Chapter 37.5- Doom Days

Part of him screamed to act, but it was like he could not tear his eyes away from what he was seeing. He never even noticed the woman who erupted from the shadows behind him with mouth open and singing her will to the heavens. Enthralled, he watched as Matsuhito walked until he was right in front of him and then placed one hand on either side of his head.

“Rest easy, Rudra” He said, and then he felt his mind snap into wakefulness as pain began to course into him. ‘There is no pain, there is no me, there is no…’ He tried to recite before he felt nothing more.

XXXX- HARRY POTTER

I watched Krum send Fleur flying off the platform with pursed lips. I’d managed to scrape a victory over Cedric in the first round while he had resoundingly beaten Fleur just now. My next match was against the French witch, but everything told me Krum would be the real threat. While the rest of us struggled to wield staves— the inelegant tools they were not allowing for any of the more civilized forms and applications of magic— Krum thrived. He was never nothing more than a brute and it showed in the way he just sent spell after spell with seemingly no strategy beyond that.

Ordinarily, that strategy would have done little to worry me from its execution but there was something that made Krum’s terrifying. It was the speed at which he could cast the spells. We struggled to shape our magic and project it trough the staves while Krum just aimed and fired. There was a brutal simplicity to how he wielded the tool and it made him too dangerous to overlook.

The next match— Krum v Cedric was called, and I watched as Krum did not even bother leaving the stage. Silently challenging Cedric to forgo the five minute rest period after the names were called. The other Hogwarts Champion seemed to silently scoff at the suggestion as he sat and rested his head in his hands.

The clock ticked down even as Krum egged on the Durmstrang crowd into booing Diggory. In the end, the Hufflepuff did not stand up until the clock had ticked down to the last fifteen seconds. And then he jumped on to the stage in no time at all.

“Begin” The referee brought down hi hand in a smooth slash and Krum attacked first. A sharp black spell shot through where Diggory had been standing before the Hufflepuff slammed his own staff into the ground, sending jet of red hot flames from he staff’s head. Krum pushed own his own staff, creating a gust of wind that blew right against the flames, scattering them in all directions. With nothing to fuel them, the flames died before they even hit the ground. He sent the same spell again, a gust of wind that caught Diggory right in his chest and sent him off the platform.