Alister stood, and the world assaulted him.
His senses had been dialed up to a degree that bordered on painful. He could hear the low, rhythmic thumping of the Black Lake's tides against the castle foundations hundreds of feet below. He could hear the heartbeat of a spider weaving a web in the corner of the ceiling. He looked at the dust motes dancing in a shaft of moonlight and found he could track the trajectory of every single particle.
"Tier Two," he whispered. His voice sounded deeper, resonating in his chest with a new timbre.
He looked down at his hands. They didn't look monstrous; his fingers were still long and artistic, his frame lean. But the density of the muscle beneath the skin felt different. Taut. Like steel cable wound under silk.
He needed to test it.
He walked—carefully, deliberately suppressing the urge to bolt—over to a pile of broken furniture in the corner. He picked up a thick, solid leg from a discarded oak desk. It was dense wood, seasoned and hard.
Alister wrapped his fingers around the center of the block and simply closed his hand.
There was a wet, crunching sound. The wood fibers were crushed into pulp under his grip, splinters exploding outward as his fist closed completely. He opened his hand, letting the sawdust and compressed wood fragments fall to the floor. It had felt like squeezing a block of soft clay.
A dark smile touched his lips. But strength was only half of the equation.
He turned his gaze to the door at the far end of the classroom, perhaps ten meters away. He took a breath, focusing on the concept of movement.
He pushed off the balls of his feet.
The world blurred.
It wasn't just fast; it was a violation of physics. He crossed the ten-meter gap in a fraction of a heartbeat. The sensation was jarring—one moment he was by the window, and before his brain could fully process the visual input, his nose was inches from the heavy oak door.
A gust of wind, created by his own displacement, slammed into his back a split second later, scattering papers and dust across the room.
100 meters per second.
He looked down at his shoes; the rubber soles had left black skid marks on the stone floor from the friction of his acceleration.
If he had been any less durable, the G-force alone would have snapped his neck. But this "Tier Two" physique, absorbed the kinetic stress as easily as breathing.
He was faster than a cheetah, faster than a broomstick at launch. In the confines of a duel, he would be a blur that could close the distance before an opponent could even finish the incantation of a shield charm.
Alister steadied his breathing, the rush of his inhuman speed still tingling in his extremities. But physical dominance was only the vessel; magic was the payload. The true purpose of the Catalyst Potion and the Tier 2 physique was to reinforce the conduit—to turn his body into a superconductor for magic energy.
He turned back to the center of the room, facing the debris of the desk he had crushed. It was time to test the processing power of his new nervous system.
He raised his right and left hands empty, fingers splayed.
The goal was Dual Casting—the holy grail of combat magic. To split the mind and the magical core into two distinct, simultaneous streams.
"Focus," he murmured.
He visualized the pathways. Through his right arm: Incendio. Through his left arm: Glacius. Fire and Ice. Two opposing frequencies. Two contradictory intents.
He pushed the magic outward.
"Incendio. Glacius."
The result was immediate and violent. A jet of orange flame burst from his right hand, but it sputtered, pulsing erratically. Simultaneously, a beam of freezing white light shot from his left hand, but it was thin and fractured.
The air between the two spells shimmered with distortion. The conflicting magical signals were too much for his current circuits to isolate. The feedback jarred his teeth, a sharp, dissonant hum vibrating through his bones. The spells collided in mid-air as a messy, unstable explosion of steam and lukewarm sparks that fizzled out before hitting the target.
Alister dropped his hands, frowning. "Unstable."
He could do it, technically. The magic had left his body. But in a duel, stability was everything. That half-second of stuttering output would be fatal against a master. His mind could command the separation, but his spirit—or perhaps the metaphysical architecture of his current physique—couldn't fully insulate the two channels from bleeding into each other.
"Let's try resonance instead of dissonance," he decided.
He leveled both hands at the far wall, visualizing the same formula, the same frequency, doubled.
"Depulso."
This time, there was no hesitation. No stutter.
A massive, invisible hammer slammed into the air. The force was perfectly synchronized, the output from his both hands merging into a single, devastating wavefront. The remaining furniture in the room didn't just slide backward; it was blasted into splinters against the stone wall with a concussive crack that shook the dust from the ceiling.
It was flawless. The energy flowed through him like water through a wide pipe, unrestricted and terrifyingly potent.
Alister lowered his arms.
"Tier 2 physique enables me to two same spells simultaneously," he mused, looking at his palms. "I can double my output, double my fire rate, and overwhelm any standard shield with brute force."
But true multi-casting—the ability to weave a shield with one hand while casting a curse with the other, or to transfigure the floor while summoning lightning—was still out of reach. The neural and magical pathways required to hold two completely different realities in his mind and body without them interfering with each other requires at least tier 3 physique.
He concluded, his voice echoing in the empty room. "To perfectly isolate the magical circuits, to make the mind truly bifurcated... that will take time. And more resources."
He wasn't disappointed, though. He was faster than a broomstick, strong enough to crush bone, and capable of projecting double the magical power of a normal wizard. For now, that would be enough.
He cast a quick Reparo on the room. It was nearly dawn. He pulled his hood up, his movements blurring slightly as he adjusted his speed to a human pace, and slipped out of the room, leaving the smell of ozone and success behind him.
______________________________________________
Alister spent his following days adjusting to his increased strength. It was three days until holiday's end, Alister was secluded in the deepest, quietest corner of the library. A stack of books on magical theory sat ignored beside him. He wasn't reading; he was writing.
His quill moved across a fresh scroll with mechanical precision, sketching complex diagrams of the human nervous system overlaid with ley-line pathways.
Alister paused, ink hovering over the parchment. The problem with this world was glaringly obvious to him now as he found in his first charm class.
Wizards treated magical power like height—something that simply "happened" as you aged. A first-year had a small pool; a seventh-year had a larger one; an adult had a mature one. They believed that the only way to get stronger was to learn more spells or wait for puberty to finish. It was a passive, biological drift.
It was an appalling waste of potential.
"Inefficient," Alister muttered, his eyes narrowing. "They focus entirely on the software—spells, wand movements, incantations—and completely ignore the hardware."
He looked down at his own hands. His journey to Tier 1 had required a brutal, instinctive manipulation of raw magic—the kind of "perfect control" that usually only manifested in Obscurials or prodigies. If a normal student tried to force their magic through their channels the way he had, they would burn out their core or detonate.
He needed to engineer a bridge. A "Universal Magic Circulation Method."
"It needs to be a closed loop," he theorized, drawing a circle over the diagram of the chest cavity. "The original method required conscious direction of every particle. This new version... it must be automated through rhythm."
The goal was to create a "Lesser Orbit," a downgraded, stabilized version of his own internal cycling method. It needed to be a system that didn't require perfect control, something that used physiological anchors like breathing rhythms to safely guide magic through the body, slowly eroding blockages and widening channels over years rather than forcing them open in an instant.
He began to sketch a rough diagram of the human chest cavity, attempting to map a safe route for raw magic to travel alongside the circulatory system.
However, as soon as the quill touched the paper, the sheer magnitude of the task crashed down on him.
He paused, the ink pooling slightly at the tip of the nib. The variables were endless. He had to account for different magical affinities, varying physical constitutions, and the chaotic nature of adolescent magical cores.
A slight miscalculation in the rhythm could cause magical deviation, leading to internal bleeding or permanent squib-status. He needed safety valves, mental visualizations to act as governors, and a failsafe mechanism to disperse energy if the user lost focus.
Alister sighed, leaning back in his chair. This wasn't a homework assignment he could finish in an afternoon. This was magical engineering on a fundamental level. It would require cross-referencing obscure texts on Eastern mysticism, studying the biological pathways of magical creatures, and months of theoretical modeling before he could even think about human trials.
He closed the notebook, the single page of rough notes the only physical evidence of an ambition that could eventually reshape the magical world. It would take months, perhaps the rest of the school year, to untangle the complexities and create a working prototype.
Sliding the notebook into his bag, Alister left the library and made his way through the dim, torch-lit corridors toward the dungeons. His route took him along the third-floor corridor, past the heavy, iron-bound door of the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom.
He slowed his pace as he passed it. The room was dark and silent, the door locked tight.
It stood as a testament to one of the most potent and petty pieces of magic in modern history—the curse laid by Voldemort himself. The position had become a revolving door of incompetence, misfortune, and tragedy. Currently, the post was sitting completely vacant. The rumor mill suggested that Dumbledore had finally run out of applicants brave—or foolish—enough to sign the contract.
For now, the students were left to fend for themselves, relying on sporadic self-study sessions in the library or makeshift lectures hastily covered by Professor McGonagall and Snape in their free periods. It was a logistical nightmare and a glaring weakness in the curriculum. To weave a spell that manipulated fate and probability so consistently... it was a terrifyingly impressive feat of intent.
He shook his head, pushing the thoughts of cursed probability aside. It wasn't his problem to solve; he had his own problems to solve.
He adjusted the strap of his bag and continued down the hall, his footsteps echoing against the stone.
"I don't know who will be the idiot who will take the risk while knowing the place is cursed," he muttered to the empty corridor, a smile touching his lips as he disappeared into the shadows of the staircase.
(END OF CHAPTER)
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