A/N: Not much happened this chapter, a lot of it was to hint how Harry's magic had advanced, except Harry's little revenge on the weasel, the Albino git and the dungeon bat.
Hope you enjoy this one as much as I did writing it. Cheers!
Thank you, texan-muggle for editing my work.
Legend
"Speech" | Thoughts | "Mind Communication" | §Parseltongue§ | [Speech in Foreign Language] | Incantations | Written Words
Scene 3 – Mind Arts
Black Lake, Hogwarts Castle's grounds
10th May, 1993
After visiting Hermione, Harry felt much lighter; he had held that in for nearly four centuries. Despite how much his later lovers had tried, Harry could never talk about her, until today. He could feel hope in his soul again.
Taking down the wards, Harry snuck out of the Hospital Wing, and pondered his next step. Repairing his own Occlumency was definitely the top priority, especially since with Dumbledore's charm in place stunting his mind, he couldn't think properly. It was seven o'clock already, so once-again-growing boy decided to take a trip to the kitchen to get some food, and find a secluded place outside the Castle to work on his Mind Magic for a couple of hours, before heading to potions. He was too paranoid right then to go to the Room of Requirement; it was one room he didn't want the manipulative old bastard know about.
Twenty minutes later, he was alone facing the lake, a tree blocking him from prying eyes from the Castle. To say Harry Potter was a master at Mind Arts was like saying Dumbledore knew magic; true, but grossly understating.
Flashback
Upon receiving the results of his medical check-up, Croaker immediately ordered the Healers to remove his mind blocks and administer the strongest flushing potion to remove any residual potions. Croaker then told him that he couldn't risk removing the bindings on his magical core, without having him master Occlumency first. With the ongoing war, there wasn't much time to teach him, and the time compression chamber in the department was still recharging.
Harry nodded, glad someone was upfront to him, and then an idea came to him. He asked Croaker if they could remove the bindings a layer at a time, and use the magical backlash to charge the time compression chamber.
Croaker was very agreeable, and told him they even had crystals that acted like magical batteries; they were usually placed close to the ley lines to collect magic for emergency use, but they had used up all of them. So Croaker took him to a sealed ritual room with twenty crystals in it; each could power the time compression chamber for a day.
After dissolving three layers of bindings, all twenty of the crystals were fully charged. They decided to go into the chamber for ten days; each real day outside was a year inside.
Given the state of war, Croaker brought five other new recruits of the Battle Unit to train and a Healer for Harry and the team in the time compression chamber. During those ten years, the Healer worked extensively on Harry, and at the same time, Harry and the team trained under a foreign Battle Mage who had been retired for decades before being called in as a trainer for the newly formed Unit. During his spare time, the Head of the Department of Mysteries taught Harry one-on-one on mastering Mind Arts.
Flashback Ends
Croaker had taught him all he knew about Mind Arts, which was as good as, if not better than Dumbledore's capability in Mind Magic, but that was only the start of Harry's journey of learning Mind Arts.
Over his decades to centuries of travelling, other than a small number of very well hidden magical communities, Harry had visited almost all other magical communities in every corner of the Earth. He had studied with all magical beings: humans from all culture backgrounds, Veelas, Goblins, House-Elves, Centaurs, Vampires, Merpeople, he even found the rumoured-to-be-extinct High-Elves, and that was not to mention the Great Dragons.
Harry didn't consider Werewolves as a separate group, as he thought of them as magical humans with a disease, a disease with a cure Harry had a major role in developing.
The studious wizard had learned all types of magic from each of these groups, but he had always focused more on Mind Magic and Battle Magic. Magic is magic; however, each species or culture had a different way of using magic, including their use of Mind Arts.
For instance, Goblins would always protect their client's privacy as well as protecting their ward schemes; thus they all had almost impenetrable defences, whereas House-Elves were more adapted at reading minds to anticipate their master's wishes. Veelas on the other hand, were much better at misdirection; you would never know what you glimpsed from their minds was real or not.
For Harry, he had took the best from everything he had learned, mixed with what muggles had understood about the brain and computers, which by 2098, were quite advanced, and he built his Mind World from all these together.
As he dived into his Mind World, dropping into his control room, the time-traveller found himself to be in his older form again. He first checked on his Memory Palace, which took the shape of Ravenclaw's Castle. No living beings other than him had seen it in more than eight centuries.
Harry then Shifted to the location where he stored a backup of his Mind World, and unlocked the security vault using a Parseltongue password. Once inside he had to find the correct locker, unlocking it using a conjured key; he then took out a copy of the disk, locked up everything again, and Shifted back to the control room.
The disk contained the schematics of the latest version of his Mind World before he returned to the past. Using a biometric palm scanner to activate the master control, he loaded the disk, and using a 256-bit encryption key he had memorised, Harry started the decryption process. As there were three layers of encryption, it took two hours in his mind to finish the decryption process; however, due to his magical power, and years of practicing Mind Arts, in reality, only ten minutes had passed. It would only get faster when his magical core was unbound.
He then tasked the master control to rebuild his Mind World using the schematics on the disk, and to run diagnostics to find out what destroyed his Mind World during his rebirth. Lastly, Harry activated the heads-up display (HUD), so he would be able to watch the rebuilding process as well as access his Mind World when he came out of his meditation.
The rest of the processes were all automatic, but Harry knew time barely passed on the outside, as the newly rebuilt world clock displays just came online in his control room. Harry had the expression of a kid at Christmas, as his control room looked more and more like a control centre, and one by one, his Artificial Intelligence (AIs) came back online. Finally, the Control Centre had finished rebuilding, and all his AIs went through diagnostics and started working furiously to rebuild the rest of his Mind World.
Immediately, one of the AIs detected the stunt placed by the MOB, a term Harry started to refer the manipulative old bastard Dumbledore as; the stunt was disintegrated very quickly, and due to this, everything else happened even faster than before.
Starting from the entrance of his Mind World, the master Occlumens had a replica of Hogwarts Castle as well as its surrounding grounds, including the Forbidden Forest and Hogsmeade. This castle was designed to lure and trap enemies; it looked just like the welcoming Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry to put intruders into a false sense of security, as well as letting the intruder assume the Castle was protecting his memories. Where in fact, all memories contained in Hogwarts Castle were either fake or very painful.
The intruder would always arrive at the Hogsmeade station; as soon as the intruder walked past an invisible ward line, all previously inactive and disillusioned defences would become visible and start attacking the intruder. The defences included many dangerous species of magical beasts, including basilisks. From above, there were also Apache attack helicopters. The intruder would be forced into the castle, if he managed to stay alive that long, and locked in. Harry would then be able to control the castle to direct wherever he wanted the intruder to go, experience whichever memory he wished the enemy to experience, and only Harry could personally escort the intruder out. Of course, Harry would be able to memory-charm the intruder before he left, or he could lock the intruder's memory so as to not be able to tell anyone else of the incident.
Harry would often exploit the intruder's state of panic, and sneak a Trojan horse into their minds, which would slowly compile information in the intruder's mind in small data packs, without being noticed. The data pack would then be placed on the surface thoughts of the intruder's mind as random numbers, allowing Harry to download information slowly even after the intruder was escorted out of his Mind World, just by scanning their surface thoughts. Once all information was downloaded, the Trojan horse would constantly build update packs for any new information.
Perhaps, what was even more ingenious or sinister, depending on how you looked at it, was the Trojan horse within the Trojan horse; the second Trojan horse serving to corrode one's mind, but dormant unless an activation phrase was whispered by Harry, and heard by the intruder. Of course, this Trojan horse would more likely be discovered by skilled Occlumens and thus destroyed, but the damage would have already been done. Harry was going to make one each specifically for Dumbledore and Snape, making sure they suffered as much as possible.
His false memories also served another purpose; with a full set of fake memories in Hogwarts Castle, Harry could overcome the most potent truth potion, by simply temporarily setting his mind to recognize the memories in Hogwarts Castle as real memories. The AIs would also be able to create detailed memories to put in Hogwarts on-the-go as he was being questioned.
His real memories, though, were all placed in the replica of Ravenclaw Castle; it also contained all the valuable knowledge he'd gathered during his four centuries of life in the other timeline. Ravenclaw Castle also served as his central command, and was placed on the far side of the moon, where no one would ever look. The castle itself was disillusioned, with an invisibility cloak covering it; it had many active defences: machine guns, grenade launchers, land mines, and twelve Hungarian Horntails patrolling around the structure. The moon itself had multiple disillusioned drones circling it, ready to attack anything getting close.
Although Harry himself could drop straight into the central command, for everyone else there was only one viable safe entrance, through a paired, upgraded version of the Vanishing Cabinets, redesigned by himself during the 2060s for the Department of Mysteries, commercially called Potter's Portals. The pair in his Mind World had top-of-the-line biometric security measures, top-of-the-line for 2098: voice recognition, again, a Parseltongue password; biometric palm scanner, keyed to his left hand; and retinal scanner, keyed to both of his eyes, with a blinking pattern in Morse code as the last security measure.
One portal was placed just outside the entrance hallway of the Ravenclaw Castle, with a team of eight AIs armed with assault rifles guarding it; its sister portal was placed in the deepest part of Hogwarts Castle, in Salazar Slytherin's library located in the Chamber of Secrets. Tommy-boy had never found the library, as he had been deemed unworthy of the knowledge in it. The Chamber had a King and a Queen Basilisk; both would only answer to Harry's command, instead of any Parseltongue.
Lastly, a copy of all the information stored in Ravenclaw Castle was placed in a replica of Potter Manor in Wales, which was placed in one of the thousands of stars in the sky. Only Harry knew which star it was on; however, he designed it so even he couldn't access that star. Once built, everything in Potter Manor would run remotely by a pair of AIs; one AI was to collect every piece of new data in Ravenclaw Castle, authenticate the data and copy it in its encrypted state to be placed behind layers of security in Potter Manor, while the other AI was designated with a single job to look for discrepancies in Ravenclaw Castle, by checking the data in it against those stored in Potter Manor; this would counter any form of memory charms. The defence system around Potter Manor was similar to that around Ravenclaw Castle, except the use of battle spaceships instead of drones.
A lot of Mind Arts is about will, and one's will could be strengthened by practicing Mind Magic; of course Harry Potter had one of the strongest wills naturally, being able to fight off an Imperius Curse on his first try when he was 14 showed that. However he had kept on strengthening it; he had security measures that would immediately alert him if someone was to try to control him in any way, Imperius Curse, Compulsion Charms, mind altering potions and repelling wards or notice-me-not Charms.
Harry now had the strength to fight all these off the moment he was made aware of any attempt, and he could decide the manner in which he fought off the attempts. It didn't really matter most of the times, but if someone was casting Compulsion Charms or Imperius Curses on him, they would be in a world of pain. If the master Occlumens chose to, the offender's will would be directed to a long, thin room. The room used an upgraded version of the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System, but instead of aircraft, the system would launch a block of metal, weighing two tonnes, accelerated for two miles, straight at the offender's mind. Whoever tried it would most likely spend months in St. Mungo's with the Mind Healers.
Harry Potter knew he had the best defended mind in history, but he wasn't arrogant enough to assume no one else would ever delve into Mind Arts as much as he did, so he prepared contingencies for when the opponent had better strategies, trying to sneak into his Mind World. Everything in his Mind World was constantly scanned for malicious objects; if something was found and couldn't be dealt with, a master reset could be used to destroy and rebuild his Mind World with all his memories intact.
Of course, defending his mind was only one of the many functions of his Mind World; he had built an ecosystem to allow all his animagus spirits to live in freedom. The multi-animagus also benefited from their roaming freely in their natural habitat, as he could learn how they moved; granted, Harry still needed to train in those forms in the physical world, but it was better than nothing.
The library in Ravenclaw Castle, as well as Potter Manor contained thousands of tomes. The well-travelled mage had used his perfect recall developed from his Mind Magic and read every single book he could get his hands on; he reasoned that he felt closer to Hermione that way. But he had not processed everything he read; there were many books Harry had simply copied to his mind by speed-reading through them. Therefore, he or his AIs could use the study room attached to the library to do research.
However, despite how much greater control Mind Arts had helped with his magic, as a security measure, Harry could not practice magic unknown in his Mind World, so he had to practice new spells and playing around with runes in the real world. However, the duelling room in his Mind World was a great place to develop spell chains, and duelling strategies nonetheless.
Harry watched as the last piece of his Mind World finally fell into place, and discovered he had twenty minutes to get to Potions. So, he came out of his meditation, and smiled as he saw his HUD up and running, reporting the diagnostic scans and displaying any information he had on everything he set his eyes on.
Potions Classroom, Hogwarts Castle
10th May, 1993
To keep up with appearances, Harry ran back to Gryffindor Tower, showered and changed quickly, got his books and arrived for Potions class with a minute to spare. Harry was giddy with anticipation, hoping Snivellus would perform Legilimency on him.
Harry was still not sure where Snape's allegiance lay, so he was not sure what he would do to Snape yet. Oh well, he would find out soon, when he finished downloading every scrap of Snape's memories. Harry had an inkling that Snape only cared about Snape; in the meanwhile, he would suffer for intentionally driving the existing wedge between Slytherin and the rest of the school, weakening Magical Britain by being the worst Potions professor in history and allowing Slytherin girls to be raped in their common room when the Dark Lord had returned.
Once sat down, Harry had another problem; he had to use all his Occlumency training to not obliterate the red-headed weasel, as even his usually green-tinted HUD was flashing red. Quickly, he decided to send a Legilimency probe to direct the weasel to sit somewhere else far away from him, preferably next to the albino git.
The weasel did just that, drawing any lingering attention on Harry away from him. The anticipation of the upcoming stupidity posturing contest finally managed to calm the angry wizard down enough to allow him to plan what to do about the weasel. Ronald may not have killed Hermione yet, but he had hurt her, insulted her, not to mention knowingly set her up to die on his first year's Halloween; that satisfied Harry's new sense of justice, allowing him to plan the weasel's punishment.
Meanwhile, the rest of the class watched the weasel like he had grown two heads. Malfoy, the person who nearly started the Fourth Wizarding War in the future, if it were not for Astoria's warning, was seething and managed a sneer at Weasley. "What are you doing here, Weasel? Did Scarhead finally drop you like a piece of filth? I can't say I am surprised, but these seats are reserved for the elites, and you, weasel, are definitely not one of the elites."
Harry was quite impressed by the ferret for once; he actually managed to insult both of them. Weasley's face went as red as his hair, but more than anything, he was confused as to why he came to sit here in the first place, but he just knew he had to sit here.
Not knowing how to counter Malfoy's insults, Ronald took a swing at him. And that was when chaos broke out. Malfoy's two bookends immediately went to help their leader; Seamus and Dean, being the hormonal Gryffindor males they were, didn't need much more persuasion. Neville, seeing Harry didn't move to help Weasley, was surprised by Harry's lack of reaction, but stayed put.
Unfortunately for the Gryffindors, Theodore Nott joined the fight, not wanting to waste a chance to have a shot at the weasel badmouthing Slytherins at every turn; Blaise Zabini thought it might be fun and also joined the fight. Even Millicent Bulstrode was revelling in the opportunity to make some use of her bulkier build.
At the side, both Pansy and Lavender were cheering on their respective houses, while Parvati was watching everything with fascination so she could gossip to others. Most other girls just got as far away from the fight as possible, not wanting to get involved in the fight, especially in Snape's classroom.
Other than Neville and Harry, only Tracey Davis and Daphne Greengrass stayed put, not moving an inch. Tracey watched everything with unveiled interest, wondering how this would affect her and Daphne in the house of snakes; Daphne kept up her Ice Queen persona, but her icy blue eyes absorbed everything, especially the tiny smirk shining through Potter's emerald-green eyes.
It was this scene the dungeon bat had found in his classroom. He was very surprised Potter was not moving to help the red-headed weasel, but masked his reaction. Five minutes later, with a few curses, Snape finally managed to break up the fight. Weasley was hurt the worst, while Malfoy wasn't much better off due to Weasley's size; both of them were sent to the Hospital Wing. The rest of the 'fighters' got away with a couple of bruises; Seamus and Dean both had muggle backgrounds, and were fitter and quicker than the Slytherin pure-bloods, so weren't hurt much from being outnumbered.
Once the class had settled down, Snape, as always, jumped to the conclusion that everything was Potter's fault, and he would be right this time.
"POTTER!"
"Yes, Professor," replied Harry calmly.
Seeing Potter didn't react, only pissed Snape off more. "A hundred points for starting a fight!"
Potter just looked back at Snape in the eyes, and said innocently. "But I was nowhere near the fight, Professor."
Snape was ecstatic inside when Potter looked him in the eye; he barely heard what Potter said, and immediately dived into the brat's mind. What he found was not what he expected, how did the brat develop a fully formed mindscape? Snape, in his infinite arrogance, decided the brat couldn't possibly build any adequate defences to stop him. So he quickly got out of Hogsmeade train station, and headed towards the castle, where he assumed all the brat's memories resided. He only realised his mistake when he crossed the invisible ward line; too little, too late.
Harry watched in fascination as Snape ran as fast as possible with a dozen Acromantulas chasing him; that was when his helicopters started to open fire. He made sure none of the bullets actually hit, but landed close enough to make Snivellus wet himself, and in the real world, he did.
In that moment of panic, the master Occlumens planted his Trojan horse, obliviated him and roughly threw the intruder out of his Mind World. Harry didn't want to do too much to draw Dumbledore's attention yet, plus he needed Snape functional to brew the Restorative Draught to revive Hermione.
In the outside world, only seconds had passed; the class was startled when Snape fell back on the ground without warning. It was then someone noticed that the potions master had wet himself. Snape, seething with rage and embarrassment, yet, not sure what had happened, except that it was Potter's fault, immediately dismissed the class. The news of Snape wetting himself during Potions had spread throughout the castle before the end of lunch that day.
A/N: Thank you for reading that, if you didn't enjoy the details about Harry's Mind World, I hope you at least enjoyed Harry's little punishment for Weasley, Malfoy and Snape.
Review Response: Thank you all so much for reading and reviewing my previous scenes, I really appreciate all your kind words. Like I said, I am happy to receive comments, suggestions, and 'helpful' criticisms.
It does tick me off when someone berates me for making major mistakes, when I haven't. True, some of the plots might be confusing at the start, and I am happy to explain if there is something you are not sure about. But don't start accusing me when there was a clear explanation already posted, within the same chapter no less. For example, it was confusing initially in the prologue where I wrote Harry had lived for over four centuries when it was only 2098, but I also wrote later on in the chapter, Harry had used a timer turner and spent centuries in the past. Clearly it wasn't a mistake!
Nonetheless, thank you for those who left useful critisms that would help me improve my story, I appreciate and welcome those comments, and please feel free to let me know if there is anything else I could do to make my story better.
But, if you just want to say my story is shit without saying why, kindly piss off.
Acknowledgement: Some elements of my Mind World were inspired by Paladeus's Death's Pride (4321881), Pyrgus's Lucky Harry (6463116), Rohata's Enlightenment (3902850) and another story I couldn't remember the name of.