Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto or Harry Potter, or any of the characters from these universes. I am making no money off of this fanfiction.
A/N: Thank you once again to those who reviewed.
Chapter 7: To Hogwarts
When Harry had first learned that all of the children attending Hogwarts went directly to King's Cross Station in London, then took a train to Hogwarts, he had been incredulous. Even for those who lived in London, it was an agonizingly inconvenient process, given the existence of multiple nearly instantaneous methods of magical travel.
Add in those students who lived closer to Hogwarts than London, and it was even worse. In fact, as the only fully magical village, there would on average be more students coming from Hogsmeade itself than from any other single location in Britain. So those students would travel from Hogsmeade to London, then spend most of the day travelling by train all the way back to end up where they left that morning.
But after actually taking the train, Harry began to understand how such a seemingly insane tradition came into being. It was the perfect situation to allow the new students to bond. Create the beginnings of what would be important friendships for years, hopefully anyway. Or to renew such friendships for returning students, he supposed.
So as the train finally came to a stop in Hogsmeade Village, long after dark, Harry was still laughing with his new friends as they wandered out of the train and towards Hogwarts. All of them could do with some maturing in various ways, but that was to be expected, given their ages. Harry was just trying to live a real childhood, something he never had as Naruto, so he tried his best to not let Hermione's pushiness, Neville's excessive shyness, or Ron's overly brash and occasionally abrasive manner bother him, but it was a work in progress.
"Firs' years! Firs' years over here! All right there, Harry?" Hagrid's booming voice interrupted his thoughts.
Harry grinned and dragged his new friends over towards the huge man. "Hey Hagrid! Doing well, how are you? Oh, this is Hermione, Ron, and Neville. They're first years like me."
Each of them greeted the man with various levels of wide-eyed shock. Hagrid quickly nodded towards them, then said, "Good tah meet all of yeh. Have to talk later though. For now jus' follow me down to the lake." He then raised his already naturally loud voice to its previous truly booming level as he yelled out once more time, "All right. Firs' years, follow me. Come on firs' years."
He led the group of first years away from the rest of the students and down a fairly steeply sloping path from the small train platform with only Hagrid's tiny lantern to light the way. Or at least it seemed tiny in the man's huge hand, and didn't supply nearly enough light for most of the children to see the rocky ground. Of course Harry could see fine in anything short of absolute darkness, but he did have to catch the others a few times - especially Neville, who was a little on the clumsy side.
But that wasn't what he was putting most of his attention to. No, it was the two men under some kind of invisibility spell hiding in the bushes off to the side of the path. Though actually, as they got closer, Harry could tell that it wasn't really an invisibility spell directly on the men, but rather that they were under some kind of object with the invisibility spell on it. A cloak, most likely, from what Harry could tell about the origins of the magic he could see with his Sharingan.
But what concerned him even more than two men apparently in hiding for a group of small children was that they started sending some kind of subtle spell at each of the first years as they went past. They had ignored Hagrid though, which seemed to indicate it wasn't immediately harmful magic, at least. If they were going for an outright attack, they certainly would have targeted the obvious threat of Hagrid first. Instead they were just going for the children. Strange.
So Harry just watched as several of the students ahead of him were hit. They didn't seem to notice anything, or exhibit any reaction at all to whatever the spell was. And Harry couldn't tell what it was doing, either. It was far too complicated for Harry's limited knowledge of magic. If he had to guess, he would say this was the Trace spell for tracking underaged magic he had read was placed on all eleven year olds before they started learning magic. But one thing he did know was that regardless of what it did, he wasn't going to allow it to take hold of him.
Because whatever it did, it was connecting directly with each of the student's chakra coils. Or 'magical core', as they called it now. He had no idea why it would do that, but he had seen it happen once before. To himself, to be precise. At some point before his souls had joined, some sort of monstrously complex magical spell had established itself, linking directly into his chakra coils. To this day, he had no idea what the thing was or what it did, but it was probably over one hundred times as complicated and powerful as whatever those two men were casting.
So of course Harry had moved it. He had wanted to destroy it outright, but he had been pretty sure that at least part of the spell included some sort of link to some other spell elsewhere. So damaging the spell might have informed someone that something was wrong. So instead he just moved it over into his cousin Dudley. Of course Dudley's chakra coils were an incredibly pathetic thing, but that didn't seem to matter. The spell didn't actually draw any magic, or at least not in its standard passive state. It just needed to be connected to the chakra coils.
And Dudley's coils worked for that, pathetic barely there things or not. Based on reading his introduction to magic book, he was pretty sure Dudley qualified as what they called a Squib, as did Aunt Petunia. Unlike most people, they did have excess spiritual energy...just not enough to actually power even the weakest of spells.
The moving of the spell had been ridiculously difficult though. It had taken him six months to figure out how, carefully pry the thing away from where it was partially merged with his chakra coils, and gently shift the thing into Dudley. He refused to go through that again. Granted, it would be significantly faster with this new spell, given his experience and this one's lesser complexity. But it still wasn't something he wanted to go through again, so he just tore the spell apart with his chakra as it approached him, and did the same for those aimed at Hermione, Ron, and Neville while he was at it.
The people hiding didn't seem to notice anything was wrong, so he just gave a tiny shrug and continued down the path to where a group of small boats were tied up at the edge of a large lake. But there were much more impressive things to see than the boats, because Hogwarts itself came into view just as they came around the final bend in the path.
Harry gasped along with everyone else as they fell silent and stared on wonder. Though he would guess that his gasp was for a very different reason. The architecture, landscaping, and view of the castle were nothing particularly spectacular to Harry. He had seen plenty of sights that equaled or surpassed Hogwarts in that regard. He could probably make its equal himself in a day or so between a lot of clones and even more earth manipulation.
No, what shocked Harry was the amount of Natural Energy running through the area around Hogwarts, and in fact through the castle itself. Mount Myoboku was the only place he had ever seen with an equal level of Natural Energy. Even from where Harry was standing, he could tell that the levels were elevated beyond the normal amounts, but the amounts running through the castle itself were truly incredible.
But Harry forced himself to shake off his awe after a few moments as he turned to Ron, having realized the red-headed boy said something while he was distracted. "What was that Ron?"
"Oh, I said it was pretty incredible, isn't it mate?" Ron responded.
Harry just nodded as he stared for a few more seconds. This would be something he would have to look into more carefully. That level of Natural Energy had to be important in some way, and might make some of Harry's projects easier as well. The most important of which would be making another attempt to contact the Toads from here. His earlier attempts over the years since his souls joined had all been met with total failure, and he had no idea why. Hopefully he would have greater success from an area of such rich Natural Energy.
He could consider that and other possible uses for this much Natural Energy later though. "Yeah, it's pretty amazing," he answered Ron. "Anyway, come on. Let's grab a boat."
"No more'n four to a boat." Hagrid yelled out as the group slowly approached the waiting boats. Harry quickly claimed one of them and helped the other three carefully climb in without tipping the thing over.
"Everyone in?" Shouted Hagrid, who had claimed one boat to himself, and even then almost dropped the edge below the water level from his weight. Upon seeing that everyone had settled into at least reasonably safe positions, he yelled out, "All right then. Forward!"
The trip across was not particularly fast and the surface of the lake was as smooth as glass. Not to mention that the students were mostly silent as they looked up at the castle. So of course Harry was pretty bored.
Harry could fix that though. So he looked over to Malfoy's boat briefly and put a band of thickened air around one of Malfoy's bodyguards. Harry didn't even know which one, but it didn't matter as he forced the boy's arm to jerk up and blatantly shove Malfoy out of the boat and into the water.
It was probably just an excuse at this point, but he had seen Malfoy looking down his nose as he refused some girl who had asked to join Malfoy and his two goons in their boat. Was it petty? Sure. Was it immature? Almost certainly. Was it small minded? Probably, yes...He was sure he had been going somewhere with this at some point. Oh well. It was funny, which was mostly what Harry cared about.
And most of the other students seemed to agree, as most were at least snickering as Malfoy floundered in the water and yelled for help. Even Hagrid's beard seemed to twitch as if he was trying to repress his smile as he grabbed the back of Malfoy's dripping robes and dropped the soaked boy back into his boat.
"You all right there?" Hagrid asked Malfoy with at least a little genuine concern. Upon receiving a hesitant and still shocked nod, Hagrid turned to the boy who had 'shoved' him. "Gregory Goyle. I haven't seen somethin' like that in all my years take'n the firs' years cross the lake. I'll speak to your Head of House once yeh get one, yeh can believe that. Yeh do it again, an' I might jus' have yeh swim the rest of the way too."
This was enough to bring Malfoy out of his shock, and the boy began to shriek in a rather unpleasantly high-pitched voice something about how Goyle could dare to do something like that, and of course how his father would hear about it. This brought the other boy out of his own shock as he began to hesitantly try to explain that he hasn't meant to, or something along those lines. It was mostly lost in Malfoy's much angrier and shriller diatribe, and Harry wasn't really paying attention to their words anyway. Malfoy's limply hanging hair that was once so carefully coifed and equally soaked expensive silk robes were just too amusing.
After landing the boats and walking up a path to Hogwarts, Hagrid knocked on a very solid wooden door and handed off the first years to a very stern looking woman who was introduced as Professor McGonagall. McGonagall then escorted them all into the huge entrance hall and gave a welcome to Hogwarts along with a spectacularly uninformative introduction to the Sorting and the Houses which effectively did nothing more than name the Houses. Her suggestion that they 'smarten themselves up' while staring at Malfoy's imitation of a soaked cat was pretty funny though.
She then left the group of first years alone in the entrance hall as she entered through the door opposite the one the group had entered the castle through. A few of the students started to nervously chatter among themselves, mostly over conjecture about what the Sorting Ceremony would be. Harry wasn't concerned though, so he decided to use this time to see more of the castle. Not waiting any longer, he switched his eyes from their current Sharingan to the Byakugan.
The Byakugan was one of the three eye based bloodlines he had taken during his life as Naruto, and the last he had obtained. It had been the only one of the three he had gotten after the Fourth Great Shinobi World War, in fact. Hiashi Hyuuga really should have known better than to try and organize an assassination attempt against him though. After Hiashi had stepped down in favor of his daughter Hinata taking over as the clan head of the Hyuuga, he and the rest of the Hyuuga elders had objected rather strongly against Hinata abolishing the Caged Bird Seal on the Branch family of the Hyuuga.
Of course neither he nor Hinata particularly cared what that group of useless old men thought, so they had gone ahead with it. Naruto had actually empathized with Hiashi's position to some extent, as the rest of the elders had been in favor of assassinating Hinata rather than him. Hiashi had pushed for Naruto's death as the only living sealmaster skilled enough to remove the Caged Bird Seal rather than trying to kill Hinata, which Naruto appreciated. Still, he couldn't let the attempted assassination of their own Hokage go, so he had to execute all of the elders, including using his bloodline theft seal to take the strongest of the Elder's Byakugans - that of Hiashi Hyuuga.
Though as much as him having to execute Hinata's father had bothered him at the time, he did have to admit that there being no surviving Hyuuga elders had greatly simplified her job of running and modernizing the Hyuuga clan.
He sometimes debated if he should have bothered with obtaining the Byakugan though. The Byakugan granted the ability to see with 360 degree vision, see through solid objects, and see long distances - up to about ten miles for him, though he had never approached the mastery Hinata had eventually achieved with the Byakugan. All of these things were useful, but rarely more useful than the abilities of either the Sharingan or the Rinnegan, so he rarely activated this particular eye.
But he did now, and he immediately regretted it.
Whoever had built Hogwarts was as insane as they were brilliant. The spatial distortion which had gone into the building was beyond incredible. Everywhere the space of rooms and hallways had been expanded or otherwise distorted, leaving something that made an Escher painting seem downright childish. Space overlapped and passed through itself in ways that should have been impossible. Straight hallways that should have crossed each other instead passed above or below each other. Full sized rooms filled the space within a single wall or even the same space as other rooms. Things impossible in three dimensions layered on top of each other in impossible ways, and all of this his Byakugan eyes tried to take in and make sense of in the span of a single second.
Worse, he had switched to them with a fair amount of chakra flowing to his eyes, which meant he saw everything around him for miles all at once, rather than a much smaller few hundred feet with the minimum chakra needed to activate the eyes. This normally wasn't much of a problem. He had trained himself to be able to take in enormous amounts of visual information extremely quickly, but this was just too much. As his eyes tried to sort out what he was seeing, a spike of agony was sent straight into his brain as Harry desperately cut off all chakra flow to his eyes before he passed out.
He was hardly surprised to find himself on the floor as he slowly regained his bearings. The blood dripping from his eyes as was a bit of a shock though. He knew that the Sharingan could produce that bleeding from the eyes effect when they were pushed beyond their capacity, but it had never happened with the Byakugan that he was aware of. The various screams and yells of the surrounding children probably should have been expected too, though with his sudden migraine, they were not particularly appreciated.
"Harry! Harry, are you all right?" He managed to discern Hermione's frantic yelling from all the others, so he slowly nodded to her and pushed himself upright off of the ground into a sitting position.
"Yeah...Sorry about that. That was weird." Harry carefully wiped away the blood running down his cheeks and pushed himself back to his feet. At the moment his eyes had taken enough damage that anyone else would have been blind, and his headache, if it could be called that, was severe enough most would be unconscious. It was hardly the first time something like that had happened to him though, even in this lifetime.
And the healing provided by his own bloodline, accelerated by the power of the Juubi flowing through him should fix that up within the next couple hours. Unfortunately, damage to his eyes always healed the slowest, given their enormous complexity between all three of his eye based bloodlines. He could regrow limbs faster than he could heal even moderate damage to his eyes. Yet another reason to sometimes regret the inclusion of the Byakugan, since it slowed that process further for relatively little gain.
But until then, the blurry shapes around him wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Anyone trained to fight blind could maneuver through a world that was merely dim and fuzzy without trouble. And his impressive levels of pain tolerance could handle the rest.
Even Hermione's shrieking, which sent enough pain lancing from his ears that he used chakra to lessen his sense of hearing for the time being. "WEIRD? You passed out and started BLEEDING OUT OF YOUR EYES. We need to get you to a doctor!"
Harry, now upright and as composed as ever, though his robes were slightly wrinkled now, gave his best rakish grin as he responded, "Yeah, but I'm fine now. Oh look. Ghosts." He pointed casually at the floating specters which had approached the group while they all stared at Harry.
This distracted people enough to take their focus away from Harry at least for the moment. There were even quite a few more screams, which surprised Harry. For at least those who grew up in the magical world, ghosts shouldn't be particularly frightening. Just from reading his introduction to the magical world book, Harry knew that Hogwarts was apparently crawling with the things, and they were not exactly uncommon in other magical areas either.
So Harry just let their words pass over him as he focused on his slowly healing eyes and clearing headache until McGonagall returned. Fortunately his vision did clear up at least enough to briefly activate his Rinnegan with the ghosts still in view, even if they were a bit blurry.
Ever since he read about ghosts, he had been quite curious. The Rinnegan could actually see souls, among other things, but he hadn't been sure if the 'ghosts' he read about in his introduction to magic book were truly the souls of the dead somehow barred from continuing onto the afterlife or something else.
It turned out after a brief examination with the Rinnegan that they were 'something else'. There were no actual souls there, just a complicated and confusing mass of magic. In fact it was rather similar to the magic he had seen on some of the moving paintings along the walls of Hogwarts, though significantly less structured.
Which probably meant it was just some sort of accidental magic spell released as a witch or wizard desperately tried to use their magic to preserve their lives when they were dying. Or possibly even just some natural effect in areas of high concentrations of Natural Energy when the excess spiritual energy witches and wizards had was released on their death.
Harry wasn't really sure, and honestly didn't care much. Either way it meant they were a magical structure which contained at least some of the memories of the person who died. What he was interested in is if he could force the effect to take place with a living person and if he could access the memories stored within a ghost. Currently his most effective method of information gathering was to literally rip someone's soul out with the power of the Rinnegan and absorb the knowledge of that person. Which killed them, obviously.
And that was unfortunate. There had been far too many times he wanted to get at someone's knowledge without actually killing them. This seemed a likely avenue to do so. It would also be a much faster and easier method of learning magic while he was at it, though that would likely make his classes at Hogwarts even more boring than they were already going to be. So he was hesitant, but still interested in at least having the option.
"Move along now," McGonagall stated in her standard humorless voice and slightly pinched expression as she once again emerged from the Great Hall, this time leaving the door behind her open. That woman was far too uptight to be the Head of Gryffindor as he had heard she was. Gryffindor was supposed to be almost as famous for its pranksters and parties as it was for its members being stupidly brave. 'Excessive sternness' was always a terrible method of dealing with such things. Especially among those brave enough to ignore the warnings of teachers.
If he got his wish to be in her house, by the time he was done with this school she would be forced to either loosen up or possibly have a psychotic break. Hopefully it would be the first. People always got annoyed when he caused psychotic breaks. He had only caused one in the past decade though, which was pretty good for him. He was sure Sakura would have been proud. Or some approximation of proud, at least. The kind of proud that came with beatings...Sometimes he wondered why he missed Sakura so much.
"The Sorting Ceremony's about to start," McGonagall continued, hopefully without any idea of what Harry was currently thinking. "Now form a line and follow me."
As they walked towards the door McGonagall had opened, Hermione guided Harry's elbow and whispered to him once again, "Are you sure you are alright Harry?"
Secretly Harry was thankful for her assistance, but he made sure he didn't put any weight on Hermione's grasp. He did stop sending chakra to his eyes to keep his Rinnegan active though. His eyes would heal more quickly if none of his eye bloodlines were activated. Not that anyone else could tell the difference behind the seals and illusions hiding anything odd about his eyes.
"Yeah," he whispered back. "I'm fine now. I can talk to the nurse later if you want, but I don't want to miss the Sorting. Besides, the nurse is probably in there with everyone else anyway. If I do collapse again, she can help me there better than me going to an empty nurse's office would. I'm really fine though."
In fact, he wouldn't be going to talk to the nurse, now or ever. He had no idea what magical detection methods magical healers had available, but there were concrete differences between his body and that of a normal eleven year old which would be almost impossible to hide. Putting an illusion over his eyes so that what was really a blood red iris with rotating black geometric shapes looked like their normal bright green was one thing. If they had a spell which actually gave a detailed analysis of the composition and makeup of his eyes, even if they were inactive, his eyes would show as incredibly different from anything normally found in a human - wizard or otherwise.
And the rest of his body wasn't a lot better. Having chakra constantly flowing through his muscles and bones caused them to be slightly denser and actually structured a little differently. Again, it wasn't something that could be detected by an external view, but any detailed medical scan would detect it. And that wasn't even considering if they could do genetic scans. With all his bloodlines and some additional mutations because of the power of the Juubi flowing through him, he wasn't even sure if he technically qualified as human.
He had once allowed Sakura to do a detailed medical analysis of him, and immediately had the thing destroyed. It had been an interesting read even for him though, and he would never be called anything remotely approaching a medical specialist. He had no desire for anyone to have similar knowledge of his physical makeup any time soon.
But Hermione hesitantly nodded and accepted Harry's explanation, with Neville seemed concerned as well. Though Ron appeared to have taken his reassurance at face value and was just looking around the room with interest. Fortunately, as they entered the Great Hall, even Hermione's attention was taken away from Harry and to the ceiling, which appeared to have been spelled to be transparent and allow a clear view of the night sky.
It was probably more interesting to the others, but for Harry, it seemed that Hogwarts was the only place on Earth that he couldn't see through the ceiling whenever he wanted. Hermione certainly seemed impressed though, as she whispered informatively, "It's bewitched to look like the sky outside. I read about it in Hogwarts, A History."
But Harry was just glad to have any distraction from his own condition as he continued to gather himself and rapidly heal. And fortunately, once in the Great Hall, what looked like an old and tattered hat provided further distraction as it sang a long and fairly ridiculous song which gave no information at all that Harry didn't already know, besides that the hat itself would apparently be doing the Sorting.
That was new, even for him though. A sentient hat whose sole purpose appeared to be to sort children once a year. Which seemed kind of pointless upon further thought. Of course he knew how to make sentient objects with seals, but he had never bothered much. There had been a brief period in which some of his children had gone a little overboard with making sentient weapons after he taught them how. His opinion that it was never worth it because the things were mostly just annoying rather than useful had eventually been proven correct though.
It would be interesting to see if this Sorting Hat was any more useful than his own attempts at sentient creations. Harry was betting no.
A/N:
Sorry this is a bit on the short side...I figured a somewhat short chapter now was better than a slightly longer chapter in a week or two. I will try and get the next chapter out a little more quickly than usual to make up for it.
For the Trace, as far as I am aware, we don't know exactly when it is placed. But we do know it happens at some point after their arrival at Hogwarts, because Hermione was using magic before school started with no consequences. Which seems stupid, actually...what muggleborn isn't going to try out a few of the spells from their new spellbooks as soon as they get them, and that is the point at which they are most likely to cause problems, what with having absolutely no training of any kind. What they should do is hold people's wands until they arrive at Hogwarts. Of course that would be expecting wizards to be logical, so I don't know why I bother.
Anyway, in this story, this is when the Trace is placed, and yes, Harry prevented the Trace from hitting him. And in case people missed it, he doesn't have his blood wards either. Being paranoid about unknown magic directly affecting him isn't always a good thing.
Please review though! I don't care if it's just a short, "I liked it," a detailed breakdown of what you think I did wrong (and hopefully can improve on), or even just informing me of a grammar or spelling mistake - I would appreciate it. But please no flames. I don't mind criticism as long as it is constructive, but a simple, "This is the worst thing ever written," or "You made Harry too powerful. You suck" will be ignored.
