The Rookery on the outskirts of Cardiff was, by all accounts, a thoroughly unpleasant place to spend a Tuesday morning.
Harry had been inside for three hours now. The dungeon was a mid-sized C-Rank zone that the BHA had cordoned off after a nest of Ashwinders mutated into something considerably nastier following the integration. The Guild that originally cleared it had botched the job, left three eggs behind, and now the whole place was crawling with what the system had helpfully classified as Infernal Ashwinders: eight feet long, fire-breathing, and irritable enough to qualify as a genuine hazard. The Guild in question had quietly paid the BHA’s reprocessing fee and pretended they’d never been involved.
Harry incinerated another one as it lunged from a crevice in the wall. The system chimed.
[Infernal Ashwinder defeated. +47 EXP.]
[Shadow Extraction available.]
He knelt and pressed two fingers to the cooling corpse. The shadow peeled away and collapsed into him like smoke through a keyhole. He had eleven shadow soldiers now. He’d started the week with three.
Somewhere near the back of the dungeon, the next wave was already moving.
It had become routine over the past four days. Wake up, check the Daily Quest, eat something, head to whichever dungeon the BHA had flagged for solo clearance in his rank bracket, grind until his magic ran low, extract shadows worth keeping, come home. Sleep. Repeat. He was on his fifth dungeon this week and he hadn’t spoken to anyone except a brief exchange with his downstairs neighbour about a leaking pipe. The neighbour had stared at the fresh burn marks on Harry’s jacket and wisely said nothing else.
He was getting faster. That was the thing he kept coming back to whenever he stopped to think about it, which he actively tried not to do too often because it led to the kind of questions he wasn’t ready to answer yet. His reaction time was sharper. He wasn’t getting winded climbing dungeon staircases anymore. Two weeks ago, clearing a nest of six Infernal Ashwinders would have taken him the better part of half an hour, leaving him sweating and low on mana. Today he’d done nine in twenty minutes, and the tenth one that came at him from above barely caught him off-guard.
He dodged right, cast a Reducto at the wall beside it to redirect its fire breath toward the stone, and finished it off with a whip of shadow that cracked like a rope. Clean. Efficient. He could still remember the way shadow magic had felt in the first days after the temple: like trying to hold water with his fingers, getting half of it through on instinct and losing the rest. Now it came when he reached for it without the mental strain. His core was different since the system had restored it, rebuilt along new architecture he didn’t fully understand. Whatever it had replaced the cracked sections with, it conducted shadow energy better than the original.
[Infernal Ashwinder defeated. +47 EXP.]
[LEVEL UP!]
[You are now Level 5.]
[All stats increased.]
[New features unlocked. Please check your status window.]
Harry straightened and opened the screen.
[STATUS WINDOW]
[Name: Harry J. Potter]
[Class: None]
[Title: Shadow Monarch’s Heir]
[Level: 5]
[HP: 620/620] [MP: 580/580]
[Strength: 54] [Agility: 57] [Intelligence: 61] [Perception: 53] [Endurance: 55]
[Available Stat Points: 5]
[Shadows: 11/20]
Then a second notification appeared beneath it, blinking slowly like it had been waiting for him to scroll down.
[SPECIAL QUEST UNLOCKED: THE JOB CHANGE]
[A Hunter without a class is a blade without an edge. The Shadow Monarch’s power recognises your readiness. Prove your worth, and your path will be defined.]
[OBJECTIVE: Enter the Instance Dungeon “The Realm of Eternal Night” and survive for four hours.]
[REWARD: Class Assignment. Enhanced Shadow Extraction. Title upgrade.]
[WARNING: This is a solo instance. No external assistance is possible. Death within the instance results in permanent failure of this quest.]
[Accept? Y/N]
Harry stared at that last line for a moment. Permanent failure. Not “quest reset,” not “try again in 24 hours.” Permanent. He thought about the throne room. About the deaths, their faces going still in the dark, that last surprised expression. About the way the Guardian had looked at him before it bowed, something ancient in its posture, something that had recognised a claim Harry himself hadn’t understood yet.
If he failed this, whatever the system had decided he was supposed to be, it would close. Permanently.
He pressed Y.
The dungeon around him dissolved.
xXx
He’d expected a gate, maybe. A door, a portal, the kind of dramatic entrance points that appeared above registered dungeons and lit up on the BHA’s tracking maps. What he got instead was the floor dropping out from under him, a sensation like falling through cold water, and then nothing for a half-second that felt considerably longer than a half-second.
Then: ground. Solid. Dark.
Harry caught himself and stayed crouched, wand up, taking stock of his surroundings. Everything in him, every instinct sharpened by the years of working E-Rank dungeons and whatever the last two weeks had done to him, went quiet and alert at once.
The sky was black. Not night-sky black with stars and a moon, but genuinely lightless, as if the concept of a horizon had been quietly removed from the design brief. The ground was stone, flat and featureless, stretching in every direction until it simply stopped being visible. The air smelled faintly of iron and something older, something he didn’t have a word for. It was cold in a way that felt less like temperature and more like absence.
[INSTANCE DUNGEON: THE REALM OF ETERNAL NIGHT]
[Time Remaining: 4:00:00]
[Objective: Survive]
[Current Difficulty: Adaptive. Enemies will scale to your level.]
“Lovely,” Harry said, to nobody.
The shadows moved.
Not dramatically, not all at once. One patch of darkness at the edge of his vision shifted in a direction it shouldn’t have, and Harry tracked it immediately. The system had done something to his perception since the temple, sharpened it in some way that went beyond the stat points in his Perception column. He clocked the shape before it fully resolved: roughly humanoid, built from compressed dark, with two pale points of light where eyes would sit. It had no mouth. It had no reason to need one.
He cast.
The first three went down in quick succession. They were fast but not tactical, charging straight at him in that mindless way lower-rank shadow creatures seemed to have, all instinct and no strategy, and Harry was starting to understand that this was a consistent pattern. Shadow creatures at this tier moved toward warmth, toward light, toward the energy of a living person. They didn’t evaluate threat. They didn’t adjust approach. You could use that.
He pulled the mana through the Shadowsteel Wand and let the familiar heat of it settle into his wrist. The wand was still the strangest thing he owned, darker than it had any right to be, carved from a material that didn’t exist in any wandmaking catalogue he’d ever seen. The wand conducted his magic cleanly and without resistance, and when he pushed it toward shadow-based techniques, it responded with a kind of eagerness that standard wands didn’t have. It wanted this.
The next group came six at a time.
Harry backed up three steps, chose a rock formation on his left for cover, and started firing in short controlled bursts rather than trying to face them head-on. One went down to a Bombarda redirected off the stone at an angle. Two more collided with each other when he conjured a brief wall of light between them, disoriented, and he took them both while they were stumbling. The last two he finished with shadow whips because he was running low on the concentration needed for proper spellwork and the whips were instinctive now, almost automatic, extending from his palm like the physical expression of something he’d always been able to do but never had the vocabulary for.
[6 Shadow Wraiths defeated. EXP gained.]
Three hours and thirty-one minutes remaining.
Right. This was going to be a long day.
xXx
Around the two-hour mark he figured out the dungeon’s rhythm.
Waves came every fifteen to twenty minutes, and they got harder each time. Not dramatically, not in the way dungeon designers who wanted to show off tended to do it, where every wave was a spectacle. Subtly. A few more enemies, slightly better coordination between them, occasionally something with a specific trick he’d have to work out quickly. The fourth wave included shadow creatures that mimicked his own movements, which was genuinely unnerving for about forty seconds until he realized they were mirroring him on a slight delay and started using that against them, making large obvious movements to set up the mirror and then attacking from the opposite direction while they were completing the gesture.
The seventh wave introduced Void Hounds, low-slung things that moved in packs of four and went specifically for the legs. He took a bite through his boot during the scramble, nothing deep, but it reminded him he couldn’t afford to get sloppy about footwork. He treated it with the basic kit he’d started carrying everywhere after the second dungeon run this week, and the system chimed a modest HP recovery when he applied the poultice. He’d taken to treating the kit as non-negotiable, the same way experienced hunters treated armor or communication stones. You carried it because the one time you didn’t would be the time you needed it.
He was learning things about himself in the gaps between waves, the minutes where he sat against whatever cover he’d found and let his mana regen tick upward and his heartbeat settle. Useful things. He was learning that he thought better under pressure than he remembered. Back at Hogwarts, back during the War, the problem had always been too much happening simultaneously with too many people to account for and too many vectors for things to go wrong. There was no capacity for strategy when you were trying to cover six flanks at once and every calculation had a human cost attached to it.
Here it was just him and a clear objective and a timer he could see.
He also discovered, at about the ninety-minute mark, that his shadow soldiers were following him into the instance. He’d thought they might not carry over, given the transfer, but when he checked his window the count was still at eleven. They couldn’t manifest visibly in the realm without drawing aggro from the shadow creatures, which was a problem he hadn’t anticipated, but he could feel them in the shadow pool, present and waiting. He filed that information. The Knight he’d extracted in Cardiff was in there with the others, already the most distinct presence in the collection, heavier than the Wraiths.
He thought about Sirius sometimes, in those quiet gaps. Not the way grief usually worked on him, which was in waves and without warning, catching him sideways at odd moments. Deliberately. He’d started doing it a few months ago, making himself think about it on purpose rather than going around it, because he’d noticed the going-around wasn’t actually making him less likely to think about it at inconvenient moments.
Sirius would have had extremely specific opinions about all of this. He would have been completely insufferable about the Shadow Monarch thing, would have turned every system notification into a joke, would have sat in Harry’s kitchen in Camden and made a big production of reading out the status window in the most theatrical voice he could manage. He would have followed Harry into the instance dungeon on the grounds that four hours sounded like a challenge and what was a permanent failure penalty, really, in the grand scheme of things. He would have been an absolute liability and Harry would have let him come anyway.
Three years since the dungeon collapsed. Harry had been on a different dungeon run that day, a routine E-Rank sweep with a contract team. He’d found out from a BHA emergency notification on his communication stone: structure failure, multiple casualties, list attached. Sirius Black had been at the top of the list in the way that meaningful names always managed to be: first alphabetically, and first by the time you registered what you were reading.
He’d sat on the floor of the dungeon corridor he’d been clearing and read the name seven times.
He put the memory away when the eighth wave started. He’d found that was the most useful thing he could do with it. Not suppress it, not pretend it wasn’t there, but put it down for a moment and pick it back up later. The Void Hounds in the eighth wave were faster than the previous group, coordinating better, and he needed all of his attention.
xXx
The ninth wave was just one creature, and it was nothing like the others.
It walked rather than crept. Seven feet tall, armored in shadow-forged plate that absorbed the ambient light rather than reflecting it. It carried a greatsword at its side, not raised, and it moved with the kind of leisurely purpose that meant it wasn’t particularly worried about him. There was something in the way it moved that tugged at Harry’s memory: the same quality the throne room Guardians had, that sense of being old in a way that went beyond age.
[SHADOW KNIGHT]
[Level: 16]
[Special Ability: Void Cleave, Shadow Step, Armor of Nullification]
[This creature’s armor reduces magic damage by 60%.]
Harry looked at that last line and felt a specific type of calm settle over him. The kind that came not from confidence but from having read the bad news and now having to decide what to do with it. The kind he’d first developed in a dungeon right before facing certain death and realized he’d been developing all his life without knowing the name for it.
Sixty percent magic reduction. His shadow whips weren’t classified as magic damage, technically. The system had been consistent about that distinction since the temple: shadow energy and magical energy were separate schools, interacting but distinct. The whips hit harder against fire-based creatures than standard spells did, had broken stone walls that magical Bombarda barely scratched. If the Nullification armor worked on magic and not shadow energy, he had an opening.
The Shadow Knight raised its greatsword.
“Alright,” Harry said. “Let’s see, then.”
It moved fast for something that size. He’d expected slow, expected its power to substitute for agility, and it almost caught him because of that assumption: the first swing came faster than his body had pre-calculated, and he had to throw himself sideways with less margin than he liked. The displacement of air from the passing greatsword was significant even in the instance’s windless atmosphere. He came up firing, standard Reducto, watched it hit the armor and confirmed the damage reduction immediately. The Knight barely staggered.
Shadow whips, then.
He kept moving, keeping the Knight chasing him in an arc rather than a straight line because its turning radius was wider than it looked. He circled, landing whip strikes at the joints wherever the plate armor had gaps, the articulated sections at hip and shoulder and knee that any armor had to have to permit movement. The system didn’t give individual hit notifications but he could feel the strikes connecting differently at the joints than at the solid plate. The Knight’s gait was getting marginally stiffer at the right knee.
Then it used Shadow Step.
No warning. No telegraph. One moment the Knight was in front of him at ten feet, the next it was directly behind him. He heard something, some shift in the instance’s specific silence, and started to turn, but not fast enough. The greatsword caught him across the back in a glancing hit, glancing because he’d moved, but a glancing hit from a seven-foot shadow creature swinging a sword the length of a man was still significant.
[DAMAGE TAKEN: 187 HP]
[HP: 433/620]
That was nearly a third of his health pool. Harry stumbled forward, caught himself, and turned. His back was burning with pain. He ignored it with the practice of someone who’d had a lot of practice.
Right. Shadow Step. It could sort of apparate while he couldn’t. He’d need to keep his perception wide rather than focused, stay aware of the whole space rather than just tracking the Knight’s current position. He started moving more erratically, changing direction every few steps, forcing the Knight to commit to a course before he changed it again.
He also reached for the realm itself.
He’d done it once in the throne room without understanding how. Reached for the shadows not as his own ability but as something ambient, something that existed outside of him and could be directed. The instance was made of shadow. It was saturated with it, dense with the stuff in a way that a normal dungeon wasn’t. And it responded to him in a way it clearly didn’t respond to the Knight, which was made of shadow and had presumably been here a very long time. The Shadow Monarch’s Heir designation apparently meant something to the instance’s architecture. The darkness tilted toward him when he asked.
He pulled.
The shadow around the Shadow Knight contracted. Not dramatically, not visibly, but the Knight slowed, its movements constrained by something in its environment that had changed its relationship to it. Its armor, which drew power from ambient shadow, was suddenly competing with Harry’s claim on that same resource. The crack along the right shoulder joint that he’d been targeting deepened by a visible increment.
Harry closed the distance, hit the exposed joint with four consecutive shadow whips targeted precisely at the same point, and watched the armor break along the shoulder with a sound like a stone splitting. The Knight’s sword arm dropped. He was already moving, pressing the Shadowsteel Wand to the exposed section at the Knight’s neck, and he pushed all the mana he had left into a single concentrated burst at point-blank range, shadow energy and raw magic both, no holding back.
[SHADOW KNIGHT DEFEATED]
[EXP: 1,840]
[Job Change Quest Progress: 100%]
Harry stepped back and sat down heavily on the stone. He waited, but nothing. There was no level up notification.
[HP: 61/620]
His hands were shaking. Not badly, but definitely shaking. The fight had taken him close to the edge. He breathed through it, counted to ten, made himself be still. Adrenaline wanted him to move, to check, to do something useful, and the best response to that particular impulse was to hold it.
[Time Remaining: 0:23:17]
He’d made it with twenty-three minutes to spare, which meant the last wave had taken him considerably closer to the line than he’d intended. He extracted the Knight’s shadow last of all, and when it joined the others, he felt the whole collection shift into a slightly different configuration: more organised, more coherent, the eleven Wraith-class shadows sorting themselves around the Knight the way subordinates sort themselves around the person in the room who’s clearly done this before.
He watched the remaining time count down. He didn’t use it to fight. He sat, breathed, and let the realm be dark around him.
xXx
[CONGRATULATIONS]
[Job Change Quest Complete]
[Class assigned.]
[New abilities unlocked. New title assigned.]
[Please review your updated status window.]
He was back in Cardiff. The Rookery dungeon was exactly as he’d left it, Ashwinder corpses cooling on the stone, the faintly sulphurous air stinging his nose. He sat on the dungeon floor and opened his status properly, taking his time.
[STATUS WINDOW]
[Name: Harry J. Potter]
[Class: Necromancer]
[Title: Shadow Monarch]
[Level: 5]
[HP: 61/620] [MP: 147/580]
[Strength: 54] [Agility: 57] [Intelligence: 61] [Perception: 53] [Endurance: 55]
[Available Stat Points: 5]
[Shadows: 12/30]
[CLASS BONUS: Shadow Affinity +20% | All shadow-based abilities enhanced]
[NEW ABILITY: Shadow Extraction (Enhanced) — Can now extract shadows from A-Rank creatures and below. Shadow soldiers retain more of the original creature’s abilities. Shadow storage cap increased to 30.]
[NEW ABILITY: Shadow Domain (Passive) — Within a 5-metre radius, shadow-based magic costs 20% less mana.]
[NEW ABILITY: Ruler’s Hand — Can manipulate shadow energy at range without physical contact. Unlocks at Level 7.]
He read through it twice. The storage going from twenty to thirty was immediately useful: ten more slots meant more variety in what he carried, could specialize the collection for different dungeon types rather than running the same generalized spread. The enhanced extraction meant the Knight wasn’t just a passive soldier but a genuinely capable one, retaining Shadow Step and its combat intelligence. He could feel it in the pool now, distinct and patient in a way the Wraiths weren’t.
Shadow Domain was the one he needed to think about most carefully. Five metres wasn’t large, but in a dungeon it was nearly the full combat space. He’d been spending significant mana on precision shadow work in tight corridors; now that cost would drop. Sustained whip combinations, shadow manipulation, the kind of extended technique that had drained him noticeably in the throne room fight: all of it cheaper, reliably, as long as he managed his positioning.
He spent a few minutes deciding on his stat points. Three into Agility, because the Shadow Knight’s Shadow Step had caught him, and if he’d had better footwork he’d have started turning faster. Two into Endurance, because long fights cost him more stamina than they should. He confirmed the allocation and felt the familiar, faintly odd sensation of the stats adjusting.
Then he walked out of the Rookery, filed the clearance paperwork on the BHA’s mobile terminal outside the dungeon entrance, and got the train back to London.
xXx
He ran into Remus on Thursday.
It wasn’t planned. He was coming out of the Leaky Cauldron, having spent two hours at a back table working through the paperwork the BHA required before a rank reassessment, and Remus was coming the other direction down Charing Cross Road in his hunting gear, B-Rank badge on the breast pocket, looking like he’d had a week that had been longer than the actual number of days in it.
“Harry.” Remus stopped, and his expression went through something quick and complicated. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”
“Sorry. It’s been busy.”
“I can see that.” Remus was looking at him in the specific way he’d developed when Harry was eleven, the way that meant he was noticing things and cataloguing them quietly. “You look different.”
“Slept better recently,” Harry said.
“That’s not what I mean.” Remus fell into step beside him, apparently having abandoned whatever he’d been heading toward. “You’re carrying yourself differently. Your posture’s changed. And unless that’s a very good glamour, you’ve put on muscle in the last two weeks. Considerable muscle.”
Harry considered his answer for a beat too long, which was itself an answer.
“Dungeon work,” he said. “Grinding, mostly. The Daily Quests are physical.”
“I know what Daily Quests do to a person after consistent completion, Harry. I’ve been doing this for four years.” Remus glanced at him sideways, not accusatory, just careful. “That’s not two weeks of Daily Quest progress. That’s something else.”
“Remus.”
“I’m not interrogating you. I’m just telling you what I’m observing.”
They ended up getting coffee from a place two streets over that had been there since before the integration and had dealt with the transition by simply pretending it hadn’t happened. The staff were Muggle-born, the coffee was good, and the other patrons were the kind of Londoners who minded their own business with dedicated professionalism.
They took a table by the window. Remus ordered for both of them on the basis that Harry clearly hadn’t eaten properly today, which was accurate and slightly annoying to be accurate about.
“How’s the B-Rank circuit?” Harry asked.
“I was running with a five-person team through a dungeon cluster in Scotland last week. C-Rank, technically, except the BHA had miscategorised it and the interior turned out to be solid B-Rank with a boss chamber that nearly took out our front-liner.” Remus wrapped both hands around his mug. “He’s fine. Needs a week off and a better appreciation of dungeon cartography. I’m fine. The Guild earns, I get my keep, everyone goes home with their limbs intact.”
“You enjoy it, though.”
“Parts of it.” Remus looked out the window. “I enjoy having somewhere to put the energy. The work is useful. I’m good at it.” He paused. “I don’t love that I’m good at it, necessarily.”
Harry understood that. He understood it more than he had two weeks ago.
“I had coffee with Molly last month,” Remus said, bringing it back around. “She asked about you.”
“I’ll write to her.”
“That’s what you said in November.”
“I’ll actually write this time.”
Remus looked at him across the table with an expression that said clearly he was choosing not to push on that particular point. “Your reassessment is coming up. The BHA notice went through the Guild network. D-Rank promotion, Monday.”
“I know, I’m the one who applied.”
“I know you know. I’m trying to have a conversation, Harry, I’m not reporting information at you.” He picked up his coffee. “Are you ready for it?”
Harry thought about the Shadow Knight with its sword arm down. About twenty-three minutes to spare in an adaptive dungeon that had been trying to kill him. About the Infernal Ashwinders that had felt like a warm-up three days ago and would have been a genuine threat two weeks before that.
“Probably,” he said.
Remus nodded, and for a moment he just looked at him, the same careful cataloguing look. Not suspicious. Something more like worried and unwilling to be intrusive about it simultaneously. “You’d tell me, wouldn’t you. If something had gone wrong.”
“Define wrong.”
“Don’t be clever with me, I taught you everything you know about being clever.”
“You taught me Defense for one year.”
“Formative year,” Remus said. “Very formative.”
Harry laughed. “Nothing’s happened that I can’t handle,” he said.
That was true in the sense that he was still standing and functioning and had, in fact, improved across every measurable metric. What it didn’t cover was the question of what he was handling or how, and he was aware of the gap between the statement and the full truth even as he made it. Remus probably was too. He let it stand anyway.
“I want to ask you something,” Remus said, after a pause. “And I’d like a straight answer, not a technically-accurate-but-evasive one.”
“That’s fair.”
“The dungeon collapse report. The one in the Forbidden Forest. You filed it as a structural failure, standard cave-in, no anomalous events.” Remus set down his mug. “Was that what happened?”
Harry met his eyes. “The dungeon collapsed. My team didn’t make it out.”
“And before it collapsed?”
“We found the central chamber and it turned out to be significantly more hostile than the entry assessment suggested.”
Remus was quiet for a moment. “That’s what I thought,” he said, and then, to Harry’s genuine surprise, he didn’t push further. He picked up his coffee again and said, “I’m not going to interrogate you on it. Whatever happened in there, I can see you came out of it differently and not worse off, and that’s enough for right now.” He looked out the window. “I do wish you’d told me something, though. I thought about coming to Camden and knocking until you answered.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because you’re twenty-five, not fifteen, and you’re allowed to decide when you want company.” He glanced back. “Doesn’t mean I wasn’t worried.”
Harry didn’t have an immediate answer to that. He looked at his coffee. “I’m sorry I didn’t answer,” he said finally. “I was working through some things. I should have sent a line.”
“Just a line. That’s all I needed.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
Remus accepted that with a small nod, and the conversation moved on, the way it always did: to Molly’s latest renovation project in the Burrow’s kitchen, to a particularly baffling BHA ruling on dungeon territorial rights, to the A-Rank Hunter who’d apparently walked into a restricted zone in Edinburgh last month and caused an international incident that three different Guilds were still trying to quietly resolve. Normal things. Hunter things. Harry drank his coffee and found that he was glad he’d run into him.
When they stood outside to leave, Remus said, “I could come Monday. If you want someone there.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know that. Do you want me to?”
Harry thought about it honestly. The reassessment would show things. Stats that didn’t match his medical records, physical condition that had no clean explanation. But Remus had just told him he wasn’t going to push on things he could see didn’t add up, and that was more than Harry was going to get from most people. “Let me see how it goes,” he said. “I’ll hit you up on Sunday night.”
“I’ll be around.” Remus looked at him for a moment longer. “Don’t disappear again.”
“I’ll write to Molly.”
“Harry, that is genuinely not the point I’m making—“ But he stopped, shook his head, and almost smiled. “Monday,” he said. “Do well.”
xXx
The penalty zone woke him at the stroke of midnight by depositing him into it.
He became aware of the following things in rapid succession: he was not in his flat; the ceiling was stone and very far away; something was making a sound like the earth having structural opinions; and the system window hovering in his peripheral vision was flashing red with a faint sense of administrative disapproval.
[DAILY QUEST PENALTY ACTIVATED]
[Failure to complete Daily Quest within the designated window.]
[PENALTY: Transported to Penalty Zone. Survive to return.]
Fuck, he’d really forgotten it after the excitement of the Job Change Quest.
The sound was getting louder.
Harry rolled off the stone shelf he’d been deposited on, was upright and wand out before his eyes had fully adjusted, and took stock. Enormous cavern. Black stone floor, cracked in irregular patterns. The shadow soldiers had come with him, which was fortunate and also something to think about later.
The thing making the sound was forty feet tall.
It had the rough shape of a person in the way that a sketch by someone who had never seen a person might. Two arms, two legs, a head that was more of a geological suggestion than an anatomical feature. It was made entirely of the same cracked black stone as the floor, and it moved with the grinding slowness of something that had learned long ago that being slow was fine when nothing could hurt you anyway.
Harry made one mistake, almost immediately. He watched it approach and assumed he had more time than he did, because its speed was deceptive. The correction arrived in the form of a fist the size of a dining table coming down hard enough to crack the floor where he’d been standing, and he had to dive sideways with considerably less grace than he would have preferred.
He was still on his knees when he got the system window up.
[STONE GOLEM: Level 22]
[Physical attacks effective. Magic damage: 80% resistance.]
[Weak points: joint sections.]
“Right,” he said. He was in his pajamas. He’d like to note for the record that he was being dropped into Level 22 enemies in his pajamas at midnight, and this was apparently what a penalty for sleeping forgetting shit looked like.
He sent the Shadow Knight in first.
The Knight’s Shadow Step got it behind the Golem in a fraction of a second, and it landed two consecutive strikes on the back of the Golem’s left knee joint before the Golem turned and swatted it with the casual force of someone brushing a fly. The Knight went forty feet through the air, hit the cavern wall, and collapsed back into the shadow pool to reform. But the knee joint had a visible crack in it now. That was the information Harry needed.
He sent the remaining eleven shadow soldiers in a coordinated swarm while the Golem was turned, all of them targeting the same joint from different angles. The Golem swatted at them with both arms and connected with three, dissipating them temporarily, but the other eight kept working. Harry layered in his own shadow whips wherever the geometry gave him a clean shot, using the Shadow Domain passive when he got in close enough, spending the mana efficiently. The Golem’s left leg buckled slightly on the cracked joint. Not enough to drop it, but enough to change how it was distributing its weight.
He spent fourteen minutes systematically dismantling the left knee before the Golem went down. It was not a dramatic fight. It was the kind of fight that was determined by whether you stayed methodical when the obvious approach kept getting swatted away, and Harry had enough practice at that by now to manage it. The Golem hit him once, a glancing blow that cost him 203 HP and spun him halfway around, and he recovered, repositioned, and kept going.
The cavern floor cracked when the Golem fell.
[STONE GOLEM DEFEATED]
[EXP: 3,140]
[PENALTY ZONE SURVIVED]
[Returning to player’s registered location...]
He was back in his flat. Bedroom floor. Still in his pajamas.
He checked the system window.
[LEVEL UP!]
[LEVEL UP!]
[LEVEL UP!]
[You are now Level 8.]
He’d leveled up thrice in the penalty zone. From a fight he’d been dropped into by accident, while asleep, in his pajamas. He sat with that for a moment and then started laughing, properly. It was objectively funny. It was the funniest thing that had happened to him since he’d moved to Camden, which maybe wasn’t saying that much, but it was something.
Sirius would have been absolutely insufferable about this. He would have started sleeping in on purpose. He would have organized it like a training program. He would have called it “the most efficient penalty system I’ve ever encountered” and meant it as a compliment.
Harry laughed until it wound down, then put the kettle on, found his notebook, and got to work.
xXx
He had two days until the reassessment, and he used them carefully.
Saturday evening was for analysis. His stats were sitting solidly in C-Rank territory across the board after the Golem fight’s level-up: Strength 62, Agility 68 after his deliberate investment, Intelligence 70, Perception 66, Endurance 64. He’d distributed the new stat points with the same logic as before, building toward the gaps his fight with the Shadow Knight had exposed. He could comfortably pass both D-Rank and C-Rank assessments at these numbers. He might push the assessors toward a B-Rank evaluation if the combat trial went well, though he hadn’t decided yet whether he wanted that kind of attention.
The shadow soldiers were the main thing to think through. He couldn’t walk into a BHA assessment with twelve shadow soldiers deployed. The system would flag anomalous energy signatures and the assessors would ask questions he had no good answers to yet. He’d take the test without them, keep them in the shadow pool, perform on his own merits. His own merits were now, by any measurable standard, genuinely solid. That was enough for C-Rank, let alone D-Rank.
He was also aware that a Hunter with a documented fractured core posting C-Rank stats at what was nominally a D-Rank reassessment was going to generate interest somewhere in the BHA’s administrative apparatus. Records got compared. Assessors talked. He’d think about how to handle that after he’d passed the actual test.
Sunday he ran the canal path for an hour and let himself think about nothing in particular, which was harder than it sounded and worth working at. He stopped at the bakery he’d found in his first week at the new flat and ate a cheese twist standing outside, watching the canal. The water was dark and flat in the early morning, and the city was still deciding whether to wake up properly.
He sent Remus a message that afternoon. Two lines: Reassessment’s at nine Monday. You can come if you want.
He got a reply an hour later. I’ll be there. Don’t be clever in front of the assessors.
Harry wrote back: Only a little bit clever.
Remus’s response to that was a single question mark, which was probably fair.
xXx
Monday morning was grey and cold, with the thin drizzle that London did in March when it wanted to be miserable without committing to proper rain. The BHA’s London assessment centre was in Holborn, in a building that presented itself as a converted Victorian office block and delivered, on the inside, a converted Victorian office block that had had significant amounts of government-grade magical infrastructure installed with minimal aesthetic consideration. The ceilings were high and ornate. The fluorescent lights underneath them were not.
Harry arrived at eight forty-five for a nine o’clock slot wearing his newest clothes he’d bought after he’d managed to get a decent chunk of money from his recent excursions. These were nothing like the designer wear most hunters liked to splash their cash on, but nothing to scoff at either.
The waiting area on the third floor had four plastic chairs, a potted plant that was doing its best under challenging conditions, and three other occupants. A woman in her late twenties reading a newspaper. A large man who appeared to be asleep, B-Rank badge on his chest, reassessment for promotion. A teenager, sixteen at most, staring at the floor with concentration, as if committing their own heartbeat to memory.
He sat in the fourth chair and opened his status window one more time, more out of habit than need.
[Name: Harry J. Potter]
[Class: Necromancer]
[Title: Shadow Monarch]
[Level: 8]
[HP: 920/920] [MP: 840/840]
[Strength: 62] [Agility: 68] [Intelligence: 70] [Perception: 66] [Endurance: 64]
[Shadows: 12/30]
He closed it.
Remus arrived at eight fifty-two, slightly out of breath, with a travel mug of coffee he offered to Harry without preamble. He conjured a chair and sat in it, nodded at the sleeping man with professional respect, and said nothing, which was the correct approach.
A door at the end of the corridor opened at exactly nine o’clock. An assessor in BHA grey looked down at a clipboard.
“Potter, Harry. D-Rank reassessment.”
Harry handed the travel mug back to Remus, stood, and straightened his jacket.
Whatever the assessors were about to see, it wasn’t going to match what they expected. He’d made his peace with that on Saturday evening, sitting at his kitchen table with his notebook open to the stat page. The numbers were the numbers. He’d earned them.
His back straight, he ignored the glances directed his way as he walked to the door.
It was time.