Chapter 45    

Neville opened his eyes to find himself sweating and bleeding at the place where Alex had cut him and it actually hurt as it looked like it had not yet healed completely.

Alex opened his eyes after a minute and along with Neville, walked back to their house tables. While Alex acted normally like there was nothing wrong, Neville looked like he was doubting his entire existence.

They had classes in the morning so Alex attended them all like a very good student and after lunch, he walked over to the Slytherin table where a group of sixth year girls sat and giggled among themselves.

"Jasmine Silveria. Which one among you is the first place holder Jasmine ?" he asked as he made eye contact with each and every girl that looked at him.

"That's me." Said the shortest girl in the group. "Are you a challenger?"

"Yes."

Professor Flitwick had made a few changes to the ranking system and duels when he found out that it was getting harder to match the duelling champion with anyone else.

The new rules were simple as the champion would be exempted from the duels until someone challenges them. The challenger would pay for the champion and in return, the champion cannot reject the challengers.

To not distract the top ranker from studies, challenges were limited to only one per day.

The group of girls laughed and the girl who sat beside Jasmine spoke, "We know that you are the creator of these boards but you should work on your talents instead of wasting time on things you have zero talent in."

"Shut up, bitch. Your nose is so huge that I can use your nostrils as a pair of socks. I'm sure you weren't this close to her before she became the best duellist among the students"

Alex said loudly, loud enough for the whole great hall to hear which wasn't actually needed as most of them already had an eye on him the second he reached the Slytherin table.

It was an unspoken fact that if a student walked over to a different house table and initiated a conversation, it would cause either a fight to break out or an argument. It was especially true with the Slytherins and also the reason why Alex preferred Ravenclaw.

Before the girl could respond, Jasmine stood up. "No one had challenged me for the past few days so I'm itching for a fight."

"Oh, don't worry. I'll pull your guts out before you can say Hogwarts." Alex said ruthlessly but most of the girls in the group didn't seem to take him seriously because he was just too small.

He tossed in two knuts and placed his hand on the edge of the board before he got his consciousness transferred along with the girl's.

Jasmine opened her eyes and the first thing she saw was a bluish light that was extremely close to her face. She wasn't able to react at all and the spell hit her. Intense pain permeated through her lower body and before she could see what was going on, her consciousness was transported out.

Alex soon opened his eyes and looked at the girl smugly, "Just because I made the game board and lost a few uninteresting matches, it doesn't mean that I'm bad at duelling."

The names on the leader board had changed, prompting most of the students to gasp in surprise.

Never in their entire life did they expect to see a first year beat a sixth year and what baffled them even more was that the kid who beat the previous champion was someone who had a double digit lose streak.

For the next two months, Alex was being challenged every single day, which annoyed him to no end. As days quickly passed, his duels went on for longer and longer until they reached an absurd time of two hours.

The ones who challenged him never did it again and when people asked them why they weren't challenging him again or what happened in the duel, they would tell them to challenge Alex themselves to quench their curiosity.

For the first time in two months, no one had challenged him and he knew that it was only temporary. Every single day, he wanted to use the cruciatus curse on the person who challenged him but didn't as the spell was banned and instead, he used old spells that fell out of trend to inflict pain on his opponents.

Some of his most favourite spells were the disarming spell, skin peeler curse, body carving curse, Senses heightening charm, body-bind curse, muscle relaxing charm and the tickling hex.

(Titilando not rictumsempra. While rictumsempra can go on forever, titinando gives fiercer and more effective tickles although it doesn't last infinitely. Note: rictumsempra can be broken with finite incantem.)

He used them based on his mood and it was in a combination most of the times. Whenever the skin peeler and body carving curse were used, Alex could conjure salt and sprinkle it on their bodies after taking their wands away so they wouldn't be able to give up.

His other favourite combination was to use the body-bind, sense heightener, muscle relaxer and then, tickle the living hell out of them.

Most of the times when he used the second combo, people cried, shat and peed all over before they died due to the lack of oxygen as they would be unable to regulate their breathing.