"There are three steps in our lives. The first step teaches us how to tell the right from the wrong. The second step teaches us that there isn't just the right and wrong. The third step teaches us to do what we believe is right and take responsibility for the outcomes." - Father Otto, Honkai Impact 3rd.
In the clearing stood twenty people and one idiot blond. Even for her, this would be a first.
Contrary to what people probably assumed, none of the fights over the past few months had been easy. She deliberately let the Slytherins plan and adapt, let them find her weak points, because that was the entire point of the exercise. Every victory had taught her something.
But they had come prepared this time. They weren't underestimating her anymore. And they had found a genuine weakness, one she couldn't simply train her way out of, because it didn't depend on her at all.
They had a hostage.
"Hermione. Of all people to get caught by Malfoy. Aren't you embarrassed?" Harriet said, looking at a visibly frightened Hermione.
"Harriet, I—" was all Hermione managed before Draco silenced her with a spell.
"You're talking to me, Potter," Draco said. "Coming here alone was very stupid. But then again, it's not as though you have any allies, is it?"
"Oh, you're talking too? Are you sure about that? I'll remind you that you're not the sharpest tool around, and every time you open your mouth you lose a little more credibility. You should really ration your daily word count, for your own sake. You know the expression, silence is golden? Apply it. Look at me, worrying about your reputation. Aren't I kind."
Maintaining composure in the face of Harriet's blatant contempt had always been difficult for Draco. It always went the same way. He lost his patience, started flinging insults in every direction.
Not this time.
"This time, Potter, I understand perfectly well that words won't be enough. I'm here to make you suffer. The Dark Lord has returned, and you are an obstacle to the world he intends to build. You need to be put in your place. Whether you live or die will be his decision, when the time comes. But you will be put in your place." He took a breath. "Potter, there are things in life you don't get to escape. Purposes worth fighting for. Traditions we are obligated to respect. You arrived in this world and did exactly as you pleased, with no regard for the culture we have fought to preserve. You, and that Mudblood there, came in believing you could, no, that you were entitled to change the magical world because it wasn't good enough for you. You are arrogant. You are an embarrassment. You need to be put in your place."
Harriet went quiet at that.
She considered it for a moment, and concluded that this was, in fact, the first time Draco had ever said anything resembling an actual argument. He must have grown, somewhat. Suffering tended to do that.
"I see," she said. "So that's the real reason. This is why you've been after me all this time."
She looked at him, and then at the twenty Slytherins arranged behind him, gold-bought recruits by the looks of most of them, though a few wore the particular expression of people who genuinely believed in what Draco had just said and weren't simply here for the money. That distinction mattered, she thought. The true believers tended to hit harder. She recognized a few faces from previous encounters. Fifteen men, five women. The ferret's elite squad.
"I see, but you're wrong. It's not that I respect nothing. If anything, I've learned a fair amount since arriving. My one real principle is freedom. The freedom to choose, and the freedom not to do what I don't feel like doing. I'm sorry if the magical world considers that malicious." She paused. "Actually, no, I'm not, because the magical world has never once cared about the moral standards of mere humans, has it. Draco, it's time you grew up and understood that the world isn't black and white. Stop offloading your decisions onto some larger entity. Whatever you do, good or bad, the important part is taking responsibility for it yourself. Something you have apparently never learned how to do."
Draco's expression still betrayed nothing.
"Ah," Harriet said. "The real reason you started this little game wasn't to teach me a lesson at all, was it. That hatred you've been carrying around for me. You're jealous of me."
The mask cracked.
"Potter, shut—"
"No, you shut up, Draco. I genuinely don't care about your jealousy. But like I said, you have to take responsibility for what you do. So you and your merry little squad are about to get the beating that ensures you never try this again."
And Harriet moved.
She got perhaps five meters before twenty-one spells from twenty-one different wands converged on her at once. With almost no room to maneuver, she raised the shield charm she'd spent months refining. A simple shield in theory, but reinforced, redistributed in real time across every point of impact through magical control precise enough that breaking it required a magical reservoir larger than her own. At Hogwarts, that was, practically speaking, impossible to find. With the possible exception of a certain headmaster in his ivory towe.
The concentrated barrage did nothing. After a brief moment of surprise, every Slytherin redirected their fire toward the now-stationary target, and the wall of spells intensified, cracks beginning to spider across the shield's surface.
But every wand in the clearing was now pointed at her.
So she did what every overwhelming, unkillable-seeming antagonist tended to do at the start of a story, the kind whose mere presence was supposed to end the conversation before it began, what Voldemort himself had done more than once. She let her magic out. Not the controlled, distributed version powering the shield. The raw aura underneath it, allowed to surface, undimmed.
The effect was immediate.
Draco, who had felt Voldemort's aura firsthand and had spent considerable time comparing it unfavorably to everyone else's, found himself unable to stop the tremor that ran through him as he registered just how close the comparison actually was. The others, who had never felt anything like it in their lives, simply froze.
Harriet used the half-second of paralysis to close the distance to the first Slytherin and drove a Repulso into his solar plexus at point-blank range, sending him into a tree hard enough that he wasn't getting up anytime soon. She used the resulting shockwave of attention to reach the second and third, side by side, breaking the second one's arm with a clean strike followed by an uppercut before they'd fully registered her movement, and dropping the third with a paralyzing jolt of conjured lightning before he could raise his wand.
Three down. Unconscious. Three seconds.
"Morons," she said.
And then she ran. Not toward the fight. Away from it, into the trees, the moment everyone else's brains caught up to what had just happened, which took roughly three more seconds.
Draco's first thought was confusion, why would she run when they still had the hostage, and his second thought, arriving a fraction of a second later, was the realization that she wasn't alone, and that while everyone's attention had been locked onto her, someone else had used the window to remove Hermione from the equation entirely.
"After her," he snapped. "Careful, she's not alone. Someone stay with the wounded. We'll deal with the Mudblood later."
The clearing emptied in the direction Harriet had taken. One of the mercenaries stayed behind with the three unconscious Slytherins.
Harriet pushed deeper into the forest and stopped roughly a hundred meters in, her pursuers only a few meters behind by then. She cast a severing charm, Diffindo, and several trees came down across the path behind her. The two leading the chase didn't have time to register it before they hit the fallen trunks and absorbed several extremely unpleasant spells for their trouble, dropping where they stood. The hunt resumed seconds later, once the rest had climbed over the debris.
It was difficult, even for them. Under normal circumstances, when Harriet ran into a group like this, she was clean and efficient, she knew exactly how to incapacitate without wasting movement, and that alone usually wasn't enough to take down a force this size, not when their single greatest advantage was sheer numbers. But this level of intelligence, intimidation, and instinct working in concert was something else entirely. It would have been enough to make her a formidable opponent even without magic.
They were down to sixteen already.
Harriet ran again, but deliberately slowed her pace, making sure everyone behind her stayed bunched together. Twenty meters later, she broke into another clearing and stopped, checking that everyone still in pursuit had cleared the treeline behind her. Then she activated the potion she'd splashed across the ground earlier, a Weasley & Weasley product she'd managed to get her hands on exclusively, that only needed a fire spell to trigger, and the forest floor turned slick, treacherously so.
The sixteen people behind her lost their footing entirely, going down in every direction at once, and what followed became something closer to target practice than combat. She wasn't holding back this time, not with the spells she threw, with the single exception of Draco, who she simply immobilized. As long as nobody died, the rest hardly mattered. If some of them spent the next few weeks or months in the infirmary, or somewhere considerably worse than the infirmary even with Pomfrey's skill set, that was their problem.
Everyone was down. Except for one motionless ferret, who found himself levitated and deposited neatly at Harriet's feet.
"So. Happy?" she said. "That was a good effort, and honestly, it's kept me entertained these past few months. But this is where it ends. Nobody will follow you into your little revenge plot anymore."
"Potter, that was unfair! Everything you do is unfair!" Draco said, unable to move anything but his mouth.
"Oh, you're going to talk about fairness," Harriet said, perfectly serene. "You've been a thorn in my side for months and now you're complaining about reaping what you sow. Honestly, you should be ashamed."
"After everything, you're still standing in my way. It's always the same with you, first you spit on my offer to help, and then you keep escalating. Why can't you just stay in your place? I'm a noble and you're nothing but a half-blood!" Draco said, nearly out of breath, talking about things he still didn't fully understand.
Harriet went quiet at that, though only briefly. "I wasn't lying," she said, before retrieving Draco's wand and lifting the spell that held him immobile. As he slowly got to his feet, she continued. "From the very beginning, all I've ever seen was a nasty little boy trying to tell me what I should and shouldn't do. And a failed Weasley with two brain cells trying, pathetically, to influence me. There's no nobility worth speaking of between eleven-year-olds anyway. It was genuinely pathetic to watch. I told you. I'm after freedom, and I won't be asking anyone's permission for it. I know you were raised like a little prince, so you don't understand most of this. You don't understand that the people you consider beneath you aren't just pawns or pets meant to accept your outstretched hand, and that refusing it doesn't make them arrogant. I'm not the only one who refuses it, either. You use your status to do whatever you want to whoever you want, without consequence, exactly like you tried to do now, even though it completely failed."
"I don't know your mother, and I doubt I'd like her much, but as a girl I can't help feeling some sympathy for what she's likely going through right now, with that lot occupying your home. Bad choices led to this. I won't be apologizing for wanting to live the way I choose, and I certainly won't be apologizing for refusing to bow to that deranged corpse. It was your father's choice, and it's been your choice too. I imagine things aren't going particularly well for you at home either, given what your father did with that book he was supposed to be guarding. But that's the kind of person you've chosen to support anyway. So stop looking for excuses. You've probably taken part in a few of those little initiation raids by now, haven't you. Done unspeakable things to people who'd done nothing to deserve it."
At that, some of Draco's anger returned. "They were just Mudbloods and Muggles. What difference does it make?"
"No remorse at all," Harriet said. "Not that I expected any. And even if you had some, you still came after me anyway." She tilted her head slightly. "Now get ready, Draco. Raise your hands and start fighting. You don't have your wand anymore, and you can't do magic without it. All that's left is the Muggle way. The one you despise so much."
A faint, sharp smile appeared.
"And just so you know, I've wanted to punch you for a very long time. My wish is about to come true."