The time Moody and his two breach team members sneaked into the fourth-floor corridor of St. Mungo's was slightly earlier than Sebastian's original plan.
Sebastian's voice crackled with static through the two-way mirror, but Moody didn't reply.
He shoved the two-way mirror into the inner pocket of his robes, rolling his magical eye to an angle capable of seeing through walls, and swept his gaze across the corridor.
The corridor was completely empty.
The healing wizards' duty station was across from the three-way junction; the lights were on, but no one was there.
An informational sign about curse-breaking hung crookedly on the wall, and beneath it sat a potted healing herb that was half-withered.
Moody was betting that Jerry's probing ripples couldn't cover the entirety of St. Mungo's.
He won half that bet... Jerry indeed couldn't probe the entire building, but Jerry hadn't placed his bets on probing in the first place.
Moody raised his prosthetic arm and made a hand signal to advance deeper into the corridor.
The brass fingers gleamed with a dull luster under the cold white lights.
He hunched over and crept forward against the wall, suppressing the thudding of his wooden leg to the absolute minimum, preemptively locking the brass knee joint before every step landed.
The two team members stuck close behind him. The one with a buzz cut held a Magic-Absorbing Bead in his left hand, the bead emitting a faint, ghostly grey glow in his palm, while his right hand held his wand horizontally across his chest.
The other team member wore thick-rimmed glasses; his breathing sounded a bit loud in the quiet corridor, and he kept his wand tip pointed at the ceiling, afraid to lower it.
They reached the three-way junction.
Turning right into the corridor led straight to the Spell Damage ward's private rooms; it was the second door.
Using his magical eye to peer through the walls, Moody saw the door to the private room.
The door was closed, bearing no traces of attached spells.
He rolled his magical eye back to a normal perspective, signaling his two team members to inspect the corridor floor while he pressed his side against the corner wall, poking only half his head out to observe the room's door.
He made a motion, and the buzz-cut team member crouched and darted out.
He reached the door in just three strides, his movements as quiet as a mouse.
He placed the Magic-Absorbing Bead on the floor tile right beneath the door gap, allowing its rippling grey glow to seep through the tile cracks and under the door.
Once activated, the bead would continuously drain dry any magic-driven protective spells within a ten-pace radius; theoretically, if there were any magical traps on this door, they would be entirely dismantled by now.
Moody gave a nod, and the buzz-cut team member grasped the doorknob with his left hand. The instant his fingertips touched it, the brass knob turned scalding hot.
The burn made him hiss and snatch his hand back. He looked down at his fingertips... no blisters, no burns, but a fine layer of dark purple powder was clinging to his skin.
The powder squirmed on the surface of his skin, crawling toward the webbing of his fingers.
Spiritual power!
Moody shoved the forward team member aside, grabbing his wrist and flipping his hand palm-up.
The dark purple powder reassembled in his palm, coalescing into a spiritual power butterfly the size of a fingernail.
The butterfly spread its wings, and the phantom image of a pair of blood-red serpentine pupils surfaced on the wings.
And then the entire butterfly exploded.
A shockwave of spiritual power blasted outward from the very center of the butterfly's wings, compressing the air in the corridor into an invisible, spherical wall of pressure.
Moody was struck head-on in the chest and abdomen by the wall of air. His body slammed backward into the corner wall, the back of his head cracking against the stone bricks, and his brass prosthetic arm gouged a long metallic scrape down the wall surface.
The buzz-cut team member was directly flipped over and sent sliding away by the air wall, his back skidding several feet across the floor tiles until he knocked over the potted, withered healing herb.
The thick-rimmed glasses team member was punched in the chest by the blast wave; his glasses flew off and smashed against the wall, shattering one lens with a sharp crack.
Moody forcefully braced his left hand against the wall to keep from falling. His prosthetic leg stomped heavily onto the floorboard to steady himself, his wand held horizontally across his chest.
At that zero hour, he re-evaluated the level of Jerry's defensive preparations.
Taking what was originally categorized as a zero-threat assessment and immediately elevating it to high.
This door had been rigged with a trap before the Magic-Absorbing Bead was even activated... Moody looked down at the front of his own robes... Sure enough, it was coated in a fine layer of purple specks.
He yanked his robes, dusting off the powder.
Then he growled into his two-way mirror: "Junction team, attention. There's a Cultivator spiritual power trap at the private room door. Don't touch the door. Send two men to flank through the walls on both sides and breach. The Floo Network is still restricted; they can't run."
The buzz-cut team member picked himself up from the floor, plucking the soil of the healing herb pot from the back of his head.
His left hand was still numb; the reverberation from the spiritual power air wall traveled up his Hand Taiyin Lung Meridian, leaving his entire arm aching and swollen. Just judging from how frequently he was shaking his hand, one could tell the impact of this air wall was far more severe on a wizard's body than on a Cultivator's... Wizards lacked a spiritual power foundation in their meridians. When blasted by foreign spiritual power, it felt like being blasted by a high-pressure water cannon; all his muscles and nerves involuntarily contracted tight.
"The Magic-Absorbing Bead is useless."
The thick-rimmed glasses team member crouched on the ground, groping around to retrieve his half-shattered glasses. After perching them back on his nose, his voice trembled as he spoke: "He used something from the Cultivation world..."
"Shut up." Moody cut him off. "I know what he used. You two feel your way along the left and right walls. Don't touch the main section of the wall facing the room's door; blow holes from the bottom corners, one on the left, one on the right. After breaching the holes, don't rush in. Observe the layout inside the room first, then wait for orders."
He turned to face the three-way junction and made a hand signal.
The hidden guard from the Corridor Control Team emerged from the corner storage room and jogged over.
Moody lowered his voice and gave the hidden guard a few brief instructions, then reactivated his two-way mirror to hail the rooftop shooter.
As it turned out, the corridor walls of St. Mungo's fourth-floor Spell Damage ward were exceptionally thick. The team member on the left wall had to hit it with three consecutive Blasting Curses just to dig out a fist-sized hole.
The team member on the right wall opted for a parallel, retreating variant of a Wall-Gouging Spell; the progress was slower, but the noise was minimal. Their division of labor was clear. Moody stood flush against the corridor wall, his magical eye peering through the structure to monitor the inside of the room... The lighting in the room was dim. The hospital bed was near the window, and a single person lay in it, covered by a blanket exposing only purple hair. Jerry's position was coincidentally blocked by the privacy curtain in the room, so Moody couldn't pinpoint his exact location.
The hole in the right wall broke through.
The team member on the left wall fired his fourth Blasting Curse, widening his hole to the size of a human head.
He stuffed the Magic-Absorbing Bead into the left wall hole first, allowing the bead to radiate its grey light inside the room and absorb all magic power... If Jerry had set up magical spell traps inside the room, this sweeping grey glow could nullify them completely.
Moody watched the bead roll a circle across the private room; it triggered nothing, nor were there any signs of backlash from a magical trap being dismantled.
He tucked his prosthetic arm near his waist, his magical eye glaring sharply. "Breach team. I'll enter the right wall hole first to draw his attention. The two of you on the left wall, flank from behind; your target location is on the hospital bed. Slap magical shackles on the purple-haired woman first, don't worry about whether she struggles or not. If Jerry intercepts, greet him with Stunning and Binding Curses. If Isabella is present and blocks your way, bind her as well. Remember... you have two minutes from the moment you enter the hole. After two minutes, the Corridor Control Team will breach the main door and come in as backup."
Moody hunched down and squeezed through the hole in the right wall.
Inside was a corner of the private room, right next to a magical heart rate monitor; the spiritual power capacity readings on the monitor's screen were still ticking.
Moody landed steadily on the ground, his prosthetic leg giving a dull thud against the floor tiles. His wand immediately pointed at the hospital bed... Only purple hair was scattered visibly on the bed. He took a step forward.
The foundation suddenly swayed.
Moody stopped dead. The swaying was minuscule but incredibly fast, like the precursor to an earthquake. He shifted his wand into a defensive posture, his magical eye scanning the entire room... the bed, the windowsill, the companion chair, behind the curtain, the ceiling... until he looked down and saw a crack splitting open beneath the very tile he was standing on.
The crack spider-webbed outward in radial lines, every single line emitting a very faint, dark purple glow.
It was too late for Moody to jump back.
From the gaps between the tiles, the dark purple lines sprouted upward into vine-like spiritual power tentacles, every single one wrapping around the top of his foot, his ankle, and his calf.
The wrapping motion was as fast as a striking snake... the moment they touched his skin, they constricted tightly into his flesh.
Moody fired a Blasting Curse at the tentacles. The spell struck the tentacles, blowing them to shreds, but the severed ends paused for only an instant before growing back and continuing to wrap upward. He drew his sword... but slicing through the tentacles with the blade was only a temporary fix. The roots of these spiritual power tentacles were anchored in the spiritual power network beneath the floor tiles; he wasn't fighting a few solitary threads, he was fighting the Myriad Demons Palace spiritual array buried deep beneath the entire room.
Outside the left wall of the room, the two team members who had squeezed into the hole to flank had barely poked their upper bodies in. The inside of the left wall hole was flush against the foot of the bed; the moment they entered, they saw Moody bound immobile from his ankle to his waist by spiritual power tentacles. The buzz-cut team member reacted lightning-fast, raising his wand at the hospital bed, intending to strike first and bind the target, but he failed to notice the same dark purple vines sprouting from the four corners of the bed... They weren't attacking Moody, but rather spreading around the bed, forming a protective barrier around the tuft of purple hair on the mattress.
The floor tiles beneath the two left-wall team members also cracked open.
This time, there wasn't even time to try jumping.
Purple threads sprang simultaneously from all the floor gaps around them, wrapping around their ankles and giving a violent yank. Losing their footing, both men were hoisted upside down into the air.
Their wands slipped from their fingers, clattering and bouncing twice against the tiles. Hanging in mid-air, the buzz-cut team member did a crunch upward, trying to grab the purple threads and rip them apart barehanded, but the result was that the purple threads only pulled tighter, cutting deep, fine grooves into the flesh of his ankles.
His Magic-Absorbing Bead fell from his pants pocket, rolling across the floor tiles... There were no magical traps in the room, rendering the Magic-Absorbing Bead utterly useless; it merely rolled fruitlessly across the floor, projecting ring after ring of grey light.
The Invisibility Charm plastered to the ceiling was finally unveiled.
That veil of invisibility was peeled back layer by layer by an exquisite Disillusionment Reversal, revealing a dark purple Blood Butterfly Array hovering directly above the room.
Not just one, but hundreds upon hundreds stacked in layers. Every single butterfly hovered in mid-air with its wings closed, arranged in a conical formation. The tip of the cone aimed at the main door, while the base covered the entire room.
This array had been accumulating spiritual power from the moment Yin Luo woke up... While feigning sleep on the bed, Yin Luo had threaded her residual spiritual power up to the ceiling strand by strand, stacking it layer by layer using the Blood Butterfly technique, feeding every single butterfly full of spiritual power.
For the traps Jerry set up, he didn't operate the arrays himself; he let Yin Luo drive them, while he only handled one piece of physical logic... scattering a row of magical snacks on the periphery of the trap to lure the opponent directly into the center of the floor crack network.
At this moment, the private room fell into an eerie silence.
From the waist down, Moody was bound dead tight by purple threads. His hands could still move, but he stopped struggling. His prosthetic arm ceased its slashing motions.
His magical eye swept across the quiet room, and he realized exactly what kind of hastily rigged little mechanism he had stepped into... it was a deeply layered, premeditated trap. It exploited the total suppression advantage of Cultivation spiritual power, exploited his own over-reliance on the Magic-Absorbing Beads, and exploited his tactical inertia of wanting to catch the prey himself and therefore leading the charge.
He rolled his magical eye back to look at the hospital bed covered by purple hair. "You knew people were coming all along."
The purple hair on the bed moved. It wasn't the person on the bed moving... it was the tips of the hair moving on their own.
The purple hair slipped out from under the covers, coiled a few times around the bed railing, and then slowly retracted.
Yin Luo threw back the covers and sat up.
Her movements weren't fast. The silver dressing on her right shoulder tugged slightly, making her frown and hiss in pain, before returning to that languid tone of voice.
Her spiritual power continuously transmitted through her left hand pressing on the bedsheet down to the array foundation beneath the floor... The array was still running, the vines were still binding Moody. "I've been lying here for days, my wound still hurts like hell, and I was planning on getting some proper sleep. But turns out someone decided to stay up half the night burying array cores under the hospital room floor, switched my mattress over, and left me lying here all by myself as bait."
She tilted her head and shot a glance at Moody. "You're Moody, aren't you?"
"He mentioned you to me. The one who almost blew him to pieces several times."
"How does it feel to step into a pitfall on my hospital room floor?"
Moody didn't answer.
His magical eye spun wildly, sweeping over the conical tip of the Blood Butterfly Array on the ceiling.
The butterfly array hadn't launched an attack yet; it was merely hovering and building momentum. He looked down and re-evaluated the spiritual power threads binding his body... only this time noticing that the threads were growing directly from between the floor tiles, sprouting from an array foundation positioned in the sub-layer beneath the room's floorboards.
The array foundation was buried in the ceiling of the floor below, its placement precise. It was almost a certainty that Jerry had Apparated into the space below beforehand to bury it.
Moody was bound from ankle to waist by the purple vines.
The brass fingers of his prosthetic hand clenched tight and then opened; the grip force crushed a Magic-Absorbing Bead in his palm to dust.
He stopped struggling completely. His magical eye rolled three hundred and sixty degrees in its socket, sweeping the locations of everyone inside and outside the room into his brain. Then, he did something that made Yin Luo frown.
He smiled. The muscles on his scarred face tugged, pulling an old wound into an even deeper trench.
"You think you're the only ones who know how to plant traps?"
With his left hand, Moody pulled a metal sphere from the inner pocket of his robes. The surface of the sphere was matte. He tossed the sphere straight up.
The sphere flew into mid-air and was engulfed by the Blood Butterfly Array on the ceiling. Hundreds of pairs of butterfly wings simultaneously closed to block it... and then the sphere exploded.
A shockwave blasted a gap right in the dead center of the butterfly array; shattered metal casing mixed with butterfly fragments, spraying in all directions.
Entire sections of the plaster ceiling collapsed downward, pouring white debris into the room like snow.
The bedsheet Yin Luo was pressing with her left hand was jolted two inches away from the array foundation by the shockwave, interrupting the spiritual power transmission for a split second.
In that single split second, the purple vines wrapping Moody's waist loosened by a hairsbreadth. Moody had been waiting for exactly this half-inch of slack.
His right hand had been gripping the hilt of his sword the entire time. The moment they loosened, he drew his sword from its scabbard, slashing horizontally to sever the three thick vines at his waist, then using the tip of the blade to flick away the threads binding his left leg.
His magical eye had seen right through the spiritual power nodes of the purple vines long ago; every single strike landed on the absolute weakest point of spiritual power transmission.
His prosthetic leg planted on the ground, and Moody steadied himself. His leg gave a dull thud against the floorboard as he tore himself entirely free from the pile of vines; a chunk of the hem of his robe was ripped away, and his face was smeared with plaster dust.
Pointing the tip of his sword at the gap in the butterfly array on the ceiling, he roared into the two-way mirror.
"Breach the wall! Frontal breach! Ignore the door... behind the door is full of traps!"
The Corridor Control Team waiting outside the room's main door had been anxious for a while.
The young wizard stationed in plain sight bit the two-way mirror in his mouth and raised his wand with both hands, aiming directly at the room's exterior wall.
He used a Blasting Curse... Sebastian had improvised a change of orders over the communication channel.
Rather than digging holes to squeeze through, it was better to blow the entire wall wide open. With Moody trapped inside, what he needed was a wide exit that would allow all team members to evacuate simultaneously.
The Blasting Curse smashed into the exterior wall.
Bricks and stones exploded outward; the entire glass window flew outward and smashed against the corridor railing.
Two-thirds of the private room's wall facing the corridor collapsed.
Before the flying ash and shattered bricks even hit the ground, the hidden guard from the Corridor Control Team dragged a long package wrapped in a cloak out from the storage room.
Opening it, there were six spare birch wood wands inside... a contingency Sebastian had prepared prior to the operation, specifically reserved for the high attrition rate of intense magical demolition.
Moody caught one with his left hand, sheathing his sword with his right. He shouted toward the outside of the breached wall.
"Wounded go first!"
"Push those two hanging upside down in the corridor forward... rooftop shooter, cover their retreat through the emergency channel!"
"Greenhouse roof, keep eyes on the inner courtyard; if someone goes through the window, shoot immediately!"
The two team members hanging upside down from the ceiling were bound at the ankles by purple vines. The hidden guard used a Severing Charm to cut the vines at the roots, and the two crashed onto the floor tiles. The buzz-cut one braced with his shoulder as he landed, picking himself up and shaking out his numb hand. The one with thick-rimmed glasses smashed the other half of his lenses; squinting, he groped around the floor twice before finally finding his wand.
The two of them scrambled and rolled through the breached hole into the corridor, where they were enveloped by cover smoke deployed from the rooftop by the sniper, disappearing into a cloud of grey-white fog.
Yin Luo gritted her teeth and pressed her left hand back onto the bedsheet.
Spiritual power flooded back into the array foundation. The remaining Blood Butterfly fragments on the ceiling coalesced once more, contracting inward from a few dozen torn wings to form an even smaller conical formation.
But this array was two full sizes smaller than before.
Yin Luo's spiritual power couldn't sustain a large-scale butterfly array anymore... Her meridians, post-sword intent extraction, were like water-logged paper; every time she transmitted spiritual power, half of it leaked out through the fissures.
The butterflies she could gather were only one-third of the original number.
Moody seized upon this flaw.
He did not choose to continue wearing down Yin Luo... his objective was to retreat.
He fired a signaling spell outside the breached wall with his left hand; emerald green sparks exploded against the corridor ceiling.
"Full retreat! Follow Route Three!"
"Take the emergency channel to the very end and exit through the morgue side door!"
"Anti-Disapparation is waiting outside."
A short, sharp whistle.
The rooftop shooter stowed his Invisibility Cloak, leaping from the skylight down to the fourth-floor windowsill, scaling the exterior wall to reach the emergency channel entrance.
The one lying on the roof tiles of the greenhouse fired a Confundus Charm at the inner courtyard, misdirecting a few night-shift healing wizards running toward the courtyard in another direction.
In the two-way mirror, Sebastian rattled off the coordinates for the rally point outside the wards at breakneck speed, his voice as coarse as grinding sandpaper.
Moody was the last to retreat.
His prosthetic leg dragged half a pant leg warped by the crushing force of the purple vines as he walked toward the breached hole in the wall. As he passed the hospital bed, he turned his head to glance at Yin Luo.
Yin Luo leaned against the headboard, her left hand pressing the bedsheet as she continued transmitting spiritual power, but her lips had gone white.
The blood seeping from the silver dressing on her right shoulder had bled into a stain the size of a coin.
"Your array is not bad."
"Next time I'll bring a few more Blast Spheres."
Moody dropped this sentence, turning and stepping over the pile of shattered bricks toward the corridor.
But in that very instant, Jerry's ambush came without warning.
Moody had just stepped out of the breach, his left foot planting on the corridor floor tiles while his right foot was still amid the rubble.
His magical eye was sweeping his retreat path for any residual spiritual power traps... and then a profoundly brief spatial distortion blasted from directly behind him.
The time spanning from sensing it, to his magical eye catching the edge of it, to his body being grabbed, was a fraction of a split second.
Moody's prosthetic leg abruptly braced backward, intending to spin around, but Jerry was already plastered against his lower back.
Jerry was a fair bit shorter than Moody. As he pressed against Moody's lower back, he lowered his entire body and stance, wedging his toes between Moody's legs. Then, his hand seized Moody's sword scabbard.
His fingers hooked the end of the scabbard, giving it an outward twist; the scabbard, along with the sword, detached completely from Moody's belt.
Moody's right hand reacted as fast as an independent living organism... the instant the scabbard was unhooked, it reached for his waist; the instant it found nothing, it reached into the inside of his robes for his secondary backup dagger.
Jerry was waiting for exactly this "searching for the sword," and not to strike the hand that was searching for it.
His left hand grabbed the back of Moody's right hand—which was currently reaching for the dagger—just a split second before the "explosion." Hooking the webbing between his thumb and index finger right between Moody's ring and pinky fingers, he snapped them upward.
As he hunched over, Moody's magical eye scanned Jerry's arms wildly... The eye caught black particles diffusing around his palm into narrow strips. In the exact same motion of diffusion, Jerry's right hand had already taken control of the collar of Moody's robes right above his nape.
He didn't aim for the throat to choke him, nor did he waste effort striking the spine... Gripping the collar at the nape, he yanked fiercely backward and downward in the opposite direction. Moody was immediately yanked into an upward-facing, arched curve.
The blue light of the magical eye rolled upward. A crimson-black piercing strike, penetrating flesh and bone, had already blasted upward from beneath, rupturing the thick tendon between the left side of his chest and his neck. The sound of the fascia beside his trachea shattering was muffled beneath the skin—duller than the sound of snapping bone, sounding more like a sack of wet flour being smashed.
Moody's mouth hung open, unable to produce a sound. The location shattered by the airflow lay exactly along the path where the air needed to travel upward for vocalization. The spasm in that instant swallowed all sound within a throat devoid of air.
His body smashed backward against the corridor wall. The brass elbow of his prosthetic smashed a hole into the wall, and brick fragments crumbled continuously out of the hole.
His entire body slid down along the wall, sitting heavily on the ground. His left fingers twitched, groping for the two-way mirror at his waist, and he actually managed to grasp it. He raised the two-way mirror to his lips; his lips moved twice, but no sound came out.
On the other side of the mirror, Sebastian fell silent for a moment. Then, in an incredibly steady tone, he finished the military order on Moody's behalf.
"Retreat. Everyone follow Route Three. Now. Immediately."
Rapid footsteps of magical boots striking floor tiles echoed from the direction of the emergency channel at the end of the corridor, the sound growing further and further away.
The rooftop shooter was the last to vanish around the corner of the emergency channel. Before leaving, he looked back once at the collapsed wall outside the private room and Moody sitting at the base of the wall.
Then he turned and ran into the channel, casually locking the fire door from the inside as he went.
The Anti-Disapparation ward was proactively withdrawn by the Order of the Phoenix during their retreat... The Anti-Disapparation string hummed as it was pulled from the base of the wall, the sound echoing across the exterior walls of the entire St. Mungo's building.
Only brick dust lingered in the air of the corridor. Tiny fragments of dark purple Blood Butterflies were scattered across the white plaster floor, like crushed will-o'-the-wisps.
A few torn wings fluttered down onto Moody's robes, flashed twice, and extinguished.
Yin Luo retracted her left hand. Her spiritual power drained to its absolute limit, she lost even the strength to sit up; she slid back under the covers, her purple hair spilling over the pillow. She tilted her head to look at Jerry.
"The timing of your ambush was quite good."
"That position was the optimal point to strike."
Jerry walked over to Moody and crouched down. Moody's magical eye had been half-blinded by the scorching black particles, its structure severely damaged; faint blue arcs flashed intermittently within the shattered sphere.
His real eye wasn't blind. It stared fixedly at Jerry, his lips moving a few times.
"Little brat." Moody bared his teeth in a grin.
His teeth were stained with blood. "How many traps did you lay for me here."
"A decoy trap at the main entrance. A spiritual array under the floor.
"The butterfly array on the ceiling was the second layer.
"The explosive array at the emergency channel was the third layer.
"The Anti-Disapparation string around the exterior wall was your own doing; I didn't touch it.
"But I embedded a layer of sensory charms alongside your string... When your men withdrew the string, the duty desk at the Ministry's Department of Magical Law Enforcement received the signal.
"Within the hour, McGonagall will bring people here to seize that string as evidence of illegal detention. The magic power residue left on the walls from the Blasting Curse you cast in the hospital room will serve as on-site documentation of 'Assaulting a Medical Facility Using Offensive Spells'."
Moody fell silent for a moment.
"When you calculated this, you were playing the long game from the very start.
"Mobile warfare on the battlefield, predetermined paths beneath the battlefield, and legal ratification outside the battlefield.
"You laid out all three timeframes onto a single blueprint simultaneously. With every layer you removed an avenue of escape, and with every avenue you made the choice for me."
He braced himself and stood up from the base of the wall.
The entire process of standing up relied completely on his left hand leaning against the wall. A purplish-black bruise on his suspended right leg spread from ankle to knee, and his center of gravity leaned heavily toward the wall, but he stood upright.
"But you miscalculated one thing." Moody spat a mouthful of blood. "Do you really think my operational objective today was to kidnap the purple-haired one for interrogation?"
Jerry didn't reply.
Moody pulled his right hand out from inside his robes. He opened his palm; resting on it were three wands.
"Every action I took after entering this room... stepping on the floor, getting caught in the vines, being surrounded by you... was stalling for time while my men emptied St. Mungo's underground potion storage.
"The climate-controlled storage directly beneath the Spell Damage ward houses a massive quantity of psychiatric healing potions and scarce curse-breaking ingredients.
"Your probing ripples might cover four floors, but they can't penetrate the spiritual power field of the underground climate-controlled layer.
"While you were on the third floor laying out your first trap, my men tunneled through the potion storage's ventilation shaft from beneath the side entrance.
"In the twenty minutes you spent ambushing us, my second team has already emptied half the storeroom."
Moody stashed the three wands back into his robes and limped a few steps toward the breach, leaning against the wall.
Jerry did not give chase. A low rumbling sound of collapse echoed from the direction of the emergency channel... the explosive array detonated right on time, pulverizing the channel's fire door. Moody's men had completely evacuated the ward's perimeter and were waiting at the rally point for their tactical commander.
"What you lack happens to be exactly what we have in abundance." Moody's figure vanished into the smoke and dust of the corridor. His lingering voice echoed in the air. "If the Ministry of Magic truly wages total war, how will they support frontline combat without psychiatric potions?
"This war cannot be fought. Who was the bait today?"
The private room fell so quiet that only Yin Luo's panting could be heard.
She lay on the bed, her purple hair pinned beneath her back, the bloodstain on the silver dressing on her right shoulder having dried.
The Blood Butterfly fragments dissolved into fine motes of light at her side, drifting down onto the bedsheet.
She drew in a slow breath, keeping her mouth closed as the tip of her tongue moistened her chapped lower lip. Then she reached her left hand over the edge of the bed and crooked a finger at Jerry.