The instant the Full Body-Bind Curse on Liu Qingluo was lifted, her body snapped upright.
Her spine arched backward into a violent, desperate curve; her bare feet planted on the mattress, knees slightly bent, her arms flinging wide to her sides.
Late Golden Core spiritual Qi detonated from her dantian, a blinding golden radiance piercing through her skin, rendering her lower abdomen, ribs, and sternum almost translucent.
Yin Luo had been sorting the Memory Stones beside her storage pouch. The moment she sensed the spiritual surge, her fingers snapped back, black-lacquered nails cutting a sharp arc through the air, but she didn't have time to intercede.
Jerry was distinctly faster.
Jerry was barely an arm's length away from Liu Qingluo.
Grey-black magic erupted from his palms, forming a translucent barrier before his chest.
Yet Liu Qingluo's objective was not to attack him.
She was detonating her own Golden Core.
The self-detonation of a late Golden Core cultivator packed enough destructive force to reduce half of the East Peak to a pile of crushed rubble. In less than half a second, the golden light across her abdomen transformed from a gentle glow into a blinding glare, shifting rapidly from pale gold to searing reddish-gold. That was the unmistakable omen of a core disintegrating—the spiritual core collapsing from a stable state into a catastrophic critical mass. Once that collapse finalized, everything within a hundred yards would be obliterated into fine dust.
"Are you insane?!" Yin Luo's hands were only halfway through weaving a mudra, dark purple spiritual threads lancing from her fingertips to bind Liu Qingluo's limbs.
"I am insane!" Liu Qingluo's voice was no longer trapped behind the soundless barrier of the Silencing Charm. Her vocal cords tore back to life under the raging tide of her burning core, her voice rasping as if scraped by coarse sandpaper across jagged rock.
"Two hundred years of cultivation! Two hundred years of my Dao heart!
Ruined by a..."
She couldn't finish the sentence. The words in her throat were shredded by the agonizing pain of her core burning away. The skin of her abdomen began spider-webbing with luminous fractures under the reddish-gold glare, cracks radiating outward from her navel like porcelain baking and shattering from within.
Jerry didn't bother drawing his wand. He stepped forward in a single stride, slamming his right palm directly over Liu Qingluo's lower abdomen.
Spiritual feedback rushed through his fingertips. The structure of her Golden Core was unraveling from the inside out.
Over three centuries of cultivation, compressed into a fist-sized orb of volatile energy, had been commanded by her suicidal will to initiate a chain collapse, outer shells imploding layer upon layer toward the nucleus. Every collapsing shell discharged a concussive shockwave that rebounded within the core's casing; once that resonance hit critical mass, the entire core would detonate in an instant.
Jerry's wand remained holstered at his belt, completely unused. Instead, he channeled grey-black magic directly from his right palm into Liu Qingluo's dantian. The moment his magic touched the outer shell of the core, the collapsing cascade hitched—as though an impenetrable insulating membrane had wrapped around the orb, temporarily severing the link between Liu Qingluo's consciousness and the core's nucleus.
"What... what are you doing?!" Liu Qingluo's hands clawed into Jerry's wrist, her fingernails tearing through his flesh, gouging five bloody furrows from his wrist bone halfway up his forearm. "Let go of me! Let me... let me die...!"
"Let you blow me to pieces?" Jerry's palm remained clamped against her belly, pumping an unbroken stream of magic to seal the core within a grey-black insulating cocoon. "Keep dreaming."
"My Dao heart is shattered!" Liu Qingluo's fingers dug deeper into his wrist, blood from his wounds dripping down onto her bare abdomen, staining deep crimson under the reddish-gold light. Tears flooded her eyes, streaming down her cheeks to pool in the hollows of her collarbones. "The Dao heart of Qingxu Palace, cultivated for two centuries... completely destroyed! Do you have any idea what that feels like?!"
"I do," Jerry replied evenly, his pitch dropping half an octave lower than usual. "You just ripped five bloody trenches into my arm. I can empathize with a fraction of your pain."
Liu Qingluo froze. The shock lasted less than half a second before her expression fractured from suicidal resolve into pure, bewildered chaos.
And in that fleeting half-second of hesitation, Jerry's left hand moved.
His hand slid smoothly down her flank, his fingers slipping straight into the parted crevice between her inner thighs.
The instant his fingertips grazed her labia, Liu Qingluo's hips arched violently.
"Don't touch me—"
Before the words could fully form, Jerry's fingers plunged into her vaginal canal.
The interior still held the thick cum he had pumped inside her moments ago; bathed in a mixture of his seed and her own juices, the passage remained intensely slick and saturated.
Every physiological process churning within Liu Qingluo's body ground to a screeching halt. The core's self-destruction stalled halfway beneath the containment of Jerry's magic. Her breath caught in her throat. The tears in her eyes halted mid-flow. The staggering, electric tingles detonating from her cunt dragged her consciousness violently off the tracks of "wanting to die" and slammed it straight onto the tracks of raw, overwhelming lust. The two opposing mental tracks collided head-on, tearing her sanity in two.
"You... you fucking..." Liu Qingluo tore her hand from his wrist, grabbing his shoulder instead, her nails biting into his flesh through his robe. "You fucking... beast...!"
"Articulate cursing. Sounds much better than muttering soundlessly," Jerry curled his fingers inside her canal, grinding with surgical precision against the raised, hyper-sensitive G-spot on her anterior wall.
Liu Qingluo's abdominal muscles clenched in a violent spasm. The reddish-gold glare radiating from her Golden Core dimmed a noticeable shade in the exact same instant.
It wasn't that Jerry's magic had suddenly grown stronger; it was that Liu Qingluo's suicidal will had fractured under the tsunami of physical pleasure. Detonating a core required an absolute, uninterrupted death wish, yet the blistering ecstasy flooding up from her groin was dismantling that death wish piece by piece.
"Let... let go..." Her voice fractured into trembling gasps, a second of hollow silence separating the words as her throat failed to produce sound, venting only desperate pants.
"I won't," Jerry's fingers began pumping inside her tight passage. Not with brute force, but with three fingers curling and pressing in turns along her inner walls, his rhythm and pressure calculated to devastating perfection. His index finger ground forward, followed by his middle finger, and then both worked in tandem. With every rotation, the spasms wringing her vaginal walls tightened another notch.
Yin Luo stood at the foot of the bed, her hand seals dispersed. With her purple spiritual threads banished, she crossed her arms over her chest, watching the spectacle on the bed like an amused spectator at a theater. Reaching into her sleeve, she pulled out the Memory Stone from before, the crimson recording runes lighting up as she aimed it squarely at the bed.
"You had quite the backbone when trying to blow yourself up a moment ago," Yin Luo murmured, gazing at the projection on the stone. "Now three of his fingers have you so fucked you can barely string a sentence together. I suggest you put your suicidal thoughts on hold and concentrate on screaming for him."
"Fuck... off...!" The curse tore from Liu Qingluo's throat, only to pitch into a piercing squeal at the tail end. As she shouted, Jerry's fingers shifted from her inner walls to tease the very ring of her entrance, lightly scraping the tight rim. That sensation wasn't merely a tingle—it was a deep, dull ache, an intense, throbbing pressure welling from the depths of her pelvis.
Liu Qingluo slumped backward from her arched stance, crashing onto the mattress, her body sinking an indentation into the deep purple silk coverlet. Her hands released his shoulders to clutch the sheets, her fingers digging through the silk, shredding fine white threads from the weave. Her clamped thighs fell wide open, her knees splaying outward, her inner thigh muscles pulsing and contracting helplessly around his pumping fingers.
Su Xin knelt by the bedside, her upper acupoints still sealed by Yin Luo, rendering her unable to move. Her eyes remained glued to Liu Qingluo writhing across the mattress, her lips pressed into a hard line beneath her collar. Her hands were bound behind her back by spiritual threads, her nails biting into her palms to leave four deep, crescent-shaped indentations, yet she stubbornly maintained her facade of unflappable stoicism. Only the force of her nails digging into her flesh betrayed the storm within.
Jerry withdrew his fingers from Liu Qingluo's soaking cunt. A glistening thread of fluid snapped as he pulled away, dropping onto her inner thigh. Unbuckling his belt with that same wet hand, his trousers fell to his knees, and his rock-hard cock sprang free. The bulging veins along the shaft stood out in stark relief under the reddish-gold aura of the core, casting an elongated shadow across the cracks spanning Liu Qingluo's belly.
"Don't... don't use that thing again...!" Liu Qingluo propped herself up on her elbows, trying to scramble backward. She had barely retreated two inches across the silk before Jerry caught her hips, dragging her forcefully back beneath him.
"Your core is still radiating outward. My magic is containing the exterior, but it won't hold indefinitely. You have to draw the spiritual Qi out of the core and vent it through your entire body. If you don't disperse it, you will explode sooner or later. If I make you cum three times, the spiritual energy will circulate three full heavenly cycles through your meridians, the temperature of your core will cool, and the excess pressure will vent safely through your Baihui point." Holding his cock steady against her wet entrance, Jerry paused. "When you said 'don't,' did you mean you don't want to die, or you don't want my cock?"
Liu Qingluo glared at him through ragged gasps, her chest heaving, her nipples stiff and darkened. It wasn't that she didn't want to curse him to hell, but her mind was being violently torn between the throbbing fullness between her legs and the rampaging energy in her core, her thoughts shattered to pieces.
"...I don't want to self-detonate," she squeezed the words through clenched teeth.
"So the cock is fine?" he asked with deliberate malice.
"...Fuck off."
"'Fuck off' means yes."
"Why aren't you cursing anymore?" Jerry hoisted her left leg onto his shoulder, driving his cock in from a new, punishing angle. He didn't just hit her entrance; the head rammed straight into a deep, recessed pocket along her posterior wall. Whatever curses remained in Liu Qingluo's mouth shattered into disjointed cries the moment he bottomed out.
"You bast... ah...! Don't hit there... I said don't... you fucking... mmph...!"
Yin Luo mounted the Memory Stone onto a bedpost, circled around the bed, and crouched directly before Su Xin. Still bound on her knees, Su Xin averted her gaze from the bed, but Yin Luo clamped her jaw, forcing her head around to face the raw spectacle of the two coupling before them. With Liu Qingluo's leg hoisted over Jerry's shoulder and her toes curled tight, the golden radiance from her core was washing through her meridians into her limbs, bathing her skin in a shimmering, pale gold halo. Every time that halo flared with a thrust, her pussy clenched down in a violent spasm around his meat.
"She's breaking through," Yin Luo murmured, pressing her fingers against Su Xin's Jianjing acupoint, whispering directly behind her ear. "Your disciple was stuck at the late Golden Core bottleneck for two centuries, and it gets shattered like this. Once her breakthrough stabilizes, as her Master, shouldn't you host a banquet to thank him? What the orthodox teachings of Qingxu Palace failed to teach her was solved by an alien rod."
Su Xin's jaw clenched tight. Just as she was about to argue about her disciple's Dao heart, Yin Luo released her chin and strode to the foot of the bed.
Jerry flipped Liu Qingluo over onto her hands and knees, her back arched and her ass thrust high, ramming his cock back in from behind. She had taken him in this exact position when he took her virginity moments earlier; now, she barely managed half a syllable of protest before choking on her own breath, because the thick veins along his shaft rubbed directly over her swollen anterior wall, her sheer stockings rustling wetly as her thighs twitched in his grip.
"Slower...! My core... the energy isn't finished venting... wait a second...!"
"You're the one venting your core, not me," Jerry gripped her tangled hair, pulling her head back while his hips hammered into her ass at an accelerating tempo. "You vent yours, I fuck mine. Two completely different matters."
"Two different matters my... aahhh...!"
The first massive orgasm slammed into Liu Qingluo right in the middle of her sentence.
The violent contraction clamped around Jerry's cock so fiercely that he sucked in a sharp breath. The reddish-gold light of her core exploded in intensity the moment she climaxed, surging three full circuits through her limbs and bones before shooting a fine, concentrated beam of golden light straight through her Baihui point atop her skull.
The beam pierced straight through the stone ceiling of the cavern, detonating a golden flare across the night sky visible to half of the East Peak.
Liu Qingluo collapsed completely onto the bedding, her fingers clutching the silk sheets white-knuckled. She panted so hard she couldn't speak, her throat emitting fractured, hitching gasps. The burning temperature of her core dropped by half.
"Two more," Jerry didn't pull out. Pulling her up from her collapsed state, he seated her across his lap facing him, burying his mouth over her left breast to suck her stiff nipple deep into his mouth.
She threw her head back, a long, guttural cry tearing from her throat—not a scream, but a deep, pent-up groan that had finally found an exit after being buried for centuries.
Sweat and tears pooled in her collarbones, splashing onto the bedding with every bounce of her body.
Spiritual Qi surged from her core up her Governing Vessel, and with each compounding wave of pleasure, flooded back down her Conception Vessel into her dantian. A complete, grand heavenly circulation was forcibly driven through two full cycles beneath his rhythmic pounding. At the end of the second cycle, she came again, a flood of cool, slick pussy nectar drenching his coronal ridge with such clarity that Jerry could feel the fluid swirl around his head before being squeezed out around his shaft.
By the time the third orgasm struck, Liu Qingluo had abandoned all pretense of resistance. She wrapped her legs tightly around Jerry's waist, incoherent syllables tumbling from her lips—mingling his name, crude curses, and wanton moans. "Jerry... you... slower... I'm... I'm cumming... mmph... that thing of yours... it's too huge... tearing me apart... fuck Qingxu Palace... to hell with the Dao heart... aahhh...!"
Her Golden Core fell into absolute stillness following that third climax. The searing reddish-gold light vanished entirely, replaced by a stable, translucent azure luminescence resting peacefully beneath the skin of her lower abdomen—no longer running amok, no longer threatening to explode. As she rode wave after wave of intense climaxes, her spiritual energy completed six grand heavenly cycles, completely purging the volatile pressure, shattering the stubborn bottleneck along the way. She slumped entirely across Jerry's chest, skin pressed to skin, her face a mess of sweat and tears.
The breakthrough from late Golden Core to peak Golden Core was complete on a spiritual level. Yet mentally, she clearly hadn't processed the reality of what had just occurred.
Curling into Jerry's embrace, burying her face into the crook of his neck, she muttered in a muffled voice: "You shattered my Dao heart, yet you made me break through... what am I supposed to do now?"
Jerry held her close, his cock still lodged deep inside her, pulsing softly as he whispered into her ear: "Cast your vote tomorrow, then keep cultivating your Dao. Gather up the pieces of your shattered Dao heart and glue it back together. It's not like there hasn't been a precedent... and if there isn't, you'll be the first!"
Liu Qingluo lifted her face from his neck, staring at his jaw.
She fell silent. Then, burying her face right back into his neck, she muttered a muffled, defeated curse: "Bastard." It carried none of the venom or moans from before—merely the deflated, resigned murmur of someone who had lost, yet stubbornly refused to surrender completely.
Yin Luo shut off the Memory Stone, walked to the bedside, scooped up their scattered clothes, tossed a robe to Jerry, and draped another over Liu Qingluo's bare back. She turned to face Su Xin, who remained kneeling on the floor, the rigid composure on her face finally showing microscopic cracks after watching hours of coupling and breakthroughs—her lips parted by an almost imperceptible hair.
Su Xin closed her eyes, then opened them.
"You and I each keep a backup of the Memory Stone. The standoff ends here. I will not cause you trouble during tomorrow's vote."
"Deal."
Yin Luo flicked a dispel mudra with her right hand, dissolving the spiritual threads binding Su Xin's wrists and ankles into dark purple motes. Su Xin stood up, her legs stiff from kneeling, though she hid it well. Walking to the bed, she hauled the weeping, hiding Liu Qingluo up from the sheets, wrapped her robes securely around her, sheathed the fallen sword, and walked out the door without looking back.
The door clicked shut.
Yin Luo kicked off her scuffed high heels, climbed onto the bed, and collapsed right beside Jerry, resting her head on his other shoulder.
"Once the voting concludes tomorrow, you are giving me the magical telemetry data from that breakthrough. I want to study it."
"I know. And right now?"
"Right now?"
"I'm burning with itch down there!"
Above Ollivanders Wand Shop in Diagon Alley hung a camouflage ward woven from Anti-Illusion Charms.
From the street, the shop looked like its usual dusty, drab self, the wooden sign on the door reading "Open," three dust-covered display wands resting in the window.
Catherine lay flat against the second-floor windowsill of Florean Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlour across the street.
The bushy tip of her cat tail dangled halfway over the window frame, swaying gently in the warm late-spring breeze. She cradled an ice cream cone in her left hand while holding an oversized panoramic spyglass to her eye with her right, the lenses trained on Ollivanders' front door. She had been perched on this sill for seven hours. Her ice cream had rotated from strawberry to pistachio, from pistachio to blackcurrant, and from blackcurrant to a flavor she couldn't even identify.
"Miss Kitty, your seventeenth cone," Mr. Fortescue set the fresh cone beside her, accompanied by a glass of ice water.
"Leave it there. Thank you, Uncle Fortescue."
"Professor McGonagall asked me to let you know she is covering the tab today."
"Then I'll eat two more."
Isabella sat on another chair beside Catherine, a three-dimensional map of Diagon Alley spread across her knees. Seven miniature flags of varying colors were pinned across the map, each marking an ambush point. Her fingers shifted between the flags, occasionally plucking one to reposition it.
"Ollivander shared the past three months of sales ledgers with Professor McGonagall last night. From last September to this March, someone used seven distinct identification papers across seven separate days to purchase twenty-eight wands in seven batches. Every single ID belongs to a real, living person, yet none of their verified alibis match the dates of purchase."
"Meaning this individual can procure twenty-eight forged identities with rock-solid alibis, bypass Ollivander's wand-memory legilimency right under his nose, and cleanly skirt the Ministry's monitoring thresholds—buying four wands per visit, precisely one below the five-wand red flag trigger."
"The target is a seasoned veteran."
"A veteran of this caliber... there are only a handful in the entire wizarding world."
Catherine shoved her half-eaten cone directly into the glass of ice water. The ice cream dissolved three times faster in the liquid, blooming into a milky cloud.
"Uncle Fortescue's ice cream is delicious."
"You just shoved it into the water."
"I'll have a fresh one when Professor McGonagall covers the tab."
The street corner's public Floo hearth flashed green.
A plump witch stepped out carrying two shopping bags, bustling toward the Magical Menagerie.
Catherine's cat ears swiveled once, then settled.
"Not him. Heartbeat is too pedestrian; just an ordinary civilian."
"Keep waiting."
Catherine's ears twitched every few seconds, sweeping the street like dual radar dishes, tracking the heartbeats of every passing pedestrian. It was one of her innate feline talents. Within a thirty-meter radius, she could distinguish individual pulse signatures and deduce from micro-fluctuations whether someone was anxious, disguised, or preparing to cast a spell.
At 3:27 PM in the seventh hour, Catherine's left ear snapped forward forty-five degrees, locking rigid.
"He's here."
"Where?"
"Walking from the Leaky Cauldron. Tall, gaunt man in black robes with a deep hood. Heart rate is forty-two beats per minute, but every seven seconds there's a microscopic arrhythmia. That's backlash from an advanced Disillusionment Charm—too many concealment layers stacked, creating periodic instability inside his body."
Isabella lifted the map, pressing her finger to one of the seven flags. The flag pulsed with a faint red glow.
"Professor McGonagall, target has entered Diagon Alley's main thoroughfare from the Leaky Cauldron. Estimated arrival at Ollivanders in two minutes. Arrhythmic pulse detected, suspecting multi-layered Disillusionment."
From the second-floor window of a seemingly abandoned tailor shop across the street, a voice crackled back through a two-way communication mirror.
"Visual confirmed. Wait until he enters the shop."
The hooded figure glided along the cobblestones. His gait was steady and paced, but every seven steps, one stride fell an inch shorter than the rest. Catherine's feline eyes caught the anomaly through the lens.
"His right leg. Something is wrong with his right leg."
Isabella's finger paused over the map.
"Right leg?"
"The uneven stride matches the exact frequency of his cardiac arrhythmia. They share the same root cause. A prosthetic, or an old war injury. Disillusionment charms alter physical appearance, but they cannot erase mechanical anomalies."
Isabella tapped the mirror.
"Professor McGonagall, target likely has a prosthetic or permanent injury below the right knee. The pulse and stride anomalies are synchronous."
The communication mirror fell dead silent for five seconds.
"...A prosthetic? Right leg?"
"Yes."
"Catherine, confirm the exact placement. Above or below the knee?"
Catherine adjusted the spyglass to maximum magnification, zeroing in on the right leg. The sweeping hem concealed most of the limb, but as he took a long stride, the fabric fluttered, baring a glimpse below the joint. She saw it. Right beneath the knee sat a mechanical seam; the lower shank exhibited a 0.2-second delay in activation relative to the thigh above.
"Below the knee. Prosthetic begins immediately beneath the joint."
The mirror went silent for two more seconds before McGonagall's voice crackled through.
"...Dammit."
"Professor?"
"All units, alert. Target preliminary identification: Order of the Phoenix operative, Alastor Moody. Codename: Mad-Eye. Defense Against the Dark Arts specialist, Senior Ministry Security Consultant. His right leg below the knee is a carved ebony prosthetic, blasted off by Death Eaters during the First Wizarding War in 1981."
Catherine's ice cream slipped from her grasp, splattering across the windowsill.
"...A member of the Order of the Phoenix?!"
"An Order operative."
"The veteran founder who fought the Dark Lord alongside Professor Dumbledore?!"
"The very same."
"Has he lost his mind?!"
"Literally speaking, he has always been somewhat unhinged.
Or more accurately, he has an entirely different agenda."
Isabella's fingers flew across the map, rapidly repositioning the seven flags. Fine beads of sweat broke out across her forehead, yet her hands remained steady.
"Professor, should we call for Ministry reinforcements?"
"Too late," McGonagall's voice cut through the mirror. "The moment he enters Ollivanders, he will detect environmental anomalies. Once he initiates extraction protocols, anyone in Diagon Alley who reacts half a second too slow will be silenced. I know his operational doctrine all too well—he would rather slaughter an entire street than leave a loose end. That is how he survived the First War."
"Then..."
"Follow my lead. Catherine, your feline form will register as a non-human entity in his magical eye; he will prioritize you as a beast. Do not engage him head-on; flank his rear to cut his escape. Malfoy, launch the Tyran biomimetic Thunderbird from the rooftops, shrink it to pigeon size, and run aerial telemetry against the skyline. Everyone else, hold your ambush points."
"And you, Professor?"
"I will engage him directly."
The scrying feed shifted. Through the second-floor window of the tailor shop across from Ollivanders, Professor McGonagall stripped off her usual emerald-tartan robes. Beneath them, she wore form-fitting, dark-grey tactical combat gear, two spare wands strapped to her belt, a golden Gryffindor crest gleaming at her shoulder. Her hair remained pinned in its immaculate bun, but she swapped her silver hairpin for a black metal clasp etched with ancient runes—her grand prize from the Hogwarts Transfiguration Championship decades ago, containing enough pre-charged magic to fuel five high-tier Transfigurations without depleting her own reserves.
McGonagall drew her primary wand.
"Albus, I pray to Merlin you haven't lost your mind, and that he's merely under the Imperius Curse."
She whispered to the empty air, a deep exhaustion weighing down her voice.
The brass bell above Ollivanders' door chimed.
The hooded man stepped inside.
Mr. Ollivander stood behind the counter, feather duster in hand, brushing dust from wand boxes. His movements were fluid and natural, his rhythm identical to any ordinary afternoon. A polite, practiced smile rested on his face.
"Good afternoon, sir. How may I help you today?"
The hooded man said nothing. Beneath the shadow of his cowl, that infamous magical eye swiveled slowly. It swept every corner of the shop, pierced through Ollivander's body behind the counter, and scanned every shelf of wand boxes.
The eye suddenly locked rigid.
It fixed on the wall directly behind Ollivander. Hanging there was an ordinary mirror reflecting the exact layout of the shop.
Only superficially identical.
"Ollivander," the man spoke, his voice gravelly and raspy from decades of hard spirits. "There is someone missing from your mirror."
Ollivander's smile froze for a millisecond.
"Excuse me, sir?"
"There is someone missing from your mirror. Standing in this shop right now are you and me, plus that cat crouching behind the third row of wand boxes to your left—three living signatures in total. Yet the mirror only shows two of us. The cat has no reflection."
Ollivander's right hand drifted toward the emergency alarm under the counter.
"Sir, this shop is protected by specialized anti-tracking wards; the mirrors occasionally suffer minor visual—"
"Twenty years, Ollivander. My eye has peered through more robes than you've seen women in your lifetime. Don't try to play me."
The man's right hand whipped from his robes, wand gripped tight. Unlike his sluggish limp down the street, his draw was blindingly fast. A purplish-black curse lanced from the tip, blowing the mirror behind Ollivander to smithereens.
The instant the glass shattered, the shop's concealment wards unraveled completely.
Catherine erupted from the shadows behind the third row of shelves. Her feline form unfurled in full combat readiness—hands warping into razor-clawed paws, fangs bared, sailing through the air toward his blind spot!
Professor McGonagall shattered the window of the tailor shop across the street, hurtling into the open air. In mid-flight, she executed her first Transfiguration—shifting from human to a grey tabby cat, from tabby cat to a massive white tiger, and reverting to human form the microsecond her boots struck the cobblestones. Three Transfigurations in under two seconds. She landed squarely in Ollivanders' doorway.
"Alastor," her voice was as cold as iron. "You had better have an exceptionally good explanation for this."
The hooded man—Mad-Eye Moody—flipped back his cowl. His true face was bared: half of it mangled scar tissue from cursed fire, the right socket housing that spinning, electric-blue eye, the left carrying his own squinting pupil. His wooden leg struck the floorboards with a heavy, hollow thud.
"Minerva," a jagged, grimacing smirk cracked across his scarred lips. "Good ambush. But you're too late."
"What do you mean?"
"I came to pay Ollivander his final installment. The twenty-eight wands I ordered from him were fully deployed moments ago. By my calculations, they have already arrived at their designated coordinates."
"Where did you plant them?!"
"Take a guess!"
McGonagall's pupils constricted.
"Jerry is there."
"I know."
"...You knew?!"
"Minerva, why do you think I chose that exact time and location?
I needed Jerry present. Or more precisely, I need him blown to kingdom come right alongside those cultivators!"
Catherine's claws skidded to a halt on the floorboards. Her ears stood ramrod straight; hearing Jerry's name, her entire body locked up as if frozen in time.
"...You want to murder Jerry?!"
"I don't want to kill him. I want total war. That boy is the greatest strategic asset the Order has secured in a decade. If he dies in the cultivators' council hall, the Ministry, the Auror Office, the Order, the Board of Governors—everyone will lose their minds simultaneously! The entire wizarding world will escalate the war tenfold! The cultivators will brand the bombing a wizard terror attack, ensuring their warmongers instantly crush the moderates! Both sides fighting to mutual, absolute annihilation—that is the fastest way to end this war!"
McGonagall's lips thinned into a razor edge.
"You have completely lost your mind."
"Minerva, I watched two hundred and thirty-four friends die before my eyes in the First War! I watched eighty-nine more butchered in the Second! And now, the cultivators are marching upon us with forces that will slaughter more than both wars combined! I cannot afford to wait! I am ending this with a single bomb! A bomb that will drive both worlds into a frenzy!"
A deep, feral growl rumbled from the depths of Catherine's throat. Her claws flexed, muscles coiling to pounce once more.
Yet McGonagall raised her left hand.
"Catherine. Stand down."
"I said, stand down."
Catherine's claws froze mid-air. With intense reluctance, she backed away three paces, though her frame remained coiled like a spring.
McGonagall gripped her primary wand with her right hand while her left traced the spare wand at her belt. Her posture resumed the flawless, upright dignity she maintained when grading papers in the Transfiguration classroom—spine straight, heels together, chin raised.
"Alastor. I have known you since the day you entered the Auror Office. In the First War, we saved over two hundred Muggles side by side. In the Second War, we held the Astronomy Tower of Hogwarts against thirty-six Death Eaters."
Moody's genuine eye flickered with a tremor, while his magical eye spun erratically.
"Minerva," a crack fractured his gravelly voice. "Do not bring up the past."
"I must bring it up. Because next, I am going to fight you with everything I have. I may not defeat you, for you have seen more combat than I. But I want you to know: not a single curse I cast will be aimed to take your life."
Moody raised his wand.
"Minerva. I respect you. So I'll open with a Stunner. If you survive it, we fight for real."
"Deal."
Combat detonated the instant the words left their lips.
Moody's Stunning Spell lanced from his wand—a beam of violet light tearing through the air along a near-invisible trajectory, flying three times faster than an ordinary wizard's spell. McGonagall flicked her left wrist when the curse was half a meter from her chest; her spare wand slipped from her belt, spinning horizontally through the air, discharging a pre-charged Rebound Charm that formed a shimmering aegis around the flying wood. The Stunner slammed into the shield and ricocheted away, obliterating the display window of Ollivanders into a shower of glass.
McGonagall's primary wand whipped into a second motion—Transfiguration, targeting the floorboards beneath Moody's boots! The timber melted into a pool of churning, viscous black pitch, sucking his feet downward. Yet his reflexes were monstrous; the moment his right leg sank, anti-gravity runes embedded inside the prosthetic flared to life, launching him clean out of the mire into the rafters!
In mid-air, he whipped his wand three times in succession. Three spells of distinct colors blasted toward McGonagall: a Freezing Charm, a Blasting Curse, and a Severing Charm. The casting interval between them was 0.08 seconds—far beyond the physiological threshold of ordinary wizards.
McGonagall didn't attempt to block them. Two-tenths of a second before impact, she completed her second Transfiguration, shrinking into a sleek grey tabby cat. At one-tenth her human size, all three curses whistled harmlessly overhead, detonating against the stone wall behind her, blowing a two-meter crater through the masonry.
The tabby cat darted in a jagged zig-zag across the floor, flanking Moody's left. Mid-stride, McGonagall shifted back to human form. She materialized three meters behind Moody's left flank, primary wand leveled at his spine.
"Incarcerous!"
A golden cord shot from her wand, splitting into seven distinct ropes mid-air, lashing toward Moody from seven angles!
Yet Moody's magical eye could see behind his head.
Before the ropes reached him, he executed a clean backflip in mid-air. His wooden leg engaged its anti-gravity runes once more, granting him nearly two full seconds of weightless suspension. Floating in the rafters, his wand locked onto McGonagall, discharging five lethal, high-tier curses without missing a beat.
All offensive.
Incendio, a Lightning Curse, a Laceration Hex, a Bone-Crushing Curse, and the Cruciatus Curse!
McGonagall's face paled the moment the fifth curse lit the tip of his wand.
"...Alastor. You swore you wouldn't try to kill me."
"I said I'd open with a Stunner! You survived it, so we fight for real! 'Fighting for real' means holding nothing back!"
Moody's scarred lips curled into a vicious grin, his magical eye spinning faster and faster.
"Minerva, care to guess where I'll hit you first?"
"Try it and see."
She smoothly drew a third wand from her belt.