At that distance, Grindelwald could have dodged the incoming spell effortlessly on speed alone. But he didn't move. And Dumbledore knew he wouldn't.
The two spells met in mid-air with a collision that split the sky, exploding into a blinding cascade of lightning. Even as the light was still blazing, both wizards were already constructing the next wave.
A piercing cry tore through the night.
The three monstrous fire-birds were released, screaming as they plunged downward in a diving attack. A single clear, ringing note answered them, and Fawkes launched himself straight at the inferno. The two forces collided in mid-air, erupting into a radiance so brilliant it hurt to look at directly.
Fawkes was outmatched in every conceivable physical measure, both in size and in number. And yet he held them. His golden flames were completely unaffected by the corrosive fury of the fire-birds, and with every passing second, rather than being consumed, Fawkes seemed to be drawing strength from the contact, growing brighter, growing larger.
Grindelwald descended from the sky back to the ground. The turbulence of their clashing magic had electrified the clouds above, turning the high ground into a liability rather than an advantage.
What followed was extraordinary.
Beams of light crossed and collided in rapid succession, each exchange sending shockwaves rippling outward that would have levelled an ordinary building. The two figures flickered in and out of sight, moving with a speed that made them difficult to track, and the crack and boom of deflected spells rang out in an overlapping rhythm, louder and louder, like fireworks at the height of a New Year's celebration.
On the bridge, Tom had secured the finest viewing position available and produced, from somewhere within his Undetectable Extension pockets, a bag of sunflower seeds. He cracked one open between his teeth and settled in to enjoy the show with great contentment.
He'd been genuinely annoyed at Grindelwald's sudden appearance, but looking at this now...
He was glad the old man had come. What else would he have been watching tonight?
With Eagle-Eye magic sharpening his vision, he could see both wizards' mouths moving clearly throughout the exchange, their lips forming words he couldn't hear over the distance and the roar of magic.
"I really should have learned to lip-read," Tom thought with mild regret, cracking another seed. He'd started to call for his house-elf Parra to bring him more snacks, then stopped himself. In the kind of spatial turbulence and ground-trembling chaos currently radiating from the battlefield, no house-elf was making it through here. The area had essentially become a no-Apparition zone for anyone but the two people fighting.
And, of course, Tom.
...
Inside the learning space, Andros, Ariana, and Ravenclaw had also gathered to watch.
"Dumbledore's spellwork is remarkably refined," Andros said, nodding with the appreciation of someone who understood what he was looking at even if it wasn't his own style. "Ordinary spells in his hands seem to take on an entirely different dimension."
Ariana understood none of the technical nuance. She simply watched the two figures clashing in the firelit dark, and something in the spectacle pulled her thoughts back to a summer's day many years ago.
Ravenclaw studied both men's techniques and styles with scholarly attention, cross-referencing what she observed against the knowledge catalogued inside her mind, tracing the thread of how magic had evolved across a thousand years.
Though, if she was being honest, the three of them were primarily just watching for the drama.
"Were those two really..." Ravenclaw glanced at Andros with a look of genuine puzzlement.
"Yes," Andros said, not understanding why she seemed surprised. "Didn't Tom explain it clearly enough before?"
"But they're genuinely trying to kill each other." Ravenclaw looked thoughtful. "Love turned to hatred?"
It wasn't an unreasonable question. Both wizards had dropped all pretense of restraint. Every spell was aimed with lethal intent, the kind of commitment that had nothing to do with performance and everything to do with meaning it. Even Tom noticed it and clicked his tongue softly.
In the original story, Dumbledore had never killed anyone. He had maintained his whole life that death could never truly solve anything.
So what exactly was going through his head right now?
Dumbledore himself seemed startled by his own instincts. He flicked aside a curse that had come screaming at his face and stared at Grindelwald with something that looked almost like disbelief. "You want to kill me?"
"Don't you want to kill me?" Grindelwald's mouth curved into something that was almost a smile, threaded through with unmistakable dark amusement. "That's quite something, you know. Making you actually want someone dead. I don't think I ever managed that before."
"Careful, Dumbledore." His voice dropped half a register, and became something quieter and more dangerous. "One small mistake and I genuinely will. AVADA KEDAVRA!"
The incantation amplified it to something extraordinary. The green light that tore through the air was brighter than any Killing Curse Tom had ever seen documented, and yet it moved in absolute silence, drifting through the darkness like a death that had learned patience.
Dumbledore looked up. The earth itself responded, a vast slab of ground wrenched upward and thrown in front of him like a shield. The green light punched straight through without slowing, reducing solid earth to drifting powder. A golden figure materialised between Dumbledore and the spell's trajectory at the last possible instant, forcing it off course. In the same motion, the figure hurled a lance that was already carrying a Severing Charm Dumbledore had somehow attached to it mid-flight, the enchantment placed at a moment Tom hadn't even managed to identify.
He watched that with a contemplative expression and cracked another seed.
That effortless integration was one of the defining hallmarks of a Century King. For an ordinary wizard, casting a spell was an act, a process with identifiable steps and recognisable rhythm. But at the level of a Century King, magic stopped being an act and became an extension of the self, as natural and unthought-about as breathing, without form or constraint, following no pattern but the caster's will.
Every one of his teachers had explained this principle to him. But understanding it and being able to do it were two entirely separate things, like being handed an ancient manual of supreme techniques and finding yourself unable to make sense of a single page no matter how long you stared.
Tom presently possessed techniques that even Century Kings and Immortal Legends would envy. But how to truly weave all of those techniques into a single unified system that flowed without seams was still a problem he was very much working on.
...
Down in the school, the four Heads of House had settled their students and were now racing toward the sound of battle. Inside the learning space, Ariana was watching the chaos with bright eyes when something occurred to her.
"Wait, where's Aberforth? If something this loud is happening, he should have heard it from Hogsmeade, shouldn't he?"
Speak of a person and they appear.
Aberforth Dumbledore arrived like a force of nature, his voice carrying over the roar of flame and the crack of spells, saturated with a killing fury that had been sitting in storage for a very long time.
"GRINDELWALD! You had the nerve to break out, and now you have the NERVE to show your face in front of me!"
"I WILL KILL YOU TODAY!"
Tom sat up straighter on the bridge, his eyes lighting up.
This evening just kept getting better.
He looked down at his bag with a quiet, tragic expression.
He was almost out of sunflower seeds.