Chapter 38.1- Doom Days

I shattered multiple blocks of granite with powerful curses. Confringo, confringo, confringo, I mentally incanted over and over again, trying to empty my mind of the fury that filled it. With a roar, a blast of blue flames left my wand, scarring the floor and heating a block of stone so thoroughly that it exploded from within. Once it didm, I fell to my knees, spent. The duel with Krum had gone far from well. I’d done ,y best, but he was too fast with the staff, too dangerous. My magic had felt clumsy with the clunky inefficient focus, while his had been razor sharp. In the end, I came joint third with Cedric in the staff duels and bumped down beneath Krum for third position.

There was everything to play for in the third task, and that was even more annoying. I should have been far ahead of everyone by now. I was there better, and it was not even close. I had taken the best of Tom Riddle, who had already been beyond NEWT level and enhanced it to the point that I was certain that even adult wizards would struggle to comprehend. I was a shark in a pot with fishes and I was losing. Losing!

I growled and flicked my wand, shattering another block of cement. I could come up with excuses for each defat, the second task had clearly been a ploy, and the duels were not for me considering I’d never used a staff before. But I knew where that road went. Excusing defeat and trying to dress it up as something else achieved nothing. It just normalized it, made it acceptable. But no. Not for me. Defeat would never be acceptable to me, and that meant I had to get better. I had to do the things that I had hesitated to do before. I had to go th extra mile to turn from merely strong to unbeatable. I had to become unbeatable.

Even if every factor was arrayed against me, I needed to win. And I knew just what I needed for that. The secret lay in the duel I had hesitated to watch for so long. Flitwick had given it to me with the first set of memories as an aside but I had never been able to look at him— Voldemort for more than a few seconds before leaving. The part of me that was Tom Riddle just could not bear the sight. But that was a problem I had to overcome. Voldemort would never have lost even if every rule was designed with trumping him in mind. Neither would Dumbledore.

With a growl at myself for spending even more time speaking instead of doing, I dumped the memory into the pensieve and dove in. The feeling of entering a memory was one that I would never get used to— not fully at least. It was like falling even while standing still. I landed on my feet in Diagon Alley. In the midst of disaster stood two titans.