The bullet struck the Dementor squarely in the forehead. Its speed far surpassed that of magic, leaving the Dementor no chance to dodge.
And yet, the bullet actually stuck in the Dementor's forehead. It had no effect on the creature at all.
The Dementor had completely ignored the physical damage.
The bullet's momentum did nothing to it. The Dementor did not even move.
That was what made Dementors such a nightmare. They could ignore physical harm, shrug off most magic, and devour both happiness and souls. They were practically the natural enemy of humankind.
If wizards did not at least have the Patronus Charm to barely restrain them, there would probably have been no way to make them obey at all.
But the bullet Leonard had fired was one of his own design, a plant-launching round with a seed inside that could grow in any environment, under any conditions.
The bullet lodged in the Dementor's forehead cracked open, and a flicker of green glowed inside.
In the blink of an eye, the green surged out like a tide. The Dementor, which should not have felt pain, suddenly let out a shriek of terror. Its whole body trembled, but that did nothing to stop the green from swallowing it bit by bit.
In just a few breaths, the Dementor was completely engulfed by the green light. And once the green had devoured it entirely, it too instantly turned to ash and scattered away.
With the Dementor dead, the aura of negative energy in this carriage weakened considerably. Only the lingering effects of the Dementors in the other carriages were still barely able to reach this one.
Leonard's expression calmed. He glanced at the scraps left behind after the Dementor had been consumed, smiled faintly, and stepped back into the compartment.
Not bad. He was very satisfied with Ephemeral's effect.
The only question was whether the death of a Dementor would have any consequences.
Then again, what did that have to do with him? No one had seen him shoot it, and there were not even any surveillance cameras on the Hogwarts Express.
So he was just an innocent, ordinary student who had been harmed by a Dementor. As for everything else, he knew nothing.
Just as Leonard was about to seal off his compartment again, a wave of magic caught his attention.
If Dementors felt like negativity, grief, and pain, then this magical fluctuation felt like joy, beauty, and hope.
Leonard looked toward the source and saw a pure white glow rolling toward him like ripples on water. It looked exceedingly gentle, yet firmly pushed the Dementors away from the carriage.
"So this is the Patronus Charm?" Leonard felt that light and shook his head. "Nice visual effect. Too bad it's just a spell for feeding Dementors."
The Patronus Charm was not actually a spell meant specifically to drive Dementors away. Its true function was to take joyful emotion as its source and create a substitute kind of magic from it for the Dementors to consume.
It was a very passive sort of defense, which was why Leonard had never intended to learn it in the first place.
He would rather spend that time studying curses. That would be far more useful.
...
About five minutes later, the train gave a long whistle and started moving again.
No Ministry officials appeared to clean up the mess, and no one came to investigate the death of the Dementor.
To be more precise, it seemed that no one even knew a Dementor had died on the train.
After all, Ministry employees had no way to keep complete control over Dementors, so it was naturally difficult for them to keep an exact count.
And Dementors themselves were mindless creatures. They probably had not even noticed that one of their own was gone.
Leonard was perfectly happy with that and went back to studying his bullets.
Ephemeral had performed extremely well. Even a creature as fundamentally unknown as a Dementor had not been able to withstand the seed's forced growth effect.
That made Leonard start looking forward to seeing how the bullet would perform on other living creatures.
Although the devouring looked fast from the outside, any self-aware being would still feel the terrifying emptiness of their body gradually disappearing.
And if there were witnesses, then all the better. Watching a living person get devoured like that would absolutely inflict a whole array of debuffs on any bystander. Shock. Panic. Fear.
"I wonder who'll be lucky enough to become the first live test subject for this bullet." Leonard found himself genuinely looking forward to it.
...
In an abandoned village roughly two hundred miles from Hogwarts, three wizards dressed like bounty hunters moved through the rotten, crumbling buildings, heading toward Hogwarts.
There had not always been only Hogsmeade near Hogwarts. In fact, during the last century there had been four wizarding villages in the area, and one of them had even competed with Hogsmeade for the name.
But as Muggle activity expanded and technology advanced, those purely wizarding villages found it harder and harder to conceal their existence. In the end, they had all been abandoned, leaving only Hogsmeade behind.
This place had once been one of those villages. Now only a few faint traces remained to prove it had ever existed at all.
No wizard should have had any reason to come here now, and yet today it had welcomed three of them, and not just any wizards, but bounty hunters, the most combat-capable kind.
"Boss, why didn't we report to the Ministry and get ready to leave the country? Why'd we come all the way here instead?" asked a burly wizard.
His boss was a wizard as thin as a stick. His face was as gaunt as a skull, and his pair of green eyes glowed with a vicious light.
His name was Sophie, an infamous bounty hunter.
"Leave the country? Only idiots would let that brat from the Black family lead them around like dogs." Sophie said, "He's not going abroad. His target is right here at Hogwarts."
"I get it, boss." Another wizard, one with a sharp, monkey-like face, spoke up. "He definitely wants to kill Harry Potter, the one who defeated You-Know-Who."
Sophie nodded. "Exactly. You can tell from the Ministry's reaction that they think the same thing. Otherwise, they wouldn't have sent Dementors to Hogwarts."
"Dementors?" The burly wizard shuddered. People in their line of work might operate in a gray area, but they still found those terrifying creatures used to deal with criminals deeply unsettling.
"Boss, that's going to be hard to deal with. We won't get past the Dementors."
"Did that really need saying? Boss obviously has a way around them," said the sharp-faced wizard.
He looked at his boss with a flattering smile, and sure enough, he saw a smug expression there.
"Heh. Of course I have a way to get around the Dementors," Sophie said.
"Oh? Really? Then tell me how you plan to get past the Dementors, and I'll spare your life. How does that sound?"
Suddenly, a hoarse voice rang out.