The residual magical heat on the dueling platform had not yet fully faded; a faint ozone tang still clung to everyone's nostrils. What had happened there, an alteration of everyone's expectation and understanding, was imprinted in the minds of the onlookers like the scar left by a precise surgical incision.
After a silence as deep as a grave, the crowd erupted as though a volcano had broken.
"My God!"
"How could he have predicted that?!"
As soon as the meeting was declared over, the club members who had been containing themselves spilled forward like a flock of birds blown from a tree. They surged around the figure who stood calm in the middle of the arena until there was no room to breathe.
"Alan!"
"Alan! How did you do it?!"
A senior Hufflepuff, face flushed, waved his arms and stammered, voice trembling with excitement. "It had to be Divination, some advanced prophecy we've never seen!" cried a Ravenclaw girl, her eyes shining with equal parts reverence and fanaticism. "How could you possibly know every single move Flint would make, every tiny twitch?"
Questions poured in like a broken dam. Every young face broadcast the same reaction: extreme curiosity, baffled shock, and a primitive worship of what seemed like miracle-working power. They stared at Alan as if at an unreachable summit.
Alan's expression remained unchanged beneath the swarm of attention. He neither basked in the attention nor cultivated mystery. His gaze swept calmly over the excited faces, less the gaze of a celebrated hero and more the steady appraisal of a seasoned instructor facing a group of eager students.
Then, with everyone watching, he reached into the breast pocket of his mantle. The simple motion had an almost talismanic effect; the surrounding clamour dropped by at least eight degrees. Every eye locked on his hand.
He did not produce a crystal ball or some glittering, rune-etched scroll. He drew out a single sheet of parchment, folded, ordinary in appearance.
Alan pinched a corner between long, precise fingers and unfolded it.
A collective intake of breath rippled through the crowd. What was revealed was not any magic circle or ancient sigil they could recognize. Instead there was a dense, intricate diagram: countless lines, arrows and branches, like the most complicated root system or a spider's web entangling innumerable prey. It was exactly what another discipline would name: a decision tree. Cold, precise, built from logic and probabilities.
"First," Alan began, his voice clear and penetrating enough to push through the last whispers, "I did not use Divination."
His opening sentence doused every romantic notion of magical miracle with a bucket of cold water. But what followed ignited an even fiercer storm, one called intelligence.
"Second," he continued, fixing his gaze on the Slytherin student who had earlier lamented Flint's defeat, "duels, especially those fought by wizards like Flint who depend heavily on instinct and emotional outbursts, are not as random and inaccessible as you imagine."
"On the contrary."
Alan's finger tapped the topmost node of the decision tree, the start node, the moment the duel begins.
"Every single choice he makes can be calculated."
The word struck like a hammer. Calculate? To reduce a heated, glorious wizard duel to computation was to overturn the worldview they had grown up with.
"Any duel," Alan began his explanation, "can be decomposed into a series of sequential decisions based on each combatant's habits, magical power, and immediate psychology. What I did was to perform a thorough data analysis of Flint's personal decision model in advance."
He traced a main branch down the chart with his finger. "I obtained footage crystals of every Slytherin Quidditch match Flint played last year, no great difficulty; the Weasley brothers are well-liked throughout Gryffindor." He paused, then added quietly, "Then I spent three hours."
"Three whole hours," he repeated, "extracting every scene in which Flint engaged physically or magically with another player. I observed the angle of every wand motion, the spells he selected, how he reacted to provocation, his facial expressions in victory and defeat…"
"I digitized everything and analyzed it."
His tone was flat and academic, like describing an ordinary, tedious mathematics problem, but to the students it sounded like thunder.
"I found that he uses exactly seventeen distinct opening patterns, no more, no less. That includes his favoured spells and a near-involuntary half-step of the left foot before he casts." He let the absurdity of that small detail sink in.
"I also computed, for each opening, the probability-ranked list of thirty-five likely follow-up attacks he would choose if his initial move were evaded or parried."
Alan's finger rested on one of the countless terminal branches, nodes representing innumerable eventualities.
"This diagram," he said, looking at the stunned crowd, "is the bespoke decision tree I built for Flint from that raw data."
"Algorithm." The foreign term landed cool and rational, at odds with the heated, magical world around them, and slashed through the hall like a knife.
"So the paper Fred carried, with its stream of prompts, those were not prophecy," Alan pronounced, voice steady. "They were simply the theoretically optimal response algorithm I precomputed for each possible move Flint might make."
He looked at them and delivered the final, clinical verdict with a voice that was as clear as it was unyielding.
"Fred's actions on the platform were not 'combat' in the original sense. He was executing, with mechanical precision, a program we had written for him."
"And Flint…" Alan's eyes seemed to look past the moment and into an inevitability, "from the instant he chose his opening and uttered his first spell, he stepped into a network of traps we had laid out, branch by branch, each decision driving him further into the web."
"He lost, therefore, entirely as a matter of course."
Silence fell deeper than before. If Alan's earlier demonstration had seemed a miracle, now he had stripped away the cloak of wonder and revealed what lay beneath: a cold, meticulous core of logic, brilliant, clinical, and lit by the pure light of intellect. He had translated a duel of passion and blood into data and then reduced a living, powerful adversary into code.
The theory was subversive, a lightning strike that cleaved the students' traditional thinking in two. A door to a new world yawned open before them.
After that brief hush, the reaction was overwhelming, more intense and noisier than anything that had come before.
"My God…"
"War, war can be like this?!"
"Isn't this cheating? No, this is ten thousand times beyond cheating. This is pure intelligence!"
"Teach me, Alan, please, teach us!"
Desire blossomed in every pair of eyes, an unprecedented hunger. For the first time they saw that besides raw magic and spellcraft, there existed a method that reduced victory to a lower dimension of reasoning: a kind of intellectual trump card, a "dimensional reduction" performed with raw, pristine wisdom.
~~----------------------
[email protected] / Dreamer20
Christmas Special Discount Code: HNY2026
(Valid till 31st December )