"Uncle Benjamin!"
Frank's face drained of color. Tom was already turning. His foot connected with a sharp, practiced crack.
Frank's leg bent in a direction legs were not designed to bend. He went down screaming, his wand spinning away across the snow.
Tom caught it, applied a single measured force, and snapped it in two. He dropped the pieces without looking.
"This boy is unusual, everyone together, break through his defenses!"
The warning came from an old witch somewhere in the back. It shook the remaining Graves members out of their paralysis. They turned on Tom as one, and the courtyard erupted with spell-light, curses and jinxes crossing in every direction. Tom didn't bother dodging. He walked straight toward the nearest target through a shower of incoming spells, and let every single one of them land.
Of all twelve trials he had completed, the talent granted by the three-headed dog, the Iron Body, had looked, at first glance, like the most ordinary and useless reward of the lot. That impression was wrong. Its ceiling was extraordinarily high. It provided passive resistance as a baseline, and could be actively reinforced with magical power to push that defense to outright absurd levels, gradually becoming one of Tom's most reliable hidden assets.
He had tested its limits in the learning space already. Without actively channeling any magic into it, not even Ariana could breach his defenses unless she used the raw power of her Obscurus. And when he pushed his full magical output into it, even the greatest wizards of the age found themselves hitting something that wouldn't give. Grindelwald had tried a few rounds and shaken his head each time. He and Dumbledore could reshape terrain and bend weather to their will, yet they remained, at the end of the day, physically fragile. Tom, meanwhile, had become something closer to a walking fortress.
How was it that every absurd advantage found its way to this one boy?
Against the Graves family in this courtyard, Tom didn't even need to draw on the active component. The passive effect alone was more than sufficient. He stood in the center of their combined assault and felt nothing.
The screaming started shortly after.
Tom moved through them systematically, going from person to person with focused precision. Some he knocked unconscious. Others received a broken arm or a shattered knee. The methods varied. The ending did not.
Every time, he finished by snapping their wand.
A wizard's wand was nearly an extension of themselves, the longer they had carried it, the more attuned it became to them, until it was almost a living partnership. Many wizards who lost their wands and were forced to replace them found their spellwork irrevocably diminished, never quite recovering that same connection.
Tom didn't kill anyone.
He simply destroyed what mattered most.
The idea had come from Grindelwald, as it happened. Two dark minds in close proximity had a way of sharpening each other. Grindelwald called it mutual inspiration. Tom called it getting useful things for free.
...
With half the family down, the survivors finally broke. A few of them attempted to Disapparate toward the nearest MACUSA liaison office.
"Usagi."
Tom stepped lightly to one side, crushed the old witch's wand hand as an afterthought, and looked up at the sky.
A dragon's roar split the clouds, vast and reverberating, shaking the snow from the surrounding hills. Usagi's black silhouette nosed out from the cloud cover and exhaled a torrent of dragonfire directly downward. Both wizards mid-Disapparition lost their concentration and crashed back to earth in an undignified heap.
"Did you not see the sign?" Tom was already closing the distance to the nearest man. "Graves and dogs. No entry or exit."
He hit him with a shoulder tackle that sent him spitting blood into the snow.
With Usagi overhead cutting off any escape, the remaining Graves members were truly cornered. All they could do was watch helplessly as Tom walked through their spellfire untouched and put them down one by one, snapping each wand afterward like punctuation.
"Riddle! Robert will not let this go! MACUSA will not let this go!"
"Avada Kedavra!"
When only one man remained standing, he reached for an Unforgivable. It was the first spell in the entire encounter that made Tom actually move. He sidestepped it cleanly, and the green light continued on its path and struck one of the already-fallen Graves members lying behind him.
The man who had cast it went very still, his eyes wide and hollow.
"No..."
He had not killed Tom. He had killed his own aunt.
"Well." Tom exhaled slowly, something almost like sympathy in his voice. "You're in a terrible state. Let me put you out of it."
He walked toward the man, reached out, and closed his hand around his throat with measured, deliberate pressure.
A single crack.
Tom had his principles. The Graves family had come at him with everything short of the Unforgivables, and he had shown corresponding restraint. The moment someone crossed that line, the restraint ended. It was only fair.
He dropped the man into the snow without ceremony and looked up.
There. Fourth floor of the manor. A window.
An old man stood at it, watching him. White-haired, slightly stooped, weathered in the way of someone who had seen a great deal and stopped being surprised by most of it. His posture was calm. His eyes were not afraid.
Their gazes met across the open air.
Tom smiled, turned, and walked into the manor.
He followed the stairs up to the fourth floor and pushed open the door.
The room was enormous, well over two hundred square meters. Apart from the old man, three young witches and wizards were huddled inside, shaking against the far wall beside a side door. Tom gave them a single glance and dismissed them from his attention. His gaze settled on the old man, and he offered a pleasant, unhurried smile as he introduced himself.
"Hello. I'm Tom Riddle."
The old man regarded him with perfect composure. Not a flicker of grief for the two family members he had just watched die. Not a trace of fear.
After a moment, he spoke quietly.
"I am Percival Graves."
Tom's smile deepened considerably.
Well, well.
An old acquaintance, in a manner of speaking.