With a heavy splash, a black shadow shot upward from the depths of an underground pool. Ryan broke the surface, gasping for air after finishing off his latest opponent in the darkness below.
The cavern was vast and silent, its air thick with humidity. He quickly realized he had surfaced at the bottom of a cenote, a natural sinkhole where rainwater and underground rivers converged. Strange mosses clung to the slick stone walls around him, glowing faintly with a pale blue radiance. Their light was dim, but it was enough to outline the jagged rocks and still water, giving the entire chamber an eerie, dreamlike atmosphere.
Ryan's sharp eyes scanned the surface. Roughly five or six meters away floated a motionless figure, half-drifting with the ripples of the water. His heart lurched.
"Hermione!"
Without hesitation, he swam powerfully toward her.
When he reached the floating figure, Ryan let out a quiet sigh of relief. Hermione was unconscious, but a bubble-head charm shimmered faintly around her face, ensuring she could still breathe. Though shaken, Ryan steadied himself. That charm at least meant she hadn't drowned.
Dragging both Hermione and the fallen attacker behind him, Ryan pushed toward the only shallow ledge of rock that served as a natural beach by the pool. The climb was difficult, but he managed to haul Hermione onto dry ground, then rolled the attacker's limp body onto the stone beside her.
Ryan immediately bent down to check Hermione's condition. Her pulse was steady, her breathing even, though she remained unconscious. He concluded she had likely been stunned during the fight. The attacker must have deliberately rendered her immobile with a spell, then hidden her to the side while preparing an ambush.
It was a clever tactic. First, eliminate one target completely so the battlefield remained uncluttered, then exploit the element of surprise against the second opponent. Clearly, this was no ordinary fighter—this was a veteran who knew how to control a fight. Unfortunately for him, he had not anticipated Ryan's formidable close-quarters combat skills or the high-grade equipment Ryan carried. In the end, the hunter had become the prey.
Since Hermione was safe for now, Ryan gently laid her on the rock, away from what he intended to do next. If she woke, she didn't need to see it. Some methods of interrogation were not for innocent eyes.
He touched the leaf-shaped brooch pinned to his robes, the gift given to him by the school principal. It was enchanted as a communication tool, meant to link him directly with the headmaster in emergencies. Closing his eyes, Ryan pushed his magic into it.
Nothing.
The brooch remained cold and inert, no glow, no signal—nothing more than a trinket of carved metal.
Ryan grimaced. "Of course. At times like this, they always fail."
Some kind of suppressive magic was blocking all channels of contact. He thought bitterly of countless movies where the hero's radio, cell phone, or artifact stopped working at the most critical moment. Perhaps it was an iron law of storytelling.
"It seems I can only rely on myself." He muttered and turned his attention to the enemy sprawled on the stone.
What he saw made him recoil.
The man—if one could still call him that—was changing. His skin, once pale, was now a sickly green. Coarse scales pushed through patches of flesh. His neck bore deep slits that pulsed faintly—gills, unmistakably. His limbs twitched as though possessed by a life of their own. Most horrifying of all was the wound on his waist. Ryan had cut him badly, yet the injury no longer bled. Instead, wriggling granulation tissue pushed outward, trying to seal the flesh. It was as though the body itself refused to die.
"My God…" Ryan whispered. "What the hell are you?"
Kneeling, he pried open the man's jaw, intending to pour a healing potion inside to keep him alive long enough for questioning. But what met his gaze was a mouthful of razor-sharp fangs, far sharper than any natural human teeth.
An ominous chill crept down Ryan's spine. Something was wrong—very wrong. With a scowl, he lowered the potion bottle. He could no longer trust that standard medicine would even work on this abomination.
Instead, he summoned the green snake from his store. The serpent slithered forward obediently, coiling around the thrashing figure to restrain him with scales strong as iron bands. Only after the creature was bound did Ryan tilt back its head and force the potion between those razor fangs.
For a moment nothing happened. Then the attacker's eyes snapped open.
He convulsed violently, muscles straining against the snake's grip. A guttural roar tore from his throat—neither human nor animal, but something in between. His eyes glowed with a feral bloodlust. No trace of rational thought remained within them.
Ryan clenched his jaw.
"Lost control…" he murmured.
The notes left behind by Salazar Slytherin flickered through his mind. Again and again they had warned of the dangers of grafting alien biological parts onto a human body. If balance could not be maintained, madness and uncontrollable transformation were inevitable. And this creature—once a man—was the very image of that nightmare.
Whatever humanity he had once possessed was gone. This was no longer a viable source of information.
Ryan's expression hardened. There was only one course left.
He drew Clinve's Tooth from the scabbard strapped to his thigh. The blade gleamed with an eerie silver light as he channeled his spiritual power into his arms. With one clean stroke, he brought the sword down.
The monster's head rolled free, the green snake instantly loosening its coils as the body collapsed.
Ryan exhaled, wiping sweat from his brow. His mind flickered back to his battles in the Fallout world. He remembered the executioner who had once clumsily hacked at Nick's neck. Compared to him, Ryan now moved with far more efficiency. War, it seemed, was a brutal but effective teacher.
Shaking away stray thoughts, he tore a strip of cloth from the creature's ragged garments. Dipping it into the strange green blood oozing from the corpse, he began sketching a magic circle on the ground.
When it was complete, Ryan carefully placed the severed head in its center. Kneeling before the circle, he pressed his palms against the runes and released a surge of magic. The symbols pulsed to life with a faint glow.
This was a technique of life magic—one of its most dangerous branches. By anchoring the soul of the freshly dead, the caster could momentarily pull fragments of memory from it. It was, in essence, an interrogation of the dead. But it had limits. The user had only one chance, and the success depended entirely on the strength of his own soul.
The moment his magic connected, Ryan's mind was flooded with a torrent of images. Shards of memory, jagged and chaotic, poured through him in a dizzying cascade. He clenched his teeth, invoking the technique of Marshall, focusing his consciousness like a fortress and sifting through the fragments one by one.
Minutes crawled by. Seven… eight… nine. Finally, Ryan exhaled heavily and pulled his hands free.
A dark blue flame suddenly erupted from the circle, engulfing the head and reducing it to ash. The ritual was complete.
Ryan rubbed his temples. Most of what he had seen had been useless—broken glimpses of ordinary life, fractured visions of irrelevant events. The mutation had badly damaged the man's soul. Still, there were a few fragments of value.
The underground cavern was not newly dug, as Ryan had assumed. No—this was an ancient ruin, long buried beneath the earth. The Castro Brussels School had unknowingly been built atop it centuries later, its teachers and students completely ignorant of what lay below.
And no wonder. The land here was riddled with fragments of abomination stone. Any magical attempts at divination would be thwarted by its interference. Only a direct excavation could have revealed the ruins, and the school's founders had merely scratched at the shallow soil. The deeper secrets remained untouched.
The choice of location, however, now seemed clearer. Even wizards, with all their magic, were still human at their core. Like ordinary Muggles, they favored locations that were safe, accessible, and resource-rich. Rivers in particular had always been prime choices. In the early days of the Floo Network, when wizarding transport was less reliable, a riverside settlement meant goods, food, and supplies could be moved easily.
For a school, the needs were even greater: space, security, and constant access to resources. Finding such a location deep in the Amazon rainforest was no simple feat. The founders had chosen well—though unknowingly they had built atop something far older, and far more dangerous.
Ryan reflected grimly. In his past life, countless human cities had been built over ruins of older civilizations. Builders would dig foundations only to stumble upon pottery, bones, or ancient walls. But this time, the school had missed its discovery. Worse—their enemies had not.
From the fragmented memories, Ryan had learned at least this: three tunnels connected the ruins directly to the underground network beneath the school's gardens. It was through these tunnels that the monsters had infiltrated the grounds.
Unfortunately, the false Professor Ferdinand—the Chimera Society operative—had known little about the ruins themselves. They had belonged originally to the Blood God Cult, a name that carried with it only shadows and dread.
Ryan's thoughts drifted uneasily to Hogwarts. That fortress of safety, too, had been breached again and again—first by Sirius Black, then by Death Eaters, and finally by Voldemort himself. It seemed to be a universal truth: no place, no matter how secure, was ever truly impregnable.
The Maginot Line in France, the defenses at Iwo Jima, the so-called "safest" wizarding schools—all had eventually fallen. Perhaps it was not weakness in their walls, but a curse of history itself.
And now, the curse had come here.
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