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Thor exhaled slowly. The electrical glow around his body faded.
He walked over to the shattered remains and kicked at the charred fragments. Once he confirmed Surtur was gone, a relieved smile spread across his face.
"Your magic has gotten even stronger! Last time we met, you weren't like this!"
Genuine admiration filled his voice.
Hermione looked at the skull. Her brow furrowed.
Something's wrong.
Nine out of ten things about this are wrong.
She hadn't sensed a single trace of soul energy being harvested by the magic book.
Which meant Surtur hadn't truly died.
Her thoughts raced.
The Eternal Flame...
The answer clicked into place.
The Eternal Flame in Asgard's vault wasn't just the source of Surtur's power. It was more like his... Horcrux.
The Surtur standing before her had only been a duplicate.
As long as the Eternal Flame burned, he could never truly die.
To destroy him completely, there was only one way: let him merge with the Eternal Flame first, restore his strongest, most complete form, and let that form shatter the "Horcrux" from within. Only then could he be finished for good.
"Excellent!"
Thor, entirely oblivious to her thoughts, brandished the Skull Crown with a triumphant grin.
"We did it! Ragnarok won't happen! Asgard is safe! Hermione, I owe you everything this time!"
She looked at his face, pure, unguarded joy — and sighed quietly to herself.
What a fool.
Still, he'd made progress. At least this time he knew to grab onto someone capable.
They returned to Asgard together.
"Don't worry, Hermione." Thor thumped his chest, beaming. "Leave the spaceship to me. I'll make sure they set you up with the most advanced one we have. While they're finishing the preparations, stay in Asgard and rest a few days."
Hermione considered it and nodded.
Thor kept his word. Within a few days, a sleek little spacecraft was docked on a dedicated platform near the palace, its hull gleaming with the sheen of metal and runes.
Not a shred of sci-fi about it. Entirely magical.
Very Asgard.
Hermione circled it once, nodded with satisfaction, then looked at Thor, who was eyeing the ship with equally curious uncertainty. "How do you fly this? Teach me."
Thor blinked. He scratched his head. A sheepish look crept across his face. "Uh... well, about that..."
They squeezed into the cockpit together and stared at the control panels: a dense, bewildering array of buttons and displays flickering in every color imaginable.
Thor tried pressing a few that looked important. The ship let out several strange hums, then shuddered violently, nearly throwing them both out of their seats.
Hermione braced herself against the console and looked at him, flustered, sweating, hands moving in all the wrong directions.
"...Let's find someone," she said.
"Good idea."
A moment later, someone walked in.
Hermione had expected a mechanic. It was Sif.
Sif came to a crisp stop and gave a formal salute. "Welcome, Miss Granger."
Once the formalities were done, Sif's expression softened into her usual smile and she pulled Hermione into a hug.
Thor stared. Why does she dodge when I try that, but Sif gets a free pass?
"Sif, you actually know how to fly this thing?"
Hermione looked at her, full medieval armor, every inch the warrior, and genuinely marveled.
Thor laughed. "Don't let the look fool you. Sif is the most tech-savvy one among us."
And so Hermione settled into Asgard for a while.
During the days, Sif came to teach her: basic spaceship operation, interstellar navigation, how to read the rune-lit charts. Asgardian technology had its own distinct logic. It just happened to look like magic.
Hermione wasn't idle outside of lessons, either.
She started modifying the ship, alchemy, enchantment, everything she had. After the experience of helping Tony retrofit the Helicarrier, this went considerably smoother.
Time passed quietly in the rhythm of learning and tinkering. She stopped counting the days.
Then one afternoon, while she was in the cockpit working on imprinting the Iron Armor Charm directly onto the ship's energy core, a sharp vibration pulsed through her mind.
She stopped. Closed her eyes. Reached for what the magic book was sending her.
The Space Stone and the Mind Stone, both fully analyzed.
The corner of her mouth curved up.
She hadn't been back to Hogwarts in a long time. Probably worth checking in.
The next second, she was standing in a Hogwarts bathroom.
She made her way to the Great Hall and found it packed. The noise hit her before she even crossed the threshold, students everywhere, unfamiliar uniforms mixed in among the familiar ones, a few adult wizards whose bearing marked them as professors from somewhere else entirely.
The first person to spot her was Snape.
His expression darkened on the spot.
"Miss Granger!"
He peeled away from the staff table and bore down on her, his robes snapping at his heels. "So you've decided to come back. You've missed most of the term. Where exactly have you been?"
Hermione looked at his face, black as the bottom of a cauldron, and said pleasantly, "Researching spaceships."
Snape said nothing.
I shouldn't have asked.
This girl's grip on reality gets worse by the month.
Hermione turned her attention to the room.
Beyond the familiar Hogwarts faces, there were students in at least two different sets of foreign school uniforms and a handful of adult wizards with very different energy. And at the front of the hall, placed prominently before the staff table, sat an enormous goblet. Blue-white flames danced at its rim, pulsing with a magical resonance she could feel from across the room.
"What's going on?" she asked.
"The Goblet of Fire," Snape said.
"The Ministry has reinstated the Triwizard Tournament. Barty Crouch, Head of the Department of International Magical Cooperation, is organizing it. Champion selection is underway." He paused. "The students and professors from the other two schools — Durmstrang and Beauxbatons — have arrived. Those are the ones you see."
He said it flatly, like someone reciting a memo they found tedious: "Each school selects one champion. Three dangerous tasks. The winner earns glory."
His tone carried the undisguised contempt of a man who considered the whole thing beneath him.
Hermione looked at the cup, the blue flames shifting and curling, and asked offhandedly, "Can I enter?"
The moment the words left her mouth, Dumbledore spoke from the head table. His voice carried through the entire hall with perfect, unhurried clarity.
"I'm afraid not, Miss Granger." A faint, gentle smile. "You are not yet seventeen."
The hall went quiet.
Every head turned.
Dozens of eyes swung toward the back of the room, toward Hermione. The Hogwarts students who knew her. The Durmstrang and Beauxbatons students who didn't, but had clearly heard the name. Their expressions ranged from startled to intensely curious as they studied her, all at once.
The legendary Hermione Granger, apparently, had just walked in.
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