Chapter 1165: Hogwarts A Hell - Black Death!

Hogwarts had become hell.

From Hogsmeade to the tented plain beyond the Hogsmeade station.

From the Forbidden Forest to the grounds beyond the Great Lake.

From homes to shops to owleries to sheds and to ships.

Screams and cracks of spells had drowned everything.

No matter where one looked, one would have found Wizards and Witches running in all directions, casting magic at... seemingly nothing.

There was no enemy.

No one was chasing them.

There were no Dark Wizards or Death Eaters of either the Dark Lord’s or the Yellow Warlock’s armies in sight whatsoever.

It was like these people were fighting ghosts.

But even ghosts were visible, at least enough to make sense of their presence.

Within the Hogwarts Grounds, a place that had become home to wizarding communities from all over the world, things had stopped making sense hours ago.

Panic was everywhere.

It was then that, upon looking closer, one would have spied something odd.

A squeak, smothered and faint enough to be called ghostly, accompanied by an equally smothered rustle.

Looking even closer, the panic began making sense.

The flashes of Spells getting hurled out of the wands weren’t directed at empty air, but mostly down toward the earth.

On that earth, squeaking and rustling, were rats of all sizes, with green-hued, ghostly eyes.

This should have been an easy observation.

However, what made it difficult to catch was the scale of it; the scale that defied logic, confusing the mind.

A Reducto Spell shot out of Harry’s wand, reducing several rats to ashes, spewing green smoke.

Before he had even pulled back his hand, though, an even greater number of rats occupied that empty patch of earth, all squeaking with madness in their eyes.

Harry’s face paled.

How many times had he cast the same Spell? A hundred?

How many rats had he already killed, reducing them to ashes? A thousand?

Exhausted beyond words, Harry brought his wand forward to cast another Spell, but found the rats coming from his right and left as well.

Future Zone, the advanced version of his Brave Heart Spell, was useless here as well.

So what if he could see the rats coming at him a moment earlier?

It wasn’t like he could do anything about it.

The only reason he had somehow survived getting bitten by a rat was because of constantly using Brave Heart upon himself.

Now, that seemed futile as well.

Harry gritted his teeth and raised his wand anyway.

If he were to die, he would die killing as many as he could, he decided.

It would have been great if he had been with his friends at this time, instead of battling alone.

However, the moment these rats had come out of that coffin, the panic caused by them had separated everyone, each fending for themselves... going against all the training that Professor Dumbledore had been trying to prepare them for.

How much time had passed since then?

Minutes?

Hours?

Harry did not know.

Time mattered little when he had already decided to go out with a bang.

Before the rats could overwhelm him, though, a hand landed on his robes from behind and pulled him, taking him into the air.

Getting choked by his own robes, Harry looked up and saw Black, his head and one hand covered in blue-hued magical armor. Then, he looked down and found Black’s feet constantly kicking the air as he walked on the air using Hopping Extremities.

"You still have them?!" Harry shouted over the screams.

"Just saved your life and that’s what you ask?!" Black shouted back.

Yes.

He was alive.

All the blood that had rushed to Harry’s face, reddening it to the extreme, slowly receded, bringing paleness.

Finally, Harry’s eyes, which had lost their ability to see anything but a few meters away from him, regained their focus, his vision taking in the entire picture.

Under him, Hogwarts burned.

Despite it being a few hours before evening, the world had oddly darkened, becoming red, black, and green.

The red was, of course, from the heat. Black was the color that the entire earth had assumed, swarms of black rats becoming a carpet over it. The green came from their ghostly eyes, turning the entire patch of blackness into a sky littered with green stars.

And, on that faux green-starred darkness ran Wizards and Witches, each of them adding another color to this hellish, picturesque sight as they cast spells, but only temporarily.

As Harry’s stomach churned, he spied a group of people who weren’t fighting.

Even the rats left them alone, going over and around them, but never losing their momentum.

These people were scattered all over the Hogwarts Grounds.

Not only were there Wizards and Witches, but there were even Magical Creatures among them.

Other than their obvious lack of fighting spirit and the rats’ odd ignorance of them, they also shared one more thing.

Green boils covered their bodies.

The patches of skin where there was no boil had gone red, their fingers constantly drawing blood as they scratched them.

Some were even pulling out their hair, their heads either covered in green boils or itchy rashes that were secreting blood.

Among these people, some were walking with a limp as if every step were a fight between life and death for them.

The ones who weren’t walking anymore just lay on the ground, staring up, their mouths open as they drew gasping breaths now and then.

By the time Harry looked up, tears had made it impossible for him to see anything.

Even then, he saw the blurry silhouettes of countless brooms and other flying Magical Creatures as people tried to avoid the hell, coming to the only place that was still safe... for now.

"We can’t leave," Black said, coming to a stop midair. "There’s some kind of magical field covering the entire Hogwarts Grounds."

Harry realized instantly what his friend was implying.

Even the ones who had taken to the sky to avoid the hell beneath them had only done so temporarily.

If nothing changed, then, sooner or later, all of them were bound to meet the same fate as those walking corpses — the people whom the rats had already bitten.

"Wha..." Harry stuttered. "Just what is going on?"

"Darcie told us before she left for Hogwarts," Black said from overhead. "It’s...

"... the Witch of Endor’s Bubonic Plague."

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