Daphne, Astoria, and Rhys's actions won the approval of quite a few people, Cedric among them.
He had never liked what those people were doing, so when Daphne made her move, he was the first to stand up and applaud.
"Good! Nicely done!"
With Cedric taking the lead, the other Hufflepuff students naturally followed suit. Soon, a modest round of applause rose from the Hufflepuff stands.
Once the Hufflepuffs started, the Gryffindor and Slytherin students were not about to just sit there and watch. Before long, applause and cheers filled the air above the arena.
Hearing the waves of applause behind him, Dumbledore smiled.
Very good. The children had made the choice he was most pleased to see.
He watched Daphne rampaging across the arena and chasing down her opponents, a trace of gratification flashing in his eyes.
This child was excellent. She hardly seemed like a Slytherin at all.
Godric, seated among the spectators not far away, made no attempt to lower his voice.
"How did that little girl not get sorted into Gryffindor? The Sorting Hat really needs a good repair, ha!"
His voice was so loud that even Rhys, standing some distance away, heard him.
Rhys's expression immediately darkened.
However, when he looked at Daphne in the middle of the fight, he found himself unable to come up with a rebuttal.
Could the root of the problem actually be me?
Rhys even began reflecting on himself.
After all, raising one Adrian with that sort of personality could still be called a coincidence. Producing two students like that was much harder to dismiss as chance.
But when his gaze swept over Astoria, who was standing just as helplessly in the lake, Rhys immediately felt relieved.
It definitely was not his fault!
Otherwise, why would little Astoria have turned out like this?
It had to be Adrian's bloodline causing trouble!
Rhys had read Muggle encyclopaedias and had heard of Mendel and his peas, so he felt that the difference between the Greengrass sisters' personalities was very likely a matter of dominant and recessive expression of the "Adrian gene."
After letting his thoughts wander for a while, a whistle suddenly sounded from the judges' area.
"All right, time's up! Contestants, please come to the judges' table!"
Daphne stopped hunting down her opponents.
What stopped her was not their resistance, but the whistle announcing the end of the competition.
She cheerfully made her way to the judges and handed over both her completion chest and her trial chest, successfully passing verification.
Behind Daphne came her younger sister Astoria, followed by Rhys, whose expression was calm even though he looked somewhat drained.
When Daphne and Astoria discovered that Rhys had obtained only a single completion chest, they could not hide the shock in their eyes.
However, with so many people watching, they could hardly drag Rhys aside and bombard him with questions. They could only tell themselves that perhaps he had some deeper plan and would explain it to them when the time was right.
They were overthinking things.
Rhys had no grand plan at all.
He simply did not need the trial reward.
Once the final contestant had completed verification, Mr. Jamison Greengrass stood up and announced the results of the event.
Thanks to the efforts of the hunters and Daphne, quite a few contestants had been eliminated.
Only fifty-three people had passed the test and obtained completion chests from the merfolk, while just nineteen of them had completed the advanced trial.
Among those fifty-three, students from the Eight Great Schools of Magic made up the majority.
Durmstrang, of course, was the exception.
Thanks to Daphne, Krum was now their sole remaining contestant.
"Contestants, you have one week to prepare. One week from now, the second stage of the competition will officially begin. The difficulty will increase significantly. The completion chests and trial rewards in your possession will be important aids in helping you pass the competition, and may even be crucial to keeping you alive."
At this point, Mr. Jamison Greengrass's expression became unusually serious.
He looked at the contestants and said solemnly, "You must take care of yourselves. Your lives must always be your highest priority."
His words cast a heavy mood over the scene.
Danger to their lives.
Who could hear those words and not become cautious?
Off to one side, Godric lowered his eyes, his face revealing no emotion at all.
At the end of the first stage, all seven young elites from the Society whom he had brought with him had disappeared, causing a minor disturbance at the time.
And now, the organisers were once again stressing safety.
How interesting.
He did not believe the disappearance of those seven had been an accident.
Someone was clearly targeting the Society from the shadows.
But it did not matter.
Those so-called elites of the Society were merely targets he had brought along.
Let that mysterious powerful figure attack them if they wished. At worst, he would lose some manpower.
As long as the plan was not obstructed, everything was worthwhile.
Even the Society itself had been founded for the sake of that plan.
'The mysterious powerhouse who appeared during the Quidditch World Cup final, the person secretly hunting members of the Society, the one capable of creating a competition venue like this... I want to see just how many hidden foundations Hogwarts and the wizarding world possess that I don't know about.'
One figure after another flashed through Godric's mind before his gaze settled on Dumbledore standing ahead.
'Albus Dumbledore... are all of these your arrangements? Pretending to be unreliable and aged on the surface, while secretly...'
After the contestants had been warned to take care of themselves, the competition officially came to a temporary end.
Contestants who knew one another left together and began preparing for the next stage.
"Neville, Luna, how did you do it?"
Harry caught up with Neville and Luna and finally voiced the question that had been bothering him for quite some time.
He considered himself the best Seeker at Hogwarts, yet somehow those two had caught fish even faster than he had.
He found that difficult to understand.
Could they also have some special fishing technique like Cedric?
"You only need to ask the fish, and they'll swim into the basket on their own. I promised them I wouldn't hurt them, and that I'd let them go as soon as I passed the trial."
Luna began explaining in a way that Harry found completely incomprehensible.
For a moment, Harry wondered whether something was wrong with his ears.
"You mean, uh... you used some sort of spell?"
"No."
Luna shook her head seriously.
"Those little fish can communicate. Just like you and I are talking right now. I only asked them to visit my basket for a while."
According to Luna, she had simply said a few nice things, and the little silver fish had willingly swum into her basket, helping her pass the merfolk's trial.
Harry did not understand, but he was deeply impressed.
He felt as though communicating with Luna was impossible, almost as if she were not speaking English at all.
"What about you, Neville?"
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12 Chaps ahead at Patreon.com/HornyFBI