All manner of monsters howled with inhuman cries as they charged the stone platform in an uncoordinated but overwhelming swarm. The sound was terrifying, high-pitched shrieks mixing with guttural roars.
Viktor and Fleur had long since braced themselves for this nightmare scenario.
Against the relentless storm of attacks coming from every direction, both of them stretched their nerves to the absolute breaking point.
They sent Impediment Jinxes and Shielding Charms flying continuously from their wand-tips in a desperate attempt to ward off the worst of the onslaught. Their arms ached from the repetitive casting.
Luna had become the busiest person on the entire battlefield.
She worked tirelessly to ensure that not a single spell was wasted and that every hit counted as a kill, carefully avoiding making herself a target for the vengeful creatures.
At all three passage intersections, the shattered remnants of ice sculptures had piled into small mountains of glittering fragments. Yet from the depths of the howling blizzard that never ceased, more monsters kept pouring out endlessly, scattering in every direction like an army of ants.
Beneath that relentless, tide-like surge, Harry, Hermione, and Cedric's planned defensive line was crumbling catastrophically.
BANG!
A goblin's explosive attack sent Hermione tumbling head over heels, slamming her hard into the ground. She scrambled desperately back to her feet and stole a quick glance across the chaotic battlefield. Her heart immediately sank like a stone as she took in the situation.
With the pathway entrances blocked by combat, the newly spawned ice creatures were crawling everywhere now, swarming every available surface like insects.
They climbed slopes, scaled rocks, emerged from unexpected angles.
Although Luna was doing her absolute utmost to clear the ones flooding into the plaza, moving like a dancer through the carnage, the defensive line had broken completely. And their numbers only kept growing exponentially with each passing second.
Hermione realized in a flash of clarity that they needed to change tactics immediately or lose.
"Forget guarding the paths, Harry, Cedric!" she shouted desperately to the two of them, who were already mired deep in the thick of combat. "There's no point anymore! The line is broken! I say we focus entirely on clearing the ice creatures already inside the plaza!"
The moment he heard her, Cedric leaped down from the stone slope into the plaza proper and began dispatching the frenzied little creatures one by one with the most efficient basic jinxes he could manage. Conservation was key now.
"What other choice do we have?" Harry replied, panting hard like he'd been sprinting. His chest heaved. He had taken more than a few direct blasts from the goblins' explosive flashes, and his face was bruised and swollen, his hair a wild, chaotic mess.
"Oh!" A sudden cry of sharp pain from Luna drew every eye immediately to her position.
"What happened, Luna!" Harry's voice cracked with concern.
Harry saw Luna collapse sideways onto the ground, curling up in agony. The ice dragon that had struck her down showed absolutely no mercy. It circled above her prone form with beating wings, blasting out gust after freezing gust of dragon breath directly onto her body.
The frost spread visibly across her clothes and skin.
The sight sent a surge of hot fury through Harry's chest.
He leaped recklessly onto the back of an ice centaur that was drawing its bow toward the stone platform. The force of his landing shattered the frozen figure completely into fragments beneath his weight.
In several quick, desperate strides, Harry reached Luna's side. He raised his wand with a trembling arm and sent a Disarming Charm straight at the attacking dragon hovering above, reducing it to nothing but glittering dust.
Then he crouched down quickly and moved to help Luna to her feet.
Hermione and Cedric, seeing Luna fall in agony, felt the same protective rage ignite within them. They raised their wands and brought them down in sharp, decisive strokes again and again, taking out one or two ice creatures with each powerful blow.
Together, the three of them cut a path through the swarming creatures to Harry's side and raised a defensive barrier around all four of them, creating a temporary safe zone.
Luna's condition was worse than they'd feared. Her hair was completely frozen solid, every strand matted together by frost and ice into a stiff mass. Her tracksuit had gone rigid and stiff as cardboard. But that was the least of her problems, the least concerning injury.
She had been carrying wounds from the earlier brutal clash with Malfoy's group in the forest that had never properly healed. And now those injuries had been sealed shut by the intense cold, the flesh around each cut was pale and bloodless white. The frost had created a grotesque preservation.
Luna herself was ashen. Her breathing came in thin, barely audible wisps that were hard to hear even in the momentary quiet of the shield.
"You can't keep going, Luna," Harry said, his voice was firm and uncompromising. "You're done. You did enough."
Without even consulting Cedric, he simply scooped her up carefully, tucked her under his arm like she weighed nothing, and with Hermione and Cedric covering him on both sides charged toward the portal at full speed.
WHOOSH.
The moment they crossed through the shimmering gateway and into the safe zone, Harry didn't waste a single second. He laid Luna down gently in the snow, then raised his wand high and fired a streak of dazzling red sparks into the sky.
"You did brilliantly, Luna," he said, looking down at her as she struggled to speak through frozen lips. His eyes and his voice were both steady, projecting a confidence he didn't feel. "Leave the rest to us. We'll finish it."
With that, he turned sharply and plunged back through the portal into the chaos.
The soft, rippling light of the gateway lit Luna's silver eyes that were slowly losing their focus. She watched Harry's silhouette go until it vanished completely beyond the shimmering threshold.
"Sorry, Cedric!" Harry called out breathlessly, slicing his wand through the air as he drove toward the center of the battlefield.
Along the way, he booted aside a werewolf that lunged at him with claws extended, sending it sprawling into the snow. "I acted on my own just then—I sent Luna out of the tournament without asking you!"
"Fine by me, Harry!" Cedric replied immediately, with not a trace of resentment in his voice. If anything, his tone was grateful, relieved. "Thank you. You did exactly what I was about to do myself."
"Will you two stop chatting like we're having tea!" Fleur's voice shrieked.
An ice arrow found a gap in Fleur's defenses, grazing her cheek and drawing blood before slamming into the lighthouse structure with a crack. The tower, already shedding chunks of stone from countless impacts lurched violently and let loose another shower of powder and debris.
Fleur shrieked in genuine fear. "How about we deal with these wretched things first!"
At last, mercifully, no more creatures were pouring from the three paths. The spawning had stopped.
But by that point, nearly a hundred ice creatures remained in the plaza, and the great majority of them were hurling themselves at the stone platform.
Viktor and Fleur could do nothing but alternate desperately between Impediment Jinxes and Shielding Charms, doing everything in their rapidly diminishing power to keep the lighthouse standing just a little longer.
"I'll help you!" Hermione shouted.
Hermione, the patron of house-elves blasted seven or eight ice-carved elf figures apart in one sweeping spell and rushed up onto the platform to join the desperate effort.
There was no clean strategy to untangle the chaos now, no clever solution. The only path forward was brute force: destroy every last ice creature as fast as possible before the lighthouse fell.
Harry and Cedric went back-to-back instinctively, forming a two-person squad of coordinated attack and defense. They poured every last ounce of their remaining strength and magical reserves into clearing the field, moving as one unit.
In the end, somehow, they managed it.
But with barely three minutes left on the ten-minute countdown that felt like hours, the last vampire absorbed five simultaneous jinxes from different directions and exploded with a deafening crack into a burst of glittering dust that fell like snow.
Silence fell across the battlefield.
"I genuinely cannot believe I'm still alive," Fleur said, her voice completely hollow and distant. She sank to the ground the moment the last rampaging creature fell, her expression was blank with shock and exhaustion.
Viktor stumbled, nearly toppling clean off the platform. He caught himself and turned around with great effort.
And then he saw it: the lighthouse, battered beyond recognition, blasted white along its entire length by repeated frost attacks, half its midsection simply gone. Yet still standing through some miracle of engineering or magic. The candle at its peak still burned with a faint, defiant flame that refused to die.
Viktor let out a groan that was almost a howl of relief mixed with disbelief and collapsed heavily to the ground beside Fleur.
Harry, Hermione, and Cedric weren't faring any better. Exhaustion was written across all three of them, their competition tracksuits drenched completely through with sweat despite the freezing temperature. They looked like they'd been swimming.
"I really need to—" Hermione bent forward, bracing her hands on her knees for support, drops of sweat were dripping steadily from her face onto the snow below. "I think I should seriously reassess my views on house-elves. When they go berserk and attack in groups, they're actually rather terrifying creatures."
Harry let out a tired grin despite everything. "Ron's going to be absolutely thrilled to hear you say—"
BOOM.
A violent tremor and a terrifying roar yanked every head toward the second path. The ground shook.
Out of the blizzard, something enormous emerged, nearly the size of the stone giants they had faced in the arena shouldering a club-shaped column of ice bristling with frozen spikes like a medieval weapon.
Each footfall it took sent the ground shuddering violently with a deafening crash that echoed off the rocks.
"A troll," Harry said flatly, his expression was one of pure, absolute despair. "Just kill me now. I'm done."
"I think this is the final wave," Hermione said, straightening up with tremendous effort despite every joint in her body lodging its own fierce protest. "We survive this one creature, and we win the challenge, Harry. Just one more."
"Survive it?!" Fleur could barely stand, her golden hair was a disheveled wreck of tangles and frost. She stared at the ice troll as it bore down on them—its every thunderous step was making the ground heave beneath their feet. "The problem is how we're supposed to survive something like that when we're already at our limit! We have nothing left!"
Hermione bit her lip hard and said nothing, because she had no answer.
"Maybe we call a restart?" Viktor said, his resignation palpable in every word. "Withdraw now, replenish, try again. We genuinely have nothing left to give."
Hermione's eyes burned with fierce refusal. 'Even Luna had gone down sacrificing herself in this round—and after all that effort, all that pain, they were just supposed to give up and start over from scratch?'
But she also knew that Fleur wasn't wrong about their condition.
"Before we withdraw," Harry said slowly, thinking it through, "we need to figure out what this thing is capable of. What its attack pattern is. Let's fall back toward the portal, buy some time, test it a little—maybe it's not as fearsome as it looks."
"Agreed," said Cedric, raising his hand like voting. "At the very minimum, we learn how it attacks. That way we go into the next attempt with a solid plan and intelligence."
And so, the decision was made.
Of the five remaining fighters, Hermione, Fleur, and Viktor retreated behind the tall stone portal arch, putting some distance between themselves and the creature.
Harry and Cedric took up defensive positions directly in front of the portal, ready to face whatever came.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
The ice troll advanced with a guttural rumbling that seemed to come from deep in its chest, its enormous ice-spiked club resting casually on one massive shoulder.
With every step, the impact sent a shockwave cracking through the frozen earth, splitting the ground. Like the smaller ice creatures before it, it set its sights directly on the lighthouse, paying Harry and the others no attention at all at first.
Harry exchanged a glance with Cedric.
Then he drew a long, steadying breath. The turmoil in his eyes went still, replaced by focus.
He swung his wand.
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