Sirius crumpled with a strangled grunt, his body folding like a shrimp.
Pain detonated beneath his right ribs, as if someone had shoved a red-iron poker into his side and twisted. His vision went black. His legs gave out, knees cracking against the stone floor. The wand clattered from his hand.
Both palms pressed against the wound, mouth gaping for air that wouldn't come. The pain had seized his breathing muscles into spasm.
Regulus withdrew his hand and stepped back.
Sirius knelt on the stone, forehead to the ground, body curled tight, still gasping.
The pain began to fade. What replaced it was worse: the humiliation of being dropped by a single blow, and that burned hotter than any bruise.
Regulus didn't look at him again. He turned and walked toward Orion.
Orion stood by the wall, watching. The corner of his eye twitched.
His intention had been for Regulus to demonstrate the gap through magic, through technique, something that would spark Sirius's competitive instinct.
He hadn't expected Regulus to close the distance and end it with a single strike to the body. No wand. No spell. Just a fist.
Still, the effect seemed... adequate.
His gaze drifted to Sirius. The boy was still on his knees, but he'd raised his head. His eyes were locked on Regulus's retreating back, and the expression in them was a tangle: anger, defiance, but beneath all of it, something shaken. Something stunned into silence.
You can do that?
Orion said nothing. He waited for Sirius to get up on his own.
Sirius braced his hands on his knees and pushed himself upright. The ache beneath his right ribs lingered, but he could bear it now. He bent down, picked up his wand, and limped toward the training room door.
Orion's arm blocked his path.
"Next," he said, voice flat, eyes still forward, "I'm going to spar with Regulus. You watch."
Sirius stopped. The anger on his face pulled back, replaced by something hard and cold.
He nodded, retreated to the wall, and leaned against it with his arms folded.
He wanted to see this.
The anger was still there, plenty of it. No one had ever hit him like that. Not with fists, not in a way so close to pure humiliation.
But beneath the anger came a hollow ache, and confusion.
How wide was the gap between them?
In that so-called duel, Regulus hadn't even tried. He never raised his wand. He walked across the room, threw one punch, and it was over.
The magical gap, Sirius could at least begin to comprehend. But ending a wizarding duel with your bare hands? That broke something in his understanding of how fights were supposed to work.
He wanted to see what happened when Regulus faced their father. Wanted to watch from the outside and understand what his brother was actually capable of.
In the center of the room, Orion and Regulus took their positions.
Fifteen feet between them.
Orion rolled his wrist, spun his wand once around his fingers, and settled his grip.
This time, Regulus raised his wand.
The fight began.
---
Nearly half a year had passed since their last bout in this room.
That time, Regulus had lost by the thinnest margin.
On the surface, it looked like Regulus had come within a hair's breadth of winning. But the ability to control a fight so precisely that your opponent believed the loss was narrow? That itself revealed the true size of the gap.
Orion had dictated the rhythm, the intensity, the outcome. His experience let him give Regulus the illusion of opportunity while keeping every step within his calculations.
In the months since, Regulus's growth hadn't been dramatic. Or rather, the kind of leap he needed now couldn't come from mastering another spell.
Learning specific curses made him more versatile, better equipped for complex combat scenarios. But on the path of magic itself, versatility wasn't the same as progress.
He'd had the foundational spells down by the end of first year. Proficiency could improve, but a qualitative shift was hard to force.
He hadn't been idle, though.
His mobility gap was closed. The combined use of the Side-Shift Spell, the Swiftness Spell, the Sprint Spell, and the Flight Spell gave him a full toolkit for close-range repositioning.
Channeling the star imagery into his spells had boosted their raw power, but the technique came with restrictions: heavy magical drain, long preparation windows, and limited opportunities when the pace of combat ran high.
Space Warp could serve as an ace. One unexpected use, just to test his father's reaction.
Of the Unforgivable Curses, the Killing Curse was off the table, but the other two were fair game.
Verdant Magic wasn't ready for combat application.
And Fiendfyre against his own father? Out of the question.
They squared off at the center of the room. Fifteen feet apart.
As Regulus bowed, his consciousness was already sinking inward.
The star imagery needed to be invoked. He built the image first in his mind, then synced it with his magical core.
He chose supernova: an image of absolute destruction and eruption, ideal for amplifying explosive-class spells.
The construct locked into place. Magic and image aligned.
Both wands rose at the same instant.
No one called the start. The fight erupted the moment their wands came up.
A beam of orange-red light blazed from Regulus's wand tip.
Expulso.
But threaded through the core of the beam, almost too fine to see, deep red motes of light pulsed and flickered: the signature of star-infused magic.
The air tore as the spell left the wand. Temperature spiked along its trajectory, and the stone tiles beneath it scorched black.
At the same instant, Orion's spell arrived. A silent Diffindo, its silver arc sweeping in from the flank, aimed at Regulus's wand arm.
Regulus didn't try to tank it. The Side-Shift Spell fired and his body slid three feet left. The silver arc grazed the hem of his clothes and screamed past, striking the far wall where protective runes flared to absorb the impact.
His feet never stopped moving. The Swiftness Spell chained seamlessly into his landing, carrying him right, widening the distance.
Orion faced the incoming Expulso without dodging.
His left hand rose, palm out, and a Protego barrier snapped into existence.
The spell hit.
The explosion was far louder than it should have been.
A standard Expulso made a dull, concussive thump, the detonation rolling outward from the core.
This was something else entirely. The sound alone told the story.
Orange-red fire bloomed across the surface of the barrier. The impact sent violent ripples racing through it, the surface patterns churning like disturbed water, radiating chaotic waves.
Behind the barrier, Orion's brow creased. His right hand moved immediately, feeding additional power into the shield to stabilize it.
This hit exceeded his expectations.
A standard Expulso striking his Protego wouldn't even raise a ripple. But Regulus's blast had nearly collapsed the barrier entirely.
Five times the normal output, at minimum.
Every protective rune along the training room walls blazed to life, drinking in the stray magical energy. The air reeked of scorched dust and the sharp bite of ozone.
Sirius stood by the door, jaw slack, eyes wide.
He'd cast Expulso at Regulus minutes ago. It hadn't so much as ruffled his clothes.
But what Regulus had just unleashed... was that even the same spell?
A single thought cut through the shock: If that had hit me, I'd be dead.
Regulus wasn't surprised his opening shot hadn't landed. If one star-amplified curse could drop Orion, he'd have to seriously question whether someone had swapped out his father for an impostor.
But he'd caught it: that split-second hitch when Orion reinforced the barrier. A momentary fracture in his attention.
Regulus moved. His body blurred through the training room in rapid shifts, and as his feet touched down, his wand snapped forward. "Expelliarmus!"
Red light lanced out. This time Orion didn't absorb it. He twisted aside and the beam skimmed past his shoulder.
His counter came immediately: an enhanced Incendio, white-hot flames fanning outward in a wide arc, cutting off Regulus's left flank.
Regulus triggered the Flight Spell, lifting off the ground just long enough to clear the wall of fire. At the apex, still airborne, he whipped his wand down. "Confringo!" Aimed straight at Orion's head.
Orion stepped back. The blast tore up stone tiles and sent shrapnel flying. A casual sweep of his hand ground the debris to ash, which drifted down like grey snow.
Regulus hit the ground already accelerating. The Sprint Spell kicked in, opening distance, and his wand punched out three rapid casts: "Diffindo! Flipendo! Impedimenta!"
The three spells left his wand almost simultaneously, angled to cover high, center, and low, boxing Orion in from every direction.
Orion opened his Protego to full coverage. The barrier wrapped his entire body and took everything head-on.
Spells detonated against the shield in showers of colored sparks. The surface buckled and surged but held firm.
The distance between them kept shifting.
Standard spells couldn't breach either defense. Regulus's Protego, reinforced by star imagery, was extraordinarily stable. Orion's, refined over decades of experience, drew on steady magical output and broad coverage.
Both of them knew the warmup was over.
Orion changed tactics first. His wand traced a complex series of arcs, and from its tip poured a dark crimson mist.
Regulus recognized it instantly. Not Dark magic, but a corrosion-class curse. On contact, it would eat into magical reserves and weaken spellcasting output.
The mist spread fast. Regulus pulled back immediately, flinging an Aguamenti from his off-hand. The jet of water dispersed most of the fog, but traces still caught the edge of his sleeve.
The fabric dulled on contact, greying and withering as though decades of decay had been compressed into a single breath.
---
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