At Hogwarts, the story begins with deconstructing Avada Kedavra.

Chapter 101 The Chessboard

The command room was completely silent.

Major General Strauss's mouth dropped open.

His hand remained stiff in the position of pushing down the guillotine, motionless. He stared intently at the massive, now motionless machines on the screen, his mind a complete blank.

He was completely unaware that his cigar had fallen onto his boot, burning a wisp of smoke.

"My God—" Colonel Hayes knelt before the screen, tears mixed with cold sweat streaming down his face. His lips trembled as he repeated the same phrase over and over, "They fell—they really fell—"

Lieutenant Colonel Martinson stared blankly at the overload button in his hand, then looked down at the still faintly glowing magic circle on the radar core, his eyes a mixture of the engineer's characteristic fanaticism and a deep-seated fear.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the secure phone line, in the Pentagon's highest conference room, there was also a deathly silence.

Everyone heard it.

Thirty explosions, the roar of thirty mechs falling, and that one scream—a scream from the depths of one's soul.

Lucian walked leisurely to the phone and picked up the receiver.

"Now, Mr. President."

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"You've seen it."

The so-called Dark Lord, the so-called invincible trend, are as fragile as a piece of paper in the face of true truth and industrialization.

A series of heavy breathing sounds came from the other end of the phone.

That was the collective silence of the highest levels of power in the free world after their understanding was completely overturned.

Someone was coughing, someone was praying quietly, and someone knocked over a coffee cup on the table without even noticing.

The silence lasted for a long time.

Then, a voice spoke.

It wasn't the president, but the Supreme Commander of NATO, an old man who had survived on the Normandy beaches, whose voice trembled but was clear: "—Say your terms again."

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Lucian's lips curled up slightly.

"I want ultimate control of your arsenal."

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His words resounded like thunder in everyone's ears.

"I want a list of MIT, Caltech, all the top physicists and engineers. I want you to tear down the entire assembly line that was originally used to build tanks and rebuild it according to my blueprints."

"Didn't you always want to win this Cold War? Didn't you want to tear down that wall?"

A flame of arcane power, enough to incinerate the old world, ignited in Lucian's eyes.

He glanced again at the ruined Berlin outside the window. The downpour was still falling, but the green lights in the distance had gone out.

"Then put down your pathetic pride and accept the logic of arcane magic."

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"Voldemort turned the world into his black box."

And I want you to use the industrial torrent of the assembly line to smash his black box, his altar, and his lofty black magic mark to smithereens.

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"This is my bargaining chip. Are you in or not?"

Across the Atlantic, there was a long silence.

It went on for so long that Strauss thought the line had broken again.

Then, the president's voice rang out again.

No longer hoarse, no longer anxious, no longer carrying that weariness of being under the shadow of the apocalypse.

It was a voice Strauss was extremely familiar with, the voice of an old fox who had deliberately suppressed all his emotions after smelling blood.

It's the voice of a politician trying to maintain a poker face when they see a trump card that could rewrite the game.

"Deal. But I have one additional condition."

"explain.

"After the first batch of 'jamming generators' rolls off the production line, I want to see its effectiveness on the battlefield with my own eyes. Until then, all the conditions you mentioned are just 'temporary authorizations'."

Lucian chuckled.

"Call it whatever you like, sir. Call it 'temporary authorization' or 'unconditional surrender'—it won't make any difference.

He hung up the phone.

In the command center, Strauss let out a long breath. It was as if that breath had been stuck in his chest for three months, and only now did it finally find an outlet.

He glanced down at his empty holster, then at the pile of gold on the ground that had once been the base of an M1911 pistol.

It is a component.

Five minutes earlier, he almost used that gun to give himself a dignified end.

Now, not a single intact rivet remains of that gun.

He suddenly felt it was absurd.

It was so absurd that he had never felt it was so absurd in his entire life.

An Asian teenager who appeared out of nowhere dismantled his gun with one finger, persuaded the US president with his words, and destroyed thirty doomsday machines with a modified radar.

And for Wilhelm Strauss, the NATO commander of the West Berlin defense zone and a recipient of the Iron Cross, a veteran who had spent half his life in trenches, the only thing he could do at that moment was to pick up the extinguished cigar from the ground.

He bent down and picked up the cigar.

The cigar had been flattened by boots and was covered in dust.

He patted it, then put it back in his mouth.

"Does anyone have a fire?" Strauss asked hoarsely.

No one answered. Everyone was still reeling from the shock that had just occurred, a shock that had surpassed the limits of human comprehension.

Without turning his head, Lucien extended a finger, a tiny cluster of eerie blue flames dancing at its tip.

Strauss stared at the cluster of flames and remained silent for a while.

Then he leaned forward and lit a cigar.

I took a deep breath.

The smoke rising from the leaves slowly ascended in the pale blue light, like the last sigh of the old world.

"So," Strauss mumbled, a flattened cigar dangling from his lips, "this is what you call 'arcane'."

?

'

"This is just a match." Lucien withdrew his finger, turned, and walked towards the shattered armored door. "The real fire hasn't been lit yet."

His trench coat dragged silently over the gravel and gun parts. Neville followed silently behind him, and the two figures quickly disappeared into the dim emergency lights at the end of the corridor.

Strauss stood there, watching the two figures disappear.

The red embers of the cigar flickered uncertainly in the darkness.

In the distance, the torrential rain in Berlin continued unabated. But for the first time, the ghastly green sky that had shrouded Berlin for three months began to clear.

A crack appeared.

Through that crack, you can see the night sky beyond.

There are stars.

Strauss stood there for a long time.

It wasn't until the cigar burned to the very end and burned his lips that he suddenly came to his senses.

He spat the cigarette butt on the ground, crushed it with his boot, and then turned to face his room full of staff and guards.

The expressions on these people's faces were all different.

Some were stunned, some were in tears, some had their mouths agape, and others, like Colonel Hayes, were hunched over a telescope, repeatedly confirming whether the wreckage of the mechs lying in front of Brandenburg Gate would really never stand up again.

"Report!"

Hayes shouted, "All thirty targets have been confirmed to be out of power! They—they are really dead!"

A huge commotion erupted in the command center.

Some cheered, some wept, some knelt on the ground making the sign of the cross, and others rushed to the radio station, which had resumed communication, to call out to the front lines: "This is Red Falcon! Respond if you hear me! The threat from the Brandenburg Gate direction has been neutralized! Repeat, the threat has been neutralized!"

The response over the radio was equally incredulous: "Red Falcon, this is the 7th Armored Company."

Are you fucking kidding me? Those things were shooting green light at us ten minutes ago—wait, they—they really went down?

Our observation post confirmed—Good heavens, they've all collapsed! How did they manage that?!

Strauss did not participate in this chaotic revelry.

He walked back to his desk alone and slowly sat down.

His gaze fell on the stack of drawings on the table, and he picked up the top one.

The contents of the paper made him frown even more.

The upper part was an engineering drawing that he could barely understand.

Mechanical structure, circuit topology, and bill of materials.

Its precision is astonishing, but its annotation method is different from any NATO or Soviet mapping standard.

Each key point is accompanied by dense annotations, written in neat handwriting and in English.

The second half was something he couldn't understand at all.

Those runes did not belong to any mainstream script; he could only barely recognize them as runes.

Strauss put down the drawings and rubbed his temples.

Why would he help us?

The boy said, "Because I can't beat him."

This answer is too concise, to the point of being suspicious.

Strauss had lived on the battlefield for forty years and had seen too many politicians who were two-faced, intelligence officers who smiled while hiding daggers, and allies who said one thing in front of others and did another in private.

He instinctively knew that someone with such power would never seek help from a group of mortals he clearly looked down upon simply because he "couldn't beat them".

There must be a deeper calculation involved.

But now is not the time to dwell on these things.

"Hayers." Strauss summoned the colonel.

"Sir!"

"Make three copies of these blueprints. Lock one in a safe, send one back to the Pentagon using the communication lines we just restored, and the last one—"

He paused, then said, "You personally deliver the last copy to the NATO Technology Assessment Center in Frankfurt."

Travel by armored vehicle, not by plane. I don't trust the current airspace security.

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"Yes, sir! But—" Hayes hesitated for a moment, "Sir, should we really trust him? What if these blueprints are a trap?"

Whether you believe it or not is not important.

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Strauss interrupted him, his voice weary but firm, "The important thing is that he took down thirty of these things right in front of me with a single radar. For that alone, these blueprints are worth the gamble."

He stood up, walked to the radar screen that had been lit up again, and looked at the East Berlin area marked on it.

The green interference signal is visibly fading away.

It didn't disappear completely; rather, it transformed from an impenetrable iron curtain into a tattered net riddled with holes.

The high-concentration magic fields released by the mech reactors were rapidly dissipating over Berlin as the thirty cores exploded.

"Communications Officer!"

Strauss suddenly raised his voice, "While the interference has subsided, immediately contact the 7th Army headquarters in Frankfurt. Also, the 2nd Tactical Air Wing of the Royal Air Force. Tell them that West Berlin is still there."

"Yes, sir!"

Strauss took one last look out the window.

The downpour continued, but the crack in the horizon was slowly widening.

The stars were dim, almost swallowed by the rain clouds. But they were definitely there.

at the same time.

At the end of the corridor.

Lucian leaned against the wall alone, his eyes closed.

The corridor was deserted.

The emergency light cast a long, thin shadow at his feet, the edges of which trembled slightly, and his body was shaking.

His face appeared extremely pale in the dim light, much paler than the composure he had displayed in the command post.

If Strauss saw him now, he would never believe that this was the same man who had destroyed thirty machines with a casual laugh just five minutes ago.

Lucian glanced down at his right hand.

My fingers were trembling uncontrollably.

Cracks appeared on his hands, and dark red blood beads kept seeping out, dripping onto the concrete floor, each drop emitting a fleeting, eerie blue glow.

When I drew the magic circle on the radar core just now, the magic circle needed the caster's life force as a "fuse" to ignite the magical reaction.

He acted as if he had nothing to lose in front of the group of Muggles, as if everything was under his control.

But only he knows how much control he exerted from the moment he drew the first stroke to the moment he pushed the guillotine shut.

Lucian clenched his fist, forcing his fingers to stop trembling.

He pulled a piece of chocolate from his trench coat pocket, tore off the wrapper, took a bite, and leaned back against the wall as he chewed, looking up at the crack in the ceiling.

That voice is still echoing in my mind.

The scream when the mech exploded.

That wasn't a mechanical sound.

That was the last cry of a soul sealed within the core, a cry from an unknown wizard, someone who should have died decades ago, in the moment of collapse.

Strauss heard the shout and thought it was pain.

He wasn't wrong, but he wasn't entirely right either.

There was indeed pain in that scream—the endless pain of being imprisoned, exploited, and twisted for countless years.

But in his pain, Lucian also heard something else.

I feel relieved.

The moment the magic core exploded, the seal collapsed, and the soul was released.

But they have been distorted and exploited for too long, and it is impossible for them to return to their original state.

They will dissipate into the air like ashes in the wind.

They can't even become ghosts, no longer have consciousness, no longer suffer, no longer be used as some kind of perpetual, thinking fuel.

If this can be considered a kind of relief.

Lucian finished the last bite of chocolate, crumpled the wrapper into a ball, and threw it on the ground.

He didn't dwell on the issue for long.

It wasn't because he was cold-blooded, but because he knew clearly that if he had to stop and grieve for every soul sacrificed by Voldemort, he would never reach the end.

He straightened up and turned up the collar of his trench coat.

My hands have stopped shaking.

"Seventy-two hours," he muttered to himself.

The commotion tonight is huge.

With thirty mechs exploding simultaneously, Voldemort couldn't possibly have missed it.

The Death Eaters scattered throughout Europe would faithfully record everything, and within seventy-two hours at the latest, they would know what had happened.

He knew that someone had destroyed his creations using a power system he had never seen before.

and then?

Lucian strode forward, his trench coat dragging silently across the gravel.

His figure quickly disappeared into the dim emergency lights at the end of the corridor.

As I emerged from the exit of the command post's underground bunker, the torrential rain had subsided considerably, transforming into a fine, almost silent downpour.

drizzle.

Lucien stood on the steps at the exit, tilted his head back, and let the drizzle fall on his face.

In the distance, the green magical film clinging to the top of the Berlin Wall, now deprived of the energy support of the mech reactors, is slowly peeling off, like a layer of sickly scales falling off a giant snake.

"Seventy-two hours," he repeated.

Voldemort will find out in seventy-two hours.

Then, the real war will begin.