"All right, go get some rest. Your friends are looking for you."
Vincent gestured toward Hermione and Ron, glancing their way in the distance.
"O-okay."
Harry had only jogged a few steps before Vincent called after him. "Oh, right — your real godfather should be released in just a few days. You'll have two godfathers, then."
"..."
Harry felt an inexplicable shiver run through him — something about the way Mr. Charles had said that felt vaguely ominous.
"Charles, Charles."
Dumbledore shook his head, exasperated. "You really are something."
"Professor, everything I said was completely true."
The two of them left the castle together, heading toward the Forbidden Forest.
Along the way, Dumbledore asked a scattering of small, roundabout questions, seemingly trying to glean Vincent's true intentions through them.
After answering several in a row, Vincent suddenly turned the question around. "Professor, what's your read on Patricia?"
The question had nothing to do with what they'd been discussing. Dumbledore looked puzzled. "What do you mean by 'read'?"
"I mean — why exactly did your old friend send that child here to Hogwarts?"
"I actually spoke with her about that directly. She said she came to Hogwarts mostly because she knew you were teaching here."
Vincent gave a small, wry smile. "And you believed her?"
"I have no reason to doubt a child, of course. Though, I admit, Gellert's motives for sending her here do raise some questions." Dumbledore held up his wand, casting a faint light to guide their path ahead. "I've gone to see him about it a few times, but his account largely matches hers."
"You two are old acquaintances, aren't you? Have you asked her yourself?"
Vincent shook his head. "My thinking's about the same as yours. If there really is some scheme behind her coming to Hogwarts, the problem wouldn't lie with her — it'd be with Grindelwald, behind her."
"Not to alarm you, but on my way back today, I actually caught a wisp of strange black smoke drifting off of Patricia. It vanished almost instantly, but I can say with certainty — it was really there."
Dumbledore adjusted his glasses, frowning. "Black smoke? I'm sorry, I don't believe I've ever noticed anything like that. Could you describe it further?"
"Hard to put into words... oh, right, at a glance it felt a bit like a dementor."
At that, something clicked for Vincent. "No — it should be an Obscurus!"
The moment the word left his mouth, Dumbledore's expression turned grave. To him and Grindelwald both, Obscurials carried a very particular, personal weight.
Grindelwald had once devoted himself specifically to studying them.
After a long moment, he said, low and serious, "I understand. I'll go see him again, and get this sorted out properly."
"This should do."
Vincent came to a stop. "This is where I originally took down Voldemort."
Without further preamble, he cast the ancient magic directly — he'd already confirmed its safety long ago, which was exactly why he was willing to demonstrate it for Dumbledore now.
Instantly, everything within dozens of meters transformed into layered, overlapping blocks of color — to Vincent's eyes, strings upon strings of information streams.
He stepped forward and stamped his foot down hard.
In an instant, everything reduced to that information-stream state shattered, silently, into strange fragments. Those fragments lingered in place for a moment before dissolving with a soundless crack, vanishing into nothing.
Radiating outward from the spot where Vincent had stamped his foot, a fan-shaped area — twenty or thirty meters long, roughly sixty degrees wide — was left with a crater about a meter deep.
Dumbledore stared, fixed. "Ancient magic?"
In truth, the destructive power of what Vincent had just demonstrated fell well short of what Dumbledore himself could produce, holding nothing back — its real strength lay in how differently it presented itself from any magic Dumbledore had ever encountered before.
It was simpler, cruder — pure, unadorned destruction.
Though, according to what Bernadette had said before, the reason it only manifested as this kind of blunt destruction, for now, was purely because she hadn't yet mastered it — hadn't found the deeper applications this ancient magic was capable of.
To use a programmer's analogy: right now, all she could do was delete code outright, disrupting a program's normal function, or wiping the whole program clean. But if she ever learned to actually rewrite and alter the code itself... that would be the equivalent of unlocking a full cheat engine.
Still, Vincent couldn't help feeling this all sounded a bit exaggerated. How could a single piece of ancient magic possibly be this powerful?
"Professor, I'm sure you can already tell — as good as this ancient magic is, it's got no shortage of weaknesses. The reason it worked against Voldemort back then was mostly because I caught him completely off guard."
"So, in the time since, I've been researching other forms of magic — and I think I've actually made some real progress."
Yes — this was the real "magic" Vincent had actually come here to demonstrate for Dumbledore today.
As a Beyonder of the "Broker" Pathway, Vincent's core "combat technique" was the Prosecutor's Words of Order — an ability genuinely difficult to showcase in any visually impressive way.
As for the "Overseer's" ability to rebound non-divine attacks after his advancement — that wasn't especially striking either; a basic defensive shield charm produced a broadly similar effect.
But Vincent still had the Nation of Disorder. He still had the Black Emperor card. And right now, within the Nation of Disorder, he could draw on the Black Emperor card to use Sequence 2-level extraordinary abilities.
What did that actually mean, in practice?
A Sequence 2 "Duke of Entropy" could use abilities like "Exploit" and "Amplify" to enhance himself to the point of leaping straight from Earth to the moon in a single bound, without even breaking a sweat.
Sure, the Black Emperor wasn't exactly famed for raw destructive power — but that was only true relative to other pathways at the same level. Sequence 2 was Sequence 2 — a rank standing well above demigod, drawing far closer to true godhood itself.
As Vincent raised a hand, his spirit entered the Nation of Disorder, and, gripping the Black Emperor card, unleashed several abilities on the forest before him at once.
In an instant —
The entire space tore apart under the force of "Distortion," the ground itself splitting under "Chaos."
RUMBLE.
The one-meter crater the ancient magic had left behind transformed into a bottomless "abyss," the entire Forbidden Forest shaking violently, birds and beasts roosting for the night startled awake, fleeing in terror in every direction.
And this was Vincent deliberately holding back, keeping the ability's range and impact tightly controlled.
"!!!"
This time, Dumbledore stared down at the abyss before him, brow furrowed, genuine shock flickering in his eyes.
Vincent's consciousness returned fully to his body. "Professor, I've held this 'magic' back as much as I possibly could."
"...Meaning this isn't your limit?"
"Yeah."
Vincent nodded. "If I went all out, I could probably cover the entire Forbidden Forest — including the Black Lake, Hogwarts Castle itself, Hogsmeade..."
"???"
This time, Dumbledore was genuinely, thoroughly stunned. So the abyss standing in front of us right now was just him going easy?
Wait — is this really how one goes about "researching magic"?
Is this even still "magic," at this point?
To be continued…
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