Regulus of Hogwarts: Lord of the Stars

Chapter 568 Fighting and Magic Fusion

It was evening in Judewangen, and the sky was still bright.

Geralt sat on the stone bench in front of the cabin, leaning against the edge of the table with his legs stretched out and his boots resting on the stone slab.

Her long, silvery-white hair cascaded down her shoulders, the ends swaying gently in the evening breeze. The fjord was calm, with only the occasional ripple appearing in the distance before disappearing.

He raised his right hand, held it out in front of his eyes, his palm open, his five fingers slightly curled.

A light began to emanate from my palm; it was earthy yellow and felt heavy.

The magic spreads outward along the bone joints, seeps into the periosteum, extends to the tendons, and from the tendons into the gaps between the muscle fibers.

The entire palm, from the base of the fingers to the wrist, had a layer of dark yellow light, neither bright nor dazzling, but rather solid.

The light seeped into the texture beneath the skin, making the outlines of the knuckles and fascia exceptionally clear, and even revealing the traces of blood flowing through the capillaries.

The five fingers curled slightly, the lines on the palm moved accordingly, and the light flickered. The light emanating from the palm made the whole hand look somewhat transparent.

He bent his fingers, and the magic moved with the flexor muscles, tightening, releasing, and tightening again.

A week has passed since the first fight with Hilde.

Dumbledore left a note on the morning he departed for the giants' camp, and then disappeared without a trace, not even a Patronus appeared; no one knows what he's been up to outside.

Frian and Gideon were called away by Dumbledore a few days ago; the Order of the Phoenix had work to do, so they had to go to Tromsø.

As Fabian stood at the doorway, adjusting his robe and belt, he kept talking: "I knew it. I finally got a few days of peace and quiet, and the professor just happened to have me sitting down for a bit before yelling at Geralt, 'Are you sure you don't want to starve here by yourself?'"

Gideon was better than him. Before leaving, he reached into the inner pocket of his robe, took out a dark brown money pouch, placed it on the edge of the table, nodded without saying anything, and went out the door.

Fabian chased after him, then turned back two seconds later, grabbed the doorframe, grinned at Geralt, and silently uttered two words.

He'll never forget that expression on his face, and his lips were so easy to recognize.

Poor wretch.

Okay, see you next time.

Geralt later opened the money bag left by Gideon and took a look inside. It contained about twenty Galleons, along with a few Silver Sickles.

It seems that his image as a poor wretch has taken deep root in people's minds. In their eyes, he is indeed extremely poor, has never paid for anything, has others pay for all his food and drinks, and doesn't even bring anything with him when he goes out.

Did Gideon leave the money bag because he was afraid Gideon would starve, or because he was afraid Gideon would steal or rob for a hot meal?

The young master of the Black family lived to be thirteen years old, and this was the first time someone had stuffed money into his hand.

Orion never gave any, nor did Walbuga; the family was never short of money.

In the storage room at the end of the corridor on the third floor of Grimmauld Place, there is a bronze box about half a person's height, which is always piled with stacks of Galleons. You can take whatever you want when you're done, and no one cares how much or how little you take.

No one had ever placed a money bag in front of him before, as if he needed to be worried about running out of food. Geralt looked at the heavy bag of Galleons in his hand, his feelings a little complicated.

He tied the purse, stuffed it back into the corner of the table, and didn't look at it again.

Everyone's gone. Dumbledore is nowhere to be found, and his two brothers have been called away. Now he's a lonely man abandoned on a Norwegian fjord.

Also good.

He lowered his right hand, withdrawing the magic from his body back into the channel. The pale yellow light began to fade from his fingertips, and after a few breaths, his palm returned to its normal color.

Geralt tilted his head, his gaze falling on the surface of the fjord in the distance, and shook his head with satisfaction.

I went to the Giants training grounds twice this week and got into two fights.

Before his second visit, he divided his brain into sections, having mastered the mental segmentation techniques of the Occupational Therapy long ago.

Each zone operates independently, with its own input channels and output ports. Signals between zones travel via parallel loops. The main system centrally manages the system and does not participate in the specific work of any particular zone.

The five systems each run independently, online simultaneously, with data being aggregated in real time and presented to the main consciousness for a decision.

He assigned tasks to five different areas.

District One is responsible for comprehensive data collection: every move Hilde makes, the speed and angle of the axe blade, the tilt of her shoulder armor when she exerts force, the direction of the shift in her body's center of gravity, the force distribution when her feet touch the ground, and the signal that magic power is converging from a diffuse state to the point of force exertion.

All external information that can be perceived and captured is managed by a single zone.

Zone 2 processes the data sent from Zone 1 in real time, comparing, modeling, and predicting.

Where will Hilde's axe land? How powerful will it be? How fast will it go? Will she change her tactics afterward? If she does, what is the most likely direction of her change of tactics? Area 2 needs to provide the answer the moment Area 1 sends the signal.

The third district is responsible for compensation and allocation, the second district provides the judgment, and the third district is responsible for the conversion. How much kinetic energy is transmitted by this axe, and how much of a Betelgeuse burst is needed to complete the collision at the contact point.

After the conversion, the magic was directly invoked, and the magic power was transmitted from the core along the channel to the sword. The will of Betelgeuse exploded outward the moment it made contact.

The calculation and execution are performed in the same area, with no waiting in between.

The fourth district is responsible for self-monitoring, with its magic reserves, mental load, physical fatigue, muscle damage, and breathing rhythm all operating in real time on the fourth district's instrument panel.

Zone 5 is the main consciousness; it only looks at the prediction results sent by Zone 2 and chooses a direction to attack.

The five zones operate independently, feeding each other data through parallel signal loops, working simultaneously without interfering with each other.

Once this system went live, the gameplay changed accordingly.

The instant Hilde's shoulder moved, Zone 1 had already detected the direction of the force, and Zone 2 responded in microseconds, determining the axe's landing point, peak speed, and the density of magic power carried by the strike.

The three zones simultaneously calculate the required size of a crimson explosion, and at the point of contact between the sword and axe, to what extent the kinetic energy needs to be neutralized to be considered safe.

The moment the sword and axe collided, Betelgeuse's crimson light exploded at the point of contact. The force of the explosion and the kinetic energy transmitted from the axe blade canceled each other out, and the amount transmitted to him was not enough to lift him off the ground.

Hilde increased his power, and the third district followed suit by increasing the output of the explosive. He added as much as he needed, and the amount of compensation for each collision was precisely calculated to completely absorb the impact.

This time, he wasn't knocked away at all; he stood from beginning to end without experiencing any unexpected force.

But they still couldn't win. The power gap was filled by magical compensation, and the essence of compensation is to use magic to fill the gap in the body.

No matter how accurately you calculate the three zones, the output of Crimson Blast is not unlimited.

Each countermeasure consumes magic power, and quite a lot of it. The five zones work in parallel, consuming mental energy, while close-range maneuvers consume physical strength.

Giants don't have this problem; Hilde's stamina is proportional to her size, and she showed no signs of panting from beginning to end.

He called a halt when his body couldn't keep up with his mind, and Hilde stopped too. She slung her axe over her shoulder, looked at him for a moment with her icy blue eyes behind her visor, and then turned and left.

It's quite particular.

Having fought for so long against an opponent far stronger than himself, and having also solved a technical problem, Geralt returned to the cabin feeling somewhat exhilarated and unsatisfied.

While playing in Zones 1 and 2, we saved data for the entire match, which was very rewarding, much more so than the first time.

The way Hilde diffuses her magic, the timing of its convergence, the direction of its penetration, and its synchronization with the rhythm of her body in each attack.

However, the armor still caused significant interference. Looking at the signals through the metal infused with the giant's magic, many crucial data points...

The data is not accurate enough.

However, he figured out the texture of the giant's magic.

Wizards' magic is flexible and malleable, capable of transforming, reshaping, and performing various intricate operations; giants' magic is heavy, thick, and weighty.

Having figured this out, he began his first experiment, altering the magical properties of certain parts of his body.

He never worried about manipulating magic; the illumination of Betelgeuse had brought his control precision to an abnormally high level.

However, changing the nature of magic is not the same as manipulating it. Manipulating is making magic move, while changing its nature is turning magic into something else.

He laid his right hand flat on his knee, closed his eyes, and began to form an image in his mind.

Deep within the Earth's crust, rock layers press against each other, and the gravity of tens of kilometers of rock collapses downwards, compressing everything onto a single point.

Normal wizarding magic is like flowing water, without a fixed form, and it can flow smoothly in any direction. Now he wants to make this water thicken, become heavier, turn it into mud, turn it into magma, and give it the earthy weight of giant magic.

My palms started to glow, gradually changing color, leaning towards warm yellow, then yellow, and then becoming darker and more turbid.

He sat motionless on the stone bench. After an unknown amount of time, the light in his palm finally stabilized, revealing a very faint yellowish-brown hue.

A faint shimmering light covered the skin from the palm to the fingertips.

He opened his eyes, looked down at his hands, and found that the color and texture were correct, at least they were close to the weight he had sensed from the data in Zone One.

Then let this simulated magic power start from the entrance of the passage and spread into the body.

This step was simple and didn't take much effort; every layer of tissue in the entire right hand was tinged with a pale yellow magic.

I clenched my fist and felt it carefully.

A normal fist, normal strength, magic resides in the muscles, spread throughout the tissues, but muscles are muscles, magic is magic, the two things occupy their own space, unrelated to each other.

He loosened his fist, closed his eyes again, and focused his mind into the brain's closed space, searching through the data stored in the second zone.

Found it! Hilde's state is different before and at the moment of exerting force.

Before exerting force, the magic is diffused, evenly distributed between muscle fibers, much like what he is doing now—just sitting there, not participating.

But at the moment of exertion, the magic suddenly synchronized with the muscle contraction. When the muscle fibers tightened, the magic tightened as well, in the same rhythm and with the same amplitude.

Diffusion is static; synchronization is the key.

He synchronized the magic in his right hand with the rhythm of his body, bending his fingers and moving in sync with the contraction of his flexor muscles, while his forearm tightened and the magic tightened along with the forearm muscles.

When tendons are straightened, magic is straightened as well; when bones bear weight, magic is beard as well; when blood flow accelerates, magic accelerates as well.

With his current level of magical control, if he can think of something, he can do it.

After everything was synchronized, I clenched my fist, and my knuckles cracked.

This punch was completely different from the previous one. The moment the fist came together, you could feel the power emanating from the bones. The contraction of each muscle fiber carried a magical weight as it exerted force together, giving it a heavy and solid feel.

He loosened his fist and then clenched it again. It was very smooth; the magic and the rhythm of his body were perfectly synchronized, requiring no extra effort to maintain synchronization.

He stood up, walked to a rough granite slab next to the wooden house, raised his right hand, clenched his fist, and without charging up or using any offensive magic, he slammed it down with the earthy yellow magic that had already seeped into his flesh.

With a muffled thud, a piece of the granite surface shattered, cracks spreading outwards from the center of the fist, and fine stone chips fell down in a flurry.

He pulled his fist back, his knuckles covered in grayish-white stone powder, his skin red but not broken.

He shook his hand, actively withdrawing the magic from his body.

The magic flowed back from the periosteum, withdrew from the tendons, and exited between the muscle fibers, returning to the core magic channel in the palm. The sense of synchronization disappeared, and the palm returned to normal.

Throughout the process, he was sensing whether there was any residue or irreversible sluggishness.

A few seconds later, the yellowish-brown glow on my palm completely faded, returning to my normal skin tone, and the sense of synchronization disappeared.

There's nothing there, and that's fine.

The example of Arcturus I serves as a stark warning: if physical enhancement is done in the wrong direction, it leads to certain death.

He wasn't sure if his instantaneous synchronization was fundamentally different from Arcturus I's approach, so he controlled the variables and removed them after each use.

Let's use it like this for now. When we get back to England, I'll ask my father for the notes and then we can talk about it.

Over the next few days, he repeated the experiment several more times, expanding from one hand to the entire forearm. The magic spread into the flexor muscles of the forearm, along the periosteum of the ulna and radius, with the synchronized rhythm becoming smoother with each iteration.

He tried it several times, and the strength and resilience of his forearms did indeed noticeably improve when the ochre-colored magic spread out, improving his tolerance to blunt impacts and the transmission of power.

So, is the Titan's entire body like this an innate racial trait, or the result of training?

He doesn't have an answer to this question yet.