114 Chapter 114: Bloody Valentine

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14 February 1993, Hogwarts

Harry had been ready to go down the stairs, to the common room, like every Sunday morning,

It had been almost a month since his meeting in Hogsmeade and finally, everything went through. The paperwork needed to get Harry certified legally as an investor in the Firebolt took a couple of weeks to process, and it took an additional week for Terrence Smythe to build the seven brooms. Finally, after a little negotiation, the Chudley Cannons accepted experimenting with the new brooms for a few matches in the season. Hopefully, the brooms would help stop the record-breaking losing streak that they currently held.

Yeah, Harry found it odd that no one batted an eyelash when he registered the paperwork for his ownership, but since there was a standard contract of the purchase and a copy of the Gringotts transaction was sent to the ministry, no one seemed to care. At no point was there anyone asking for his age. It was surprisingly straightforward, especially since property worked weirdly in the wizarding world.

That's the thing, for a property to be bought or sold, it's not the actual person who owns it, but the holder of the vault used to buy it. It was an efficient way for the ministry to track down the owner of any property without bothering with the paperwork. Because technically speaking, if someone stole a property or committed fraud, they would need to fool the bank and Gringotts are not merciful when it comes to thieves.

Every single wizard or witch that attends Hogwarts has a monetary vault that's opened just for them. As part of an agreement between the school and the Goblin Nation, these vaults do not require any fees until their owners graduate. Even the scions of rich families get a vault if they specifically don't have one in their name. In Harry's case, since he was the last Potter, the bank didn't need to create a new account for him.

It was actually pretty efficient. In a way, instead of having an identification number, the ministry could use Gringotts' vault numbers. Additionally, large scale transactions using physical gold were rare and usually done off the table, meaning that whatever you're buying is not something that you want the ministry to know about it. You can, of course, get a signed proof of purchase and use it to file the paperwork, but usually, going through Gringotts was just easier for everyone.

But yeah, hopefully, everything would go fine with Firebolt, and Harry would start refilling the Potter vault after the mess that his father made of it. He invested five thousand galleons into what was essentially a sinking company with only the knowledge from the stories of his past life as a reference. He only hoped it would end up working.

The issue wasn't even the broom, it was Smythe's ability to market his product. The broom was an amazing artefact, but Harry didn't have the capital to market it on a large scale so he employed a method that a certain energy drink used to market their products in the early days when they didn't have enough money for a large-scale advertising campaign.

The trick was to subtly incorporate it into athletes' routines, in Harry's case it was making the broom show how much better the team had gotten with the new brooms. Oh, they'll probably be shit, but a substantial increase in performance, and maybe even a winning streak, and the fact that the brooms looked unique, would generate organic buzz and word-of-mouth marketing, which wouldn't cost them a single galleon.

It was a dirty trick, and the fact that Harry subtly threatened the broom maker by figuring out how his invention worked didn't help ease his conscience. Alas, in the long run, they would both benefit from it. For the moment, he would trust Smythe to follow the plan he had outlined to him.

So, as promised, the Potter scion decided to not get involved and came back to the main issue of Riddle's inevitable return. So far, Harry only focused on his ice magic, but he did distract himself by reading about spacial expansion charms in his downtime to enchant his hat. It was a nice calm project that was completely independent from the whole Chamber of Secrets thing, and that was just calming. The Potter scion had dedicated almost his entire year to dealing with the chamber and it was getting tiring.

When he got down, he was met with Daphne, who brightened when she saw him, "Good morning, Harry. Did you have a good night's sleep?"

He nodded, "What about you?"

"Great, but Tracy wouldn't get up early on a Sunday. Where's Blaise?"

Harry shrugged, "It didn't seem fair to wake him up, to be honest. It's a Sunday, Daphne. You shouldn't wake them up just because you want to have breakfast with them."

"Fine, it's just that keeping things from them for so long has been hard."

"You're the one who picked the red pill, and they didn't. They haven't answered my decision, so I'm assuming that they don't want to be involved, and I will respect that."

And Harry was serious about that. He wasn't going to involve them in his mess unless they specifically asked him to do it. Yeah, there was some tension because it was obvious that Daphne knew something that they didn't, and they definitely noticed the Greengrass scion disappearing with Harry for hours. Yeah, the whole thing weighed on Daphne's conscience, and she wanted nothing more than to tell them. Fortunately, she couldn't take out her anger at him since he did offer them a chance and a standing offer. They just didn't take it.

"Let's just get some breakfast and meet up with Luna for our lessons," the Greengrass scion grumbled.

Yeah, he started giving her and Luna lessons to protect themselves. It wasn't anything fancy, but a few curses here and there and a couple of charms that would hide them or shield them would come a long way. Harry was focused primarily on ice spells since extremely low temperatures limited the mobility and reactions of snakes, even magical ones.

It was shown in the casualty rates of the only Basilisk hunt that happened in a cold environment. Apparently, some Ice elemental centuries back went insane and tried to start a new ice age. She ended up freezing up half of Europe in what seemed like the worst winter ever recorded. Well, it turned out that the large shift in temperate had woken a Basilisk in Greece, enough for it to try to find a new nest warmer. It was hunted down and killed in less than a week and the hunting party only came out with a single death and a few petrifications.

Apparently, the cold had weakened the beast immensely, enough that its glare was very underpowered and that its movement was stiff. The only casualty happened because one of them was bitten, not because of the glare.

So, yeah, it was an advantage that few knew of, and Harry was very interested in using it.

Harry's thoughts were interrupted by Daphne's voice, "What in Merlin's name is this monstrosity?"

Harry looked up and saw the Great Hall, well, what should have been the Great Hall. For a fraction of a second, Harry thought that he was wrong room was designed by a toddler who was obsessed with the colour pink.

The room was completely unrecognizable. Gone were the rich and regal tones that usually adorned the castle walls. In their place was a blinding, almost fluorescent, pinkish hue that practically assaulted his senses. The walls themselves seemed to blush, covered in an indecent quantity of pink flowers that clashed horribly with the stone architecture.

As Harry took in the scene, he felt like he had stumbled into the imagination of a seven-year-old girl who had an inexplicable obsession with the colour pink. He blinked, half-expecting the entire spectacle to disappear in a puff of logic, but it remained stubbornly, garishly real.

It was then that Harry remembered the date and murmured, "I think it's Valentine's Day."

The Great Hall was transformed into a bizarre and gaudy carnival of affection. The candles that usually cast a warm glow on the students and their meals had been replaced by thousands of hearts. They floated in the air, flickering with a silvery-pink light that was both mesmerizing and headache-inducing. There were hearts of all kinds—pink hearts, silver and pink hearts, red and pink hearts, and even some inexplicably gold-pink hearts. They bobbed and weaved in the air as if performing a choreographed dance.

The tables were adorned with tablecloths that were, you guessed it, pink. Heart-shaped dishes held a rather excessive assortment of pink treats, from candies to pastries. Harry half-expected his dinner to start oozing pink syrup at any moment.

As Harry tried to make sense of the spectacle, he caught sight of the paintings that adorned the walls. Normally serene and aloof, the portraits had been swept up in the pink craze. Their frames were circled with hearts as if someone had gone on a heart-sticking spree with reckless abandon. Miniature angels, sporting hues of pink and gold, fluttered around the paintings, their cherubic faces attempting to serenade the inhabitants of the hall with some truly horrifying love songs.

He couldn't help but wonder who had orchestrated this explosion of pink. It was as if Cupid had gone on a caffeine-fueled rampage with a rainbow palette. Of course, the architect of this abomination was smiling brilliantly with flashy ink robes that genuinely hurt Harry's eyes.

With that realized, he looked at his blonde companion and spoke up, "Yeah, we're out of here."

He looked up and noticed that Luna was sitting at the Ravenclaw table. He motioned her to come over and she nodded.

The three of them slowly walked up to the seventh floor in silence, trying to bleach the past few memories from their brain, something that was unfortunately very hard to do. Hopefully, training would distract them.

A couple of hours later, it obviously didn't. Even while Harry was animating a giant Snake construct made of ice, his mind still looked back at the abomination he saw at the Great Hall.

Daphne held up her hand in shielding charm, dodging the snake's charge, alas the charm exploded into a shockwave when it was shattered. It was a spell of Harry's own creation that he named "Protego Pulsum."

It took a little time to teach Daphne the Protego charm, which Harry thought was completely worth it since it was a very useful spell. Still, it was a very notable achievement and a testament to Daphne's talent that she managed to learn it in less than a month. Now, they were covering the variants of the charm, like adding layers or in this case, a concussive force when it breaks.

The giant snake's head snapped backwards, only to be met with a Flipendo from Luna. Just as Harry was manipulating the ice to heal the damage to the construct, he froze and the world around him disappeared.

Instead, there were flashes of a giant snake with yellow eyes, a familiar corridor near the Astronomy tower, and a screaming girl with a blue tie.

The Room of Requirements came back into view and the ice snake fell crashing into a thousand pieces, but Harry didn't seem to care, instead being horrified by what he had just seen.

"Are you alright, Harry? What happened?" Daphne asked.

"I just had a vision. He's back. Riddle started to attack again. I think it was a Ravenclaw, I'm not sure, to be honest. It was pretty fast."

Harry practically ran towards the exit, the two girls following behind him, that is until he found himself near the corridor he saw in his vision. He noticed that there was a small crowd forming and he pushed his way forward, only to see the familiar form of Penelope Clearwater frozen with a fearful expression on her face. Yeah, this was the girl he had just seen.

However, something was different. Near the wall next to her something weird. It was a smiling face, drawn in blood, and Harry paled. This was a message aimed at him.

"What do you think it means," Daphne asked.

"Oh, that's simple. It means that it is time for us to resume our game."

Talk about a bloody Valentine.

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I tend to upload drafts of early chapters on there to get people's opinions of them so you can read up to 20 chapters ahead as a bonus.

Thank you guys for your support in these hard times.