"Rules are made to be broken." - Trailblazer
It was, for Draco, a genuine shock. Words weren't working. He didn't have his wand. All that remained were his fists.
This had happened to him before, courtesy of Voldemort himself, who had dominated him completely. But it had never once occurred to him, even then, to use physical contact to reclaim what was rightfully his when stripped of everything else. And in this moment, he made a decision he never would have imagined himself capable of making. He charged at Harriet, fists raised like a Muggle for the first time in his life, anger building with every step and a single-minded desire to inflict as much damage as possible on the enemy standing in front of him.
Without a doubt, Draco was a genuine champion of gender equality in that moment. A certain isekai protagonist, accompanied by the most intelligent of blue-haired goddesses, would have been proud of him.
So was it really a surprise that he walked straight into a sidestep and a backhand to his poorly defended face, losing a couple of teeth in the process? Was it possible for a complete novice throwing his first punch to beat an opponent who actually knew how to fight? The answer was yes. With enough luck. And possibly a concealed weapon. But why would a wizard ever need anything beyond his wand?
Against Harriet Nicole Potter, however, luck alone was never going to be sufficient.
Still reeling, before he could fully gather himself, Harriet reappeared in his field of vision. He instinctively raised his arms to protect his head, which earned him a kick to the stomach that emptied the contents of it and dropped his guard entirely, followed by a second punch and a third, one to each side of his face. The blows were carefully measured, deliberately not enough to finish the job too quickly or knock him out. A genuine exercise in restraint.
Before he could recover, Draco's legs were swept out from under him, and Harriet was on top of him in an instant, knees pinning his arms. Beyond kicking uselessly, there was nothing left for him to do.
"You threw away your pride and decided to fight with your fists, and somehow you also forgot that you don't actually know how to fight. Arrogance is fine, Draco, but it helps to have the ability to back it up." She tilted her head slightly. "Now I'm going to beat you to within an inch of your life, so you remember not to target me again. You should be grateful I'm not just taking your life outright, that would create more problems for me than it's worth. But either way, I'm going to say back to you what you said to me earlier, and put you in your place, Draco."
She said all of this without the slightest sign of physical exertion.
And so she landed a clean right hook to his nose, still measured enough not to knock him out.
"Honestly," she said, almost to herself, "I expected this to be harder." She glanced briefly toward the unconscious bodies scattered across the clearing behind her before returning her attention to Draco. "I never actually prepared for any of these fights, you know. I just adapted as I went, every single time. You lot kept finding weaknesses and exploiting them, which meant I kept finding my own weaknesses too, and had to fix them in real time. None of that was particularly comfortable. But I suppose tonight you didn't think I would come prepared."
Draco, unable to speak, understood in that moment that everything he had done up to this point had been treated as a game, or a training exercise, by his enemy. And now he had absolutely no control over the situation whatsoever. He couldn't even manage words anymore, only the occasional grunt of pain.
Methodically, without hesitation, she kept landing blow after blow, looking him directly in his barely open eyes the entire time. There was nothing left to prove, and this time it landed somewhere deeper than his body. Harriet was stronger than him. She always had been. The whole time, he had been fighting someone who had already possessed absolute certainty in her own victory.
The thought brought him back, unbidden, to the source of his pain still comfortably residing in his own home. But there was an honest difference between the two of them. One was human. The other was not. Not just physically. Mentally. Compared to Voldemort's bottomless rage, and the teachings that had followed him from birth, the lessons insisting that the absence of emotion was the ideal path to success, Harriet retained her humanity without flinching from it and took full ownership of it.
He had lost on that front too.
She didn't stop. By the time she reached what might have been her fifteenth strike, still silent, still looking him directly in the eyes, as though waiting for something, Draco finally understood.
No intimidation worked.
No pain inflicted on others worked.
No strategy worked.
No escalation worked.
He had simply lost. Completely. Because she simply didn't play by the rules. She broke them whenever they displeased her. She had never been willing to let someone else's rules define the limits of what she could do.
Whereas he, in the end, had done nothing else his entire life. A puppet, dancing to whatever string happened to be pulling at the moment. A kind of freedom without freedom, if that even meant anything.
So Harriet stopped.
"You can't break me, Draco. That's just how it is. I might fall someday. But it won't be at your hands. You picked the wrong person. It's that simple."
Draco answered with something between two grunts that might have approximated agreement, and then slipped into the one state currently capable of offering him any relief.
He passed out completely.
With that, Harriet decided she'd had enough.
"Well, that was entertaining enough, but isn't someone missing?" She paused, then waved the thought away. "Oh, never mind. Mutsuko's with Hermione, I'm sure there's no problem on that end." She glanced once more at the field of wreckage she was leaving behind. "Let's go find the princess captured by a draco. I'm sure she's waiting for her prince."
She left behind her a landscape of devastation, composed entirely of people who probably ought to reconsider their choice of friends.
Two minutes after she departed, another figure arrived in the clearing. A certain Potions professor, here to clean up the damage. Visibly irritated, he stood over Draco's bloodied face and said, "You have more than enough problems as it is. Why go looking for more? You knew this was how it would end." A pause. "Perhaps it's a learning experience, if it teaches you anything at all. I don't expect much from you, but a little more patience would be a start."
He looked around at the rest of his students, scattered across the clearing in various states of pitiful disrepair, and his irritation deepened into something closer to genuine anger, both at the harm done to them and, for entirely different reasons, at Harriet.
"That insufferable little show-off. Always making a spectacle of everything. Who exactly are you trying to impress, leaving this kind of mess behind? What goes through that head of yours to make you think this was acceptable? And Dumbledore lets it happen, as though he holds every card on the board. These are minors, Albus. They're the ones suffering the consequences of your schemes."
He had spent far too long trapped in a story that refused to let him go, haunting him nearly every day, whether it was Dumbledore, Voldemort, or that insufferable little show-off who reminded him, against his will, of Lil... He knew it had never been healthy, dwelling on it like this, but he couldn't escape Hogwarts and everything it contained until the whole thing finally ran its course. He also knew he had played his own part in everything currently unfolding, even as the script kept drifting further and further off course.
But these were children. Children who deserved a far better school than this, without question.
"These students, and frankly the rest of us too, deserved better than this, Dumbledore. You're not solely responsible for it, but you've never actually made it better either. If anything, you've made it worse, in your own way."
Unfortunately, these were empty words coming from someone with no actual power to change anything.
"The best I can probably do is leave this place, assuming I'm still alive by the time it's all over."
Hermione POV:
Hermione was hidden beneath the invisibility cloak. The moment Harriet had pulled every eye in the clearing toward herself, Mutsuko had slipped over, thrown the cloak over Hermione, and tucked her own small frame behind the tree Hermione was leaning against.
The problem was that one person remained who hadn't been incapacitated. Sarah, seventh year, if Hermione remembered correctly. A pretty brunette with blue eyes.
The question now was how the tiny Harriet fan beside her was going to free her without being spotted. This was going to require some delicacy.
"Wooo, they really all left, it's actually amazing it worked that easily, but then again, the simplest plans are usually the most effective. That's the basics, hah!"
The miniature Gryffindor declared this with her hands on her hips and her chin lifted high, visibly proud that their plan had succeeded.
This, unsurprisingly, drew Sarah's attention.
"Well, well, what do we have here, a little Mudblood. So I take it you're with Harriet, and I'd guess it's thanks to you that we lost our hostage. How very brave of you to come back."
Sarah said this with the particular expression of someone who had just found an outlet for all her pent-up rage.
And there it was. This was exactly why nobody ever stopped to think before acting. Was the little chuunibyou not content with being a fan of Harriet's, did she also have to imitate her impulsiveness specifically? There were six years between them, and one of them had only just discovered magic existed. How come she is so brave to show herself?
Hermione found herself wondering, once again, why she always seemed to attract the most uniquely specific category of people.
"Hey! I know what Mudblood means, and technically it's not even possible, you'd die from sepsis if you had actual mud for blood, even with magic involved. Honestly, did nobody teach you basic biology at school?" Mutsuko said. "Oh, I see. You're living in a nightmare, aren't you. Someone must have cursed you when you were little, a dark wizard, probably, and now you genuinely believe people have mud instead of blood. That's weird, but villains do weird things sometimes. I'm not judging."
Mutsuko said all this with the particular sympathy of someone addressing a deeply unfortunate, slightly slow individual.
Perhaps, in hindsight, looking at an older girl, one who had clearly known how to fight for a long time and clearly knew exactly how violence works, with that exact tone of pity was not the wisest strategic choice. Ah yes, well played. Now she was furious.
"You filthy little Mudblood, it seems nobody ever taught you to respect your betters. In that case, don't blame me for putting you in your place." She raised her wand toward the small munchkin, who had already returned to her smug default expression.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you. You've already fallen into my trap!"
Mutsuko brought one hand up over her eye and tilted her head slowly from side to side, as though she had just attained some unprecedented level of enlightenment and glimpsed the ultimate truth of the universe.
"You... what are you even saying? What are you even doing?" Sarah said, on the verge of a complete mental breakdown at this point, and it remained something of a miracle that she hadn't simply attacked already.
"Heh! I just unsealed my demonic eye for a brief moment, and I've constructed a magic circle that grants access to the Quantum Sea. If you move even slightly, the monsters lurking inside it will see you, and they will attack and tear you to absolute pieces!"
Mutsuko's expression shifted yet again as she attempted to look properly evil, an effort somewhat undermined by her objectively adorable face.
"You're talking complete nonsense, I'm the one who's going to tear you to pieces, child or not, you are genuinely getting on my nerves. Bombar—"
Before she could finish the spell, a quiet, almost inaudible "depulso" sounded, and a rock struck her squarely in the forehead with considerable force. She dropped instantly, unconscious.
The brief moment Sarah had spent glancing down at her own wand, having unconsciously fixated on the phrase "you'll die if you move" and checking which part of her body had shifted, had given Mutsuko exactly enough time to ready a projectile and launch it directly at her with genuinely commendable accuracy. Simple. Effective.
"Mmm, I did warn you not to move. Honestly, trying to attack a main character when you're nothing more than a pretty background extra. Brave, I suppose, but stupid. You picked the wrong person to attack." Mutsuko paused, looking thoughtful. "My quantum magic eye is improving, though. I didn't destroy the world this time. I'm genuinely proud of myself. Hah!"
She struck her hands-on-hips pose once more, chin held high with pride.
"Oh, I almost forgot about you, miss repressed genius archetype."
She pulled the invisibility cloak off Hermione, and the two of them found themselves face to face.
"Repressed genius? What are you even talking about." Hermione decided this particular thread wasn't worth pursuing. "A quantum magic eye, huh? Aren't you worried about letting that information slip and ending up as someone's lab rat? Though it's impressive that you even know about quantum mechanics at your age," Hermione said, having watched the entire process and understood exactly how this clever girl had pulled it off. "But thank you, regardless. You handled that very well."
She had also decided, for the moment, to suppress the lingering panic from the entire ordeal. At the very least, she wasn't going to fall apart in front of a girl younger than herself.
"Mmm, that's true, you always have to watch out for unethical evil scientists," Mutsuko said, with complete confidence, while untangling the spells holding Hermione in place. "But I'm sure they'll only end up being my stepping stones. And Harriet won't let them get away with it anyway."
This kid is genuinely talented, Hermione thought.
"Anyway, let's wait for Harriet to get back. She promised me a forbidden book on voodoo for good behavior."
Hermione had one thought, distantly, somewhere underneath everything else.
They really don't use candy to lure children anymore?
Hermione tried, for a moment, to distract herself with the thought, anything to avoid dwelling on the conversation that was undoubtedly waiting for her once Harriet returned.
Honestly, that prospect was somehow more stressful than the kidnapping itself.
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A/N: If you want more, there are 5 advanced chapters available now on P --> OphisL