Eric’s eyes were wide as he burst into motion his body exploded with his own magic tendrils to counter as Ginny’s own swarm of magical limbs struck inward to attack him.

Eric used a few of his magic tendrils to grab his clothing and pull him into the air. He jerked around wildly to avoid the swarm of Chompers and magic tendrils attacking him from all sides.

He sent bursts of flames from the palms of his hands to roast groups of Chompers that attacked him. But Ginny and the Chompers were used to it and expertly dodged and leapt around his attacks to push forward with their relentless assault. Ginny was always summoning more and more Chomper replacement forces even as she and Eric’s magic tendrils wrestled with each other for dominance. Eric had more of them, but he was distracted and panicked and so Ginny was making progress and boxing him in even despite his numbers advantage on her.

Caught by surprise by Ginny’s sudden full assault, Eric was sweating and looked panicked as he used his superior force of three hundred magic tendrils to barely fight off her attacks. One of the Chompers managed to jump up and sank its sharp teeth into Eric’s calf.

“Gah!” Eric shouted before having a magic tendril lance out and skewer the Chomper and dissolve it into loose magic before it could fully tighten down with its strong jaws.

“Nidhogg!” Eric said, his voice cracking a bit as another two Chompers managed shallow bites on him, “Help! Stop her!”

Ginny grabbed her robes with ten of her magic tendrils and sent herself launching up into the air as there was a hiss and a sudden rush of air behind her. Ginny saw a blur of green scales below her as a massive serpent’s jaws snapped down where she had been standing. Ginny glanced over to where the snake had come from and saw a strange obsidian hallway had appeared in the wall of the great hall. The massive serpent was still slithering out of the wall even now that it had stretched fully across the room.

It was… It must be a basilisk! Like the one rumored to be in the Chamber of Secrets. As the Basilisk’s head whipped around towards her, Ginny scrunched her eyes deeply shut. The serpent lunged at her again and she dropped down to dodge again leaving the serpent to snap at only thin air again.

The massive snake fully slithered out of the strange tunnel in the wall and as soon as the tip of its tail was fully through Ginny felt the opening shrink and disappear with her magic sense.

The fifty foot long snake drew back its head after its second failed attack, Ginny could sense its full form and Eric below with her magic sense.

With her sudden distraction, all of her momentum and attacks had evaporated away. Eric was now pressing her in on all fronts, now using his higher numbers of magic tendrils more effectively now that he had the Basilisk running interference and he wasn’t as panicked anymore and had a brief moment to regroup himself.

“Eric, you asshole!” Ginny shouted, “It was you! You killed the old Ginny too! I should have known that it would be you!”

“Says the one trying to murder me right now!” Eric shot back, “What happened to your pacifism towards every little hurtful thing I did to somebody before? You’re acting crazy right now!”

The basilisk snapped its head out to bite her again. She darted to the side in her flight. She summoned twenty Chompers directly onto the snake’s head, allowing the ones attacking Eric to be stupider and get killed quicker in exchange. The Chompers leapt towards the Basilisk’s eyes with deadly intent. The snake shook its head violently, but not before one of the Chompers managed to latch firmly onto one of its eyes.

The Basilisk hissed loudly and began thrashing wildly in pain and after a few shakes of its head dislodged the singular latched on Chomper from its injured eyes.

Ginny summoned another squad of twenty Chompers onto the Basilisk’s head. Eric’s tendrils were all around him and Ginny could summon her Chompers from any point along her magic tendrils. When the Basilisk had darted forward to bite at her it had entered ‘her’ zone filled with magic tendrils letting her summon the Chompers on it freely.

Its green scales seemed to be magically resistant somehow. As soon as one of Ginny’s magic tendrils tried to latch onto them they just popped right into loose magic as if hit by some kind of electric shock.

The Basilisk was quicker this time and kept shaking its head and even rubbed it against a wall to scrape off the onslaught of the Chompers.

With her focus on the Chompers attacking the Basilisk, Eric started summoning the big ball of flame around himself to throw at her like he had at Lupin and Fate the two times when Eric had fought them.

“Just calm down, Ginny!” Eric shouted, “So what if I let the old Ginny die too? I didn’t kill her, it was some Tom Riddle guy that did it. I never so much as talked with the old Ginny or cast a spell at her! You’re being ridiculous!”

Ginny’s rage was pushed to new heights, “Standing back and watching as someone…”

Ginny remembered that she had structured spells too and prepared a spell in her palm. She sent the cutting curse downwards and it sliced into the already ruined eye of the Basilisk and cut deeper. The Diffindo cutting curse.

“...Dies!” Ginny finished with a grunt, “When you could stop it easily… Is basically the same as killing them yourself! You killed her just like you killed Ron!”

The basilisk hissed again as Ginny’s Chompers bit into and blinded its healthy eye too. The snake began to flail around wildly biting at thin air as Ginny floated above and hovering with her magic tendrils holding her robes. The cloth was slightly ripped from all the sudden dodges and movements she’d forced them to endure. But they’d last for the fight.

Ginny sent another cutting charm down deeper into the Basilisk’s ruined eye with pinpoint precision as it smashed its head into a wall and became dazed for a moment and stopped moving as much briefly. Ginny summoned another ten Chompers on the Basilisk’s head as it reeled back in pain from Ginny’s cutting charm. The Chompers dived into the now sizable and bleeding hole in the Basilisk’s empty eye socket. The Chompers crowded inside the hole and no matter where the Basilisk thrashed or what it rubbed itself against the Chompers kept chomping and burrowing deeper into its head.

“Fine, Ginny,” Eric said with a calm voice with only a slight tremble in it as he sweated with the massive ball of flame held right above his head, “Fight to the death then. And I tried so hard to be nice to you too… A shame it has to end this way.”

With that, he threw the massive ball of flame directly at Ginny. Ginny used her magic tendrils on her robes to pull her directly upwards. Eric held out both hands with intense concentration and shifted and twisted his hands as if molding an invisible ball of clay in front of him.

The ball of flame shifted in mid-air to shoot up to go towards Ginny. Even as the ball of flame came towards her she sent her tendrils of magic into the ball of flame, trying to disrupt it and dissolve its spell structure. But every magic tendril she sent to stop the ball of flame was one less countering Eric’s own magic tendrils pressing inwards and boxing in her now that she’d lost the momentum of the fight.

Ginny’s Chompers inside of the Basilisk kept biting and burrowing inwards as the Basilisk was helpless to stop them. Ginny’s Chompers attacking Eric were much less effective than they had been in the beginning. But they were still distracting him somewhat and he seemed slightly confused on how she was managing to make them dodge and work together so intelligently while she was doing so many other things.

It was just practice. Ginny darted to the side again, Eric twirled his hands and the ball of the flame moved to track her.

The thrashing and hissing Basilisk on the ground spasmed one last time before going limp. Ginny’s Chompers had burrowed deep enough that they’d started biting chunks out of the important bits of the Basilisk’s brain.

Ginny dodged the ball of flame two more times, bringing her close to the massive window that sat just behind the professor’s table.

With the basilisk fully dead as far as Ginny could tell, she opened her eyes to quickly survey the room. Eric was concentrating deeply on his hands as he controlled his ball of flame to turn towards her again.

Now that she didn’t have to deal with the Basilisk she could devote more of her magic tendrils from dissolving Eric’s fireball and sending more and more Chompers towards the sweating Eric to distract him and get a few small bites in. Even now Ginny could see Eric’s legs and arms bleeding slightly from dozens of small pinprick wounds all over his body.

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Ginny prepared to dodge the ball of flame again, but instead of rotating his hands around again Eric slammed his palms together flat with each other.

The ball of fire exploded right in front of her and she was thrown back as all the windows in the hall including the massive one behind her shattered into tiny shards of glass from the force of the explosion.

Ginny was flung inside into the open air with blue skies and green lawns below. As she flew out of the window she thought she saw the form of a Dementor floating there just to the side of the glass staring at her. But then she blinked and it was gone again like nothing had ever been there at all.

All of Ginny’s magic tendrils and Chompers inside the great hall and in the ball of flame had been destroyed. But she couldn’t let the setback stop her. The Chompers were wearing Eric down, she could see it. She just had to last long enough that he made a mistake and they started getting some real bites in on him before he could destroy them. Ginny flew upwards out of sight of Eric and up to the roof of the great hall.

She knew that Eric’s magic sense was less powerful than hers was. But how much less? She could just barely sense the inside of the great hall from here. She stood on the roof and had her magic tendrils worm out in a circle and bunch by the upper sills of the shattered windows. She waited for a few seconds to prepare herself. Eric was doing something inside the great hall too, she could sense him taking the flames from the fiery explosion and gathering them around himself in a circle of flames.

Ginny noticed in satisfaction that the field of flames was much smaller than the one he had created in his fight with Lupin and Barty Crouch Junior. Detonating his fireball early must have made him lose a lot of the flames he otherwise could have collected for his ‘supply’ of flames for his fire manipulation.

Fully prepared now, Ginny sent her magic tendrils darting through all the windows at once from the top. Based on how Eric had bunched most of his magic tendrils in a defensive tangle over by the window Ginny had been blown out of, he must have expected her to come back that way. Ginny’s tendrils pushed in from all sides and claimed much of the upper half of the great hall back as Ginny’s territory before Eric managed to bring his far flung tendrils back to himself to combat her fully.

Ginny leapt to the side as a flaming spear exploded out of the roof below her. Using her flight, she moved as Eric began to throw flaming spear after flaming spear after her, his attacks cutting through the tiles of the roof as if they were made of paper. But with each attack he launched his little zone of flames diminished.

When it was half depleted, he stopped throwing the flaming spears at Ginny. Half the roof was perforated with the fist sized holes left by their passage.

Ginny went around the side and through a shattered window and flew back into the great hall. She hovered near the ceiling staring down with the top half of the room claimed by her and her magic tendrils while the bottom half was defended by Eric’s.

Some of Eric’s tendrils had been dipped in his pool of flame and were being used as heavy weapons to destroy and dissolve Ginny’s own tendrils en masse when hers encountered one of the flaming ones.

But Ginny had a counter for that. She carefully lined it up in her head for a second before summoning thirty Chompers all at once in mid-air directly above Eric. All of the little constructs started to fall. Eric tried to use his tendrils to destroy them or swat them aside. But Ginny just kept summoning more and more. She didn’t have to give them any complex commands. Just point towards Eric and then bite. No fancy dodging, no teamwork, nothing. Just pure numbers.

The first one landed on Eric’s shoulder and bit down only to be dissolved before it could do more and break the skin. But then a second later another did the same. Then another, another, another…

A few even managed deeper bites with their teeth.

Eric’s field of flame was rapidly dwindling as he had used it all up on the flaming spears or the flaming tendrils to claim more territory in the ceiling away from Ginny. Ginny had ceded control of most of the ceiling and only kept a portion to herself as she kept focusing on making the Chompers keep raining down on Eric while doing her best to fight off Eric’s flaming tendrils where she could.

Normally Eric would just fly and dodge away from an attack like this. But forming the field of flames for his fire manipulation had rooted him in place. If he wanted to use fire attacks then he had to launch it from there and so he wouldn’t leave its confines until the last possible moment or all the magic he'd invested into the flames would be wasted.

A Chomper managed to get a full bite on Eric’s arm, actually tearing out a chunk of muscle fully free before it was destroyed.

“Ginny, you hypocrite!” Eric shouted desperately as his arm started bleeding heavily, “You stood by and watched me do all those things you’re upset about without doing anything! Doesn’t that make you complicit too?”

“I didn’t have the power to stop you,” Ginny replied despite herself, “I had no choice.”

“That’s ridiculous! C’mon, what I did wasn’t even that bad…”

The doors to the great hall burst open and both Eric and Ginny froze at the sudden interruption. Standing there with their wands out were Snape and Flitwick with… Alexa and Jack right behind them with their wands out.

“Help, help!” Eric shouted, “Ginny’s trying to kill me!”

Snape opened his mouth to say something, but Ginny answered Eric with another rain of Chompers. She was so close, she was sure that he was on the end of his rope. If he had any more tricks then surely he’d have already used them by now before he started getting bitten by her Chompers for real.

“Back, back!” Snape barked as he gestured with his hand to Jack and Alexa behind him who looked concerned.

“Aggghhh! Fine!” Eric shouted as a Chomper took another good bite out of him before Eric destroyed it, “It’s a death match isn’t it? Then I’ll have to use every advantage I can get!”

Ginny’s eyes widened as at the tip of Eric’s tendrils by the floor started forming self contained spells. Killing charms pointed at the professors and her two friends.

“No!” Ginny shouted and let her flight stop briefly to drop like a stone to the floor. Eric’s tendrils battered her and tried to capture her as her body fell right into a solid mass of them. But she dissolved most of her current tendrils all in an instant and ceding the rest of the ceiling so all of them could help her fall faster and stop herself from getting captured by Eric’s tendrils.

The dozens of killing charms at the tip of Eric’s tendrils all launched at once in green beams of light from all directions directly toward the teachers and Ginny’s friends.

Ginny frantically sent her tendrils to disrupt the spells and stop them before they could hit anyone. She succeeded just as she landed and stopped her fall from the ceiling to hover only a few feet off of the floor.

The extended battle had her huffing and puffing while red in the face. Eric wasn’t looking much better, sweat pouring down his face and looking like a tomato even as the wounds all over his body kept bleeding.

Eric’s eyes narrowed and instead of targeting her, he kept casting killing charms at Jack and Alexa over and over and forcing Ginny to frantically block and dissolve them with her own magic.

Snape and Flitwick looked bewildered, ducking and looking around in confusion as green bolts of light seemed to appear from nowhere to shoot towards them before dissolving again into nothing as Ginny stopped them.

“Go!” Ginny shouted while trying to keep up her absolute focus even as she took in heaving breaths, “Can’t stop Eric for… Much longer. Too dangerous.”

“Ms. Weasley…” Snape said sternly. A green killing curse came from an angle and Eric’s magic tendrils pushed inwards to try to clear a path and bat Ginny’s tendrils aside as she attempted to dissolve it.

“It’s Eric!” Ginny said quickly as she finally managed to dissolve the killing curse only ten feet away from Snape’s chest, “He’s casting the killing curses.”

“You’re forcing me… to do it!” Eric shouted from across the way, the pool of fire below his feet now barely ten feet across now, “It’s your fault he died, what are you blaming me for? It was your job to save him! I did my part, I stopped the bomb. You're the one that failed, not me!”

“RAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!” Ginny screamed as she charged the most destructive spell she knew on dozens of the tip of the tendrils closest to Eric. His eyes widened as Ginny launched the spells at him in a sudden counterattack to his relentless barrage of the killing curses on Ginny’s friends.

“BOMBARDA!” Ginny shouted as all her spells flashed across the intervening space, Ginny’s remaining tendrils carving out clear tunnels almost directly towards Eric for her spells while almost completely forgoing defense.

Taken by surprise by Ginny’s sudden attack, Eric was late to respond. He dissolved almost all of the explosive spells firing towards him. Almost all of them.

Ginny saw a strange pitch black shadow form at Eric’s feet and start growing upwards. But whatever it was, the spells reached Eric first. Ginny and everyone else had to shield their eyes as the massive explosion let out a massive burst of light and shook the room so hard that all of them except the floating Ginny were thrown off of their feet.

When all of them looked up blinking heavily all that was left on the floor was a heavy blood splatter and a few chunks of flesh scattered across the room.

Vision cutting in and out and feeling like she’d collapse at any moment, Ginny slowly lowered herself until she was on the ground again. Her legs were weak and she sank to a seated position as she kept lowering her body down.

She blinked and time passed like a buffering video suddenly jumping forward again.

“...Ginny? Ginny, what happened?” Alexa was asking as she shook Ginny’s shoulder hard.

“Ron’s dead,” Ginny said numbly, “I couldn’t save him. I killed Eric. I killed somebody. Even if it was him.”

“Oh, Ginny…”

Time stuttered forward again and Alexa had Ginny wrapped up in a tight hug and was crying into her shoulder and babbling. Jack was sitting just to the side behind Alexa looking concerned and frightened.

Time stuttered and Ginny was lying on her back with a shouting Umbridge and Snape standing over her. Ginny had never thought that she’d ever hear Snape defending her, but that’s the impression that her fuzzy mind was receiving.

One last flash of her friends peering down at her from above. Jack’s hand was cupping her cheek and his lips were moving, but Ginny’s fuzzy mind didn’t understand. But they were okay. Jack and Alexa were… okay.

Ginny’s world went black and her thoughts devolved into murky dreams where there wasn’t a single coherent thought to be found.