On the gate side, the outer wall was gone from the foundation up to the third-floor windowsills, and rubble filled most of the ground floor. The second-floor turret hung crookedly off the remaining load-bearing wall, its floor split and its walls collapsed.
Everything above leaned toward the collapse, the outer walls cracked, half the battlements fallen, a few window frames dangling loose in midair. But the main frame was still standing. The structural reinforcement charm had absorbed the worst of it.
From a distance, the castle looked like something had bitten half of it off. The broken edge was jagged, rubble was still falling, and the inside was exposed to the night wind.
Every protection charms. All of it had failed, because that magic was anchored to the physical structure, and once the structure broke, so did the magic on it.
The same went for the traps on the ground floor. With the ceiling down and the stairs twisted, every trigger line and containment boundary had been torn apart.
Regulus stood a hundred and fifty meters away. By the time the shockwave reached him it had weakened into a gust of scorching wind, and the silver light of his constant Protego flickered as it roared past.
He checked his own condition first. Two minutes of continuous high-intensity casting would drain a standard adult wizard’s entire reserve. For him it was about twenty or thirty percent. Sweat ran down his temples and his muscles ached slightly, and two minutes of preparation was the longest he’d ever spent on a single spell.
The power was decent. It met expectations. But there was a lot of room to improve this combination.
Today’s version had come from a flash of inspiration. He’d only decided to work Bellatrix in midway through the charging stage. Planned out in advance, the compression ratio could go higher still.
Bellatrix’s Guardian will and Protego’s containment were basically the same thing. Both held a boundary. Betelgeuse’s burst and the fire type charm were only there to break it, and in the end it was just ordinary fire. Swap in Fiendfyre, fuse its self-driven urge to destroy with Betelgeuse at the moment of release, and the energy peak would jump by several orders of magnitude.
Push further, and Transfiguration could replace the air with a better working medium, a gas with higher heat capacity and a larger expansion coefficient. Better still, he could skip compression entirely and transfigure superheated Plasma directly inside the sphere. Preparation would drop from two minutes to a few seconds, and the power would be greater.
Magical manipulation was the foundation. Bellatrix handled containment, Betelgeuse handled release, Transfiguration swapped the medium. This spell was nowhere near its ceiling.
There was one question he kept coming back to. How much of the physical world could magic actually move? It wasn’t about turning magic into physics. It was about making magic do the most that physics could do, and then go beyond it.
Tonight’s thermobaric blast was the first real-combat test of that idea. He was pleased, but not satisfied. He’d work through the rest after he got home.
He started Star Guided Meditation. Deep in his mind, the six stars settled into place, and magic flowed back to refill what he’d spent. He flicked the leftover sparks off his wand tip and shifted his weight onto his back foot, relaxed.
He looked back at Dumbledore and Moody and grinned. "Done."
Moody’s face was something to see.
His eyes darted between the ruins and the white-haired wizard, and the scar running from his temple to his jaw twisted uglier as the muscles jumped.
He’d felt something was off from the moment this guy started charging. When that ball shrank to the size of a fist, he’d nearly Apparated out on the spot. Now he was looking at the result.
The front of the castle had been blown off. A young wizard barely over twenty had stood outside the fight for two minutes with three basic spells and blown a hole straight through a Death Eater stronghold.
Moody had been an Auror for nearly thirty years and put half of Azkaban’s dark wizards behind bars. But he’d never seen anything like this. A few run-of-the-mill spells put together, and somehow they did this?
His throat moved as he swallowed.
That face turned toward him with a smug grin. Moody stared at him for a long moment, then huffed through his nose.
Dumbledore was taking it better. He lifted Quietus and the barrier, and his eyes went from the smoking ruins to Regulus’s grinning face.
It was about what he’d guessed. Protego as the container, Ventus as the pump, air as the ammunition. Compression to store the energy, will to push it far past normal limits, a Throwing Charm to launch it and a Fire Charm to set it off.
Every step was a basic spell, and the use of will wasn’t all that advanced either. But this way of thinking, binding physics and magic together, was something even he had never considered.
During the trip to France he’d seen how much the boy knew. Flight, aerodynamics, muggle scientific thinking. Back then he’d been glad, because this young man wasn’t boxed in by the magical world’s fixed ways.
But there was a huge gap between having the knowledge and using it in a real fight. In those two minutes, the boy had closed it.
The corner of Dumbledore’s mouth curved. His blue eyes held surprise, admiration, and a bit of a headache. He shook his head, his white beard swaying along.
With a bang that big, every wizard for dozens of miles must have felt it. The Ministry would probably send someone to investigate tomorrow.
But who cared. It wasn’t his problem.
---
On the ruins, stones were still tumbling down here and there, and the air smelled of scorched lime and burnt earth.
Regulus spread his magic perception through the smoke. Under the rubble were three or four magical signatures, chaotic and faint, flickering on and off, but still beating.
Two more lay sprawled on top of the ruins, silver fragments of Protego fading on them. One coughed up bubbles of blood that stained the rubble dark brown, half his mask shattered. The other bled from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, curled up and unable to move.
Another was still standing, but swaying badly, his wand raised and drawing circles in the air, his eyes unfocused.
They were all alive. For now, at least.
Regulus swept deeper. There was one signature stronger than all the others. Rapid, but stable.
Antonin Dolohov.
He stepped out from behind a pile of rubble, fairly steady, wand in hand, but breathing hard. Blood leaked from his mouth and nose, streaking his face and neck, and his robes hung in tatters, the left sleeve torn away.
His magic was in decent shape, most of his injuries surface-level. Anyone who could stay on his feet after a blast like that was seriously tough.
Regulus looked at the figures sprawled across the ruins, and the corner of his mouth lifted a little.
Good. The old man had said no killing, and he’d managed it.
That shot had been carefully chosen. The arch was the outer wall’s key support point, so taking it out dropped the wall on its own, and most of the energy went into the building rather than the people inside.
If he’d thrown the ball through a ground-floor window instead, the overpressure would have bounced and stacked with nowhere to go and ruptured everyone’s lungs. Not even Protego holds up against that.
He hadn’t done it. He had to give the old man some face, after all. And some of the Death Eaters were competent enough to get Protego up before the shockwave hit.
Behind him, Dumbledore’s magical presence suddenly vanished from his perception.
Just like that time at the Werewolf camp. His eyes could see the old man standing there, but his Magic Perception picked up nothing. Present but undetectable, holding back and watching the whole field.
Moody’s magic came through very clearly by contrast. Rough, heavy, as unpolished as his scarred face, but sharp enough.
Crack! A sharp sound burst at the edge of the ruins.
Moody appeared right on the line between the castle ruins and the open ground.
The Anti-Apparition Charm was long gone, and the Prewett brothers must have realized it too. The second-floor turret was tilted badly, and staying up there was just waiting to get crushed.
They had already climbed out, covered in dust, and were sliding down the pile of rubble. Fabian stepped on a loose slab and nearly fell. Gideon grabbed his arm.
Their magic had been unstable before and was shakier now, but Protego and the Bubble-Head Charm had kept them from any real injury. They landed on open ground a few dozen meters out.
Moody had put himself between them and Dolohov, off to one side. His wand was lowered, the tip pointed at the ground. He didn’t raise it.
A textbook intimidation stance.
Dolohov glanced at Moody, and the corner of his mouth twitched.
Regulus didn’t rush to attack. He watched first.
Dolohov pulled several small dark vials from an inner pocket of his torn robes and tossed them to the dazed Death Eater who was still standing.
"Pour these down their throats."
The man caught the vials and stood there a moment before it registered, then staggered off toward his companions on the ground.
Dolohov uncorked one himself, drank it, wiped the blood from his mouth with his sleeve, and took two steps forward, placing himself in front of his men.
Regulus looked back at him. He wasn’t smiling or taunting. He was just quietly watching, and the silence was more oppressive than any threat.
The two of them faced each other across the smoking rubble, and now and then coughing and the sound of falling stone came from deep in the ruins.
Moody stood in the shadows by the stone wall in the distance, wand at his side, gray-blue eyes watching every person on the field without moving.
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