A technique Quirrell had used a hundred times without a second thought suddenly lurched out of control at the worst possible moment. In the next instant, it would have split him apart from the inside. Voldemort seized control of Quirrell's body by force, tore himself free from the Apparition mid-execution, and cracked into existence several hundred metres from Malfoy Manor.
Bernadette had already caught the ripple in space. She was there the moment Quirrell appeared — her wand swept in a sharp arc, and a fire dragon erupted from its tip, lunging straight at him.
Her wand didn't stop moving. Seven, eight streaks of dark green light blazed out in rapid succession behind the dragon.
Faced with a wall of conjured fire coming at him, Voldemort wrenched backward at full speed — and turned straight into the killing curses that had fanned out to cut off every retreat.
"Just who exactly is the Dark Lord here?!"
He whipped his wand and conjured a series of shields, precisely angling each one to intercept every curse in sequence. He was just drawing breath to retaliate when, in a language he'd never heard before and yet somehow grasped the meaning of, a voice landed in his ear: "You murder — you are guilty."
Sharp spears of ice erupted from the ground all around him from nothing. If he hadn't thrown up the Armour Charm the instant he'd arrived, he'd have been skewered on the spot.
He'd barely stabilised himself when a fresh wave of spells crashed down on him from overhead like they cost nothing at all. Voldemort could only keep blocking and deflecting, trying to swat aside each curse as it came — not because the gap in their raw power was anything like this large, but because he was stuck operating inside Quirrell's body, and Quirrell was simply not built to sustain this.
"Charles, what are you doing?!"
He'd finally gotten a clear look at who was attacking him. He shouted at the top of Quirrell's voice: "You're openly assaulting a Hogwarts professor! Do you want to end up in Azkaban?!"
Bernadette said nothing. She kept throwing spells.
"Damn it all!"
The indignity of it was suffocating. "Why? Why are you attacking me?"
Bernadette said, without inflection: "You've forgotten about using the unicorn's body to frame me?"
"???"
Voldemort was genuinely caught off-guard. That particular manoeuvre had been nothing more than a nuisance tactic — leave the carcass at her door, give the Chadsworth faction an angle to use against her, get her shipped off to Azkaban or pushed out of Hogwarts. By his own standards, it had already been an embarrassingly conservative move. And it had failed completely anyway, so what was she—
This?
That's going a bit far.
By now Bernadette had finished her preparation. She turned her palm upward.
In that instant, everything within a dozen metres seemed to fragment into layer upon layer of colour — and in her eyes those colours resolved into dense, flowing streams of information.
She launched herself forward. The delicate wand was gone; in her hand was the hard, unyielding staff, and she drove it in a sweeping arc directly at Voldemort.
Crack.
The staff came down hard against the Armour Charm. Voldemort's expression didn't go to anger — it went to savage delight. A cruel smile spread across Quirrell's face. "Fool. Do you think you're actually a Gryffindor?"
"Avada Kedavra!"
He laughed and fired the Killing Curse point-blank at the Bernadette standing inches in front of him.
And then the smile froze.
Nothing happened.
A heartbeat later, he felt himself grow very, very light — a feeling he knew intimately, having drifted in exactly this state through the forests of Albania for over a decade.
Voldemort had become a formless wisp of soul again.
As for Quirrell — or more precisely, everything within a several-metre radius centred on Quirrell, including his own magic — it had simply come apart into oddly-shaped fragments and ceased to exist.
What kind of magic is that?
The thought had barely risen when a streak of dark green light swallowed Voldemort whole.
"Not dead?"
Bernadette looked at the spot where Voldemort had vanished, a genuine question forming in her mind. As far as she knew, in this world only creatures with innate magical resistance — giants, dragons, that sort — could survive a direct Killing Curse. No human wizard, however powerful, survived one without any shield in place.
But she was certain beyond any doubt: Voldemort was not dead.
No — to be precise, Voldemort had indeed died. He'd died on that night eleven years ago. But his soul had simply never gone out. Even after taking a second Killing Curse from her directly, his soul was still clinging to existence by some method she couldn't identify.
In her own world, this would also be anomalous — a powerful Beyonder's body could die and the soul could become an evil spirit, yes. But there was no such thing as an evil spirit that then became unkillable.
Is it a special form of magic?
Bernadette's interest was thoroughly caught. Here was a new direction of study: alongside her ongoing deep research into ancient magic and ancient magical script, alongside her search for traces of memory magic and time magic — this.
Crack.
Her outline twisted and she reappeared in the Malfoy Manor study.
Lucius Malfoy shot to his feet. "What happened?!"
"Quirrell is dead. Voldemort escaped."
"???"
A wave of dizziness hit Lucius. The only thought in his head was: this is it, the Malfoy family ends with me.
Bernadette didn't bother explaining further and was already turning to go back to Hogwarts — when her eye caught the notebook on the floor. It had fallen from Quirrell's body in the chaos of Voldemort's frantic exit.
She raised a hand. The diary flew to her fingers. She flipped through a few pages quickly.
One eyebrow went up.
This book... is rather interesting.
...
LOTM world.
The following evening at seven-thirty, Klein followed Sherman to Bravehearts Bar on Iron Gate Street in Backlund's Bridge District. Sherman ordered two beers and they settled in to wait.
During that time, a few drunk men noticed the striking "Kleya" and tried to push their luck — Sherman broke their fingers and threw them out of the bar.
Klein sat with his drink and felt something complicated.
Based on the picture he'd built up of Sherman: not long ago, the man had been on the timid side, someone who was regularly pushed around and never pushed back. It was almost hard to believe he was the same person.
A Chinese proverb surfaced in his mind: a weapon in hand puts murder in the mind.
Sherman could still hold himself back right now — still picking only people who were, by his own reckoning, deserving of it. But as he got more comfortable with killing, as he got more comfortable with the strength that each advancement brought him — would that last?
At eight o'clock, Sherman set down his glass and stood. "Let's go, Kleya."
"You still haven't told me where we're going tonight," Klein said.
The sound of his own voice gave him a familiar flash of discomfort. But there wasn't much he could do about it — if you were going to impersonate a Witch, you couldn't exactly speak in a man's baritone.
"A Beyonder gathering!" Sherman's eyes lit up. "I found it a while back — organised specifically by and for Beyonders. You can buy and sell all sorts of extraordinary items there, including materials and formulas. You used to—"
He caught himself. "Right, I forgot. You're not exactly new to this."
Klein smiled faintly. "No — my earlier formulas and materials all came from gatherings just like this one."
As they talked, they slipped out through the bar's back door and into the alley behind it.
"I've always wanted to ask," Sherman said, hesitating a moment before lowering his voice. "What does it actually feel like — going from a man to a woman?"
Ugh.
I feel terrible every minute of the day.
Especially the chest — those two shapes he'd "moulded" into existence using the Faceless ability, like something that wasn't quite his own body and wasn't quite not his own body. He still hadn't fully adjusted to them, and probably wasn't going to any time soon.
He finally understood what some well-built girls back home had always complained about — that a good figure was more burden than blessing. For him it was less a burden and more an active torment.
To be continued…
Advance 100 Chapters are up on my Patreon!
pat reon.com/AlphaSenatus