Chapter 47
Descending so, he managed to get down about forty feet until the first major obstacle hit. All the stone below him had been smoothed out through hundreds of years of erosion. There were no more ledges to grab onto and no more holes to stick his feet into.
Pooling his mana into his hands, Harry slammed his hand into the stone in an attempt to use Earth element magic on it and create a notch for him to hold onto.
"Ow!" he said with a wince as his fingers cracked against the stone. Hogwarts' magic was too strong for him to bend the castle using magic. Manipulating the wall was out of the question. Harry momentarily considered using his firepower to propel himself mid-air but discarded the idea. Fire would cause too much attention. Earth was out of the question. Wind he wasn't too confident in. That only left one option.
It was time to try out the new trick he'd been practicing.
Extending his still hurting hand up into the air above him, he let his mana flow out into the air around him, feeling it saturate his surroundings as it reached out farther and farther, searching for what Harry wanted. Luckily, it had been raining during the Grand Feast, and the air was full of it.
Harry closed his eyes and his brow furrowed as he focused with all his might, twirling his hand in a gentle swinging motion as he pulled the mana back in, pulling with it the humidity in the air surrounding him.
Water vapor condensed around his free hand, creating a blob of water that grew more and more in size as water drew in from the nearby atmosphere.
Harry didn't know a lot of science, but he understood Force. Mass times acceleration. With Gamer's Mind, he ran through the basic motion formulae and calculated the force with which he'd hit the ground and compared it with the viscosity of water, coming up with the thickness of the layer of water he'd need to cushion his fall. Creating a thick wall of water under him, he jumped and pushed away from the tower, free falling straight towards the ground.
But all was not well with his plan. Almost instantly, the layer of water started to crumble. Harry's eyes widened as he realized that he hadn't accounted for the resistance of the wind, which was breaking away chunks of water from his protective shell by the second.
With the ground approaching at an increasingly faster rate, Harry's eyes widened as a humongous tendril of mana shot out, almost as if of its own volition, and pierced the ground. Harry could only gape for a moment. He had no idea how he'd reached a target so far, but he didn't have time to theorize. With a not inconsiderable amount of difficulty, he bent it to his will and raised it to form an incline to catch him in mid-air.
Slamming into the makeshift slide, he skidded down the ramp and landed face first on the ground. He lay there for a minute, letting the pain in his limbs fade before he dared to try and get back up again. Luckily, the water had shielded him from the initial landing, but the rocks and stones on the floor hadn't left him without his fair share of cuts and bruises.
"That went a lot worse than I'd imagined," Harry groaned into the ground.
After a few minutes of catching his breath and dusting himself off, he shaped the earth back into its initial shape and made his way past the groundskeeper's wooden hut, trying not to tremble under the sheer force of his loud snores. With a deep sense of anticipation, he stepped into the forbidden forest.
The crescent moon lit the entire forest with an almost dream-like light.
The trees seemed sentient, filling the air with a haunting song with their rustling leaves that spoke of the thousands of years of battles they'd witnessed and the secrets they would forever keep.
Harry shivered and pulled his jacket around him tighter.
He quickly found a tree low enough that he could use it to climb up to the higher ones. Clutching onto a branch, Harry pulled himself up onto it and jumped up, tightly grabbing onto the foot long thick vines than swung from the top and climbing onto a solid branch that was high enough to be out of the reach of ground predators and low enough for him to escape if anything on the tree tried to kill him.
He took a deep breath. Looking straight ahead, his mind plotted out routes along the branches, ways that he could take running and jumping across the treetops and branches that would be most efficient for DEX training.
With some trepidation, he started heading for the one that ran to the deepest part of the forest.
The enchanted forest beckoned him into its heart. The deep, haunting ballad of its ancient song called out to him. In a corner of his mind, Harry absently compared the song to the call of a siren, calling onto its prey before choking it to death.
Almost as if sensing the very thought, the song turned a bit more severe, as if reprimanding him.
Harry realized why this was called the forbidden forest. This amount of mana…the sheer magical weight was not to be taken lightly. There was some ancient magic in this forest. Harry sent out a mental plea to whatever mysterious creature's magic he was feeling, asking it to not crush him like a bug and give him a chance to prove himself worthy to roam its realm.
Suddenly, almost as if on cue, a pack of beautiful pure white wolves broke out from the various bushes and trees that surrounded the pathway of trees Harry was jumping and converged under him and started running with him under the trees.
Knowing at first glance that these were not werewolves, Harry cast observe on their collective group while adjusting his path to take him a bit higher into the treetops should the wolves try to attack
Forbidden Forest Wolf Pack
If two werewolves meet and mate at the full moon, which is extremely rare, the result of the mating will be wolf cubs which resemble true wolves in everything except their abnormally high intelligence. Such a litter was once set free, under conditions of extreme secrecy, in the Forbidden Forest at Hogwarts, with the permission of Albus Dumbledore. The cubs grew into beautiful and unusually intelligent wolves and some of them live there still, which has given rise to the stories about 'werewolves' in the Forest.
They think Harry is interesting and are wondering why the immortals sent them to evaluate a two-legged one.
Harry, upon reading the last line, jumped towards the branch of the next tree, grabbing it with both hands and swinging his whole body around the branch, diffusing the inertia of the high-speed run he was in before swinging into a stable perch.
Noticing that he had stopped, the eight wolves trotted to a halt and sat down on their haunches around the tree, staring up at Harry with their unusually intelligent eyes. Keeping the last line of their description in his mind, Harry climbed down the tree slowly, not making any sudden movements.
The wolves backed up, almost as if realizing that Harry wasn't at ease. Harry gave them an uneasy smile.
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