“Go, Chompers, go!” Ginny shouted as her little soldiers bravely charged full speed through the deadly killing field, “Get him! You’re almost there!”

The white wood like material of the mannequin was slightly singed by all the other defenses, flames, and acid spraying around it to defend it from all of Ginny’s little Chompers that she deftly organized in little groups to fight forward.

One of her little Chompers leapt forward and latched its large mouth around the ankle of the mannequin.

“Yes!” Ginny shouted, “Get him Chompers, you got this!”

More and more of the little guys latched on and started chewing and biting, their little silvery legs waving frantically in the air as they chewed with all of their might. Okay, Ginny could admit she was splitting some of her attention to make them kick their legs to do that. But it made it much more fun when they finally managed to get some attacks in.

After another minute or so, the stationary mannequin was absolutely covered in biting and gnawing Chompers, all of their little legs kicking behind them furiously.

After letting out one last cheer with her fist of black mud pumped high in the air, Ginny sent an order to her crown. The flame and acid of the defenses stopped firing. With a single order Ginny dissolved all her little Chompers back into loose magic. It had been so difficult to manage to train her skills with the constructs to get so far as to even touch the mannequin. A mannequin that looked extremely battered and covered in splinters with big bites taken out of it all over its surface. Even as Ginny watched it pulsed with Teregatt’s magic and started slowly repairing itself, the white wood reforming and almost regrowing back into place to fill the gaps and fix the damage that had been done to it. After a few minutes it was good as new, not even a scratch on it anymore.

Ginny summoned a new Chomper into her hands and praised its success for a little while and pet its cold bowling ball plasticy black surface. She had it kick its little legs idly as she held it between her hands and kept praising it proudly.

She knew it was ridiculous, but it made her feel better about her success when she felt like she was sharing it with her little Chompers too.

Ginny let out a satisfied sigh as she dropped the Chomper and dissolved it back into magical mist before it hit the ground.

After letting herself soak in her victory, she turned back to the white wood mannequin laying on the ground and narrowed her eyes at it.

“Now for the really hard part,” she muttered at the limp mannequin, “Letting you actually let you move around and run away while the Chompers are attacking you…”

There were two more difficulty levels that she could activate above this. All the defenses in the room, fire and acid and all the other things were meant to simulate an enemy wizard using spells to attack her constructs.

The mannequin itself was supposed to be the one she was fighting. Up until now it had just stood there in place while its ‘magic’ fought off all of her constructs.

But now with an order to her crown, Ginny activated the mannequin fully. It could move around freely and kick and punch her constructs if it needed to. As well as run away or reposition for the best advantage. She could control its speed too. From barely a crawl to so fast that Ginny could barely even track its movements as it darted around. Ginny set it as just barely faster than a person should be. If she got frustrated she’d start from lower, but she wanted to see how she’d do against someone similar to a moving person.

The second level of difficulty she could add to the mannequin was to give it a ‘shield’ of defensive magic. It took a bit for Ginny to understand the purpose of it, but after reading through Balthazar’s chapter a few times and sending different questions to her crown about the room, Ginny finally figured it out. It was meant to simulate Ginny’s own skill with disenchanting things. If someone tried to send a Chomper to attack her, Ginny would just poke it with her magic and make it dissolve as its spell structure collapsed. Something that might be hard to do under the pressure of active combat… But not that hard.

That’s what the shield was for. The closer the constructs got to an enemy wizard the more likely it was they’d just be able to dissolve them with just a small amount of their attention. So to win Ginny would have to keep the Chompers as a relentless assault and make sure that the enemy wizard had so many attacking them at once that the enemy couldn’t dissolve them all before they got bitten by a few lucky Chompers who made it through.

The shield around the mannequin simulated the same thing by dissolving more and more Chompers depending on how close they got to the mannequin. Even when Ginny turned off the ‘defenses’ of acid and flame and had her Chompers just attack the mannequin as it stood still with the shield on, she’d still struggled to take it down. Being able to dissolve her constructs when they were inches away from biting it was just so overpowered.

But Ginny wasn’t giving up hope yet. By the time she had to go back to Earth for the night, she was feeling strong on having the Chompers attack at the slowest speed of the mannequin. She was making good progress and improving rapidly. Or she felt like she was. Without Balthazar there to tell her there was no way to be really sure what was fast learning or not compared to what was normal.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Ginny opened up her eyes on Earth. She went to go swim with Alexa and Jack, then went to sit with Jack and Luna for breakfast. Luna didn’t hang out with the three of them all the time, but Luna was their friend now and so they had spent some significant time together over the last month and a half or so.

Things at the school were at an uneasy balance. Fred and George had ‘leaked’ the real reason that Preston and his friends had been hung from the chandeliers. So the whole group had studiously avoided Luna in the wake of the resulting rumors, not even wanting to be associated with her in case people would take that as a confirmation of what everyone was saying about them.

Or that’s what Fred and George had said was the reason all the bullies were avoiding Luna like the plague ever since recovering from what Eric had done to them.

Ginny went to class, and learned. She took her tests, did her homework. Eric kept abusing his authority as head Inquisitor to the extreme, but avoided Ginny and her friends with all the chaos that he managed to stir up.

More time passed. It was the end of March now. In Teregatt, Ginny focused intently, not even cheering for her little soldiers or doing any of the roleplay or playacting that she usually did for fun. She had absolute focus in directing her force of Chompers to attack the Mannequin. The Mannequin was moving just a hair faster than most people could move and had its shield activated part of the way. And Ginny was sure that she could take it down this time.

It was an excruciating, difficult process. But every few minutes she managed to land a single Chomper to latch on to the mannequin and take one strong bite into the white wood before it was dissolved by the shield.

Bit by bit the mannequin accumulated damage as it ran around and fought off the Chompers with its ‘magic’. Eventually it stumbled as its right leg finally let out a large crack of splintering wood and went limp. It fell to the ground and before it could get up Ginny’s Chompers went to work and disabled its other leg. She quickly had her army of Chompers attack and descend on the mannequin in a flash. She kept having them attack even through the mannequin’s shield. The mannequin was using its arms to slap itself and destroy the Chompers covering it as Ginny managed to get more and more of them to reach the now stationary mannequin. After another minute of battle, it was over. The mannequin finally went still and all the ‘magic’ shooting from all sides of the room stopped. Ginny’s crown pulsed once to let her know that she’d won the challenge.

Ginny dissolved her Chompers and watched as the mannequin slowly healed itself again as she watched. She was almost there. Now all she had to do was slowly increase the strength of the mannequin’s shield to the maximum and she would be there. Able to fully beat the mannequin at its fullest reasonable settings and sure that her little Chompers would be able to truly help her in a fight against Eric.

Just because things were stable between them now didn’t mean he wouldn’t suddenly snap or do something horrible when the status quo changed again in some way.

— — —

“Are you sure about this, Vorzik? We have no idea how this will affect your connection to Ancestor. Or the connection between your other bodies.”

Vorzik nodded. The ground shook slightly and the sky flashed brightly as the wards fought off another one of Merlin’s titanic attacks.

“I am sure,” Vorzik said, only one of its house elf bodies standing in front of Balthazar, “It is our fault that the defenses of the island have weakened so much. Our arrival, of all the house-elves across the world, was the opening that has allowed Fate and Merlin to create a real hole in the wards and start carving deeper inwards. It’s only a matter of time before she breaks through now. We must test the plan before the larger battle.”

“Very well,” Balthazar said as he lifted the silky Cloak of Invisibility in his hands, “I have added the binding spells. Let us test just how well it can contain an Aspect of a conceptual entity such as yourself. And you’re sure that Ancestor won’t be angered by this?”

“I’m sure that Ancestor will not be,” Vorzik said, “The purpose of us Aspects is to assist the species we are merged with. A larger shard of the greater so that we may pursue our own interests and functions independent of the greater Concept of Ancestor. This is me performing that function. Teregatt’s future is the house elves' future now.”

“Then without further ado…” Balthazar said and threw the cloak of invisibility over Vorzik. As soon as the cloak touched Vorzik’s skin the binding enchantments activated and it constricted tightly like a plastic bag over Vorzik and smothering him completely. The house-elf struggled and thrashed inside of the cloak as Balthazar stood by and watched. But eventually the creature went still. Balthazar waited for a few more minutes before reaching out and undoing the weak binding spell he had put in place for this little test. As soon as he lifted the cloak of invisibility off of the house-elf he saw that its eyes were closed and it was breathing softly.

Both of Vorzik’s other purple clad house-elf bodies walked around the corner a second later.

“Did it work?” Balthazar asked, “Were you able to connect to the body under the cloak?”

“It worked,” Vorzik said as the two awake bodies cast some magic to heal and wake up the third who had been under the cloak, “That fragment of us was completely cut off from the world. I am but an Aspect, not a full conceptual entity like Fate. But we knew nothing of what happened underneath the cloak until you removed it and we reconnected ourselves to the severed fragment. The fragment underneath the cloak was unable to escape even the weaker bindings that you placed on the cloak, with the artifact’s power working to keep our fragment suppressed as it was contained within it.”

“So, you believe that this will work against Fate?” Balthazar asked, “To bind her?”

“Yes,” Vorzik said as the unconscious body finally opened its eyes and stood to join the two others in staring at Balthazar. Even now their ghostly projections kept trailing their movements as they made even their smallest movements.

“As I said, Fate is a full conceptual entity of incredible power and we can not be certain… But I believe it will work.”

“Then we have our plan,” Balthazar said grimly as he carefully picked up the cloak, “I will work on placing the full bindings on it. Then there will only be the hard part…”

“Getting the cloak around Fate and Merlin,” Vorzik finished.

The island shook again and Balthazar felt another one of his wards buckle and crumble under the powerful blow. There was a flash of yellow light outside that briefly blinded the two of them before they cleared their vision again.

“Indeed,” Balthazar as he saw Merlin floating outside with golden eyes channeling another massive attack on the island.

“Our greatest challenge yet.”