The words landed.

Fudge's expression froze.

Wh, what?

Behind him, Umbridge and the crowd of Aurors went equally blank, all of them privately wondering if their ears had stopped working.

A few seconds passed. Then Fudge's face flooded purple, and he started waving his hands.

"You— you do love your jokes."

He laughed, dry and forced.

"You killed You-Know-Who with your own hands. Everyone here saw it. You're the hero of the Wizarding World. How could you possibly collude with him?"

"Oh. So you do know that."

Hermione let the mockery drain from her face. Her eyes went cold, slowly and deliberately.

She stepped off the raised platform and came down, one step at a time.

"So since you know the Daily Prophet's story about me and Voldemort was a fabrication," she said, "then tell me something."

"Why, when they claimed Dumbledore caused my death, did you believe it so easily?"

Fudge opened his mouth. Nothing came out.

The logic was airtight. It punctured his excuse cleanly, and the double standard underneath couldn't survive a second's thought.

His face went red, then redder. He held it in, jaw tight, brain churning.

Finally he tried to recover.

"Precisely because you are the hero of the Wizarding World," he said, "your safety is of the utmost importance. We had to be cautious. We couldn't overlook a single lead!"

"Everything we did was out of concern for you. All of it!"

"Is that so."

Hermione took two slow, unhurried steps forward. "Then why have I heard that this rumor was put out by the Ministry itself?"

Fudge reacted like a cat whose tail had been stepped on. He nearly came off the ground.

"No! Absolutely not!"

"That is slander! That is a fabrication against the Ministry of Magic! My Lady Witch, you must not believe unfounded rumors like that!"

"You're telling me not to believe rumors?"

Hermione's voice went cold, sharp and instant.

"And yet you had no trouble stirring up quite the storm with rumors about me."

She raised her head. Her gaze moved across the face of every Ministry official in the room.

"If I say the rumors came from you, then they came from you. You dared to use my name while I was gone. That means you'd better be ready to live with what comes next."

The moment the words left her mouth, a magical pressure so intense it stopped the breath erupted from her slender frame.

BOOM!

Dark red elemental particles tore through the Great Hall like a storm. Every floating candle snuffed out at once. The enchanted ceiling, stars and open sky a moment ago, turned black, boiling clouds crackling with lightning rolling across it in waves.

Fudge caught the full force of it. He felt a weight like a boulder drop onto his chest. Just breathing became a struggle.

That pressure. He knew it. Despairingly, hopelessly familiar.

And with it came the full weight of his regret.

He had convinced himself that if the Witch had been missing for over a year, she must have run into something fatal. The Wizarding World was littered with ancient magic and old curses, forbidden traps that even Dumbledore wouldn't touch carelessly. With her reckless, lawless nature, her compulsion to go barging into places she shouldn't, triggering a lethal trap in some crumbling ruin wasn't just plausible. It was almost inevitable.

It was the only explanation for nearly two years of silence.

That was why he'd dared send Umbridge back to Hogwarts. The whole thing was a test. A bold one, he'd thought.

If the Witch were alive, she would never, not in a thousand years, tolerate a creature like Umbridge appearing in front of her again.

And so he had waited. He had watched. He'd told himself he was on the verge of locking down Hogwarts entirely, of tearing out Dumbledore's influence root by root.

Then she walked back in.

Dumbledore had his scruples. His hesitations. His limits.

The Witch had none.

She would actually kill you.

Every scheme, every careful plan, all of it a joke the moment absolute power walked through the door.

And yet.

Even now, even here, something in Fudge refused to let go.

He clenched his jaw. He held himself up through sheer stubbornness, clinging to the last shred of his dignity.

"Then where is your evidence!"

The veins on his forehead stood out. He looked like a gambler who'd lost everything, throwing his last chip onto the table.

He stiffened his neck, loud and hollow.

"You claim we put out those rumors, but where is your proof?! Even the Witch cannot just overturn the truth without a single shred of evidence!"

Hermione looked at him, face dark red, voice cracking, practically screaming, and her expression didn't change at all.

She raised her right hand slowly. A coil of dark red lightning danced around her fingertips.

"Evidence?"

She gave a short, cold laugh. Like she'd just heard the funniest thing in the world.

"I'm the Witch."

"What do I need evidence for?"

Her tone was flat. Utterly matter-of-fact, like she was stating something that had always been true and always would be.

"If I say you did it, you did it."

"Even if you didn't — you did."

Power was the only evidence that mattered.

Fudge's eyes went wide. His breath stopped.

Every argument he'd prepared, every carefully arranged rebuttal, gone, shattered in an instant by those five words.

He had never imagined she wouldn't even bother pretending. No performance, no pretense, no effort to dress it up. She simply put her foot on top of so-called order and pushed down, the most domineering, unreasonable thing he had ever witnessed, and she did it like it was nothing.

Before the echo had even faded.

Hermione turned around and faced the students of Hogwarts. Her voice rang out, bright and clean.

"Everyone, was it the Ministry of Magic that spread rumors of my death and framed Headmaster Dumbledore?"

"YES!"

Harry and Ron were the first ones onto the tables, on their feet, arms in the air.

"It was them, it was them!"

"My gran came to me in a dream last night — it's Fudge's conspiracy!"

"Drive out the Pink Toad! Drive out the Ministry!"

The Great Hall erupted. Laughter, jeering, the crowd's contempt washing over the Ministry officials in waves.

Fudge's face went the color of a bruise. Every shout, every peal of laughter landed like a needle until there was nothing left of his dignity.

He'd lost.

The moment she walked back in, he'd already lost.

But power was all he had left. He couldn't retreat. Retreating meant losing everything.

"Mad!" he screamed. "You're all completely mad!"

His eyes had gone bloodshot. He dropped every last pretense and roared.

"This is open defiance of the Ministry of Magic! This is rebellion!"

He threw his arm up and pointed straight at Hermione on the platform.

"Move in! Take her down! All of you, NOW!"

The over one hundred elite Aurors at his back felt their scalps prickle.

You're the one who's mad. That's the Witch.

More than a few of them had been there 3 years ago. They still remembered the sky full of fire dragons. That memory hadn't faded even slightly.

But Fudge was still the Minister for Magic. If they wanted to keep their place in the Ministry, his orders were law. It didn't matter that their legs were shaking.

They braced themselves and moved.

"For the Ministry of Magic!"

One Auror at the front bellowed it out, more for himself than anyone else, and raised his wand first.

Over a hundred wands went up. The tips blazed with bursts of clashing color. The surge of magic churned into a wind that tore through the Great Hall.

And Fudge, watching it all unfold, quietly greased his heels and began backing toward the doors as fast as he could manage.

➤ Next: The Witch's Disarming Charm

Chapter 360 - The Witch's Disarming Charm

He backed away step by step, voice rising to a shout as he fell back on his last argument.

"Albus! Witch! Are you really going to start something here? Look around you — these are Hogwarts students! Are you truly going to throw their lives away for your own sake!"

He'd already taken Dumbledore's measure. The moment the fight spilled toward the students, the old headmaster would step in to restrain the Witch. That was the one card Fudge still had left.

"Cornelius. I think you've misunderstood."

Dumbledore stood on the raised platform, watching Fudge's desperation with something close to pity. He let out a quiet sigh.

"Drawing my wand was never about fighting you. Not from the very beginning."

Before the words had finished leaving his mouth, the Elder Wand traced a single light stroke through the air.

"I did it to protect these children. So she could act freely."

A transparent ripple spread outward from the wand's tip.

The Great Hall hummed, a strange, resonant vibration that seemed to come from the space itself.

Before the students' eyes, the world seemed to film over, like looking through a membrane of water. The Ministry crowd was still there, only a short distance away, yet they suddenly felt impossibly remote. Every trace of magical turbulence was cut off behind an invisible wall.

Harry reached out, trying to touch one of the figures inside.

His hand passed straight through.

Visible. Unreachable.

Hermione glanced at Dumbledore, genuinely surprised.

"You've been watching me use the Mirror Dimension all this time."

Dumbledore gave her a small wink and smiled. "I managed to work a few things out on my own. It's nothing close to what you can do — but for simple isolation, it gets the job done."

Hermione smiled back. She hadn't expected that across an entire world, someone would quietly teach themselves Kamar-Taj's signature technique just by watching.

"Stupefy!"

"Reducto!"

"Incendio!"

"Incarcerous!"

The Aurors broke. One couldn't hold it any longer and snapped, and that was all it took. A chain reaction tore through the formation. Over a hundred spells blazed toward Hermione in a torrent of color, enough combined force to flatten a small hill.

Hermione raised one hand. A casual, unhurried sweep in front of her.

A transparent barrier unfolded.

BOOM!

The spells hit all at once. Light exploded outward in every direction, wild magical currents churning through the hall, the stone floor shuddering beneath everyone's feet.

The smoke cleared.

The barrier stood without a single ripple.

"That's — that's impossible!"

The Aurors looked like their eyes might leave their skulls.

They knew the Shield Charm. They'd spent careers mastering it. Even the Ministry's finest could hold a Shield Charm against three, maybe five spells of comparable power at once.

Against a hundred people concentrating fire?

One Shield Charm shouldn't exist that could do this.

This isn't magic.

Hermione looked at their horrified faces and felt nothing.

You have no idea what a real gap in power looks like.

She closed her eyes slowly.

When she opened them, the world had gone grey and white. And floating above every Auror's head was a mark, dark red, invisible to everyone but her.

The moment she moved, every Auror went rigid.

"Combined defense!"

The lead Auror's voice cracked with the effort of the shout.

The formation shifted fast. Magic converged, building, layering.

"Protego!"

"Salvio Hexia!"

"Protego Totalum!"

A massive blue shield snapped into place, sealing every Auror inside a single fortified shell.

Hermione raised her right hand and extended one finger.

A slender red beam left her fingertip.

It looked like nothing. Unremarkable, almost thin. But the Aurors watched it punch clean through their combined ward as if the ward wasn't there.

It struck the foremost Auror.

BANG!

He grunted. His wand ripped free from his hand and spun away.

That was just the beginning.

The red light didn't stop when it hit him. It branched, lightning-fast, lightning-bright, jumping from the first Auror outward, threading through the crowd and connecting body to body in a single instant.

SWISH. SWISH. SWISH.

Red light leaped through the packed formation, skipping and arcing, stitching everyone together in a web of crimson that spread across the entire room in less than a second.

Every Auror in the web seized at the same moment.

Then, all at once, over a hundred wands tore themselves from their owners' hands. They shot upward and rained back down across the floor like scattered kindling.

A beat later, every Auror was launched backward in unison, a single grunt ripping from a hundred throats at once, bodies scattering like bowling pins into a tangled heap at the entrance of the hall.

None of them got up.

One strike.

Just one.

No spectacle. No Dark Magic. No theatrics of any kind.

A Disarming Charm, the one spell every first-year learns in their first week, had punched through the Ministry's strongest combined defense and put a hundred elite Aurors on the floor.

Silence swallowed the hall.

Fudge stared at the wreckage in front of him, mind utterly blank.

Defeated?

Like that?

3 years ago, when the Witch had stormed the Ministry, it had been terrifying, but she'd worked for it. She'd used genuinely dangerous spells. There had been effort. Resistance. Even Ethan, the Chief Auror, had managed to trade a few blows with her before going down. They'd lost, but it had still felt like a fight between human beings.

That loss had driven Fudge to act. He had poured money, time, and everything he had into rebuilding the Auror corps. He'd recruited the most powerful wizards he could find. By every measure, the Ministry's Aurors today were a full tier stronger than they'd been 3 years ago.

He'd told himself that even if they couldn't win, they could hold.

A Disarming Charm.

She hadn't even needed to think about it.

Everything Fudge had spent 3 years building, she'd dismantled with the first spell a first-year student learns.

And it had been easier than last time.

Everyone in that hall understood what that meant. The simpler the technique, the more completely it revealed the gap. This was mastery distilled, all the way back to its bare, effortless core.

In a few short years, she had become something that couldn't be reasoned with, outmaneuvered, or overwhelmed. Not by numbers. Not by preparation.

This wasn't strength.

This was a chasm no one in that room could ever cross.

Outside the sealed space, the students stood in stunned silence.

Over the past half year, some of them had tried to push back. Every time, the stationed Aurors had put them down without breaking a sweat and marched them off to Umbridge's office. The Aurors had worn a particular look doing it, that contemptuous, almost bored expression. Underage brats. Think they can take on elite Aurors. Embarrassing.

Now those same Aurors were piled at the entrance of the hall, flat on their backs, not one of them able to rise.

The shock was still there. But underneath it, rising fast, was something that felt incredibly, deeply satisfying.

Someone in the crowd found their voice first.

"Long live the Witch!"

It swept through the students like a wave.

"Long live the Witch!"

"Long live the Witch!"

The sound rolled through the corridors of Hogwarts, louder than it had been for Dumbledore. Even the Slytherins were shouting, not to fit in, not out of habit, but because they meant it, eyes bright with awe, voices open and unguarded.

Then the doors at the far end of the Great Hall swung open.

A blond man walked in. His robes were dark purple, trimmed with gold, immaculately tailored. Behind him came several Aurors with stone-cold faces.

Two of them had a woman between them, green coat, arms pinned.

Fudge turned at the sound of the doors. His eyes found the blond man's face.

Wild, desperate joy detonated behind his eyes.

His savior had arrived.

➤ Next: Dog Eat Dog