Moody's words hit like a slap across the face, and the air over the entire pitch went still.
The sunlight seemed to lose its warmth.
Students gasped. An invisible hand clamped around their throats.
Even the Slytherins, who wore cold composure like a second uniform, had unease written plainly on their faces.
Draco's color drained in an instant, leaving him pale as waterlogged parchment. His lips moved. He seemed to be searching for something to say in defense of his two idiot lackeys.
But under the gaze of Moody's wildly spinning electric-blue Magical Eye, every word died in his throat. Not a single syllable made it out.
Moody gave him no time to find them.
He jabbed his walking stick forward, and an invisible force shoved Crabbe and Goyle stumbling into the octagonal ring.
"One Shield Charm! At me!"
His voice carried the grating quality of metal dragged across stone.
"Imagine I'm the Auror who broke into your homes and dragged your worthless fathers off to Azkaban!"
This so-called test had been nothing but undisguised aggression from the first second. Curse after curse burst from the tip of Moody's wand, pelting them as densely as hail.
That wasn't teaching. It was punishment.
Red Stunning Spells, purple Binding Jinxes, weaving together into something that looked a lot like a net.
The two boys scrambled in a frantic, clumsy, pathetic mess.
Fear twisted Crabbe and Goyle's magic before it could form properly. The Shield Charms they managed to throw up were dim and thin as a dragonfly's wing. Moody's curses didn't even need a direct hit. A graze along the edge was enough, and the fragile blue light shattered, scattering into drifting sparks.
Eventually, Moody couldn't even be bothered with offensive spells.
He flicked his wand.
"Leg-Locker Curse."
The simplest, most basic version. It wrapped around both boys' ankles and dropped them hard. Their bodies hit the grass with two dull thuds, sprawling in complete disarray.
"Get up!"
Moody's wooden leg slammed into the ground. The boom rang out across the ring.
"Your fathers at least knew how to wag their tails for their master! And you?" He let the silence stretch for exactly one brutal second. "Just going to lie there and shake like slugs?"
"Is that all the spawn of Death Eaters can do?"
Every word was a poison-tipped blade. He drove them in one by one, into two boys who were already alone and terrified.
Around the ring, the students watched with varied expressions. Scattered snickers drifted from the corners of the crowd — faint, but sharp. Others felt something they couldn't name and quietly looked away.
Draco's face cycled through green, then white, then settled into something harder. Humiliation. He clenched his fists until his knuckles went pale, then jerked his head to the side and refused to look at the ring anymore.
Inside it, Crabbe was trembling. He gathered everything he had and raised his wand, as if one hex might salvage a crumb of dignity.
The tip hadn't even started to glow.
"Expelliarmus!"
Moody's flick was almost casual. Crabbe's wand ripped free and spun through the air in a weak arc before planting itself in the earth at the ring's edge.
"A coward's attack is no different from a mosquito's buzz!"
"Professor!"
Hermione finally broke. She stepped forward, her voice cutting clean through the oppressive quiet.
"They're just students! What you're doing isn't fair!"
Moody's electric-blue Magical Eye turned toward her. Slowly. Almost mechanically, notch by notch.
"Fair, Miss Granger?" His voice was hoarse and icy. "When the Killing Curse is flying at your face, it won't stop to discuss fairness." He let that sit for a moment. "Only your reaction, your spell, can save your life."
Up in the stands, the gentle smile Albus Dumbledore had been wearing all morning finally disappeared.
He frowned.
"Alastor is going too far."
"He's forging them." Douglas said it calmly, refilling his cup with lightly sweetened milk tea. "Or rather, shattering them. The line between the two is thin. But sometimes, without being shattered first, there's no reshaping."
As if on cue.
Moody suddenly bellowed and thrust his wand skyward.
"Protego Maxima!"
A Shield Charm erupted outward from him in a wave. Not the thin, brittle kind the boys had been throwing up — this one rippled like something dredged from the deep ocean, layer upon layer, spreading to swallow the entire octagonal ring whole. It carried a weight that felt genuinely indestructible.
This was the kind of precise, absolute control over magic that only a top-tier Auror could manage.
He held it for a long moment, then dropped it and turned to Harry.
The shift in his manner was immediate. He was still severe. That didn't change. But the naked malice was gone. He looked at Harry the way a battle-scarred veteran looks at an unpolished recruit. Measuring. Not contemptuous. Just measuring.
"Potter! You've faced him!"
"Don't tell me you survived on luck!"
The last word was barely out before a Disarming Charm tore through the air with a sharp whistle, straight at Harry's face.
Harry twisted aside. Red light grazed past his ear and left a trail of scorching heat in its wake. He raised his wand and tried to counter.
But Moody's attack came like a storm. One spell after another, no gaps, no breath.
Disarming Charm. Stunning Spell. Impediment Jinx.
Light strobed wildly across the ring. Harry threw up a Shield Charm and kept backing away, barely holding on.
"Too weak! Too weak!" Moody's roar was soaked in frustration. "At your age, James could dodge three curses at once and still put a bow on his opponent's eyebrows!"
The pressure was enormous. It pressed down on Harry's shoulders like a physical weight. His mind went blank — every standard drill, every casting sequence, every carefully memorized technique from class evaporated into nothing.
He stopped thinking. Stopped calculating.
Dodge. Block. Counter.
Most of it was pure reflex.
After slipping one tricky curse, he hadn't even fully regained his footing. His body was still half-crouched. But his wrist flicked anyway, on instinct, and a Disarming Charm flew.
In that fractured second, he finally understood what those near-torturous physical and reaction drills in Douglas's class had actually been for.
The corner of Moody's mouth twitched upward. Just barely. Just for an instant.
"Not completely hopeless."
Outside the ring, Draco had not stopped watching Harry. His expression was layered and ugly with it , jealousy, resentment, and something else underneath that he hadn't yet identified. A kind of confusion he hadn't let himself look at directly.
Those dodging angles. Those counterattacks thrown from impossible positions at the edge of control.
He recognized them. They were shadows of what Professor Holmes had explained in class , theories he had dismissed with a sneer. And here they were, working. On Harry Potter, of all people, demonstrating a kind of practical effectiveness that made Draco's jaw tighten.
The practical session was winding down.
Every student looked wrung out. Their nerves had been stretched to the edge of snapping, like rubber bands pulled too far. Moody's Magical Eye swept slowly over the crowd, and every student whose gaze it caught felt their stomach drop.
Then Moody's head came up sharply. His eyes, both the real one and the electric-blue one, cut across the distance like arrows and locked onto Douglas in the stands.
"The children's games are over."
His voice wasn't loud. It didn't need to be.
"Professor Holmes." He let the name land. "Enjoy the show?"
---
PS: Daily Question.
Which of the following statements about "Dueling Environment Factors" is incorrect? ( )
A. In confined spaces such as corridors, large-area spells like Incendio should be avoided.
B. Rain weakens Fire Spells but increases the impact force of Water-Jet Spells.
C. In dark environments, Lumos provides illumination but also reveals your position.
D. When dueling in snow, Freezing Spells have a shorter duration because low temperatures suppress magical effects.
➤ Next: A Lethal Threat with Every Step! The Oppressive Aura of Holmes
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