Chapter 394

Chapter 394: Chapter 394

At the same time, Lynn hurled the lightning gathered in his palm toward the wizard’s head.

Blue-white radiance erupted from his hand and carved a blinding trail through the night. With a sharp twist of his other wrist, the ground on either side of the wizard suddenly bulged. Soil, gravel, and tangled roots burst upward and compressed into two thick walls, closing in on him from both directions.

The wizard found himself trapped between the earthen walls, with Lynn’s lightning descending directly ahead of him. After judging the situation in an instant, he chose to withstand the attack.

He refused to believe that any wizard would willingly take a Killing Curse head-on.

His judgment was correct. Lynn had no intention of testing whether his skull was harder than Avada Kedavra. He wasn’t insane, nor did he have any interest in dying merely to prove a point.

Unfortunately for the wizard, Lynn’s reaction was far faster than he had anticipated.

With a single thought, Lynn’s body divided neatly into two identical figures. The Killing Curse passed through the gap between them and struck a large tree in the distant forest, blasting apart its trunk and scattering splintered wood in every direction.

One of the Lynns immediately swept Agnis into his arms and flew away. With an arm wrapped firmly around her waist, he moved so quickly that the girl only had time to release a startled cry before they landed behind a boulder dozens of metres away.

After placing Agnis on the ground, the duplicate positioned himself between her and the battlefield, his wand aimed toward the distant wizard.

"Stay here, and don’t move."

Meanwhile, the wizard was caught between the descending lightning and the two earthen walls.

He raised a Shield Charm just before the lightning struck. Blue-white radiance exploded against the barrier, filling the area with dazzling light, while the earthen walls crashed together from both sides. Soil and gravel engulfed him, burying his body beneath a crushing mass of earth.

A muffled impact followed, and a thick cloud of dust rose into the night.

From the outside, the two walls appeared to have fused into a sealed tomb without doors or windows.

Having learned from experience, Lynn did not wait for the dust to clear before attacking again. Cold mist gathered around him as countless blue ice crystals condensed from the moisture in the air. More and more appeared until the space behind him was filled with a dense formation of ice spikes, each as long as an adult’s arm and sharp enough for its tip to catch the starlight.

Lynn swept his wand forward, sending the entire formation plunging into the churning dust like a torrential downpour.

A rapid succession of heavy impacts sounded from within the smoke. Judging from the noise alone, Lynn immediately understood that his opponent had blocked the attack.

It was the classic rule of battle: if the smoke was thick enough to hide the enemy, then the enemy had almost certainly taken no damage.

"You green-robed rat!" Lynn shouted into the dust. "If you’ve got any courage, stop hiding behind your defences!"

"Impudent brat!"

The furious roar had barely emerged before tendrils of black mist poured from the cloud. They divided into a vast swarm of tiny venomous insects and rushed toward Lynn from every direction.

His pupils contracted.

Those were no ordinary insects. Each one was formed from concentrated Dark Magic, with a curse compressed inside its body. A single insect carried enough power to kill an adult in excruciating agony.

It did not even need to touch bare skin. Contact with clothing would be enough for the curse to take hold, after which maggots would erupt across the victim’s body and devour them alive within seconds.

How did Lynn know all that?

He had never seen the spell before, but that did not prevent him from activating [Record] the moment it appeared.

His thoughts moved quickly, and his body moved even faster. He pointed his wand toward the ground and gave it a gentle twist, causing a ring of golden-red flames to ignite around his feet.

The cursed insects plunged into the fire one after another. Each vanished with a sharp hiss, like ice dropped into boiling oil, until the entire swarm had been consumed.

"Is that all you’ve got, old man?" Lynn called from within the ring of fire. "What, have you never seen a gas stove before?"

"Fiendfyre?"

A powerful gust scattered the dust and revealed the wizard standing within the remnants of Lynn’s earthen prison.

Wizards capable of casting Fiendfyre were not unheard of, but those who could control it with such effortless precision were exceptionally rare. Fiendfyre was notoriously violent and difficult to restrain; even skilled dark wizards risked being consumed by their own flames.

For the first time since the battle began, the wizard’s expression became genuinely serious.

He thrust his wand forward, releasing a stream of crimson fire. What began as a flame no larger than a fist expanded rapidly until it became a roaring dragon, which opened its blazing jaws and lunged at the ring surrounding Lynn.

The two masses of Fiendfyre collided with a thunderous explosion.

Lynn immediately felt his wand grow heavy, as though an enormous weight had been placed upon it. The pressure increased so rapidly that his arm nearly buckled, forcing him to reinforce his grip. ℴ

His expression changed.

The intensity of the wizard’s magic was absurd. In a direct contest of raw power, Lynn could not be certain that he would win.

Rather than stubbornly continue the struggle, he flicked his wand upward. The two entangled masses of Fiendfyre were torn away from the ground and dragged into the night sky, where the crimson and golden-red flames coiled around each other like battling beasts.

Lynn seized the opening immediately.

He reversed his grip on his wand as blue-white arcs of electricity burst from his palm and danced between his fingers. Within seconds, the lightning condensed into a crackling silver-white spear.

The arcs pulsed against his skin as he tightened his hand around its shaft. Then his figure blurred and vanished.

A moment later, he appeared behind the wizard.

The man sensed only a sudden gust of wind before the spear was already driving toward his heart, its tip shining with almost unbearable brilliance.

Yet the supposedly unavoidable strike passed through empty air.

The wizard’s body shifted slightly, his position changing in a way that did not correspond with his movements.

The hair on the back of Lynn’s neck stood on end. He had been deceived; at some point during their exchange, the wizard had trapped him inside an illusion.

A Killing Curse erupted from the wizard’s wand almost immediately afterward.

Lynn swung the spear across his body, pouring power into its tip as it collided with the curse and forced the green beam away from his chest. Taking advantage of that brief opening, he Apparated to the branch of a tall tree some distance away.

"Hahahaha!"

The wizard’s triumphant laughter echoed through the forest.

"Your fighting style is far inferior to Godric’s!"

Godric.

Godric Gryffindor.

Lynn narrowed his eyes as an initial guess concerning the man’s identity formed in his mind. Before he could question him, however, the wizard gave him no opportunity to speak.

With another sweep of his wand, crimson Fiendfyre surged forward and transformed into a roaring dragon. It crashed into the tree beneath Lynn, igniting the trunk and canopy in an instant.

Leaves curled, blackened, and crumbled into ash as the flames consumed them. Cracks spread upward through the burning trunk, accompanied by a constant series of sharp pops.

The wizard’s frown deepened.

"Something’s wrong."

Lynn was no longer standing on the branch. The figure engulfed by the flames was merely an illusion, already dissolving into scattered fragments of light.

The wizard spun around and aimed his wand behind him, only to find empty forest. When he turned back, there was still no sign of Lynn.

During that brief moment of confusion, Lynn appeared behind him with the lightning spear raised and thrust it mercilessly toward his backside.

"Argh! How dare you!"

The wizard twisted away at the last possible instant. Although the spear failed to strike him directly, the lightning concentrated around its tip sliced a long tear through the back of his robes.

The rip began at his backside and extended down to his thigh. A passing gust caught the divided fabric and pulled both sides apart, revealing the wizard’s white undergarments to the night air.

His robes had effectively become a pair of open-backed trousers. From the front, nothing seemed unusual, but from behind, his dignity had been laid bare for the entire forest to admire.

The attack had caused almost no physical damage, but the humiliation was devastating.

The wizard’s expression changed from cold fury to livid rage. Murderous intent radiated from his body as he inhaled slowly, took another deep breath, and forcibly reined in his temper.

Then he recalled all the Fiendfyre scattered across the battlefield.

Crimson flames streamed toward his wand from every direction, gathering at its tip and compressing into a slowly rotating sphere of dark-red fire.

He raised his eyes and stared at Lynn with naked hostility.

Only then did Lynn finally feel the full weight of his opponent’s power.

He had never experienced such suffocating pressure from Dumbledore, perhaps because the Headmaster had never truly gone all out against him. The wizard before him, however, no longer appeared interested in restraint.

He lifted his wand without chanting an incantation or making any elaborate movement. He merely pointed its tip at Lynn, and the compressed Fiendfyre erupted.

Lynn drew a deep breath as his expression became more solemn than it had been at any previous point in the battle.

It was time to call upon the power he had obtained beneath Azkaban—the strange force he had never encountered before and still could not adequately describe.

He did not know what it was, where it had originated, or what it was truly capable of. There was only one thing he understood with certainty.

It was extraordinarily powerful.

Dark-purple magic gathered at the tip of his wand and began to compress. It resembled a fragment of the night sky crushed into a single point, a thunderstorm solidified into matter, or an entire universe sealed within a tiny sphere.

The mass rotated faster as it grew smaller. Space warped around it, nearby light bent toward its surface, and even the surrounding air was pushed away.

Lynn swung his wand forward with all his strength.

The sphere shot from its tip, dragging a distorted trail through the night as it hurtled toward the approaching Fiendfyre.

The two spells met in mid-air without producing an explosion. Instead, a vast ripple of magic spread from the point of collision before abruptly contracting.

Light, sound, and magical energy were drawn inward at the same moment. The opposing spells collapsed into that single point and vanished, leaving nothing behind.

The wizard stared at the empty space where his Fiendfyre had disappeared, his face filled with disbelief.

"How is this possible?" he demanded. "How can someone born outside the old pure-blood families wield Ancient Magic?"

---

Happy reading! Be sure to leave a review!!!

The story has reached its epilogue on my P@treon. Join now to read ahead!

P@treon: patreon.com/mrfanfiction140