By the time Lynn returned to his office, it was already past midnight.
He did not go to bed immediately. Instead, he continued sorting through the scattered manuscripts.
The Basilisk hidden within the castle had him deeply concerned. Even Lynn could not afford to take lightly a creature capable of killing with a single glance.
Still, it was not as though he had no way of dealing with it. The 4th-circle spell Arcane Eye could create an invisible magical eye that transmitted visual information to the caster through a mental link.
Lynn was not yet certain whether the 5th-circle spell Hold Monster would work on it, so until he had made complete preparations, he had no intention of provoking that creature rashly.
After finishing with the manuscripts, he lay down in the bedroom behind his office and quickly fell asleep.
...
This dream was unlike his usual ones.
Inside the dream, Lynn "woke up."
He found himself floating in a wondrous pale violet space. Shifting curtains of aurora light surrounded him, dotted with tiny white stars. The place was breathtakingly beautiful.
"This is..."
He immediately realized that this was no ordinary dream.
Either someone had invaded his dream, or someone had pulled his spiritual body here from the real world.
Whichever it was, Lynn could not think of any wizard in this world capable of doing such a thing.
Far away from him, he saw a humanoid figure. It seemed to be watching him from the distance.
He tried to move closer, but no matter what he did, the distance between them refused to shrink.
Then suddenly, a pair of enormous phantom eyes glowing with violet light appeared within the space.
The moment Lynn met their gaze, he jolted awake in bed.
His pajamas were soaked with cold sweat. Just before waking, he seemed to have vaguely heard a gentle yet majestic female voice speaking to him in a language he could not understand.
But before he could recover from that strange dream, the ring on the little finger of his left hand suddenly began to grow hot.
It was the warning device he had set up at his manor by Highgate Cemetery in London. Heat meant that some living creature had entered the alert perimeter.
That was no easy thing to do. He had layered the manor with all manner of triggered defenses, even more intricate than the ones on his old wizard tower back in Albania. He had even added local spells from this world, like the Muggle-Repelling Charm.
He snapped his fingers, instantly changed into his robes, and hurried out of the school grounds.
Originally, he had intended to inscribe a matching Teleportation Circle in his office so he could travel directly home, but Hogwarts’ anti-Apparition protections blocked his teleportation magic as well. Left with no other choice, he had secretly established an invisible teleportation circle in a remote area not far outside the school.
...
London. Highgate Cemetery.
A cold rain was falling over London in the dead of night, washing over the crooked gravestones of the cemetery.
A faint silver barrier, invisible to ordinary people, covered the entire courtyard and kept the rain outside. Before the great iron gate, which had been pushed open by some unseen force, stood a small figure.
Lynn, who had just teleported back, was hiding in the shadows of the courtyard under Greater Invisibility, cautiously observing the intruder.
It was a brown-haired girl who looked no older than ten.
She wore a white dress far too thin for the season and stood barefoot on the muddy, moss-slick stone path.
Unlike when he had faced Dumbledore, every single one of the manor’s defenses had failed.
Not broken and dispelled.
Simply never triggered at all.
"Come out, wizard."
The girl turned toward the exact spot where Lynn was hiding, locking onto him with perfect precision despite his invisibility.
Her voice was childish, but her tone carried a lazy maturity utterly at odds with her apparent age.
"A very nice Greater Invisibility. Unfortunately, your magical fluctuations gave you away."
Since his invisibility had been seen through at a glance, Lynn stopped wasting magical power and dropped the spell, stepping out of the shadows.
"Who are you? Trespassing on a wizard’s territory is hardly polite behavior."
The girl tilted her head, ignoring his question and continuing instead.
"Wall of Fire, earth elemental servants, Wall of Force... Circle of Death..."
Hearing the names of all the defensive spells he had placed around the manor recited one by one, Lynn did not hesitate. He immediately layered himself with Protection from Evil and Good, Protection from Energy, and Stoneskin.
In this world, even Dumbledore, who had already read a great deal of the material Lynn had compiled, would not have been able to name every single spell he had set here so casually.
The thing in front of him was absolutely not just a ten-year-old girl.
And when faced with an enemy, Lynn wasted no time.
His spells came flying out in rapid succession.
A pale blue glow flared beneath the girl’s feet, forming a square of binding force, 2nd-circle Hold Person.
At the same time, eight enormous shifting patterns of distorted light sprang up around her, sealing off every line of sight.
3rd-circle Hypnotic Pattern.
A control spell that plunged anyone who looked at it into a daze.
Before the girl could react at all, 3rd-circle Slow and 4th-circle Evard’s Black Tentacles followed at the same instant.
The flow of time around her instantly turned thick and sluggish. At the same time, the mud on the ground boiled, and countless giant black tentacles, slick, cold, and reeking of the void, burst out of the ground like a nest of abyssal horrors, surging toward the tiny figure.
Finally, staring at the area now swallowed by writhing tentacles, Lynn chanted softly for a brief moment.
"Upcast. 5th-circle Ice Storm."
Countless fist-sized hailstones mixed with razor-sharp shards of ice, all carried on a freezing tempest, crashed down in an indiscriminate bombardment upon the black mass of tentacles as though the sky itself were collapsing.
By the time his carefully arranged courtyard had been blasted into ruins by that combo, Lynn had already used Dimension Door to reposition himself to another corner closer to the impact zone, while the strongest spell he could currently cast, 6th-circle Disintegrate, stood ready to fire.
Extreme caution. That was Lynn’s combat style.
Thanks to Weave Unbound, he could cast spells below 5th circle as freely as cantrips, which was what made this sequence of layered control and indiscriminate bombardment possible.
"Cough... cough..."
As the hailstorm slowly died away, a young yet pained coughing sound came from within the icy mist.
The girl in white walked slowly out from the area of the tentacles, looking rather disheveled.
Her white dress had been torn to shreds by the tentacles. Smears of translucent slime and a few still-wriggling tendril-like remnants clung to her pale skin. Her legs, arms, and cheeks were reddened by the freezing cold. She was moving very slowly, and Slow was clearly still affecting her.
"You’re really... not holding back at all..." the girl said pitifully, even squeezing out two tears.
But Lynn was not buying it.
Seriously, what kind of normal girl could walk out alive after taking that kind of spell barrage? And she did not even look badly injured.
"Dis-integrate!"
Without the slightest hesitation, he raised his blackwood wand and pointed it at her. He did not depend on a wand, but he had found that for directional spells like Disintegrate, using one improved accuracy.
At the tip of the wand, a pulse of sinister dark green light gathered instantly, carrying within it the terrifying law of total atomic unraveling.
Hiss!
"...You really don’t listen to a word anyone says, "
A thin green ray, fine as a hair, ripped through the air in an instant, so fast it gave her no time at all to chant a counterspell.
At this distance, and with the residual effects of Slow still on her, this hit was guaranteed.
The girl clearly sensed the danger. Her body shifted as if trying to evade, but it was already too late.
Lynn saw a trace of helplessness flash across her face.
Then she raised her small left hand and actually reached out to grab the ray of Disintegrate.
Hum
A cluster of silver fire ignited in her palm.
The silver flame engulfed the green ray, burned through it, and erased it completely.
"This... what kind of spell is that?"
Lynn was stunned beyond words.
Whether in the spell system of Faerûn or in the native magic of this world, he had never heard of anything that could neutralize Disintegrate barehanded like that.
The girl shook her hand once, and the silver fire vanished.
Looking at the dumbstruck Lynn, she gave him a faintly apologetic smile.
"You win, Lynn Gray. If it had been anyone else standing here, they would already be dead."
"Who are you?"
She did not answer.
Instead, the girl straightened what remained of her tattered dress, gave Lynn a slight curtsy, and silver light began to glow around her body.
"You’ll find out, Professor Gray. Tele-port!"
A pulse of spatial distortion passed through the air.
The small figure vanished completely, leaving behind only the black tentacles behind her as they slowly faded away.
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