"Fuck you in the mouth! And why didn't the movies say anything about the fucking mess that was going on at Hogwarts during the time of the parents of damn Harry Potter!" I cursed everything in the world to myself, diligently trying to cover Black, who had gone into a frenzy, and snap back with simple spells at the fifth-year Ravenclaws who had attacked us.
"Flipendo! Protego Duo, Acar-Siga, Diagolerri!" I cast magic continuously, trying to use at least one attacking spell for every three defensive ones. Our team was being bombarded too intensely with not very pleasant spells and elemental charms, from which it was almost impossible to defend with a simple Protego.
"Peter, don't get lost!" Black growled angrily, somehow, mainly due to defensive artifacts, continuing to shower our opponents with combat curses. Peter, to the best of his ability, tried to help his friend, but the chaos of the surrounding battle greatly distracted our buddy from magic.
The crowd-on-crowd battle very quickly turned into a real hell, in which strong and not-so-strong loners in green ties tried to knock out the same loners and rare ones in scarlet-gold ties... Which spawned a real chaos, in which a stray curse to the back of the head could fly in almost at any moment.
And the endless hum of screams, explosions, painful groans, and other, sometimes very specific sounds from the use of all sorts of spells, hit the ears and calm hard. Which, combined with the constant danger, from which Potter's Sneakoscope squeaked non-stop, and the magical fog obscuring the view, pressed hard on the nerves.
Peter, not ready for such trials, even though he continued to do at least something, seemingly fearing Black even more than all the Slytherins combined, could not adequately react to what was happening, let alone anything more.
However, it was hard for all of us in this regard. Only due to mental techniques and a special spell that dulls emotions did I manage to maintain my composure. Sirius was frankly carried away, so due to anger and rage he managed to hold up pretty well among all this variety of noise, screams, and magical strikes.
Peter, along with James, kept themselves within limits only for the first few minutes after the start of the battle... Then the students were just beginning to get fired up, spells flew relatively neatly, and the warring parties tried to stay on opposite sides of the invisible border dividing the two warring camps.
Then everything somehow imperceptibly escalated into one big dump, the edge of the Forbidden Forest was covered by a magical fog, the roar of spells and the screams of wounded wizards were literally deafening, and panic gradually seized both sides of the conflict. The smartest and most cowardly had been trying to break out of this hell for a couple of minutes already, often swelling the number of the wounded and knocked out...
Fortunately, by general agreement, the students didn't even try to use truly deadly spells. And dark magic, capable of crippling any wizard with amazing ease even through most magical defenses, as far as I could judge, was not particularly used...
But even so, finding yourself in the middle of all this farce, fighting almost against everyone at once, was really scary! It's not at all surprising that Peter and James showed weakness in such a situation, frankly sluggishly fighting off other people's attacks. Sirius and I had to take the rap for the whole company...
"Protego Duo! Depulso, Soulcede!" I cast magic furiously, in passing trying to strengthen my own spells by concentrating additional magic in them... It didn't work very well, because the books sent by Andromeda Black on this topic didn't explain all that much.
Still, wizards capable of feeling their own magic, as I learned from those same books, are quite rare, and the strengthening of spells mostly occurs due to banal emotions, the power of intentions, and banal habit... Because of which it is practically impossible to directly pump magic into a spell, but a sincere desire to do so is still capable of strengthening the spell.
And right now I really, really wanted to strengthen my own magic, desperately trying to cover my comrades and not expose myself. With which I had some problems, because all my defensive spells dissipated quite quickly under the power of other people's curses and combat charms, and only Sirius had normal defensive artifacts.
And even then, at some point the expensive protection of the eldest heir of the Most Ancient and Noble House simply could not withstand the pressure of constantly changing opponents... After all, we didn't stand in one place all this time, sometimes running away from senior students, sometimes simply escaping from elemental magic and large-scale transfiguration, sometimes vice versa—pursuing opponents who had given up their positions.
Actually, in one of such moments, someone from the senior years of Slytherin flew at us, in passing launching a fire spell at Sirius, whose protection, although able to block such an attack, still not completely... The guy's hands and face were specifically singed, and then the senior student's spell also knocked my comrade out.
"Damn it, Black! Levicorpus!" I yelled furiously, pulling Sirius behind my back with a spell, and immediately throwing an Abbelus—a spell perfectly replacing a stun grenade—in the direction of the supposed opponent.
It's true, it deafened us pretty well too, but I still managed to distract the superior opponent for a few moments, digging a mini-trench with a construction spell, where I threw the unconscious Black...
Well, and then, when Peter also received his dose of curses, and I managed to break through the Slytherin's defense with the curse of decay, which Sirius had used on me quite recently, the trench was expanded, and our whole company hid in it, covering our heads with a transfigured board. Fortunately, another Abbelus in combination with a weak, because I had only recently mastered this spell, Expelliarmus, completely incapacitated the senior student who had attacked us.
"So I didn't study construction spells under Flitwick's guidance for nothing," starting to literally shake from the adrenaline overflowing me, I laughed. For some reason, the idea of digging a trench right during a magical brawl seemed painfully funny and clumsy to me... But it worked, because no one tried to drag us into the battle anymore.
"That's for sure..." Potter quietly spoke up, trying to wipe his uncontrollably watering eyes. He was doused with the fumes of some potion, after which the guy, although he didn't lose his ability to see, tears greatly interfered with his normal casting.
"No longer drawn to bravely punishing the Dark Lord's henchmen?" I snorted sarcastically, in passing expanding our shelter a little and protecting the board hiding us with additional charms... Nothing serious, I didn't know truly powerful stationary shields, but additional protection wouldn't be superfluous anyway.
"Not drawn," Potter answered me angrily, however, immediately quieting down, feeling how something exploded right above us...
"Bombardas are flying, no doubt," I noted to myself, at the same time beginning to frankly fear how serious the battle had become... "If someone has already used Bombarda, a direct hit of which into a wizard's body is almost guaranteed to kill him—an ordinary schoolboy meeting has already ceased to be such," I concluded, deciding to sit it out in the self-dug shelter until the very end.
And this was the right thought, because very soon the Headmaster and Professor Flitwick intervened in this whole brawl, interrupting the fight that had gone too far... The Headmaster's thunderous roar, strangely amplified so that some people's eardrums almost burst, managed to stop the fighting crowd for a while.
After which the old man dispelled the magical fog, knocked out the too zealous schoolchildren still continuing to fight with pinpoint spells, and began to organize help for all the victims and threaten the survivors with terrible punishments.
So, Peter and Black were delivered to the hospital wing, and James and I were sent to the house common room, having received the strictest ban on leaving it until the end of the whole raised bacchanalia... Such a large-scale fight caused quite a stir; Healers from St. Mungo's were urgently summoned to Hogwarts, the Board of Governors was convened, teachers were pulled from their legal days off...
"It seems this time our confrontation with the snakes went too far," James noted dejectedly, not finding a place for himself after everything that had happened.
"Well, but now half the house can brag about loud victories in an unequal battle against the insidious Slytherins and the vultures who forgot their place," I grumbled in displeasure, at the same time rejoicing that at least this skirmish did not end for me with seclusion in the hospital wing.
"Don't joke like that..." Potter asked me, having taken Dumbledore's, albeit calm, but rather harsh urging really sharply. And the Headmaster's dissatisfaction with his own students was so great that for the first time in my memory he raised his voice at the students, reprimanding everyone at once for our stupidity and recklessness. "Do you think the Headmaster wasn't joking about expulsions?"
"I'm not sure... You yourself know that it's not customary in our school to expel students. But sending a couple of dozen hotheads to 'home schooling' won't stop Dumbledore," I easily shrugged. "But don't worry too much about this. The prefects and senior students will be the first to get it. It's unlikely anyone will seriously punish us. After all, we were dragged into all this almost in the position of ordinary meat..."
"Yeah... but my father, having learned about my participation in such a fight, will definitely not be happy... We could have died there," still being in a defeatist mood, James noted. "And someone probably really did die."
"Finally realized what exactly such crowd-on-crowd wizard skirmishes usually end up with?" I looked at my drooping friend mockingly and angrily, still furious at the stupidity of my buddies... And my own inability to normally influence James and Sirius when the situation really demands it.
"These two clumsy fools are too dependent on the opinions and words of our senior students... Which in light of recent events is not a good thing," I grimaced mentally, thinking how not to get into the situation that arose today in the future. "Although the experience turned out to be gorgeous... I even liked it," I admitted somewhat lost, recalling a couple of my own victories over other wizards with a smile and seething excitement.
Even if this whole skirmish didn't last more than ten minutes, the guys and I hid in the hole at the seventh minute anyway, but honestly, even these few minutes were so saturated with danger and the emotions associated with it that I still can't recover. Even mental magic doesn't help!
"Okay, don't sour too much. It's unlikely anyone managed to die before the Headmaster intervened. Still, no one particularly used truly lethal spells... But there are really a lot of wounded in the hospital wing right now. And the Headmaster called St. Mungo's for help for a reason," I still took pity on my comrade, realizing that the boy took everything that happened much more sharply than me.
It was me, having heard that a big meeting was planned, who already roughly knew what to expect from a magical brawl of such a scale... And even if reality still turned out to be much more unpleasant than my expectations, I was still far from the breaking of the template that Potter faced.
And therefore, I had to spend the next few hours trying not to let Potter go into particularly deep wilds of a depressive mood. Fortunately, James was always a fairly quick-tempered guy, starting to regain his former mood right after a few jokes and a reminder that the same Snape should have gotten much more during this skirmish than us...
In general, Saturday ended for us something like this. Potter and I sat decorously in our own room, talked, shared impressions, and even analyzed our own mistakes, deciding what our team would do at the next joint training...
Well, and already on Sunday, not the kindest news and rather harsh decisions of Dumbledore reached all the Gryffindors, who decided this time not to limit himself to simply deducting points against those who organized and arranged this whole mess... Some of our senior students were specifically out of luck.