Chapter 17: High-Altitude Duel, a Glimpse of the Fifty-Foot Fall (Patreon)

The wind shrieked in her ears.

Fifty feet up, the gale whipped her robes into a furious snapping.

The emerald lawn below shrank into a flat green carpet, and the first-years standing on it looked like a cluster of black ants.

Draconia pressed one hand down hard on the front of her broom, hugging the slender handle almost flat.

The rushing air should have terrified her. Instead, those clear water-grey-blue eyes blazed with a pure, burning hunger to win.

"Come on, Capet! If you can't even keep up with a Malfoy's slipstream, go back down and gnaw on your parchment!"

She let out a bright, ringing laugh, flicked her right wrist, and pulled off a brutally dangerous inverted spiral barrel roll in mid-air!

The old broom drew a nearly vertical arc through the sky. Draconia tossed the blood-red Remembrall thirty feet into empty air, swung into a sideways dive, and carved an elegant curve with her slim body to catch it cleanly again!

The Slytherin first-years on the ground erupted into deafening cheers and screams.

Even Harry, a Gryffindor, held his breath. He had to admit that this proud young lady's talent for flying was almost unbelievable.

But before the smile had fully bloomed on Draconia's lips, a sharp whistle tore through the air behind her and to the side, closing in like a shadow!

"Whoosh!"

Raven moved through the wind like a silent, precise black hawk.

Draconia flew by sheer instinct, bold and sweeping. Raven's [Magic Circuit Analysis Vision] showed him something else entirely: every turbulent eddy and every pocket of dead pressure in the sky became a flowing block of color he could read at a glance.

He didn't waste a single extra movement. He merely adjusted the angle of force on the broom's tail twigs, then slid into the most perfect streamlined posture and bit straight into the vacuum of air Draconia left behind!

The gap shrank to less than five feet in an instant!

"Damn it… how can he be this fast?!"

Draconia glanced sideways and saw Raven's handsome profile, still calm as a deep pool in the roaring wind. Her heart skipped a beat. Being hunted down like this, with nowhere to hide, made every hair on her body stand on end.

She clenched her teeth, wrenched the front of the broom downward with both hands, and tried to force out an extreme steep dive that only professional Quidditch Seekers used: the Wronski Feint!

But she had overlooked one fatal thing.

The old school Cleansweep beneath her had weathered decades of use and was rotten through. It could never withstand such violent plunging torque and the crosswinds shearing across that height!

"Crack!"

A tooth-grinding snap of splintering wood exploded through the sky!

The wire that anchored the levitation circuit in the broom's tail snapped. Overloaded, the gravity-balance runes collapsed all at once!

The whole broom turned into a mad horse with a severed spine. It bucked and spun wildly in the air, its tail twigs lashing and convulsing, and it flung Draconia clean off its back!

"Aaaaaah!"

The girl's shrill, despairing scream tore across the sky!

The Remembrall flew from her grip and drew a cold red line through the sunlight. Draconia lost her balance completely. Like a white fledgling with broken wings, she plunged from fifty feet toward the iron-hard stone edge of the field!

The ground fell into dead silence for a heartbeat. Then came piercing screams of horror.

"Nia!"

Pansy clapped her hands over her eyes and crumpled to the ground.

"Merlin's beard!" Hermione's small face drained of all color, and her nails dug deep into her palms.

Harry almost threw his leg over a broom on pure reflex. But he knew perfectly well that at this height, in a straight vertical fall… not even a god could reach her in time!

High in the air, the wind poured into Draconia's nose and mouth.

The terror of weightlessness coiled around her heart like a cold viper. The hard ground rushing up at her emptied her mind. Death had never been so close as it was in this second.

…Father… Mother… Two tears of despair were stripped from the corners of her tightly shut eyes by the wind.

Then, just as she was about to fall into the abyss with no way back—

A cold, resolute howl, ringing almost like metal, came plunging down from above with something close to madness.

It was Raven.

In the tenth of a second after the broom snapped, he hadn't even glanced at the falling Remembrall.

The [Abyss of Magic] inside him erupted at full power, holding nothing back!

Vast magic poured down through his hands into the handle beneath him. The clumsy, mediocre old Cleansweep was forced up past the limits of a Nimbus 2000 and into a terrifying, overloaded surge of thrust!

A vertical dive!

A drop of almost exactly ninety degrees!

Two figures became streaks of light chasing each other down toward hell!

Raven's robes tore against the brutal wind resistance, his black hair whipping wildly, and his deep black eyes were as cold as ancient ice.

His magic ripped a visible, transparent cone through the air around him. With less than fifteen feet left, close enough to count each trembling blade of grass, in a situation with no way out—

Raven's hand shot out with the savage momentum of a man tearing through the gale!

"Smack!"

A heavy, solid thud rang out!

His left arm, hard as cast iron, swept around Draconia's slender waist like an unbreakable barrier and crushed her against his chest!

At the same instant, Raven hauled back on the broom with his right hand alone, and his magic turned into a violent anti-gravity shockwave that blasted from his ankles toward the ground!

"Boom!"

A ring of wild air burst outward across the turf, and clumps of grass and soil flew in every direction!

The plunging momentum was bent into a horizontal glide in mid-air by that terrifying fine control of magic. The broom skimmed the turf for a full thirty feet, left two long scorched brake marks across the smooth ground, and finally came to rest steadily in the sunlight.

With a soft pat, the Remembrall that had fallen from the sky was plucked neatly from the air between two fingers of Raven's casually raised right hand.

The wind finally died. Not a sound came from anyone.

Over a hundred first-years on the lawn stared with wide eyes, not even breathing, as if they had just witnessed a miracle.

At the center of the lawn,

Draconia trembled violently, nearly limp, collapsed against Raven's broad, solid chest.

Her face was paper-white and her eyes were shut tight. Her small hands in their thin deerskin gloves clenched the black fabric over his chest so hard that her knuckles turned white, as if she meant to tear the robe.

She could hear his steady, powerful heartbeat just above her head. She could feel the warm, firm arm across her waist, the arm that had dragged her back from the gates of death into the world of the living.

"All right, Miss Malfoy."

Raven's low, gentle voice drifted down from above her head, a little breathless from the exertion, brushing her disheveled platinum hair. "Open your eyes. You're safe."

Draconia opened her eyes, trembling. She saw the clean line of his jaw, glinting faintly in the sunlight, and his deep, dark eyes, calmly reflecting her own disheveled state.

Raven loosened the arm around her waist and gently pressed the intact red Remembrall back into her cold palm. Then he brushed the grass off his robes without a care and looked down at the dazed girl, one corner of his mouth curling into a teasing smile with a touch of sternness in it.

"Your flying is truly dazzling. But next time you challenge your fiancé… oh, sorry, your former betrothed… check your broom first."

Draconia stared at the warm Remembrall in her hand, then up at the black-haired boy in front of her, full of life and without a scratch. Her eyes turned red all the way round.

She bit her lower lip until it went white, and her water-grey-blue eyes filled with glistening tears. She wanted to call him arrogant, loudly, the way she always did, but her throat was so tight it ached, and all that came out was a low murmur with a faint sob in it. "I won't thank you… idiot."

…

At that very moment, before a tall arched window on the third floor of the castle,

Professor McGonagall slowly lowered the brass telescope in her hand. Her stern, tightly drawn face was full of shock and astonishment beyond words.

She had gone to the window only because she'd heard the commotion from the flying lesson, and she had watched all of it, every second of that legendary fifty-foot dive and rescue.

That frightening control of magic far beyond his age, that nerve and reflex, so cold and calm on the very edge of life and death that it was outrageous…

"Merlin's beard…"

Professor McGonagall swallowed hard, pushed her square spectacles up her nose, and murmured to herself, "Albus… it seems that the student we've welcomed this year isn't an ordinary genius at all… but a true dragon."