Barrages of blinding light flooded the immense chamber. Hexes rained down upon Riddle from multiple directions simultaneously. The girls perfectly executed the tactics assimilated during their exhausting training sessions, rapidly deploying a flanking formation that hemmed in the possessed Percy to riddle him with an unceasing bombardment.
However, Riddle was no ordinary wizard; he defended himself with a methodical and ruthless cruelty. He launched ferocious counteroffensives with the clear intention of maiming or disintegrating the group. Although he fired several hexes of a lethal nature, the brooches kept the girls relatively safe, forcing them only to deal with the kinetic aftermath and the residual pain of the impact.
Spells of immense magical density and perversity erupted from Percy's wand, always seeking his opponents' vital centers: the chest or the head. Nevertheless, once again, those curses designed to reap lives behaved like invisible battering rams upon colliding against the unseen barriers of the robes, propelling the girls through the air and causing them sharp, almost unbearable, but strictly temporary suffering.
Riddle barely had tenths of a second to curse this fact before the coordinated counterattack forced him to retreat.
"Incendio!!"
"Depulso!!"
"Incarcerus!!"
"Bombarda!!"
Percy's wand traced frantic arcs in the air, intercepting and deflecting the magical projectiles at the very last instant. His prefect body, notably emaciated and at the limit of its physical capabilities, contorted with gymnastic dexterity to dodge the flashes that managed to bypass his shields.
"Crucio!!" he finally roared, contorted with fury.
The Cruciatus Curse struck Parvati square, and she collapsed onto the stone slabs, writhing in violent spasms. A grimace of sadistic satisfaction stretched Riddle's features as he beheld the scene, releasing some of the immense frustration caused by this group's defenses. However, his sadism was short-lived: Penelope, Tracey, and Daphne coordinated a simultaneous assault from opposite flanks, forcing him to interrupt the torture to safeguard his own integrity, while Padma, Luna, and Astoria dashed into the line of fire to drag Parvati toward a safe zone in the rear.
In reality, Parvati did not experience the absolute severity of the curse; though it might pass unnoticed to the naked eye, the brooch cushioned the neurological damage. Unlike what occurred with the killing hexes, the jewelry filtered the Cruciatus to prevent any permanent aftereffects or irreversible brain trauma, limiting the effect to severe pain. It was enough to leave her weeping, trembling out of pure terror and with her face covered in tears... But that residual suffering was transitory.
From the shadows, I made sure to channel my [Auras], manipulating the peaks of their chaotic emotions. I alleviated the physical pain and reconfigured the collective panic, transmuting it into a burning determination, a deep resentment, and an imperious need for vengeance. That injection of soulful energy forced them to their feet, reinserting them immediately into the battle line.
This skirmish constituted both a trial by fire and the perfect anvil to temper their character and endow them with confidence. Just as Albus Dumbledore intended to forge Harry Potter into the ideal martyr for his own agenda against the darkness, I was executing an analogous process, but strictly under my own terms. My girls would leave this chamber having experienced the authentic and wrenching pain of real combat and the proximity of death, but I would ensure they emerged from here with an absolute victory. I wouldn't give them any other alternative.
"Reducto!!" Penelope roared, forcing Percy into an extreme evasive maneuver.
As he dodged to one side, Penelope's flash accidentally struck Millicent Bulstrode. It was an episode of friendly fire brought about by the nerves of their debut and the lack of veteran experience in high-pressure situations, but, fortunately, the brooches absorbed the bulk of the destruction.
Far from easing the pressure on Riddle, the evasive maneuver placed him in a vulnerable position. At the precise instant he avoided Penelope's attack, Hermione Granger demonstrated her tactical sharpness by launching a timely binding spell straight at his ankles. To elude it, Percy had to propel himself into the air with almost superhuman agility; and even suspended in the void, he was forced to conjure a shield to repel Luna's onslaught. The insulting part of the matter was that Lovegood's spell wasn't offensive at all: it dissolved into a harmless cloud of illusory butterflies that fluttered around his eyes—a gesture of psychological mockery that utterly unhinged the soul fragment.
Decided to break the siege once and for all, Percy swept the air with his wand, unleashing a monumental barrier of fire that swept the room with the intention of forcing the witches to retreat.
By this point, Riddle was perfectly aware that his position was untenable. Although his pride prevented him from consciously admitting it, the thought of retreat was already orbiting his mind, but they did not plan to grant him that opportunity.
Demonstrating unforeseen audacity, Pansy Parkinson, imbued with a fierce resolve, pushed through the curtain of flames, exposing her own body. Blindly trusting that the safeguards of my equipment would mitigate serious burns, she ignored the blistering pain and executed a hex in the middle of the fire.
A subtle flash of dark magic, which failed to manifest its full destructive potential due to the haste, struck Percy's robe dead-on, forcing him to pivot on his heels to face the new threat.
It was a mere few seconds of distraction, but it was more than enough for the rest of the contingent to reorganize with the efficiency of a fire brigade:
"Aguamenti!!"
"Aguamenti!!"
"Aqua Eructo!!"
Torrents and high-pressure columns of water erupted from their wands, dousing the outbreaks of fire in a blink before converging directly upon Percy's figure. The hydraulic harassment struck him from multiple angles, destabilizing him, blocking his field of vision, and even threatening to flood his respiratory tract.
Water flew everywhere, extinguishing the fire and harrying the wounded prefect, while other hexes of various kinds began to manifest on the periphery. The girls were employing the entirety of their available arsenal, dynamically alternating between elemental charms, curses, and hexes.
Percy's wand moved at a frantic frequency, but it no longer constituted an exhibition of magical virtuosity; it was a desperate display of pure survival.
"Miserable bitches!" Riddle roared, with a genuine mixture of helpless frustration and a nascent surge of terror.
With every charm conjured and every impact received, the grueling days under my tutelage bore their ripest fruit. The students' level rose at an exponential rate right in the middle of the battlefield. Until today, they had never tested themselves in a real life-or-death scenario; they lacked the experience of fighting someone who genuinely viewed them as mortal enemies. But now they had an opponent before them whom, unlike me, they had the actual capacity to overpower, making him the perfect recipient to discharge all their repressed emotions and aggressiveness.
My brother's body was accumulating fatigue, bruises, and superficial lacerations at an alarming speed. If the soul fragment inhabiting him hadn't desisted yet, it was solely out of dread for the humiliation of being defeated by the group of students he had despised minutes prior. In that instant, Tom Riddle's essence was forcing Percy's biological container to 120% of its genius, employing every shred of its intellect just to survive this school club.
"Now!" Hermione barked unexpectedly.
Instantly, three of the girls executed a simultaneous Avifors spell, materializing a massive flock of birds that swooped directly upon Riddle. Although the attack lacked real offensive intent, the mass of feathers and flapping completely blinded the possessed man. Amidst the chaos, a high-density sphere of light erupted inches away from Percy's head and burst into a blinding flash: a remotely modified Lumos spell. To cap off the distraction maneuver, Ginny threw a contraband firecracker from the Weasley twins with millimetric precision, which detonated with a deafening crash to one side of her brother.
The light scorched his retinas, the sonic waves dazed his eardrums, and the birds intercepted any attempt at physical or magical counterattack.
Exploiting the breach, Tracey and Millicent aimed their wands in perfect synchrony at the cobblestones beneath Riddle's feet, conjuring a thick mantle of black oil. Percy was on the verge of losing his balance, but showcasing impressive motor skills, he stabilized his stance while trying to raise an emergency defensive shield. However, a simple protective charm would no longer suffice to contain what was coming.
"Everte Statum!!"
"Diffindo!!"
"Flipendo!!"
Cho, Parvati, and Padma unleashed an implacable combo of piercing, cutting, and concussive impacts. Despite not mastering the hexes with absolute perfection, the adrenaline of combat and sheer precision made Percy's shield flash violently under an energy overload. Far from pausing the assault, the other members joined the firing cadence, bombarding the exact same spot on the barrier until Penelope Clearwater dealt the finishing blow.
"Defodio!!" roared the prefect, releasing a devastating, concentrated charge.
The protective charm shattered into a thousand pieces. Although the shield cushioned just enough to allow Percy to compose himself in a fraction of a second, the harem's offensive gave him no respite.
"Avada Kedavra!!" Pansy's sharp voice resonated, as an emerald green glow sprouted from her wand.
Gripped by instinctive panic, Riddle performed an erratic, awkward contortion to dodge the fatal projectile, realizing a fraction of a second too late that Pansy had tricked him using a simple flash of Verdimillious coloration.
The distraction was fatal. On the opposite flank, Hermione already had him in her crosshairs:
"Incarcerus!!" she barked, materializing a set of magical ropes that wrapped tightly around the prefect's torso.
He had swallowed the bait completely. Nonetheless, employing sheer dark willpower, Percy began to strain against the bindings to dissolve the restrictive enchantment. But before he could complete the release, Susan Bones intervened from the periphery, having abandoned her logistical role as a nurse to join the firing line:
"Flagrate!!"
A lash of searing fire enveloped the wand in Percy's hand. The wood heated to a glowing red, scorching the skin of his palm, but the soul fragment endured the agonizing pain with clenched teeth; he was aware that being disarmed meant definitive defeat. With a final spark of resistance, he counterattacked by firing blind blasts. Ever since he discovered that the safeguards prevented him from directly murdering the girls, he had dedicated himself to inflicting superficial lacerations and deep burns; their sustained loss of blood was taking effect, making their movements noticeably slower and more erratic... But his own physical endurance had reached its absolute limit.
"Torsio Testicularis!!" roared the powerful and highly enthusiastic voice of Lavender Brown, employing a twisted spell of dark anatomy that I had taught her out of pure whim and which she still didn't fully master.
The hex did not manifest with complete technical neatness, but the effect was more than enough: Percy froze dead in his tracks, locking up entirely with his lips pressed into a rigid line as his face turned from pale to purple due to a sharp, utterly paralyzing pain.