Cuthbert and Alex left first. On the way back, neither of them said much.
It wasn't the same silence as before.
Coming here, Cuthbert had been in a good mood, cracking jokes, saying tonight would finally make Regulus admit they'd improved. Alex hadn't said anything, but he'd been hoping for the same thing.
Both of them had felt it lately.
Magic came easier now. Spells that used to take effort last year came out with a flick. A few even felt automatic. Wand up, intent settled, spell cast. Clean.
They'd taken that as proof they were getting stronger.
Technically, they weren't wrong.
What they hadn't known was that this happened to basically every young witch and wizard as they got older. Unless you were exceptionally hopeless, magic settled with age. Control that once needed real focus became second nature.
Holiday training had very little to do with it. Talent didn't matter as much as people liked to think, either.
So those little hopes from earlier? Gone.
Show Regulus their progress?
Progress? What progress?
All that scrambling around the dummies. Weak spells. Worse footwork. Dodging without even knowing where to dodge. The Room of Requirement had exposed all of it under bright, merciless light.
Now all they had left was silence, and neither of them really knew what to call it.
They'd accepted a long time ago that Regulus was on another level. For a Muggle-born, maybe that was hard to swallow.
Why should it be like that?
Same school. Same classes. Same homework. So why was one person allowed to be that much stronger than everyone else?
But kids raised in pure-blood families didn't have much trouble with the idea.
Some people were just born better.
Some children showed signs early. Some had stronger magic from the start. Some were monsters, plain and simple.
That was basic pure-blood education. Family gatherings were full of it. An elder would point at some cousin and talk about how his accidental magic started earlier than anyone else's. A name would show up in the paper, and someone's father would say, at last, the family had produced a child worth mentioning.
So talent looked fixed from birth. Getting bitter over it was stupid.
Regulus was one of those people. Whether it was talent, bloodline, or just something that belonged to him alone, the boy made no sense.
But Hermes was different.
Regulus treated Hermes differently than he treated the rest of them.
Not in a rude way. It was subtler than that. When Regulus looked at Hermes, he looked at someone who could actually follow the conversation.
When he looked at them, he looked at children who needed their hands held.
That got under Cuthbert's skin.
Still, facts were facts. Hermes had gone farther than either of them, and he knew it.
The gap between Cuthbert and Hermes was clear enough to see. He could watch Hermes cast and understand why he was dangerous. Faster spells. More force behind them. Cleaner movement. None of it was mysterious.
Even the dark curses Hermes used, the ones Cuthbert himself couldn't cast, weren't beyond recognition. He knew what they were. He had some idea how much work it took to get there.
So if he learned a few strong spells of his own, if he trained in dark magic too, maybe he could close that gap.
Maybe.
Cuthbert didn't know yet, but he wanted to try.
The Avery family could not afford to trail behind the Mulcibers. As for the Blacks...
He let that thought die halfway through. Better not.
Alex, meanwhile, saw nothing strange about any of this.
Weak was weak. Admitting it wasn't shameful. The weak found shelter. They stayed close to the strong. That was how people survived.
His father had taught him that.
Not everyone got to stand at the top.
But standing beside the person who did? That counted too.
---
Inside the Room of Requirement, Hermes hadn't left.
Usually he would have gone with Cuthbert and the others. Not tonight.
Regulus glanced at him and said nothing. If Hermes wanted to stay, fine. The session with the other two was over. He had his own things to do now.
He headed toward the far wall, already thinking that what he really needed was a private practice room.
The wall rippled.
Stone shifted, flowed, and folded into a door that hadn't been there a second earlier. Regulus pushed it open. Inside was a small room, cramped but usable.
He stepped in. The door shut behind him.
Hermes stayed where he was, staring at that door. The instant it closed, he had the sharp feeling that he'd been shut out of more than just a room.
There was another barrier there, one he couldn't touch.
He knew Regulus was about to work on real magic.
He also knew he probably shouldn't care this much. It was Regulus's business. Hell, even if he stood there and watched the whole thing, there was a good chance he wouldn't understand half of what he was looking at.
That didn't stop him from being curious.
His thoughts kept drifting back to their spar.
He really had gone all out. Everything he'd trained over the summer, every dark curse he had, every lethal spell he was confident enough to use, he'd thrown all of it in.
His father had once told him that at his current level, he could already handle ordinary sixth or seventh years.
And Regulus?
Regulus had just walked at him.
Wand lowered. No Protego. Spell after spell crashed into him, silver light flashed, and that was it.
Nothing else.
He hadn't countered. Hadn't dodged. Hadn't even bothered to properly defend. He just kept walking, and Hermes hadn't been able to stop him.
Thinking about it made Hermes remember his father.
His father also dealt with his attacks easily. He could crush Hermes whenever he wanted. Control the pace of the fight. End it at will.
But his father still moved. Still cast. Still did something.
Regulus hadn't.
He'd walked.
Hermes had no idea who was stronger, Regulus or his father. That comparison was stupid from the start. Apples and dragons.
Still, one thing was obvious.
Regulus was stronger than he had been last term.
Back then, he still used Protego. Still lifted a hand to knock things aside. Now he didn't even need that much.
Hermes shook his head and forced himself to stop.
Someone else's strength was their business. His own strength, that was his problem.
He sat down against the wall and rested until his breathing settled and some of his strength came back. Then he got up, walked back onto the training ground, and drew his wand.
The wooden dummies were still standing.
He stepped in and started casting.
---
Inside the small chamber, Regulus sat cross-legged on the floor. Four walls. One floating lamp. Nothing else.
Spatial magic.
Out of everything he had, it still had the highest ceiling.
The Decomposition Curse was finished. Fiendfyre was close. Verdant Magic just needed time to grow on its own.
Only spatial magic still felt endless.
Space Warp could already carry the Decomposition Curse. He hadn't tested Fiendfyre through it yet. Too unstable. Too stupidly dangerous. But other spells should work fine. No reason they wouldn't.
Together with spatial anchors and Apparition, Space Warp had already given him a way to break through anti-Apparition interference.
That worked against places like Reef Town.
Hogwarts was different.
Hogwarts' defenses were another beast entirely, solid as poured concrete with iron bars running through it. Slam headfirst into that kind of barrier and all you'd do was split your skull.
The Patronus was different.
His Patronus had evolved into something more advanced. Starlight Kite could physically carry him through space, forcing it open and letting him pass.
Of course, that wasn't exactly his own spellcraft. It was the Kite's ability.
Then again, a Patronus was still the caster's power. If he could call on it whenever he wanted, it counted. At some point he should test whether the Starlight Kite could punch through Hogwarts's barriers.
Phoenixes could do it.
No reason the Kite couldn't.
As for spatial anchors, he'd made real progress since the night he set Bellatrix on fire. His usable anchor count had gone from five to twelve.
But numbers by themselves meant nothing.
Back in Germany, against the masked man, he'd used a single anchor to shove the Decomposition Curse straight into the man's chest.
One anchor, used right, had been enough.
So what was the point of having more? Convenience? Insurance? A fancier way to miss?
Regulus sat still and thought it through.
What if the anchors weren't separate points at all?
What if they were nodes in a web?
Twelve anchors. Twelve spatial channels. If he connected them into a network...
A spell went in at Point A.
It could come out at B Or C Or D.
Better, it could route through the whole structure first. A to B. B to C. C to D. Then out at D, if that was where he wanted it to appear.
And if the network moved?
If the channels kept shifting instead of staying fixed, then the spell's exit point would become hard to predict.
If even he couldn't predict it in advance, then his opponent definitely couldn't.
Against another spatial mage, that would be useful.
Against a Legilimens, it would be disgusting.
I don't know where it's coming out either. So what exactly are you planning to read?
He could go further.
He could load spells into the network ahead of time.
Send a few attacks in, keep them cycling inside the channels, and dump them all out at once when the timing was right.
Single shots became volleys.
Volleys became a wall of fire.
The more he turned it over, the more workable it sounded. But thinking was cheap. He needed proof.
Regulus stood and raised a hand.
His magical senses opened completely, taking in the spatial structure of the room.
The space here was stable. The Room of Requirement had its own weird properties, so the space inside it was a little more flexible than the castle outside, but not enough to interfere with delicate work.
He cast Space Warp first, building the channels, then drove anchors into place.
One.
Two.
Three.
All the way to twelve.
Twelve anchors, twelve spatial channels, spread evenly through the room.
Now came the hard part. Connecting them.
He shut his eyes and pushed his magic outward, linking one anchor to another. The connection formed like a bridge slung between cliffs.
One channel.
Then a third anchor joined in.
Three anchors in a line. Then four... Five...
A rough little network slowly took shape.
Regulus opened his eyes, lifted his wand, and fired a Lumos at the position of the first anchor.
The ball of light disappeared.
A beat later, it popped back out near the third anchor and hovered there in midair.
Regulus looked at it, and the corner of his mouth ticked up.
Good.
That meant the idea worked.
Next, he needed motion. Real circulation. A spell shouldn't just travel through the network once. It should keep moving until he let it out.
He closed his eyes again and adjusted the structure, bending the links into a closed loop.
Now anything that entered would keep circulating until he opened an exit.
Magic bled steadily from him as he maintained the whole thing.
The drain was ugly, but the Star guided Meditation kept turning in the back of his mind, feeding him a constant stream of support.
He fired another Lumos.
The light vanished.
One second.
Two.
Three.
Nothing came out. Good. It was still circling.
Five seconds... Ten.
With a flick of intent, he opened an exit.
The orb appeared at the sixth anchor. Its glow was a little weaker than before, but still bright enough.
Regulus watched it and started doing the math.
What could ten seconds buy him?
Three Apparition shifts, easily.
Enough time for an enemy to assume the attack was gone.
Enough time for them to relax for one stupid second, and then get hit by seventeen or eighteen spells at once.
He kept testing.
Disarming Charm. Stored and released after three seconds.
Impediment Jinx. Stored and released after five.
Blasting Curse. Stored and released after eight.
Every test worked.
The downside was obvious.
Keeping the network active required constant magic and constant focus. The more spells he stored, the faster it drained him. The longer he held them, the more expensive it got.
At twelve anchors running at once, thirty seconds was his limit.
After that, the network fell apart on its own.
Still, thirty seconds was enough.
In a real fight, thirty seconds could decide everything.
And this was only the first version. He could optimize it later.
Regulus let the magic go and the network unraveled. The room went still.
He remained where he was, quietly sorting through the results.