"Tell me how you plan to get past the Dementors."
Along with that hoarse voice, a pair of crimson eyes appeared before the three of them.
A half-transparent figure slowly emerged. At first glance, he was a man of breathtaking beauty, but the longer one looked, the harder it became to ignore the sense of wrongness. Those perfect features looked as though they had been stitched together.
It was Raichel, student of Raven's third council elder.
Raichel made no effort to hide the excitement in his eyes. He stared at the three wizards as though they were priceless treasures.
The arrival of the Dementors had caught Raichel by surprise. By the time he learned that they were to serve as one layer of Hogwarts' defenses, those creatures were already floating in front of him.
Raichel was quite confident in his own strength. He believed he could at least exchange a few blows with Dumbledore, though only he himself believed that. But when facing monsters like Dementors, creatures that could not be destroyed, even he felt somewhat out of his depth.
More importantly, perhaps because of one of his bloodlines, he was unable to use the Patronus Charm he had already learned. That alone meant he did not dare provoke those creatures.
Who could have guessed his luck would be this good today? He had originally only wanted to find a place to vent his frustration, and instead he stumbled across a wizard who claimed he could get past the Dementors.
With the solution practically delivered to his door, how could Raichel not be delighted?
He was so delighted, in fact, that he was even considering sparing these three.
Naturally, that was only if they cooperated.
The wizard leader frowned at the man who had suddenly appeared in front of them.
The man looked strange, certainly, but among wizards there were always a few talented oddballs who liked tinkering with themselves. Compared to that, what concerned the wizard leader more was the man's invisibility.
An invisibility spell strong enough to evade the notice of even wizards like them, people who made their living chasing bounties, was not something an ordinary person could pull off.
So Sophie remained extremely cautious.
"You must be in the same line of work too, sir? You're also here for the bounty on Sirius Black, right?"
"Sirius Black...?" Raichel thought about it with some interest. "I think I've heard that name before..."
Raichel did not have much of an impression of Sirius Black. He paid no attention to the Ministry's wanted notices. He had only happened to overhear some wizards discussing the name.
What did the Ministry's wanted posters have to do with him? Money? As if he needed something like that.
That vague answer made Sophie even more dissatisfied. It gave her no way to judge whether the man in front of her was friend or foe.
Then again, from the very beginning she had never really cared what this man was doing here.
Anyone who got in the way of her making money had to die.
Sophie quietly signaled to her two underlings, intending to kill the man in front of her while he was off guard.
The two lackeys understood at once. They lifted their wands and secretly took aim, ready to strike hard the moment their boss gave the word.
Raichel's lips curved upward. His eyes lost focus.
"It seems you're not very willing to share information," he said flatly.
"Then go ask Death for your information!" Sophie shouted. "Kill him!"
The two underlings instantly raised their wands and aimed at Raichel.
"Avada Kedavra!"
The deadly green light shot out, on the verge of hitting its target in an instant.
Then both underlings froze.
The man who had been standing right in front of them had suddenly vanished.
No, more accurately, it was as though he had foreseen the attack in advance and casually dodged the supposedly inescapable fatal spell.
Immediately afterward, a wave of weakness washed over them. The two wizards felt the world tilt and spin before their eyes...
Blood sprayed.
Sophie's eyes widened as she watched the headless corpses of her two underlings slowly collapse to the ground.
Their severed heads spun through the air and only then hit the earth.
Sophie's pupils trembled. She slowly turned around and looked at the man, who now had a pair of membranous wings growing from his back.
They were blue-green wings, their tips ending in vicious spikes.
At that moment, a drop of blood slid slowly from one of those spikes.
A chill spread through Sophie's entire body.
"You... what kind of monster are you?"
The thing in front of her was not human at all. It was a monster. There was no magic in the world that could make those grotesque wings sprout from a person's body.
Raichel smiled in disdain. He glanced at the two heads on the ground, their eyes still wide with stunned disbelief, and could not help licking his lips.
Sophie grew even more frightened. She could not tell whether it was just terror playing tricks on her, but she felt as though she saw a naked hunger in his eyes.
Raichel's gaze turned cold as he looked at the wizard leader.
"I really hate it when people call me a monster..." he murmured.
Then he suddenly reached out and seized Sophie by the throat, revealing a horrifying mouth lined with jagged fangs that extended all the way down into his throat.
Sophie's terrified screams rang out through the abandoned village, then suddenly seemed to be muffled inside some sort of container. A soft crack followed, and the screams ended abruptly, leaving only the chilling sound of chewing and bones breaking.
After some unknown length of time, three headless corpses lay on the ground. Raichel elegantly wiped the red-and-white mess from the corner of his mouth, glanced at the bodies, and frowned.
"Damn it. Still couldn't control myself."
He muttered the words, then suddenly a sickly smile spread across his face.
"But it doesn't matter. Extracting memories this way is much more convenient than Legilimency."
From Sophie's mind, Raichel learned one piece of information. Somewhere within Hogwarts there was a secret passage leading out to one of the surrounding villages.
That passage could bypass the Dementors.
However, Sophie himself had never used it. He had only heard about it while he was a student at Hogwarts. The only clue he had was that the passage connected Hogwarts to one of the villages nearby.
"No wonder these people were here... looking for the secret passage?"
Raichel gave a dismissive snort.
Raven actually possessed some leads regarding Hogwarts' secret passages, but the people who controlled that intelligence belonged to the second council elder's side. After taking a loss in the meeting, those useless fools had decided to trip him up over something this petty.
But so what?
At most, it would make things slightly more troublesome for him.
Those people would never understand that petty tricks like this were meaningless against someone like him.
He was a genius who possessed the bloodlines of dozens of magical creatures, second only to the council elder who had obtained Titan blood.
And among those dozens of bloodlines was the Demiguise, a creature with both invisibility and foresight.
With even the slightest clue, he could use that effortless gift of prediction to uncover any information he wanted.
Very quickly, among the countless possibilities of the future, Raichel found the correct answer.
"There are two secret passages from Hogsmeade to Hogwarts."
Raichel's eyes refocused, and a bloodthirsty delight appeared in them.
"I wonder what the brain of that inheritor of ancient magic tastes like. I'm really looking forward to it."