January continued.
The training sessions deepened in the specific way that fifth-year sessions deepened — not wider, but more precise, the accumulation of four months of work finding its application in things that were harder and more specific than what they had started with. He taught area defence: how to establish a perimeter, how to maintain it under pressure, how to coordinate with two or three others to cover ground that one person could not cover alone. He taught basic healing magic — not Madam Pomfrey's level, not the clinical work, but the field version, the things you could do in ten seconds to keep someone functional until help arrived. Episkey for clean breaks. Vulnera Sanentur for cuts that were losing too much too quickly. The specific stabilisation charm that bought time without fixing anything, which was sometimes the most important spell in a situation.
Neville took to the healing work with the focused attention of someone who had spent fourteen years in a hospital ward understanding, from the visitor's side, what it meant that someone knew what to do. His casting had the quality it had had since the ritual — precise, his own, the hesitation entirely gone — and the healing spells landed with the particular sureness of someone who was not performing competence but had it.
Harry had the combat instincts. He had always had them; what the training had done was give the instincts a framework, a vocabulary, a set of principles he could interrogate rather than simply act from. He was faster than almost anyone Ron had trained and he had the specific quality of someone whose body had made decisions before the conscious mind finished making them, which in combat was an advantage that training could sharpen but not manufacture. Ron watched him work through the pressure scenarios and thought: he is going to be extraordinary. He is already extraordinary. The war has not finished making him yet.
Hermione was methodical in the way she was methodical at everything — the approach of someone who understood that competence was built in layers and was patient with the layers. She had been working on the advanced shielding since October, the kind that held under sustained pressure rather than deflecting individual casts, and by January she could maintain one for four minutes under simultaneous pressure from three casters, which was four times longer than anyone else in the group and roughly twice as long as the theoretical ceiling Ron had calculated for a student at her power level.
He noted this and filed it and did not remark on it. She already knew.
The Dumbledore sessions continued on Tuesdays. The work was in its final phase — not the building phase, not the expansion phase, but the integration phase, the work of making what he had built into something that was fully his rather than something he was managing carefully. Dumbledore approached this with the precision he brought to all technically demanding work, which was the precision of someone who had spent a century understanding that the difference between power and wisdom was the difference between having a thing and knowing what it was for.
He was, Ron calculated, approaching ninety percent of Dumbledore's power. Not all of it. He would never be all of it — the accumulation of a century of magical practice and the specific deepening that came from living with that practice for that long was not something that could be replicated in five years regardless of the methodology. But ninety percent was, as Dumbledore had said once in a Tuesday session with the mild precision he used for things that were not mild, quite sufficient for most purposes.