"Merlin's beard," Ron gasped out between ragged breaths.
He bent forward at the waist, hands braced on his trembling knees as he stared back through the maze of trees toward the direction they'd fled from. His chest heaved violently with each desperate gulp of air, his lungs WERE burning from the frantic sprint through the forest's terrain.
The ominous sounds had finally ended. The trees no longer cracked and toppled with that sound. The soft layer of dead leaves carpeting the forest floor had stopped sinking suddenly.
This meant, at long last, they had successfully escaped the pursuit of those terrifying monsters.
Ron dry-heaved continuously, his whole body was shaking with the effort as if trying desperately to cough up his own heart. Meanwhile, Harry whose stamina had always been slightly better thanks to years of Quidditch training walked over with unsteady steps.
He placed a reassuring hand on Ron's trembling back, patting it a few times while casting a frightened, questioning glance toward Hermione. His eyes were wide with confusion and lingering terror.
"What exactly are Thestrals, Hermione?" Harry's voice came hoarse and strained, still affected by their desperate run. "Why can't you and Ron see them? I don't understand."
Hermione had collapsed against the bark of a massive beech tree. Her usually bushy hair was now plastered to her flushed cheeks with a mixture of sweat and forest moisture.
They'd run so desperately fast through the overgrown woodland, heedless of obstacles in their path, that her face had been scratched and torn by wildly growing branches that had whipped across her skin. Several bloody marks stood out against her pale complexion in red lines.
Drops of crimson blood slid slowly down from one particularly deep scratch near her temple.
"Because Ron and I have never witnessed death," Hermione managed to say between hard breaths.
She wiped absently at her bleeding face with the back of her hand, succeeding only in smearing the blood and dirt together, making herself look even more disheveled than before.
Seeing the incredulity still clearly across his face, she tried to steady her ragged breathing enough to provide a proper explanation.
"Thestrals are mysterious creatures, Harry. Only those who have truly witnessed death can perceive them with their own eyes. To everyone else, they remain completely invisible, as though they don't exist at all."
"Witnessed death," Harry repeated slowly.
Then, like a door opening in his memory, he suddenly remembered with vivid, unwanted clarity the graveyard where Voldemort had been resurrected.
He saw again Karkaroff's body, torn to pieces by dozens upon dozens of simultaneously cast Cruciatus Curses, the man's screams echoing in the darkness. And Barty Crouch Senior's tragic self-sacrifice.
The memories crashed over Harry like a cold wave, and he understood. When Karkaroff and Barty Crouch Senior had died in those final moments, Hermione and Ron had both been unconscious and unable to witness those deaths occur. That was why only he, could see the Thestrals now.
"Tamed Thestrals actually make excellent mounts," Hermione continued. "They're very docile creatures and have an excellent sense of direction; you only need to tell them your desired destination once, and they'll take you anywhere—"
"Docile?!" Ron's voice emerged as an incredulous shriek that sent several nearby birds fluttering away in alarm.
He straightened up abruptly from his bent position, staring at Hermione as though she'd lost her mind. "Those monsters just tried to kill us!"
"I said tamed Thestrals, Ron," Hermione snapped back irritably. Her eyes flashed with annoyance at his lack of attention to the crucial difference.
"Domesticated ones that have been raised by wizards from birth. What we just encountered out there were wild ones!"
Her voice rose slightly as she explained, driven by the need to make him understand the critical difference. "Wild Thestrals are territorial, aggressive hunters. They're nothing like their domesticated cousins. We were lucky to escape!"
The three of them slumped down once more beneath the sheltering canopy of the beech tree, their exhausted bodies found the damp carpet of dead leaves that had accumulated over countless autumns.
Despite their disheveled appearance and exhaustion, the Omnioculars hovering persistently above their heads still followed their every movement with precision.
But they no longer had any energy left to worry about their image on those giant screens back at the competition grounds, about how they must look to the thousands upon thousands of spectators watching their every move.
"I really hope we're not the only unlucky ones," Ron muttered darkly, his voice was filled with resentment and fatigue.
He glared up resentfully at the Omnioculars hovering annoyingly above them like mechanical vultures, as if hoping his resentful look could somehow be transmitted through those lenses directly to Professor Watson himself, lodging a complaint about the unfairness of their situation.
All around them were overgrown vines and large patches of shrubs.
Although they'd been awake for less than three hours, the past half hour's traumatic adventure had already exhausted Harry more thoroughly than an entire day of regular classes ever could.
He stretched out his bent legs with a soft groan of relief, extending them across the forest floor and looking down with weary resignation at his mud-covered shoes. He felt a surge of deep, heartfelt gratitude that during that frantic sprint for their lives, his shoes hadn't come off.
'Wait—half an hour?'
The thought struck Harry like a lightning bolt. His drooping eyelids immediately widened, snapping fully open. His pulse, which had just begun to slow from their desperate run, suddenly quickened again with a different kind of urgency.
Harry's drooping eyelids immediately widened, but before he could say anything, Hermione had already acted first.
She struggled to curl her legs and pulled out the tightly-stuffed chalkboard map from her pocket.
The map was still exactly the same as when they'd first received it from Professor Watson on the competition platform. There were no apparent changes to its appearance.
"Oh Merlin, how long have we been running, Harry?" Hermione's voice rose with panic.
She reached out and grabbed Harry's wrist, and wiped away roughly at the accumulated mud and moisture on the watch face. Her hand trembled as she angled it to catch enough of the dim forest light to read the time clearly.
Then she shrieked, "We didn't miss it, did we?"
Ron immediately lifted his neck over to see. Three heads crowded together in a tight huddle, pressing close to get a clear view of the watch face.
The memory was vivid in Harry's mind: when they'd first emerged from that psychologically traumatizing dark passage into the actual Forbidden Forest, he had checked the time once. Now, examining the watch face carefully, he could see that the minute hand had moved a little over two large intervals on the dial.
"Half an hour—just about," Harry calculated quickly. "There should still be two or three minutes remaining, I think. I really hope we haven't missed it."
Harry was also quite shaken. The location marker that would reveal the positions of all teams only lasted for thirty seconds. If they missed it because they'd been too busy fleeing from invisible monsters, that would be absolutely fatal to their chances in this competition.
Understanding the critical importance of not missing this singular opportunity, the three of them didn't dare take their eyes off the chalkboard for even a single moment.
When completely focused on a single object, the forest around them seemed eerily quiet. Hermione became highly aware of sounds she normally would have ignored—she could hear all three of their hearts beating and breathing, as well as the sound of the second hand moving across Harry's watch face.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
"Speaking of which—" Ron's voice suddenly broke the silence.
The small watch face reflected three pale, sweating faces bent over it like conspirators. Ron suddenly wanted to say something that had occurred to him. But before the words could fully leave his mouth, Hermione's stern gaze forced them back.
Don't you dare speak right now. Don't you dare distract us from this.
The look was so fierce, that Ron's words died in his throat. He swallowed them back down forcefully, clamping his mouth shut.
Suddenly, with no warning beyond the passage of those minutes, the chalkboard gripped tightly in Hermione's trembling hands lit up!
The transparent green lines that had been barely visible before now glowed with a glowing light. The moment that supernatural glow illuminated their three faces from below, the tense trio instinctively held their breath in unison.
Four bright dots appeared on the chalkboard's surface. Three of the dots glowed with a cool, steady blue light. Only one pulsed with a warm red glow.
Hermione's sharp mind immediately grasped the system. The red dot, which had a small directional arrow attached to it, probably represented their own team's position.
She jumped up from the ground with energy born of urgency. She held the chalkboard map carefully with both hands and turned slowly in a complete circle.
As she rotated her body, the small arrow connected to the red dot representing their team also rotated in place with synchronization.
"This thing could be really useful when you're lost!" Ron laughed dryly.
But Harry and Hermione didn't respond to his attempt at humor. Instead, they pressed their lips together tightly, their eyes were still fixed unwaveringly on the map's glowing surface. They looked very tense.
By sheer coincidence, their current position was located right near the center of the entire mapped area. On the grid-lined surface, their red dot sat almost perfectly centered.
The nearest blue dot was positioned only two squares away from their central position.
The other two bright blue dots were much farther away from the red center where Harry, Ron, and Hermione stood. One glowed in the upper left corner of the map, the other in the upper right corner. Both were positioned almost at the very edges of the mapped area, approximately ten squares distant from the trio's position.
"How actual distance does one square represent?" Harry asked.
His voice was low, but his eyes blazed with intense focus as his mind keenly grasped the key question that would determine their next move.
"I don't know—" Hermione admitted in a whisper.
The suddenly heightened sense of imminent crisis made her lower her voice to barely above a breath.
"We'll have to figure that out ourselves."
Ron stared tensely ahead into the unfathomably deep forest stretching before them in all directions, as if enemies might jump out from behind those trees swaying slightly in the wind at any moment.
Harry also raised his wand defensively. He found himself watching the shadowy black shapes hanging from the overgrown branches, as if they might attack at any second.
The thirty seconds passed in a flash, the four bright dots disappeared, and the chalkboard went dark.
The three exchanged glances again. Harry looked cautiously at Hermione trying to read her expression.
"Whoever they are, we need to go check it out, don't we?" Harry said softly, stating what they all knew to be true.
Then he immediately added: "They'll come looking for us too. We can't avoid this confrontation."
This went without saying, really—it was the nature of the competition they'd entered. According to the rules Professor Watson had set, the only path to victory was obtaining the most badges.
They needed to hold at least two badges to remain undefeated, to avoid coming in last place. If they somehow managed to acquire three badges, they'd be guaranteed to win. But that meant taking badges from other teams, which meant conflict.
"We need to change our approach, Harry, Ron," Hermione said with sudden decision.
After fully committing herself mentally to the competition, she had rediscovered some of that remarkable calm and decisiveness she'd displayed in that dangerous final moment when facing the dragon in the first task.
"What's coming will be an encounter battle. The forest environment is extremely complex, full of obstacles and hiding places. If the other side spots us first, if they get the advantage of surprise, we'll be at a severe disadvantage. So, we need to hide our tracks, move carefully, and stay alert."
"If only we had your invisibility cloak,"
Harry exhaled heavily, speaking with considerable frustration.
"I can use the Disillusionment Charm," Hermione interjected.
"I'm really grateful I made the effort to learn that particular spell before the competition started. It's quite advanced magic, but I practiced it until I could cast it reliably."
Her expression shifted slightly, becoming more worried. "But we can't rule out that other teams might also use this exact same magic to conceal themselves. We have to assume our opponents are just as prepared as we are."
She paused, thinking through. "At least Cedric will definitely know the Disillusionment Charm—this is taught in sixth-year Charms class, it's part of the standard curriculum. He's had a full year to practice it. So, we still need to—"
"Hey!" Ron suddenly interrupted Hermione's focused tactical analysis.
His voice cut across her words with an urgency that made both his friends' heads snap toward him immediately. When Harry and Hermione's eyes settled on his face, they saw his face was deeply furrowed with concern.
"Don't you think something's wrong?" Ron asked slowly.
'Something's wrong.'
Harry and Hermione exchanged quick, worried glances, then both turned their full attention to Ron. Hermione asked cautiously.
"What do you mean, Ron?"
"That firework we saw earlier," Ron said, holding his breath as he looked between Harry and Hermione's attentive faces.
His eyes were wide and serious. "You both saw it clearly—that red flare shooting up into the sky. That means someone gave up, doesn't it? So why—why are there still four teams showing up on the map?"
Both Harry and Hermione's brows furrowed simultaneously as the logic of his observation sank in. Their expressions shifted from confusion to deep thought as they processed this contradiction.
Ron swallowed hard before continuing, his own realization of the implications made his eyes widen even further.
"And haven't you noticed—there's something else we've completely overlooked?"
'Something we've overlooked.'
Harry blinked rapidly, his mind racing through everything that had happened since they'd entered the forest. Suddenly, like a flash of lightning, understanding struck him. His eyes went wide with the shock of realization.
Meanwhile, Hermione beside him also cried out almost simultaneously, "You mean—"
"Those students from Physical Education class," Ron said in a serious, tone that was unusual for him.
He looked between his two friends, making sure they were following his logic. "Professor Watson never explained why they're in the Forbidden Forest."
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