章 120: Plot and shields

Nick watched as the snitch flitted past Adrien Pucey causing the boy to lose the quaffle from the surprise and both Harry and the Slytherin seeker hurtle towards the flying golden golfball from their respective positions in the sky. Harry was a bit faster however and got a firm lead on chasing the snitch when Marcus flint slammed into him to cut him off earning a foul on Slytherin and giving Gryffindor a free shot. Once the game restarted Nick narrowed his eyes at Quirelmort as he saw Harry's broom start to act up.-

Hagrid who had joined them in the stands by this point also noticed this and mentioned how something was wrong. Hermione being the ever reliable person she was pointed out how Snape was staring at Harry from the adult stands and muttering something before wanting to rush off to do something only to be stopped by Nick. He raised his wand and pointed across the pitch at Quirrell before an invisible pulse flew from it straight at the possessed man. Immediately Quirelmort recoiled as an invisible legilimency attack struck him breaking both his concentration and spell freeing Harry's broom.-

Nick quickly hid his wand before anyone noticed what happened and earned weird looks from both Ron and Hermione but he simply shook his head and focused back on the game. Quirelmort looked positively livid at the moment as his face had turned red and veins had popped out on his neck while he ground his teeth. He scanned the crowds to try and find whoever dares to attack his mind but all he saw was people focusing on the game leaving him frustrated and without a place to vent his anger. The man stormed off from the stands angrily but everyone was too busy watching the match to care.-

Harry meanwhile looked like he was about to throw up but instead spat out the snitch that he had somehow caught in his mouth. "Ive got the snitch!" He exclaimed while holding it high and the crowds went wild as the game was over. All in all it was a pretty fast match barely taking thirty minutes to finish when it could have taken much longer. There was actually a world record of a game taking eight whole days to finish since the seekers kept getting stopped and nobody was scoring.-

Hagrid was making tea for the group of friends after the whole match was over and Hermione and Ron started to argue about Snape's involvement in the attempt on Harry's life earlier with Hagrid. Nick wisely kept himself out of it even when Hagrid accidentally spoke of the Cerberus in the castle that Harry had apparently overheard Snape talking to himself about earlier in the week after getting bit. So the idea came into existence amongst the golden trio that Snape was trying to steal the philosophers stone and they needed to do something about it despite being a bunch of first years.-

Nick chose not to interfere as even in the books nothing of note happened for a month and a half after this match. Instead he simply went back to his preparations in the workshop and todays work was especially important. Nick sat against the wall of the workshop with his eyes closed as he entered his mindscape once again. 'I'll first get a center point set up to serve as the hub for my mind.' he thought before starting to move the floating stones around towards each other and having massive vines form between them to sort of anchor them together.-

This created the scenic look of a floating mountain range and with the lighting and fire water going through and under the range was quite beautiful. Next he levitated into the air by his will alongside the item facets and landed on the largest floating rock that was in the center of the mountain range. With but a though it's top was flattened and smoothed out and Nick started the real work by forcefully moving the center of his mindscape to this exact point. The whole mindscape shuddered as the change took hold but remained stable and strong in the end.-

'Now for my defenses.' Nick thought seriously before a dense fog began to billow out from his mental self and reach the very edges of his mindscape before taking the form of many hexagonal lattices interwoven like a net around the whole thing. The trick to occlumency shields was that they were very much dependent on the owners perception of them. In this case Nick chose what he remembered as the strongest natural shape as the outside layer of his shields. Occlumency shields didn't need to be only single layer but rather could be as complicated or simple as the user liked.

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