Chapter 586: The Plan
Chapter 586: The Plan
As Malfoy ran into the Room of Requirement, Liam and the others didn't follow him inside. Instead, they found a spot where they could see the door to the Room of Requirement and then cast the same Magic to hide themselves.
Before hiding, Liam casually waved his left hand over the Hand of Glory that had fallen to the ground. A grayish-white light shot from his rings to the withered hand, and the Hand of Glory instantly deflated like a punctured balloon, then quickly turned into a pile of ash-gray sand.
This Magic was a new spell Liam had developed after mastering the rules. It could destroy a Magic Artifact by disrupting its mana circulation. After using it today, Liam found that the spell worked very well, effectively weakening the enemy's strength. The only downside was that using it in battle could significantly reduce the loot afterward.
"Will they just hide inside and not come out?" Hermione asked, a bit nervous, after a few minutes of waiting without any sign of movement.
"Don't worry! They'll come out soon", Liam assured her confidently. If everything went according to plan, the trap on the Vanishing Cabinet had already been triggered.
From the beginning of the semester, when Liam discovered that Malfoy was trying to repair the Vanishing Cabinet, he started setting up corresponding traps. Over the course of the semester, especially after mastering the rules of Alchemy, he reinforced the trap, turning it into a chain trap with increased lethality and stealth. He was certain that unless Voldemort's side could find an Alchemy master to carefully inspect the cabinet before teleportation, they would have no way to avoid the trap.
The first layer of the trap was Spatial Disruption. If five intelligent beings transferred through the two Vanishing Cabinets, the Spatial Disruption would be triggered when the sixth intelligent being entered the Spatial Gateway. This would render the Vanishing Cabinet's dimensional transfer function completely useless, and the sixth being would be caught in Spatial Turbulence and shredded.
The second layer of the trap was a modification Liam made after mastering the rules of Alchemy. He placed three Fat Man Nuclear Bombs, which were tied together as trigger devices, in a small compartment he created within the Spatial Gateway between the two Vanishing Cabinets. Once the first layer of the trap was triggered, these three nuclear bombs would be activated and teleported to the other Vanishing Cabinet to explode.
So, once the trap was activated, the initiative would shift to Liam's side. If the Vanishing Cabinet couldn't teleport, the people who had entered would be trapped inside the Room of Requirement. Without food or water, they wouldn't last long, and once Dumbledore returned, they would have nowhere to run.
At this point, the people inside would have no choice but to try to break out in a desperate attempt to escape. Therefore, Liam and the others just needed to wait by the door, ready to catch them like rabbits. There was no need to enter the complex environment of the Room of Requirement to play hide and seek with them.
Of course, all of this was Liam's estimation, but it wasn't a wild guess. It was based on solid evidence and logical reasoning.
If Liam could see through the walls of the Room of Requirement, he would find that his guess was entirely correct. As he and Hermione patiently waited in their chosen spot, the Death Eaters inside the Room of Requirement were already in chaos.
"I told you all from the beginning that the Malfoy brat is completely unreliable, but you didn't listen. See what's happening now? Our people can't get through", Lestrange, Bellatrix's uncle, complained. "My sister-in-law kept warning us that the Malfoys are untrustworthy—"
"Enough, shut up!" Avery's eyes were bloodshot. "We need to make a decision and act immediately. Otherwise, once Dumbledore returns, I don't think the five of us can stand against him."
“I’ll start by asking our little Malfoy.” Mulciber stood up and roughly hauled Draco Malfoy to his feet, who had been huddled aside with a handkerchief pressed to a wound he had hastily sealed with Magic.
“Tell me, what exactly did you see out there?”
“I, I...” Malfoy trembled, unable to form a coherent sentence. After all, he had always lived under his father’s protection. Now that his father was in prison, Malfoy had taken on the task, but it proved far more challenging than he had imagined. The difficulties in repairing the Vanishing Cabinet had already put him under immense pressure, and today’s mission had started off poorly from the beginning. Out of the 12 people who were supposed to come, only five managed to get through, and the Vanishing Cabinet seemed to have malfunctioned.
With the Vanishing Cabinet broken and Hogwarts’ shielding in place, their connection to the outside world was severed. Realizing the dire situation, Mulciber had punched Malfoy in the face, which explained the bruise Liam and the others had noticed earlier. Now, as Mulciber held him by the collar, Malfoy was too nervous to speak.
“Speak up, we don’t have much time to waste here,” Mulciber growled, his anger mounting as Malfoy remained silent. He grabbed Malfoy by the collar and slammed him against an old, abandoned cabinet.
“I didn’t see much,” Malfoy finally managed to say, perhaps having been scared into clarity or calmed by the moment. “I only saw a thin black line wrapped around my hand, and then my hand fell off.”
“Right.” Just as Mulciber raised his hand to strike again, Malfoy had a sudden flash of inspiration. “If I’m not mistaken, the attack must have been from the Gryffindor Prefects.”
“Why do you say that?” Lestrange asked with a hint of curiosity. “You just said you saw nothing. Are you making excuses to deceive us?”
“No, I would never dare to deceive you,” Malfoy said, his voice suddenly steady and almost eloquent. “The sudden attack doesn’t match the style of the professors, and since it’s curfew, the only students who could be in the corridors are the Prefects assisting the professors. Given that we are on the eighth floor, the most likely culprits are the two Gryffindor Prefects patrolling the seventh floor who attacked Pansy and used Magic against me.”
“Moreover, those two Gryffindor Prefects have a grudge against me. They also injured my aunt with Magic at the Ministry of Magic last year. So, considering the reasons for the attack, their Magic habits, and their skill level, I can confidently say that they were the ones who attacked me.”
“Since that’s the case, we should hurry and get out of here,” a bearded male wizard said. “If we wait, the professors will be up here, and we’ll be in trouble. We should head for the school gates; they won’t be able to stop us.”
“But what about our mission? Constantine,” the only witch in the room interjected. She looked to be in her forties, with lips and nails painted a dark, ominous black. “We didn’t come all the way from Constantinople to simply turn tail and run. Don’t forget, this is the first task we’ve received since joining the Dark Lord.”
“We are severely understaffed; we don’t even have half the people we need,” Constantine, the Greek wizard, replied.
“The Dark Lord’s orders cannot be twisted, even if we are short-handed,” Lestrange said with a fanatical expression. “We’ll charge out, take care of those two troublesome brats, and split up to complete the mission from both corridors.”
“Aye,” a chorus of voices responded from the Room of Requirement, some excited, others resigned. After dividing into teams, the six people gathered at the door, ready to burst out and carry out their plan.
(End of Chapter)
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