Regulus stood on the shore, watching the water churn at his feet.
Waves broke against the foot of the rocks, white foam rolling up and sliding back. Water never held a shape. Its shape was whatever held it.
Air was the same.
Everyone knew water was water and air was air, but who could point at a stretch of sea and say this body of water is one whole thing?
It had no outline, no start or end, forever flowing, forever reshaping. Where it began and where it stopped, no one could say.
He knew there was air overhead. But which part? How much? What shape?
He couldn't answer that himself, so he couldn't lock the target.
The sky hung grey. He raised his wand, swung it loose, and circled some random patch of air in his mind as a target.
The yellow-brown ray shot out, cut through a span of air, and burst at some point into a ring of half-clear ripples, the air compressing once before the ripples faded.
It had struck something, but only the thing he'd carelessly circled in his head. The air itself shook out no real effect.
He lowered the wand and studied that patch of air a moment.
The logic held.
His cognition could frame a stretch of air as a target, and the spell had run through that region, only its effect came to nearly nothing.
Halfway there. The other half jammed on the medium.
The gaps between air molecules ran too wide. The oscillation found no walls to bounce off inside, and the energy scattered straight away.
He didn't try a second time. Pulling his gaze back, he kept thinking it through.
Solid, liquid, gas, space...
In theory, once a caster's cognition and control reached that level, there was no ceiling on what the Disintegration Curse could break.
The Decomposition Curse had gone from replication to spell in one leap, coming out finished, its ceiling sky-high but out of reach for now.
The Disintegration Curse was different. From the moment it surfaced it showed more parameters to tune: sustained output, cognitive precision, magical output.
Its ceiling rested on the quality of the caster.
Sharper cognition, more abstract the target it could lock.
Stronger magical control, steadier the oscillation it could hold.
But one threshold stood out front of all the rest. The Disintegration Curse's magic had to shift from striking to penetrating.
An ordinary spell hit a target by collision, the magic slamming in from outside, taking effect the moment it touched the surface.
The Disintegration Curse had to bore in. Reaching the surface, the magic had to gather to a needle-point, not bursting, not scattering, forcing its way in, then opening into oscillation once inside.
That conversion took enormous precision of control. In the instant of release at the tip, the magic had to draw from a face to a point, from diffusion to penetration, the window for that gather under a hundredth of a second.
That precision threshold would cut out the overwhelming majority.
Anyone who could learn this spell was either a wizard already skilled enough, or born gifted, carrying an instinct for handling magic from birth.
He didn't dwell on that. Another matter was worth more thought.
What if the target were big enough?
A building. The British Ministry of Magic, that vast thing under London, dozens of levels, packed with hundreds of wizards and countless departments.
Or the Magical Congress headquarters, MACUSA, that thing tucked inside the Woolworth Building in New York.
Or Hogwarts.
He took Hogwarts back out of his head. That place had an owner. Not one to toy with.
Something ownerless, then. A mountain. An island.
When a target grew past a certain size, fixing it in the mind as one whole became hard work.
A fist-sized stone, he could think its boundary clear with his eyes shut. It was a stone.
A building?
He'd have to frame the whole structure's outline in his mind, every wall, every floor, every room, every pipe and stairwell, ignoring all the detail, keeping only the one concept of a whole.
The bigger the building, the harder that frame to hold.
The corner of his mouth tugged.
Then again, when cognition fell short, magic could make up the difference.
Fine operation saved magic. Brute force covered for fine operation.
Pull the output high enough, and maybe the demand on cognitive precision dropped.
The caster wouldn't need to lock the whole Ministry of Magic as one precise target. He'd only need to pour enough magic in that direction.
The magic would spread the oscillation through on its own. Crude, but it worked.
The cost was a vast drain of magic.
How vast, he didn't know. He'd never tried.
But the logic should hold.
Regulus drew his thoughts back and turned his gaze out to the deep water.
He Apparated back to the hut.
Both forms needed building.
The first form, single-point directed output, was done. Everything he'd tested so far was that.
The second form, area.
The Decomposition Curse's second form ran on Infrasound, below twenty hertz, inaudible to humans, an attack across an area.
The Disintegration Curse's oscillation was physical, naturally compatible with sound waves. A sound wave was itself oscillation traveling through a medium. No extra conversion step needed.
In his mind he changed the release mouths at the ends of the branching model from directed output to omnidirectional spread.
Before, a single needle spraying forward. Now, from a sphere's center, spraying in all directions at once.
After the magic ran its two and a half turns through the model, it released from every end at the same time, radiating outward with the caster at the center.
The magic allotment for the all-directional version ran far more complex than the single point. Every release mouth needed even magic, no leaning. Lean, and a dead angle opened.
He recalibrated the fork nodes once more in his mind, confirmed the flow ratio across every branch held even, and opened his eyes.
He went out to the clearing, hauled a dozen-some stones, and set them in a ring around himself, all sizes, the nearest a meter from his foot, the farthest fifteen meters out.
Regulus let the wand hang at his side, tip down. "Quassare."
The area oscillation spread from the tip, no light, no sound, rippling faint through the air outward with him at its center.
The granite at his foot crumbled to powder in an instant. The one two meters out split into pieces. At seven meters the surface webbed with cracks. At ten a single thin fracture, barely an effect at all.
Farther than that, nothing.
He walked the ring and looked.
The strength fell off from the center outward, maybe a tenth lost with each meter, down to under three-tenths by nine meters.
A radius of ten meters, the effective kill range somewhere inside seven or eight. Past that it could only crack stone. Killing was out of the question.
The magic cost ran well above the first form. The same output that let the first form shatter a man-high block of granite was only enough, spread all directions, to crack stone within seven meters.
Efficiency traded for coverage, reasonable. Oscillation falling off with distance, reasonable.
Regulus put the wand away.
Both forms steady now. Single-point shattering, area oscillation, the same twin-form setup as the Decomposition Curse.
---
The hearth in the hut still burned. Agnes had come by at some point, a meal box and hot tea set out on the table.
He sat and ate a couple of bites, bread in his mouth, his mind already outside.
Next he needed a bigger target to test.
He came out of the stone hut and walked west along the north side of the plantation.
Past the last belt of shrubs, the ground began to tilt toward the sea.
A few hundred meters on, the shrubs and wild grass cut off, and a cliff opened ahead.
A sheer drop of close to forty meters, nothing but sea below.
He looked down once over the edge.
The sea stretched off into the distance, the water and the low cloud merging into one, the horizon blurred, no telling sea from sky.
Regulus Apparated and appeared high in the air.
The Flight Spell held him drifting aloft, his robe snapping in the wind.
Visibility was poor, the grey cloud pressing low, the sea throwing back no shine, nothing below but a dim grey haze.
He hung there, looking out toward the open water. The view opened a little, but still didn't reach far. A thousand meters out it was all fog.
He Apparated west, about a kilometer a jump.
First jump. He landed in midair, the Flight Spell catching him. Below, grey-black sea, white swells, no island.
Second jump. Still sea.
Third jump. Sea.
Fourth jump. The water's color deepened a shade, the shelf falling away beneath.
Fifth jump. Something, faintly.
A outline showed through the mist, low against the water, its shape irregular, from this distance only a flat dark block.
One more jump, and he had it. A small island.
About eight kilometers offshore, neither large nor small, roughly half the size of a Quidditch pitch, rock stacked up from the water, the highest point standing close to five stories above the sea.
No buildings on the island, no dock, no sign anyone had ever set foot there, just a knot of granite forgotten in the sea, untrodden for thousands of years, most likely.
He dropped from the air and hung at twenty meters above the island's face.
The Flight Spell held his body, the wind sweeping his hair to one side.
He framed the island's outline in his mind, every edge, every hollow, every crack and cavity ignored, his cognition laid over it, keeping only the one concept.
All the rock, the strata, the cavities, the plants, the birds, they were one whole.
Regulus raised his wand and aimed below the island's center.
The magic began to gather inside him. This time, full power.
---
Join my Patreon for early access to chapters: patreon.com/rivyura
Next Target 200PS :)