case, you’ll have to settle for a one-time teaser.”
“You monster!”
The two of us kept bantering as we walked towards Susan as she went through the ringer. She saw us approach, and lifted her wand up, and the machine stopped firing. It was likely she knew the drill and waited for further instructions.
“Susan, I’d like you to give Mr. Potter here, a chance to prove his skills.”
Susan arched an eyebrow, and gave me a full-body look, before stepping back. I stood in her place, undid the coat, and folded my sleeves. After over two months of constant spell practice and sparring with a werewolf, this was the first time I was getting to actually show off my skills.
“It starts off easy and gets faster depending on your performance, so don’t let that surprise you.” Amelia began stating the rules. “The scoreboard will mark you based on the number of quaffles you hit. The ratio of hit to miss also adds to your overall score. Wide angle deliveries get rated differently than balls striking you head on. The game ends if you get hit by one of them, which means you’re a goner. Make sense? Good. Now your job is to stay hanging for five minutes without getting hit. Any more than that, well, I doubt it’ll happen so let’s get started.”
“Go on, Potter,” said Susan impishly. “Impress a girl.”
I glanced at her, and then at Amelia and then turned around and faced my opponent. The magical pitching machine. I had no suspicions that this exercise was my best chance to impress Amelia Bones, and the result would cement our relationship. Practising spells alone in the dungeon until I was down to my knees gave me a good idea of my power levels. My ever increasing affinities also meant that my spells would be more potent with minimum energy expenditure. My reflexes would be the deciding factor in this game, and I was playing for keeps.
Activating Perk - Natural Demon
I cannot describe the power that burned through my veins right then. You’d think that sparring with a werewolf with the passive buffs that Natural Demon gave me would have prepared me for this. It didn’t. I felt the power flood into every inch of my body, spreading like wildfire and filled me with an alien warmth. My muscles felt like steel cables, and my body, a perfect oiled machine. There was this physical sensation that I was at the apex of what my body could physically become, the tangible proof that conquering the impossible was by no means, impossible. It was me, at my most powerful. My senses were dialled to eleven, and I could sense both of their heartbeat, hear them inhale and exhale, feel the slight tremors on the ground from the slight shifting of my feet. The vision before my eyes upgraded, like I had been watching a movie on an old television, only to suddenly replace it with 4K.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale —
“START!”
My hands blurred into motion, whipping my wand left and right, flooding the air before me with orange streaks of light. The machine, sensing a tougher opponent, increased its speed and the range of its throws, but it was far, far below what I was expecting. I stared at the device apathetically, shooting down every single quaffle before it even diverged past the midway line. It threw seven of them in increasingly wider arcs, and I slanted my body, firing repeated hits, blasting all the balls in a perfect line before moving to my next kill as the scoreboard kept a record of my ever-increasing count.
“How’s he doing that?” I heard Susan murmur. An average person wouldn't be able to hear it from that far but to my ears, she sounded perfectly audible.
“Just wait,” murmured Amelia. “The machine has yet to reach its top speed.”
I smirked, and kept shooting down my targets, all the while looking at with a bored expression. The machine tirelessly increased its volleys, but it failed to stand against the reflexes of a werewolf. If I had to guess, the quaffles were shooting somewhere between fifty to sixty five miles per hour, which was around the same speed of the killing curse, with roughly fifty balls per minute across varying ranges and angles.
“Fast!” muttered Amelia.
“Isn’t it like… fifteen minutes already? Shouldn’t it have hit max speed?” asked Susan.
“Seventeen and it did,” said her aunt. “Thirteen minutes ago. He’s been casting blasting curses and striking true. The sheer power alone dwarfs most of our records, let alone that consistency. If his spell selection is half as good as his performance, I’d love to pit him against one of my best Aurors.”
“Or against you?” Susan quipped.
“Hush!” said Amelia. I couldn’t hear what she said afterward, having to concentrate on my game. At this speed, anything less than my fullest concentration would get bowled out. I blasted nine quaffles with an overpowered exploding curse, only to have to fall back to an impossible angle to catch a solo close to my blind spot. The constant struggle fed into my perk, and an irrational anger began to scratch past my rationality.
The Demon within me wanted out.
I had seen this before. When I pushed Hermione really far, her eyes went all silver and her movements blurred. She’d lose all sense of her humanity and come at me like a cat, shifting from two legs to four limbs, dodging and spinning and striking in ways no human would ever consider. It was why werewolves were kept away from learning magic — their physical skills were more than enough to prey upon the average wand wielder. A werewolf spellcaster was possibly one of the most dangerous opponents one could face out there.
That alone said a lot about how ridiculously weak and hopeless Remus Lupin was.
I was no werewolf, but the Natural Demon instilled a similar power within me. I had already reached the limits of my natural power but the Demon within me wanted more. It had been nailing the game since the very beginning and it would not be defeated, not now that the blasted machine was keeping me on my feet. I spun, twisted and threw my hands out, my wand spinning from right to left and back, never stopping, never halting, never once resting before the next curse. My body was already running on fumes, so it was dragging power out of places I had no business doing. My anger, my hatred, my rationality, my spirit — things that made me what I was, and reducing them into bestial instincts in exchange for impossible power.
I went faster.
To an outsider, it probably didn’t look like a continuous shower of spells. No, I was moving too fast for that. Instead there was a whip of orange light, a liquid flame arising out of my wand tip and slashing every single ball that entered my vicinity with ruthless prejudice.
“Impossible!” whispered Amelia as I bent sidewards, and lashed at five of my targets moving in an arc, aimed for my blind spot. My instincts predicted each and every single trajectory, and I slashed them into halves, exploding far after I was done with them. This was nothing, this was nothing, and I’d go on and on and on—
“Enough!” cried Amelia, and the machine stopped.
But the bestial instincts of Natural Demon didn’t care about any of that. It simply saw the machine was its foe and wanted to destroy it. Overwhelm it. By shutting it down, Amelia had effectively snatched its prey out of its paws, and my instincts wanted to grab Amelia by her throat and rip it apart in return. Its nature was beautiful violence, stark clarity, the most feral need to hunt, to fight, to protect territory and to kill.
I fought against that drive, repressed it, held it at bay. That savagery wasn’t meant for the incubus path I had taken up. It wasn’t even meant for the wizarding world. It was meant for the dark and the dangerous, and had no place in this warm mansion with bright lights and lively people.
Natural Demon Deactivated
A fluttering surge of pure terror went through me, and it was energy enough to let me rip all bestial instincts away from my thoughts. It fought me every inch of the way, howling, filled with raw lust for flesh and blood.
And then it was gone.
I lurched.
My body stilled and trembled, and my wand which had remained clenched within my palm like an extension of my being, rolled and slipped off my fingers and fell to the floor. My eyes bulged out, and I feared they’d fall out of their sockets. My body trembled, like a force of a dozen blasting curses had hit me all at once, and my knees gave away. I fell down to the ground, my jaw hanging open, reddish drool slipping out of it.
“Potter!” “Harry!” I heard them yell.
Damn it. And things were going so well too.
