Hearing Sherlock and Cedric's smug complaints, Harry could only manage a wry smile.
He knew Sherlock wasn't showing off, even if it certainly sounded like it. Because Sherlock genuinely meant every word: the third task really had felt a little too easy for him.
What Harry hadn't expected was that Cedric would agree.
He'd always thought Cedric was such a cheerful, sunny sort of person.
Clearly, he'd misjudged him.
For Harry's part, what the two of them called "slightly underwhelming difficulty" had been anything but simple.
True, compared to the first two tasks especially the sheer terror of getting past the dragon, the pressure in the maze had been somewhat lighter. Staring down a dragon in the first task now seemed, in hindsight, like sheer madness. But that didn't make what they'd just been through feel easy in the slightest.
Take the Billywig swarm, for instance. Those things were terrifyingly fast. If Sherlock hadn't anticipated their flight path and frozen off a whole section of the corridor with a Glacius, and if Cedric hadn't laid down Impedimenta to create a makeshift slowdown field, Harry would almost certainly have been stung and sent floating helplessly into the air.
Just thinking about it made Harry shake out his hand, as though he could still feel the air currents stirred by those tiny blue wings.
"I never want to run into those things again," he muttered.
"At least Hagrid didn't put Acromantulas in there," Sherlock said, giving Harry a light pat on the shoulder, a faint smile on his lips. "Just imagine—Aragog's descendants, spinning their webs right behind those hedges..."
"Please stop talking!"
Even the thought of it made Harry shudder. He shot Sherlock a deeply aggrieved look. His fear of spiders wasn't quite as acute as Ron's but he had absolutely no desire to tangle with anything the size of a small elephant.
"Sherlock's just winding you up, Harry—you know that's not possible," Cedric said, unable to suppress a laugh. "Acromantulas are XXXXX-classified beasts. They're nothing like Flobberworms or Billywigs. Even Hagrid would have a hard time getting his hands on one."
Hearing Cedric's confident declaration, Sherlock and Harry exchanged a glance, and by silent, mutual agreement, let the subject drop.
Sometimes, ignorance really was its own kind of happiness.
Because who, after all, could have imagined that a third-year student had once single-handedly given rise to an entire colony of Acromantulas?
"By the way—who is Aragog?"
Cedric had been talking along quite happily when he suddenly noticed that neither Sherlock nor Harry had responded. The absence of a reply caught his attention, and he turned to ask.
Sherlock only smiled.
Harry sighed. "Trust me, Cedric—you don't want to know."
He paused. "Wait—what's that?"
Harry's eyesight was famously poor behind his glasses. But his ability to track moving objects was, oddly enough, sharper than many people who didn't need them at all.
And right now, in the middle of his conversation with Cedric, Harry caught sight of something—a massive shape on the crossing path to their left, moving fast toward them through the hedgerows.
Cedric followed Harry's gaze.
As a Seeker, his own tracking instincts were nothing to scoff at.
When he made out what the fast-moving shape actually was, he drew a sharp breath and cried out in disbelief:
"Merlin's beard—it's a spider! Did Hagrid actually put Acromantulas in here?!"
Just as Cedric said.
Charging straight toward them was a spider.
An enormous spider.
One moment they were discussing Acromantulas, and the next, one came barreling out of the dark?
In that instant, Cedric felt a visceral, bone-deep sympathy for everything Harry had just said.
'Damn Hagrid.
The man is absolutely unhinged.
I hate him.'
"Stay calm!"
Just as both Harry and Cedric were beginning to question their life choices, Sherlock's voice cut through cleanly:
"It's a spider—but it's not an Acromantula."
Even as he spoke, he raised his wand and hurled a spell at the charging creature:
"Glacius!"
The Freezing Charm struck the spider's dark, bristling body. But the beast was so immense that the spell's area of effect couldn't cover it entirely. The hit slowed it—but didn't stop it.
Fortunately, Sherlock's teammates were not decoration.
Seeing the opening the Freezing Charm had created, Harry and Cedric acted at once:
"Stupefy!"
"Impedimenta!"
The Stunning Spell combined with the Impediment Jinx was finally enough to do some meaningful damage. The spider's movements visibly slowed to a crawl.
Harry and Cedric pressed their advantage, pouring everything they had into bearing down on the creature.
It was the hardest fight they'd had since entering the maze. The spider was colossal, magically resilient, and ferociously aggressive—a nightmare of an opponent. But it wasn't without weaknesses.
Its sheer size, which gave it such raw power, also made precision irrelevant—unlike the Billywigs, this thing was impossible to miss. And because they'd seized the initiative from the start, stacking slow and stun debuffs on it early, the enormous creature had effectively become a stationary target.
Harry and Cedric showed a ruthless streak, focusing their spells on the spider's soft underbelly. Under their relentless barrage, the massive creature endured for a long time—but at last, it began to visibly falter.
They pushed harder, doubling their output.
Finally, sensing it could no longer threaten them and just as the creature seemed to muster the effort to raise one of its razor-sharp pincers—Harry had a sudden flash of inspiration.
"Expelliarmus!"
"...What?" Cedric stared at Harry mid-battle, utterly bewildered. A Disarming Charm? It doesn't have a weapon. You can't disarm something that has no wand.
And yet—against all logic—Harry's spell worked.
Throughout the fight, the spider had been absorbing everything they threw at it through sheer body mass, waiting, enduring, biding its time. Slowed and stunned by the accumulated layers of spell work, every attempt to strike had been delayed, and delayed again. But it had been patient. It had been waiting for its moment.
And when it finally, at great effort, managed to heave one massive pincer into the air—
Harry's Disarming Charm hit.
The raised pincer went limp and dropped.
As if that last spell were the final straw—once the pincer fell, the spider itself could hold on no longer. With a thunderous crash, it toppled sideways, flattening a section of hedgerow, its long hairy legs sprawled in every direction across the ground.
Harry and Cedric exhaled.
"We used at least ten Stunning Spells on that thing," Cedric said, eyeing the spider cautiously. "Its magical endurance was even stronger than I expected."
"That's because of its size—massive body, massive magical reserves," Sherlock said, already walking toward the downed spider.
He crouched beside it and began to examine it carefully. "It's hide can't reflect spells outright the way a Blast-Ended Skrewt's can, but it does absorb and partially neutralize them. Only the spells that landed on its abdomen were fully effective."
He tilted his head, peering closer. "Four pairs of eyes... notably hairy... pincers are very sharp... venom in the glands, but not lethal. Just as I thought—it's not an Acromantula."
Harry and Cedric stood completely still.
It wasn't that they'd processed what Sherlock was doing and found it reasonable. It was that what Sherlock was doing was so thoroughly unreasonable that it had short-circuited both of their brains entirely, leaving them staring blankly for a full few seconds.
"Sherlock—what are you doing?"
Harry snapped out of it first, covering the distance in two strides and grabbing Sherlock by the arm to haul him back.
Cedric followed immediately, seizing Sherlock's other arm.
"Merlin's beard, get back here!"
Together they dragged him away. Sherlock didn't resist.
"Are you out of your mind? What if it wakes up?" Harry asked.
"It won't," Sherlock said, perfectly calm. "Not with this many Stunning Spells. It's not coming around any time soon."
"That's what 'what if' means!"
"In single-trial scenarios, we generally treat low-probability events as functionally negligible. And besides—" Noticing the alarm on his friend's face, Sherlock allowed himself a small smile. "Even if it had some fight left, I'd be able to handle it."
"You..."
"Sherlock, that was reckless," Cedric said, his expression serious. "Whatever you wanted to learn about the spider—did it have to be right now?"
"Because I needed to confirm something."
"Something important enough for that?" Harry said, not bothering to hide his irritation.
"We're not far from the center."
Sherlock's gaze swept across the direction the spider had come from—particularly the gap its enormous body had crushed through the hedgerow, and the fresh drag marks its thick legs had left in the earth.
He spread his hands and explained, unhurried:
"Looking at the pattern of obstacles we've encountered, the difficulty has been steadily escalating. That's very consistent with Hagrid's instincts—he always saves his favorites for last."
At the word favorites, both Harry and Cedric glanced involuntarily back at the massive, unconscious spider.
Eight gleaming black eyes. Razor-sharp pincers. Venom sacs. A body the size of a small cart.
'Adorable.'
"Furthermore," Sherlock continued, "based on the direction and speed of the spider's movement, as well as the composition of the hedge debris and soil it was carrying, it appears to have been patrolling. Which means the center of the maze lies in the direction it came from—and we may be very close. The gap it tore through the hedgerow, along with its own trail, gives us the most direct path. I chose to confirm this because that route offers the least interference and the highest efficiency."
Harry took a slow, deep breath. "Even so—what you did just now was too dangerous."
"My dear friend," Sherlock said warmly, "thank you for your concern. I promise I won't do it again."
Harry opened his mouth. Then closed it. Then said nothing.
He knew Sherlock far too well.
That adventurous streak—the one buried deep in the man's bones—could border on outright madness at times. This was hardly the first or second time something like this had happened. Whenever it did, Sherlock's response to any well-meaning warning was always the same: graciously received, completely ignored.
Cedric, who didn't know Sherlock nearly as well, assumed Harry had actually gotten through to him. He turned and looked toward the passage Sherlock had indicated. In the dim glow of their wand-light, it stretched ahead of them—deep and unknowable.
But Sherlock's analysis had cut through the fog like a knife, and in an instant the path ahead felt not ominous but promising. Even the worry that had been nagging at Cedric dissolved.
"That's brilliant—what are we waiting for? Let's go!"
This time, there was no need for Cedric to lead cautiously, testing each step.
Without hesitation, all three of them stepped over the unconscious spider—Harry and Cedric carefully skirting its outstretched furry legs—and pressed forward into the passage it had come from.
Just as Sherlock had deduced, the path proved remarkably clear. The hedgerows, battered from the spider's rampage, seemed to have lost some of their enchanted obstinacy. The corridor ran straighter than anything they'd seen all evening, and even the constant branching and forking that had plagued them throughout the maze had disappeared entirely.
The clarity of purpose translated directly into speed, and even the tension that had been coiled around them for hours loosened just a little.
"Harry," Cedric said as they moved, "how did you come up with the Disarming Charm back there?"
"I honestly don't know," Harry said. "I saw it raise the pincer, and I just... reacted."
"Didn't think it would actually work, though."
Cedric shook his head in genuine admiration, though even as he spoke he kept his eyes moving, scanning the hedgerows on either side—ready, at any moment, for whatever might come pushing through. But beyond the soft rustling of leaves in the evening wind and the sound of their own quick footsteps and murmured voices, the passage was utterly silent.
Harry appeared to be talking with Cedric. But beneath the surface, his heart was hammering in his chest.
The Triwizard Cup.
The end was in sight.
Victory for Hogwarts.
An escape from this labyrinth of dangers.
The thoughts circled and built upon one another. He found himself stealing a glance at Sherlock, walking steadily beside him. Sherlock's expression hadn't changed—it was the same quiet, composed calm he'd worn from the moment they'd entered the maze.
That's Sherlock for you.
Harry felt his admiration deepen. Looking back over the fight with the spider—over every obstacle they'd navigated tonight—Sherlock had used his wand less than either of them.
While Harry and Cedric had fought hard and fast, drawing on everything they knew, Sherlock had moved with an almost unsettling economy.
But every single time he'd acted, it had mattered. There were moments, Harry realized, where without Sherlock's precise and perfectly-timed intervention, they simply wouldn't have made it this far—not unscathed, not at all.
If only facing Voldemort could be like tonight...
Just as that thought surfaced, Cedric who had been walking slightly ahead—stopped dead.
More than that: he threw his arm out sideways, blocking both Harry and Sherlock, and made a sharp signal to halt.
"What is it?"
Harry dropped his voice immediately, his wand snapping up to point straight ahead, every nerve suddenly taut.
Sherlock stopped as well, following the beam of his wand-light into the passage ahead.
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