Hogwarts: Chill, I'm Not That Riddle

As the streak of light that was the arrow vanished into the blanket of black cloud, a thread of dawn-colored glow seeped down through the gap.

Then the storm clouds over the sea parted, as if a blue thread had been drawn across them. The heavy mass split to either side, revealing a sea of stars that didn’t belong to this sky. The stars flickered in time with the longbow in Tom’s hand.

Countless points of starlight lit up deep in the clouds and linked together into an aurora stretching across the night sky. At first it was a single band. In the blink of an eye it split into two, then three, then too many to count.

Ribbons of blue and violet drifted slowly behind the clouds, and starlight rained down along them, making the whole stretch of sea look like a dream. It was nowhere near daylight, but the aurora’s eerie glow was enough for the professors and students on the Mayflower to see what was happening.

The Leviathan’s body lit up under the aurora, every scale suddenly clear. It writhed uneasily. Ever since it surfaced, it had been parked in one spot gulping down seawater, but now it sensed danger and actually started moving toward Tom.

Too late.

The arrow the boy had fired into the sky was like a signal flare, the kind of arrow that tears through the clouds to call in an army. And an army answered. The arrows of starlight came down like a charge of ten thousand horses.

They sharpened into arrowheads as they fell and slammed into the Leviathan. Its seemingly impregnable scale armor did nothing. The arrows punched straight through, buried themselves in flesh, and blood geysered into the air.

But the Leviathan was simply too huge, and wounds like that barely registered.

Arrow after arrow, each as powerful as the first, kept raining down, and once the wounds piled up enough, even a beast the size of an island couldn’t take it. The shockwaves from the exploding arrows drove its body a good way down into the water by sheer force.

The Leviathan bellowed in pain and thrashed wildly, flippers slapping the surface and throwing up waves dozens of meters high. It tried to dive and escape the arrows, but its body was so massive that the sea took time to rush back in and cover it. So the arrows kept landing without any trouble.

At first you could count them. Soon it was just a dense curtain of light, thousands upon thousands of starbeams falling from the night sky, every one finding its mark. Some pinned down its bony spikes, some sliced through its scales, and some bored down through earlier wounds into the flesh.

The Leviathan threw back its head and roared, and a huge column of water shot skyward as if to smash the star map overhead. It worked a little, and plenty of the light arrows were scattered. But the star map itself stayed firmly in the heights, and the water column fell back limply after only a few hundred meters.

The students on the ship were staring, dumbstruck. They were all wizards, and they flatly refused to believe that what Tom was doing was magic. They could barely conjure a decent fireball, okay? Whose magic changes the weather and beats an island-sized monster until it can’t take care of itself?

After the shock, though, came a wave of relief. Having someone this strong around had its perks. At the very least, they weren’t in danger today. They were going to live.

A lot of them felt admiration and gratitude toward Fontaine all at once. They’d shrugged it off when their headmaster insisted Tom had to come along as an escort. Now it looked like the most far-sighted decision ever made.

Without Tom here today, how many of them would have made it out? With bad luck, none.

In just a few dozen seconds, who knew how many arrows had fallen, yet the Leviathan was still going strong.

It wasn’t that the magic lacked power. The Leviathan’s vitality was just absurd. In terms of total magical reserves and the essence of its life, it even surpassed Morgan. It simply had no idea how to use any of its powers and could only fight back on instinct.

Still, killing it with raindrop-style attacks like these would take who knew how long.

The only reason Tom had made such a huge production of it was that he’d been bottled up so badly beforehand. He was cutting loose without restraint, casting purely on instinct and the guidance of the power in his staff.

And to his surprise, he’d stumbled into a big move.

The aurora in the sky suddenly contracted.

The falling starlight stopped all at once and hung beneath the clouds. Then every ray of light began to converge toward a single point. One, ten, a hundred, a thousand. Countless threads of starlight twisted together and slowly formed a colossal spear.

The burst of energy had swept away all the mist that had gathered again, and the spear, just hovering in the air, was over a hundred meters long. It looked more like a razor-sharp lance.

The Leviathan looked up at it, and for the first time, it showed fear. It gave up on fighting back and plunged its head toward the seabed, trying to hide in the deep.

But the spear had already dropped.

In that moment, the world lost its color. Every sound seemed wiped out. The students on the Mayflower could only watch as the spear tore across the night sky, so fast it became a single silver-blue line, and struck dead center on the Leviathan’s back.

The Leviathan let out a shrill cry. The spear drove through its entire body without resistance and pinned it firmly to the ocean.

The giant beast moved slower and slower, its roars sinking lower.

Tom set the Mayflower back down on the water and pushed it a safe distance away. He stayed where he was, watching the Leviathan quietly.

Floating on the surface, the Leviathan’s head twitched now and then. It took a full half hour before it finally went still.

"Finally dead." Tom let out a breath.

The thing’s vitality was downright terrifying. If he hadn’t been feeding magic into the spear the whole time to keep it in place, the Leviathan might well have come back to life within that half hour.

Where on earth had this thing come from? Tom set the question aside and flew toward the carcass. Honestly, it felt more like a god than Quetzalcoatl did.

Wait!

Halfway there, Tom suddenly stopped and sank his consciousness into the system.

A joy he couldn’t hide spread across the boy’s face. The god-slaying quest he’d been worrying about, wondering where on earth to find a target, had just been completed by accident?

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