Deep within the Forbidden Forest, light filtered through the ancient trees' dense branches, breaking into mottled shadows that fell upon the slippery moss and rotting soil.
Every molecule in the air was saturated with the heavy scent of death and rebirth. Decaying leaves, damp earth, and a faint, sulfur-like burn combined into a disquieting cocktail.
Fang, the hound, sank its paws into the mud, letting out a constant, restrained low growl from deep in its throat. It ignored the usual animal tracks, driven instead by a more stimulating scent, its nostrils flaring as it tracked the intensifying trail of the Weasley twins, forming a black, rapidly moving silhouette ahead.
Alan followed closely behind, the hem of his robes splattered with mud.
His steps were steady and fast, but his mind had already detached from his running body.
Deep within his consciousness, the grand structure of his "Mind Palace" was running its core computation units at overload. Streams of data, like roaring waterfalls, washed over every nerve. He had turned himself into a living radar, absorbing all visible and invisible information from his surroundings, scanning furiously for any "illogical" anomalies.
A patch of purple caught his retina briefly.
It was scattered ash at the base of the grass, seemingly never cooled—hot flakes shed from the body of a Purple Ashwinder.
Any ordinary tracker would have taken this as a direct, effective lead. But Alan's gaze lingered only 0.3 seconds before marking it as "false information" and filtering it out.
In his brain, a dynamic "Hogwarts ecological map," interwoven with knowledge of magical biology, ancient runes, and Hogwarts geography, was comparing thousands of differential calculations per second with the real environment before him.
Soon, a sharp red alert rang in his Mind Palace—a fatal logical error.
An absolutely illogical structural BUG!
According to his map database, the coordinates they were at matched the environmental parameters perfectly. This area should have been the primary habitat of a creature called a "Snidget."
The Snidget's entry unfolded automatically in his mind: timid, gentle, feeding on small insects and magical worms.
The most critical attribute was highlighted: the Snidget's feathers, due to their unique molecular structure, possess near-immune physical resistance to most magic.
Conclusion: The Snidget is the highest-level—and only—predator in the Purple Ashwinder's ecosystem.
If this place showed such dense Purple Ashwinder activity, their natural predator, the Snidget, could not possibly remain silent, as if evaporated from the forest.
Not a single birdcall could be heard.
That deathly silence itself was the biggest flaw.
Unless…
This was a trap.
A carefully designed, deliberate logical trap.
Someone—or something—had exploited the tracker's most basic common sense, fabricating the illusion of a forest full of Ashwinders. The real purpose: to lure anyone tracking the twins straight into a perfectly prepared ambush.
Cold sweat instantly seeped from Alan's temples, sliding down his face. It wasn't fear, but the physiological shiver of worst-case validation.
He acted without hesitation.
He lunged forward, grabbing Fang's collar with brute force, stopping the hound mid-charge.
He scanned the surroundings.
A clearing lay before him, wider than anywhere else in the forest. But this openness felt suffocatingly unnatural. The towering trees around it, their growth patterns, their branches' angles—all formed an eerie, centripetal enclosure.
This was no ordinary spot—it was a deliberate ambush arena, a circular theater without visual blind spots.
Alan's breathing steadied, his heartbeat returning to a calm, powerful rhythm. He crouched, his hand soothing Fang's restless back, issuing a precise command in a detached, code-like tone:
"Fang, bark at the center of that clearing! Loudly! Make your presence known!"
The massive hound tilted its head, confused. It didn't understand why its master wanted it to bark at a patch of empty mud.
But years of obedience made Fang faithfully follow the command.
"Woof! Woof! Woof!"
The ferocious, intimidating roar instantly tore apart the false silence of the Forbidden Forest. Fang unleashed all his strength, barking furiously at the very center of the clearing, his paws clawing at the ground, creating the illusion of a locked target ready to strike.
Sound waves echoed through the trees, startling a flock of unseen nocturnal birds.
And at the same moment that Fang's barks drew the attention of all potential "observers,"
Alan silently retreated.
The tip of his wand glimmered with a faint, nearly imperceptible light. A miniature version of his "Phantom Body Charm," compressed to the extreme with minimal magical fluctuation, instantly enveloped his body.
His outline blurred and twisted; in less than a second, the color and texture of his robes perfectly matched the massive oak behind him, its deep, textured bark.
He had seamlessly embedded himself into the environmental background.
Holding his breath, he slowed his heartbeat to a minimum, becoming like a cold, lifeless statue, silently waiting.
Waiting for the programming error to fully reveal itself.
As expected, nothing had escaped his calculations.
After nearly a minute of Fang's relentless barking, when even the hound began to grow weary,
Something abnormal happened.
The seemingly flat clearing, covered with fallen leaves, suddenly began to bulge violently, yet completely silently, from the ground!
It was as if an invisible giant hand from deep underground was lifting the entire earth upward.
In the next instant, mud and leaves were blasted into the air by a massive surge!
Hundreds—perhaps even thousands—of Purple Ashwinders, their bodies wreathed in ominous violet flames, twisted, coiled, and intertwined into a nauseatingly huge mass, bursting from the earth!
It wasn't a living creature.
It was a disaster given form, composed purely of malice and magical energy!
Its "body" consisted of countless writhing, hissing Ashwinders. Violet flames flowed across their scaly forms, distorting the surrounding air.
Its "head" was a cluster of ten or more of the thickest, most menacing Ashwinder heads, forcibly bound together into a grotesque mass of fangs and forked tongues, silently roaring.
It "opened" its eyes—ten pairs of burning flames—fixating its gaze on the source of Fang's barking.
Without hesitation, its massive body, made entirely of writhing snakes, opened the cluster-mouth of snake heads and lunged toward Fang like a bolt of purple lightning!
Yet at the very same moment it struck,
A piercing, ice-blue beam, condensed to perfection like a solid arrow, shot from behind a giant oak to the side.
Its target was neither the monstrous head nor the enormous body.
It struck precisely, without the slightest deviation, hitting a seemingly insignificant node in the midsection of the massive snake construct—a point formed by seven intertwined Ashwinders that, in the overall structure, maintained its energy flow.
"Glacius!"
Alan's attack was calm and lethal.
The instant the monster broke through the ground, his Mind Palace had already scanned and modeled its entire structure. He identified that the node of seven intertwined snakes was the "vital point" maintaining the energy flow between the upper and lower halves of this aggregated mass.
Crack!
The bone-chilling ice exploded violently upon contact with the burning snake bodies!
The collision of ice and fire erupted into thick clouds of white steam!
Though the extreme cold could not completely freeze a creature made entirely of flame, the chilling surge that penetrated its core successfully, if temporarily, slowed down its incredibly frenzied lower body movements.
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