Chapter 85: Hagrid

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Gilderoy Lockhart was a wizard who was hailed by many as the greatest wizard since Albus Dumbledore, with exploits far more widespread and varied than the Headmaster's.

He had felt the man's magic a couple of times through his host's senses and it had been enough to make his host light-headed, which spoke volumes of the man's raw ability.

Of course, there were people who believed that he was a fraud, and maybe he was. He was a man more incompetent a teacher than any he had ever seen before.

But he wasn't feeling up to taking any risks. If there was even a one percent chance that the man could, in any unpredictable or unexpected way, prove to be a hurdle to his plans, then it was better to take it as absolute certainty and simply remove him from the equation.

Besides, this ridiculously over-publicised attempt at jumping off of a tower and proving that he had somehow discovered the key to broom-less flight was almost too convenient to pass off on.

He had barely made his way to a seat under the giant canopy that had been set up under the highest tower when suddenly, the announcer's megaphone suddenly stopped with a large static screech.

Murmurs swept through the crowd as Professor McGonagall came half marching, half running across the grounds to the announcer, and started arguing with him.

The megaphone switched on a minute later with another screech of static, before the announcer said, "We will be starting the event shortly. Meanwhile, Mister Potter and Mister Thomas! Professor McGonagall is asking for you. I repeat. Potter and Thomas!"

He watched amusedly as the two boys waded through the crowd and followed the acting Headmistress as she jogged off into the castle. They must have discovered Granger.

He pushed the thought out of his mind as he cast a Supersensory charm on his host's eyes before looking up at the tower, on top which he could now clearly see what the Defence Professor was doing.

He smirked at the sight.

The man had used some rope to tie two children's brooms to his arms, and was now putting on his plum robes. Apparently, he was going to use the broom's child-safety feature of simply floating down into the ground to create an illusion of a controlled fall.

"And now!" the announcer yelled, "The moment you have been waiting for. Ladies and gentlemen! Give it up for the legendary Gilderoooooooooy Lockhart!"

And with that, the Defence professor above the tower stepped off the precipice. A ripple of shock spread through the crowd as the man started slowly floating down instead of the madly plummeting to his death, before the cheers started.

It was time.

His eyes flickered to the enchanted safety net underneath the tower, before he quickly sent out a substantial tendril of magic and shattered the Unbreakable charm on it. He quickly looked back up at Lockhart before muttering a short jinx under his breath.

The brooms, and Lockhart's arms tied to it, gave a mighty lurch before the enchantments on the brooms completely broke and the man plummeted with a loud yell, going faster and faster as screams of horror rose in volume in the crowd. He tore right through the net, barely slowing down as he slammed straight into the solid ground with a loud crunch.

The mediwizards and mediwitches nearby rushed in to help the man, and the teachers started herding the students back into the castle. He let his host get carried by the flow of the crowd. This would be more than enough of a distraction to make sure nobody noticed anything until it was too late.

But for now, it was time to rest and recuperate his strength. The next day was going be much more taxing than this one.

The next day, Harry skipped breakfast to head up to visit Hermione, only to learn that Madam Pomfrey had barred visitors completely from entering the hospital wing.

"We're taking no more chances," Madam Pomfrey told him severely through a crack in the infirmary door. "No Potter, I'm sorry. There's every chance that the attacker might come back to finish these people off."

With that sort of start to the morning, the rest of the day wasn't exactly looking up. By the time noon rolled around, he learned that Dean had shut himself up in the Gryffindor tower, feeling quite under the weather.

The rest of the school, forced to stick together in groups of two and three were full of gossips and rumours.

"The Minister wouldn't have taken Hagrid to Azkaban if he hadn't been a hundred percent sure that he was guilty," said a third year Hufflepuff to his mates as Harry passed him by and Harry held himself from correcting them. He had a gut feeling that the half giant could never have been the killer, but he couldn't really say that for sure.

And with the current paranoia in the school, saying anything even remotely supportive of someone who was apparently convicted of opening the Chamber would have been a stupid thing to do.

So he headed over to the Project room, where he shut himself up, spread the newspaper article Hermione had found open on one of the worktables, and pointedly trying to ignore the last line about her suspecting him, started looking through it, scanning for clues.

By and in itself, he noted, the article was almost completely useless.

But with Hermione's notes, it started to reveal information that he wouldn't have noticed by himself immediately.

Information like that female ghost Moaning Myrtle being the same girl that had been killed all those years ago. And some sort of spider being associated with the opening of the chamber back then.

However, he almost immediately dismissed her theory about a spider being the Beast.

Dumbledore had been more than sure when he had told him that the creature was serpentine, and he was willing to take the headmaster's word for it.

In fact, if the ministry believed that the killer was Hagrid and the beast was a spider, then the impossibility of the spider being the beast also made Hagrid being the heir highly improbable.

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