HP: The Duelist of Hogwarts - 438

Chapter 438: The Giant Tribe’s Extermination

Sean gave a hoarse roar and beat his wings, ready to hurl himself at Oranides again.

At that moment, a dull yellow beam slammed into his flank. The scales there, charred black and blown apart, exposed raw flesh beneath. All around him, giants swung their weapons, pillars of wood and rusted axes crashing down onto his body.

Snarling at the pain, Sean opened his jaws and spat a volley of fireballs. They arced through the air and burst around the giants’ feet and chests, detonating in a chain of thunderous blasts.

He twisted his serpentine body, intent on pursuing Oranides, but two giants lunged in from left and right, seizing his tail to hold him back. More piled on, throwing their arms around his coils, trying to pin him in place.

Off in the distance, Kuklops, the cyclopean giant with cloven hooves, gathered a far stronger charge in his single eye. Seeing Sean bound under a mass of bodies, he took careful aim at the White Serpent King’s head and unleashed the beam.

As the yellow ray lanced toward him, Sean’s Animagus form suddenly shrank. He slipped free of the giants’ grips and flared with heat. Flame wreathed his body, and in the next instant, he was nothing but a streak of red and white fire surging straight toward Kuklops.

Dragon Fire Acceleration.

He weaved as he came, snaking through gaps in the giants’ formation. They lunged and grabbed, but no one could lay a hand on him while that blazing speed wrapped him.

When he drew close enough, Sean deliberately left an opening, slowing just enough to show a gap.

Kuklops saw it at once. He seized the chance without hesitation, pouring every scrap of energy into his eye. The yellow glow condensed into the densest beam he had ever produced and fired straight at Sean’s head.

Sean’s serpentine eyes flashed with triumph.

As the beam erupted, he accelerated again, leaving a red and white after‑image hanging in its path. He struck Kuklops in the same heartbeat, coiling around him at a speed that blurred the air. His body swelled, thickening and tightening until the cyclops was completely entangled.

Sean lunged from behind and clamped his jaws over Kuklops’s head. Muscles bunched along his neck as he wrenched the giant’s skull around, forcing the eye‑beam to scythe sideways into the onrushing giants instead.

The yellow ray swept across the field. Wherever it passed, giants were carved into chunks, falling in bloody pieces under their own comrade’s attack.

At the same time, Oranides burst out of the collapsed house, a battleaxe in one hand and a massive club in the other, charging for Sean.

Sean had been watching him all along. Ignoring Kuklops’s struggles and the impossible angle of his neck, Sean bit down harder and twisted. The vertebrae creaked under the strain. With one last wrench, he turned Kuklops almost halfway around, the beam raking across Oranides as it went.

Only Oranides’s speed saved him from being bisected. The ray sheared off the three arms on the left side of his body instead. A fraction slower, and the cyclops’s power would have cut him in two.

Crack.

Squelch.

With a brutal heave, Sean tore Kuklops’s head free, spine and all. The beam winked out. He spat the grisly trophy onto the ground and looked over the battlefield at the handful of giants still standing and the maimed form of Oranides.

Dropping out of his White Serpent King form, Sean returned to human shape. As Oranides slowly dragged himself upright, Sean walked toward him. A flick of his wand sent chains of stone surging from the ground. They wrapped the remaining giants where they lay. Wounded and exhausted, they had no chance of breaking free from Transfiguration, pushed to the fourth stage under Raven’s Claw’s blessing.

Sean stopped in front of Oranides. “Do you regret it?” he asked calmly.

“Regret? The descendants of the Titans will never—”

“Got it. Shut up.”

Sean’s wand moved. Oranides’s lower jaw dropped to the ground in a spray of blood.

Looking down at him one last time, Sean raised his wand. “From this moment on, your tribe is struck from the giants’ rolls. There will be no giant tribe left in Britain.”

Sectumsempra.

Blood fountained from Oranides’s throat.

Sean kept his wand moving, cutting down the last surviving giants one by one. There were males and females among them. He treated them all the same.

During the culling, he noticed a few Death Eater corpses among the dead, but it seemed not all of them had been killed. Some had escaped.

It did not concern him. They were not what he had come for.

When the final giant fell, Sean lifted his wand once more, conjuring a torrent of Fiendfyre that roared through the camp. It devoured huts, palisades, stockpiles, and corpses, erasing every trace of the ancient tribe.

Only when the Fiendfyre had burned everything to ash did he gesture again, drawing the cursed flames back into his wand. He turned his back on the smoking ruin and walked away. Once he had left the range of the giants’ wards and their lingering distortions, he took a single step forward and vanished.

At the same instant, he stepped out of thin air beside Hagrid and Madame Maxime. Sean opened his mouth to speak and then realised his upper body was bare.

He reached out, plucked a leaf from a nearby tree, and tossed it lightly into the air. It lengthened and darkened as it spun, turning pitch‑black before coiling around his torso and shoulders. In a breath, it had become a black robe that hid him from throat to ankle.

“Hagrid, Madam Maxime,” Sean said, “let us head back.”

At his words, Madame Maxime asked, “Sean, the business with the giants… is it dealt with?”

“It is dealt with,” Sean answered. “And they will not be a problem in the future either. We do not have to worry about them joining the Dark Lord’s ranks.”

“They changed their minds? That is really…” She trailed off. Her gaze had fallen on the smears of blood on Sean’s face and the streaks along his exposed hands. She froze, then seemed to put the pieces together. “Sean, did you… deal with that giant tribe?”

Sean caught the look she gave him. He flicked his wand, and the blood vanished from his skin as if it had never been there. His clothes smoothed and cleaned themselves. Once more, he looked as if he had just stepped out of a classroom at Hogwarts.

“It took a bit of work,” he said. “But it is done. The thing is, if the Dark Lord has thought of recruiting giants, he will have thought of werewolves and Dementors as well. All of them are potential threats. If possible, it would be best to deal with those dark creatures in advance too.

“What do you think, Madam Maxime?”