HP: The Duelist of Hogwarts - 460

Chapter 460: Taking Action

At Hogwarts, in the Gryffindor common room.

Hermione was revising for her O.W.L.s, quill scratching steadily as she summarised key points from the book open in front of her. In the middle of a sentence, the watch on her wrist gave a faint vibration.

She set her quill down at once and glanced around the room. Apart from Ron and Neville sitting beside her, no one seemed to have noticed anything.

She caught Ron’s eye and gestured for him to sit a little further out, blocking her from view. Then she turned her wrist and gently twisted the watch’s bezel. A softly glowing, simplified map flickered into existence above the dial.

“Hermione? What is it?” Neville asked in a low voice.

Hermione frowned.

“Harry has left the Burrow,” she whispered. “He is heading towards central London. His speed is very fast. He must be on his Firebolt.”

“London?” Ron blinked. “Why would Harry go there?”

Hermione twisted the bezel again. The map zoomed in, one dot pulsing faintly.

She stared at it for a moment, then answered Ron.

“Because the Ministry of Magic is in London.”

“The Ministry? Why would Harry go to—”

Ron broke off mid‑sentence, his face suddenly draining of colour as the pieces clicked into place.

Seeing his expression, Hermione let out a slow breath.

“You have thought of it too, haven’t you?” she said. “Back when we were training with Harry, he told us Voldemort had been trying to get at something in the Department of Mysteries. But the Department is the most secret division in the Ministry. Umbridge has not managed to lay her hands on it. Harry must have seen something and feels he has no choice but to go and stop it.”

“Stop it?” Ron squeaked. He looked as horrified as if he were watching Voldemort and Umbridge perform a pole dance together. “Harry wants to go and stop You‑Know‑W— I mean, the Dark Lord’s plot, all on his own?”

Hermione turned and gave her “useless boyfriend” a look.

“Harry is going to stop Voldemort’s plan, not Voldemort himself,” she said. “There is a difference.”

“Hermione,” Ron said weakly, “since when do you just call You‑Know‑Who ‘Vold—’ like that?”

“That is not important,” Hermione snapped. “What matters is that we cannot let Harry try to wreck Voldemort’s plan by himself.”

Ron stared at her, looking even more appalled, as if his mental image had just evolved from pole dancing to the pair of them wrapped around each other doing a striptease.

“Shouldn’t we tell Professor Dumbledore?” he tried. “Or Sean, or someone?”

“If we could reach them, Harry would have,” Hermione said flatly. “If he is heading for the Ministry, that means he could not get through, and that this is urgent. We have to go and help him. Otherwise, everything we did over the holidays, all that training, will be for nothing.”

Ron, still shaken, watched as the light on Hermione’s watch began flashing faster and faster.

“Speaking of that,” he said slowly, “what is with your watch, anyway? Since when did you have something like that?”

“That is not the point, Ron. Why can you never focus on what matters?”

Hermione’s enchanted watch was not something she had owned before.

She had made it herself before the term started.

During the holidays, in the old Order of the Phoenix headquarters at Number 12 Grimmauld Place, she had come across Molly Weasley’s old notes.

Before she married Arthur, Molly had been a member of a pure‑blood family herself. Not all pure‑blood lines despised Muggles and Muggle‑borns; some, through chance or temperament, simply remained pure‑blood while still seeing no shame in the non‑magical world.

Molly’s family was one such house: the Prewetts.

They were a well‑known old name with a long history. One only had to look at the clock Molly had crafted, the one that showed the location and danger level of every member of her family at once, to understand what kind of skills the Prewetts had preserved.

Very few witches or wizards in the world could have made such a thing.

Those were the Prewett family’s accumulated secrets.

Hermione had stumbled across Molly’s notes by accident and had been astonished. She had begged to borrow them and spent the rest of the holiday devouring every line. With guidance from former professors like Lupin and Moody, who were often around the house, she finally achieved some results.

By combining Molly’s designs with Professor Lupin’s teachings, she created the watch she now wore, a device that fused the principles of the Weasley family clock and the Marauder’s Map.

When Harry left Hogwarts, Hermione had marked him with the watch. That was how she could track him now.

“We need to move quickly,” she said. “Fortunately, Hogwarts is closer to the Ministry than the Burrow is. If we hurry, we can meet up with Harry on his way there.”

She looked from Ron to Neville, eyes serious.

“This is dangerous. The three of us will be enough. We are not calling Blaise, Luna or the others. You two fetch the broomsticks. I will get a few things ready, then we will go straight to the Ministry.”

The trio split up at once.

Hermione ducked up to the girls’ dormitory, grabbed several vials of potion and stuffed them into her bag. Then she ran down, slipped out of the castle and headed at speed for the edge of the Forbidden Forest near Hagrid’s hut.

When she arrived, she found she was not alone.

“Blaise, Jensen… Luna, Ginny… what are you all doing here?” she demanded. She already knew the answer. Ron and Neville must have run into them on the way. Neither of them could lie to save their lives, so of course, the others had followed.

“To help Harry, obviously,” Ginny said. “We are not sitting this one out.”

“We are not going to help Potter,” Blaise drawled. “We are going to test ourselves. Those Ministry idiots only pushed me around last time because I could not cut loose at Hogwarts. This time, I will not be holding back.”

Hermione opened her mouth to argue, but her watch flashed even faster.

Harry had reached the outskirts of London.

“All right,” she said. “No time. We leave now.”

She turned to Ron.

“Ron—did you get the brooms?”

Ron shook his head, ready to explain, but Luna spoke first, dreamy as ever.

“We do not need brooms,” she said. “The school ones are all ancient models. They could not keep up with a Firebolt. We need something faster to get us to the Ministry.”

As she spoke, she turned towards the trees.

Seven Thestrals stepped out of the shadows of the Forest, black hides gleaming, leathery wings half‑unfurled.

Seven riders.

Exactly enough for all of them.

Riding Thestrals at full speed, they would be able to reach the Ministry of Magic and meet Harry before it was too late.