Chapter 144: Four Champions, Venturing Into The Darkness
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The Halloween feast seemed to take much longer than usual. Perhaps because it was their second feast in two days, people didn't seem to fancy the extravagantly prepared food as much as they would typically have. Like everyone else in the hall, judging by the constantly craning necks, the impatient expressions on every face, the fidgeting, and then standing up to see whether Dumbledore had finished eating yet, Quinn too wanted the plates to clear, and to hear who had been selected as champions. His reason wasn't the same as others. Quinn ninety-nine percent knew who would get chosen; he simply wanted to enjoy the commotion that would follow.
At long last, the golden plates returned to their original spotless state; there was a sharp upswing in the level of noise within the hall, which died away almost instantly as Dumbledore got to his feet. On either side of him, Professor Karkaroff and Madame Maxime looked as tense and expectant as anyone. Ludo Bagman was beaming and winking at various students. Mr. Crouch, however, seemed entirely uninterested, almost bored.
"Well, the goblet is almost ready to make its decision," said Dumbledore. "I estimate that it requires one more minute. Now, when the champions' names are called, I would ask them to please come up to the top of the hall, walk along with the staff table, and go through into the next chamber" — he indicated the door behind the staff table — "where they will be receiving their first instructions."
He took out his wand and gave a great sweeping wave with it; at once, all the candles except those inside the carved pumpkins were extinguished, plunging them into a state of semidarkness.
"Show off," muttered Quinn, but with a smile on his face as he enjoyed the dramatics.
The Goblet of Fire now shone more brightly than anything in the whole hall, the sparkling bright, bluey-whiteness of the flames almost painful on the eyes. Everyone watched, waiting. . . . A few people kept checking their watches. . . .
"Any second," Eddie whispered, a seat away from Quinn.
The flames inside the Goblet turned suddenly red again, turning to its activation state. Sparks began to fly from it. The next moment, a tongue of flame shot into the air, a charred piece of parchment fluttered out of it — the whole room gasped.
Dumbledore caught the piece of parchment and held it at arm's length so that he could read it by the light of the flames, which had turned back to blue-white.
"The champion for Durmstrang," he read, in a strong, clear voice, "will be Viktor Krum."
As a storm of applause and cheering swept the Hall, Quinn saw Viktor Krum rise from the Slytherin table and slouch up toward Dumbledore; he turned right, walked along with the staff table, and disappeared through the door into the next chamber.
"Bravo, Viktor!" boomed Karkaroff, so loudly that everyone could hear him, even over all the applause. "Knew you had it in you!"
The clapping and chatting died down. Now everyone's attention was focused again on the Goblet, which, seconds later, turned red once more. A second piece of parchment shot out of it, propelled by the flames.
"The champion for Beauxbatons," said Dumbledore, "is Fleur Delacour!"
Quinn leaned back to see the Veela get up gracefully to her feet, shook back her sheet of silvery blonde hair, and swept up between the Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff tables. She passed by him confidently towards Dumbledore.
"Oh look, they're all disappointed," Luna said over the noise, nodding toward the remainder of the Beauxbatons party. "Disappointed" was a bit of an understatement, Quinn thought. Two of the girls who had not been selected had dissolved into tears and were sobbing with their heads in their arms.
When Fleur Delacour too had vanished into the side chamber, silence fell again, but this time it was a silence so stiff with excitement you could almost taste it. The Hogwarts champion next. . .
And the Goblet of Fire turned red once more; sparks showered out of it; the tongue of flame shot high into the air, and from its tip, Dumbledore pulled the third piece of parchment.
"The Hogwarts champion," he called, "is Cedric Diggory!"
Every single Hufflepuff had jumped to Their feet, screaming and stamping, as Cedric made his way past them, grinning broadly, and headed off toward the chamber behind the teachers' table. Indeed, the applause for Cedric went on so long that it was some time before Dumbledore could make himself heard again.
"Excellent!" Dumbledore called happily as, at last, the tumult died down. "Well, we now have our three champions. I am sure I can count upon all of you, including the remaining students from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang, to give your champions every ounce of support you can muster. By cheering your champion on, you will contribute in a very real —"
But Dumbledore suddenly stopped speaking, and it was apparent to everybody what had distracted him. The fire in the Goblet had just turned red again. Sparks were flying out of it. A long flame shot suddenly into the air, and borne upon it was another piece of parchment.
Quinn's heartbeat quickened as automatically, it seemed, Dumbledore reached out with an extended hand and seized the parchment. He held it out and stared at the name written upon it.
'Come on, old man. . . spit it out,' thought Quinn, staring intently at Dumbledore.
There was a long pause, during which Dumbledore stared at the slip in his hands. Everyone in the room stared at Dumbledore. And then Dumbledore cleared his throat and read out — "Harry Potter."
Quinn clenched his fist, and inside his head, he did an imaginary fist pump of celebration.
'Hell yeah! Not me sucka!' The paranoia of Quinn West finally calmed down.
After Quinn's short celebration, he turned his attention back to his surroundings. There was no applause. As though of angry bees, a buzzing was starting to fill the hall; some students were standing up to get a better look at Harry Potter as he sat, frozen, in his seat.
While Harry had tried to put his name into the Goblet with the Weasley twins and Ron, he had failed. Even if he had succeeded in getting his name, Harry had never thought he would get selected. But now, Dumbledore was calling out his name. . . to see this took him by shock was an understatement.
Quinn removed his fourth champion and turned his sight to more interesting people in the hall. Up at the Head table, Professor McGonagall had got to her feet and swept past Ludo Bagman and Professor Karkaroff to whisper urgently to Professor Dumbledore, who bent his ear toward her, frowning slightly.
Still watching from his table, Quinn raised an eyebrow as he observed them before another Professor caught his eye. Lily Potter sat on her chair, but the mother of two looked shell-shocked, her face portraying her current emotions clear and transparently.
'Now I feel bad for her,' thought Quinn, and seeing that his eyes were on a Potter, he decided to shift his sight to the third Potter and watched the girl twin with her hand on her twin's shoulder. Ivy Potter looked as if she was rapidly asking questions to Harry. Her twin, though, sat still on his seat, not answering her question.
Finally, Quinn looked at the initiator of this situation and watched the figure of Barty Crouch Jr. in the form of Alastor Moody with a hidden gaze. For once, Moody's eyes were still, and if one could ignore the strap holding the magical artificial eye, Moody's eye pair looked like they were normal.
At the top table, Dumbledore had straightened up, nodding to Professor McGonagall.
"Harry Potter!" he called again. "Harry! Up here, if you please!"
Harry got to his feet, trod on the hem of his robes, and stumbled slightly. He set off up the gap between the Gryffindor and Hufflepuff tables. The Boy-Who-Lived, with hundreds of eyes on him, took a long walk towards the Head table. The buzzing grew louder and louder as he reached the Head table before following Dumbledore's instruction to exit the Great hall to the antechamber.
"Now that's an eventful Halloween," nodded Quinn, but his voice drowned way in the voice of the entire Great hall's chatter and talk.
Quinn took out a chocolate cube from his pocket. The dice-sized cube cooled down with a faint gush of ice magic, and as he popped the cold chocolate into his mouth, Quinn only had one thought.
'Halloween sure isn't good for Potters.'
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The next day, while the castle was still fresh with the last day's events, Quinn could be found near the Forbidden Forest dressed in Noir transformative gear. He wasn't interested in listening to everyone talk about the fourth champion and wanted to get some work done.
Firenze had guided him on his first visit, but now Quinn had navigated his own way to the darkness within the Forbidden Forest. Standing at the edge of darkness, Quinn looked into the darkness with his hood still up.
"This is going to be tough," his voice distorted, "there are too many of them inside."
The last time Quinn had gone in, he was attacked by a clutter of Acromantula. They had tried to tear him apart and feast on him with ferocious intensity as Quinn had to fend off Arcumantulas trying to get to him even if it meant they would get burned.
"A few minutes and I nearly burned through fifty percent of my capacity," spat Quinn. The shield spell, which burned when touch. The spikes from Quinn's patent ice magic. And the orange spell which had cleared a path in front of him. The three spells had burned through a lot of magic.
"Well, most of it was used by the shield," said Quinn clicking his tongue. "I can't blow the place up. . ." If he did that, the residents - living inside the darkness or not - wouldn't appreciate their home being torn apart by explosions.
"I can't be on defense; putting up the shield isn't doing me any favors."
If he wanted to get past the Acromantulas, Quinn needed to preserve the magic and not spend his entire capacity on them, leaving him vulnerable to other danger.
"For that, I need my sight back."
Unlike inside water, Quinn didn't know how to use a magical ripple sonar radar to navigate without sight. So, Quinn needed to find another way to see, and in the time between this visit and the first, Quinn had found a way to get his sight back inside the darkness.
He placed his palms over his hands, and magic entered his eyes through his palms.
The human eye lets light in through a hole called the pupil. A lens inside the eye focused on the image, and the retina detected that image. The retina contained two structures called rods and cones that detected light and sent the image to the brain.
Rods were great at capturing very dim light and movement. However, they do not detect colors. Humans could see colors so vividly because of cones, which can only function with plenty of light. They had four times the number of rods than we have cones.
This ratio meant that humans could see pretty well during the day, and though they have more rods than cones overall, humans had more cones than many animals. They could see many kinds of colors during the day, and we still see reasonably well in the dark. However, other animals with more rods and fewer cones than humans could see even better in the dark, even if their color vision wasn't as good during the day.
Right now, Quinn's magic was altering the structure of his eyes. Inside his eyes, rods increased in quantity while cones sinking in numbers.
Cats, owls, raccoons, red foxes, bullfrogs. . . Quinn had ordered eyes of various nocturnal animals with a ratio of rods and cones, which allowed night vision. Going through them, he created an eye structure that would let him see in the dark.
"Ugh, I don't like doing this one," said Quinn, and when he removed his hands, Quinn's iris had widened, and inside, the pupils were so large that the stone grey was nothing but a thin ring on the outside.
As he looked around, Quinn found that the dim forest was brighter, as if he was standing under clear sunlight. He looked ahead, and the darkness had turned into a late evening light.
"Yeah, I can work with that," he smiled, but it wasn't at his success. The smile was at the shining dots he could see inside. Numerous eight-eyed sets stared at him from just within the darkness. Watching. . . observing if Quinn would enter their territory.
"Let's get started." With the hood on, he stepped inside the darkness, and pandemonium ensued.
The second the black-clad Quinn entered the darkness, two comparatively small Acromantula dove down from the tree canopy and jumped on Quinn, their pincers clacking in excitement.
Quinn's transfigured eyes briefly glanced up and grinned, "I can see you~."
The two spiders that had jumped on their target felt a force against their bodies. Like taking a giant sledgehammer straight to the body, they were blown away before the two could touch the ground.
With a serviceable sight providing him with visuals, Quinn could finally focus on individual targets. Something he couldn't previously as his vision was short and limited. Plus, Acromantula held venom in their pincers, a single cut, and Quinn would be in deep trouble.
Not even a second had passed since Quinn had launched two Banishing charms; he twitched when he felt something at his back. A transparent shield formed behind his back just before an Acromantula slammed against it, sending silvery waves along with the shield. With a turn on his neck, Quinn gave a brief glance for the offending Acromantula to feel a heavy force from above and found himself being slammed into the dirt.
"You need to do better if you want to eat me," said Quinn as his eyes moved left to the right, looking at the Acromantulas creeping towards him on their clacking pincers.
The provocation seemed to work as one of the biggest, baddest Acromantula jumped Quinn with a loud shriek. Quinn raised his arm for a shield to appear, and the Acromantula slammed against the shield. He used the shield to push the massive, hairy spider down, thrusting the spider into the ground before casting a point-blank Explosion charm to rip three out of eight legs apart.
A painful screech filled the darkness, and for a split second, the spiders backed away, but the agony from their kind made their blood boil and simultaneously jumped out on Quinn.
From above, one could see a black figure standing in the center with gigantic spiders throwing themselves at him. Shields would appear to stop the spiders who go too close while Quinn rammed their siblings away with magic.
With every second, the scene started to get violent. What had begun as harmless, yet a little tough, spell push from Banishing spell was now a bloody scene as Quinn was breaking their pincers to make sure they won't return any any time soon.
'Not so proactive after losing three legs, aren't you,' thought Quinn. He could see that the clutter was lightening up, bringing a smile to his face.
But then there was sudden reversal as Quinn saw something white from the corner of his eyes. He had no time to react as something thick and gooey attached itself on Quinn's elbow.
His eyes widened when he saw what it was, "Spider web!"
The exclamation was met with a pull as Quinn's body was pulled to the right towards an Acromantula shrieking in glee, but before Quinn's feet could leave the ground, another spider web stuck to his body and pulled him to the left.
The Acromantulas weren't coordinating and mainly moving on their own, which helped Quinn as he felt the two opposite forces pull him in opposite directions. The force lifted him up from the ground, but he stayed in a single spot, giving Quinn enough time to release a sharp cold wave into the thick, sticky, yet steel-like webs and froze them till they were rigid.
He cast Blasting curses on the frozen bindings for them to shatter into ice shards.
"Yes!" he celebrated, but then his pupils shrunk as he felt a stinky smell waft across his nose; he moved his eyes up to see an open mouth with fangs inside about to bite his head off. A shiver went through his body as he found himself in a life-death moment.
Time seemed to slow down as Quinn continued to stare at the Acromantula's hairy feature, and strangely, he could see joy inside the leader. His magic moved on instinct, and a deep, murky dark maroon orb formed in front of Quim before it stretched out and zapped straight into the mouth.
The magic entered the body through the body, and the Acromantula started to feel quizzy as its body heat raised. It went from comfortable warmth to burning heat in a matter of spans seconds. It began to shriek and dropped right in front of Quinn, writhing in pain.
Quinn shot two spells, each on the two different sides towards his almost-captures. There were blasts, and shrieks were intense and short build as a second spell hit them. He hadn't removed his eyes from the Acromantual who was writhing on the floor.
The spell was a dark curse, one that would corrode the target user. Right now, the spider was feeling everything burn as the curse worked its charm.
Seeing the Acromantula so close, Quinn raised his hand, and a murky yellow spell light appeared over his hand. He was about to take out all of the Acromantua's legs in one clean sweep, essentially destroying the spider's life; a yell filled the surroundings.
"Halt!"
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[
A/N: Hello peeps, FictionOnlyReader this side.
This Author's Note is to inform you that till the end of this month (which means 4 days), the release/update schedule is going to be pretty janky/erractic. My mid-terms are upon me and I haven't studied jack. I need to pull all-nights (hate 'em) to make sure I don't fail.
As such, I might not be able to post regularly.
But from 1st of September, I'll be back as my mid-terms will be over.
This ends the PSA, you can proceed to the short post-chapter credit section
]
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Quinn West - MC - Spiders vs Me; let's dance.
FictionOnlyReader - Author who makes lots of grammer mistakes - AlanL (Mighty editor) isn't feeling well, please send best wishes.
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