Fighting dirty against an opponent with superior raw power is foolish. That was a lesson straight from Professor Watson's teachings, drilled into them through countless brutal training sessions where they'd learned that honor meant nothing if you were dead.
To lay an effective trap for the Stone Giant, Harry and Hermione spent a precious stretch of time digging frantically and preparing their ambush site with care. They worked in tense silence, ensuring they wouldn't suddenly lose the life-saving warmth of their protective red smoke cover in the middle of the battle ahead.
That would be a death sentence.
While the rosy-red mist still enveloped their bodies like an invisible blanket, they moved quickly between the arena and the outer chamber to replenish it constantly, maintaining that crucial protection against the killing cold.
The colossal ice block of pale blue crystal still stood exactly where it had always stood. Fleur sat idly on a nearby snow-covered stone, long legs crossed elegantly, toying absently with the bronze key she had won in the previous round turning it over in her fingers.
When she saw Harry and Hermione come charging out of their door yet again, Fleur rose happily to her feet and called out cheerfully to ask what was happening, what progress they'd made.
And was, once again, completely ignored by the two of them. Their eyes were fixed wholly on victory, tunnel-vision focus, there was no time for explanations.
Hmph!
Fleur stamped her foot in annoyance, her hair was whipping around her face. But she could do nothing except sink back down onto her cold stone seat with a sigh, resigned to the company of the bitter, boring wind and endless snow.
At least she was warm.
The trap was finally set. Harry and Hermione stood approximately forty feet from the Stone Giant on the right, the one Harry had scouted earlier, wands gripped tight in trembling hands, bodies coiled like compressed springs ready to release.
"Ready, Hermione?" Harry asked, his voice was tight with tension.
Harry tightened his grip on his wand and discovered his palm was slick with nervous sweat despite the cold. He quickly wiped both hand and wand handle on his robes, trying to get a better grip. His heart hammered against his ribs.
"Go, Harry! Do it now!" Hermione's wild tangle of brown curls whipped about frantically in the howling gale that never ceased.
She had no interest in tidying them or pushing them from her face. Her full attention was fixed with intensity on the Stone Giant standing before them, still as a sculpture, waiting.
Whoosh!
A sharp, piercing screech split through the mournful keening of the wind. Harry raised his arm with aim and sent a powerful Disarming Charm straight into the Giant's single stone pedestal, the oval base it stood upon.
Satisfied that his spell had indeed chipped away several visible chunks of stone creating a small crater in the base, Harry threw back his head and shouted at the top of his lungs—
"Run, Hermione! Now!"
And then, without a single backward glance between them, without checking to see if their enemy had awakened, the two turned as one and sprinted desperately for the transport stone-gate that would take them to safety.
ROAR!
They had barely covered a few strides before a thunderous, world-shaking howl erupted violently at their backs. The sound was so loud it was almost physical, pressing against their eardrums.
Harry knew logically he shouldn't look back, that he should reach the gate as quickly as possible without wasting precious seconds. And yet he couldn't help himself, couldn't resist.
He glanced over his shoulder and his blood ran cold.
Exactly as they had anticipated, the formerly silent stone colossus had roused the instant it was provoked, awakened by that first aggressive spell.
The Stone Giant unleashed another world-shaking roar directly at Harry and Hermione fleeing. The shockwave from its roar was powerful enough and carried enough raw force to throw the driving blizzard into complete chaos, sending violent gusts rolling out in every direction like a bomb blast.
A ferocious blast of displaced air struck Harry and Hermione across the back like a giant's palm, knocking them both completely off balance despite their spiked shoes. They tumbled forward helplessly, each rolling once across the hard ice before desperately regaining their footing.
Amid the churning wind and swirling snow, the two of them shot horrified glances back at the stone creature. What they saw made their stomachs drop.
The Giant swung its massive head toward them with grinding sounds of stone on stone. And in the two fist-sized hollows where its eyes should have been, a mesmerizing golden-yellow light blazed suddenly to life.
ROAR!
Another earth-shaking roar that made the ground vibrate beneath their feet. The sheer pressure of the sound forced Harry and Hermione, already braced in defensive stances with feet planted, sliding back across the ice like they weighed nothing.
HMMM!
Then the Stone Giant swung its enormous rectangular arms, churning the air with a bone-deep thrumming that resonated in their chests. It did not advance forward on its base. Instead, it leveled the blunt, fingerless ends of those massive stone arms directly at Harry and Hermione.
A gut-deep, heart-stuttering sense of being targeted, being in a predator's sights rose in both of them simultaneously.
"What is it doing?" Harry gasped, drenched in sweat despite the dead of winter surrounding them.
"Why isn't it chasing us?!"
Hermione couldn't make sense of the creature's strange posture either, couldn't understand why it remained rooted. But she no longer needed to think about it or puzzle it out.
The attack had already arrived.
WHOOSH—WHOOSH—WHOOSH!
The blunt ends of the Giant's arms blazed suddenly with the same golden-yellow light as its eye sockets. Then, one after another, fist-sized chunks of stone appeared from within that light, conjured from nothing.
They tore through the air with a shriek that stabbed at the eardrums, plunging toward Harry and Hermione with enormous speed and devastating force.
"Get clear, Hermione!" Harry screamed desperately.
The black shapes rapidly ballooning in Harry's vision, growing larger and larger as they closed the distance made his soul nearly leave his body with pure terror.
These were nothing like the dodgeballs they'd put up with in gym class back at primary school, the sort that only left you bruised and crying. If these rocks hit, their bodies would be scattered in pieces across the ice.
Worse still, in this life-or-death instant, Hermione froze completely, seemingly unable to believe or process that the Giant was actually throwing rocks at them.
There was no time for words or explanations. Harry shoved Hermione hard to the side with both hands, using the force of the desperate push to launch himself out of the attack's kill zone as well, diving in the opposite direction.
CRACK—CRACK—CRACK!
Dozens of egg-shaped stones rained down from above like artillery shells, turning the smooth ice into a cratered, devastated mess of pits and jagged shards. Chipped stone and shattered ice pelted Harry's exposed face hard enough to sting tears from his eyes and draw blood from small cuts.
But before he could feel even a flicker of relief at having survived that barrage, he looked up in rising horror. The Stone Giant was already turning its clumsy arms, grinding slowly, locking onto him again for a second attack.
Whoooosh—
That bone-chilling scream again, the sound of death approaching. The rocks came a second time, faster now.
"Protego!" Harry's voice cracked with desperation.
Still sprawled flat on the ground where he'd landed, Harry knew he had no time to get up and run. He would have to weather this assault where he lay. He raised his wand with a trembling arm and shouted the Shield Charm.
"Impedimenta!" Hermione screamed from where she'd been thrown.
Hermione, thrown to the side but already scrambling up, had already read where the stones were going with her tactical mind. She screamed her own spell to buy Harry precious cover, to slow the projectiles.
The Impediment Jinx successfully bled some of the speed from those lethal stone eggs, slowing them just enough. And in the end, Harry's hastily-cast Shield Charm held—barely, wavering and crackling but not breaking. He lived this time.
"This thing won't move!" Harry shouted in frustrated realization.
After surviving the second devastating barrage, Harry leapt back to his feet immediately, adrenaline overriding exhaustion.
"The trap we dug is completely useless, it's not going anywhere! It won't leave its position! Hermione, do you have another idea?! Please tell me you have another idea!"
"I'm thinking, just—watch out, Harry, it's targeting you again, Impedimenta!" Hermione's voice was edged with panic.
CRACK—CRACK—CRACK!
Slowed by the Impediment Jinx but still dangerous, the stones slammed repeatedly into the barrier of Harry's Shield Charm with a furious noise like a typhoon battering a pane of thin glass.
Harry's sweat-soaked clothes clung to him uncomfortably. Against the relentless, seemingly endless arctic wind, he screamed in disarray—
"Why is it only coming after me?! What did I do?!"
"I think it's because—" Hermione called back breathlessly, her mind racing, "—you're the one who woke it up! You attacked first! If I attack it too, it might split its attention between us. Wait, Harry—"
Hermione raised her wand, ready to strike the Giant and draw its fire.
"Don't, Hermione!" Harry's face was set with firm resolve, his green eyes were holding the steady look of someone prepared to die if necessary.
"Let it come at me! I can handle it!"
"Don't be stupid, Harry!" Hermione was nearly frantic.
"If I don't attack it, how are you possibly planning to dismantle it?! We need a plan!"
"Ahem." A shadow of embarrassment crossed Harry's pale face at not having thought that through.
Then the Stone Giant moved again in a new pattern. It remained rooted firmly to its spot, apparently unable or unwilling to leave its position but it bent clumsily at the waist with grinding sounds.
BOOM!
A deafening crash and a violent shuddering of the earth arrived simultaneously, shaking the entire arena.
At the sight of what the Giant was doing, Harry went ashen. Hermione looked no less horrified beside him, her eyes were wide with disbelief.
The creature had driven both its massive arms brutally into the ground with tremendous force. The ice cracked and split in all directions like a spiderweb. And then a block of ice roughly the size of Hagrid, maybe larger was hoisted up in the air by the Giant as though it weighed nothing at all.
"Run, Harry! Move!" The pitch of Hermione's scream made anyone watching clap their hands over their ears.
"But, where do we—" Harry was genuinely shaken by the Giant's violent, escalating tactics, stumbling over his words in panic.
"We go out!"
Hermione abandoned all caution and tactical thinking, sprinting desperately to where Harry stood frozen in shock. She seized him by the wrist. The two of them ran like madness itself toward the transport gate, feet pounding.
Fortunately, they had planned to engage the Giant near the transport gate all along for quick escape. It wasn't far.
BOOM!
The shockwave from the massive ice block hitting the ground precisely where they'd been standing did the rest. The force caught them both from behind and hurled them clean out of the trial place like rag dolls.
"Ugh—" Harry groaned in pain.
After rolling violently out through the stone door, the two skidded a good distance through the soft snow before they could finally stop themselves.
Harry let out a strangled groan of pain, gritted his teeth against the sharp ache screaming from every corner of his battered body, and dragged himself upright.
"Bloody hell," Harry wheezed, gasping for air. "That Stone Giant was actually trying to kill us."
Harry cursed between ragged breaths, his hands were shaking with adrenaline.
Hermione struggled up from the snow beside him with effort, her hair and face was plastered with wet snowflakes. The shock was still not fully gone from her white face.
And at that exact moment, Viktor's team and Cedric's team came spilling out of their own hidden realms as well, emerging from their respective doors in similar states of distress.
They shared one thing in common: both teams looked equally battered, disheveled, and traumatized.
Where they differed—Viktor's competition robes were shredded to ribbons, torn and hanging in strips, and his face bore a series of thin cuts, as though something sharp had raked across it repeatedly.
Cedric and Luna, for their part, made straight for a nearby slope without even speaking.
Their robes were soaked completely through with water and had frozen into a crinkled shell of ice which was rapidly draining whatever warmth the rosy-red mist had left them.
The two of them were shivering too violently to speak clearly. Only after warming themselves back up with fresh red stones did they let out long, heavy exhales of relief, collapsing onto the ground in sheer exhaustion.
Harry and Hermione exchanged a look, breathing hard.
From the look of things, the trials the other two teams had faced were nothing like their own Stone Giant.
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