Chapter 283: The Cursed Reaper

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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.

I would like to thank my beta, Awdyr, for his help in this chapter.

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21 November 1994, Rome, Italy

Harry looked at his watch and winced. He had disappeared for almost half an hour. He needed to get back to the tournament or his absence would be noticed, if it hadn't been already. He couldn't help but feel like things had gotten a lot more complicated with this.

The last Potter used his cloak to sneak past the second task's security. He slowly walked to the stands, where the rest of the Hogwarts delegation sat in anticipation. And yet, he couldn't really care about the outcome of the task, no matter how much he had planned for it.

Instead, his mind was occupied by what he had just witnessed. He hadn't had the time to even digest what he had seen. He couldn't shake the image of the small girl with olive-coloured skin pleading silently for her attacker to spare her.

There was no justification for Dumbledore allowing this to happen. The girl was innocent. She was just a child…

Harry wasn't the most emotional of people. He would admit that fact easily. He could be apathetic sometimes, and he rarely cared for the fates of people he considered to be strangers. It was why, for all the lives he had saved, for all the extraordinary things he had accomplished, he would never consider himself to be a hero. He was just too selfish to be one…

But this was the first time he had seen a child die at the hands of another, and it disturbed him immensely. He didn't know how to describe it. It was a mixture of grief for the lost potential of the girl, mixed with regret and hatred at her assailants.

He couldn't refute that he also had his part to play in this. He had done as he always did and kept talking, hoping to distract his opponents so that he could put in place his convoluted plan, to be so clever. He had never considered the fact that the vampires allowed him to talk because they were also buying time for the ritual to be ready…

He could have probably saved the girl by avoiding the fight altogether and creating a portal to the girl and getting her out himself. But no, he had to fight…. He had to be clever.

Harry had failed before… Voldemort had almost killed him in his first year, Tom Riddle had tricked him many times in his second year, Dumbledore had trapped him in his third year, and that was just the tip of the iceberg… But he was always the one who paid for the consequences of his failure, or at least, he was able to stop them from affecting other people.

This was different… The girl, whose face just wouldn't leave his head, had died… She was a complete stranger, and it didn't make sense for him to be so hung up about it, and yet he was.

He knew that Dumbledore could be ruthless. Harry was thirteen years old when he'd trapped him in the Gardens of Avalon, but he always thought that it was about futureproofing his plans. Harry was a threat and he wanted it to be dealt with easily enough…

But he never expected the Light Champion to allow the killing of a girl in cold blood, just to power a ritual…

He needed answers. Something just wasn't right.

Harry's train of thought was interrupted by the masked form of Lily nudging him with a worried tone, "Are you alright? What happened?"

"Yes, I'm fine. You sensed the magical release?"

She nodded, "It was stronger than the first task. A lot stronger…"

"Huh, I thought so too… But then again, it happened right in front of me."

"What did you see?"

Harry swallowed and forced himself to speak, "I followed the trail of magic. There were vampires using some kind of shadow magic to be able to move around. We fought and I beat them. But, I wasn't fast enough. They were protecting this ritual. The magic from the stadium was powering this knife… They used it to kill a girl, barely more than a child. I tried to stop it, but it cut through my portal somehow…"

"That doesn't make any sense… A magical release of this size can't have been done from the sacrifice of an entire city, let alone a single person. The magic taken from the stadium alone would have been more than the sacrifice of a single girl… It just doesn't add up."

"A girl died… A child, not even at the age of coming to Hogwarts… Dead because of Dumbledore's plan. Dead because I was overconfident… and all you care about is how it doesn't make sense?"

The woman's voice got softer, "Of course I do… I know you probably feel like shit. I know I have, and I made a lot of mistakes, trust me. A lot of people died on my watch… It's a horrible feeling. But the sad truth is that hundreds of little girls, just like her, die every day. One more or one less doesn't make a difference. Dumbledore's plan, whatever it is, can have large-scale consequences. Stop thinking about the little girl that you failed and focus on the wider picture."

Harry wanted to yell at the woman but thought that it wasn't fair for him to do so when she was trying to comfort him, in her own weird way. He just nodded.

The masked redhead continued, "From what you said, I think that the purpose of the magic was to enhance the knife. The fact that it cut through your portal meant that the magic it absorbed was so overwhelming that any spell wouldn't affect it. It's a pretty old art, used in the old days to cut through certain wards during sieges. Using something like this to kill a girl would have been very counterproductive, but using it to bypass some kind of protection that she had, something that kept her safe, could explain the magical release. But, it had to be one hell of an enchantment, though, to cause something of this magnitude."

Was she trying to distract him with arcane knowledge? It was strangely working in this weird way. Harry decided to humour her a bit, "I guess so… But what kind of magical enchantment could be this powerful?"

"An old blood curse, maybe?" she replied sounding relieved, "Technically speaking, a blade imbued with such magic could cut through a blood pact, and the magic release from the blood pact could have a similar effect. But, the curse would have to be very powerful, considering the magical release. Still, a blade enhanced like this could cut through the magic itself, killing the girl was completely unnecessary. And it's definitely not like Dumbledore to do something like this… Sure, he could be ruthless and pragmatic, but killing kids for no reason isn't something he would condone, especially if there's another way to achieve the same result."

"Are you seriously defending the man? And the vampires did say that he was working with Grindelwald for some reason."

Lily froze, "Are you sure about that?"

"Yes. They said something about the Light and Dark Ones becoming allies. You seem worried. Why are you worried?"

"No, it's just that… The Light and Dark Champions should instinctively want to kill each other. Any partnership always ends in a battle and suffering. There is a reason why the Great War was so destructive and left massive scars all over the continent. For Dumbledore to risk another partnership with Grindelwald… Something big has to be happening. We've been planning on another great war, another fight, but what if we were going about things all wrong…"

Flamel's words about Ragnarök came to mind, but Harry didn't say anything. He was still coming to grips with the situation… The hidden redhead continued, "I'll try to figure out what I can. Give me a couple of days to figure this out. Tonight, I want you to conjure me an illusion of the girl in question, and I'll try to figure out who she was. It might give us a better idea about what's really going on."

"I can do that myself," Harry protested.

"I know you can. But can you do that and also take care of the situation with Isabella Zabini?"

He suppressed a groan. He had almost forgotten about the woman… As satisfying as it would be to wipe her smug smirk from her face and stop her from killing Tracy, he was so preoccupied with what had happened in the forest that it almost felt… underwhelming, in a weird way.

"You have a point. But, tell me when you find something. By the way, what's happening on that front? Are they doing well?"

"This task was actually pretty interesting. Every beast other than the Minotaur, the Griffin, and the Nemean Lion has been eliminated. Two by the Romans, one by the Spanish and one by the French. As for the teams, Durmstrang couldn't really do much against the Romans, even if they were able to take out just one of them. The Spanish were eliminated first at the hands of Beauxbatons, which was pretty surprising. The Veela girl, Delacour, I think, charmed her voice and put them all to sleep. But, the Italians are sending some goat blood at her to get the Griffin to do their job for them. Pretty efficient, to be honest."

He hummed in approval a bit. She was right, the task sounded pretty exciting, "What about Hogwarts?"

"Your teammates were immediately swarmed by Nebelheim and Olympus. The Gryffindor girl, Johnson, was taken out early on, but she took two Nebelheim Champions with her. That fog spell of yours was very effective. Diggory took out one of the Olympus champions as well. They're looking to get the minotaur to win, but elemental magic from Olympus is pushing them back."

Harry snorted, "A surprisingly good showing considering that I trained them for just a few days."

He grinned as the crow cheered when Cho lured a Nebelheim champion in with a spell, only for him to be stunned in the back by Diggory. Since they had full vision in the fog, that gave them a tremendous advantage. And the fog was very hard to dispel or dissipate with wind magic. The spell didn't even conjure a fog. It was a large-scale light illusion that was already calculated when Harry created the spell. Honestly, they would have been screwed if the competitors specialized in illusion magic, but Harry had checked the list of competitors beforehand and there wasn't anyone who really bothered with the field. Illusions weren't all that flashy, really…

Magic or no magic, teenagers still liked flashy things.

Speaking of flashy things, Fleur's partner sent a blinding white spell at the Griffin that was attacking the blood-soaked Veela. She hadn't even used her wand, so that must have been a family crest… Interesting. Harry didn't know that there were any crests remaining in France. The revolution a couple of centuries prior had caused the extinction of most old family lines in the country.

Anyway, the spell did not hurt the Griffin. Instead, the Eagle-Lion hybrid froze… Hmm, she'd taken control over the beast. Huh, it must have been a very powerful spell to subjugate the will of a creature that strong. The girl took the key from the Griffin's body, and quickly checked over Fleur. With a flick of her wand, the blood had disappeared, and with a glare, she said something to the Griffin, which flew up into the air and in turn, started to attack the Italians with unnatural ferocity.

On the other side of the stadium, the Olympus champions were attacked by the Minotaur. They were able to defeat the beast without too much trouble… Harry saw the new Olympus champion enter the arena after speaking with one of their professors. He went in front of the fog and waved his wand in a complicated manner. A spell appeared from his wand and dissipated the illusion.

Chang found her position exposed by the lack of mist and was immediately accosted by the three Olympus champions. Diggory, instead of capitalizing on their distraction and taking a few out, decided to run and conjure a shield in front of him. Of course, the shield shattered from the attack of three opponents, and he was immediately taken out of the fight as well.

The last Potter smirked to himself. Everything was going remarkably smoothly. Hogwarts was doing quite well, considering that people didn't think they could last long without Harry being there. Because he hadn't trained them to win… He had trained them to last as long as they could.

And as Cho did her best to fend off the Olympus champions, and the French and Italians went at it, he wondered how people were going to react when his plan was activated. Oh, he was looking forward to seeing the looks on their faces…

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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.