"...someone like me?"
Three adults absorbed this in silence. Ariana quietly lowered her head.
She had always been comfortable with her appearance. Her brothers had called her lovely from the time she was small, and placed alongside Daphne, Hermione, and the rest of Tom's circle, she had never felt she fell short. But compared to Tom directly, there had always been a gap, and now that gap had become something she couldn't even measure the bottom of.
What if Tom stopped finding her worth looking at?
The thought arrived and began to settle, and Ariana let it, turning it over in her mind with the particular thoroughness of someone who had found a worry and intended to finish it.
Tom had no idea a casual, self-congratulatory throwaway comment had started this entire chain of thought. He had already moved on to examining his own changes with the focused interest of a researcher cataloguing results.
Appearances were secondary. He was a person who appreciated beauty in others. Possessing it himself was a pleasant fact and nothing more. He was not a man who coasted on his looks. Whatever softness he'd allowed himself that first year of school had long since been replaced by something more durable.
A series of tests followed, and the results were satisfying without being overwhelming.
Physical constitution and soul quality had both improved, but not dramatically. The golden apple's primary nature was immortality, not combat enhancement. What he'd gained in body and soul were byproducts of a more fundamental change, the raising of his life's essential vitality to a level that simply didn't permit deterioration. The magic increase was proportional and similarly understated.
The most significant change was harder to quantify. Tom felt full, completely and continuously. No fatigue accumulated. A battery of tests that should have left him tired left him exactly as he'd started, as though he were perpetually inside the learning space, sustaining the stable and concentrated state that place provided.
And then there was the divine power.
It resembled what a higher-order being might inherently possess, and one golden apple was not enough to fully awaken it. What it had done was push his magic through a transformation, the way a magical circuit's compression amplified output, but the change ran deeper than compression. The magic that came out on the other side was not the same kind that went in.
"Come on then. Let's test it properly."
Numbers were less useful than a real opponent. Tom entered the learning space and went straight for Grindelwald.
Grindelwald experienced something he hadn't felt in a while: genuine unease. A premonition, specifically, that he was about to embarrass himself.
He genuinely feared that he might no longer be able to hold Tom down. And if that happened, his position as teacher became very difficult to justify. Would he be demoted to Ariana's table?
The result confirmed his fears without fully answering the question. Tom, who had always been close to the Century King threshold, had stopped holding himself below it. Grindelwald pushed himself harder than he'd needed to in years and still couldn't win. He could manage the surface appearance of advantage, controlling tempo and spacing, but it was a performance built on technique and experience, not on being stronger.
Tom hadn't even accessed Willpower-Embedded Spellcasting yet, the signature ability that marked a true Century King. He was doing all of this purely on divine power augmentation, and the difference it made to both attack and defense was substantial. Even blocking a simple Disarming Charm felt wrong to Grindelwald, as though his own magic were working uphill.
After thirty minutes, Grindelwald called a halt.
More of the same would produce more of the same. He couldn't finish Tom and Tom couldn't finish him. It had started to resemble his current arrangement with Dumbledore, which was not a comparison he enjoyed.
"Andros. This old man's tapped out. Your turn."
Tom was in excellent spirits as he turned to face Andros, who laughed, stepped into the space, and took Grindelwald's place without ceremony.
Another thirty minutes later, Tom was pressed firmly into the earth up to his waist, contemplating the sky and his own decisions.
Ravenclaw walked over and looked down at him pleasantly. "Still feeling smug?"
"Not particularly." Tom considered shaking his head and found the geometry of his situation didn't allow it.
"You did very well," Andros said. "A little more growth and I genuinely won't be able to manage you."
Tom was currently a level eighty player in equipment scaled for level one hundred and twenty, and he was already giving the endgame bosses a serious workout. Once he hit one hundred and made the class advancement, Andros's level advantage would evaporate entirely.
The ground cracked. Tom climbed out.
"I don't need consolation. What you two should be doing is some honest self-reflection. I've gotten stronger, yes. But neither of you has progressed in how many years? A third-year student keeping you occupied for thirty minutes apiece is not the compliment you think it is."
The two older wizards' expressions darkened simultaneously. Privately, both were thinking that the boy had an absolutely vicious streak and not a gram of mercy in him.
"Tom," Grindelwald said, with the restraint of a man who had a request and knew it. "When are you going to plant the tree?"
The golden apple's effects had been remarkable enough that even he couldn't pretend disinterest. If he could eat one himself, holding Dumbledore down for the rest of eternity became a considerably more realistic prospect.
"Let me think about it. Though don't expect too much. The eternal lifespan effect will carry over, but the divine power will be weaker in cultivated fruit than in the original. Possibly significantly weaker."
Tom turned the problem over in his mind.
Eating the apple had come with knowledge attached, a complete understanding of how the tree grew, what it needed, what it would produce, settling into his awareness the way a memory settles after sleep. He knew already that what he cultivated would fall short of what he'd eaten. The original had been a mythological artifact made real. A cultivated copy, however carefully tended, grew in a different world under different conditions. The gap was inevitable.
The immediate question was where to plant it and how to feed it.
He thought for a moment, and then something clicked.
"What do you all think," Tom said, "about me relocating Voldemort's lake?"
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