The exploration quest offered extra rewards once it reached certain thresholds?
Ivan found the method unsettling.
The system would not simply hand the prize over.
He would have to walk into the Restricted Section in the middle of the night and collect it himself.
The whole arrangement carried an unnecessary sense of dread.
Still, a reward was a reward.
He had already seen ghosts.
Midnight held nothing new to fear.
In the Great Hall Harry and Ron were already at a round table.
They waved him over the moment they spotted his drained expression.
“Ivan, over here!” “Where were you all morning?
You look wrecked,” Harry said.
“Practicing spells.” Ivan rolled his eyes, speared a sausage, and shoved it into his mouth.
He had burned through magic for hours without eating.
The residual dizziness still sat behind his eyes.
While he demolished lunch, Harry and Ron talked flying techniques with growing excitement.
Only halfway through their conversation did Ivan remember the afternoon lesson.
Mild interest stirred.
Flying was a near-universal dream, even if the vehicle was only a broom.
Across the hall Draco Malfoy held court among the Slytherins, loudly describing his pre-Hogwarts experience.
“I was flying long before I came here.
My father and I once flew all the way home and nearly collided with a Muggle aeroplane.
If I hadn’t dodged in time I would have knocked it out of the sky!” Ivan choked on his goat’s milk.
Knock an aeroplane out of the sky?
At that altitude, with no protection, he would have frozen solid long before impact.
“Have you ever flown a broom?” Harry asked, clearly irritated by the bragging and encouraged by Ivan’s reaction.
“No.” Even if the original body had tried, the memories were gone.
“Ron?” Ron launched into a detailed account of practising on Charlie’s old broom at the Burrow.
Ivan listened in silence.
The afternoon lesson would sort the claims from the reality soon enough.
It did.
Madam Hooch’s whistle blew.
Of the twenty-odd first-years on the lawn, only Harry summoned his broom on the first try.
Draco managed it a heartbeat later, saving face.
Ron shouted too loudly; the broom leapt up and cracked him squarely on the forehead.
“Up!” Ivan copied the demonstration.
His broom merely spun in lazy circles on the grass.
He was starting to regret not reading a few flying manuals when Madam Hooch turned her back.
He hooked the shaft with his foot and flicked it neatly into his hand, becoming the third student to hold a broom.
She glanced over, saw the steady grip, and gave a small approving nod before moving on.
Harry stared.
Ivan raised a finger to his lips.
At least the evaluation would not be Poor.
Academic Points made almost anything manageable.
He still muttered internally about the system’s single exchange option.
A talent-boosting card would have been useful.
Pretending to be a prodigy with average ability was a short-term strategy at best.
Once the act failed, the points would dry up.
While Madam Hooch corrected the others, Ivan ran through a hundred mental scenarios of controlled flight and possible disasters.
He silently begged the battered school broom to cooperate.
Rising a few feet only to drop like a stone would be humiliating.
“Watch carefully.
I will demonstrate once.” Madam Hooch waited until every broom was held correctly, then showed the proper mounting posture.
“When I blow the whistle, kick off hard from the ground.
Keep a firm grip and try to rise a few feet.
That is all.” Ivan settled onto the broom, ready for his first real flight.
He never got the chance.
A short distance away Neville shot upward with a terrified scream, already twenty feet in the air before anyone else had moved.
Ivan remembered the fall.
His wand was out before the others had finished gasping.
“Wingardium Leviosa!” The Levitation Charm caught Neville mid-plunge and held him steady roughly three metres above the grass.
Madam Hooch’s rigid posture eased.
An accident on her first lesson would have been a career-ending embarrassment.
“Well done.
Five points to Gryffindor.” The system chimed with matching Academic Points at the same moment.
Ivan allowed himself a small internal smile.
The Gryffindors, led by Harry and Ron, began to clap.
They managed only a few beats.
Neville dropped straight out of the air and hit the ground with a heavy thud.
Silence.
“Sorry, Madam Hooch.
I seem to have run out of magic.” Ivan’s smile turned sheepish.
A full morning of intensive practice had left him nearly empty.
Catching the fall at all had been the limit.
The points were already banked.
If the five house points were later deducted, so be it.