AN: 440/300 followers on my new original story, which means another quick update, yay! It also means there will be another one tomorrow (again)! This is a time of joy, a time of celebration, the best of times, and the worst of times…
Check it out on RoyalRoad and drop a follow:Time Looping for Dummies by Bor902
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"Elections coming up soon," Cedric said from his side of the yellow and black couch in the Hufflepuff common room.
"You can't even vote, why do you care?" Penny grumbled, her nose buried firmly in a book on Potions. She was still hesitating on when to take the advancement exam for the class.
Harry thought she should do it as soon as possible. Skipping the fourth year was easier than doing the O.W.L. one year early without having attended the classes.
"My dad works at the ministry, it might be important for his job," the brown-haired boy replied.
Harry trawled his mind for a memory about what kind of job Amos Diggory had. "Are the two candidates that split on how to control and regulate magical creatures?" he asked once he'd remembered.
Cedric nodded enthusiastically. "Of course! My dad says Fudge is more ambivalent and likely to keep the status quo on that, not lightening or harshening restrictions despite that werewolf he killed last year. Potter, on the other hand, has a few…" he hesitated. "Let's just say controversial opinions."
Harry raised an eyebrow. "What, he probably wants to give them more rights. More work for the department, if anything, always needs more hands when things get restructured."
"Well, Dad says that for all he's friends with the Potters, that part of James' policy suggestions isn't really doing him any favours. People don't want to suddenly have fewer regulations, especially after last year's attacks. If anything, they want more, so Fudge's position should have been bringing in the critique, but considering the radicalness of the other proposal…"
Penny rolled her eyes and delivered some words of wisdom from the mouth of babes. "The average British witch, or wizard, would prefer digging up their dead ancestors and desecrating their bodies than giving more rights to goblins, merfolk, or centaurs."
"Hear, hear," Harry muttered. "So Potter's fucked then?" he asked. His mind drifted back to the conversation he'd had with Neville after duelling a few weeks ago. The boy had told him that Christmas had been a bit gloomy due to political developments, or rather, the lack of political developments.
"Fudge isn't too stupid," he decided. "Potter's a radical and everyone knows it. Unless extremists are willing to be inflammatory, it's better to confront them with neutrality. Most would prefer to preserve a bad status quo than try to work towards a better one. That way, Fudge becomes the main candidate of the conservative factions while also getting the not too progressive liberals into his camp."
Cedric shrugged helplessly. "Seems like it, although I guess we won't be able to know for sure until the elections."
Harry snorted. Britain was a country of which the muggle part had been castrating World War 2 heroes for homosexuality as close as 40 years ago. The magical part, if anything, was even more stuck in the past.
Turned out that when you had a society in which people could easily live up to 200, you had less advancement as the scales of democratic power rested firmly in the hands of people over the age of 50. Not really the most shining demographic of progressivism in any country.
"Will be a good experience for Potter, maybe he'll learn something from it," he said dismissively. "For example, how to lie better."
"You're very fast to write him off," Penny commented as she continued reading.
"I'm sorry, but I guess I don't currently have a lot of optimism coursing through my veins." Quirrell's attempt on the stone was moving closer, Neville and his group were becoming more paranoid, and the general atmosphere of the castle was slowly worsening as the end-of-year exams moved closer inch by inch.
Cedric quirked an eyebrow. "Why, everything's going great," he said somewhat affrontedly.
Harry guessed that his friends wouldn't know about the dark lord, or the prophecy, or the still ongoing Horcrux hunt. He sighed. He hoped this shit could finish quickly so he could still enjoy the tail-end of the 90s. His actual birth year, the one from his last life, was coming up soon. He knew his parents didn't exist in this world, so neither would he, but still, it would be an interesting experience. One that would be all the more pleasurable if it hadn't happened in the middle of a war. That would be great.
"Maybe I'm just stressed about exams," Harry thus said evasively, causing both his friends to whip-lash their heads towards him, Penny abandoning her book.
"You, worried about exams?" Cedric asked with a wide-open mouth.
"What am I supposed to do if you're worried?" Penny complained. "Cry in a corner."
Harry shrugged. "It's a tough year, alright," he said. "Arithmancy O.W.L., it ain't easy."
"It's one O.W.L., how are you going to handle the other five coming at the same time?" Cedric asked incredulously. The flame in the fireplace behind him roared, underscoring his message.
Harry huffed and crossed his arms. "Why didn't you come to the duelling session?" he suddenly asked, switching the topic. He actually was a bit salty about that.
His two friends paused awkwardly before sharing a look.
"We were wondering how to address this," Cedric suddenly said very seriously.
"We were making a presentation!" Penny piped up.
"It had charts."
"And graphs!"
Harry looked at the two of them with a deadpan expression. He was surprised that two magic-raised kids even knew what a graph was. Was he starting to rub off on them, or were they just regurgitating phrases they'd heard without knowing the meaning? "Charts and graphs about what?" he asked.
Another awkward look flew through the room.
"Well, I don't know how to say this, really," Cedric started slowly.
"We think you're paranoid," Penny suddenly interrupted bluntly, chopping down a hand declaratively.
Cedric awkwardly rubbed the back of his head. "We kinda noticed that you treat the duelling sessions as some sort of training for war. Different team constellations, shouts about constant vigilance and spells that mimic the colour of the killing curse."
Harry had stolen that idea from Quirrell.
"It's just not quite as fun if we were just duelling?" Cedric finished weakly.
"Is everything all right?" Penny added.
Harry hung his head. Of course, they wouldn't get it. They were two teenagers who didn't know the potential shitstorm approaching magical Britain. He'd try to make the duelling fun, like a game, but it was obvious that he'd been seen through at least to some extent.
"Everyone needs to know how to protect themselves," Harry argued weakly, causing his friends to share another look.
"I don't know Harry, Quirrell's a pretty good DADA professor, I mean, you respect him enough that you have tutoring with him after this," Cedric said. "Maybe we should just let him do his job?"
"It's a bit exhausting to attend normal classes and then fight for our lives on the weekends as well," Penny contributed.
"So, you guys want to stop coming?" he asked, receiving two shakes of the head.
"Maybe just not every weekend, alright? Once a month, you have Neville over there anyway, Harley too, and Hermione since recently?" Cedric asked.
Harry shrugged. There was honestly nothing he could do here. He couldn't tell his friends that Voldemort might not be as dead as people thought and that many Death Eaters had only hung up their masks temporarily while they waited for their master to return. In that case, it was good to accept that he'd squeezed the two of them for as many sessions as he already had; it had probably raised their survivability by at least a bit, although he was mostly worried about Cedric. He shot the brown-haired boy with an appraising look.
"You might look stupid," Harry eventually decided. "But I think you'll at least duck or something when you hear the incantation of the killing curse one day."
Cedric put a hand to his heart proudly. "Thanks, Harry, that means a lot coming from you," he said.
Harry then turned to Penny. "Just run if something happens. The war effort will need high-quality potions more than they'll need another body in the meat grinder," he warned.
Penny flipped her long blonde braid over her shoulder and rolled her eyes. She gave him a sloppy salute. "Aye, general," she said sarcastically. She was starting to enter her mean girl era. Hormones, what could you do?
The redhead nodded. "At least you're taking this with some of the gravitas required. War seems impossible until it suddenly happens, and then it's too late to think." He looked at the clear March sky outside one of the windows with a far-away look. "Fought by muggles or magicals, war, war never changes. Abrupt, destructive, senseless, it comes and it reaps."
"Mate," Cedric said gently, leaning over and putting a hand on Harry's shoulder. "What the fuck are you talking about? We're thirteen years old."
Harry only shook his head. "If only that mattered," he said with a sigh.
-/-
Harry dropped to the ground, rolled underneath a green spell and shot back with his own small barrage of mildly cursed flames.
Quirrell, still barely moving, sent out a widespread bombardment curse which dispersed the fire before travelling towards Harry and threatening to smash him into the ground.
Jokes on the professor, however, that was exactly what Harry had been aiming for. A twitch of his left hand wandlessly dispelled enough of the incoming kinetic force for Harry to slip through, before a barrage of disarming jinxes escaped his wand as he advanced towards the purple-robed man.
Quirrell smirked self-satisfiedly at the attempt and withdrew for the first time, taking one, two steps back as he quickly deflected each of the incoming disarming jinxes. Then, as a stunning spell mixed itself amongst the disarming jinxes, his brows furrowed, and he cast a wide-area shield which seamlessly absorbed Harry's barrage.
"Clever," he complimented. "But no real wizard relies only on their sight," he said to Harry, who had tried to take advantage of the fact that deflections necessitated knowing what spell was coming to unfurl their maximum potential.
"Made you step back," Harry returned provocatively.
Quirrell, for his part, simply snorted, a dark glint entering his eyes. His wand twitched in his hand, and the barely visible shield he'd cast suddenly rippled, before dozens of beams of red burst out of it like the spines of an angry porcupine and shot at Harry.
The student, for his part, swept his wand out in front of him, summoning a swarm of wasps to the front. They absorbed the spells before swarming at Quirrell.
"Transfiguration, bug boy?" the professor asked mockingly. "I'm glad you're finally expanding your repertoire. But, well, insects, quite fragile, just like you," he finished before waving his wand in the air and putting a palm up to his mouth.
As the wasps buzzed towards him, he puffed his cheeks before exhaling a great gout of purple flames which billowed out in all directions around him to form a tornado of fire with Quirrell at the epicentre.
Harry felt some darkness in the flames, likely signifying it to be a spell that was bordering on dark. A normal shield wasn't going to cut it, and while he assumed that Quirrell had good control of his pyrotechnics, he wasn't willing to risk a visit to the hospital wing on the man's mental stability, as impacted as it likely was by the drinking of unicorn blood.
Thankfully, he'd recently learned a neat trick to dealing with cursed flames. He threw his wand upwards moments before he was to be engulfed in the roaring purple flames.
"Aqua Eruptio!" He screamed with no little amount of desperation to his voice. The purple flames already burned on his skin, and they hadn't even touched him yet.
A gout of water erupted from his wand, the tip of which was connected to the elemental plane of water. The water spouted down to form a protective shield around Harry, which the purple flames crashed against, hissing and spitting.
Then, the water truly erupted, forming the heads of large snakes and the bodies of winding dragons as the liquid continued to coalesce around Harry. The room was being lost in a battle of deep blue magical water and cursed purple flame, clashing against each other in violent crashes. Water had an advantage over fire, but Quirrell was obviously a more powerful wizard than Harry, so the clash lasted longer than it should have. But, well, elemental advantages had to matter sometime and after a few more seconds, the purple fire receded before disappearing, revealing, for the first time, a truly surprised looking Quirrell.
The water had stopped flowing at this point, submerging the room completely and reaching up to the knees of both duellists present. The dragons and snakes stopped forming.
But…
Before wand magic, Harry had been honing his sorcery for nearly a decade. On only three subjects at that. Pyromancy, telekinesis and hydromancy. The water was there, his water, and his sorcery was amplified by the trusty elder wood and phoenix ash wand in his hand.
He ripped his hands to the side, taking a low stance as he mustered every bit of willpower he had and concentrated it to a single point. He clenched his fists.
The water the room was submerged in suddenly surged into activity again and snapped towards Quirrell, travelling up the man's legs, torso and arms, all in less than a second. It bound him, and Harry now controlled a man-sized ball of water with the professor trapped inside, listlessly constrained by the magical element.
Harry then remembered the exercise he'd been working on so far back as when he'd first gotten his wand. Creating a ball of water, back then barely fist-sized, and freezing it.
The sphere of water holding up Quirrell suddenly frosted over, veins of ice travelling further and further inside so as to freeze the man into a popsicle.
That was when Harry felt it. A surge. Sheer power erupted from the man, nearly blinding Harry's magic sense and overwhelming the background signature of Hogwarts with effortless ease. The ice sphere cracked open, and Quirrell gently floated to the ground, his feet plopping wetly back into the water. The ice shards from the destroyed sphere, now out of Harry's control, floated in the air behind him. The look in Quirrell's eyes was… indecipherable. Partially proud, furious, intrigued and perhaps, perhaps all the way in the back, in there where instincts hid and disguised their expressions as rationality, was a hint of fear.
"You are playing with forces beyond your comprehension," the man said in a stilted calm, as if controlling his voice, before looking around the completely wrecked room. The tables and chairs that had been cast aside were burnt to a crisp, submerged in water. The stone walls were covered in soot, and the decorations were scattered about. At some point during the duel, the protections protecting the room had broken like an egg thrown against a mountain. "But are you ready to step into the realm of magic few have ever even glimpsed?" he asked. He clapped his hands, wands clasped in the middle, above his head. The ice shards behind him, numerous and sharp, turned all point towards Harry, who jutted his chin defiantly at the man.
"YOLO," Harry said simply, the adrenaline and exhilaration from the highest level of combat he'd ever experienced coursing through his veins like hot fire.
"So be it," Quirrell replied. Another pulse of magic, and all the ice shards behind him turned into black glass. He seemed to hesitate before shaking his head.
Then the shards of glass, transfigured so Harry really lost all control over the element he had summoned, hurled towards him, leaving behind black streaks of light.
Harry raised his wand in the split second before he would have gotten impaled and cut to shreds.
He had been untransfiguring and transfiguring incoming projectiles for two years now, starting with James Potter all the way back at the start of year two. He had gotten quite decent at it as well. If Quirrell was nice enough not to add an enchantment to the shards, then there was nothing stopping him from protecting himself in the only way that was feasible. A shield would have buckled under the pressure; a bombarda would have simply caused him to be blinded by glass dust.
The only thing that could stop such a multifaceted attack was… Harry formed his intent. A transparent white pane of magic erupted into existence in front of him. The black shards of glass didn't crash against the shield, but simply passed through it.
Just not in the way that they had arrived. A snowstorm buffeted against Harry as each glass shard dissolved into a bundle of snowflakes. Untransfigurating the shards might simply revert them back into ice, just as deadly, but through the symbolic original form, transfiguring the shards into snow was the best way to go about it.
The shards kept coming for several seconds, all of them turning into snow as Harry's focus refused to waver. Could not waver.
Then it suddenly stopped. The transfiguration shield, formed from the principles Harry had been learning for the mist spell, a temporary area enchantment of transfiguration, dropped.
Revealed behind the now-gone field of white was the purple-robed professor looking down at Harry impassively.
Wait, looking down? Harry tilted his head to look down and realised he had sunk to his knees at some point during the barrage. He was now resting on a pile of wet white slush.
He looked back up. Quirrell was now closer, but the man was swaying left and right in a weird approximation of a dance.
Harry suddenly felt something slimy travelling up his throat. He lowered his head and upchucked the contents of his stomach onto the ground. The slushpile became brown and bile-yellow.
"You overexerted yourself," Quirrell said calmly as he kneeled down in the slush next to Harry and steadied the boy with a hand on his shoulder.
Harry passed out before he heard the second part of the sentence.
"I'm proud of you."
-/-
AN: Maybe some explanation here. Why is Harry so comfortable taking lessons from Voldemort? It's because nothing has happened for any of the other lessons, so he's getting complacent. During this battle, I tried to depict how Harry is progressing beyond being simply a master of the basics, but is also starting to approach the deeper aspects of magic, elemental planes, large-scale transfigurations, enchantments mixed with transfigurations etc. Trying not to make him too op, but he's been intensively studying magic for a long time now. Ever since he was basically 3 years old, he has spent several hours a day, sometimes more than 10. I mean, wouldn't you if you suddenly discovered you had magic? Now Harry is at the stage of finding out that his foundations are so solid in terms of pyromancy, hydromancy, magical theory and simple magical control that spells considered immensely difficult simply aren't.