At Hogwarts, the story begins with deconstructing Avada Kedavra.

Chapter 99 Hope

Just then, the office intercom rang shrilly.

Strauss grabbed the receiver.

"General!" The officer on duty at the frontline radar station cried out on the other end of the line, his voice trembling with extreme panic. "The radar has detected an abnormal signal! It's not electromagnetic waves—it's—it's—the high-energy disturbance source we identified before! And the numbers are increasing!"

"Calm down, Lieutenant! Specify your location."

"Right across the wall! Twelfth Sector! Sir, the optical telescope confirms that at least thirty mechs are gathering towards the Brandenburg Gate!"

Their chests were glowing! That's a red alert status!

Strauss's heart sank.

Thirty units.

A single Chernobog-class armored vehicle could easily destroy a NATO armored battalion. The simultaneous deployment of thirty of these vehicles is not a border skirmish; it signals a full-scale offensive.

Are they finally giving up on psychological warfare and preparing to completely crush West Berlin?

"Sound the highest combat alert! Notify artillery positions, target Brandenburg Gate, base number three, prepare for saturation fire! All anti-tank missile teams, move to their designated positions!" Strauss roared into the phone.

"Sir—it's no use—our artillery fire can't penetrate their 'Wall of Sighs' at all—" The lieutenant's voice was filled with desperate sobs.

"Then ram them with tanks! Fill the gaps with human flesh! Even if we die, we should die in the trenches, not be turned to ashes by those green lights while we're running away! Execute orders!"

Strauss slammed down the phone.

The sound of air raid sirens ripped through the silence of a rainy night in West Berlin.

The entire command center descended into chaos.

Staff officers shouted orders, and communications soldiers frantically shook their radio transmitters, trying to contact their superiors, but all they heard through their headsets was a despairing static.

"Sir! Strong electromagnetic interference! Our communications with the Supreme Allied Command Europe have been lost!" the communications officer shouted.

Strauss's face turned ashen.

He knew that this was not just electromagnetic interference; all modern communication methods would become scrap metal.

They became an utterly isolated island.

Strauss walked to the window and opened it. Cold rain mixed with a strong wind rushed in.

He looked towards the Berlin Wall in the distance.

In the thick darkness and rain, he vaguely saw clusters of pale green light rising from the top of the wall.

The light was like the will-o'-the-wisp of hell, cold, eerie, and filled with contempt for all living beings.

An unprecedented sense of powerlessness overwhelmed Strauss.

He had imagined the scene of his death in battle.

Perhaps they will be reduced to ashes in the fireball of nuclear war, or perhaps they will be torn apart by armored projectiles during an armored assault.

That is the fate of soldiers, a fair death bestowed by God.

But he never imagined that he and his tens of thousands of soldiers would be crushed like ants by a completely unreasonable being, a being akin to a demon from mythology.

"Science can't save us now —"

Strauss muttered to himself as he reached for the holster on his waist, where an M1911 was concealed.

He would rather shoot himself than be turned into a puddle of pus by that strange ray, or into a soulless shell.

Just then, he suddenly sensed something was amiss.

The rain had subsided without me noticing. No, it hadn't subsided; rather, the temperature of the surrounding air was dropping at an incredible rate.

Immediately afterwards, all the incandescent lights in the command center began to flicker wildly, emitting a crackling electrical sound.

"What's going on? Where's the backup power?!" Strauss turned around and yelled.

"Sir! Radar malfunction! All electronic equipment is being interfered with by an unknown magnetic field!"

Before the soldiers could react, the heavy alloy armor door of the command post emitted a sickeningly loud twisting sound.

"Bang!"

The two-ton armored door was torn apart like a piece of paper by an invisible force, caved inward, and finally collapsed with a crash.

Strauss instinctively drew his pistol and pointed it at the door.

Dozens of guards around him instantly raised their automatic rifles, the dark muzzles pointing at the smoke-filled corridor.

Strauss's heart leaped into his throat. He thought it was Soviet special forces, or one of those terrifying mechs that had breached the defenses.

However, it wasn't Soviet mechs that walked in, but two people wearing black trench coats.

Walking in front was an Asian boy with black hair and black eyes. He strolled leisurely over the door, not a single drop of rain getting on his clothes.

This way of making an entrance gave Strauss the creeps.

Who is this? A new type of biological weapon from the Soviet Union? Or a monster that escaped from that den of iniquity in London?

But at that moment, the soldier's instincts overcame his fear.

In this command post, driven mad by magic and steel mechs, any intruder who cannot be understood is an enemy.

"Fire!" Major General William Strauss gave the order without hesitation, and gunfire erupted.

However, all the bullets aimed at the boy sank into the mud half a meter away from his body, and were then directly decomposed into metal fragments by a layer of eerie blue light, which fell to the ground in a flurry.

The boy waved casually.

"A ripple swept across the entire area, and all the soldiers' weapons were completely dismantled into their most basic parts, which then fell to the ground with a clatter."

The command post was deathly silent, with only the heavy breathing of the people inside.

Major General William drew his pistol, only to find that he had only a grip left in his hand. He stared in shock at the boy in front of him, his mind filled with terrifying legends about the Soviet "mysterious forces".

"Are you—a KGB agent? Or one of those damned British 'wizards'?"

"I have absolutely no interest in your ridiculous geopolitics, General."

Lucian walked to the command table, casually picked up the Berlin defense map on the table, glanced at it, and a hint of disdain flashed in his eyes.

"I'm here to give you insects, who are about to be abandoned by the times, a chance to survive."

He snapped his fingers.

A three-dimensional structural diagram of a Soviet Chernobog mech was quickly sketched in mid-air.

Major General William's pupils contracted sharply. This was an internal structural diagram that NATO intelligence had been unable to obtain, even after sacrificing hundreds of agents!

But what shocked him even more was yet to come.

Lucian pointed to the power core emitting a red glow on the hologram.

"You call it the Miracle Reactor," the Soviets called it "the brilliance of cornism."

But in my eyes, this is inefficient and wasteful.

Voldemort used living beings to create magic and used wizarding magic to forcibly power machines.

When Lucian said this, his tone was as flat as if he were stating that one plus one equals two.

But Strauss's blood froze, in Siberia. Those sealed trucks.

It's not fuel.

are people.

Lucian looked at the dumbfounded NATO officers and a devilish smile crept onto his lips.

"This machine appears to be flawless."

However, it has a fatal weakness—it needs to replace its magic core regularly, otherwise it will self-destruct.

And you, without even knowing what it is, dare to try and fight it with tanks?

"You—who exactly are you?" Major General William swallowed hard.

You can call me Lucien.

Lucien casually slapped a stack of blueprints on the table, and the air currents from the falling papers scattered several blue flags on the sand table.

"These are the reverse engineering blueprints, and the blueprints for how to manufacture a magic interference generator using your existing industrial system."

Lucian's eyes deepened. "Voldemort wants to use dark magic to monopolize the world's power."

Then I'll give you the arcane arts for free.

When the wizard gains mastery of arcane magic, and every Muggle soldier can disable his mech, let's see how stable his position becomes.

"certainly,"

"In exchange, I want to speak with your leader."

The air in the command center seemed to freeze.

Strauss stared at the stack of drawings on the table, motionless.

The staff and guards behind him were all frozen in place, the scattered gun parts reflecting a cold light under the pale emergency lights.

No one dared to move.

It wasn't because of fear, although fear was certainly there, but more so because of confusion.

Strauss's gaze slowly shifted from the drawings to the boy in front of him.

His excessively young face showed no emotion, and his black eyes were like two bottomless wells.

His posture was so casual it bordered on rude, with one hand in his trench coat pocket and the other still shimmering with a faint blue light.

He said his name was Lucien.

He said he wanted to meet with the NATO leader.

He also said that those mechs were filled with people.

You're lying to me.

Strauss finally spoke.

"You want me to believe that the Russians' invincible war machines rely on—rely on stuffing living people into them as batteries?"

What is this? A horror movie script?

Lucian did not answer, nor did he even look at him.

He walked to the window, pushed open the bulletproof glass window that was wet with rain, and the cold night wind rushed in.

In the distance, the ghastly green light atop the Berlin Wall continued to intensify. The energy field released by the simultaneous operation of thirty Chernobog-type reactors was so powerful that even from several kilometers away, it could make one's teeth chatter involuntarily.

"General," Lucian said softly, his back to everyone, "I remember something you said earlier."

Strauss frowned: "What did you say?"

You said, "They need fuel."

Lucian turned around and made eye contact with Strauss for the first time.

"Your intuition is correct."

Those sealed trucks that departed from Siberia, each one had living people in its cargo compartment.

They are controlled wizards in England, and "squirts" who are born with a small amount of magic but are unaware of it.

"After they are sent into the reactor, they will undergo a 'magic extraction' process that takes about 72 hours."

Their nervous systems were stripped off and used to serve as the mech's sensory network;

Their bones were dissolved and recast using alchemy, becoming the base material for the armor;

Their souls—if you're willing to believe in the concept of a soul—are sealed within the core of the reactor, as a perpetual entity.

Magic Power Supply Unit.

66

The reason why the "immortal metal fragment" you just mentioned causes nightmares and mental breakdowns in those who come into contact with it is because a fragment of the soul is sealed within that fragment.

They are still screaming inside that tiny piece of steel.

The command post was completely silent.

Colonel Hayes' face turned ashen.

He subconsciously looked at the lead box in the safe, as if recognizing for the first time the thing they had kept as a "research sample" for three months.

Strauss's cigar slipped from his fingers and fell to the ground.

He opened his mouth, as if to say something.

As a veteran who spent fifteen years on the front lines of the Cold War, he experienced too many cruel things.

He knew about the Russian Gulag, the KGB's secret prisons, and the appalling atrocities humans could commit against their own kind.

But to turn people into machines? To burn souls as fuel?

This is not an act of human evil.

Of course, if he knew what would happen in the future, he might not feel that way.

"Why should I believe what you're saying?"

Strauss's voice trembled, but he stubbornly maintained the last vestiges of a soldier's rationality.

"You broke into my command post and dismantled all my weapons in a way that I cannot comprehend at all."

You showed us a structural diagram that we couldn't obtain even after sacrificing countless agents.

Then you tell me that behind all this is "witchcraft" and "spirits," words that shouldn't even be in a military commander's dictionary.

"You want me to believe you?"

Strauss took a step closer, veins throbbing on his forehead. "Then answer me a question first. If you really have the ability to analyze those mechs and create some kind of 'magic interference generator,' why don't you do it yourself?"

Why come looking for us Muggles?

This is a very pointed question.

All eyes in the command post were on Lucien.

Lucian remained silent for a moment.

Then he did something that surprised everyone—he smiled.

It wasn't the condescending sneer of before, but a genuine laugh tinged with self-deprecation.

"Because I can't beat him."

"The man who created these mechs, the one who turned the whole of Britain into a puppet state and the Soviet Union into an altar, is called Voldemort."

The power he now possesses is close to the very rules of this world.

I alone cannot shake him.

"But his power has a fundamental flaw."

"What I need to do is overcome this flaw."

Lucian raised his hand, and his fingertips glowed with a ghostly blue light once more.

This time, the light did not transform into weapons or shields; instead, it slowly wrote lines of complex formulas in the air.

Half of those formulas were classical physics symbols that Strauss could understand, such as the Sway equations, Schrödinger equations, and the laws of thermodynamics; the other half were some kind of runic system that he had never seen before.

"This is 'Arcane'."

4

Lucian's voice echoed in the silent command post.

"It is not witchcraft, not superstition, and certainly not the 'incomprehensible power' that the Dark Lord used to fool you."

The essence of arcane magic is the systematic analysis and application of magical power.

"Voldemort's witchcraft is experiential, ritualistic, and unreplicable."

He was able to create mechs because he himself was the most powerful wizard, and he used his will and dark magic to drive them.

But this also means that once someone can replace his "unreplicable will" with a "replicable formula," his monopoly will collapse overnight.

Lucian pushed those formulas that were suspended in mid-air toward Strauss.

The blue runes shone on the old general's weathered face, and his eyes reflected the formulas he could only partially understand.

"General, you said physics is dead."

But it didn't die; it was just—incomplete.

Lucian withdrew his hand, and the light faded.

"The drawings I gave you contain a complete theoretical framework."

Your engineers can manufacture a pulse device that can interfere with the magic field using existing industrial equipment, based on the parameters above.

Its principle is not complicated, but it still requires "duds".

66

"In other words," Lucian's lips curled up again, "you can't cast spells, but you can create 'anti-magic'."

Strauss lowered his head and looked at the stack of drawings on the table.

His hands were trembling.

It wasn't out of fear, but because something he thought he would never experience again was swelling wildly in his chest.

hope.

A dangerous, fragile hope that could be crushed by reality at any moment.