"Oh!" Fleur clapped her hands together with sudden enthusiasm. Her blue eyes lit up with genuine excitement and curiosity.
"Now this is far more interesting than sitting here in awkward silence like mourners at a funeral! So, why don't you each tell us exactly what you encountered in there?!"
The situation facing them was this, and everyone understood it: there were four Trial chambers in total, each one seemingly designed with completely different mechanics tailored for a different team.
Conquering any single one of them should theoretically yield whatever was needed to melt the ice block.
So, their best tactical move was to identify the least daunting challenge among the four available options and pool their combined efforts and complementary talents to overcome it together as a unified force rather than continuing to bash their heads individually against impossible walls.
"Well, then—who wants to go first?" Cedric asked, looking around the circle of exhausted, frost-covered faces with courtesy.
The proposal was met with general agreement and cautious nods from everyone gathered. Viktor straightened up suddenly from his previously slouched position, becoming energetic and eager despite his exhaustion and the cuts on his face. "We'll start—"
"We'll start," Harry said at the exact same moment, just as eager and determined, his voice was overlapping Viktor's in an almost comical unison.
He genuinely wanted to understand how they were supposed to deal with those two terrifying stone giants.
Hermione didn't object to sharing their information first, despite the competitive implications. She gestured for the group to follow her toward their stone door.
"Come inside with us. It'll be easier to explain if you can actually see it for yourselves rather than trying to describe it inadequately with words."
The group followed Harry and Hermione toward their stone door in a loose cluster.
A bright flash of transported light and they found themselves standing inside the ancient Greek-style dueling arena that Harry and Hermione had been battling in.
Even Fleur had tagged along for this tour, far too curious to see what all the fuss was about and completely unwilling to be left out of anything interesting.
"There are two enormous stone giants over there," Harry said, as he led them carefully across the ice toward where the creatures stood. "We can get closer as long as you don't attack them or provoke them in any way. They won't move or activate until someone strikes first."
The slick ice floor gave Cedric and Luna considerable trouble with every cautious step.
Viktor and Fleur, however, moved across the ice as if it were solid ground, without even consciously thinking about their footing or balance.
"Most of the year where I come from looks exactly like this," Viktor explained straightforwardly, catching Hermione's puzzled look at his easy, assured movement across the slippery surface.
Fleur gave a small, satisfied tilt of her nose, looking rather pleased with herself and her own graceful gliding across the ice. "I'm rather good at ice skating."
When the stone giants' massive forms finally loomed into clear view through the swirling curtains of falling snow, those seeing them for the first time—Cedric, Luna, Viktor, and Fleur drew sharp breaths of shock that turned immediately to white vapor in the frozen air.
"How did you deal with them?" Cedric asked, his voice was full of genuine awe and disbelief, his eyes were traveling slowly up and up the massive stone giants above them. "They're absolutely massive. One swing from those arms could crush a person completely flat. How do you even begin to fight something that size?"
"Each giant has two distinct types of attacks that it cycles through," Harry explained.
"Once you strike one and wake it up from its dormant state, it launches stone projectiles—we call them stone eggs because of their shape at whoever attacked it first. Three volleys in a row, very predictable timing with five-second intervals.
And then it switches tactics completely and tears up the ground beneath it, hurling enormous chunks of ice instead. Also, three throws in series. There's a consistent five-second pause between each individual strike."
He pointed up at the tall surrounding walls that encircled the entire arena, rising thirty feet into the air to support the tiered seating.
"Hermione's idea was to climb up there to those spectator seats carved into the stone. The stone eggs can't reach us at that height. And the ice chunks aren't too hard to dodge as long as you watch the giant's movements carefully and time your dodges exactly right."
"Then how did you fail if you had a working strategy?" Fleur asked bluntly, genuinely confused and frowning. "That sounds difficult but manageable."
"We did defeat one of them completely," Harry said, his face darkening at the bitter memory.
"Completely destroyed it, shattered it into rubble and scattered pieces across the arena floor. We thought we'd won, thought the trial was over. But it recovered almost immediately within seconds, the pieces all reassembled themselves magically, rising up and fitting back together.
And when it came back, when it reformed, it went into a complete frenzy unlike anything before. In that berserk state, it just keeps hurling ice without stopping at all. No pauses, no patterns, no predictability. Just endless bombardment. And once it recovered, it started actually moving around on its base for the first time, advancing toward us. Before that, it had stayed rooted in one place the whole time like it was bolted down."
Everyone pictured the horrifying scene vividly in their minds and shuddered.
"Is there any chance," Viktor said slowly, his brow furrowed deeply in concentration, "that you need to defeat both giants at exactly the same time? I mean, simultaneously, within seconds of each other so neither has a chance to resurrect the other?"
Harry's green eyes went wide with sudden realization. The idea hit him like a Bludger straight to the head.
"After everything that just happened, I did briefly consider that possibility," he said somewhat sheepishly.
Hermione's expression didn't shift into surprise, she simply pressed her lips together, something troubled moving behind her eyes.
"At the same time..." she repeated thoughtfully.
"That would mean Harry and I each take one giant solo. But we still have to dodge the stone eggs and ice chunks individually while maintaining offensive pressure, which cuts down our actual attack window significantly.
The sustained magic drain would be enormous. I'm not confident we could finish them both within the duration of a single Warming Charm before the cold forces us to retreat. We'd freeze to death before victory."
Everyone nodded slowly in understanding and agreement. Hermione was right.
Viktor, however, was studying the two stone giants positioned on either side of the central axis, his expression was contemplative.
"Then," he said at last, exhaling slowly through his nose, "let's go and have a look at my chamber."
The group made their way back outside through the transport door and then trudged through snow to the Trial chamber Viktor had chosen.
The transport door deposited them into a completely different environment—a rugged mountain landscape shrouded in thick wind and endless falling snow.
Sharp rocks protruded up between tall, ancient pine trees heavy with snow, and at the center of a natural clearing carved into the mountainside, a roughly circular stone-paved area perhaps fifty feet across held a raised stone platform.
Several zigzagging mountain paths extended out from the clearing's edges like rods on a wheel, disappearing into the blizzard-blurred distance where visibility failed completely in the white-out conditions.
At the heart of the high platform rose a lighthouse structure, somewhat taller than Cedric, constructed of dark gray stone that looked ancient and weathered. Its conical top held a lit candelabra with a single thick candle burning steadily.
"Wait, don't go up there!" Viktor grabbed Harry's arm firmly just before he stepped onto the first stone of the platform. "The moment anyone steps onto the platform, they appear!"
"They?" Harry's eyes went wide with alarm, stopping in his tracks. "What appears?"
"Everything," Viktor said, exasperated by the mere memory of it.
His face showed genuine trauma. "House-elves, goblins, centaurs, werewolves, and some creatures I couldn't identify for certain but looked like they might be vampires—or at least I hope they weren't actual vampires..."
Seeing the alarmed looks spreading across everyone's faces like ripples, he quickly clarified before full panic could set in.
"Oh, none of them are real living creatures, I mean. They're all moving ice sculptures, conjured by incredibly advanced Transfiguration magic. They come pouring out from all the mountain paths surrounding the clearing simultaneously, wave after wave, and there are more of them with every wave. The numbers increase exponentially..."
"What do they do once they appear?" Fleur asked, suddenly very interested and leaning forward intently.
"They attack the lighthouse," Viktor said darkly, his mood was visibly souring at the deeply unpleasant memory.
"The moment the lighthouse completely collapses and falls, the challenge is failed immediately. The platform sinks straight down into the ground and you have to wait five minutes before you can try again."
"So, you're meant to protect the lighthouse from the swarm of attackers?" Cedric said, working through the logic.
"Exactly," Viktor confirmed with a sharp nod, his expression was grim.
"But here's the real problem—the moment you strike any of those ice sculptures to destroy them and defend the lighthouse, some of them immediately break off from the main attacking group to come after you personally. And their methods of attack are..."
He paused, searching for adequate words to capture the horror. "Varied. Trust me on this. Not pleasant at all..."
"But how do you actually win the challenge?" Hermione pressed, frowning deeply. "There must be a victory condition. What triggers success?"
Viktor shook his head in frustration. He gestured toward the candelabra and its half-melted candle.
"I never managed to find out. But my guess based on the candle is that you have to protect the lighthouse successfully from the moment the challenge begins until the candle burns all the way down to nothing on its own."
He went on to describe in vivid detail the relentless waves of ice sculptures, their sheer overwhelming numbers and the brutal, punishing pace of their assault. Everyone listening was wincing and exchanging looks of dismay by the time he finished.
There was no question about it: this challenge was completely impossible to complete alone. It absolutely required cooperation, multiple defenders working together.
And since Viktor was the only one left from Durmstrang after his teammates had been eliminated in earlier rounds, it made complete sense that he'd come looking for allies.
"Our turn, I suppose," Cedric said with a resigned sigh that seemed to deflate his entire body.
The group moved once more arriving this time at the chamber that had put Cedric and Luna through what Cedric had privately described to Harry earlier as "an experience somewhere between purgatory and delirium."
Stepping through the stone door into this new environment, the first thing everyone saw was a tall stone pillar rising from the ground like a monument, carved with intricate reliefs in remarkable detail—a lion, a badger, an eagle, and a snake intertwined.
Hovering just above the pillar's flat top, an orange orb of light roughly the size of a basketball pulsed gently with warm light.
"Last year, when Professor Watson substituted for Professor Lupin's Defense Against the Dark Arts class," Cedric said, turning to address Harry and Hermione specifically with meaningful eye contact, "he taught you how to deal with Hinkypunks, didn't he? You used small boats?"
When they both confirmed it with nods, he let out a slow breath and pointed toward several small boats moored at the rocky lakeshore behind the pillar, bobbing gently. "I thought as much when I saw this."
They were standing on the edge of a vast lake that stretched beyond sight into darkness.
The sky above was black as night, completely starless and oppressive, and the water beneath it was murky and dim, impossible to see more than a few inches into.
All of it was lit only by small cyan orbs floating across the water's surface like tiny moons, spaced out at regular intervals and trailing away in a winding, glowing path that stretched far beyond what any of them could see.
"What do you have to do exactly?" Harry asked, looking at Luna with curiosity.
"Oh, it's actually rather interesting!" Luna said cheerfully, as though describing a pleasant countryside outing. "When you touch the orange orb on the pillar, it floats out over the lake and you have to follow it in one of those boats."
"It follows a fixed route marked by those cyan lights," Cedric added, nodding toward the floating markers that bobbed gently on small waves. "You have to keep pace with it constantly, never falling behind. If you fall too far behind, thirty feet is the threshold, we think—the challenge ends immediately and you fail."
"What happens when you fail?" Harry asked.
"The orange orb drifts back to the pillar on its own like it's being reeled in, and the boat returns automatically to shore." Cedric noticed Harry's expression—he looked like he was about to say that doesn't sound so hard compared to the other challenges and gave a tired, knowing smile.
"Paddling forward does take magic to propel the boat through the water, but that's manageable on its own. The real problem is what you run into along the way: whirlpools that can capsize the boat completely if you don't navigate around them carefully, sudden crosswinds that push you violently off course, and... things beneath the water that like to push up from below."
He paused meaningfully, meeting Harry's eyes with a haunted look.
"Trust me, Harry. Falling into this lake in this weather is not something you want to experience."
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Author's Note: Hey guys, It's been a massive thousand chapter run. Thanks for sticking to the story till now. We are now nearly at the end of this fanfic and From the bottom of my heart, I want to thank everyone who read and supported this story. Thank you!