The System notification came on a Wednesday, three weeks and four dungeons after Hampshire.
Harry was in the middle of his post-run stretches, still sweaty from the morning circuit, when it flashed into his peripheral vision. But something about it was different this time. It was not the steady blue of a quest update or the crisp white of a level milestone. No, this was something different. Amber, pulsing slowly, like a heartbeat that expected to be noticed.
He straightened and opened it fully.
[SPECIAL QUEST — MEET THE ARCHITECT]
Harry’s brows furrowed as he read further.
The System did not make itself. What was built can be explained. Seek the origin.
[REWARD: Understanding]
[A key has been added to your inventory.]
That was it. No objective breakdown, no timer, no threat assessment. Just four lines and a reward so vague it was almost insulting.
Harry opened his inventory.
The key was there. It was smaller than he’d expected, roughly the length of his thumb, made of something that looked like black glass but caught the morning light from the kitchen window in a way glass didn’t. When he picked it up, he felt it resonate against his palm with a faint, low hum, the same quality the shadow pool had when Corvus stirred. Not warmth. Not cold. Just presence.
He turned it over twice and set it on the counter next to his tea.
Meet the Architect.
He rolled that around for a moment. The System had given him job change quests, penalty zones, daily requirements, unlocks, class bonuses, an entire architecture of self-improvement that he’d been living inside for months without fully questioning where it came from or what it wanted from him. He’d been too busy using it to interrogate it.
This felt like it was correcting that.
He checked his current status on reflex, a habit now.
[STATUS WINDOW]
[Name: Harry J. Potter]
[Class: Necromancer]
[Title: Shadow Monarch]
[Level: 26]
[HP: 3,120/3,120] [MP: 2,890/2,890]
[Strength: 134] [Agility: 148] [Intelligence: 156] [Perception: 142] [Endurance: 139]
[Available Stat Points: 0]
Level 26. It had come faster than he’d anticipated, even accounting for the daily quest doubling at level three. Six weeks of grinding had done things to his numbers that would have seemed impossible back when he was standing outside a Southwark textile mill with a borrowed collection bag and approximately no idea what he was doing. He’d pushed through the D-Rank ceiling without formalizing it, through C-Rank territory, and he was solidly deep enough into B-Rank range now that his BHA file, if anyone looked at it carefully, would raise serious eyebrows. He was managing that by attending Finch’s team assignments once every ten days or so, running carefully within his visible limits, and trusting that the follow-up assessment in six weeks would be navigable.
His shadows had grown with him.
Corvus was the obvious one. Whatever the Shadow Knight had been inside the Realm of Eternal Night, it was more now. The tactical intelligence had sharpened over weeks of being deployed and retracted, deployed and retracted, engaged in dozens of dungeons from the relatively simple to the genuinely challenging. He moved with anticipation rather than just response. Harry had stopped directing him specifically in most fights because Corvus generally made the right call before Harry had finished forming the thought, which was either a sign of excellent development or something slightly unsettling that he’d decided to interpret charitably.
Crag the Golem had hit Level 26 alongside Harry, his mass and structural resilience scaling in ways that were quietly impressive. He was slow and he would always be slow, but as a defensive anchor he was unmatched in anything Harry had cleared so far. The Iron Colossus in Bermondsey had hit Crag with everything it had and barely scratched the surface.
Seren, the skeletal archer, had developed something Harry hadn’t expected: range correction. When he first extracted her, she’d shot with accuracy. Now she shot with judgment, adjusting her arc not just for distance but for moving targets, for partial cover, for the gaps in an enemy’s defense that appeared and closed in fractions of a second. She’d become the most precise thing in his collection.
Ash and Ember, the flame wolves, had grown larger and faster both, which he hadn’t thought was possible. They moved now in a pattern that wasn’t quite circling and wasn’t quite flanking, something between the two that enemies consistently couldn’t adapt to. Twice in the last two weeks, they’d taken down B-Rank boss creatures entirely on their own while Harry was occupied elsewhere.
And then there were the new additions. Three more soldiers since Hampshire.
Wrenn — a water-serpent boss from a flooded dungeon beneath the Thames near Canary Wharf. Long, supple, capable of moving through shadow the way a real serpent moved through water. Harry had first deployed her in a tight underground passage and watched her slip through three enemy formations without a single one registering she was there until she was already past them. She was his infiltrator now, in the way Corvus was his commander.
Vale — a Banshee variant from a C-Rank dungeon in Edinburgh that the BHA had listed as particularly hazardous. It was. The Banshee had stripped his MP by about thirty percent in the first forty seconds with a wail that functioned as a targeted drain rather than just damage. He’d taken her down eventually with a combination of Seren’s ranged work and a shadow domain suppression he’d managed to hold while half-deaf and losing mana. Extracting her had been worth it. Vale’s wail, deployed against enemies, was somewhere between a stun and a terror effect. He used her selectively.
Dusk — a shadow variant of a Griffon, found in a B-Rank dungeon in the Scottish Highlands. Harry had used his apparition point to get there, cleared the dungeon in four hours, and come home with a winged soldier that could cover terrain in a way nothing else in his collection managed. Dusk wasn’t his fastest in a straight line but he operated in three dimensions in a way the others didn’t, and his size alone made him a significant presence when deployed.
Eight truly elite soldiers. The rest were lower-tier monsters from various dungeons that Corvus had adopted into the hierarchy, quiet and functional, filler for volume work when he needed bodies rather than quality.
Harry set the key down on the counter and looked at it over his tea.
Instance Dungeon.
The quest notification hadn’t used those words exactly, but the key resonated the same way the instance gate had in Cardiff, that same deep-frequency hum that meant a space separate from normal dungeon architecture. Private. Contained. Not registered on any BHA map.
He finished his tea and went to the living room. He held the key and felt the resonance in his palm. And then, because the System had been unfailingly consistent about exactly one thing since the temple, which was that it gave him a thing when it was ready for him to use it, he pressed the key to the empty air in the middle of the room.
The gate materialized around the key.
It was different from any dungeon gate he’d seen. Most gates were vertical seams, a shimmer in the air, something like a crack in a window. This was a door. An actual door, freestanding, rendered in the same material as the key, dark and slightly luminous. No frame. No hinges he could see. Just a door that hadn’t been there and now was.
Harry stood in front of it for a moment.
He checked his status. All soldiers were present in the pool. His mana was full, his HP at ceiling. He was wearing his gear because he’d been intending to run a dungeon today anyway after the morning circuit. He was, by any reasonable measure, prepared.
He opened the door.
The space on the other side was not a dungeon.
He’d expected architecture — stone walls, collapsed corridors, the particular hostile geometry that dungeon interiors came with. What he stepped into instead was more like a library. Tall cases of books ran in concentric arcs, but the books weren’t catalogued and the spines were blank, and the light source was everywhere and nowhere, ambient in a way that cast no shadows.
He noticed that last part specifically because he was looking for his shadow on the floor and there wasn’t one.
The door closed behind him.
“Good.”
The voice came from the center of the space, which opened into a circular clearing where the bookcases peeled back. Harry had his wand in his hand before he’d consciously decided to draw it, which was useful information about his own instincts even if the gesture was probably pointless.
The figure standing in the center was... well, ambiguous was the only word that actually fit. Tall, roughly human-shaped, dressed in white so completely absent of detail that it registered more as a concept than a garment. Not male or female, not young or old, not anything Harry could grip and assign. The face was present in the structural sense — features, eyes, a mouth — but whenever he tried to focus on the specifics, the impression shifted, like trying to read something written just at the edge of his vision. He gave up on getting a fix on it after ten seconds. Some things you had to accept at the information level rather than the detail level.
The eyes were the only fixed point. They were light-colored and very still, and they gave nothing.
“You came quickly,” the being who Harry assumed must be the Architect said. Still that same voice, which managed to be both everywhere in the space and specifically addressed to him.
“The key doesn’t expire,” Harry said. “I could have come whenever. I chose to come now.” He kept the wand up, not aggressively, but visibly. “You’re the Architect.”
“I am.”
“You built the System.”
“I did.”
He waited for more. The Architect offered nothing. It simply looked at him with those still, light eyes, and the... quality of its attention was the strangest thing about it, utterly unhurried, as if this moment was one in a list of very many and it had no particular interest in any one of them.
“Why?” Harry said.
“That’s a large question.”
“You gave me a quest called ‘Meet the Architect.’ The implied promise was answers, not another round of vague quest text.”
Something shifted on that impassive face, very briefly. Not quite amusement. More like the recognition of something expected.
“The System was designed to prepare you,” the Architect said.
“For what?”
“What is coming.”
Harry stared at it. “That’s not an answer.”
“It is an answer. It is simply not a complete answer, and you’re conflating the two.” The Architect moved, if that was the right word, gliding across the floor in a way that didn’t quite look like walking, settling itself into a seat that had appeared without Harry seeing it appear. It gestured vaguely toward the space across from it, and a second seat appeared in a similar manner. “Sit, if you’d prefer.”
“I’m fine standing.”
“Then stand.” There was no inflection in the voice, no irritation. The Architect simply didn’t care.
Harry stayed where he was. “You designed a system to make me stronger. That means you know what’s coming, you think I’m the one who needs to deal with it, and you’ve been developing me like a... like a piece in something.” He let that settle for a second. “Without asking.”
“Correct on all three counts.”
The directness of it was almost more infuriating than evasion would have been. Harry looked at the Architect and worked at keeping his voice level. “Who gave you the right to decide that?”
“Nobody. I decided it.”
“And that’s just... fine? You make something that rewires a person’s body and expands their magical core and fills their head with system interfaces and drops them into penalty zones at midnight, and that’s just a decision you made?”
“Yes.”
“Why me?”
The Architect was quiet for a moment, seemingly choosing words. “The System was built to find the optimal vessel. It found you.”
“Optimal vessel,” Harry repeated flatly. “Great. That’s what I am.”
“Among other things.”
“What’s coming?” He said it straight, with no preamble. “You said the System is designed to prepare me for what’s coming. What is it?”
The Architect considered him with those unchanging eyes. “Have you heard the word Monarch before? In the context of the integration, not the political sense.”
“Shadow Monarch,” Harry said carefully. “It’s my title. The System assigned it after the throne room.”
“The Shadow Monarch is one. There are others. Monarchs of different domains. They are not human. They preceded the integration by an interval that makes the word long insufficient.” The Architect paused. “The integration did not bring them here. But it opened the door.”
Harry processed that. “You’re saying there are entities of enormous power that exist outside the dungeon structure and the integration opened some kind of passage for them.”
“I am saying that the barriers which existed before the integration functioned as containment as well as separation. What is separated is also contained. The integration was a consequence of something much older breaking down. The dungeons and the mana flow are symptoms.”
“And these Monarchs... they’re what’s on the other side.”
“Some of them are interested in this world,” the Architect said. “Some of them have already extended influence through the dungeon system in ways your kind hasn’t categorized yet. The war I referred to is not a war that’s coming in the human sense. It is already at its very early stages. What you have been experiencing as dungeons is, in part, that influence.”
Harry thought about the throne room in the Forbidden Forest dungeon. The scale of the architecture. The throne that had waited. The Guardian that had bowed to him. “The System gives me a title and a shadow army and enhanced abilities. You’re saying that’s to prepare me to... what, fight these things?”
“Among other possibilities.”
“What does Shadow Monarch mean in that context?”
The Architect’s expression shifted again, that barely-there movement that wasn’t quite anything he could name. “The shadow domain has a Monarch. That Monarch’s power can be inherited. You carry some fraction of that inheritance.” It paused. “A small fraction, currently.”
“How small?”
“You are Level 26.”
Which was its way of saying very. Harry stood with that for a moment. He’d felt strong recently. Genuinely strong in a way he hadn’t allowed himself to feel before, because feeling strong before you actually were was a good way to get killed. He’d cleared B-Rank dungeons solo. He’d developed a shadow army that could engage high-tier bosses without his direct involvement. His stats were pushing toward ranges that could’ve never imagined before.
And the Architect had just told him he was holding a fraction of power that it considered not worth specifying precisely because the fraction was that small.
The Architect said nothing. It simply waited with absolute composure, as if it had all the time in the world.
Harry turned toward it. There was something building in his chest, something that had been building since the first line of that quest notification, and he’d been holding it off while he gathered information but there was only so long you could do that before it needed out.
“You designed something that embedded itself in my life without my knowledge or consent,” he said. “You made decisions about what I needed and what I was supposed to become and what I was going to be for, and you made those decisions for me, without ever once telling me what was actually going on. You made me into a weapon for something I didn’t know was coming and you didn’t ask. You didn’t even consider asking.” His voice was barely level, and even that took considerable effort. “I’m not a tool. I’m not a vessel. I’m a person, and the fact that there’s a war coming doesn’t change that.”
The Architect looked at him.
And then it looked at him a little more, with the same leisurely, unchanged look it had worn throughout the conversation.
And then the pressure started.
It was subtle at first. A heaviness in the air that wasn’t physical in any normal sense, more like gravity had a preference and its preference was downward, specifically downward in the direction of Harry becoming much smaller than he currently was. His mana started draining without him drawing on it, the MP number in his peripheral vision dropping at a steady, unbothered rate. Not quickly enough to incapacitate, just enough to make a point.
Then his legs went to one knee.
He hadn’t decided to kneel. His body had made that determination independently, as if a weight had been placed on him that exceeded his ability to bear. He was down on one knee on the floor of the Architect’s chamber before he’d registered the decision, and the pressure kept increasing, gentle as a mountain range, entirely indifferent to whether it was comfortable.
His HP held. The System’s rebuilt core was doing what it was built to do. But the ease with which the Architect had just dropped him to a knee, without apparent effort, without changing its expression, without even particularly seeming to notice that it was doing it... that told him something unambiguous.
This was not a fight he could win.
He stayed on one knee and breathed through it.
The pressure eased after a moment. Not lifted entirely, but reduced to background hum.
“Your feelings about this are noted,” the Architect said, in exactly the same tone it had used throughout, as if the outburst and the demonstration and the fact that Harry was currently on one knee had all been the same thing — not worth mentioning. “They don’t alter the situation.”
Harry got his feet under him and stood.
He was shaking, very slightly, and he made himself stop. His MP was at thirty-three percent and climbing back. His legs worked fine.
“I didn’t say they’d alter the situation,” he said.
“Good. Then we can continue.”
Harry looked at the Architect, at its perfectly composed, unreadable, barely-there face, and felt something sharpen inside him. Not anger, exactly, or not just anger. Something harder than anger, something with more structure. The Architect had made decisions about him. The Architect had built something designed to use him. The Architect could press him to his knee in the middle of a chamber without breaking a sweat, and it would do all of that again because it had decided it was necessary and it had decided he was the right tool for the purpose.
None of that had changed. The Architect hadn’t apologized and wasn’t going to.
But Harry was upright, and he’d said what he meant, and the Architect had listened, and he was still here.
Some things you filed and came back to when you were stronger. That was a lesson the last two months had taught him about as clearly as a lesson could be taught.
He was not strong enough. He admitted that. But he was not strong enough... yet.
“Tell me about Rulers,” he said. “The ones that aren’t Monarchs.”
The Architect inclined its head fractionally, which he was starting to think was as much acknowledgment as it offered. “Rulers and Monarchs are approximate translations from an older concept. Rulers are domain powers. Each has a specific function and a specific relationship with the world it influences. Some are constructive in the human sense. Some are not. None of them are neutral. The ones that have begun extending influence through the dungeon system are, at minimum, establishing presence. What they do with that presence depends on factors I am monitoring.”
“And the war that is coming?”
“The war is the consequence of multiple powerful entities existing simultaneously within a space that wasn’t designed for it. Conflict is the inevitable result. Whether it involves humanity directly and extensively or peripherally depends on how events develop.”
“You’re monitoring it,” Harry said. “Which means you know more than you’re telling me.”
“Yes.”
“Why not just tell me everything?”
“Because information at the wrong stage of development is more destabilizing than useful,” the Architect said. “You are Level 26. What you need now is power and continued development, not a complete briefing on events you cannot yet influence.”
Harry looked at it steadily. “You don’t trust me with information.”
“I don’t find it efficient to give you information you lack the capacity to act on. That is not a judgment on your trustworthiness.”
“It’s a judgment on my strength.”
“Yes.” The Architect said it without apology, which was at least consistent.
Harry breathed in, and out, and let the irritation settle somewhere manageable. “What can you tell me?”
“That there are entities significantly more powerful than what you’ve encountered. That the dungeon system is not a natural phenomenon but a designed one, and the design has multiple purposes, not all of which were mine. That the Shadow Monarch’s power, at its full expression, is relevant to what is coming in ways that your current level cannot fully demonstrate.” It paused. “And that you are not the only one being influenced so directly through all of this.”
Harry’s eyes widened. “Who else?”
“That is not information I’ll share.”
Harry looked at the ceiling of the library, which was made of the same ambient impossible light as everything else, and thought about the fact that he had been, since he walked in here, consistently outmaneuvered by an entity that wasn’t particularly trying.
“All right,” he said. “The Shadow Monarch’s power at full expression. What does that actually mean?”
“At full expression,” the Architect said, with what might have been the nearest thing to care it had shown in the conversation, “the Shadow Monarch is one of the most significant individual forces in this domain. The shadow army, at full capacity, would not be described in terms of the numbers you use now. The abilities that unlock as you progress are qualitatively different from what you currently understand them to be. The throne room you experienced was a fraction of the domain’s expression.”
Harry thought about the throne room. The sheer scale of it. The Guardian bowing to him. That weight of age in the walls and the architecture.
“The previous Monarch,” he said slowly. “What happened to them?”
“That is one of the things I won’t tell you yet.”
Consistent, at least.
The library settled into quiet around them. Harry stood in the middle of it and felt the shape of everything he’d been told trying to arrange itself into something he could think clearly about. An incoming war, or a war already starting, with entities that made level 26 feel like showing up to a fight with a sharp stick. A system designed to develop him into something capable of being relevant to that conflict. An Architect who had made unilateral decisions about his life and was entirely unbothered about those decisions.
And one other thing.
The System interface flickered.
Not the standard flicker of an incoming notification. Something more significant, the way the air changed before thunder. Harry held still.
[SPECIAL QUEST — PROGRESSION TARGET]
The Shadow Monarch’s inheritance requires proof.
OBJECTIVE: Reach Level 100 within 6 months.
REWARD: Truth about your parents’ deaths.
The quest sat in his vision, solid and impossible to look away from.
Harry stared at it.
Level 100. He was at 26. Seventy-four levels in six months, which sounded like a lot until he thought about the fact that he’d gotten from Level 2 to Level 26 in roughly two months of focused grinding. The progression rate would slow. It always did. Higher levels required exponentially more experience. Getting to 100 would mean pushing into territory that was in the upper echelons of S-Rank, probably even beyond the ceiling of what the current Hunter classification system even acknowledged.
S-Rank territory.
He remembered standing on the sidelines watching Daphne Greengrass walk to a car without looking at him. Level 78.
Level 100 was way beyond that range.
That part of it registered. He’d thought about S-Rank as the distant eventual destination, something on the horizon, not a six-month target. That recalibration was significant.
But it was the reward that had stopped working and just sat in his chest.
Truth about your parents’ deaths.
Not your parents died. Not the story he’d been told. Truth. The System was implying, with that one specific word, that what he knew wasn’t the whole of it. That there was something else. That the deaths of Lily and James Potter in Godric’s Hollow were... what? Not what they appeared? Connected to something larger? Connected to the Shadow Monarch and the Rulers and the war the Architect had described?
He thought about all the things the Architect had refused to tell him.
That is one of the things I won’t tell you yet.
He thought about that specific formulation. Not I don’t know, not that’s not my information to give. Won’t tell you yet. The Architect knew. Whatever the truth was about his parents’ deaths, the Architect had information about it that it had decided was not for him right now.
“The quest,” Harry said carefully.
“Yes.”
“Level 100. Six months.”
“Yes.”
“That’s beyond S-Rank territory.”
“According to human classification. But still not identical to it. The System’s measurement and the Hunter classification exist on related but distinct scales.” The Architect paused. “It is achievable.”
“I wasn’t saying it wasn’t.” Harry kept his voice very even. “The reward.”
There was a slight pause from the Architect, fractionally longer than the others. “Yes.”
“You know what happened to my parents.”
“I have access to that information.”
“And you’re making me earn it.” The evenness in his voice was harder to maintain now. “You’re using it as a carrot to push me toward a progression target. You’ve turned the deaths of my parents into a system reward.”
The Architect looked at him with those still, impassive eyes. “I am incentivizing you toward the development you need,” it said. “The information will matter to you. That makes it useful for this purpose.”
Harry stood very still as he looked at the Architect and thought about what it would feel like to actually try to hit it. The act would be pointless and he knew it was pointless but the thought came anyway. His hands were very steady. He made sure of it.
“You don’t have the right to do that,” he said, his voice quieter than before. It was not calm, but it took all his effort to keep it this calm. “You don’t have the right to hold that over me.”
The Architect stayed quiet.
Harry waited for the pressure to come again, the weight settling, another demonstration of precisely how irrelevant his objections were to the Architect’s scale of operation. It didn’t come this time. The Architect simply sat in its chair and looked at him with that expression that gave nothing.
“Your objection is noted,” it said, and there was something in the phrase that was different from before, almost imperceptibly. “The quest structure is what it is.”
Harry looked at it for a long moment, and then he turned away.
He wasn’t going to win this argument. He’d known that before he opened the door. The Architect had made its decisions, it was going to continue making its decisions, and it had the power to enforce those decisions in any space it occupied. Harry was Level 26, and even with his shadow soldiers and a rebuilt magical core and stats, he would be killed in approximately fifteen seconds if the Architect decided that was the outcome.
None of that was going away.
But here was the thing that was different from before, from standing in the BHA corridors with an E-Rank stamp on his forehead and the press writing about his fractured core and the world generally having a settled opinion about who he was and what he’d amount to. Here was the thing that the last two months had built in him, dungeon by dungeon, level by level, the thing that had sat down in his chest and stayed there.
He was going to reach Level 100.
Not because the Architect wanted it. Not because some designed system had decided it was the progression target. Because there were answers about his parents’ deaths at the end of that road, and he was going to get there regardless of the System’s aesthetic choices about how to frame the journey. The Architect could call it a reward if it wanted. Harry knew what it was: information that had been taken from him, that he intended to reclaim.
That was different from performing a quest for a prize. That was personal.
He turned back to the Architect. “Is there anything else you want to tell me?”
“Not today.”
“Will there be more conversations like this?”
“When the time is useful for them, yes.”
“On your schedule.”
“On my assessment of when it is productive,” the Architect said. “Which is, yes, my decision.”
“I’m aware.” Harry looked around the library one more time, the concentric rows of blank-spined books, the ambient impossible light, and the strange untethered quality of a space that existed separate from the normal world. “One last question.”
“Ask it.”
“The throne room in the Forbidden Forest dungeon. The Shadow Monarch’s throne. Why was it in a dungeon that a standard BHA team was assigned to clear?”
The Architect considered him with what might, on a different face, have been a look of faint consideration. “The dungeon was placed where it would be found by you.”
Harry let that land. “You arranged for me to be assigned to that team.”
“I arranged for the dungeon to exist in a location accessible to you, within the rank range you were operating at, at a time when you had been sufficiently ground down by your circumstances to be ready for what the dungeon offered.” It paused. “Yes.”
“The people who died in there,” Harry said quietly, thinking of Creevey in particular. “Were they always going to die?”
The Architect was quiet for two full seconds, which was the longest pause it had taken. “The dungeon was designed to culminate in a chamber that required the Monarch’s inheritance to survive. Anyone who entered that chamber without the appropriate lineage would not leave it. The team composition was not under my control.”
“But you knew.”
“I knew the dungeon’s design,” the Architect said. “I did not control who was sent.”
Harry looked at it for a long time. The Architect returned his gaze in exactly the same manner as before.
“Noted,” Harry said, quietly.
He turned and walked toward the door.
The door was where he’d left it. He put his hand on the frame, felt the same low resonance as the key, and paused.
“The six months starts today?” he said, without turning.
“The six months started when you accepted the quest notification.”
“And the truth about my parents. You have it.”
“I have access to it.”
“After Level 100.”
“Yes.”
Harry opened the door. The Camden flat was on the other side, exactly as he’d left it, the morning light through the living room windows, the shadow pool quiet and full.
“I’ll see you at Level 100,” he said.
The Architect said nothing.
He stepped through, and the door dissolved behind him before it had fully closed, the key disappearing from his inventory at the same moment, its purpose apparently complete.
Harry stood in his living room.
The shadow pool was very still. He could feel Corvus in there, patient as always, the most coherent presence in the collection, waiting in the same manner as the Architect, as if it too had all the time in the world. The difference was that Corvus was his. Whatever the Shadow Knight had been, it was part of Harry’s army now, and that distinction mattered.
He pulled up the quest log and looked at the new entry.
[SPECIAL QUEST — PROGRESSION TARGET]
OBJECTIVE: Reach Level 100.
TIME REMAINING: 5 months, 29 days, 21 hours, 43 minutes.
REWARD: Truth about your parents’ deaths.
Five months and twenty-nine days. He’d gone from Level 2 to Level 26 in roughly eight weeks, with constant grinding, increasingly difficult targets, and the compounding effect of the daily quest doubling and the Shadow Domain passive. The next seventy-four levels would be harder because they always were, the experience requirements scaling upward in the way all systems of this kind scaled. He’d need to push into A-Rank equivalent dungeon territory first before progressing into S-Rank and beyond. He’d need to fight things that were genuinely dangerous to him in a way that little had been for the past couple of months.
He was fine with that.
The thing in his chest that he’d felt when the quest came up, that had narrowed and sharpened and settled while the Architect was telling him what it had told him, was still there. It was cleaner now. Less tangled with the anger at being used, less complicated by the Architect’s scale and his own comparative smallness.
His parents. James and Lily Potter, dead in Godric’s Hollow before he was old enough to properly remember them. A story he’d grown up with, the official version, the version that ended with a sacrificial death and a curse rebounded and a scar on his magic. He’d never had reason to doubt it, not specifically, not until a System quest had used the word truth and implied that what he knew wasn’t quite the whole picture.
Whatever the whole picture was, it had a cost: Level 100, within six months.
Harry looked at the quest timer for another long moment, and then he closed the window.
He put his wands away, both weapons present and ready, and opened the dungeon listings on his BHA terminal, the wider bracket now that he’d been quietly operating above his registered rank for weeks.
There was a B-Rank unassigned dungeon in West London that appeared just as he refreshed the page. Flagged two seconds ago, and obviously no takers yet. The estimated loot value was also in the upper range of the bracket. It seemed strong enough to be interesting.
He paid for the rights to it and got his gear together.
Six months was enough time, if he moved efficiently. He’d proven that much already. Whatever the Architect thought of his objections, whatever its decisions about what he was ready to know, the progression path it had designed was one Harry could walk faster than it might expect.
He wanted the truth.
And he was going to get it.
The shadow pool stirred as he moved toward the door, his soldiers present and ready, Corvus a steady dark weight at the top of the hierarchy. Harry felt them the way he’d learned to feel them, collectively and individually at once, the army that was his and nobody else’s.
“Not yet,” he told them quietly as he walked out into the daylight.