Mad-Eye Moody's roar echoed through the empty hall, every word was lashing into Umbridge like a whip.
She stood frozen in place, her whole-body went stiff.
Her face went from white to green to purple, and even her carefully styled bun seemed to come loose.
She opened her mouth as if to object, as if to invoke the authority of the Ministry she represented.
But under Moody's furious glare honed by real battle and real killing and his merciless accusations, she couldn't force out a single word.
Especially since Moody had spoken Voldemort's name outright.
As everyone knew, any wizard bold enough to say that name was no ordinary wizard.
There had been Albus Dumbledore before him, the only man the Dark Lord had ever feared.
There was Harry Potter after him—the Dark Lord's one true nemesis.
And now there was Alastor Moody—the greatest Auror alive, who had filled Azkaban almost single-handedly.
The gulf between them, in sheer presence alone, was simply too vast.
When Mad-Eye Moody told her to sit down, her legs actually buckled, and she sank back into her chair.
The entire hall fell utterly silent.
The students stared, dumbstruck, at this scene the likes of which none of them had ever witnessed.
A new professor—one sent here representing the Ministry of Magic, no less— had just been torn to shreds in public by the hot-tempered Mad-Eye Moody, and couldn't even manage a complete sentence in response.
Oh, right technically, Moody had been sent by the Ministry too.
Well, never mind then.
At the Gryffindor table, Fred and George were shaking all over trying to hold back their laughter, their faces were flushed as red as their hair.
Ron's mouth hung open wide enough to fit a chicken leg in it, pie crumbs were still stuck to the corner of his mouth.
Harry and Hermione both shot a quick glance at Sherlock looking secretly amused.
And it wasn't just the students.
At the staff table, the corners of Professor McGonagall's tightly pressed lips seemed to twitch up slightly.
It happened so fast one might have taken it for imagination, and then her face settled back into its usual severity.
Beneath his black robes, Snape's shoulders gave a subtle shrug, as if he were silently sneering.
Professor Sprout kept her eyes lowered on her folded hands as though flowers had sprouted from them.
Professor Flitwick glanced from Moody to Dumbledore and back, then broke into a satisfied smile.
Once Umbridge had sat down, Moody gave a cold snort and sat down as well.
Seeing this, Dumbledore began to applaud.
The other teachers followed suit.
And then, finally, the students.
Dumbledore rose to his feet and said gently, "It seems our schedule this evening has run rather long.
"Professor Umbridge, thank you for sharing your—ah—first impressions—
I think the practical details of educational philosophy are best discussed more thoroughly at a future staff meeting.
And Professor Moody's remarks were most enlightening—I trust everyone will take them to heart."
He bowed slightly toward Umbridge and then toward Moody in turn. "Now one more thing. Quidditch try-outs will be held—"
Dumbledore had skilfully avoided passing any direct judgment on Moody's conduct.
Nor, of course, had he given Umbridge any chance to go on speaking. Instead, he simply brought the whole farce to a close.
"Well then so as not to take up any more of your precious rest, and so that we may all face tomorrow's challenges with full energy—I declare the start-of-term feast at an end.
Ah, yes—Prefects, please lead your House students back to your common rooms in an orderly fashion. Good night."
The moment Dumbledore finished speaking, the hall fell into a brief, vacuum-like silence.
Then, as though a long-pent flood had finally found its outlet—a deafening roar of chatter, scraping chair legs, and rustling belongings erupted all at once, swallowing up the entire hall.
Amid the clatter of tables and benches, the students leapt eagerly from their seats, talking excitedly as they walked about the astonishing scene they had just witnessed.
The subject, naturally, was the furious Moody and the publicly humiliated Umbridge.
"Neville, you've forgotten something again."
Hermione reminded him kindly. "You're supposed to help Parvati show the first-years the way!"
"Oh no!"
Reminded, Neville jumped up at once. His memory was never very good to begin with, and after everything that had just happened, he'd forgotten about it completely.
"Thanks, Hermione!"
He said, already dashing off toward Parvati.
A cluster of first-years came shuffling shyly down the aisle between the Gryffindor and Hufflepuff tables.
Every one of them tried to shrink to the back, not daring to stand out.
Just as had been remarked earlier, this year's new students looked unusually young.
Even the ones sorted into Gryffindor, a House known for courage, were no exception.
Still, their timidity came as something of a relief to Neville.
He'd half expected to have a pack of troublemakers on his hands.
"You probably won't believe this, but I actually remembered the password this time—"
Neville said in a low voice to Harry and Ron beside him, even as he kept pointing the first-years toward the staircase. "Go on, guess what it is."
"Riddles aren't really our strong suit, mate."
Ron grinned and glanced over at Sherlock. "You'll have to ask Sherlock for that one. Right, Sherlock?"
"Mimbulus mimbletonia."
Sherlock's gaze swept over Neville's right hand, where he was holding the same stunted little cactus that had sprayed Harry all over on the train.
Working that one out had cost him no effort at all.
"That's it exactly!"
Neville said excitedly.
Finally—finally, a password he could actually remember!
It hadn't been easy for him, not at all!
Sherlock smiled and nodded at Neville, then glanced back once more before walking out of the hall.
Umbridge was still sitting rigidly in her seat, looking starkly isolated against the noisy backdrop.
The simpering smile had long since vanished from her face, leaving only a twisted mixture of shame, rage, and disbelief.
With his keen powers of observation, Sherlock could even make out that her fists were clenched tight.
Her manicured pink nails had surely dug deep into her palms by now.
And the look she gave Moody's retreating back was filled with venomous hatred.
At the sight, Sherlock couldn't help a soft laugh.
It wasn't hard to deduce, from what had just happened, that this woman called Umbridge had indeed prepared carefully for her debut.
The reason was simple enough: she'd been trying to establish the Ministry's authority at Hogwarts or, more accurately, her own.
The pity was that the woman had no clear sense of her own place here.
She was nowhere near as important as she imagined herself to be.
And the Ministry badge carried nowhere near the weight she thought it did.
In short, the woman was both foolish and malicious.
With the Ministry having already publicly admitted Voldemort's return, for her to still try a stunt like this was just asking for trouble.
And so Mad-Eye Moody had given her, in the crudest manner possible, her very first lesson in what Hogwarts was really like.
As for Dumbledore's seemingly gentle closing remarks those, in truth, signalled distance, not warmth.
Her unrealistic fantasies had been thoroughly shattered.
Sherlock shook his head slightly. The self-important fool of a woman wasn't worth spending much more thought on.
If she proved too stubborn to learn and kept causing trouble, well someone would eventually teach her some manners.
For Sherlock, what mattered more about returning to Hogwarts once again was laying out his goals for the year.
It occurred to him that he'd already drawn up a plan before term began:
First, to press on and continue searching for Voldemort's remaining Horcruxes.
Second, to pursue every available means of dealing with the fragment of soul lodged inside Harry.
Third, to take the initiative in continually improving his own magical ability.
All three mattered, but finding the Horcruxes was the core of it they were the key to Voldemort's immortality, and destroying them was the necessary precondition for defeating him for good. Every other action ultimately pointed toward that end.
Dealing with the soul fragment in Harry's body was the safeguard. Even Voldemort himself didn't know it, he'd meant to split his soul into seven pieces, but had unwittingly torn off one extra fragment besides.
That fragment inside Harry gave him a mental connection to Voldemort one that left him open to being controlled, and one that could prove fatal once the other Horcruxes were destroyed.
Only by removing it could Harry stay safe and in control of himself throughout the search for the Horcruxes and the fight against Voldemort.
And besides the whole point of finding the Horcruxes was to destroy them, and Harry Potter himself counted as one.
Improving his own magical strength, meanwhile, was the basic guarantee underlying it all.
Granted, his own side had top-tier wizards like Dumbledore, who could go toe-to-toe with Voldemort.
And the Order of the Phoenix had no shortage of high-level fighters besides. But the stronger he himself became, the more it would help in accomplishing the first two goals.
For now, though better to get a good night's sleep first.
Even a detective as full of energy as he was could feel drowsy when there was no case at hand.
Or perhaps it was precisely because there was no case that he felt drowsy at all.
The next morning.
As was customary, Sherlock didn't take Harry and Neville out for morning training on the first day of term.
So, the three of them simply left the dormitory together to go down to breakfast.
No sooner had they reached the common room than Hermione caught up, falling into step beside Sherlock.
"She's getting better and better at this."
Harry murmured to Ron beside him, watching the two of them walk ahead.
"Too right, mate."
Ron lowered his voice and gave Harry a deliberate wink. "If you ask me, the two of them look more like they're going out than you and Cho Chang ever did."
Harry: "——"
If you're going to talk about Sherlock, talk about Sherlock why drag me into it?
"Ron, what are you on about?"
Hermione's hearing was unusually sharp, and the moment she caught Harry and Ron muttering behind her back about her and Sherlock, she spun around at once to ask.
"Oh—I was just saying it's nice weather today."
Hermione gave a "hmph," clearly not believing a word of it.
But her attention was quickly drawn to something new on the notice board.
A brightly coloured sheet of parchment had been pinned squarely in the center of the board, its crooked lettering all the more eye-catching for it.
"[FISTFULS OF GALLEONS]
Is your pocket money not covering your expenses?
Want to earn a bit more gold?
Contact Fred Weasley and George Weasley in the Gryffindor common room!
They can offer you an extracurricular odd job so simple it's almost entirely painless.
(Terribly sorry, but all work is undertaken entirely at the applicant's own risk.)"
Hermione's eyes widened in surprise, and she reached out to touch the parchment. "When did this go up?"
"Last night," Sherlock said evenly. "Originally, they meant to pin this notice right over that other one."
Hermione glanced at the notice beside it, which announced that the first Hogsmeade weekend of the year would be held in October.
"If they'd actually done that, it would have been completely out of line!"
Hermione said, her face looked stern. "Though even this isn't exactly right, I need to go have a word with Neville and Parvati."
"What do you need them for?"
Harry and Ron had drifted over by now, and Harry, who'd been reading the notice, asked, a little puzzled, when he heard her.
"Because they're prefects!"
Hermione, already climbing out through the portrait hole right on Sherlock's heels, called back, "It's their job to put a stop to this sort of thing."
Harry and Ron exchanged a glance, and each saw the same resigned exasperation in the other's eyes.
In that moment, the two of them were thinking the exact same thing.
Clearly, Hermione's old habit had flared up again.
It had to be said this had more than a little of the dog-chasing-mice, sticking-her-nose-in-where-it-wasn't-wanted about it.
Neither of them expected, though, that they'd run into the Weasley twins themselves at breakfast in the Great Hall.
And even more unexpectedly, it was Hermione herself who brought the subject up with the Weasley twins. "Fred, George, you can't go pinning recruitment notices for test subjects on the Gryffindor board."
"Why not?"
Fred, busy spreading jam on a piece of bread, looked up and raised an eyebrow at that. "This is our last year here, you know!
"We've got to make the most of it—do some proper market research, find out exactly what your average Hogwarts student wants to buy from a joke shop."
"And test our results properly, so we can come up with products that actually meet demand," George added.
"Our notice says it plain as anything—it's entirely voluntary, and the testers get paid in galleons."
"One side's willing to give it, the other's willing to take it and besides, we made a point of adding a risk warning."
"Even so, where exactly are you getting the start-up money for a joke shop?"
Hermione pressed on; arms crossed over her chest. "You'll need all your ingredients and raw materials, plus premises, packaging—all of that costs a great deal of money."
She eyed the two of them with open suspicion, clearly not believing they had that kind of money to spare.
As far as she was concerned, the brothers trying to make something out of nothing was the least of it.
What really worried her was the prospect of some overly curious test subject actually getting hurt.
To her surprise, the moment she asked the question, Fred shot a quick, carefully blank glance at Sherlock.
The look was so well concealed, so quick, it was like a bird skimming past a treetop.
But because Hermione had been watching them so closely the whole time, she caught it all the same.
Her heart gave a sudden lurch as she realized that this, somehow, had something to do with Sherlock too.
"It was me. I gave it to them."
Sure enough, Sherlock set down the cup in his hand, its base clinking softly against the table.
He looked at Hermione calmly. "I gave them my Triwizard Tournament winnings. Call it start-up capital."
The moment Harry saw Sherlock admit it openly in front of everyone, he threw up his hand at once. "Same here!"
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