Lucius clicked his tongue, visibly thwarted upon realizing that the Jarjacha was passively counteracting his dark magic, almost without the need for me to formulate complex incantations. However, his brow sank even deeper into an expression of pure hostility when he saw my left hand slide into my robes to draw the second Jarjacha wand.
He had done his homework; he had investigated my background, my exotic magics, and the objects I carried, so the existence of the twin wands originally from Brazil did not take him by surprise, but the prospect of facing both simultaneously made him deeply uncomfortable. Even so, the Malfoy patriarch had already made an irrevocable decision: at this point, he didn't give a damn about his public reputation. This was a Duel of Honor with no restrictions on etiquette. Though some puritanical sectors might question his methods later, the only thing that mattered to him in this microsecond was winning. Once he had his prize, a bit of media scrutiny or corridor slander would be an insignificant price to pay. He planned to empty his entire repertoire of dark magic onto the arena, and under that premise, he refused to accept that a child could bend him to his will.
"Do you truly believe a pair of cursed woods will grant you victory?" Lucius roared, seeking both to intimidate me and to breathe a bit of confidence into his own chest. "Blindly relying on dark objects will never allow you to match a true wizard, you abomination!"
The brief truce was shattered to pieces. Lucius resumed the offensive by unleashing a torrent of authentic, indisputable black magic: a gale of cursed flames, blasts of corrosive acid, purulent beams, and suffocating miasmas. These were spells designed exclusively for butchery—hexes conceived to cause deep gashes, unstoppable bleeding, disembowelment, and the agonizing melting of living tissue.
And in the middle of that hell of dark arts stood I. Wielding my two Jarjacha wands, I glided across the stone while a grim aura, of a nature as dense and poisonous as Lucius's own attacks, seemed to devour my body. Before the eyes of the Atrium, the use of the cursed relics was taking a ghastly physical toll on me: the veins in my neck and arms were beginning to stand out with a blackish, necrotic tint, my skin was turning alarmingly pale, almost deathlike, and my lips were cracking as if vitality were pouring out of me.
Of course... that was the farce the others were witnessing. In reality, the true, agonizing effort I was making was not defending myself against Lucius, but actively containing the immeasurable, destructive power of the Jarjacha wands. Lucius Malfoy did not possess the level or strength required to force me to unleash the authentic potential of my weapons. If I grew careless for a single second and let the Jarjacha's will flow freely, the duel would end in the blink of an eye and the aristocrat would be reduced to slag, completely ruining my staging. I had to feign weakness so that my subsequent victory would look like a desperate miracle.
...
On the other side of the translucent barrier, the spectacle of my apparent destruction drove my parents into madness. Desperate, they lunged forward, shouting recriminations at the Minister for Magic.
"You have to stop this immediately!" my father roared, his voice broken with panic and his eyes fixed on my blackened veins. "Lucius is employing dark magic! He is... he is violating the rules! Order the Aurors to dissolve the dome, the duel cannot continue!"
Cornelius Fudge, adopting a hieratic posture and shielding himself behind his best tone of political rhetoric, did not even deign to grant the Weasley patriarch a second glance.
"This is a formal and legitimate Duel of Honor, Arthur," Fudge declared with impeccable bureaucratic coldness. "At no point was a restriction on the dark arts stipulated. The challenge was agreed upon under the canopy of the term 'no restrictions.'"
Everyone present, even those officials who harbored a certain sympathy for the Weasley family's cause, found themselves forced to nod in silence at the finality of the Minister's words. The ancestral laws governing duels of honor were archaic, inflexible, and ruthless; as a general rule, they lacked ethical regulations. And in this particular case, the "no restrictions" clause legally shielded any atrocity. Even if Lucius chose to employ the most twisted, inhumane, and sadistic methods conceived by magic, the court had no power to intervene. Technically, even the use of Unforgivable Curses did not constitute grounds for disqualification inside that pit; although they were capital offenses in the outside world, the Ministry's laws of feudal honor temporarily protected them during the litigation.
Arthur felt his blood boil in his veins, his face flushing a bright red out of fury and helplessness. He looked at his wife, catching her identical desperation. At that moment, completely stripped of his magic due to Dumbledore's suppressor blockade, he realized he had no resources to force an entry; the most he could do would be to slam a fist into Fudge's cowardly face before the Auror guard pinned him to the floor.
In a last-ditch effort, Arthur begged the Minister to dissipate the curse that the barrier had implanted in him and which Dumbledore was keeping suppressed along with his magical channels. However, the leader showed not the slightest willingness to cooperate. Not that Fudge could have done it anyway, given that he lacked the most basic technical knowledge of what had actually occurred with the dome; so he chose to turn a deaf ear to the pleas. With masterful cynicism, the Minister went so far as to insinuate that Arthur's blockage was, in fact, a providential blessing: a guarantee that the Head of the House of Weasley would not commit a folly that would tarnish the legality of the match, cataloging the temporary loss of his magic as an appropriate institutional countermeasure.
Fudge's rhetoric hit home among the neutral spectators of high society, who nodded in conviction, swallowing the official narrative that Arthur Weasley was an unstable man who required containment to prevent a greater disaster.
Dumbledore, watching the scene from the shadows, did not intervene. His eyes alternated between the Minister's cynicism and the dueling arena.
...
Inside the dome, I decided I had staged enough weakness. Lucius's incessant bombardment was turning from a useful choreography into an unnecessary nuisance. It was time to change the rules of the game.
I planted my feet firmly, holding both Jarjacha wands in a low but rigid guard. Suddenly, a torrent of blood erupted in a controlled fashion, pooling at my back in a dense, floating scarlet mass.
Both the mass of spectators and Lucius himself beheld the transmutation in an astonished silence. Before their eyes, the mass of plasma stretched and segmented until it molded four tentacles of pure blood that swayed in the air behind my back. An exotic, aberrant figure that monopolized every gaze in the Atrium. A moment later, the fluid limbs tightened like cords, and their sharp tips oriented themselves at a perfect angle toward the aristocrat.
A deathly chill ran down Lucius's spine as he realized the threat. Without warning, the tips of the four appendages snapped in perfect synchrony, firing simultaneous volleys of crimson light: four Stunning Spells. Although the projectiles possessed a magical density subtly lower than the norm, the cadence was fiendish. The Malfoy patriarch hastily conjured a concave shield to cover himself, taking the impacts with a grunt as he felt the violent shove of kinetic pressure against his arm.
Everything fell into a tense muteness. I held Lucius's gaze; he scrutinized me with wide eyes, and the audience held its breath in the stands. I gave Malfoy an imperceptible smile, a subtle flash of mockery that only he, due to his proximity, was able to catch. And then, I resumed the attack.
The contention mutated into a whirlwind of unbridled violence, causing the audience to fall into a state of genuine euphoria; it had been generations since the corridors of the Ministry had hosted a spectacle of such caliber. The everyday wizards marveled at the technical display and innovation, while the sectors of the nobility were struck by the impeccable tactical neatness of the exchange. The older nobles reminisced aloud about the classic duels of their youth, muttering under their breath that this was a true exhibition of power, while the younger ones looked at my parents with entirely new eyes, wondering at what point the House of Weasley had sired and raised a specimen of such caliber. Granted, some skeptics refused to accept that such refined magic was the exclusive fruit of my talent and the experiences I gathered during my stay in Brazil; many knew of my capabilities with hematomancy, but no one imagined I had taken it to this extreme.
The intensity reached its zenith. My blood appendages operated autonomously, behaving like true ballistic turrets that spat constant volleys of spells. I made sure to calibrate the arcane flow to weaken the spells just enough to grant Lucius the necessary room to breathe and react. For me, the process was almost elementary. Mastering my own blood as a channeling focus was something I had resolved long ago, relegating it due to its low practicality in large-scale combat against truly formidable enemies... but in this arena, it was the perfect tool.
Beset by the multi-directional siege, Lucius was forced to squeeze every noble fiber of his muscles to dodge the impacts. His physique, softened by the luxuries of courtly life, was not designed for such athletic demands, but adrenaline forced him to twist in desperate feints while responding with increasingly erratic waves of dark magic, desperately seeking to balance the scales.
Now, the fear on Malfoy's face was real and absolute. At the start of the day, after studying my background, he was confident that his years of experience would neutralize any surprises I kept up my sleeve. Then, upon feeling the pressure, he assumed he would have to make ethical sacrifices to bend me. But at this precise second, certainty had evaporated from his mind; he knew himself caught in a slaughterhouse without a clear victor. Or at least, that was what his ignorance dictated to him.
While my parents tore themselves between pride and panic in equal measure, over in the Malfoy wing, Narcissa felt a suffocating anguish tightening her chest. The ominous premonitions that had haunted her gained a terrible strength every time her husband's body received another wound. In the midst of her desperation, she shifted her gaze a few meters back, where her sister Andromeda observed the arena with a smile. A freezing thought crossed Narcissa's mind: What if she was right? Is Lucius going to die here today?
The confrontation became frantic. Our movements grew so electric and fluid that it gave the impression that both of us were burning through our very last reserves, but that was nothing more than the prelude to my opponent's emotional collapse. Exhausted, cornered, and with his pride in tatters, Lucius tried to concentrate his fire on destroying my blood tentacles. I allowed it. I interrupted my offensive on purpose, feigning that it cost me a titanic amount of time and effort to reassemble the hematomantic structure, all to maintain the illusion of a close duel while, in passing, slipping in a couple of direct hits that made him stagger.
Arrived at that point of absolute breaking, Lucius Malfoy lost his sanity.
"¡AVADA KEDAVRA!" he roared, his eyes bloodshot.