"Flipendo!"
Harry didn't lose his nerve either and tried again. This time, he poured all his anger, fear, and resentment into the spell. It possessed incredible power—the orange beam was as thick as a grown man's forearm. The professor's Shield Charm failed to withstand the impact and shattered into a spray of orange and yellow sparks.
Quirrell's face twisted with fury. A mad gleam appeared in his eyes. Richard watched in terror, as though in slow motion, as the wizard raised his wand and pointed it at him.
"Avada Kedavra!"
Richard knew those words. They filled his heart with overwhelming horror. His stomach dropped. In that extreme moment, he acted on instincts drilled into him through long and relentless fencing practice.
Richard's right hand opened. His wand slowly began to fall towards the floor under the pull of merciless gravity. His left hand moved to meet the right and closed around the hilt of the artefact sword. From the steel cylinder burst a bright blue blade of light a yard long. Inspired by the film Star Wars, the finest magical engineers of Grosvenor Workshop had endowed it with the astonishing properties of a Jedi lightsabre.
The green beam of the unforgivable killing curse raced inexorably towards Richard. Grosvenor's heart hammered in his chest. The young swordsman's arm performed a familiar parrying motion and—
A miracle!
The green beam of the Avada Kedavra collided with the blue blade of the sabre. Green and blue sparks exploded from the point of contact.
Quirrell stared with boundless astonishment and a mask of horror frozen across his face. His eyes, wide with terror, followed the green beam of his own deadly curse as it flew back towards him. He had no time to react. The reflected Avada struck him squarely in the forehead.
In the deathly silence that followed, the boys heard the heavy thud of a body hitting the floor, as though someone had dropped a sack of potatoes. The dead Quirinus Quirrell lay pale and motionless, face pressed against the cold stone. The ghastly face on the back of his head had frozen into a hideous and terrifying mask.
Suddenly, a black, semi-transparent substance burst from the back of Quirrell's head with a savage, malevolent wail. It resembled a dreadful ghost, its outline vaguely human.
Harry Potter screamed in pain, dropped to his knees, and clutched his head with both hands.
The ghost seeped through the ceiling and vanished without a trace. Only then did Harry begin to feel better. He lifted his head. Tears glistened at the corners of his eyes behind his glasses. Looking around, he said with relief:
"Phew! Once that thing disappeared, my head stopped hurting. Killing the professor was worth it for that alone."
"You sound exactly like a bloke talking about an ex-wife who took half his fortune in the divorce," Richard commented jokingly.
"An ex-wife would be better than You-Know-Who living on the back of a professor's head," Ron remarked fatalistically. "Richie, congratulations on your first murdered teacher," he added nervously, trying not to look at the professor's body.
"Well... technically, Quirrell killed himself." Richard was also avoiding looking at the corpse. He felt awful.
Out of the corner of his eye, Richie noticed something wrong. He turned to the right and froze. Every thought of the dead professor instantly vanished from his mind.
"Nooooo!" he screamed in horror.
"What?!" Ron spun around, gripping his wand tightly.
"Where is it?!" Harry leapt to his feet, sweeping his wand from side to side.
"My precious..." Richie pointed towards the mirror with tears in his eyes. "He smashed my precious!"
"Merlin's pants!" Weasley spat onto the floor. "You scared me."
"Richie, it's only a mirror," Harry said.
"What do you mean, only a mirror? That mirror could've made me billions. And now it's gone... My precious is gone..."
"So you don't feel sorry for the professor, but you do feel sorry for the mirror?" Ron asked ironically.
"For that, I'd have—"
Richie glared at Quirrell's body. His nostrils flared with rage, and his jaw muscles twitched. He no longer regretted the professor's death. In fact, at that moment, he would happily have killed Quirrell a second time.
People always said that businessmen would commit any crime for a three-hundred-percent profit. And here the profits would have been measured in the thousands of percent. All he would have needed was a measly fifty million dollars in investment, and afterwards he could have shoveled money in by the cartload.
"Riiight..." Harry suddenly looked around. "Where's the Philosopher's Stone?"
"Oh!" Ron glanced around in alarm. "I think I dropped it when we started throwing spells at Quirrell."
Harry carefully examined the floor around Ron, himself, and Richard.
"Ron, but where could the Philosopher's Stone have gone?" he asked.
Richard had no idea where the fake Stone could have disappeared to. He looked around with the same bewilderment as his friends. Then his gaze settled on the owl, which seemed slightly puffed up and was sitting in the corner with an insolent expression.
"The owl!" he exclaimed. "The owl must've swallowed it!"
Ron and Harry fixed the bird with sharp, predatory stares. The owl shuffled backwards until it found itself pressed into the corner.
"We-e-ell, let's have a look," Harry said. "Ron!"
Grosvenor and Potter stared intently at Weasley.
"What?!" Weasley exclaimed in confusion.
"Look inside the owl," Harry said.
"What do you mean, look inside the owl?!" Ron's eyes nearly bulged out of his head.
"I mean, open it up," Harry replied.
"For Merlin's sake! It's not a bottle of Butterbeer! What do you mean, open it up?!"
(End of Chapter)
P@treon: /SadRaven
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