Bill stood slack-jawed, completely disoriented. This was no longer a simple childish prank: his younger brother and sister were matching his level in that complex, challenging trial, and even threatening to surpass him without breaking a sweat. His instinct would have been to yield to panic, but my words snapped him out of his stupor.
"They don't need your protection. They're much more capable than you imagine. They can handle whatever comes their way, and if they do happen to get hurt, it'll just be a valuable lesson," I said as I moved fluidly across the tiles, reaching the twenty-seventh sequence before having to reset. "Let yourself go and compete with me. I bet it's been a long time since you faced a worthy opponent at this."
Bill watched them out of the corner of his eye and couldn't help marveling at the almost martial dexterity with which they moved. Even when they suffered a glancing blow or a minor scratch, they completely ignored the pain, one hundred percent focused on the rhythm. The girls kept carving their way forward, bypassing the traps with the precision of veterans, yet preserving the agility natural to their age. Influenced by my dance classes, their movements had grown rhythmic, magnetic, and perfectly synchronized with the background music.
Bill looked at me and then watched as I executed every jump as though dancing atop danger, having the time of my life. He let out a sigh of surrender. Although the older brother inside him demanded he halt the game, his blood began to boil with competitive pride, no doubt fanned by the energy of the songs.
"The longest sequence I know of is thirty-one tiles, and the final stretch gets genuinely dangerous," he warned as he took a fresh step, resetting his own score.
Looking away from us for a moment, Bill trusted in our capabilities and concentrated on his own advance, though he glanced at us sideways every few seconds.
Four people—three of them underage—without protection, bounded across the board as if they were at a party, keeping everyone present on edge between terror and fascination. Rarely had the venue's staff witnessed such a display; while workers had free rein to test the circuit, they lacked financial incentives and rarely invested time in mastering it. In the stands, the twins cheered us on euphorically, while Ron tried to disguise a furious jealousy as he kept his eyes glued to us. Percy and Charlie argued heatedly nearby, picking up debates about the Heir of Slytherin based on what they were witnessing. And our parents... well, they alternated between scolding the staff and begging us to stop once and for all.
After endless minutes, upon seeing that we remained unscathed, my parents' reprimands tapered off into a tense, heart-in-the-mouth silence. Every time a mechanism triggered, they shrank back; every time we dodged it, they let out a sigh of relief and excitement.
The music took a sudden turn, and the notes of Rasputin began to play, raising the intensity of the moment. Bill had just stamped out a streak of twenty-nine successes.
"Red! Once you hit the thirties, things get really complicated: Gringotts couldn't modify the final stretch for fear of damaging the core of the mechanism, and since almost no tourist gets this far, they left it intact. Best leave it here," my brother proposed in a firm tone. "If you want, step off the board and I'll show you what happens."
"Relax, Bill, we're fine. We can handle this," I replied as I stepped onto the twenty-seventh tile.
"I understand your confidence, and you've more than proven it's not unfounded. But recklessness costs dearly; trust me, in my profession we know that well," he insisted with gravity, gesturing toward the girls. "Think of Ginny and Luna. Even though they've impressed me, they're still exposing themselves too much."
Indeed, though they emerged triumphant, both breathed with heavier fatigue, and their clothes showed a few tears caused by the shocks and the friction of the traps.
"Trust them. I do," I held my ground, pushing toward the twenty-eighth tile.
"Red, that's enough! Get out of there!" my father shouted from outside the platform.
"Yes, you've proven enough already! You don't need to keep risking yourselves..." Mum chimed in, not quite knowing how to address me.
What was happening was that I was completely dismantling the image they had of me. There is an unbridgeable abyss between being told what someone is capable of and seeing it with your own eyes. I didn't know if this was my true self, or if it was a way to grab their attention, a way of telling them they shouldn't worry about me.
"Keep going, Bill! We can do it!" Ginny exclaimed, cutting off our mother as she wiped a lock of sweaty hair from her forehead. "If you're cowing out, we'll finish the run."
No sooner said than done; she and Luna leaped forward without a second's hesitation.
"Go on, Bill. If I see the real risk, I'll stop them. I'll vouch for their safety, so..." I added, reaching the twenty-ninth tile, "unless you want to be left behind..."
Bill exhaled a gust of air, resigned to our absolute stubbornness. He weighed the option of stepping off the board to force us to abort the trial, but the fear that we would continue alone held him back.
"Fine. You asked for it. I'll show you what's at the end, and then we leave," he declared, taking a long stride onto the thirtieth tile.
The exact instant his boot sole collided with the stone, no attack was unleashed against him; instead, a mechanical roar shook the foundations of the room.
Every tile on the board creaked and pulled apart a few centimeters from one another. From the gaps at the joints of four tiles, rows of solid iron spikes began to emerge, making it look as though the entire board had transformed into a gigantic bed of nails. The metallic gleam of the spikes swept across the entire chamber amidst general astonishment.
"Careful! This steel cuts just by looking at it; don't you dare graze it," Bill warned severely, staring right at us. "Are we leaving now?"
"You said there are sequences beyond thirty, didn't you?" I asked.
In my mind, I had already almost completely deciphered the board's logic. With my experience and mental capacity, I could deduce the following combinations as if it were a giant typewriter where the tiles played the role of letters. That was why it was so simple for me to match Bill's pace despite not knowing the prior sequences, whereas Ginny and Luna had a much harder time hitting the correct pattern.
"Yes, but very few are known. I've only memorized one more tile," Bill replied. "I'll try it and then we're leaving."
Without wasting a second, as if wishing to get the matter over with, he took a stride onto another tile, deftly dodging the iron stakes. Immediately, the environment reacted: a barrage of spears shot out from the peripheral pillars and ceiling, forcing him into a defensive shield at top speed before letting out a heavy sigh.
"We're done," he declared, stepping on the wrong tile on purpose to break the sequence. With that single movement, the rods sank back down, and the tiles reclaimed their original position. "Let's go. At least we earned ourselves a few Galleons."
"Mmm... If you don't mind, I want to see if I can finish this game," I challenged him, leaping back onto the board.
"Red, NO!" Bill screamed, his face distorted by panic as he watched the spikes resurface. "This stopped being a game! What on earth are you trying to prove?"
"Nothing. It's just that I rarely get a chance to do something like this, and we're this close to finishing," I replied with absolute seriousness as I executed a double jump with the finesse of an Olympic gymnast, bypassing the mechanisms on the fly.
Ginny and Luna followed my lead immediately, unleashing the fury and desperation of Bill, our parents, and the Gringotts goblins alike.
While my family consumed themselves with anguish, the bank employees suffered for their money. The attraction and the juicy prizes had been designed as a lucrative trap for unwary tourists; they never expected three kids to show up capable of climbing to such high sequences consecutively. They weighed the idea of deactivating the mechanisms by force or artificially increasing the difficulty to force our defeat, but the risk was sky-high: if any of us were severely injured and what they did came to light, the scandal and lawsuits would cost them an infinitely larger fortune.
To the beat of the music, the girls and I kept advancing. Bill, with his knuckles white from clenching his fists so hard, chose to rejoin the march to act as our human shield if things went south, all while shouting reprimands at us in a classic older brother tone.
The room was a hive of emotions: tourists cheered in astonishment, while some let out shrieks of genuine terror. Xenophilius had stopped cheering Luna on; the tension had paralyzed him completely, unable to utter a word save for some choked gasp every now and then.
We danced among the metal spikes, though the margin of error forced us to start over a couple of times when I fumbled on the thirty-fourth and thirty-seventh tiles.
Past the barrier of thirty successes, the system unleashed its full offensive potential; not even Ginny and Luna were safe from traps that no longer qualified precisely as harmless. Despite that, none of the three made a move to retreat. In the stands, opinion was split between those who admired our tenacity and those who cursed our foolishness, but no one was capable of tearing their eyes away from us.
Upon stepping onto tile number forty, the board underwent another mutation: the floor destabilized, sinking about ten centimeters while water flooded up to the surface. At the same time, the perimeter pillars rose with a clatter and began projecting flashes of glowing hieroglyphs, though some were unlit or blinking—an unmistakable sign that the core's magic was starting to fail from age. The scene left everyone petrified, as not even much of the staff had ever witnessed anyone making it this far.
The difficulty skyrocketed to infinity, and the real danger lay in the fact that the traps stopped being individual. Ginny was a step ahead when the terrain flooded, and upon stepping onto the next tile, in a fraction of a second, powerful electric shocks leaped from the pillars into the stagnant water.
The attack was lightning-fast. Outside, a collective howl of horror echoed, but those of us inside were the only ones aware of the impact's lethality. My reflexes, sharpened to the limit: I lashed out with my wand straight at the liquid surface, channeling a magical counter-current.
The voltage threatening to fry us alive was brought to a dead stop, allowing us to receive merely a tiny fraction of the discharge. Bill, out of pure instinct, had enclosed himself in a defensive dome, though upon realizing the real danger fell upon us, terror dried him up from within. Ginny and Luna suffered a heavy jolt that made them stagger and gasp, while I, withstanding the epicenter of the electrical clash thanks to my high physical resistances, barely flinched.
"Ginny! Red!" / "Luna!" our parents bellowed in unison.
"I warned you! This is madness!" Bill roared, agitated and pale with fear, staring at the girls without daring to take a false step lest he trigger another mechanism.
"It got interesting," I retorted with feigned calm. To me, it was still a stimulating test without any real issues; the only actual inconvenience was the girls.
Though visibly dazed, they recovered quickly. Ginny clenched her fists in pure rage; wounded pride consumed her. She had underestimated the trap, and had it not been for my intervention, her defeat would have been humiliating.
"Red, cut the sequence!" Bill ordered.
"Girls?" I asked, ignoring him completely.
"Keep going! We can handle this," Ginny gasped, refusing to accept defeat after a stumble.
"You heard her. We continue," I shrugged. "Get ready, Bill."
And without giving them a moment to breathe, I moved toward the next tile.
"Red!" my parents and my brother screeched at the same time.
Upon pressing tile number forty-one, the surrounding pillars spat out a horizontal wall of fire that swept across the entire board at the exact height of our heads.
The spectacle was monstrous; the heat wave scorched the air, making the onlookers outside step back as they felt the heat on their faces. Inside the circuit, our only alternative was to dive headfirst into the water to weather the fire, with the millimeter-thin hazard of not stepping on any additional tiles or touching the iron stakes.