“But I have six families I will need to make notification for!
And two were seventh years!” Snape was nearly wailing.
“One was the only heir to the Occludis line!”
Hari raised a hand.
“Do you need me here, Professors?
Only it’s not even two in the morning.”
“Sadly, I think we might.” Dumbledore looked at Snape.
“In point of fact, Severus, I believe two of them were from the Nonsuch family, so there are only five notifications to do.”
“Not helping, Headmaster!” Snape sighed.
“Potter, go to bed.” He looked at the surprised faces.
“I can see when it’s a losing battle.
It’s not worth keeping him up when I know he’s not getting in trouble.
Go to sleep, Potter.
And if someone else bothers you, could you please leave them alive?”
“Uh .
.
.”
“If you can’t say yes, please just leave.”
Hari turned and walked out.
Things continued as they had, although somewhat subdued.
The deaths of a half-dozen pureblood scions had a rippling effect in the house of the cunning.
Power vacuums opened and there were viciously fought internecine battles for the positions left vacant.
Hari watched them with the detached air of observation Uncle Sasori had taught him; he made note of the most likely candidates and occasionally sabotaged their efforts as he had learned so that they continued to struggle instead of stabilizing.
Sometimes, someone would try to gain an edge with an attack on the target of the Boy Who Lived, but those stopped when those who’d bragged that they’d see the brat a doing over vanished completely from the castle.
There were no investigations anymore, as there were no bodies.
Despite that, Professor Snape made it subtly clear that he knew Hari was involved (“You did it, Potter!”), but without evidence, he didn’t even bother to drag him to Dumbledore.
All told, by the end of October, almost an even dozen Slytherins had shuffled off the mortal coil, nearly half that without leaving behind enough to say they were dead.
Two wealthy families were left in quandaries as they found their heirs missing and could not move to declare new heirs without certainty of the current heir’s death.
One of those deaths had been carefully selected by Hari to ensure that no one in the house could manage to reclaim control of the snakes.
The disappearance of a Prefect had caused some concern, but without reason to blame him beyond the fact that his head of house knew it, he was left alone.
Perhaps of greater concern to the great and the good—which was to say the rich and the arrogant, was the vanishing of a pair of young women of marriageable age.
To the mindset of the pureblood community, women were not exactly property in the archaic sense any more than men were.
But as daughters of their bloodline, it was expected that they would marry to the family’s advantage.
As such, they were valuable.
A good marriage cemented an alliance or linked two houses.
The loss, therefore, of two women of good breeding was a terrible blow to their families.
Hari had selected them less for that and more for their pending connection to those whose power he saw no reason to allow to grow.
In less than two months, the entire leadership of Slytherin had been rendered impotent.
No candidate stood a chance of rallying enough support to take control and things descended into chaos in which no one could really afford to worry about Harry Potter.
No matter how much of a coup it would be to beat him, there were too many other problems of a more immediate nature for the older Slytherins to deal with that.
Dumbledore could be seen twinkling merrily at every meal, apparently unaware of the howlers screaming at him.
The rest of the staff had taken to wearing earmuffs at mealtimes to deaden the sound a bit.
The papers were strangely silent on the matter, apparently taking the view that the students had run off in some sort of excessively complex love-shape that Hari had yet to find in any two-dimensional drawing.
He wasn’t alone.
On a completely unrelated note: the Acromantula were eating well.
Classes continued as they had for Hari.
He continued to excel despite Professor Snape’s best efforts.
To date, Malfoy had been hospitalized fifteen times for various injuries without any punishment being issued to his assailant.
Potions class was especially dangerous and two incidents had warranted twenty-four hours in the care of the mediwitch.
Other Professors gradually began to notice that Hari was failing to even carry a wand, let alone use it for classes.
The fact that he seemed to have little difficulty with classwork only frustrated their attempts to understand what was going on.
Even more frustrated was one Hermione Granger, who had taken to regularly informing Hari that what he had done was impossible, which was always ignored or answered with a repetition of the impossible task in question.
On the other end of the spectrum, Daphne Greengrass found that she was growing worryingly accustomed to Harry Potter’s presence in her life—even if he insisted his name was “Hari” for some reason.
She had discovered that he was able to help with classwork a little, although he kept trying to get her to stop using her wand.
She had the horrible feeling she would end up doing so someday by accident and he would be insufferably smug for weeks.
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