A.N. Hey guys, I am back. I was incredibly busy the last two weeks. Still haven't got a handle on the the new college schedule. Finally got the time and energy to write more. Moreover, just as I finished a few chapters, I realized that I was going in a completely wrong direction from what I had envisioned. That the current chapter I was writing would derail the entire story. So... had to tear it all and build it all from scratch again. Spent a few houra on how to move forward.
But anyway, here we are. Wont bore you much longer. Heere you go, enjoy the chapter. And send the Powerstones!!!!
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Months passed by. Winter came. Holidays like Halloween, Easter, Christmas, New Year, came by and went. Yet her training schedule never deviated. By day, she was the model student she had been. But her day truly began in the evenings after school.
Evenings and nights were for practice and increasing her mastery over the strange magic she possessed. Yes, strange. Over time, she had come to realise that her magic definitely strange. Not at all like the magic she expected from the wizarding world. For one thing, it was too fluid. And it might just be her observational bias, but she didn't think it was supposed to be this smooth, so fluid to her commands. And that led to the second thing.
Her control over it. She seemed to have extraordinary level of control over her magic. The way she could command it, will it to alter the reality of the world, was definitely not normal. Not to mention, the cold that was associated with it. She didn't hate it or anything. It was comforting even. But it was certainly strange.
It did occur to her, that maybe this wasn't the Harry Potter she knew. Maybe she was in a normal world, with a familiar name, albeit with an abnormal ability. But she confirmed it wasn't. A few months ago, during an outing to Central London, she saw the evidence that proved it was the wizarding world she knew.
People dressed in out-of-fashion, and sometimes completely strange clothes, as if trying to blend in, but with outdated knowledge of how modern clothing was like. However, the ultimate proof was when they were on the Charring Cross Road. She saw almost all the strangely dressed people going in one direction. With the pretense of wanting to visit a bookstore, she managed to get her parents to head in the direction those people were going on.
And sure enough, there it was, the famous Leaky Cauldron. It sat between a music shop and a bookstore. Normal people seemed to be ignoring it, yet those strangely dressed people went right in between them, where she could see the entrance to the pub.
Seeing it, tangible and real, did bring a thrill of excitement. But it also brought a cold, clarifying focus. The threats—Voldemort, Death Eaters, the instability of a world teetering on the edge of war—were not abstract concepts from a book anymore. They were real, physical dangers that would one day intersect with her life.
This confirmation solidified her training philosophy. Before she could even begin to forge weapons, she had to reinforce the forge itself: her body.
Her theory that her physical form was the bottleneck had been proven correct time and again. It was a living conduit, and like any biological system, it could be conditioned. The principle was the same as building muscle: consistent, controlled strain followed by rest and recovery would increase its capacity over time.
So, she began a grueling, repetitive regimen. She didn't focus on complex spells. Instead, she chose the basics—telekinesis and light manipulation—and practiced them for extended durations. She would hold a dozen pencils in a complex orbital pattern, not for a few minutes, but for an hour, pushing until the first throb of a headache began behind her eyes. Then she would hold it for another ten minutes.
The results were not immediate, but they were measurable. In the beginning, twenty minutes of sustained, intricate work would leave her with a splitting headache. Pushing past thirty minutes risked a nosebleed. Now, months later, she could maintain an hour of moderate use before the pain became significant, and it was a pounding, yet bearable, headache, not a debilitating migraine.
This increased capacity had the most profound effect on her dual-casting. Her initial failures had been based on a flawed assumption. It was never about a finite amount of magical 'resource' being split between two tasks. The magic itself was vast, an ocean she could draw from. The problem was the pipe. Her body could only channel a certain volume of that ocean at any given time. Trying to run two complex spells was like trying to force water through two pipes when the main valve could only supply enough for one. The second pipe didn't just run dry; the strain of the system trying to force something that wasn't available caused a painful, physical backlash.
But now, the main valve was wider. She could sustain two separate constructs simultaneously with far greater ease. The strain was still there, but it was manageable, a war against her own physical limitations, rather than a question of focus.
With the forge reinforced and the channels widened, she could finally begin to craft her tools. Her first life had taught her the flaws in a superficial understanding of many things. True strength lay in absolute, unshakable mastery of the fundamentals. Better to be a master of one and build from there, than to be a master of none.
And so, she returned to the beginning. To the first thing she had ever willed into existence. Light.
Her initial experiments had been about control—shaping the light, changing its colour and intensity. Now, she began to explore its applications. She moved beyond simple illumination and into the realm of tactical utility.
Her first project was the 'flashbang'. The principle was simple: a sudden, overwhelming burst of photons to overload the optic nerves of a target. The execution, however, presented a critical flaw: the light would affect her as well. Closing her eyes was not an option; it was a tactical liability, a moment of blindness she couldn't afford.
Her mind immediately discarded magical solutions in favour of physics. The answer was polarization.
The project became a dual-construct spell, an exercise in multitasking that strained her developing conduit. She needed to do two things in the exact same instant:
One, Generate the omnidirectional burst of light, but force all the photons to be polarized along a single, specific plane.
Two, Simultaneously manifest a microscopic, perfectly cross-polarized film of magic directly over her own corneas.
To anyone else, the room would be filled with a blinding, searing light. To her, the two constructs would cancel each other out. The world would simply dim for a fraction of a second, as if she'd blinked behind a pair of high-end sunglasses.
Perfecting it took weeks. The first dozen attempts failed because of timing. The filter would form a millisecond too late, and she'd be left with a splitting headache and spots in her vision. Other times, the polarization of the flash would be imperfect, and a painful amount of light would leak through her filter. But she was methodical. She refined the timing, calibrated the energy output, and practiced until the dual-casting was a single, seamless reflex.
Eventually, she perfected it. Standing in the centre of her dark room, she unleashed the spell. For a single, silent instant, the room was bathed in a light more brilliant than the sun. And she saw it all perfectly, the world just momentarily dimming behind her invisible, magical shield. It was her first true, self-engineered shield and weapon, both at the same time.
The flashbang 'spell' was a success, a tool for individual or even crowd control and disorientation. But her logical mind, always moving to the next strategic step, immediately pivoted. Disabling an opponent was one thing; neutralizing a threat was another. Her focus shifted from overwhelming the senses to overwhelming matter itself. She needed a purely offensive capability. And in the physics of her old world, the ultimate application of weaponized light was singular and absolute: a laser.
The theory was sound, a direct application of her past life's knowledge. She needed to create a coherent, collimated beam of light—to force trillions of photons to travel in a single, unified direction and phase, turning chaotic energy into a focused point of destructive power. This was an order of magnitude more complex than the omnidirectional burst of the flashbang. It required her to compress her magic, to shape the energy at a near-subatomic level of precision, and to maintain that perfect, unwavering structure as she projected it outward.
Her first attempts were clumsy but informative. She extended a finger, and a thin line of intense, indigo light shot forth, striking the far wall. But it was unfocused, diffusing over a few feet into a harmlessly bright, wobbling cone. Where it touched the wallpaper, it created a small, warm spot and the faint smell of ozone, but nothing more. It was more of a high-powered, glorified torch than a weapon.
Still, it was a start. She had proven she could project a sustained beam. Now came the true challenge: the endless, repetitive grind of refining the focus, narrowing the beam, and increasing the power output until that gentle warmth became a silent, unstoppable cutting edge. The path to mastery was long, but the proof-of-concept was a success.
She kept at it for weeks, dedicating entire evenings to the single, monotonous task of focus. The problem, she deduced, was internal. Trying to force the magic into a perfectly coherent state before it left her body was inefficient and incredibly draining. The magic seemed to naturally resist being constrained into such a rigid, unnatural form.
The breakthrough came when she stopped trying to shape the source and decided to shape the output. She wouldn't try to create a laser inside her hand; she would create a lens outside of it.
Once again, she had to employ dual-casting. It was a delicate, two-part process. With her right hand, she generated the raw, powerful, but unfocused beam of light. Simultaneously, with her left hand's focus, she manifested a second, invisible construct in the air just inches from her right index finger: a small, perfectly concave disc of pure magic, designed to function as a focusing lens.
Her first successful attempt was startling. The unfocused cone of light passed through the invisible magical lens and converged into a single, silent, needle-thin beam of brilliant indigo. It struck an old wooden toy block on her shelf, and a thin line of smoke instantly curled into the air, leaving a blackened, charred line scored across its surface.
It worked.
She tested the range. For about three feet, the beam was perfect, a silent, cutting edge. At four feet, it began to lose integrity. By five, it had dispersed back into a powerful but harmless flashlight beam. The magical lens could only maintain the beam's coherence for a short distance before the energy naturally dissipated.
It was imperfect. It was short-range. But it was a weapon. It was another tool, forged from scientific principle and magical power. And with time, she knew, her mastery would only grow. The lens was a clever workaround, but it was still a crutch. She hadn't forgotten that her very first attempts, clumsy as they were, had proven that internal focusing was possible. That high-powered torch was evidence that she could impose a degree of coherence on the magic before it ever left her body.
As her already unnatural control grew even more refined and her intuitive feel for the magic deepened, she knew she could improve upon that initial success. Eventually, the efficiency of the lens construct would be replicated internally. The ultimate goal was to make the external lens redundant, to achieve a perfect, silent, and devastatingly precise beam with a single, focused act of will.