Chapter 416 - A New Trick, the Space Trap

Chapter 416: Chapter 416 - A New Trick, the Space Trap

Regulus didn’t bother with Hermes again. He turned to Alex. "You take them through it."

Then he walked toward the back, into the small partitioned training room.

The door shut behind him, sealing off everything happening outside.

Only once he was gone did the others let out their breath and start moving again.

Lina exhaled long and slow, patting her chest, her whole body going loose. She’d been convinced she was next.

Samuel relaxed too, the stiffness draining out of him bit by bit.

The two of them exchanged a glance and said nothing.

Alive. That was enough.

Lina’s eyes drifted back to Alex. Samuel’s kept flicking toward the closed door.

Cuthbert grimaced his way over to Hermes, crouched down, and poked him. He checked the face first, confirming no parts were missing, then held a hand under his nose. Hermes stared back at him, expressionless.

"So," Cuthbert said, gleeful and honestly puzzled at once, "what exactly did you do? For Regulus to beat you like that."

Hermes played dead, turning his head the other way, breathing hard, ignoring him.

"You definitely did something." Another poke. "He’s knocked you around before, but never like this. That was a killing kind of beating. What’d you do to him?"

Hermes said nothing.

"Talk. Quit playing corpse." Cuthbert circled to the other side and bent down, peering up into his face. "Come on. Where’d you cross him?"

"Shut up." Hermes’s voice came out muffled, but at least it came out.

"Then say something!"

"Nothing to say."

Silence again.

"Really not talking?" Cuthbert got his second wind and grabbed his arm. "Up, up. Lying on the floor like that, what’s the point."

He hauled Hermes upright, half dragging him toward a bench along the wall.

Meanwhile the room was repairing itself.

Cuthbert pushed Hermes down onto the bench, straightened, and folded his arms. "Fine. Be stubborn. Next time he takes you apart, I’ll stand there and applaud."

Hermes didn’t give him so much as a glance.

"What gets me," Cuthbert said, sitting down again and studying his face, "is that you’ve got real skill. You normally take a beating without a sound. Today you’re wilted. Regulus doesn’t do that for no reason."

Head down, eyes closed, Hermes offered nothing.

"The less you say, the more I want to know." Cuthbert leaned in, voice dripping.

Hermes tilted his head away.

Alex came over and sat on his other side, looking him up and down with a trace of amusement. Hermes must have done something to sour Regulus’s mood. Then again, surviving that particular beating might mean his level had come up. He hadn’t died in one hit. He could take a hit.

"Look," Alex said, gentler than Cuthbert, closer to advice, "if you did something wrong, just own it. Regulus isn’t unreasonable. Apologize, get it out in the open. Beats grinding your teeth through this."

Hermes opened his eyes, looked at Alex, lips moving. Nothing came out. He closed them again.

What could he say?

That he wanted to apologize and Regulus wouldn’t give him the chance? Then why wouldn’t he?

That he had it coming? Then why had he tried to dodge when it came?

That Regulus was being reasonable? If Regulus was reasonable, what did that make him?

That he got beaten for wanting a shortcut? That was worse.

Better to keep his mouth shut.

He sat there with his forearms on his knees, staring at the floor.

Alex watched him a moment longer and let it go.

Cuthbert crossed one leg over the other and eyed him sideways. "I’m telling you, you’re just pigheaded. Fine, be pigheaded, but at least make it count. Every single time he flattens you like that. Fight back, would you."

Hermes lifted his head, neck stiffening. "I did."

Cuthbert spread his hands. "You call that fighting back? You couldn’t even raise your wand."

Hermes glared, briefly, then pulled it back in.

Nothing to argue with. Cuthbert was right. He hadn’t been able to raise his wand.

But he didn’t believe anyone else would have done better. Put anybody across from Regulus and their wand would stay down too.

Cuthbert snorted and dropped it. There was no getting it out of him; Hermes’s mouth was shut like something had been charmed onto it.

Still, he couldn’t work it out. Regulus had been getting harsher with Hermes lately, singling him out and beating him half to death. The idiot had done something. Regulus wouldn’t say, Hermes wouldn’t say, and Cuthbert was left guessing on the sidelines, itching worse the longer he failed.

Lina edged back toward Alex, glanced at Hermes on the bench, then at the closed door.

Her eyes were shining with something close to worship. "Alex," she asked quietly, "are you that strong too?"

Her reasoning was simple enough. Hermes had taken all that and stayed standing, so Alex, even if he couldn’t match Regulus, ought to be somewhere near Hermes.

It was a colossal misunderstanding.

Alex went stiff under the look, and stiffer at the question. His mouth opened and stayed open.

Cuthbert burst out laughing. Even Hermes raised his eyes to Lina, with an expression somewhere between pity and scientific curiosity.

Lina scratched her head and looked around, missing the joke entirely.

Alex waved both hands. "No. No, I don’t have that in me."

He steered off the subject fast and took Lina and Samuel to the far end of the training floor to start dueling practice.

Warm-ups first. Basic movements, wand grip, stance corrections. Both of them had done this in Defence Against the Dark Arts and drilled it on their own besides. Between them they’d managed to take down Peter Pettigrew, and while that boy was worse than useless, the two of them weren’t nothing. Middling. There was something there.

Alex laid the requirements out in detail. Keep your weight low. Don’t stand with your feet together. When you move, back foot first. After you cast, shift position immediately, don’t stand there watching your spell fly.

He demonstrated while he talked, slow enough for them to see it.

Two years of drilling with Regulus had burned some of this into muscle memory. His spells were far weaker than Hermes’s, his speed and accuracy behind too, but Regulus had told him once that he paid attention to detail and was suited to teaching. He didn’t think of that as high praise. Still, Regulus had handed him Lina and Samuel, so he’d do it properly.

"Try it. Lina against me, Samuel watches." Alex drew his wand and took position opposite her. "Disarming Charm. You start."

Lina pulled in a breath and pointed. "Expelliarmus!"

Llight shot from the tip, quick enough, but the wind-up was obvious.

Alex turned aside and let it graze past his chest. "Again. Just enough gesture to cast. Nothing extra."

She bit her lip and lined up again.

Alex began returning fire, basics only. A Disarming Charm drifted lazily toward her, nowhere near full strength, leaving her time to react.

She dodged. Successfully, if not gracefully.

"Stop staring at the wand tip." He cast again as he corrected her. "Watch the whole person. Their weight. Where the wand’s pointing."

Lina made a noise of agreement and hit back through gritted teeth, an Impediment Jinx that Alex brushed aside.

"Too slow on the counter." Another spell came at her. "The dodge has to flow straight into the next thing. You dodge so you can hit. Dodging alone gets you nowhere."

A few exchanges later there was sweat on her forehead, and improvement with it.

Alex, mild by nature, gave her a "Not bad."

Her whole face lit up.

Then he brought Samuel in for a turn.

Cuthbert skipped their practice. He set a training dummy to a pattern and let it start circling, firing at him from different angles. Disarming Charms, Impediment Jinxes, red and violet light spiralling in while he ducked and swung back, muttering the whole time. "This thing’s faster than last time, isn’t it... oi, not the face!"

An Impediment Jinx caught him in the shoulder before he finished. He stumbled back two steps and nearly lost his wand. Shaking out his arm, he swore through a grin and threw himself back in.

Hermes sat on the bench with his head down and didn’t move.

---

Inside the small room, a single dim light hung overhead, barely illuminating the close stone walls. Regulus sat cross-legged in the center, one hand raised, palm up.

A blur of air hovered above it, bending the light like heat shimmer. He drew his magic into fine threads and worked them through the elasticity of space, easing it apart. The distortion stretched from a sphere into an ellipsoid, narrowed into a spindle, then folded into a slowly rotating polyhedron.

After a few seconds, his fingers twitched. The spindle caved inward as its ends pulled in opposite directions, twisting the entire shape into a spiral.

It kept moving.

Space rotated along its length, each layer twisted a little farther than the one above it. The outer ring barely reached a quarter turn, while the innermost layer had been wrung almost half a revolution. Regulus turned his hand over and let the spiral settle onto his fingertips.

McGonagall had demonstrated Spatial Transfiguration in her office, using Transfiguration on the elasticity of space itself. Regulus had been practicing ever since. At first, he could only manage a palm-sized patch for a few seconds. Gradually, he learned to twist it a quarter turn, hold it for minutes, and maintain a range of roughly half a foot.

Now, the spiral had lasted nearly five minutes without collapsing.

The process no longer felt like wrestling with a compressed spring. It was more like weaving. His magic was the shuttle, the elasticity of space the warp, and instead of forcing the space to stay twisted, he simply let its elasticity bleed away.

Regulus pushed the spiral half an inch forward and left it hanging in the air before raising his wand.

A small bead of light from Lumos drifted toward it.

The instant it touched the outer ring, it disappeared into the fold and began sliding inward. It spiraled through the layers of distorted space, stretching into a thin filament until, after three turns, it stopped inside one of the grooves.

There.

McGonagall’s method had been about catching and shredding spells within warped space. Regulus had discovered something different: the folds themselves could seize a spell and hold it in place.

The bead remained trapped in the crease, glowing but unable to move, its magic bound by the structure of space just before activation. It was not a Spatial Network. It was a trap woven directly into space itself.

Anyone who touched the hidden fold would trigger whatever spell lay inside.

A harmless Lumos proved the principle. The real danger came from combat spells.

Fiendfyre was unsuitable. It required constant control, and embedding it in the fold would cut off that control. The flames would eventually tear through the distortion and emerge somewhere Regulus had never intended. Outside Hogwarts, however, it could work as a short-lived trap in open ground, where he could let the fire burn itself out.

The Killing Curse was even less practical. Once embedded, the green light began darkening the surrounding space. The fold lost its elasticity and became brittle, eventually collapsing under the curse’s own influence.

Neither was necessary.

The strength of a spatial trap came from placement, not the spell itself. A Blasting Curse positioned at the back of someone’s head would end the fight the moment they triggered it. A Reducto could do nearly as much damage, while a Diffindo placed at knee height could take a leg off.

The possibilities were endless.

Regulus balanced the spiral on his fingertip and turned his wrist. The distorted space sank along the direction of the twist and vanished.

It had not dispersed. It had slipped into the natural grain of space and hidden itself. The fold and the Lumos remained, but from the outside, the air looked completely ordinary. Even light passed through without bending.

Space had its own direction of weave. By aligning the fold with it, the surrounding structure swallowed the distortion completely.

A visible trap was no trap at all.

Regulus tapped his finger and released the Transfiguration.

The space snapped back into place. The fold opened, the trapped bead of light slipped free, flickered for a moment, and faded. The last ripple smoothed away, leaving nothing behind.

---

Outside, Alex had just finished a round with Lina and Samuel.

Both of them were spent. Lina stood bent over, hands braced on her knees, loose hair plastered to her damp temple, exhaustion and satisfaction mixed on her face. She glanced up at Alex, let one corner of her mouth rise, and pulled it back in.

Samuel sat against the wall with his eyes shut, evening out his breathing, calm-faced, fingers still tapping his knee as he replayed the movements.

Alex had spent the morning grinding against the dummy and swearing at it.

"That’s all it’s got? Come on then... ow!"

A Disarming Charm caught him across the back of the hand and his wand went spinning into a corner. He shook out his wrist and went to pick it up, and an Impediment Jinx clipped his back mid-crouch, pitching him forward until his forehead nearly met the wall.

He retrieved the wand, turned to glare at the dummy, and gave himself an exit. "It’s four o’clock. That’s enough. That’s enough."

Hermes hadn’t moved all morning. He sat on the bench with his arms on his knees, lifting his head now and then to watch the others train before lowering it again.

The door of the little stone room opened and Regulus came out, sweeping a look across the floor.

Lina and Samuel were slumped against the wall catching their breath. Cuthbert was sliding his wand back into his sleeve. Alex had a hand clamped over his forehead, rubbing. Hermes rose from the bench.

"Let’s go. Food." Regulus headed for the door.

Alex fell in first, then noticed after a few steps that Hermes was still standing by the bench. He turned and waved him on. "Come on, food. You may not be hungry but I am."