“That was great; you are awesome, Ethan,” said Ron as Ethan sank the last stone statue.
“cough, cough, cough”
Ethan didn’t react to Ron's praise and frantically opened his bag.
He quickly drank a potion that seemed to make his coughing even worse. His complexion also changed as he pointed his wand at his chest, mumbling some sort of spell.
Around twenty seconds later, Ethan began to cough out blood. Hermione, Harry, and Ron ran to him to help him, but he raised the arm with his wand in their direction to stop them.
“It’s fine. It’s 'cough' fine. The troll just broke a few ribs of mine, and they penetrated my lung. The potion 'cough' needed to be inhaled to work fast enough, but the blood that was in my lung still needed to be pushed out. Now I just need to heal my arm, and I will be fit again.” explained Ethan in an attempt to sound unaffected by what he had just gone through.
Atlas, in the meantime, levitated some of the larger pieces of rubble to the door to stop it from eventually closing, because he was sure that the door would at some point close again or it would have still been open when they arrived there.
He then went past the chess pieces, which filled the room with hammering noises as they still tried to free themselves by punching the floor with their weapons. At the center of the chess board lay the dead troll. His face was smashed in, and his skull was cracked open. The brain, if one wanted to call the smooth, fist-sized, deformed lump a brain, quilled out of his head. The key that was supposed to be in the nose was drilled through the troll's upper jaw, and only a snot-covered edge was barely visible. Atlas was sure that no human should have the power to cause so much damage with a simple punch. Even a gorilla, with ten times the strength of an adult, would struggle to do that much damage with a punch. Atlas mentally noted to himself to stay out of Ethan's fist when the fight began. The only problem with that was what Ethan’s reach actually was. The troll’s arms were quite a bit longer than Ethan's, and even if they were angled, Atlas was sure that Ethan should have been unable to hit the troll’s face, much less with such power. So for safety reasons, he would try to keep the distance longer than the two-meter-long troll arms.
Musing about Ethans ability, Atlas took care of the ugly task of getting the key out of the trolls head. He used the acio charm to slowly pull out the deformed key. The flesh stuck to the key, but after stretching a little, the key was ripped off. He used a simple cleaning spell to wash off the troll's blood and snot before using reparo to straighten the key again.
He walked over to his group of friends and steeled his resolve one last time before he planned to take action.
“Here catch!” said Atlas, and threw the key towards Ethan, who was still occupied with healing his arm. Instead of using the healing arm or catching the key otherwise, the key started to levitate a meter around him and slowly entered Ethan's pocket. This action confirmed to Atlas that he hadn’t really missed an opportunity, as he didn’t stop Ethan from healing. Sure, for a normal person, a punctured lung would have been fatal, but Atlas knew that Ethan had a breathing skill that would surely have extended Ethan's time to fight back. Time that he would have needed to stop Ethan from healing, which he was probably unable to do.
As everyone’s focus was on Ethan, Atlas started to swing his wand two times in quick succession. A red bolt hit Hermione in the side, and the second hit Ron in the stomach as he was about to turn around, causing both to immediately collapse.
“Hey, what are you doing?” yelled Harry, casting an expelliarmus at him.
Atlas easily deflected the spell and returned multiple expelliarmus charms of his own. Harry tried to block them but faltered at the fifth spell, and his wand flew out of his hand.
“What are you planning? Why are you doing this? Ethan, help!” yelled Harry, with panic in his voice and face as he thought that Atlas had betrayed their cause.
“Don’t worry, Harry. I won’t do anything bad. You have seen the trials, and if it weren’t for Ethan, I wouldn’t be so sure we could have beaten the troll unharmed. I won’t let Hermione enter any more of these trials and eventually fight someone who has already made an attempt to kill her. Ron, on the other hand, had shown that in a real fight, he doesn’t know what to do. I knocked him out for his own safety. I will hide them inside my suitcase and hide the suitcase with your invisibility cloak, so they will be safe, no matter what happens.” Explained Atlas, a little tense, but glad that Ethan didn’t make a move. He wasn’t sure if he would have gotten the opportunity to explain himself if Ethan hadn’t known about it beforehand.
“Then what about me? I’m not much better than Ron and much worse than Hermione,” said Harry, realizing that Atlas was at least right about the possible dangers they would have to face.
“Do you want to get knocked out too? Do you want to go back, Harry? Don’t you want to prevent Voldemort from returning?” asked Atlas calmly, knowing that Harry would want to fight Quirrell at any price since Neville's death. He could also have used the words Hermione had used in the original to send him away, but he thought that in Harry’s current state, it was easier to question his dedication to fight Quirrell.
“No… I … I won’t run! I will fight!” answered Harry, gathering his courage.
“Good, then you can go ahead with Ethan, and I will follow as soon as I have placed them at a safe location. We can’t lose too much time, or Quirrell will get the stone. I don’t trust that these statues will stay like this forever, so I will bring them back to the corridor before the room of keys.” explained Atlas and carefully lifted up Hermione.
Harry looked a bit hesitant at Ethan, who nodded at him, before they made their way towards the next room.
When Atlas climbed out of his suitcase to get Ron, the two were already gone.
As he had told them, he went back to the first corridor. He pushed a few mandrake pots to the side to place the suitcase there. He then covered the suitcase with the invisibility cloak before entering.
Down there, Hermione was lying on the table, with a soft pillow and a blanket under her, while Ron was lying on the floor next to the table.
Atlas walked around them multiple times, regulating his breathing and trying to focus on what he needed to do.
The creation of a horcrux was as simple as killing someone and ripping your own soul apart. The problem was that this simple killing had to be done without regret or remorse, and it’s not possible to kill out of mercy. The last part was the part that worried Atlas, because he knew that if Voldemort killed Ethan, Ron would die anyway, and killing him painlessly with the killing curse might be an act of mercy, depending on how painful it was if your soul got forcefully ripped out of your body to give enough energy for the recreation of a hero’s soul.
To fulfill these conditions, Atlas had two possible solutions. One is the hate potion, which is like an anti-love potion that reveals the worst traits of the person whose hair was used by the drinker. That might give Atlas enough reasons to kill Ron in cold blood. The other option was to use his egoism to achieve this goal and make the kill not about Ron but about himself. He would kill to achieve his egoistic goal of taking Hermione with him, regardless of the cost. The problem was that he was unsure if Ron had enough hateful traits in himself to make him hate him so much that he actually wanted to kill Ron so much that he would be able to do it without regrets.
That he knew almost all of Ron’s bad traits, like his permanent jealousy, snoring, laziness, anger issues, snoring, bad breath, lack of appreciation if someone helped him, insecurities, lack of manners, snoring, unreliability, ambition combined with a lack of effort or cowardice, lack of tact, narrowmindedness, prejudice, bad communication skills, impulsiveness, and snoring. The problem was that even if Ron had all of these traits, was it really enough to kill him for them? Atlas thought about it a lot and knew that as much as he hated Ron’s snoring and his other less pleasant traits, it wouldn’t be enough to justify a murder in his mind, and he would have remorse, and no amount of hate potion could change that. So the only option available was for him to accept that he wanted to kill Ron in cold blood for egoistical gains.
He walked around and focused on the reason he was doing all that. He looked at Hermione, went with his hand through her hair that smelled like her peach shampoo, while remembering the times he had combed that heir. He touched her soft cheek, kissed her on the forehead, remembering how she always frown when she was trying to concentrate on a problem. Ron’s existence was getting less and less important to him. He was just a tool he needed. A necessary sacrifice, he told himself.
With determination, he pointed his wand at Ron, who unconsciously lay on the floor, his school uniform covered in dust from the chess match, his hands carefully folded on his stomach.
“Avada Kedavra.” Whispered Atlas and a bright green flash went through the small lab.
Pain went through Atlas' chest as he clenched his fists.
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He then quickly pointed the wand at his own chest.
“Anima Diviso.” said Atlas and envisioned his body being split in half. It was the spell needed to cut his soul into too, but the image and the intention would decide how much of the soul was split off.
The pain instantly increased in magnitude. Even getting burned by the basilisk felt like a minor injury compared to that. Dark smoke was leaving his body, which was forming into something that resembled a human body.
He then pointed his wand at Hermione, clinging to his consciousness.
“Anima Ligamen”
The smoke that was still oozing out of his body was entering Hermione’s at an accelerated speed as he crashed down to the floor.
He didn’t know how long he lay there. Was it five minutes or five hours? He didn’t know, but the pain had stopped. Instead, he felt the same uncomfortableness he had previously only felt on his back. The feeling of incompleteness despite having an intact body. He realized that the Fiendfire basilisk had probably wounded his soul when it burned his body. A wound that hadn’t fully recovered yet.
He instantly became worried. What if his soul was so damaged that he wouldn’t be able to save Hermione with the part that was left? What if his soul was so damaged that he would be unable to survive?
He quickly picked himself up and looked at Hermione. She looked just the same as before. Her breathing was calm, her body was warm, and her heart was beating. When he touched her hand, he felt a faint connection to her. He felt that he could use this connection with his legilimency to look at her mind if he wanted to, but he knew that she wouldn’t dream or think because of his stunning spell. She was simply unconscious. It did help him in a way, as her thoughts would have distracted him from feeling his soul, but even without it, he was unable to get a clear picture of his soul. He could just feel that it was there. It didn’t really calm him down, but he accepted that he could do nothing else now. The only thing he had to do now was make sure that Ethan would die. No matter the cost,
He took his wand, which had rolled next to Ron’s corpse when he had fallen to the floor. Ron looked exactly the same as before, with the exception that his chest wasn’t going up and down anymore.
With a short hesitation, Atlas picked up his wand. He tried to blend out the fact that he had just killed someone and instead focused on killing another person, another "friend."
When Atlas left the suitcase and made sure to cover it with the cloak again, he heard a sudden tremor. Not like an earthquake, but more as if something really heavy smashed into the ground.
He could only assume that it came from below him, from where the Basilisk presumably was, and he thought that it was probably the professors that were fighting them.
He ignored the sudden distraction and started to hurry past the trials. He went past the humming key, past the door that had, with the exeption of the wooden parts dissolved and laid there in pieces, fought of a few chess pieces that had freed themselves, and entered the next room. The room was empty with just a few rats running around, a corner where the troll probably took a shit, and a large Warhammer on one corner, making Atlas glad that the troll was to dump to take it with him. At the end of the square room was an open door.
He went past that door and saw a round room lit up by a wall of black flames that barred the entrance to the next room. In front of the wall stood a small cupboard with potions. The moment he neared the cupboard, purple flames closed on the wayback. He was a bit anxious that he didn’t see Ethan and Harry there. Sure, drinking a potion only required a few seconds, but Atlas knew that behind those black flames was Quirrell, and theoretically, there should be no potion left to go forward. Theoretically, there was only one potion to go forward, so either Ethan or Harry should still be there. But then again, if Quirrell had used a potion, neither of them should be able to advance, which made Atlas realize that the potions would probably be able to refill themselves automatically.
When he arrived at the cupboard, he saw the seven different potions and the riddle on a scroll.
He read the riddle in its entirety and realized that it was exactly the same as in the original.
He already knew the answer, so he culped down the potion in one go and rushed through the black flames.
What awaited him on the other side was not what he expected. He expected the room to have the Mirror of Erised and Harry and Ethan battling Quirrell, but instead he found another circular room filled with shelves of potion ingredients. To his surprise, he saw Harry and Ethan sitting in the center around a cauldron.
"Hey, there you are. Took you long enough. Did something happen?” asked Ethan, almost carefree.
“No. I.. What are you doing? Where is Quirrell?” tried Atlas to make sense of the situation while also changing the topic.
“Snapes Trial isn’t over. The potion we drank was filled with poison as well. It knocks you out within one hour and kills you within a day. Snape, that old bastard, gave us the ingredients and the potion formula to brew the antidote. Guess what. It takes an hour and a half to brew. The trick is to eat a bezoar beforehand. It eliminates almost all poisons, so you don’t fall unconscious after an hour. But I guess it would still get quite uncomfortable after three or four hours, and you would probably still die after a day. So we still need to brew the antidote to get rid of everything. The potion is also almost finished. With a trick, I managed to reduce the brewing time by almost half.” Explained Ethan.
Atlas nodded and took a bezoar too. It wasn’t the most pleasant experience, but he was too distracted by his own thoughts to actually care. The question of why the trials were changed the way they were bothered him. He was sure that it wasn’t Voldemort's doing, as he wouldn’t have had the time to change everything. But if it was Dumbledore, he couldn’t understand why. If he wanted to make the trials more deadly, he was doing a bad job. The Mandrakes would have only knocked them out; the amount of keys they had to use for the door also only slowed them down, and overall the keys were even less dangerous than in the original; the chess game was not changed at all, or at least not that he noticed; Dumbledore had no real influence on the troll, so that was Quirrell’s doing, and now they were poisoned but were given the recipe for the antidote. The only thing that came to his mind was that Dumbledore wanted to slow Quirrell down, or maybe he wanted to slow them down. But for what purpose? Did he want to delay them long enough to return from the ministry? That was a tough task, as he was sure that Fudge would keep him at the ministry till the end of the night.
There was something he was overlooking, but he didn’t know what.
“The potion is ready. Did you really swallow that disgusting thing even though I told you the potion would be ready soon?” asked Ethan when he realized what Atlas had done.
Atlas realized that it was indeed unnecessary, but in the end, he thought it was just a minor setback, if it could even be called that.
“So what's next?” asked Atlas.
“We have to go past that door. It’s not even locked or anything, but it seems there is another trial.” Said Ethan and pointed at the door between two shelves of ingreadiends.
“Another trial?” asked Atlas, confused.
“Yes, I don’t know who is responsible for that, so I don’t even know what it's about, but it requires multiple people. As we don’t know how long the trials will last, we decided to brew the antidote before rushing through and then dying because we were poisoned.” explained Ethan, and Harry just sat there and nodded affirmatively.
“Okay, then let's take a look at what they throw at us this time.” Said Atlas and opened the door.
To Atlas' surprise, the room didn’t look like the room where the mirror would have stood. It was an entirely different room, making him wonder if Dumbledore could shuffle Hogwarts rooms around like he wished or if the whole trial area was just like a magically expanded castle version of a tent that was specially designed by Dumbledore for these trials.
The room was dark, with only a small ray of light illuminating the center. A stone table was there with another scroll of introductions.
“Only those who trust each other can complete the final step. One goes to the left, the other to the right. The right will guide the left, while the left will free the right. If you place your trust in the wrong person, non shall leave.” Read Harry, and when he finished, two different sources of light illuminated the room as two doors opened.
“That is... interesting.” said Atlas, hoping that he would have another opportunity to eventually kill Ethan.
“I will go to the left. You will go to the right.” said Harry and pointed at him and Ethan.
“Why?” asked Atlas, genuily confused.
“Because I think it would be better if you guided me instead of me guiding you. We all know that two are the smarter ones, and I don’t want to send you to your deaths because I was too tired to listen to a specific lesson.” answered Harry.
“That makes an odd lot of sense.” said Ethan and winked Atlas over to him as he prepared to enter the right door.
Atlas followed slowly as he saw Harry walk to the left.
When he entered the door, he was in a barely four-square-meter-sized room. As Atlas felt that the room started to move, it reminded him of an elevator. For like half a minute, the room moved like one of Gringott's underground rollercoasters before the walls became transparent. They could see a small maze below them. The corridors weren’t empty as one would expect but filled with water, or something that appeared like water.
Harry appeared a few seconds later on a small platform on the left side of the room, at the height of the maze walls. He stumbled carefully forward, his arms stretched forward.
Ethan and Atlas immediately realized that Harry couldn’t see anything and could already suspect where this was going.
“Look there. Do you see the door at the end of the room? I guess we have to guide Harry to that door.” Said Ethan.
“Seems like it. Do you think the water is dangerous?” asked Atlas.
“Probably, I would prefer if we don’t let Harry test it.”
“Hello, is someone there?” yelled Harry, not moving another step after exiting the door.
"Yes, Harry, we are here. We have to guide you across the walls of the maze. You have to be incredibly careful because the maze itself is filled with some kind of water that you better not touch.” said Ethan to explain the situation, but before he could give Harry the first command to guide him on what to do, the room or cage he was in was slowly beginning to sink.
“It also looks like we have a small time issue as the cage we are in is slowly sinking down toward the water. Harry, listen, now you stand on a two-to-two-meter platform that is connected to the maze on the top right corner. Slowly advance towards the right of that platform and then go towards the top. There is a small edge between the wall and your platform. But the edge is just half a meter away, so you shouldn’t have any trouble getting over.” Explained Atlas.
Harry did as he was told and slowly advanced to the right top corner.
“Now step forward. A single normal step is enough. Don’t make it too long, or you will be too far.” Said Ethan.
After five minutes, Harry had almost crossed half of the maze under strict and precise commands from Ethan and Atlas. Naturally, Harry asked a few times for specifications or if they were serious about what they were saying. Especially when Harry needed to jump, there was a small quarrel because, as much time as Ethan and Atlas wanted to give him, their cage was going down too. It also didn’t help that the labyrinth was starting to constantly change as soon as Harry reached the middle, requiring Ethan and Atlas to time their commands precisely.
As soon as Harry reached the door, the cage-like room stopped moving and opened.
Atlas and Ethan quickly went through the maze, which wasn’t as hard if you could actually see where you were going, and joined Harry.
“Let’s hope that was the last trial.” Ethan, Atlas, and Harry couldn’t help but agree.
When Harry opened the door, a cold, loud voice came towards them.
“Finally, you are here!”