Sergeandgreen

I'm once again sorry for the long delay. There are multiple reasons for that and i think the main one was that these chapters are quite draining to write. I need to constantly check the older chapters to see what had happened during that time and if i don't write for a day i need to reread it again, which was quite problematic because i didn't have the time to write the whole chapter in one go. The other reason is that the batteries of my laptop are dead and i can only work when I am at home now. The last reason is that i also started to write another story and got carried a little away there. It's about a first person point of view from a girl at a wizard school similar to hogwarts. I started to write this as an excersise to give my characters more depth, as I think that some of the characters are not as fleshed out as i wanted them to be. Especially the girls in the story. As the story is not as complex as this one, it is far easier to write and I had so much fun doing it. Anyway, i won't drop this story, as i like the concept too much and i don't want to disappoint you guys. But I guess I will write both stories at the same time and will release one chapter for each of them each week. 

I will probably upload the story on this site in a few days.

So for those that need a short reminder to orient themselves in the story, this chapter play at a time where Professor ward was the substitute teacher for Quirrell. That is after Newt Scamander came to Hogwarts, but before Atlas has to enter the forbidden forrest. So we are about one or two weeks from the final fight. (The chapters from that timeline are 53 and 54) 

The next few days, Ethan was on edge. It was almost the weekend, and the end of Professor Ward's lessons was near. He didn’t know what he should do when Voldemort realized that he had escaped his control. His first thought was going to Dumbledore, but he didn’t want to be transformed into some kind of weapon for the greater good. His next thought was talking to Amy and Leona, but he feared that Voldemort would target them too if he did. He hadn’t realized it before, but Voldemort's ability to read minds was far more powerful than he had thought. He had thought that he could only affect Harry so much because Harry was Voldemort's Horcrux, but he had been wrong. Voldemort could do far far more than the movies had shown him. What he did to Harry was childsplay compared to what he had done to him. The only thing the Horcrux affected was the distance at which he could use it. Telling them about the Horcruxes would paint a target on their back that was as great as Harry's, if not greater, because they would be an actual threat with that knowledge.

Thinking about that, he realized that he should probably try to destroy the diadem ahead of time. Or at least put it somewhere else, because he feared that Voldemort would hide it as soon as he realized that he had escaped his control.

With that in mind, he went to the room of requirements only to realize that not only was the Diadem not there anymore, but the room also looked as if a bomb had exploded in the center of the room. It confused Ethan immensely, as he didn’t understand why Voldemort would leave such a scene behind. The only possible reason was if he realized that the Diadem had been taken away or destroyed by someone, but he was sure he had told no one. Which, as he realized, didn’t mean much. If Voldemort could use legilimency, then there would be other wizards too. Dumbledore would surely be able to do just as well, and Snape could use it too, but he needed to use his wand for that. At least from what the movies showed. He was sure that even if Professor McGonagall could use it, she wouldn’t. She was too much of a by-the-books person. Professor Ward naturally was also an option. He seemed to be a famed war hero, so maybe he learned it in some special interrogation training. It would also explain why he replaced Voldemort as a teacher. Ethan was unsure why Voldemort disappeared. Maybe Ward destroyed his horcrux, and Voldemort now wants to hide all his others.

When the weekend finally came, Leona had asked him to meet up with Atlas, as he had something he wanted to talk about. As he had realized that all other Horcrux locations were unreachable for him, he accepted the invitation for the next day. But before that, he had to talk to someone. Someone he had treated quite badly in the past few months. He wanted to talk to Amy.

So, after breakfast, instead of going to the library to study, he asked Amy to stay behind with him.

“So, what did you want to talk about Ethan? Don’t say you don’t have time for our frienddate today. Your potions can wait for one day.” Amy said, and it pained Ethan that he heard frustration in her voice. He really had neglected her for far too long.

“No, I mean, it's about our frienddate, but it has nothing to do with potions or the like. Amy I’m sorry for how I treated you in recent times. I was absentminded; I invited other girls to our group, and I didn’t even ask you how you were feeling about all of this. I want you to know that it wasn’t really me and that if you are still willing, I would like to go on a real date with you. Not just as friends. I…” He wasn’t even able to finish what he was saying before Amy hugged him and pressed her lips on his.

“You idiot. Do you know how long I waited for you to ask me that?” Ethan was overwhelmed by her sudden kiss. It was his first kiss, and he was sure that it was Amy’s first kiss too. In that moment, he forgot all about Voldemort, Quirrell, and even the torture he was put through. For that short moment, he was genuinely happy.

“I know. I’m sorry; I let you wait so long. I will make up for it, I promise.” said Ethan and returned the kiss, causing Amy, who was so confident a second ago, to blush with a smile.

“So where do we go for our date?” asked Amy hugging him tightly as if he would disappear the moment she let him go.

“As long as it's just the two of us, I’m fine with everything. But if you want a suggestion, then the top of the astronomy tower would be a good choice. I mean, it would be nice to see the stars with you without having to name every single one of them, and from there we could see the great lake, the forest, and the castle. And if it’s a little cold up there, we can take a blanket with us.” He said it while Amy still clung to his chest, her face pressed against his robe.

“Mmh, sounds good.” She said without even looking up.

“Okey… should we go to the others till then, or what do you want to do?” he asked, unsure of what to do.

“Just five more minutes. I waited so long for this.” answered Amy, ignoring the fact that they technically stood in the middle of a corridor where people went past them.

On the date that followed that evening, Ethan confessed to her that he had been reborn and that he had a system that helped him to get better at certain things. He omitted the fact that this world was just a movie from his old one, and that Voldemort had returned. He didn’t want to worry her, and he also didn’t want her to become a target. He wanted to clear up his own mess, protect his now girlfriend from anything that could be dangerous, and eventually make the world a better place. Even immortality might be a possibility for them. Amy didn’t care as much about a potentially great future and was just happy that he told her ”everything” and was still in a blissful mood because they got together properly.

The day after, he met with Atlas, who looked a little as if he hadn’t slept well, but Ethan was sure that Atlas wasn’t too affected by it. They met in front of the room of requirements, which made Ethan wonder a little, but when he asked, Atlas told him he knew about the room of requirements from Hermione, who apparently knew it from Amy.

The first topic they talked about was Hermione Granger. It was a bit embarrassing for Ethan, as he realized that he acted the way he acted because Voldemort manipulated him to build a harem that also included Hermione just because he didn’t want the golden trio to form. It was especially embarrassing because he had just gotten together with Amy, and having someone rub his past behavior under his nose was not the best of feelings. Especially if you knew that it only worked because the desire itself was there even if burried. Luckily, for Ethan, Atlas didn’t take it too personally.

To his surprise, this personal topic wasn’t the main reason for their meeting. It was a bit surprising for him when Atlas asked him for a spar, and at first Ethan thought Atlas was on some kind of vendetta for Hermione, but he quickly realized that this was not the case. After a surprisingly not-so-boring spar with Atlas, he was invited to regular training sessions with Harry, Hermione, Ron, and Neville. What shocked him was that they weren’t just casually training themselves but were training to put up a fight against Voldemort.

His first thought was that Atlas was a reincarnator who knew about the future too, but after hearing his reasoning, he wasn’t as sure anymore. He tried to go through all his memories, but he only noted Atlas as an overly ambitious student who had a crush on Hermione, and after all the changes he had caused, he wasn’t sure if he could judge if having a crush on Hermione was reason enough to be sure that he was a reincarnator. He also thought about the possibility of Voldemort manipulating him, but he couldn’t find a reason why Voldemort would have left him with the knowledge of his activities then and also let him train the trio and Neville. Atlas also confirmed some of the fears that Ethan had. Voldemort was so sure about his return and his current power that he was already gathering followers. It wouldn’t be farfetched to say that if he failed to stop Voldemort from returning, that a war was bound to happen soon.

After thinking it through, he realized that training with the others was one of the best courses of action he could take. Not only because he thought that more training his friends would make them valuable allies, but it could also have some benefits for him as well. With his new knowledge transfer skill, he would be able to profit from their training as well.

He was sure that he would need them, as with Voldemort's recent activities, he was sure that finding and destroying the horcruxes would be much more difficult than in the movies, not to mention a possible premature war. Training Harry was also a way to put some resistance up against Voldemort. So he decided, under the condition that Amy and Leona also join the training, to accept Atlas' invitation to train with them.

It made him chuckle a little that they would be like Dumbledore's army in the movies.

They scheduled their first training session after their regular lessons, after the weekend. Amy and Leona were naturally eager to participate in the training after explaining the situation to them. Leona needed to be stopped from writing letters to her grandparents and the ministry, but being unable to relay on them made her even more eager to train. She even delayed her plan to get her animagus transformation for that. The training itself was also nothing like what he expected.

Sure, he expected the sparring part, but Atlas use of the room showed him that he had underestimated the usefulness of the room far too much. Especially the woodpuppets were quite interesting, and Ethan thought about the possibilities of replicating these enhancements in the future. If Voldemort had an army of wizards, he could build an army of woodpuppets. But the thing that made him the most happy was that Atlas knew how to teach legilimency and occlumency. It naturally made him a bit worried at first, especially with his experience with Voldemort, but after learning that Atlas wouldn’t need to use legilimency on him like Snape did to Harry, he was relieved. That was until Atlas confirmed that it really wasn’t necessary to use your wand to use legilimency even if one wasn’t a master in the art. It made him worry a little that Atlas, Snape, Dumbledore, or even some other wizards knew about his secret, but he suppressed that worry as he knew he couldn’t change anything now.

Instead, he focused on something different. With his current skillset, he could get a reasonable high proficiency in occlumency in a short time, but with his recent experiences, he got a little paranoid and wanted to get the occlumency skill to be really sure that no one was able to play with his mind ever again. The problem was that he had several open T2 skillslots and enough skills at a reasonably high level to tier them up. If he got the occlumency skill right now, he wouldn’t want to use the random skill upgrade, as he feared that he would accidentally upgrade his occlumency skill before it was reasonably high. So he needed to contemplate upgrading his skills before taking new ones.

After contemplating for a little longer, he decided that he wanted the occlumency skill as soon as possible. The driving factor was that he would have classes with Quirrell the next day and didn’t want to risk anything. So he started to invest his skillpoints with a little frustration, as he was sure he could have leveled most of his skills easily with his headstart skills.

That skill sounded good, but he wasn’t sure if it would reduce the time he would need to sleep or if it was just a way to recover more quickly. But he was sure he would be able to test that easily, as even the 21% increase should be easily noticeable. If he reached level 33 in the skill and the boost increased to over 100%, he would probably only need to sleep half the time. The other change in the skill he noticed was that its level-up requirements changed from hours he needed to sleep to times he needed to fall asleep. Considering that he would probably need much less sleep than before, it was a positive change for him. Still, the skill was bound to level slowly, even if he started to include powernaps in his regular schedule.

Not waiting any longer he bought the next skill up.

That upgrade was in line with what he had expected. When the skill leveled up a little more, he was sure that if he cast it on someone, they would die from thirst before the spell wore off. Naturally, the skill was easily lifted by a simple countercharm, but that was what he wanted from the spell.

Ethan cursed a little. He didn’t want to upgrade his thinking skill so soon. At first, he thought that the skill had been a bit of a waste, but after leveling it to level 103 and getting a 10,3% boost to his thought speed, he realized how great the impact the skill could have was. The best part of the skill was that it enhanced all other skills as well. As it was too late for regret now, he continued what he was doing.

That skill was actually quite insane. At least combined with his herbology skill. From his other skills, he had learned that skills, with the exception of his headstart skill, stacked multiplicative. So while his herbology skill increased the regular growth by six times, that would increase to 8 times just with level 7 of his harvesting skill. Naturally, that only worked if he had harvested the plant once. He didn’t know how it worked exactly for plants he would uproot completely, but even if it just worked for plants he could harvest multiple times, it was an insane boost. It almost made him take the planting and the fertilizing skill to stack these types of skills to instantly grow the most expensive ingredients, but he refrained from doing so. But it still made him hesitate. If his herbology skill leveled a few times more, that boost could become even more incredible, so he didn’t want it to tier up just yet.

He gnashed his teeth as he paid a full 100 points to upgrade his experimenting skill. It was the last of the skills that didn’t have that insane stacking potential.

The skill was developing in the direction he wanted it to go. But he also knew that the skill was misleading at times. Even if his skill increased the accuracy of his predictions, the true result might still be different from his prediction if he didn’t consider all variables. It was something he had already realized before going to Hogwarts. The skill only worked with the information he had or wanted to use, and school did a poor job by teaching him that friction and the like could be ignored in many cases. Still, the skill would work wonderfully if he managed to decrease the number of unknown variables as much as possible.

He stared at the rest of his skills.

His potion skills synergized so well with each other, and he could probably cure malaria with a simple disinfectant by now. With the potential these two skills had together, he thought it wouldn’t be worth it to upgrade the skills now. Especially if the upgrade was probably just an increase in brewing speed. With how things were developing, he would be a walking potion factory in a few years, with a whole greenhouse in his bag, and the ingredients would transform into potions within seconds after he touched them.

So it was time to choose the skills he needed to fight against Voldemort. The first pick was naturally occlumency.

Not the protection he hoped to get, but at least he would know if someone was searching his mind now. He contemplated what kind of skills he would need to fight Voldemort. He thought about the killing curse but dismissed the spell. He would need to cast the spell to train the skill, so it wasn’t really something he could or wanted to do on a regular basis.

He contemplated taking the general magic skill, but he decided against it. With how his Headstart skill was developing, he knew that it was only a matter of time until he could reliably level skills past two or three hundred, and he wanted to wait till then to not have another case like with his thinking skill.

The other thought was legilimancy but he didn’t know if he could get it high enough to be useful till then, especially because the first tier only increased the stealth factor of the skill.

He needed something more practical that, at the same time, was easily trainable. He stared at the skill of torture resistance for some time but dismissed it. It was just his trauma speaking to him. Funnily enough, he had gotten the skill even before meeting Voldemort. Apparently, having to sit in a classroom at 40°C during the summer counted towards that. Sure, Voldemort had added a few nasty specifications for the skill, but he ignored them as well. He spent a few hours scrolling past his skills. The list had become far too extensive for him to read everything in detail, but a few interesting things still popped up, even if he thought they weren’t as useful to him right now. Things like a workout skill that increased his physical growth would have been something he would have killed for in his past life, but now he was decently in shape, and with magic, it just wasn’t that difficult to get into shape, so he dismissed it. The other skill he saw that interested him was the kissing skill. It was like a proof to him that he and Amy, a girl that would have been so far out of his league in his previous life, were in a relationship, and he even considered taking the skill to make the whole experience more pleasurable for them, but he knew that he should probably focus on surviving more for now.

In the end he could only decide on four more skills.

Combat intuition increased his overall awareness during combat. His positioning, his surroundings, the strength differences, and the dangers of certain actions. It just gave a single 1% increase, but it affected so many different aspects that he thought it was worth it.

The next thing he took was the Aiming (spells) skill.

His T3 Protego spell had given him the idea of homing spells, and he thought that this might be a good skill for combat. It naturally had potential beyond that, which was what convinced him in the end to take the skill. It also gave a 0.25% increase in precision and accuracy. It didn’t sound like a lot, but he had already assumed that things that normally shouldn’t go over 100% had a lower increase. His marathon skill was the perfect example of that. Theoretically, he would have been able to level the skill to a level where he would have recovered stamina by running around.

The next skill he took was the skill Magical Shielding. Unlike his Protego skill this one affected all types of magical shields. That included enchanted shields or clothes as well as the protego skill. He wasn’t sure if his protego skill could block the killing curse, but he hoped that if not, that this skill would put the shield over that edge. The increase of 3% per level was also not to be underestimated, especially because it should work multiplicatively with the protego T2 skill. Sadly, the skill didn’t buff his occlumency further, as occlumency technically wasn't a magical shield.

The second last skill was the skill tracking. He knew that they would be unable to kill Voldemort, but he hoped that he could use the skill to eventually find the Horcruxes with it. As this was still more of a longtime goal, he chose a more general option for it, even though he had the option to take the skill Tracking (Voldemort). He had the faint hope that the skill would help him in the future if it came to finding rare ingredients, specific people, or beasts, and he didn’t want to give up a skillslot just to find Voldemort with no use beyond that. The skill improved his ability to detect trails his target left behind. These trails were more than just footprints. He tested the skill on Amy and realized that the scent of her perfume got a little more noticeable if he concentrated on it, and he was sure that he would be able to find her just based on this after the skill got a few more levels.

The last skill, Magical Combat in Hogwarts, was a skill he only expected to get to T2 before deleting it.

The skill was similar to his combat intuition skill, but it was affecting even more aspects. It strengthened his offensive and defensive spells, increased his ability to dodge, and much more. Or at least he hoped that because the skill description just said that it would increase all aspects of magical combat as long as he was in Hogwarts by 3,5% per skill level. He could have taken the more general skill, but he needed the faster growth as the final fight couldn’t be that far away anymore.

He still had one skillslot left. His plan for that was simple. The moment he clashed with Voldemort, he would take a skill that improved his fighting, specifically against Voldemort. He was a bit frustrated that he hadn’t gotten a skill in that direction already, but apparently what he had done till now wasn’t enough.

With his new skills, he felt much safer than a few minutes ago, and his worry about meeting Quirrell during their next lesson lessened quite a lot.

Sergeandgreen

I hope you liked the chapter. I decided to not describe a detailed date, even though I like writing these kinds of things, as I thought it would not really be interesting for you to read about the romance of a side character that we know will die.

Spoiler: The next hero won't have a system. Writing these things sucks, even thought I like reading stories with a system. This will probably be the last status page you will see from Ethan, as he doesn't have the time to significantly change anything now.