Harry Potter: Reborn as Regulus Black

Chapter 305: Two Ways to Fight [bonus]

Bella drove her wand into the floor, magic flooding from the tip into stone.

Dark tiles split open along the path of the surge, rubble and dust blasting toward Regulus.

Her left hand whipped upward at the same time. The collapsed banquet table in the center of the hall twisted and righted itself.

Four legs stretched into spikes, the tabletop cracked into jagged slabs with serrated edges, and the whole thing flipped over, launched from behind the rubble pile, hurtling straight at him.

Bella flicked a Diffindo through the gaps between the table legs, the silver arc hugging the table’s flank, its first half hidden by the table’s trajectory, only emerging from behind the shattered planks halfway across.

Regulus sidestepped twice to the right. Protego deflected the Diffindo....

He tapped his wand once on the floor in the table’s path.

Transfiguration seeped into the tiles. The stone’s surface texture vanished in an instant, grain smoothed to nothing, seams filled, the entire stretch rendered frictionless.

When the table hit that patch its legs skidded sideways, direction wrenching ninety degrees. It scraped past him and crashed into the wall, spraying wood splinters and plaster from the impact point.

The dust hadn’t settled before Bella’s wand was moving again.

Dozens of stone fragments from earlier explosions floated up in front of her simultaneously, stretching, narrowing, sharpening. Tips glowed red-hot, heat distorting the air around them in visible waves.

The same trick Regulus had used on her. Only more numerous, more dense.

The stone spikes screamed forward in a wall, covering enough width to seal off both his flanks.

Regulus flicked his wand three times in quick succession, each pulse of magic striking the tip of one of the leading spikes from a distance.

The three needle-points began to swell, expanding from forearm-width to fist-sized irregular stone spheres, their flight speed plummeting.

The spheres flattened further, spreading paper-thin, stretching to the size of tabletops, unfurling in midair.

The spikes behind them couldn’t veer in time. Momentum carried them straight in.

A dense chorus of cracking. Spikes punched into the stone sheets and shattered, fragments clattering across the floor in a cascade.

Every one of Bella’s spikes was destroyed, but she was no longer where she’d been standing.

She’d started moving the instant the spikes launched, feet grinding over rubble as she circled to his flank.

A horizontal sweep of her wand, and the cracked load-bearing wall on the side of the great hall tore free from its structure.

Bricks bulged outward. Morite between the joints crumbled to powder and rained down.

The entire wall ripped from the building’s skeleton, tilting in midair into a vast slab, and drove toward Regulus.

A Blasting Curse threaded through the gaps before the bricks had fully separated.

He sidestepped. The Blasting Curse detonated behind him, the shockwave kicking up ground debris that peppered his Protego in a staccato of cracks.

As he landed he lashed out a Reducto. Bella dodged. It struck the moving wall and only knocked a few loose bricks from its edge.

A backhand Blasting Curse followed. She used the wall as cover, sparks spitting from between the joints.

The wall bore down on him.

Tons of masonry descended with the grinding moan of structural collapse, bricks squeezing against bricks in a sound that set teeth on edge.

Regulus raised his wand and aimed at the center of the wall.

Transfiguration punched from wand tip into the wall’s heart. The bricks began to fade from dark grey to pale grey to a dead, chalky white. Their composition shifted from stone to raw earth, turning brittle, dry, too weak to bear their own weight.

The wall struck a jutting stump of broken pillar in the wreckage and split down the middle, the crack branching in every direction.

Tons of material disintegrated into powder midair. A grey-white cloud of dust billowed forward several meters on the shockwave.

Bella’s Piercing Curse was already threading through the dust, needle-thin and fast, the pale beam nearly invisible among the falling grit.

Regulus tilted his head. The beam grazed past his left ear and bored a charred pinhole into the wall behind him.

In the same instant the Piercing Curse cleared the dust cloud, Bella’s wand traced an arc at her side.

The floor erupted.

Across a wide stretch of the banquet hall’s center, tiles peeled upward along their seams, section after section cracking open and standing on end.

Broken edges revealed raw earth beneath, the rotation scooping up shattered wood and candelabra wreckage, grinding it between stone and soil.

Curses followed.

Bella ran behind the rolling wall of upturned flagstones, her silhouette flickering in and out of the dust. Spells lanced from gaps in the stone barrier.

Blasting Curses, Severing Charms, Piercing Curses, Reductor Curses, one after another without pause, using the churning floor as mobile cover, firing from one gap and shifting to the next.

The rolling stone cut off his forward line of sight. She tracked his blind spots while moving, every curse launched from outside her own visual range, aimed purely on instinct, reading the terrain and his movement patterns.

This was what she’d honed on real battlefields. Combat intuition.

She didn’t need to see him. She knew roughly where he stood, which direction he’d dodge, and she put the next curse there before he arrived.

Regulus stepped back. His first retreat.

A Diffindo chased through a gap in the stone. He flicked one away with his wand, bounced another off a Protego, and sent a backhand Reducto at the nearest section of rolling floor.

The Reducto hit the slab dead center, but he didn’t shatter it.

He altered only that section’s internal structure, made it brittle. Gravity pulled the weakened slab down half a foot, opening an angle difference in midair.

He slipped through the gap at the edge of that angle.

At the same time his wand snapped downward, Transfiguration seeping into the seams beneath his feet. The joints softened.

The rolling force driving the floor came from the magic Bella had poured in, pushing from back to front, each slab lifting the next.

The moment the seams went soft, that chain of force broke. The leading three or four slabs lost their support and collapsed backward with a thunderous crash.

Slab struck slab, front to back, the entire rolling advance reversed.

The dust thickened.

Somewhere inside it Bella swore, her voice swallowed by the din of crashing stone.

The ground beneath her was caving in. Her own creation was folding back on itself. She jumped twice, landed on a slab that still held, and found her footing.

A Diffindo sliced out of the dust.

She caught it on her wand. A second came from a different angle. She twisted clear.

The third she never saw coming. The Diffindo grazed her side, opening a slit in her robes. Pale skin beneath, and a thin line of blood.

Bella gritted her teeth and charged out of the dust, planting a foot on a toppled pillar section, using the height to scan below.

She spotted Regulus standing seven or eight meters away. Dust flowed around him like water around a stone. He stood in it the same way he’d stand in an open field.

Breathing even. Robes clean. Not a hair out of place.

She leapt from the pillar, launching a Blasting Curse on landing.

Regulus tilted his head. The curse sailed past his ear and detonated behind him. A backhand Piercing Curse answered.

Bella sidestepped. The beam struck the rubble at her back.

They faced each other again.

Dust drifted slowly down.

Bella stood atop the debris, chest heaving, sweat and grime streaked across her forehead, mouth still stretched wide, teeth still bared.

Magic still poured off her, but the rate had slowed. The large-scale Transfiguration had cost her dearly.

Regulus stood where he was, wand hanging at his side, watching her.

Nothing but rubble and ruin between them.

The banquet hall no longer resembled a banquet hall.

The floor had been peeled up and collapsed back, leaving an uneven landscape of ridges and trenches. More than half the pillars had fallen. Two walls had caved in. Deep cracks split the ceiling, and lime dust and grit still sifted down in a steady rain.

Orion’s wand was out of his robes now, held low at his side. A translucent silver barrier spread in front of him.

Debris, dust, deflected curses, the blast radius covered most of the hall.

The barrier held. Fragments and stray spells struck it now and then with a soft clatter and bounced away.

He stood at the front.

Lucius was half a step behind his right shoulder, left arm around Narcissa, right hand gripping his wand.

His eyes never left the center of the hall. Brow smooth, lips still, pupils tracking.

He was studying Regulus’s approach.

Those last exchanges, an entire wall ripped down, the floor torn open, that was the ceiling of what a witch or wizard could produce within the bounds of conventional spells and Transfiguration.

But through all of it, Regulus hadn’t once cast a curse more powerful than Bella’s.

Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he lacked the raw output. None of that mattered.

What mattered was that the result was the same: Regulus held the upper hand again. He hadn’t shown himself to be stronger. He’d shown himself to be more precise.

So precise it almost looked as though any wizard standing in his place could have managed the same result against Bella.

A patch of frictionless floor. A slab turned brittle. A softened seam.

Who couldn’t do that?

But that wasn’t how it worked. This style of fighting demanded extreme calculation.

Reading the full architecture of an opponent’s attack the instant it launched. Finding the weakest structural point. Countering with the absolute minimum expenditure of magic.

Most wizards couldn’t pull it off. The magic was there, but the mind couldn’t keep pace.

Lucius ran through every adult witch and wizard he knew. Not a single one fought like this.

Hogwarts didn’t teach it. Even if it did, no one could learn it.

How had the Black family’s younger son been trained?

And if he had a son someday... could the boy study under Regulus?

The thought flashed and vanished. His eyes resumed their tracking.

Narcissa stood behind Lucius, fingers curled into the fabric of his robes.

She glanced at Orion.

Her uncle stood behind the barrier, wand in one hand, the other still resting on Walburga’s wrist. Not a flicker of tension on his face.

The fight had escalated to this level, and he didn’t look concerned in the slightest.

It struck her all at once: this felt deliberate. As though this entire situation had been under control from the start.

She frowned slightly and stopped looking at Orion.

Walburga stood at his side, past the stage of bewilderment.

She was watching Regulus.

He bore no resemblance to the obedient younger son who’d listened to her instructions at Grimmauld Place.

A thought surfaced unbidden: What about Sirius?

Was Sirius like this too?

The realization hit with a quiet shock. She might never have truly looked at either of her sons. She’d only ever seen what she needed to see.

She’d decided Regulus was obedient, therefore good. She’d decided Sirius was disobedient, therefore not.

She’d never once considered how far apart her perception and their reality might be.

Her gaze drifted to Sirius.

Regulus was this.

Then what was Sirius?

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Orion be like: Son😭😭