The magical riot burned through him slower now.
For years, the training ground had been Cassius' crucible—where he had learned to drag raw magic out of his veins, to shape it, to weaponize it until the air shimmered around him with dangerous brilliance, this training at first only occuring once per day, sometime even needing breaks to recover between days, then once developed enough his mentor Grindelwald increased the challenge by demanding training multiple times in the same day, more recently Cassius was being made to train almost constantly, trying to get the last drops of juice out of the thoroughly pulped lemon so to speak.
But now, approaching ten years old, each lesson took longer.
Harder.
When he tried to call the energy outward, it resisted, clinging stubbornly to his bones, compressing into something denser, heavier.
A sign, his mentor said.
His veins were condensing.
His core was crystallizing.
No longer an untamed river of power but the beginnings of a reservoir waiting to be tapped.
It was progress.
And yet—progress hurt.
Every evening, when he staggered back to his room and collapsed into the leather chair by his desk, he felt wrung dry.
His hand shook as he unfolded the day's batch of Hogwarts reports.
Feeling as if he had just been put through an intense p90x gym workout meant to get him prison fit!
The ink soothed him.
If his body was reaching its bottleneck, then the castle was blooming for him in compensation.
~
By the end of the first year, the results were undeniable: the Muggle-borns—his children, his seeds—outstripped wizardborn peers in almost every subject.
"Transfiguration: top five all Muggle-born."
"Charms: nine of the top ten first-years."
"Potions: Snape snarled but admitted the written work was impeccable. He favored Slytherins in practice, but could not hide the scores. though he snarled a bunch about how the muggle-borns were treating potions like it was chemistry."
It was beautiful.
Delicious.
A blunted nose to those high and mighty generational wizards and arrogant pure-bloods.
Failing to even meet the standard of children whom to their knowledge hadnt even know a thing about real magic less than a year ago.
Cassius grinned at the parchment, imagining the whispers flowing through the ministry, and local haunts.
Even Hufflepuff, swollen with new blood, held its own against the other houses.
They did not win the House Cup, but they filled the classrooms with a noise that could not be ignored, managing to earn a respectable number of points to come in 2nd place.
Slytherin, though small, clung to the top of the rankings through Snape's favoritism and Quidditch victories.
Gryffindor floundered, dragged down by its own pranksters, landing them in last place much to Professor McGonagal's displeasure.
~
The Defense Against the Dark Arts professor had cracked at last.
Cassius read the news in silence, eyes narrowing at every detail:
Found in the Restricted Section at midnight.
Chalk circles scrawled across the floor.
Books on ritual magic piled high, some charred from magical backlash.
Notes found on the scene depicting Godric Gryffindor's lost knowledge.
This revelation made Cassius snicker since a pair of secrets did exist in the library and one of them was certainly Griffindor's but it did not need a ritual such as this one to find, and the item required to do so would be arriving at the school next year.
The man now lay in St. Mungo's, barely clinging to life.
Cassius tapped the report against his desk.
A fool, yes.
But a fool with ambition.
he had not sought safety—he had sought power.
Cassius respected that much, at least.
Still, his failure fed Cassius' plan.
Every broken professor was another crack in Dumbledore's façade of control.
~
The Weasley twins rose higher in the reports, their antics escalating month by month.
"Turned an entire corridor into a skating rink overnight."
"Transfigured Slytherin's breakfast sausages into snakes—caused three fainting spells."
"Built a fireworks charm that spells rude words across the sky."
Cassius leaned back, amused.
They were reckless, unfocused, but undeniably brilliant.
One day, he promised himself, he would test them personally.
If they could be sharpened, they could become weapons—or distractions—worth their weight in gold.
For now, they destabilized Hogwarts in ways he could not have planned better.
~
By June, Cassius' own growth ground to a crawl.
His mentor—faceless as always, voice echoing through the training ground—explained the truth plainly.
"You are condensing, Cassius. The channels shrink to refine. The core hardens to prepare for true expansion. To force more now would tear you apart, you've got a year left to go, but your training comes to an end, rest and prepare for what is to come next, your plans will require a greater amount of your attention to come to pass."
Cassius hated it.
He had grown accustomed to relentless progress, to seeing numbers tick upward, skills climb higher.
Now, every practice session left him with diminishing returns.
Still, he endured.
He poured his frustration into discipline, into reading, into the endless reports from Hogwarts.
If he could not grow outward, he would grow deeper.
~
July arrived, and with it, the approach of his tenth birthday.
Cassius stared at the gleaming certificates on his desk: three O.W.L.s, achieved last year.
Outstanding in every one.
Enough to rattle the Ministry, enough to make Dumbledore's eyes narrow with suspicion.
The question whispered in his mind: Should he sit for the N.E.W.T.s now?
He could.
He was ready.
It would shatter precedent, shake the wizarding world to its foundations.
And yet…
He closed his eyes, fingers brushing the edges of the papers.
No.
To leap now would be to reveal too much.
Better to hold the cards close, to let the whispers of his genius grow on their own.
He needed to make himself appear less threatening for now, so that Dumbledore and even the ministry could not prepare to combat him instead focusing on the to them greater threat of Voldemort.
Patience was the sharper weapon.
The coming school year would bring with it another round of challenges for Dumbledore and the rest of the hogwarts staff, already with the students having been sent home for summer vacation they would be hard at work preparing for the coming new term.
The quill and book of hogwarts had already been hard at work recording all the new students, and even before the christmas break had reached them Dumbledore began to panic.
The surprising number of students this year, was about to be outshined, half a year of birthdays still remained and already the admittance would show a coming surge of first years to bring about an estimated 200 new faces to the school.
Bringing the total enrollment to the school over 1,000 the current number of staff would be pressed to accomodate such a number, so plans needed to be worked out about signing on new teachers to expand the classes, or even split them up so that houses did not share classes with one another to allow the teachers to still instruct the same number of people per class.