To be honest, things didn't go much further than that. Seeing my mother on the verge of fainting and my father ready to pounce onto the board to drag us out of there, I decided not to fuel the chaos any further. I asked the girls to step down; although Ginny raised her eyebrows in discontent at having to yield before reaching me, they ended up obeying. I wrapped them in a soft beam of levitation and safely hoisted them out of the perimeter.
I tried to do the same with Bill, who stubbornly resisted abandoning me to my fate. After assuring him with absolute firmness that I had the situation under control and simply intended to finish the run, it took some effort to convince him, though I gave him a very subtle mental nudge to tip the scales. The moment he set a foot outside, he ran desperately toward his colleagues at the control panel, ready to cut the power if things went south.
Yet no intervention was necessary. I was one step away from the finish line. I advanced smoothly toward tile number forty-two and beyond:
Flying blades imbued with venom.
Countless arcane life-sucking curses.
A devastating magical attack with anti-magic capacity.
Three successive tiles featuring increasingly complex and difficult-to-repel onslaughts. The entire room held its breath, anxious to witness the outcome, while my family wondered whether such a risk was truly worth it. At least Mum could now hug Ginny and Luna with a scrap of peace of mind, even though every single one of my movements made her heart squeeze all over again.
I stepped onto sequence number forty-four and sensed the end was near. This time the board demanded a multi-meter leap across a stretch riddled with cutting rods, which I cleared without much trouble.
And then... nothing.
Everyone waited for the next death trap to detonate, but the silence stretched on. Faces filled with confusion: had the pattern failed, the entire system would have reset immediately, and yet the mechanism remained static. The spectators concluded that the machinery had collapsed due to age, and some let out relieved sighs.
Only I knew the truth. The reason no physical damage was registered was that this final trap consisted of a powerful mental attack—a psychic blow potent enough to shatter the mind of any wizard who hadn't reached legendary rank or an equivalent resistance, reducing them to a vegetative state or absolute stupidity. A genuine hazard, though treatable for expert minds.
Yet the challenge was over. Although the others didn't notice, upon overcoming the mental onslaught, the engravings on virtually every single tile emitted a faint glow... all except one: the final step.
With total serenity, I took the definitive step onto the closing tile.
The exact instant the sole of my boot pressed against the stone, the entire chamber sprang to life. The outer pillars sank with a dull thud, the accumulated water drained through hidden sinks, the floor reclaimed its original height, and the iron spikes vanished back into the depths. It looked as though the mechanism had simply reset due to a glitch... until the inevitable happened.
The center of the board widened via a subtle shifting of the blocks, allowing a heavy stone pedestal to rise from the bowels of the floor, crowned by a dark golden chest, albeit a small one.
The entire room fell mute for a couple of seconds before erupting into a deafening murmur of astonishment, tension, and greed... while I merely let out a sigh and walked back toward where my family was waiting.
The rest makes for a brief anecdote. The moment I reached the family perimeter, instead of receiving a warm congratulation, I earned a resounding slap from my mother immediately followed by a hug so tight it took my breath away. These kinds of dynamics seemed designed to forge masochists, but the truth was, I had earned it.
Instantly surrounded by my brothers, who inspected me from head to toe to make sure I wasn't missing any limbs, they oscillated between relief at seeing me intact and the urge to scold me for the sheer madness of it. I was on the verge of copping another monumental reprimand, but at least I had accomplished my goal.
"Red! Are you not going for the chest?!"
"Yeah, you can't let Gringotts keep it! It's yours!" my brothers exclaimed, gesticulating in desperation.
I didn't need to answer. The onlookers who had rushed ahead to inspect the loot discovered what I already knew.
"It's empty!" someone roared in the distance, causing dozens of heads to snap toward him.
The golden chest looked magnificent, but someone had already plundered it long ago. In adventure legends, great treasures always wait intact at the end of the journey; in reality, people usually omit the detail that without the original owners, if someone else took everything long before you arrived to solve the riddles, there'd be no one left to restock the prizes.
...
We left the pyramid amidst comments about returning to the inn. After such a physical and mental display, no one retained the energy to keep sightseeing, though at least we weren't leaving empty-handed.
I held a heavy pouch containing four hundred Galleons in my hand—the official bounty Gringotts was forced to hand over after an agonizing calculation. Between Ginny, Luna, and me, we had shattered the reimbursement quota, racking up dozens of sequences exceeding ten successes. My final streak alone multiplied the base refund forty-sixfold, to which the previous stretches had to be added.
The goblins had never fathomed such a scenario. As a rule, wizards rarely advanced that far, and the few who managed it abandoned the board exhausted after their first success. They hadn't counted on a trio of cheaters who mocked the rules, chaining sequences until they drained the house reserves. Anyone would have thought that if someone pulled off such a feat, it had to be internal employees exempt from fees... but there we were: three kids who had just conned the con artist.
At first, they refused to pay us, hiding behind pretexts as absurd as Bill—being my brother—possibly having leaked the sequences to us, or us having used the illegal music device to alter the mechanisms. Any trick was fair game to dodge payment; they even went so far as to hint at direct threats against Bill's job. Those goblins portrayed themselves as petty, despicable beings.
Neither my family nor the tourists witnessing the scene looked kindly on the matter. Gringotts' primary Achilles' heel was the imposing crowd of witnesses gathered there. My parents burned with indignation, but held back out of fear of harming Bill; causing his firing was something they would never forgive themselves for, so they preferred to swallow their bitterness and write the case off as a loss.
However, Bill himself stood his ground. He was not going to consent under any circumstances to Gringotts ripping me off, even if it came at the cost of his job. Having witnessed what I was capable of that day, he was convinced my potential far surpassed anything he had ever imagined and decided to back me to the ultimate consequences.
To avoid unnecessarily dragging out the conflict, I resorted to a subtle compulsion charm on the chief appraiser. Simultaneously, I sent a direct [message] to the fiefdom so my goblin confidants—recruited into my ranks during the campaigns—could settle accounts through administrative channels in the future; that way, I avoided compromising Bill's position.
In the end, we managed to pry the Galleons from their hands, though they didn't match the exact figure we were legally owed; the bankers planted their feet on a "take this and leave" stance, handing over only what their greed allowed them to release. Let's not even talk about the golden chest: the goblins flatly refused to award any kind of bonus, likely covering up the fact that their own crews had already cleaned it out long beforehand.
To be frank, I cared very little about the money, but my brothers were glowing with excitement. Even my parents felt a deep sense of pride.
"Red! Look at how much money!" Fred exclaimed, shaking the pouch.
"You've earned it," Charlie commented, giving me a friendly pat on the shoulder.
"What are you planning to do with so much?" George asked.
"You could buy a new broom," Ron suggested, rather verbalizing the whim he would indulge in if he were in my place.
"Hey, that money belongs to us too!" Ginny protested, outraged to see that everyone seemed to overlook her and Luna's participation.
"Honestly, I don't really care," Luna murmured off to the side, earning herself a glaring look from Ginny.
"My opinion is that the wisest thing is to save it for the future. You never know when you'll need a good backup," Bill advised.
My parents and Xenophilius nodded immediately, convinced it constituted a providential nest egg for our adulthood. Nevertheless, being aware of how we had earned it, they preferred not to curb our freedom or impose decisions upon us regarding the loot.
"I don't know if I agree much with saving it, but don't you dare put it in Gringotts!" George warned.
"Yeah, absolutely not! We're not letting those goblins get back a single Sickle; they deserve to catch Dragon Pox for cheating!" Fred finished off.
"Honestly, they crossed the line this time. When we failed, they didn't hesitate to charge us down to the last Knut, but when it's time to pay, they play dumb. I think the Ministry should be aware of their practices," Percy opined with a grim expression.
...
Back at the hotel, dinner took place in an exceptionally lively atmosphere, celebrating the victory with a little party... which rapidly morphed into an intense family interrogation.
What happened in the pyramid wasn't something that could be swept under the rug. Siblings and parents alike wanted answers, though the chat flowed more with excitement than tension.
"Red! Since when can you do all that? And where did you get those muscles? You're making us look ridiculous!" Fred lamented, pinching the soft skin of his abdomen. It wasn't that he was obese, but he completely lacked tone. "A physique like that isn't normal in this family; I bet you used illegal potions," he joked to mask his obvious complex.
The next moment, Charlie and Bill exchanged a brief glance and lifted the front of their shirts to display their own washboard abs; perhaps lacking the micrometric three-dimensionality of mine, they nonetheless bore witness to the daily physical effort demanded by their respective professions.
Fred snapped his mouth shut instantly, muttering silently to himself about his firm resolution to start working out. Ron shared that exact same frustration. For their part, my parents stood speechless: Mum with the strange sensation of watching her boys turn into men overnight, and Dad feeling his own belly with the expression of someone who had neglected his shape.
Ginny made a move to lift her clothes to prove she too maintained a core of steel thanks to my training, but I stopped her with a stern look before she could spark an exhibitionist scandal right in the middle of the dining room.
"Forget the muscles—explain how you pulled that off! Since when do you move like a Zouwu? We always knew you were a prodigy, but today bordered on the absurd..."
"Yeah, and someone explain how Ginny and Luna managed to keep up with them!" George chimed in.
"Truth be told, they didn't show even half that agility in the sand fight," Ron pointed out, crossing his arms.
"Maybe they let themselves lose on purpose so they wouldn't show us up," Charlie speculated, taking a sip from his goblet.
---///---
I have an exam on the 12th. I will be away for these next two weeks. I'm sorry, and thanks for reading.