A day at Hogwarts.

Chapter 578 Protecting the Glasses
Hogwarts is open to the wind and rain, but nothing that disrupts students' classes is allowed in.

No matter how drastic things change in the outside world, students will not be able to miss a single class.

In the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom, after taking attendance, Professor Moody said to the students, "Today's lesson is a dueling practice class. I will randomly select one student to take turns dueling with the other students."

His demonic eyes spun incessantly in their sockets, causing many students who saw them to tense up immediately.

This wasn't the first time a student had taken on the entire class single-handedly. Moody would comment after the duel, and for many students, this was the most grueling part of the course, making them prefer to wash Snape's hair.

“Porter,” Moody said, selecting today’s lucky student, “come to the front.”

Harry walked out somewhat nervously; last time it was Neville, and he'd beaten him up pretty badly.

He couldn't help but look at Neville, only to see a wicked grin on Neville's face, looking completely confident.

This made Harry a little nervous. It seemed like Neville had been doing something secretly lately. The last time he saw him, Neville was whispering with a Slytherin student. Could he be learning some kind of dark magic?

“Longbottom,” Moody saw the two’s subtle interaction and readily agreed, “you will be Porter’s first opponent.”

Neville's face lit up with a bright smile, and he excitedly got up from his seat.

Harry became even more nervous.

The two bowed to each other, and the duel began.

"Except your weapons!"

Harry attacked first, his spell swift and precise, a beam of light shooting directly at Neville's wand.

Neville's wand was suddenly pulled outward by an invisible force. However, the handle of the wand seemed to be coated with superglue, firmly stuck to his palm. The enormous force only made him stagger and sway, but the wand did not fly out of his hand.

"Glasses flew over!"

Neville's counterattack followed immediately, without any hesitation, relying on Zhao Laifu's masterful use of the Flying Spell.

Harry's glasses weren't glued to his face; they instantly floated lightly off his nose.

With half of his eyes gone, his opponent's figure became elusive, like a reflection in water.

Harry's alarm bells rang in his head, and he instinctively growled, "Protect yourself!"

Just as a halo of armored charm enveloped his entire body, Neville's counterattack came from the ground—those seemingly harmless weeds suddenly seemed to be injected with life, growing wildly like venomous snakes, and the tough grass leaves instantly wrapped him and the armored charm into an airtight green cocoon.

Harry was like a mummy, unable to move or even breathe.

Moody had Neville remove the spell, and Harry, unable to defend himself immediately, was enveloped in the grass. By the time he dealt with the grass, the enemy was already prepared to kill him.

Harry emerged disheveled from the remaining grass, his face etched with frustration and sullenness, a few bits of grass still clinging to his hair.

"Potter is like a newly hatched chick."

The classroom immediately became lively.

“Not vigilant enough!” Moody’s voice was cold and ruthless, as if he were talking to a corpse.

The next opponent is Hermione.

"Take off your glasses!"

However, Hermione's tactics were more textbook-like. After a back-and-forth exchange of offense and defense, their spells clashed, sparks flew, and they ended up evenly matched.

The third is Ron.

"Take off your glasses!"

He chanted the spell with a grin, clearly intending to play a prank.

Harry, without his wand, caught the flying glasses with lightning speed—faster than catching the Golden Snitch—and said irritably, "Are you guys ever going to stop?!"

Ron chuckled and said, "I learned this using toffee pudding as tuition."

He doesn't need to be told who he learned it from.

Harry muttered, "When Charles gets back, I'll tell him you gave Hermione a lot of sweets."

Hermione almost raised her hand to volunteer for a two-on-one fight, and maybe even kill him while she was at it.

As it turns out, everyone quite liked using this trick against Harry, but both the Summoning Charm and the Disarming Charm are very difficult and have a low success rate.

At dinner, Ron handed a chicken leg to a sullen Harry, saying, "It's okay, next time we can just glue the glasses back together." Harry ignored him, but still wanted to eat the chicken leg, so he took it and ate it in a huff.

He then asked Neville across the table, "How did you stick the wand to your hand? Could you use it on Harry's glasses?"

Neville took out his wand, grasped the top, showed him the handle wrapped with a layer of bandage, and said, "My father gave me a very useful bandage."

At this point, Harry said dejectedly, "If only I could get in touch with Charles!"

Several people around him looked at him, curious about what he would say next.

Harry continued, "I want him to help me buy something."

Everyone became even more curious. Harry wasn't poor, so if Charles was going to buy it for him, it must be something very expensive.

No one doubted that Charles wouldn't buy it; after all, it was Harry, and a few kind words might be enough to secure it.

Ron, munching on a chicken leg, said in a low voice, "Percy said in his letter that he's been writing to Charles lately, discussing the goblins."

This immediately drew everyone's attention to him. This was the first time Charles had heard anything about him since he was "captured" by Voldemort, and even Fleur didn't know where Charles was now.

The day before yesterday, Harry went to ask Fleur if she had contacted Charles recently, but he felt a palpable murderous aura and immediately ran away.

Just then, a gasp rang out from Slytherin's side, and the candles on the ceiling swayed.

Everyone looked on in confusion, only to see Draco Malfoy sitting at the center of the Slytherin table, a carefully crafted, perfectly measured smug smile on his face, slowly and elegantly cutting a juicy steak, as if putting on a performance.

The Slytherin students surrounding him, especially Crabbe and Goyle, cast undisguised envious and admiring glances at him, which greatly satisfied his inflated vanity and made him hold his chin up even higher.

When Malfoy saw Harry looking at him, he was about to show off as usual, but he immediately dismissed the idea.

Other things are easy to talk about, but on this matter, I really don't have the confidence to brag to Harry.

The news came quickly.

"Charles asked Malfoy to handle the compensation negotiations with the goblins?!"

"There are very high commissions on transactions exceeding 300 million Galleons?!"

"Malfoy is going to build his own team?!"

Harry found the news hard to believe, preferring to believe that Hagrid had become the Potions professor.

He could accept Hermione if she were chosen, because Hermione is smart.

“Hermione,” Harry turned and asked, “didn’t Charles contact you to discuss this matter and put you in charge?”

Hermione shook her head and said, "No."

Harry felt something was off about this. It would make sense if Charles approached Hermione first, then failed to reach an agreement because Hermione wanted the privilege of eating sweets, and only then approached someone else. There was no reason for him to go to Malfoy right away.

He looked toward the professors' table and saw Dumbledore eating boiled cucumbers with a blank expression, showing no reaction whatsoever to the Malfoy affair.

Dumbledore was too tired to care about fairies anymore; he was exhausted and didn't care about destruction. He should focus his energy on Voldemort.

Eating bland, tasteless weight-loss and blood sugar-lowering meals every day is even more tiring; I wouldn't care if the world ended.

Harry saw Snape on the professors' table and tried to suppress his laughter.

Two days ago, Snape received a letter from a client wanting to buy potions. On his way to Hogsmeade to discuss the business, he was reportedly put in a sack and beaten up. Although he wasn't killed, the wound on his head showed signs of dark magic and would take a long time to heal.

The killer was cunning; witnesses said he even impersonated Aberforth Dumbledore. The Aurors couldn't find the real killer and could only determine from the footprints at the scene that it wasn't a goblin.

After dinner, Harry returned to his dormitory in the Gryffindor Tower, his mind heavy with worry.

He quickly spread out a roll of parchment, dipped his quill in ink, and hastily wrote a letter to Percy.

The letter repeatedly emphasized that you must, absolutely must, deliver a letter to Charles.

After writing and sealing it, he walked to the window and called out softly.

Soon, Hedwig fluttered her powerful wings and landed on the windowsill.

Harry carefully tied the letter to its leg and watched it disappear into the night outside Hogwarts Castle like a white lightning bolt.

(End of this chapter)