Chapter 50.4- Doom Days

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It turned out mastering the shield was just a matter of cementing my intention and adding it to every step of the drawing process. With the nature spell I’d use to trap the hellhound, it had been unconscious since I’d kept the chant in mind as I drew the runes and so I could partition my mind to both parts of the spell simultaneously. With this one, with a much shorter incantation and a complicated runic structure, I’d started off focusing on the latter first and then the former at the tail end. It was only when I fixed that little bit that the spell came together.

The shield formed, massive and strong. The runes gleamed a strong silver as the rest of the shield was a glowing gold.

“Are you sure about this?” Sirius asked from his position opposite me.

“Hit this thing with everything you’ve got Sirius. Or don’t tell me you’re having performance anxiety? I understand how hard it can be to get up to it. You know it’s really common with people your age. Three in five men over forty—“

“I’m not a day over thirty-five” he yelled, sending a bone breaker curse at my shield. The shield took the hit, glowing all the while and came out none the worse for wear. I didn’t even feel the impact.

“That the best you can do? Also, I know your date of birth, Sirius. You’re many days over—“ Once again, he interrupted me, hammering my shield with more and more spells. A cutter, a piercing hex, a retching curse, a jellylegs jinx, and way more. It was only by the fifth spell did I begin to feel the shield straining with the impacts. In the end, the final spell, the straw that shattered my metaphorical camel’s back was a slug-vomitting hex. The second the shield winked out of existence, it was all I could do to bend over in time to avoid the hit.

Of course, that didn’t stop Sirius from nailing me with another one just as I straightened up. I felt the spell begin to run its course.

“I swear I’ll get you back for this—“ I didn’t get to finish the sentence, doubling over as my throat ejected the slugs in their numbers. It was a marauder special— this version of the slug vommitting hex. In truth, it was more like a curse than the hex but it wasn’t like I could tell that to the poster boys of the light side. They had modified the intention, the arithmantic structure, and the makeup of the spell so that instead of the regular slug vommitting hex that could be cancelled out with a simple finite, their spell took root at the bowels and basically did not stop until it had run its course. In their ‘genius’, they hadn’t even bothered making a countercurse.

I tried to avoid thinking about the continuous flood of green slugs that flowed from my mom as I knelt on the floor to allow the spell run its course. Oh I was so going to get Sirius back for this one. It was with thoughts of replacing his shampoo with hair removal potion, adding a laxative to his night cap and then cursing all the toilets shut, and dying all his clothes hot pink, that I passed the two minutes or so it took for the spell to finish wreaking havoc with my body.