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Chapter 43: The Rules of the Game
🕑 Added 2025-09-04 08:38:57 +0000 UTCThe two teams hung in the air, separated by twenty yards of tension and bad blood. The roar from the stands was a physical thing, a wall of sound that tasted of house pride and roasted peanuts. Down below, Marcus Flint, a boy built like a brick house with teeth to match, flashed a sneer that was all predator.
“Running out of players, Wood?” he drawled, his voice carrying easily in the charged air. “Sending in babies to do a man’s job?”
Oliver Wood’s knuckles were white on his broom. “They’ll fly circles around you, Flint.” It was a weak comeback, and he knew it. The weight of years of losing sat heavy on his shoulders.
“Is that so?” Flint laughed, a nasty, grating sound. “Gryffindor hasn’t seen the Cup since Charlie Weasley was here. You’re a legacy of failure, Wood.”
Wood turned to his team, his face tight. “Ignore him. Just… play your best. Friendship first, competition second.”
Flint howled with laughter. “That’s what losers say! What’s the point of playing if not to grind your enemy into the dust?”
“He’s right.”
The voice was quiet. Cold. It came from Wood’s own side. Every player turned. Hermione Granger was looking at Flint, her expression unreadable.
“The game is for winning,” she said, her voice flat. “Why lose when you can win?” She gave Flint a slow, deliberate nod of acknowledgment, and for a second, he looked genuinely surprised to find an ally in the enemy camp. “But you’re wrong about one thing, Flint.”
“What’s that?”
“The priorities,” she said, her face breaking into a smile that was sharp and utterly devoid of warmth. “It’s not ‘competition first, friendship second’.” She let the pause hang in the air. “It’s winning first… annihilation second.”
A whistle shrieked, and the world exploded.
Stark Tower.
“Okay, the aerodynamics of those brooms are a physical impossibility,” Tony Stark muttered, leaning so close to the giant screen his nose was almost touching it. “Some kind of localized gravity-plating? Ion drive? Jarvis, are you getting this?”
Pepper just shook her head, her eyes wide. “They’re going to get hurt. Look at them, they’re just children.”
Nick Fury stood behind them, silent. He wasn’t watching a game. He was watching a tactical display. Seven-person squads in coordinated aerial combat. He was finally, truly convinced. The world he thought he knew was a lie.
“And for Gryffindor,” a voice boomed from the screen’s speakers, “the famous ‘Library Witch’… HERMIONE GRANGER!”
“Library Witch?” Tony snorted. “That kid’s about as much of a librarian as I am a monk.”
The game was a blur of red and green. A brutal, high-speed ballet. Angelina Johnson had the Quaffle, streaking toward the Slytherin hoops, but a green-robed player slammed into her side, a clear foul that Madam Hooch, trailing behind the action, missed. The ball tumbled free. Alicia Spinnet snatched it, but Flint came out of nowhere, his shoulder connecting hard with her gut. The Quaffle fell again.
The crowd booed. McGonagall was on her feet, screaming something that was lost in the wind. Flint just laughed.
Hermione watched it all from above. She saw the dirty hits, the useless referee, the frustrated look on her teammates’ faces. A slow, cold anger began to burn in her gut. Alright, she thought. So those are the rules. No rules.
She angled her broom into a steep dive. Her target: a Slytherin Chaser lining up another cheap shot on Alicia. She didn’t use her bat. She didn’t use a spell.
She just jumped off her broom.
For a split second, she was a free-falling angel of vengeance. Then, with a perfect, spinning kick, her boot connected with the Slytherin’s face. The thud was sickeningly audible. The player went limp, spiraling unconscious from his broom. Hermione landed gracefully back on her own, which had been waiting for her.
The stadium went dead silent.
Then, the Gryffindor stands erupted in a disbelieving, savage roar.
Lee Jordan’s commentary was a strangled squawk. “I… I don’t even know what to call that! It seems… it seems Granger has responded to Slytherin’s foul play with a… a flying kick to the head!”
Hermione just cracked her knuckles. A job’s a job.
She went after the next one. He saw her coming and started juking, but she had a solution for that, too. She pulled out a small, cylindrical object strapped to the front of her broom and clicked a button. A beam of light, so intensely bright it bleached the world of color, shot out, blinding the player. He cried out, hands flying to his eyes, just as a Bludger, expertly hit by Fred Weasley, smashed into his side.
“She’s using a light spell!” Flint shrieked.
“NO WAND, NO INCANTATION! PLAY ON!” Madam Hooch yelled back.
“It’s a headlight,” Hermione called out cheerfully. “For safety!”
Next came the air horn. A deafening blast that made another Slytherin flinch so hard he flew straight into a goalpost. Then a thick smokescreen. Then an oil slick. It was a systematic, technological, and utterly humiliating dismantling of the entire Slytherin team.
Soon, only Marcus Flint was left. He looked at the carnage, at his teammates scattered across the pitch, then at the small, smiling girl on the neon-lit, gadget-covered broomstick. He did the only sane thing a person could do. He turned and fled.
He pushed his Nimbus for all it was worth, but she was right on his tail.
“Come on, Flint!” she yelled, her voice full of manic glee. “Let’s see what this baby can really do!”
She hit a red button on the handle. From the back of her broom, a blue flame erupted with a roar. The Cyberpunk 2077 shot forward like a rocket.
She caught him in seconds. With a final, brutal elbow to the jaw, she sent him spinning from the sky. As he fell, he managed one last, despairing scream.
“ARE YOU EVEN HUMAN?!”
Then he fainted.
In the dead, stunned silence that followed, Harry Potter, who had been completely absorbed in his own private battle, finally pulled out of a steep dive. He held the struggling Golden Snitch high in his fist, a triumphant grin on his face. He looked around, expecting a roar of applause.
Nothing. Just thousands of people staring in horrified, breathless silence at the carnage below.
He looked at the scoreboard. 160-0. “We won?” he asked the empty air.
Madam Hooch, after a long, silent conference with a pale-faced Dumbledore, finally blew her whistle. “Gryffindor… wins,” she announced, her voice weak.
The silence held for another second. Then, the crowd erupted. Not for Harry.
“HERMIONE! HERMIONE! HERMIONE!”
Harry just hovered there, the Snitch forgotten in his hand, a look of profound, soul-deep confusion on his face.
