Chapter 29.1- Doom Days

One more day until I had to go back to Hogwarts, and I had to admit it, the holiday had grown on me. Especially when Sirius had gotten bored of resting and allaying about and decided to help me with my training and figuring out the benefits of the ritual I’d undergone with the end of the previous year. He might have opposed some of my testing ideas, but we’d managed to narrow down the seven benefits I’d gotten. I felt the first one as my muscles strained to perform the hundredth pull-up as the clock hit 60 seconds. I smiled as I dropped down from the bar. Agility. That had probably come from the acromantula and Cwn Annwn in concert. It was the easiest to feel, and had funnily enough been the last one to kick in.

The first to kick in had been my newfound affinity for fire magic. It was so great that every fire spell in Alekhine’s elemental conjuration book had been mastered in a matter of four or five tries. I hadn’t tried the one spell that he didn’t describe how to cast yet, but something told me I wouldn’t have much of a challenge with it as well. Another benefit was that I found it even easier than before to learn Dark Magic.

Sirius had been teaching me what spells he wanted to from the Black Family Magic and none of them had taken long to learn, which was impressive considering most of the spells were so old that they were only useful when cast non-verbally— it was a common thing among older spells to have incantations that were more like full sentences than simple words or phrases. So the third benefit was clearly an easier time learning dark magic. The fourth benefit was one I noticed when duelling Michelle Jones. For some reason, when I was in combat, and only then, my eyes could lock into some sort of hyper focus that let me track things in real time that I had no business tracking. I could just tell that when I combined that with the enhanced agility, I was going to be a nightmare to duel against. Sirius had only managed to win two of our duels after the ritual which was a marked departure from the previous trend where we were beginning to approach equality with all the progress he was making with getting his body on track.

“Harry!” Sirius called out from the entrance hall.

“A minute” I said as I returned to freshening up and putting my things in order. The fifth benefit was that my magic felt even more potent that it had before. That was noticeable and readily apparent almost from the moment it came through. The sixth was only noticed in our second duel when Sirius executed a complex strategy that ended up with me nailed with a sleek underhand disarming charm. It would have been his win, except that the low-powered spell hit and did nothing but loosen my grip slightly. We’d tested it, and it was far from the magic immunity that Class 5 beasts enjoyed, but it was still better than nothing. I could wake up from stunners faster than normal, I could resist disarming charms if they weren’t sent with enough power, and I could just ignore some low level hexes if you didn’t put enough vim in it.

And the seventh? Well, Sirius had opposed the testing but we now knew I as basically immune to most low-level poisons.

“Harry, magic help me if you don’t get down here in the next—“

He fell silent as my silencing charm hit once I walked into the room.

“Finally” He said after a slash of his wand to cancel out my spell.

“Let’s go”