Novel Full Chapter 343: Orion: That’s It?
Chapter 343: Chapter 343: Orion: That’s It?
Orion sat behind the desk, a cup of tea steaming at his elbow, correspondence pushed aside to clear a space.
Regulus came in and sat across from him.
Orion watched him, a faint curve at the corner of his mouth, something expectant in his gaze.
"Cornwall," he said, lifting his tea, taking a sip, setting it down. "How’d it go?"
The tone was casual, tossed off, but Regulus knew better. Orion already had pieces.
Agnes was a family retainer of twenty-plus years. Anything that happened on the grounds got reported to the Head of House. That was standard.
She hadn’t witnessed the Disintegration Curse being cast. But she knew that the small granite island eight kilometers to the west, Snell Rock, the one that had been marked on Cornwall sea charts for centuries, was gone.
Orion had received the report, but the picture he could piece together was limited.
The Whomping Willow had barely been in Cornwall a few days before the boy had used it to produce magic capable of sinking an island.
Powerful, certainly. Alarming, even.
But if he was being honest, sinking an island didn’t strike him as irreplaceable.
The wizarding world had plenty of ways to destroy large targets.
What Regulus had produced, based on Agnes’s report, fell roughly into large-target destruction type magic category.
But compared to the Decomposition Curse...
Orion weighed it internally. What had truly shaken him about the Decomposition Curse was the concept.
Making skin no longer skin. Making flesh no longer flesh. Making existence lose its definition. That eerie quality of unmaking wholeness was something nothing else could replicate.
Of course, all of this was speculation.
Agnes hadn’t seen the spell cast. Her report contained only results, third-hand intelligence, neither vivid nor reliable.
Orion pulled himself back from the thought. He looked at Regulus and waited.
The corner of Regulus’s mouth lifted. He leaned into the chair, posture relaxed. "Development’s finished."
Then the smile widened a fraction. "Far exceeded expectations."
Orion’s brow rose. He already knew the result. An island was gone.
He leaned forward, arms on the desk, fingers laced, gaze settling on Regulus’s face.
Regulus tilted back and held up three fingers. "This spell needs to be explained in layers."
Orion’s eyebrow climbed again.
A single spell with layers?
He understood what that implied. Each layer meant something different from the last.
He said nothing. A slight nod. Go on.
"First layer." Regulus extended his index finger, tapped the air once, tone easy. "The basics."
"The spell is the Disintegration Curse. Quassare. The wand motion is a reversed overhand strike, with a half-inch wrist rotation at the lowest point."
His right hand mimed the motion, wrist pressing down and twisting. "Effect is straightforward. Hit the target, magic drills inside, shatters it from within."
Orion listened. His expression didn’t shift, but a thought flickered through his mind: That’s it?
Shattering from inside versus blasting from outside. What was the difference?
A block of stone pulverized by a Blasting Curse and a block of stone shaken apart by this spell both ended up as rubble.
The feel of the casting differed, the experience of being hit differed, but on a battlefield, destroyed was destroyed.
He kept those thoughts to himself. A nod to show he was listening.
Regulus continued. "The harder and denser the target, the better it works."
Something shifted in Orion’s eyes. That was counterintuitive.
Standard destructive spells struggled more against harder materials. Granite was tougher than wood, metal tougher than stone. Common knowledge.
He gave nothing away. Listened.
"Ordinary casting," Regulus went on, same tone, "you fire one shot, the target breaks, you stop. Output scales directly with the caster’s magic. Pour in a certain amount, destroy a proportional amount."
A palm turned upward. "A hundred Galleons of magic buys a hundred Galleons of damage. A thousand buys a thousand."
Orion understood.
Single-shot output, results proportional to investment. Linear.
That was the model for most offensive spells. What you put in was what you got out. Bigger effects demanded more power.
Nothing unusual. Logical. Intuitive.
But Regulus had called this only the first layer, which meant what followed wasn’t linear.
His gaze settled on Regulus and hardened a fraction.
Regulus caught the shift in his father’s expression. The corner of his mouth rose again, and he kept going.
"That’s the spell at its most basic." A second finger went up. "Layer two. Oscillation stacking."
Orion’s brow creased.
Stacking. How?
"Sustained output," Regulus said. "Keep the wand trained on the target, maintain the flow. Oscillations compound inside the target, each wave layering on the residue of the one before. Building on itself."
He held Orion’s gaze and said two words. "Exponential increase."
The crease in Orion’s brow deepened.
Exponential increase wasn’t a phrase he was accustomed to. It was the kind of description Regulus favored, carrying the flavor of Muggle mathematics.
But the meaning came through. Each layer doubled the force. One strike was one. Two was four. Three was sixteen. By the fourth, two hundred and fifty-six.
The numbers climbed, and the further they climbed, the more violently they leaped. Each step more absurd than the last.
The numbers were absurd, but what Orion found more absurd was the claim itself. Nothing like this existed in the wizarding world.
Yet Regulus said it, and he believed him.
A long silence. Then: "How long can it be sustained?"
"Depends on the caster’s reserves. As long as the magic holds out." Regulus saw his father’s expression and let his smile widen.
And we’re nowhere near the end of it.
Orion drew a deep breath and let it out slowly.
Sustained output. Exponential increase. Given enough time, with his own magical reserves, if he pushed this spell to its absolute limit... what could it break?
He looked at Regulus, a weight entering his voice. "What’s the ceiling?"
Regulus didn’t answer directly. A smile. "Before we talk about the ceiling, we need to talk about the threshold."
Orion’s brow knotted.
Threshold. The Decomposition Curse had a threshold too: understanding decomposition. He still hadn’t crossed that one.
"First threshold. Magical precision."
Regulus raised his right hand, fingers closing into a fist in the air, then opening.
"The instant the spell leaves the wand tip, the caster has to collapse the magic from a spread into a point. Diffuse energy, the moment it contacts the target’s surface, compressed to the size of a needle tip. Converted into penetration."
He looked at Orion and mimed the downward strike.
"The compression window is less than one hundredth of a second. Miss it, and the magic detonates on the surface, never gets inside. The oscillation dissipates externally. Useless."
Orion said nothing. His expression wasn’t light.
One hundredth of a second. Collapsing diffuse magic into a needle point.
That was an entirely different animal from conventional casting.
The vast majority of wizards would never require that degree of magical control in their entire lives.
They learned spells, pronounced the syllables correctly, moved the wand correctly, magic shot from the tip, hit the target, job done.
What shape the magic took the instant it left the wand, whether it was a spread or a point, convergent or dispersed, never crossed their minds.
Because it didn’t need to. Spells worked the way they worked. The caster wasn’t meant to adjust.
A flicker of something passed through Orion. Every time Regulus produced something new, he set the bar in the strangest places.
But Orion wasn’t the vast majority. Fine work was within his reach.
His magical control was strong. Excellent, even. Among the Pure-blood Heads of House of his generation, he ranked well.
Regulus’s requirements, though, were different.
Routine spellcasting gave him a half-second to a full second of adjustment between initiation and release. Plenty of time to correct mid-motion.
One hundredth of a second left no room for correction. The execution had to be right on release. Wrong meant wasted.
He considered it, then nodded slowly.
Achievable. Not easy. It would take dedicated practice, drilling until that split-second compression became instinct. No thought, no deliberation. Wrist turns, magic collapses on its own.
Difficult, but the goal was defined and the path was clear. Give him time, and he could get there.
Far better than last time.
The Decomposition Curse’s threshold couldn’t be trained into existence. A million repetitions wouldn’t help. Without the concept in your mind, the magic couldn’t carry the property.
The Disintegration Curse was different. Magical precision was a technical problem, and technical problems had solutions.
A quiet breath of relief. He lifted his tea and took a sip.
If the Disintegration Curse was only this...
Then Regulus spoke again.
"Second threshold." Regulus continued. "Cognitive compression."