“Hostility! A foul, bloody stench! Two miles out and closing fast! Wake up, you oblivious fools!”
The Navigator’s hysterical voice pierced Frey’s mind like steel needles.
He bolted upright, his hand instantly gripping his wand.
Newt’s blue trench coat was fluttering in the morning mist.
Pushing the canoe into the water, he called out urgently, “Up you get, kids. We have company. Four boats! They’ve all got magic sails and they’re moving incredibly fast!”
Frey shoved a half-asleep Hermione into the canoe.
“How do they dare use magic on such a large scale in the jungle?”
Newt took his seat at the bow.
“Give us a push, quick! The water’s too shallow here. There are a lot of them—practically a small army of twenty or thirty. Wizards know how to coordinate, unlike magical creatures. At this scale, they have nothing to fear. As long as they aren’t ambushed, they’re basically guaranteed to win.”
Frey pushed the canoe into deeper water, scrambled onto the stern, and looked back at the four approaching vessels.
They looked like rafts fitted with sails, each carrying six or seven fully armed mage-hunters, with ballistas mounted on their bows.
Hermione was finally wide awake.
“Dammit, why would Third Salem commit so many people just for the few of us?”
Newt waved his wand, and several oars began paddling on their own.
“It’s not just for us. They lost the MACUSA elections last year. They’ll spend the next few years trying to ensure MACUSA achieves absolutely nothing. Unfortunately for us, our expedition is commissioned by MACUSA.”
The Navigator shrieked, “One mile! Speed up! Speed up!”
Frey resorted to his old trick.
Crouching at the stern, he pressed his wand against the surface of the water.
“Depulso!”
But he had forgotten that the last time he did this, the one steering at the bow was Dick—a man born and raised here who had spent his entire life on the water.
But now… yes, Newt was the legendary wizard who had captured Gellert Grindelwald, and perhaps the greatest naturalist in the world, but everyone had their own specialties.
He was clearly not a skilled sailor capable of steering a rudder with precision through rapid currents.
The canoe veered erratically across the river, bucking like a drunken stallion.
“Left! Turn left! Sandbar on the right! Rocks ahead! Turn back!” The Navigator’s desperate warnings blurred into a continuous scream.
Frey shouted, “If this isn’t working, can we just fly? This canoe should be able to fly, shouldn’t it? Dick’s could!”
Hermione rolled her eyes.
“If you had bothered to look, you’d have seen how many advanced runes were carved into his canoe! That was a high-end model. This is a freebie from the chief! Oh, my god!”
The bottom of the canoe scraped heavily against a shallow red sandbar with a bone-jarring screech.
The bow suddenly veered sideways, and the resulting skid instantly canceled out more than half of the propulsion Frey had generated.
The four rafts, however, nimbly bypassed the obstacles under the control of the mage-hunters, drawing closer and closer.
“Five hundred yards!”
Frey narrowed his eyes.
He saw a man standing on the leading boat.
The man had no hair—not even eyebrows.
His entire face looked like a polished, gleaming cobblestone.
Under the pale morning light, his bald head reflected an unsettling, cold glare.
Hermione grumbled, “He looks like an overcooked marinated egg.”
The egg-head waved his hand, and a hail of crossbow bolts wrapped in a red glow rained down on them, carrying the stench of rotten eggs.
Frey and Hermione cast their spells simultaneously.
Deafening impacts exploded against their shields, sending sparks flying in all directions.
Every poisoned arrow that struck the shields produced a puff of corrosive black smoke.
With Frey joining the fight, he had no time to use Depulso for propulsion, and the canoe’s speed plummeted instantly.
“Grandpa, can we Apparate? Just jump straight out of this damn forest!” Frey yelled.
“Have you lost your mind, Frey?!” Hermione shrieked.
“This is unexplored territory! The ambient magic is as turbulent as a blender. If you dare to Apparate here, your lower half will be left in the canoe while your upper half ends up hanging from that dragon blood tree we just passed! If you don’t value your life, I value mine!”
Frey gritted his teeth.
Watching the egg-head draw closer, a sudden surge of anger flared within him.
He drew an arc in the air with his wand and stabbed it fiercely toward the leading boat.
“Confringo!”
An orange-red fireball hurtled toward the egg-head with a terrifying screech.
Beside the egg-head, a man dressed in Shuar attire lightly adjusted the sail.
Their boat seemed alive as it nimbly dodged the center of the explosion, only its lower trim getting wet from the splashed water.
Frey cursed under his breath.
“That sail-handler must be Banco! That bastard…”
“There, the ballistas! Do something, Frey!”
Frey looked where Hermione was pointing and saw that the ballistas on the bows of two rafts had already been drawn back.
With a low growl, Frey flicked and swished his wand toward a towering tree leaning over the water at the riverbank.
“Wingardium Leviosa! Rise!”
Under the raw, violent output of Frey’s magic, the ancient tree was forcibly uprooted from the soil and flung horizontally across the river channel, blocking the path behind the canoe.
*Thud!
Thud!
Thud!*
A rain of arrows peppered the trunk.
Two massive bolts from the ballistas slammed into the tree, their tips piercing all the way through to the other side.
Frey shuddered inwardly; if those had hit them, not even a dragon could have survived.
Frey waved his wand.
“Depulso!”
The massive tree hurtled toward their pursuers.
Hermione leaned out beside him and shouted, “Incendio!”
The trunk burst into flames and crashed directly onto a raft that had charged too close, forcing the mage-hunters on board to dive into the water to escape.
“Great job!”
But before Hermione could finish celebrating—
The egg-head appeared at the stern like a cut-and-pasted afterimage, bringing with him the smell of singed flesh.
His fist moved faster than sound, bypassing Frey and striking directly toward Hermione’s face.
Suddenly, she felt a yank at the back of her collar, pulling her backward into the boat.
The egg-head’s fist grazed past the tip of her nose.
The egg-head bared his teeth in a sinister grin at Frey before vanishing like a fading afterimage.
“Are you all right, Hermione? Keep your focus. You never know what bizarre abilities wizards or magical creatures might possess.”
“Understood, Professor Newt.”
From the three rafts behind them, the mage-hunters launched non-stop attacks using spatial displacement abilities.
Fortunately, Frey, who possessed the strongest magic, was at the stern to bear the brunt of the assault.
After shielding himself with Shield Charms, he tried his best to counter with a Stupefy or Petrificus Totalus whenever he saw an opening.
It was simple and effective.
Many of the mage-hunters fell into the water before they could teleport back to their rafts.
To Hermione, Frey’s figure seemed incredibly imposing in that moment.
Yet while she and Frey were preoccupied with repelling the mage-hunters’ attacks, no one noticed the Shuar man next to the egg-head quietly raising a blowgun.
*Phut.*
Without a word, Newt rushed from the bow to the stern, throwing himself in front of Frey and blocking the blowdart that had seemed to materialize directly in front of the boy.
His Shield Charm shattered like glass.
The Shuar dart was tipped with the spine of a Quendo beast.
Once fired, these spines would bypass space to appear directly in front of the target—making them the bane of all magical shields and leaving no time to dodge.
A few days ago, the Peruvian Vipertooth had suffered from this exact trick.
“Grandpa!” “Professor Newt!”
“Frey… this poison… it’s fascinating. It must be poison dart frog venom mixed with the saliva of a blue-tongued serpent… Don’t worry, I just… need to sleep for a bit… Sorry… leaving all the work to you two…” Newt mumbled as he lay down flat on the floor of the canoe.
The poison affected his head and neck muscles first; he could no longer move his head.
The numbness spread downward to his chest, the muscles between his ribs, and finally his diaphragm.
As these organs lost sensation, he found it difficult to breathe, and his magic quieted down until he could no longer sense it at all.
“Don’t worry about me, kids… just focus on getting us out of here.”
The canoe was drifting downstream like a lifeless log.
The Navigator screamed incessantly, “The captain is down! The big guy’s out! We’re going to feed the crocodiles!”
Hermione was seriously considering whether to cast a Silencing Charm on it.
Suddenly, their pursuers stopped attacking and began frantically slowing their rafts down.
Another sound echoed from ahead—the roaring of rushing water.
The Navigator shrieked hysterically, “Dead end! Vertical drop of death! Hold onto your souls, a waterfall is coming! I’m already dried meat! Don’t let me turn into fish bait!”
Frey looked toward the bow.
The river’s surface suddenly sloped downward, turning into a jade-green slide that vanished abruptly from his line of sight at its end.
“Hermione, quickly get Grandpa into the backpack. Hurry.”
“What about you? I can’t leave you alone—”
Newt interrupted her in a weak voice, “Listen to him, Hermione. He’ll be fine.”
Hermione supported Newt as he was sucked into the backpack like a melting marshmallow.
Frey calmly slung the backpack over his shoulders, pocketed his wand, and stared back at their pursuers, waiting for the weightless sensation of the drop.