Two hundred times normal pressure. Any more and the shell would break, and all that work would be wasted. Unless he could push its strength even higher.
Regulus closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, a blue-white glow flashed through his amber slit pupils.
The guardian image of Bellatrix rose from deep in his mind, seeped outward through his Magic channels, flowed into his wand, and merged with Protego.
A layer of blue-white light spread over the shell’s silver sheen, running down from the top and gathering at the bottom.
The trembling stopped. The humming disappeared. The shell held steady.
A boundary formed from Guardian will could contain far more than Protego’s physical limits allowed. The gas that had been wobbling at the breaking point was pinned down completely.
The next step was where this magic truly demanded talent.
He stopped feeding air in. The hole at the top closed, the wind died, and the flying grass and dust dropped back to the ground.
Then he started compressing. Under evenly applied magical pressure, the shell began to shrink inward.
It happened fast. In three seconds it was down to half a person’s height, the glow brightening as it went. The temperature had already shot up to several thousand degrees, and the air was ionizing, molecules broken into atoms, electrons stripped from their orbits. The pressure was tens of thousands of times higher than outside.
He kept pressing. From half a person’s height down to the size of a head took over ten seconds. Blue-white Plasma boiled inside, turning the sphere into a tiny star, the temperature racing past ten thousand degrees toward tens of thousands, hotter than the surface of the sun.
Sweat beaded on Regulus’s forehead. He was holding Protego’s containment, Guardian will, Magical manipulation, and the mental partitioning of Occlumency all at once, and the burden was approaching his limit.
But the hand holding his wand was steady, and the light in his eyes didn’t waver.
From the size of a head to the size of a fist, every millimeter was a grind.
A fist-sized ball of light hovered above the wand tip, bright enough to burn the eyes if you looked straight at it, bathing the moorland in cold tones. The heat warped the air until even the distant castle looked bent, and a small whirlwind spun slowly around the ball, carrying grass and dust in circles.
A miniature sun.
The shell was trembling again, but at a steady frequency. Bellatrix’s Guardian will wrapped around the outside, locking the Plasma’s extreme pressure tightly inside.
Compressed this far, the air had become an entirely different state of matter. Fully ionized. Over a million times normal atmospheric pressure. A metastable state, extremely dangerous, held down by nothing but will. If the shell broke, the energy released would probably be enough to blow the entire castle away.
The corners of his mouth slowly spread into a grin.
He’d done it. A bomb with more punch than any Blasting Curse most adult wizards had ever seen.
Air itself as ammunition. The cleanest explosion there was.
And he wasn’t done. It still wasn’t strong enough. He could push it further.
---
Moody stared at the sphere, his eyes completely still.
He recognized Protego. He recognized Ventus. He could see the compression. He knew every single step, but put together, he had no idea what he was looking at.
His right hand was already gripping his wand.
His body was telling him to run. On foot was too slow. He should Apparate, get as far out as possible.
They were only a dozen meters away. If that ball went out of control, the blast would reach them faster than anyone could cast a spell.
He’d seen Dark magic explosions. He’d seen Fiendfyre get out of control. He’d seen what Muggle gunpowder could do in an enclosed space.
But this thing was pure. There wasn’t a trace of darkness in it. And yet that blue-white light made every hair on the back of his neck stand up, a line of fire burning up his spine until his scalp tingled.
He glanced sideways at Dumbledore. The old man wasn’t looking at him. His eyes were fixed on the ball of light, his mouth curved slightly with appreciation, surprise, and a bit of anticipation.
Moody’s fingers tightened on his wand, then loosened. In the end, he didn’t run. Albus was still standing here with that look on his face. Something had caught his curiosity.
What the hell was that ball?
Moody forced the rising alarm back down and pressed his lips tight.
He wanted to see what this guy was up to.
---
The ball’s glow flickered across Regulus’s face, he turned his head toward Dumbledore and Moody. One looked calm. The other looked grim.
Regulus grinned. "Old men! Cover your ears!"
Dumbledore’s eyes blinked behind his spectacles. He didn’t hesitate. He raised his wand, tapped it lightly beside his ear, and cast Quietus on himself.
Then he turned to Moody and waved his wand next to his own ear. The meaning was clear. You do it too.
The corner of Moody’s mouth twitched. He looked at the you’d-better-do-it expression on Albus’s face, then at the blue-white ball. If Albus was doing it, he had no reason not to. He raised his wand, cast it on himself, and took a few steps back.
Dumbledore didn’t step back with him. Even from a dozen meters, the air around the sphere was visibly distorted. Quietus could block sound. It couldn’t block anything else that slammed into your body.
He waved his wand again and laid an extremely thin transparent barrier over himself and Moody, right against the skin, to absorb any impact the human body couldn’t take. Only then did he step back and stand beside Moody.
Moody glanced at the nearly invisible barrier on himself and said nothing. Albus always had his reasons, and one extra layer was better than one less.
At the ground-floor window, the Death Eater who’d muttered earlier glanced outside again.
The white-haired wizard had spent all that time just to make a fist-sized ball of light?
That’s it?
He snorted, his mouth curling. He was just about to turn his head back...
Regulus turned around and locked his eyes on the stone arch above the main gate. He readied a Throwing Charm.
At the same time, deep in his mind, the burst image of Betelgeuse had fully ignited. The will to erupt surged up into the wand tip, the structure of a Fire Charm already built, waiting only for the moment of impact.
A hundred and fifty meters. Air resistance negligible. About 0.4 seconds.
Too early, and the ball would explode in midair, losing most of its energy. Too late, and the Plasma would already be expanding freely, and the burst would only be a bonus. Impact and detonation had to land in the same instant.
That level of timing went beyond spellcasting technique. It was calculation. Flight path, speed decay, impact angle, the threshold at which the shell would break, all worked out before launch.
He’d worked it out.
The next moment, he snapped his wand. The charm fired with a short, sharp crack.
The ball shot off the tip so fast it left a straight trail in the air. Dry grass flattened in whole patches beneath its wake, and a shrill whistle tore through the night as it flew at the arch.
The 0.4-second countdown began.
A burst of dark red flame shot from his wand tip, chasing the ball along the same trajectory. It was faster. It caught up.
The ball hit the arch. The shell cracked, a razor-thin blue-white flash leaked from the fracture, and in the same instant Betelgeuse’s will and the heat of the fire charm poured in through it.
Dark red light lit up from inside. The blue-white glow shattered outward, the cracks spreading, fragments tangling with dark red.
Everything that had been held down was let loose.
The moor went silent. The wind stopped. The insects cut off. Even the cattle in the distant pasture went quiet.
Then came the explosion, and the sky turned to day.
A blinding white flash burst from the center, brighter than the noon sun. The castle, the moorland, the hills in the distance, all of it lit up. Every color was washed away, and the castle became a black silhouette swallowed by white light.
After the flash came the shockwave.
At least three layers of protective magic lit up on the castle’s outer walls. The outermost, several stacked dark green barriers, shattered into countless pieces under the overpressure. The middle layer, a dark gray rebound charm, held for a moment, then tore apart along with the stone surface it was anchored to. The innermost was a structural reinforcement charm, its dark brown lines embedded inside the walls, and it barely managed to hold the main frame together.
The protective spells ate about a third of the energy. What was left was more than enough.
The stone arch blew apart, and fist-sized chunks of stone and pulverized mortar shrieked through the air in every direction.
Without its support, the outer wall collapsed from the top down, the thuds of breaking stone rolling upward one after another. A crack ran from the main gate to the second-floor windowsill, then split up through the third floor. The entire ground-floor wall on the gate side caved inward, and dust burst out of the windows and cracks.
The shockwave kept pushing outward, flipping up gravel and dirt into a ring of grayish-white air that was still rolling a hundred meters away.
Even from a hundred and fifty meters away, that deep, heavy roar made their chests shake.
Then came the fireball, white at the core, orange-red outside, dark red at the edges, rolling upward in layers and dragging gray smoke and broken stone with it. The top flattened and spread, and the rising air stretched the bottom into a column.
A small mushroom cloud. By the time it rose thirty or forty meters above the castle, the flames were already fading. There was no fuel. It was only the brief glow of superheated Plasma as it expanded and cooled.
The fireball went out from the outside in, and the night wind scattered the smoke into grayish-white strands that drifted east.
As the smoke cleared, the torn-open cross-section of the castle came into view.
---
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