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Magic roared through the center of the arena.
Voldemort's newly formed body held immense power. He swept his wand in wide arcs, green light and Fiendfyre twisting together as he poured out curse after curse, the kind that would drop an ordinary wizard before they could blink.
Killing Curses flew like they cost nothing. Fiendfyre shaped itself into a massive, snarling serpent and hurled itself at Hermione.
She flickered. Her figure rippled through the deadly barrage, dissolving into a wisp of black-red wind one moment, snapping back into solid form the next, always slipping free at the last possible instant.
Her counterattacks were just as sharp. Ice and flame, precise and efficient. Not a wasted movement.
For a while, neither gained ground. The duel was ferocious.
The trees ringing the arena trembled and withered under the ambient discharge of raw magic. The ground cracked in scorched lines and frozen furrows where stray spells had landed.
Dumbledore erected a barrier between the two fighters and the crowd. Even through the protective magic, everyone could feel the cataclysmic force churning inside it. Hearts climbed into throats. No one breathed.
With every exchange, Voldemort grew more alarmed, and more unhinged.
He had come back at full strength. A teenage girl, however famous, should have been trivial.
Reality had other ideas.
Her magical technique was beyond anything he'd anticipated. Her combat instincts were sharper. And that bizarre evasion ability, that elementalization, dissolving her body into near-intangibility, had caused a dozen of his most certain strikes to pass through empty air.
He screamed and threw everything harder, but his repertoire hadn't changed. The same attacks, cycling through again and again. There was a frantic, hollow quality to it. The hysteria of someone who had run out of answers.
Hermione's brow creased slightly.
Limited variety, yes. But his raw output was genuinely sixth-tier. The magic behind each cast was dense and brutal. And that life-saving flight technique of his was the same problem as her own Elementalization, he could bleed into incorporeality whenever he needed to, which made him extremely difficult to pin down and finish quickly.
She had stronger options. She just didn't want to use them yet.
The moment Voldemort sensed the real gap between them, he'd run. That was who he was, survival above all else. He'd dissolve into black smoke and be gone before anyone could stop him.
Even with Dumbledore here, catching a Voldemort who had committed fully to escape and could shrug off most conventional magic was not a simple problem.
The Mirror Dimension could hold him, but the Mirror Dimension didn't operate on this world's magical rules. The energy cost was enormous. If he dug in and used his incorporeality to outlast her, she'd burn through her reserves long before he did.
She briefly missed the Space Stone she'd handed off to Thanos.
She couldn't actually let him go. Not here. The Witch and the Dark Lord's first meeting, a battle that needed to establish something real, could not end with him walking away.
Her mind moved fast.
She had a plan.
The next time Voldemort sent a Killing Curse screaming toward her, Hermione's movement stuttered. Just slightly. A fractional delay, as if her magic had hitched, as if she'd misjudged the angle by a hair.
The green light hit her square.
"Hermione!" The sound that tore out of Harry was raw and broken. His eyes went red instantly.
"No!" Ron, Ginny, and the others cried out, the sound ripped from them without thought, color vanishing from every face.
Silence crashed down over the arena.
Then the wailing started.
Hermione's figure stood rigid where it had stopped. Completely still. Every trace of life gone in an instant, like a candle snuffed.
Voldemort froze for a half-second. Then his face split into a savage, triumphant grin.
Done.
This damnable Witch, yes, her strength had been a genuine surprise, but she had still died at the hands of the great Voldemort. As it should be.
The Killing Curse. The most lethal spell in the wizarding world. Tested beyond counting. Anyone it touched, died. That was ironclad law.
Even Harry Potter, that Boy Who Lived, had only survived because his mother's sacrifice had been some extraordinary fluke, and everyone had blown it up into a grand story about a chosen savior.
This Witch, however powerful, had no Horcrux to shield her. The Killing Curse had found her, and there was only one outcome for that.
Voldemort turned away. He didn't bother looking at the lifeless body behind him. He lifted his eyes toward Dumbledore, standing on the elevated platform above.
"Do you see, Dumbledore?" His voice rang out across the silent grounds. "This is what happens to those who oppose me. The Witch amounts to nothing. I — Voldemort — am the one you should all truly fear!"
He drew breath to continue. The Dark Lord's grand return declaration, with the moment finally his,
A voice came from behind him. Light. Casual. Faintly amused.
"Hey. We're not done yet. Why are you turning around?"
The grin died on his face. His pupils contracted to pinpoints.
"Since you like showing me your back so much," Hermione said, "I won't stand on ceremony."
"Avada Kedavra."
The green light arrived before he could move.
Shock filled his eyes. Pure, absolute disbelief. He had no time to react, no time for anything. Only the sudden sensation of cold death folding over him like a tide.
"How did you—"
The words never finished.
The curse struck him between the shoulder blades with perfect precision.
The last light in Voldemort's eyes went dark. His newly formed body toppled forward like a felled tree and hit the ground with a dull, heavy thud.
A thin thread of black smoke drifted up from the corpse. It twisted once, twice, then streaked away and vanished.
Standing not far behind him, completely unharmed, was Hermione. Looking down at his body with the patient expression of someone watching a very slow person finally grasp an obvious point.
She glanced at the fallen Dark Lord. Then at the direction the smoke had fled. Then she turned to Dumbledore.
"As expected," she said calmly. "Not quite dead. He has more than one Horcrux."
Dumbledore exhaled slowly. "Indeed. It seems we have more work ahead of us." A faint note of something like dark amusement entered his voice. "Still, Tom's timing, coming back only to run into you... this resurrection was a complete waste of everyone's time."
The reversal left the entire crowd paralyzed.
One moment, they had been in despair. Hermione was dead. The unthinkable had happened. The next moment, the invincible Dark Lord was on the ground, felled by a single Killing Curse from behind, and Hermione was standing there without a scratch.
At this point, nobody was particularly bothered by the fact that she'd just cast an Unforgivable Curse on a person.
What had just happened?
In the crowd, held in place by Snape, Barty Crouch Jr. came back to himself. He stared at Hermione with wide, uncomprehending eyes, terror written plainly across his face.
"That's impossible!" he shouted. "How are you not dead?! You were hit by the Avada Kedavra! That was the Killing Curse!"
Hermione looked at him the way one looks at someone who has just said something profoundly dim.
"Then why did Harry survive being hit by it?"
Barty's mouth moved automatically. "Because of his mother's love. The power of love."
The most widely accepted explanation in the wizarding world. The one Dumbledore had never bothered to correct.
Hermione let out a short, derisive laugh. She made no effort to hide what she thought of it. She rolled her eyes so thoroughly it looked like it might require physical effort to bring them back.
"Power of love, my ass."
"You're supposed to be a master of magic, and that's what you believe?" Her voice wasn't raised, but it carried cleanly to everyone standing within earshot. "If love could stop the Killing Curse, then there are loving mothers and devoted husbands and wives all over the world. How come none of them are out here rebounding Killing Curses?"
Barty Crouch Jr.: "..."
The crowd: "..."
Harry: "..."
Dumbledore: "..."
She was completely right, and not one of them had a word to say against it.
It landed like a thunderclap. A second wave of shock rolling through everyone who was still standing.
Because when you actually thought about it, yes. That was exactly the logic. If love were the mechanism, Voldemort could never have killed the number of people he had.
So what was going on with Harry? What had just happened with Hermione?
The questions spread through the crowd like a current, and with them, a tide of eyes. Curious. Probing. Filled with something close to reverence.
All of them fixed on Hermione, this strange, unfathomable Witch who kept refusing to behave like anything they'd prepared for.
➤ Next: The Grief-Stricken Snape
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