He waited for the plant's bark to deflate, then slipped the sharp edge of the brass shears right at the stem's base.
Snip.
The stem severed cleanly. Not a single thorn discharged.
Beside him, Marcus was faring considerably worse. He snipped blindly at a side stem, pinching the plant's tissue too hard.
Pop! Pop!
Two soft thorns ejected instantly, snapping against Marcus's goggles with a dull thwack.
"Gah!" Marcus ducked, dropping his shears onto the wooden table with a loud rattle. "It's targeting me! I swear it aiming for my eyes!"
Across the table, Rosalind had already pruned three stems with precision, placing each trimmed branch neatly onto her tray without triggering a single thorn release.
Professor Sprout waddled down the central aisle, her sharp eyes scanning the tables. She then tapped the bench with her shears, bringing the class's attention back to her.
"Alright, settle down! Pruning is only half the job," Sprout called out. "Now we move to fluid extraction."
"You'll be draining the pus into these," Sprout said, dropping small glass vials at the end of each table. "And don't forget to add three drops of Essence of Murtlap to close the opening."
Aegeus made his incision exactly where Sprout had pointed, catching the thick, yellow-green sap as it gushed into his vial.
Beside him, Marcus's plant let out a small, wet noise of protest as he finally found the seam on his second attempt. Rosalind's plant, meanwhile, had already gone slack in its tray, her vial full before either of them had finished.
"Show-off," Marcus muttered, not looking up.
Sprout moved down the row, checking vials as she went, nodding at some, pausing a beat longer at others. She stopped at Rosalind's.
"Very good," she said. "You're quite handy with knives."
"Mm."
She didn't push, already moving on. "Don't forget to rinse your gloves before you take them off."
By the end of the period, the trays had been cleared, and the vials lined up on Sprout's desk, each one labeled in cramped first-year handwriting. Marcus eyed his own with visible relief that it was over. Rosalind was already peeling her gloves off.
Outside, the bell rang faintly through the greenhouse glass. Sprout waved them out, already ushering in the next class, and the three of them filed out into the cooler air past the vegetable patches.
~~~
The flying field sat past the greenhouses, a stretch of clipped grass ringed by old stone markers worn smooth with age, twenty broomsticks laid out in a neat row waiting for them when the first-years arrived.
Madam Hooch was already pacing the line when they got there, a thin witch with cropped grey hair and yellow eyes like a hawk. She didn't wait for them to settle before speaking.
"Put your right hand over your broom," she said, "and firmly say 'Up!'"
A ragged chorus of "up" went down the line. Most of the brooms twitched and rolled uselessly in the grass. One, belonging to a nervous-looking Ravenclaw boy, shot straight up and hit him right on the chin before he could react, and he staggered back clutching his jaw while a few people laughed, before Hooch's glare shut them up.
Marcus's broom snapped up into his hand on the first word, no hesitation in it at all, and he caught it out of the air with confidence.
"Show-off," Rosalind said, getting back at him, hers rising a beat later.
Aegeus's rose smoothly on the first try too, settling into his hand with no more drama than picking up a quill.
"Now mount!" Hooch called, moving down the row to check grips. "When I say go, you kick off, hover, and land. Nothing more than that, you hear me?!"
She corrected two grips, told a Ravenclaw girl to stop death-gripping the handle like it owed her money.
"Go!" she said.
The line rose together, unevenly— a few shot up too fast and wobbled, overreacting so hard that they nearly spiraled themselves sideways; a few barely cleared a foot off the ground before losing their nerve and touching back down.
Marcus went up easily, he hovered with a loose posture— not perfect, a slight wobble when a gust caught him, but the kind of small adjustment that came from long hours of practice.
Rosalind rose just after him, more careful, watching the broom the way she would watch a wild animal, reacting to it as she went rather than trusting it outright, and settled into a steady hover a moment behind him.
Aegeus rose evenly and stopped level with the others. The broom responded to each subtle shift of his weight— neither fast nor slow, but precise. The kind of control that came from paying close attention rather than talent. He held there without drifting.
"Land it now! Gently. I don't want to hear a single one of you tumble down like a sack of potatoes."
Marcus's landing was clean, an easy step down. Aegeus touched down without a sound.
"Better than expected, this lot," Hooch said, already moving to collect the brooms. "Same time next week. Try not to forget everything by then."
They walked back up toward the castle together, Marcus considerably more pleased with himself than he had been walking down.
~~~
Sunlight slanting in through a tall window, dust motes drifting lazily in the light. He had claimed an empty corridor near the base of a rarely-used staircase for his free period before Charms.
He sat with his back against the cool stone, a stack of borrowed library books beside him, all of them on dueling— proper dueling theory, footwork diagrams. Chapters on distance and timing. A slim volume titled Practical Defence for the Younger Witch or Wizard, which turned out to contain the clearest explanation of a proper Shield Charm he had found anywhere.
Protego came first, since all the books agreed it was one of the most important charms for dueling. He worked through the wand movement slowly, without casting— no incantation spoken aloud, just the motion itself, over and over, until his wrist stopped hesitating over every turn.
_________________________________________________________________________
TO BE CONTINUED
I forgot to add his Physics passive. That's what he used to calculate the ball trajectory.
[Kinetic Vectors] Reach Level 10 in Physics
Passively senses force, mass, acceleration, and trajectory within his immediate surroundings.
~~~
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