Chapter 20- The Life and Times of Draco Malfoy

“Welcome, Wizards and witches, to the final task of the Triwizard tournament. This is brought to you live from Hogwarts. We have the homegrown favourite, Draco Malfoy” Bagman stopped to allow the crowd to run wild. I looked around me at that. Stands filled to the brim with students of Hogwarts, and magical monitoring devices spinning about the stadium to broadcast everything that happened across Europe.

“And the lovely French beauty, Fleur Delacour” Her applause was notably more muted with the lack of French students in the crowd. Luckily, even though Fudge was being an idiot about this, he wasn’t being a complete one. At least not enough of an idiot to invite hordes of foreign students into the country again. This entire thing was quite stupid, but I could see the reasoning. Draco Malfoy was a clear favourite to win. Broadcasting his victory, and even our willingness to win was a clear display of England’s strength to the rest of Europe. The Sharks of Europe that wanted nothing more than to feast on Britain’s carcass after the fiasco that was the Yule Ball, this would hopefully be enough to project enough strength to make them wary. To ward them off the idea a bit.

“This task will be a massive course around the entire school. The champions will begin here, with brooms, before heading to the black lake, the forbidden forest, and then  returning here to move through the maze and find the Triwizard trophy at the centre.” The students broke out into excited whispering and I turned to look at the Champions instead. The Malfoy boy looked quite differently from how he did during the Yule Ball. He seemed to have shot up a whole foot in height. His hair was pulled back in a topknot and he had a look of concentration on his face. I couldn’t deny being interested in what he could do. OWLs and NEWTs in a few months apart with the kind of results he achieved was nothing less than extraordinary. That didn’t even take into consideration his performance in the tournament so far. The Blonde Veela next to him seemed to pale in comparison. I’m sure that’s the first time anyone could have ever said that.

I didn’t catch the rest of what Bagman said, but I caught the siren that started the event. Both of them bolted into the air in between breaths. Susan had mentioned that Draco was the seeker for the Slytherin team and was an above-average flyer but that was nothing compared to the Veela. She made him look clumsy in the sky as she swept ahead, straight at the lake. Most of the obstacles being avoided with contemptuous ease. Even the harpies barely slowed her for a few seconds. Fleur Delacour was a two-time broom racing champion and it showed. Her competitor was stuck dealing with each and every obstacle with clever wandwork.

I watched with interest as he dispelled the tornado in the middle of his path with a deft wave of his wand and turned all the harpies to ash with another. Clearly a powerful wizard, but one that was losing right now. By the time he was halfway through the course, his opponent had already made it to the lake and was stripping to her trunks to make her way inside. The groans of the boys in the stands as her swimsuit turned out to be a very conservative swim dress brought a smile to my face. Fucking idiots.

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Definitely hadn’t expected Fleur to be so good on a broom. Draco’s instincts were barely enough to prevent me from crashing and I had to do my best to prevent a disgraceful end to the tournament. The good news was that I’d already gone through most of the obstacles already. The only thing remaining for me was the herd of Gryphons. I said ‘only thing’ like they would be easy to pass. Feracious creatures by every metric. There’s a reason Godric had named his house after them. Bodies of lions and heads of eagles. I thought this was supposed to be a last minute change to the plan. Where the hell did they manage to get so many creatures on short notice.

I left my thoughts and only just managed to barrel roll out of the way of one of the Gryphons’ talons. Another one charged at me then and a piercing spell to the head barely stunned it for long enough that I could retreat. Their magical resistance had to be the most annoying part about them. The only way I’d be moving at anything resembling a good speed was if I resorted to some serious dark magic.

There were five Gryphons here and I couldn’t think of anything to get rid of them quickly. They were highly fire resistant so even that wouldn’t work, and you just got to see their magic resistance. There were too many for me to risk standing still for long enough to use lightning on so there was literally nothing I could do but run. It grated at my pride as I used a bright flashing lumos to stun the creatures and zoomed straight at the lake.

My light tactic worked surprisingly well and it took them a few seconds to adapt and find me before they could begin their chase. I pushed my broom to the maximum speed I could reach and trusted my magic to shield my body from the effects of physics as I reached such speeds.

The Gryphons hounded my every move and I just barely managed to make my way to the lake with all five of them behind me. I couldn’t stop to dismount or even decide how to approach the next stage, so I focused my intention and waved my wand around myself. This better work. The books were clear. Spells were mere guidelines. Extremely complicated ones, but still mere guidelines. They helped move your magic and shape your intent. So the first question I’d had was what if I changed the guidelines just a little bit? Not creating a new spell, or even going through the necessary arithmancy to decide how to alter an existing one, just using pure intent to shape a spell to my own needs. Armand had laughed and said it wasn’t particularly difficult since we all did that one way or another whenever we cast a spell. The only issue was I wasn’t talking about a simple change, I was talking about pure modification without actually going through the stress of modifying anything. Interesting, right?

All this thinking wasn’t going to help me though. The spell already failed the first time, and I was quickly approaching the pier, the location of the next checkpoint. I’d already gone across the lake and attempting to do so again wouldn’t end well. THe Gryphons were clearly losing some of their enjoyment in the hunt and might just decide to end things with me before I got too far.

Oxygen, pure oxygen couldn’t be the true answer. I’d thought of basically surrounding myself with the element I needed to breathe but that clearly wasn’t working. This time, I decided to start directly from the spell I was modifying instead of trying to get the intent right immediately. I cast the bubblehead charm, and while the magic was preparing to attach itself to my face, I grabbed a hold of it and stretched it to cover my entire body. I could see a clear distortion in the air in front of me after a few seconds and I laughed in triumph. It worked.

My broom bucked as several of the bristles were torn away. I turned around and found the Gryphons bearing on me too close for comfort. I leaned forward on the broom, trying to eke out any extra second of speed I could. The broom wasn’t too affected by the damage, but I knew that it would fall apart eventually,, if not now then soon. Once I reached the floating circle in the sky and flew through it, I dove straight into the sea. I could hear the cries of disappointment from the creatures behind me and I laughed again as my body flew into the water.

The ‘bubblebody?’ charm was working like a charm. I couldn’t even feel any of the water, and it was like I was in my own separate world from the lake around me. I looked around for a bit before using a supersensory charm. At this depth, the lake was far too murky for me to make anything out. As the charm came into play, I could suddenly see the golden circles that marked the checkpoints a bit deeper into the lake. I hadn’t gotten deep enough apparently. I took a deep breath and zoomed off on my broom.

‘Fleur might be ahead of me for now, but I doubt she was making speed like this’ I thought as I flew through the third checkpoint unopposed. I was moving too quickly for any other traps to be truly effective. Of course, that’s when life decided to fuck me up. I felt claws raking across my back and just barely managed to keep my focus as I grabbed onto it and threw it out of the bubble that protected me. I was lucky my variation worked quite a bit differently from the original. If this was an actual bubble, I’d probably be already dead from something like a grindylow managing to get it. As the grindylow came back sweeping at me, I eviscerated it with a scowl on my face.

This task was getting a bit too annoying. Murphy decided to rear his ugly head again. The grindylow was nothing more than a scout it seemed. A whole school of them swam out of the reeds below me and rushed at me. The blasting curse I shot at their mass was dodged with barely any thought as they separated. Fuck. They came from every direction, and it took all of my focus to prevent any of them from breaching my aura and attacking me directly. It was going to happen sooner or later though. After all, It looked like for every one I killed, two more took its place. When I finally got the idea of how to solve my problem I almost facepalmed. Grindylows were cold blooded, weren’t they?

A deep breath and calling on that inner flame I had begun to feel within me weeks after finally truly mastering fiendfyre helped me heat up the water around me to a boil and beyond their point. I stretched my area of influence as far as I could take it and it took barely a second for the Grindylows closer to me to reel and try tpo escape. THe ones farther away were able to escape the field to only major burns, but the ones closer? They were cooked apart. I wondered how it smelt as I watched one of the Grindylows practically desiccate from within.

I couldn’t sit still and admire my handiwork though. There was still work to do, after all. I continued flying through the checkpoints, wondering how long this section of the task would take. The black lake was massive, and I’d only just began to  appreciate that fact in its entirety. I’d been here for almost half an hour and I still wasn’t any closer to the end.

It took me another ten minutes of flying beneath the lake to come across Fleur. She was swimming straight towards me and I took a second to admire her form. Covered in bruises and cuts as she was, she still looked angelic. She was waving her arms at me as she approached but I couldn’t understand what she was trying to say until I saw the dark shape forming out of the sea behind her. A fucking Kraken. I’m not even ashamed to say I turned around and started flying off. This wasn’t my problem. Fleur had wanted the task. She could deal with the fucking Kraken on her own.

It took me almost ten minutes to realise there was no way of avoiding the Kraken. I’d tried approaching things from every angle but about two of the checkpoints I needed to pass through were enveloped in the creature's sprawling form. There was no chance of me somehow getting away with just going through the checkpoints and not somehow getting its attention. Might as well join Fleur in her battle with it. She looked like she needed the help either way.

“Sectumsempra”, I intoned in my mind and cleaved through two of the creature’s tentacles to get its attention, and when it turned to me, I sent a conjunctivitis curse at one of its eyes. It just blinked at the right moment for the curse to hit an eyelid instead of the fleshy mass I was aiming for. Several of the tentacles came flying at me and I was barely able to weave out of the way of all of them before returning fire with another of Snape’s dark cutters. It was to little effect though. The Kraken had so many tentacles that everyone I cut seemed to be just a grain from a whole bag of rice. There was also the downside of destroying so many tentacles. The more I destroyed, the faster the remaining ones moved. It was almost like I was helping it concentrate its brain power on moving only a few dozen limbs instead of a couple hundred.

Eventually, it seemed like it tired of our game of cat and mouse as it sent everything straight at me. With the broom beneath me, I was king on this field. I manoeuvred around the tentacles like I was flying through the sky, which for all intents and purposes, I was. The full-body bubble was quite useful. I turned to see what Fleur was doing and found her scrawling runes that looked to be made of flames in the water. She seemed to have some sort of plan in mind so I dedicated my efforts to keeping the monster distracted while she found a way to defeat it.

An arrow made of ice lodged deep into one tentacle and I repeated that technique with three more tentacles. My next tactic was to focus on my control of the water that made up the ice and increase the pressure of it. Forcing it to flow into the tentacles and then explode.

I let out a breath of relief to see the strategy work. It had been quite a bit more exhausting than I’d expected though. I had to be careful with that strategy. My control of water wasn’t native, after all. All my thoughts disappeared in a blur of pain as I felt something slam into me from beneath and knock me so high that I flew out of the water itself. I didn’t come to, until I was at the apex of my flight and was already heading back down. “Arresto Momentum” I screamed in reflex. Luckily, it worked. My fall slowed to a crawl and I tried to come up with my next move. My ribs were hell and the broom I’d been using had been shattered in the impact along with the full-body bubble spell. I focused on my magic and decided to go with my original plan. I began my transfiguring gills into my neck, and doing some magic on my respiratory system to make it accept water like it would air.

The next bit of magic went to my eyes. I transfigured them to see better in the cold dark depths of the lake, and turn my legs into a tail. I looked like a complete merman. I wasn’t done yet, though. I focused on my skin and transfigured all of it to the scales one would expect to find on a fish. The lake was bloody cold and I’d need some protection from that, at the very least. With all these changes done with, I ended my momentum spell and arranged my body to fall into the lake in a perfect straight dive.

My new changes allowed me to move in the water like a jet. I found the Kraken just where I’d left it, except this time it was bound by chains coming from glowing runes floating in the water. It was thrashing and the chains were already creaking. I looked around for Fleur and found her long gone. Cracks started forming along the chains and I couldn’t be bothered to deal with this again.

I focused all my desire to kill and whispered, avada kedavra.

A/N; How does the chapter look?