"The Killing Curse certainly doesn't count as truly powerful magic," Voldemort said, his tone suggesting he was almost agreeing with Adrian's assessment.
He put down his wand for a moment and spread his hands in a gesture of explanation. "You're correct about that. Even the Killing Curse, feared as it is, can only take away a person's body, can only sever the connection between soul and flesh. As for the soul itself—the curse has no effect on it at all. The soul remains intact, merely freed from its mortal prison."
Adrian stared at Voldemort, his mind racing to understand where this conversation was leading even as he maintained his defensive stance. He decided to push back.
"Your Killing Curse can't even break through a simple earthen wall," Adrian mocked, allowing a tone of contempt to enter his voice. "So how exactly do you expect it to touch my body when I can conjure barriers faster than you can cast?"
Voldemort shook his head slightly, and remarkably, he showed no anger at the mockery. Perhaps his damaged soul made him less prone to emotional volatility in some ways, or perhaps he simply didn't care about Adrian's opinion of his magical abilities.
"You're wrong about something crucial," Voldemort said softly. "I was talking about an ordinary Killing Curse, cast by an ordinary wizard with ordinary power. But I am not ordinary, Adrian Westeros. I am not included in that category of mediocrity."
He suddenly spread his arms wide in a dramatic gesture and swung his wand with violent force, channeling power on a scale that made the air itself crackle with dark energy.
"Avada Kedavra!"
Dazzling green light erupted from the tip of Voldemort's wand, so bright and intense that Adrian had to squint against the glare. But this wasn't a single beam like the previous casting, this was something far worse.
The massive burst of green light split into dozens of separate streams while still in the air, the deadly energy dividing and subdividing like a river breaking into countless branches.
The individual beams curved and twisted through the space between Voldemort and Adrian, attacking from all directions simultaneously.
It was an extreme display of magical control, taking a spell that should produce one effect and transforming it into a multi-directional assault that gave the target nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
"!" Adrian's eyes widened in shock.
He immediately channeled magic and used advanced Transfiguration with desperate speed.
The surrounding soil responded to his will, rising up and flowing together like liquid. The earth formed an airtight sphere that encased Adrian completely, creating a shell of dirt and stone around him just as the first streams of green light reached his position.
The dozens of Killing Curse streams struck the dirt sphere from all directions simultaneously, impacting with tremendous force. The green light penetrated into the barrier, sinking deep into the compacted soil, and the sphere emitted a series of dull hums as the deadly magic fought against the physical matter.
For several seconds, the outcome was uncertain—would the barrier hold, or would the sheer volume of Killing Curses overwhelm it?
Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the assault ended. The green light faded.
At the same moment, Adrian felt the magical connection sustaining the silver-white chains suddenly snap.
His concentration had been too divided, focused entirely on defense, and he'd lost his grip on the binding spell. The chains around Voldemort's legs disappeared, fading back into nothingness.
The scene fell into an eerie, tense calm. Silence fell over the plantation, broken only by the gentle rustle of the Tree of Wisdom's leaves.
Well, that's taken care of, Voldemort thought with grim satisfaction.
"Sir!" Dobby's voice suddenly cried out.
The house-elf had been watching without acting rashly, following Adrian's earlier instructions to stay back and not engage unless absolutely necessary.
But seeing his master apparently killed, sealed in that earthen sphere and struck by dozens of Killing Curses, Dobby's grief overrode his caution.
His small figure shot toward Voldemort like an arrow released from a bow, moving with the surprising speed.
However, Voldemort didn't even bother turning around to face this new threat. He merely waved his wand casually behind him, not even looking at Dobby, as if swatting away an annoying insect.
An invisible force struck Dobby heavily in mid-flight. The house-elf's small body was hurled back with tremendous force, flying through the air until he crashed hard against a distant tree trunk with an impact.
Dobby didn't even have time to let out a groan of pain before losing consciousness. His eyes rolled back, and he slid limply down the trunk to collapse in a heap on the ground.
"How boring," Voldemort commented dismissively, already dismissing the house-elf as irrelevant. He turned back toward the Tree of Wisdom, ready to resume his interrupted advance.
The battle just now—both the exchange with Adrian and the casual disposal of Dobby was merely an insignificant interlude, a minor delay in his ultimate goal. He had more important matters to attend to than dealing with a dead wizard and his pathetic servant.
Just then, Voldemort seemed to sense something that made him pause. His head turned around sharply, his eyes were widening slightly with genuine surprise.
He saw the earthen sphere that should have been a tomb slowly beginning to crack open. Fissures spread across its surface like a spider's web, and chunks of dirt and stone fell away. The barrier split apart, and through the opening, Adrian became visible.
Adrian stood there in the ruins of his shield, completely unharmed and very much alive. That exaggerated multi-directional Killing Curse assault had not caused him even the slightest injury.
"I'm still alive," Adrian said calmly, meeting Voldemort's shocked gaze without flinching. "Does that surprise you somewhat, Tom?"
"Somewhat," Voldemort responded after a moment, though his expression showed a trace of fluctuation.
In fact, Adrian's heart was far from as calm as his surface appearance suggested. His pulse hammered in his ears, and his hands shook slightly from the adrenaline still flooding his system.
At the moment when the multiple Killing Curse streams had penetrated the dirt sphere and been about to reach him, mere fractions of a second from contact with his flesh, Adrian had cast three separate Shield Charms on himself, layering the protections one atop another.
Simultaneously, he'd retracted the Binding Curse from Voldemort's legs and redirected that soul-touched magic in, using those silver-white ethereal chains to create a final protective layer around his own body.
Only by combining all these defensive measures, the earthen sphere to absorb most of the impact, the layered Shield Charms to deflect what penetrated, and the soul-magic chains to block what remained had he barely managed to survive that lethal multi-strike assault.
It had been desperately close. If he'd been even slightly slower, if any one element of his defense had failed, he would be dead now.
"It seems I underestimated you, Adrian Westeros," Voldemort said slowly, shaking his head. "Your defensive capabilities are more sophisticated than I anticipated. However..."
He slowly turned his full attention back toward the Tree of Wisdom, his wand was rising to point directly at its massive trunk.
"I didn't come here for you in the first place," Voldemort finished coldly. "You were never the goal. You're merely an obstacle—an annoying one, I admit, but ultimately just an impediment between me and what I truly seek."
As he spoke, his wand hand steadied, and dark power began to gather at its tip.
"Stop!" Adrian roared.
The silver-white Binding Curse shot from the tip of his wand again, racing toward Voldemort with all the speed and power Adrian could channel through it. He poured everything into this casting.
However, it was already too late.
A strange gray light erupted from the tip of Voldemort's wand, shooting forward before Adrian's binding spell could reach him.
The beam of colorless, lifeless light struck the trunk of the Tree of Wisdom with perfect precision sinking into the bark and disappearing within.
The light was neither bright nor particularly dark. Yet it carried with it a kind of heart-palpitating sense of wrongness.
"What have you done?" Adrian asked sharply in horror and fury. An ominous premonition surged through his heart. "What was that spell?"
However, Voldemort didn't answer the question. He didn't gloat or explain his actions.
Instead, his newly constructed body suddenly trembled, jerking as if struck by an invisible force. His red eyes went wide, and his mouth opened in a silent gasp. Then, as Adrian watched in shocked confusion, Voldemort collapsed limply to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
His wand rolled from his powerless hand, clattering against the earth. His eyes stared sightlessly at the sky. His chest didn't rise or fall with breath.
Adrian stood frozen, his wand still aimed at where Voldemort had been standing, his mind was struggling to process what had just happened.
The Binding Curse he'd cast just dissipated, the silver-white chains were fading into nothing.
After quite a while, seeing that Voldemort remained completely motionless, Adrian slowly approached the fallen figure with extreme caution. Every instinct screamed that this might be a trap, that Voldemort was merely feigning death to lure him closer.
But when Adrian finally stood over the body and examined it carefully, the truth was undeniable.
Voldemort had stopped breathing. His chest was perfectly still.
His eyes were blank. They stared at nothing, containing no spark of life or consciousness.
The body he'd constructed from mist and magic was cooling rapidly, the unnatural warmth that had given it life was fading into the chill of true death.
Voldemort was truly dead.
"This is impossible..." Adrian murmured. None of this made any sense.
He clearly remembered the scene just moments ago, that gray light sinking into the trunk of the Tree of Wisdom, disappearing within the wood. A terrible hypothesis formed in his mind, growing more certain with each passing second despite how much he wanted to deny it.
He jerked his head up to look at the Tree of Wisdom, and what he saw confirmed his worst fears.
The once lush and vibrant canopy was now shrouded in an ominous gray mist that swirled among the branches like fog on a dark morning. The healthy green of the leaves had taken on a sickly whiteness.
"Eldra?" Adrian called out desperately.
However, the only response he received was a single phrase, weak and distorted as if coming from a great distance.
[Help me...]
Voldemort hadn't died from some spell going wrong or from his body's instability. He'd abandoned it intentionally.
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