The wind died.
The entire Quidditch pitch sank into a strange, stretched silence.
Sunlight fell across Moody's scarred face but couldn't reach whatever storm was brewing in his good eye.
Not a trace of fear. Not a flicker.
This was a man who had walked out of the blood-soaked ruin of the First Wizarding War. In his eyes, there was only prey.
"Ventus!"
Moody's roar split the silence. His wand carved a brutal circle in front of him, and a whirlwind erupted from nothing , visible to the naked eye, raw and vicious.
It didn't blow toward Douglas. It swept sideways, crashing into the two golden swarms with surgical precision. The gale tore through their formations like an invisible fist, scattering bees in every direction. They tumbled and spun through the air, stripped of any offensive capability in an instant.
Before the whirlwind had even faded, Moody was already turning.
He didn't spare the scattered bees a glance. His wooden leg hit the platform with a heavy crack, anchoring him. His wand jabbed out in quick succession.
"Impedimenta!"
Two invisible barriers snapped into existence at his flanks, solid as walls. The charging golden monks hit them at full speed. Two dull, bone-jarring thuds rang out. Their massive frames shook , and held there, stopped dead.
Two threats. Both directions. Neutralized in under three seconds.
Moody's electric-blue Magical Eye had never stopped moving. It cut through every distraction, every illusion, and locked onto the only enemy that mattered: the man standing at the center of the platform.
Douglas moved.
Not like a fighter. Not like a duelist.
His footsteps were weightless, unpredictable , every shift of his weight, every extension of his arm, carrying the unhurried grace of a white crane in flight. He wasn't walking into a fight. He was stepping into a dance someone had already choreographed for him, and he knew every move.
The students below the platform nearly forgot to breathe.
This wasn't what dueling was supposed to look like. No blinding exchanges of spell fire. No deafening detonations. Just one side's brute force and the other's effortless composure, pulled taut between them like a wire about to snap.
Then Douglas's silhouette blurred. An afterimage hung in the air where he'd stood.
The Golden Scale Sword's tip drew a cold arc through the air and drove straight at Moody's Shield Charm.
The corner of Moody's mouth curled into something cruel.
Using a Transfigured object to punch through a top Auror's Shield Charm?
Naive.
The expected crack of colliding magic never came.
CLANG!
Clean. Sharp. Metal on metal , ringing out across the entire arena like a bell strike.
Not the sound of spellwork. The sound of two real blades meeting in honest combat.
The tip of the Golden Scale Sword pressed against the blue light-shield Moody had thrown up, and ripples spread outward from the point of contact in violent, concentric waves.
"You think this is a toy?!"
Moody's wand blazed. He drove more power into the Shield Charm, trying to blast Douglas backward , sword, body, all of it.
Douglas flicked his wrist.
The blade didn't fight the force. It curved with it, riding the edge of the shield in a smooth, unhurried arc, sliding away from the densest point of magical concentration like water finding a path downhill.
Moody dropped the Shield Charm immediately, already recalibrating, braced for Douglas's follow-up.
He never saw it coming.
A bolt of gray-white light shot from the sword tip without warning.
"Petrificus Totalus!"
Moody's pupils snapped to pinpoints.
He had never, in thirty years of combat, imagined an attack coming from that angle, in that form.
This sword.
It wasn't just a blade. It wasn't just a wand. It was both.
Combat instinct older than conscious thought took over. Moody stopped caring what the students thought of him. He threw himself sideways in an ugly, scrambling roll. The Petrificus Totalus skimmed the edge of his cloak and hit the platform floor behind him, leaving a spreading patch of gray stone where it landed.
The duel changed register in that single moment.
Moody came up off the ground fast, the disdain scrubbed clean from his face, replaced by something harder and colder. He was done holding back. He emptied out , a rapid-fire sequence dense enough to pin down a small squad of dark wizards, spells pouring from his wand in a relentless chain. Stunning Spells. Impediment Jinxes. Blasting Curses that hit like hammers. The beams wove together into a wall of light that sealed off every forward path Douglas might take.
Between bursts, Moody flicked his wand sideways at the two golden monks who had finally clawed free of the barriers.
"Verdimillious!"
The platform floor liquefied into churning bog. Both monks plunged in up to their knees, thrashing uselessly, going nowhere.
Against the storm, Douglas moved like a crane riding a current.
He batted the trickiest spells aside with the flat of the blade, precise as a racket stroke, angling each deflection so the magic scattered harmlessly wide. When the red beams came too fast, he slipped past them with inches to spare, body tilting at impossible angles, never breaking his rhythm.
The Golden Scale Sword was no longer a sword. It was no longer a wand. It was an extension of his arm, the physical expression of something that lived in him. Swordsmanship and spellwork dissolved together into a single fluid thing, seamless, with no boundary between them.
Harry, standing below the platform, couldn't look away. His heart was hammering.
He understood now — actually understood, in his bones , why Professor Holmes had driven them through those brutal training sessions. Balance under movement. Spellcasting in extreme positions. Endurance past the point where you wanted to stop.
In a fight at this level, that wasn't extra. That was the difference between surviving and not.
The other students wore something different on their faces. Shock, mostly. A kind of bewildered wonder.
So magic could look like this.
Those who'd watched Douglas duel Professor Snape exchanged glances and silently agreed: this was something else entirely.
Moody's anger climbed with every failed exchange. His good leg hit the platform with a thunderous stomp.
BOOM!
A concussive shockwave erupted from the point of impact, radiating outward along the platform floor in a rushing arc. Pure force. No finesse. He was going to knock this slippery opponent off his feet through sheer, overwhelming power.
Douglas had seen it coming.
The instant the shockwave reached his feet, the tip of the Golden Scale Sword tapped lightly against the floor.
"Quicksand."
Quiet. Almost conversational.
The platform floor softened. Sank. Dissolved. Within a single second, every inch of hard stone had transformed into a churning expanse of dark yellow quicksand. Moody's shockwave plunged into it and vanished without a trace , a sledgehammer swung into open water.
And Moody's wooden leg, planted deep for leverage, went in with a muffled PLOP and kept going.
He lurched. His balance shattered. His body tilted hard to one side, arms pinwheeling.
"Constant vigilance, Deputy — Director Moody."
Douglas's voice carried clearly through the chaos, edged with precisely the right amount of amusement. Not gloating. Just accurate.
"But vigilance without the wisdom to adapt to change — that tends to land a man in the mire."
He gave Moody's words back to him without changing a syllable.
The scars crossing Moody's face pulled and twisted as the fury hit him in full. Something wild and animal came into his expression. He didn't wait to steady himself. He raised his wand right there, sinking into the quicksand, and put everything he had left into a single Cutting Curse , dense, ferocious, nothing held in reserve, carrying enough force to split the platform and the man standing on it clean in two.
Douglas didn't retreat.
The tip of his foot touched the shifting quicksand. Barely a tap.
He went airborne.
Like a crane opening its wings, weightless and inevitable, he soared toward the off-balance, furious, sinking fortress in front of him.
---
PS: Daily question.
When analyzing an opponent's spell preferences, which of the following can be safely ignored?
A. Their dominant hand (right-handed wand users tend to attack from the left)
B. The puffiness of their robe pockets (may conceal auxiliary magical items)
C. The types of spells they repeatedly used in previous duels
D. The species of their pet (unrelated to dueling style)
➤ Next: He Saw Through Everything? A Storm of Shock Surged in Moody's Heart!
───── ⊹ ⊹ ─────
📖 Main story COMPLETED + Bonus Stories ongoing on Patre\on
🔍 Search:p a t r e o n.com/GoldenLong
───── ⊹ ⊹ ─────