When the silver whistle blew to signal the midpoint of the double practical period, the transition inside the enchanted pavilion was a study in controlled chaos. The high-ceilinged canopy echoed with the scuffle of dragon-hide boots as the first group of wizards descended from the scaffolding, while the sweaty, breathless students of the initial Red Cap team stripped off their heavy, oiled leathery armor and dropped their glowing paint-tipped knives into the iron lockers.
Among the chaos, Fred and George Weasley stood near the staging benches, their identical grins practically lighting up the dim, twilight atmosphere of the tent. They had spent the first hour on the defensive platforms. While George had managed to survive the round alongside Cedric Diggory, Fred was still nursing a bruised ego; he had been caught right across the ankle by a swift, low-set strike during the previous simulation.
Now, pulling the thick, transfigured leathery hides over their shoulders, the twins traded a silent, dangerous look of mutual understanding. They weren't planning on just surviving this round as the pack. They were planning on a highly satisfying, calculated revenge.
"Cedric," Fred murmured, gesturing for the Hufflepuff to join their huddle as he buckled his wrinkled, curse-absorbent vest. "You managed to hold your own out there as a wizard, but now you're with us. We need maximum flexibility in the ankles. Uncle Richard said it's the spring in the calves that gives the Gallowglass variant its clearance."
Cedric, adjusting to the heavy, unfamiliar weight of the armor, nodded with a competitive gleam in his eye. "I saw how they isolated us last time. If we coordinate our movement, we can control the tempo from beneath the scaffolding."
"Exactly," George replied, snapping the heavy, crimson-tinted goggles over his eyes. The world instantly shifted into a sharp, monochrome landscape of thermal signatures. The cold stone panels of the lower maze glowed a deep, resonant blue, while up on the rope bridges, the silhouettes of the remaining third-years pulsed in brilliant shades of amber and gold. George's grin widened as he locked onto a very specific, brightly glowing heat signature pacing directly above the central bottleneck. "Well, well. Look who's playing for Team Alpha. Our dear roommate, Lee Jordan."
Fred leaned in, his goggles flashing blood-red in the dim light as he picked up two blunt wooden knives and tested the weight. The thick, glowing crimson paint on the tips caught the artificial moonlight. "Ah, Lee. He was the one cheering loudest when that paint caught my ankle last hour. Said my footwork looked like a dancing troll."
"Tragic, really," George chuckled, twirling his own wooden blade. "He's anticipating an ambush from the central bottleneck. He thinks he can anchor the terrain and keep us pinned."
"Then we don't give him a straight fight," Fred whispered. "We split the compass. Left and right flank, Cedric takes the center anchor, and we execute a classic Weasley inversion to teach our favorite commentator a lesson in humility."
From his raised observer's platform near the velvet exit, Richard Prewett leaned against the iron railing, his arms crossed over his dark charcoal dueling coat. His face remained an unreadable mask of professional detachment, his dark eyes tracking the movement of the students below through the shifting shadows. He had watched dozens of students take up the Red Cap mantle today; most had blundered blindly, fighting the restrictive goggles or attempting to rush the scaffolding like standard duelists without a wand.
But as the second round commenced, Richard's gaze narrowed, locking onto the specific heat signatures of his two eldest nephews and the Diggory boy.
The whistle echoed through the tent, and the new team of wizards instantly moved into defensive formations on the second floor, their wands casting trembling, silver pools of light into the darkness. Lee Jordan stood right at the apex of the rope bridge, his wand held high, looking remarkably confident.
Down in the lower maze, Fred, George, and Cedric didn't charge. They dropped low, their movements fluid and entirely synchronized. Instead of utilizing the sub-audible clicking vocalization as a simple tool to cause vertigo, the trio began to play the environment like an instrument.
George tapped his wooden knife against the base of a moving limestone panel, a sharp, rhythmic click-click-chord that echoed through the acoustic isolation of the cavern. A second later, from thirty paces to the left, Fred mirrored the rhythm perfectly, but added a slight variation in pitch by striking a hollow iron support beam. Cedric added a low, scraping friction against the stone at the center.
The effect on the scaffolding above was immediate. The alternating, synchronized frequencies created a rolling wave of acoustic disorientation that seemed to vibrate from everywhere at once, entirely disrupting the wizards' inner ears.
"They're in the walls!" Lee shouted, his wand sweeping erratically over the edge of his platform. "Left side—no, right side! Impedimenta!"
Lee fired a red stasis bolt blindly into the dark, striking an empty stone panel and completely wasting his defensive momentum.
Richard Prewett's posture stiffened slightly against the iron railing. His mind, usually a fortress of cold, analytical logic, suddenly experienced a violent, unbidden pull backward through time.
Ten years. More than ten years.
He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, and the damp, pine-scented air of the pavilion vanished, replaced by the memory of a rain-slicked courtyard in a small wizarding hamlet during the height of the first war. He could still see them. Fabian, with his reckless, bright laughter, deliberately making a racket on the right flank with a series of localized atmospheric fractures, while Gideon—silent as a specter and entirely unbothered by the darkness—crept through the blind spots on the left to completely dismantle a squad of Death Eaters before they even realized they were in a fight.
They had called it 'the pincer-waltz.' It wasn't a standard Ministry tactic; it was something the Prewett twins had engineered in their seventh year at Hogwarts, a chaotic, non-linear style of engagement designed to make two wizards look like an entire battalion.
Richard opened his eyes. Below him, Fred and George, alongside Cedric, were executing the exact same formation.
Cedric utilized the shifting momentum of a towering stone panel just as it ground shut, using the mechanical leverage to vault himself silently onto a low rock ledge, drawing the attention of Lee's flanking partner. Simultaneously, Fred and George exploited the blind spot. Moving on all fours with an agility that perfectly mimicked the Gallowglass predator, they slid under the low, suffocating "underground" ceiling formed by the underside of Lee's rope bridge.
Lee kept his weight centered, trying to fight off the dizziness. "Stay together!" he commanded his peers. "Don't let the noise break our—"
From below the floorboards, right beneath Lee's boots, Fred didn't strike with the knife. Instead, remembering his own ankle injury, he reached through a gap in the wooden planks and gave the timber a violent, precise jerk, dislodging a structural support wedge that the tent's magic had left deliberately loose.
The rope bridge groaned, the sudden slack causing the entire platform to dip violently to the left. Lee's balance broke completely, his footing slipping on the smooth wood.
"Payback time, Lee!" Fred's voice echoed, ringing with a fierce, triumphant energy.
George materialized from the shadow of the rock ledge like a phantom. He kept his body low, his leathery, alkaline-coated armor absorbing a desperate, wide cutting charm from a nearby Ravenclaw with a faint ripple of silver light. Before Lee could even attempt to reset his wrist rotation to counter, Fred and George struck simultaneously from both sides of the destabilized planks.
Two blunt wooden knives swept across Lee's robes in perfect unison, leaving a brilliant, massive cross of glowing crimson paint across his chest and back.
The magic of the tent immediately simulated the heavy impact of a dual-talon strike. Lee let out a theatrical groan as his posture shattered entirely, sending him tumbling backward onto the safety matting of the platform, completely eliminated and thoroughly marked in red.
With Lee down, the wizards' central perimeter was entirely shattered. Cedric vaulted up from his ledge to close the trap, guiding the rest of the Red Cap pack to swarm up the scaffolding and finish the match.
Up on the observer's platform, Richard Prewett remained perfectly still. His hands, still clasped behind his back, gripped his own wrists with enough pressure to whiten his knuckles.
It was uncanny. It was almost offensive in its accuracy. The way Fred tilted his head when he assessed a target, the specific, arrogant tilt of George's shoulders as he baited an opponent into overextending—it was a ghost story written in red hair and school uniforms. They had never met Fabian or Gideon. They had been toddlers when the ambush occurred, raised on nothing but the sanitized, legendary campfire stories Molly told them on holidays.
Yet here they were, breathing life into the dead through sheer, inherited instinct.
The silver whistle blew, its sharp chime cutting through the twilight as the double practical period drew to an official close. The simulated night sky faded back into the grey canvas ceiling, and the damp, metallic scent of the cave dissolved into the crisp, normal air of the late October afternoon.
The students collapsed onto the staging benches, utterly spent, laughing and groaning as the crimson paint vanished from their robes. Lee Jordan was dramatically massaging his ribs, glaring playfully at the twins, while Fred and George pulled off their goggles, their hair plastered to their foreheads with sweat, high-fiving Cedric with a boisterous, chaotic energy that filled the entire tent.
Richard descended the wooden steps of his platform, his boots clicking rhythmically against the stone floor. The classroom instantly fell silent, the third-years straightening their posture as the severe, imposing figure of their professor approached.
Richard stopped at the center of the arena, his dark eyes sweeping over the exhausted class. If any of them expected a compliment, or a sign of breakthrough emotion from the notoriously detached wizard, they were disappointed. His face was as rigid as the limestone map he had drawn the week before.
"An acceptable performance," Richard said, his smooth, dangerous cadence carrying effortlessly through the pavilion. "Team Omega discovered, through extensive trial and error, that a predator without a strategy is merely a target. You adjusted to your limitations. You utilized the environment. That is the bare minimum required to survive."
He looked directly at Fred and George. The twins grinned up at him, expecting perhaps a wink or a nod acknowledging their specific success.
Instead, Richard's gaze remained entirely cold, though his voice dropped a fraction of an octave, carrying a weight that only those who knew the Prewett line would recognize.
"However... do not mistake a clever parlor trick for true combat mastery, Mr. Weasley, and Mr. Weasley. Dislodging a support wedge is effective in a controlled simulation to settle a petty score. In a true subterranean enclave, a Gallowglass variant will not drop a bridge to trip your classmate; it will drop the entire ceiling onto your skull. Precision is nothing without foresight."
The twins' grins faltered slightly, replaced by a look of sudden, intense focus. They didn't look insulted; they looked challenged.
Richard turned on his heel, his dueling coat flaring behind him as he walked toward the exit flap of the tent, throwing the canvas wide to let the bright, real afternoon sun flood the arena.
"Clean the gear and return the wands to your person," Richard concluded, not looking back. "Next week, we return to the classroom. We will see if your wrist mechanics have caught up with your imaginations. Dismissed."
As the students began to file out into the crisp air, talking excitedly about the match, George leaned closer to Fred, his voice low. "Did you see his eyes, Fred? Right before he called us out?"
"I saw," Fred said softly, his usual joking demeanor entirely gone as he watched their uncle's retreating form disappear toward the castle shadows. "He looked like he was looking right through us. Like he'd seen those exact moves before."