In unspoken agreement, they raised their wands again.
"Reducto!"
"Confringo!"
"Stop it, Harry!" Hermione screamed, trying to stop them, but it was already too late.
Two blinding Charms crossed paths in midair, shooting straight toward the other.
The Blasting Curse and the Reductor Curse… it was obvious they had the same goal: to kill each other.
Hermione shut her eyes on instinct; she couldn't bear to watch what came next.
But the explosion and screams she'd imagined never came.
It might have been a second, or it might have been a minute; when Hermione opened her eyes again, she saw something unbelievable.
The glow of the Charms had vanished, but now there were two… ravens? of different colors in the bathroom.
Ravens, probably—one red and one blue, perfectly matching the colors of the Reductor Curse and the Blasting Curse.
They circled in midair for a while, then suddenly shuddered all over, turning into two bursts of fireworks and disappearing.
Everyone was stunned, even Moaning Myrtle fell silent.
Hermione hadn't seen it, but she had seen everything clearly.
Just now, when Harry and Malfoy shouted their spells, Kael had also raised his wand at the same time.
No one knew what he had done; the two Charms had simply frozen weirdly in midair, then twisted and turned into ravens.
Maybe the scene was too unbelievable; in that instant, the two who had lost their heads in the fight suddenly sobered up and looked together at Kael standing in the doorway.
"You got here just in time, I—" Harry started to say, but Kael didn't give him the chance.
He flicked his wand again; the pipes on both sides suddenly lengthened, snaking around them like serpents and tying them up tight.
Metal pipes really were handy; no matter how Harry and Malfoy struggled, it was useless.
"Let me go!" Malfoy shouted furiously. "Damn it, you can't do this—"
But Kael couldn't even be bothered to listen to Harry, so how would he listen to Malfoy? With another wave of his wand, the pipes wound another loop around Malfoy's mouth.
Harry got the same treatment—no more, no less; fairness was the name of the game.
The place went quiet.
"Moaning Myrtle," Kael turned his head and said, "could I trouble you to go get a professor? Any one of them will do. Ask them to come as soon as possible."
"Ah… o-okay!" Moaning Myrtle, finally reacting, cast a worried glance into the bathroom, then immediately flew off.
Hermione, meanwhile, was shocked by Kael's command of Magic—he'd just pulled apart two people who were already completely gone in their rage?
Even though they were a year below Kael, they were still two people, and it's not like their grades were terrible. Controlling them this easily was a bit too outrageous.
Even if a professor came, this was about the best they could do… no, most ordinary professors probably couldn't have handled it better than Kael.
Hermione thought again of what Kael had said before… he really didn't have much need to keep attending classes.
But now wasn't the time to be thinking about that.
Hermione shook her head and marched into the bathroom, furious.
"Harry, do you even know what you're doing? Using a Reductor Curse on a classmate—if a professor finds out, you'll be expelled!"
Beside her, Kael raised an eyebrow…
"If a professor finds out?"
So that was what Hermione cared about?
Well, she wasn't exactly wrong.
"What on earth happened?" Hermione stared at Harry and went on, "Weren't you just in the common room? How did you suddenly end up on the seventh floor, and fighting Malfoy on top of that! Have you even thought about the fact that you could be expelled?"
"Say something! Don't think you can bluff your way out of this by keeping quiet. Professor McGonagall will be here any minute. You'd better start figuring out how you're going to explain this so you don't get expelled!"
Harry made a couple of muffled "mm-mm" sounds.
He wanted to speak—had Hermione really not noticed that his mouth was blocked?
Harry forced his head around with difficulty and blinked wildly at Kael, trying to get him to let him down.
Kael pretended not to see.
That was where Harry was in the wrong—if Kael had wanted to let him go, why would he have tied him up in the first place? This was just fine; at least it gave them a chance to cool off.
Dueling recklessly at school like this… they really were brave, weren't they.
Kael crooked his fingers, and the two wands on the floor flew straight into his hand.