A single Death Eater, without even resorting to genuine Dark magic in the technical sense, could kill hundreds of Muggles and destroy hundreds of millions of pounds' worth of Muggle property using nothing more than a handful of ordinary Severing Charms.
And the entire act, from first spell cast to final collapse, might take less than two minutes from start to finish.
To stamp such a threat out completely, to guarantee it could never happen again anywhere across the country, was simply, plainly, a fantasy.
"Surveillance Omnioculars—"
At the staff table, under the curious, immediately attentive gazes of the professors, Bryan said it calmly.
"Ah—"
Professor Flitwick let out a delighted, high-pitched exclamation, sitting up straighter in his chair.
"What a splendid idea, Bryan! Simply splendid!"
None of the professors present were strangers to this particular invention of Bryan's. Last year, during the Triwizard Tournament, Hogwarts had used exactly this technology to broadcast the champions' various heroics live to the audience across Europe.
A gleam flickered briefly in Dumbledore's deep blue eyes at the suggestion, though it settled back into its usual calm stillness almost immediately.
"I imagine that if you haven't already proposed this particular solution to the Ministry directly, the plan must carry some drawback that oughtn't be overlooked, Bryan?"
"A question of cost-effectiveness, primarily, Headmaster Dumbledore—"
Bryan said calmly, cutting into a greasy sausage on his own plate.
"You all know already that surveillance Omnioculars are essentially useless when deployed in small numbers—a handful scattered here and there catch almost nothing of real value.
To properly cover a city the size of London, you'd need something in the range of hundreds of thousands of individual units and even counting only the raw cost of materials involved, setting aside labour and enchantment work, that would run to several million Galleons."
'Several million Galleons!'
Not even the Ministry and the goblins working together, pooling their combined resources, had invested a sum anywhere close to that in constructing an entirely new wizarding town from the ground up, as the ongoing Diagon Alley reconstruction was already demonstrating.
And to spend such a staggering fortune purely on blanketing a single city in surveillance coverage was, frankly, when weighed against the Ministry's other pressing obligations, simply not a defensible use of those resources.
Britain, after all, had more than one major city beyond London to worry about. Birmingham, sitting at the heart of the Midlands. Manchester and Liverpool, both significant population centres in the Northwest. Edinburgh, further north, in Scotland.
And beyond even those named cities, there were the countless smaller villages and towns scattered across the countryside in between—each one were just as vulnerable and undefended.
There was, in short, no shortage of places for Death Eaters to wreak havoc for their own dark satisfaction. Even if the Ministry bankrupted itself in the attempt, pouring every available Galleon into surveillance infrastructure, it could never hope to cover them all comprehensively.
"As it happens, the Muggles themselves have developed technology of their own broadly similar to surveillance Omnioculars in function—"
Bryan said, thinking through as he spoke.
"If the Muggle government attempted to roll something like that out on a genuinely large scale, though, I imagine they'd meet considerable resistance from their own population. After all, not many people anywhere—Muggle or wizard are especially willing to have their every word and movement laid bare before their government's watching eyes."
"And even if the Muggle government were somehow willing to cooperate closely with the Ministry on something of this scope, this isn't remotely the kind of system that could be built and perfected overnight, Bryan—"
Dumbledore said, and Bryan gave a slight, acknowledging nod in response.
…..
Bryan was still turning the entire problem over in his mind even after he'd returned to his office later.
One couldn't simply set aside or ignore Muggle lives. But to those wizards who actually held power and understood the true scale of what protecting an entire population would require, pouring every available resource into preventing Muggles specifically from being harmed felt, in some sense, like missing the more pressing point of where limited resources could actually accomplish the most good.
Rolling out surveillance Omnioculars on a mass scale, covering every city and village across the country, simply wasn't realistic given the costs involved. But producing a smaller, targeted number and placing them specifically at key locations—that was entirely achievable, and worth doing properly.
The Muggle Prime Minister's official residence. The private homes and workplaces of the various Muggle government ministers. Critical pieces of civilian infrastructure that, if struck, would cause disproportionate harm.
Doing so would also, as a secondary benefit, help guard more directly against any Death Eater attempt to infiltrate the Ministry itself.
The area immediately around Hogwarts, too, and even Hogsmeade village and the edges of the Forbidden Forest, could reasonably stand to have a small number of monitoring points installed as an additional layer of protection.
He dashed off a detailed letter at his desk, setting down a full account of the tragedy that had just occurred in the Muggle world alongside his own warnings and specific recommendations for the targeted Omnioculars programme, then summoned an owl from the office window to send the whole thing off.
Only then did Bryan finally rise and walk out of his office at a brisk pace.
Ten minutes later, Bryan appeared at the door of the Physical Education classroom. The students scheduled for this particular session were already all present, seated and waiting.
The N.E.W.T.-level course within Physical Education.
There weren't many students in the room—only those who'd made it successfully through the gruelling basic training in earlier years and had since advanced into their sixth year and higher were present.
"Good morning, everyone—"
Bryan snapped his fingers with ease, and the desks, chairs, and even the lectern that had been stacked and piled up against the far wall all lifted smoothly into the air at once, unfolding themselves neatly into orderly rows across the classroom floor without a single collision or misstep.
"Cool—"
Fred let out an appreciative, low whistle at the casually tossed-off yet thoroughly dashing display of magic.
The Weasley twins, along with a handful of upper-year Gryffindor girls from the Quidditch team, Cedric of Hufflepuff, Cho Chang from Ravenclaw, and two upper-year Slytherins rounded out the room—Bryan's first-ever proper N.E.W.T. level class numbered fewer than ten students in total.
"Thank you all for that—"
Bryan set a spellbook down on the freshly reassembled lectern, saying it with a light laugh.
"So, how has the first week back at school treated all of you so far?"
A jumble of overlapping answers came back at once, students were describing their own particular impressions of the first few days back, the general mood in the room was clearly high-spirited and comfortable.
"I heard—"
Fred raised a hand high, grinning.
"That Meditation class—Professor Rahansen mentioned it was on your recommendation specifically that Hogwarts started offering a course like that in the first place?"
"Ah, that's right."
Bryan nodded, smiling faintly at the question.
"What do you all think of Professor Rahansen's Meditation class so far? Has it been of any help to you yet?"
"Well, I'm not entirely sure, Professor Watson. We've only had it the one time so far—"
Fred said, clearly working up to something.
"But if Professor Rahansen keeps training us to just… zone out, I'm not convinced we're getting our money's worth."
A ripple of genuine laughter went through the small classroom at that.
"Ah, getting properly started really isn't easy with that particular discipline, no. But I'm quite confident Professor Rahansen can help all of you make great strides forward with it, given enough time and patience."
Bryan said, still smiling simply.
"And what about you, Professor Watson?" Alicia asked, chin propped on one hand, clearly intrigued.
"Have you managed to make proper sense of meditation yourself?"
"Ah, I haven't, actually—but then, I don't especially need to, for my own purposes."
Bryan said it plainly, without any particular self-consciousness.
"Why not?"
"There are a thousand different roads that all, in the end, lead to the same destination, Alicia. I have a road of my own that already gets me where I need to go. Well then—" He clapped his hands together once, briskly, shifting the room's attention. "—enough chit-chat for now. Let's actually begin the lesson."
The heavy curtains slid shut across the tall windows with a soft, decisive snap, and one torch after another around the classroom's walls flared to life in sequence, lending an air of mystery and anticipation to the already spacious Physical Education classroom.
Up to this point, across their entire history in this class—now officially, renamed Duelling Training on the Hogwarts timetable—they had endured no shortage of gruelling drills under Bryan's instruction.
Every single one had been, without exception, brutal in its own particular way. But also, undeniably, and somewhat to everyone's surprise genuinely great fun.
Every student in the room stared toward Professor Watson now, buzzing with anticipation, quietly wondering to themselves what fiendishly difficult new drill was about to be unveiled specifically for this small, advanced N.E.W.T. class.
And then Professor Watson's actual next move left every single one of them thoroughly disappointed.
Professor Watson, standing calmly at the lectern, gave his wand a single flick, and with a soft, quiet pop, a thick stack of spellbooks appeared suspended in midair, distributing themselves automatically out until one settled neatly on each student's desk.
On the black hardcover binding, silver-green script spelled out the title in elegant lettering: Analysis of Common Spell Structures.
The author's name, engraved just below the centre of the cover in the same silver-green ink, made even the Weasley twins who usually dozed off within minutes at the mere sight of any big book—gape in astonishment.
"This is your own book?"
Cedric looked over at Professor Watson with unmistakable admiration written his face.
"That's right, it is—"
Bryan said, his tone entirely calm despite the reaction rippling through the room.
"I compiled this particular volume myself, over quite some time. It's simply never been released for any kind of public sale."
He stepped out from behind the lectern and began pacing slowly before the small row of desks.
"Up to this point, all of you have been put through some rather punishing training within this class, term after term. As far as I'm concerned, that training has already given you enough self-defence capability that most adult wizards would be no match for you."
The students straightened their backs almost in unison, faces glowing with unmistakable pride at the assessment.
After all, this was genuinely high praise—sincere praise, at that, carrying real weight coming from Bryan Watson himself.
"But going forward from here, if you want to improve any further beyond where you currently stand, I'm afraid that's going to prove considerably more difficult than anything you've faced in this classroom so far—"
Bryan's next words sent a small, distinct chill rippling through the students all the same, cutting through the earlier pride.
"If you want to break free of your current limits and truly refine your duelling skill, there are, as I understand it, only two viable ways to actually accomplish that. The first is to stand on the front lines against genuine evil, and let the trial of blood and fire polish what you've already learned until it's rendered flawless through sheer necessity."
That particular path was impossible for any of them. They might technically be of age now but at the end of the day, they remained students who hadn't yet graduated.
Hogwarts would never, under any circumstance, send them off to an actual battlefield simply to season their skills through real danger.
"As for the other available way—"
Bryan, now perched casually against the edge of the lectern, patted the spellbook resting beside him, smiling faintly.
"It's to lay a proper foundation instead—to truly understand, at a structural level, the magic you've already learned to cast, rather than simply repeating the wand movements from memory."
"You mean—"
Cho Chang of Ravenclaw asked, her eyes were narrowing slightly with intensive attention.
"—we're going to relearn all our existing spells from scratch?"
"In a certain sense, you could look at it that way—"
Bryan said, arms crossing over his chest.
"But I should warn you all now, my standards for this are going to be considerably higher than Professor Flitwick's. I'm going to walk each of you through a deep breakdown of the structural patterns underlying every single spell you've already learned across your years here, help you properly understand the actual purpose behind every individual part of that structure—and then, once that foundation is properly laid, I'll expect every one of you to go on and create magic entirely your own—"
Looking out over the students, several of whom had quietly begun breaking into a cold sweat at the sheer scope of what was being described, Bryan gave a smile that could only be called fiendish.
"And if what you eventually bring me doesn't genuinely impress me, I'm afraid I won't be letting any of you graduate from Hogwarts quite so easily as you might currently be hoping."
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