WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Sorry, but I absolutely love myself! I was watching the Caleb Widogast - Sinners video and despite never watching Critical Role, I could piece together parts of his story, and so then I wanted to add a tortured character like that, experimented on and 'trained' to hunt down targets, but who broke free and now hides from the one who made them. And the events of what I just set up perfectly allows me to do that. So, once again, WOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Also, I am once again asking for your financial support . I changed how my Pat reon works, so you can donate as much or as little as you want for the same result, and it now bills on the day of subscription instead of at the start of every month, because it used to be the case that you'd pay when you subscribed, then you'd pay again at the start of the month. So if you subscribed on the 31st, you'd pay again the very next day, which is dumb.

So yeah, please, throw me some money, I beg of ye!

Chapter 12

Apparating to her familiar alleyway choice, Skye stretched as she made her way towards the Leaky Cauldron.

Tom had relayed to her that her chosen teacher had been given the time and date, and so she would be meeting him there to discuss specifics and give him a magical contract she had gotten written up by a legal firm recommended by Tom. The contract itself stipulated...well, pretty much everything honestly. He was to train her to the best of his ability in using charms, jinxes, hexes and curses in a combat situation. It went into more detail than that of course, as well as detailing how he was to be paid for every hour he spent training her, and so he had to train her for at least an hour in a session in order to be paid.

He would not be held responsible for light or moderate injuries sustained when training. Cuts, bruises and pretty much anything up to and including broken limbs were acceptable injuries when training, she could easily see herself breaking an arm or a leg during a fight. Anything more severe than that of course was not acceptable though. She doubted she would even need that clause, but it was better to put it in a contract than not do so. It didn't mean he had free reign to break her arms and legs though obviously, it was within the word of the contract but she of course had the option to cancel the contract whenever the hell she felt like it.

Entering, she glanced around to try and figure out which person it was that Tom recommended to her. A few couples and groups were there having drinks, he wouldn't be amongst them most likely. A few men who looked promising, one particularly grizzled individual eyeing her closely for a moment before returning to his drink. Guy sat at the bar with bandages over his hands...looked promising enough, but his clothes made him look like a hobo, plus his hunched-over back and the way he was nursing a drink whilst remaining hidden told her he was probably not who she was meeting.

Giving up her small little guessing game, she headed up to the bar and sat down, waiting patiently for Tom to come over. "Bell, welcome. This is Henry." He said, gesturing at who she had deemed a hobo in her head. Then again, from the look he gave her, he probably didn't think much of her either. "Now, he's a bit down-and-dusty right now in attire, but I've seen his skills first-hand. I wouldn't underestimate him in a fight against Filius is all I'm saying, regardless of his appearance." Smiling a little thinly, Skye still put down the agreed-upon fee for the work Tom had put in on her behalf.

Not a lot of work, sure, but he still had to put in effort so that was something. "Tom tells me you want to learn to fight." The man didn't ask, he just spoke outright, still hunched over and half-hidden from view. "You're looking for alternatives to Flitwick, so you either have a feud with him, want to avoid him for some reason, or want a teacher as good as him in order to try and beat him." Raising an eyebrow, Skye let him continue his thoughts. "Double."

Snorting, Skye put an elbow on the bar and leaned her head on her hand, looking towards him in amusement. "I have plenty of other people I can go to. Tom vouched for you, but don't think that means I put a lot of value into you just because Tom said so, I can just employ someone else instead. Ten galleons an hour, paid per hour of training. I had a contract written up so that we both know everythi-"

"No contract, ten an hour." He cut her off, turning his head to look towards her a little. "Bad history with magical contracts, I don't care where it came from or how much you let me read it, I won't sign it. If that's a requirement then that's a dealbreaker." Drawing out a hum, Skye watched him for a moment before shrugging. She would let him get away with being a little difficult, it wasn't like the contract was outright required, it just made things neater. "Where?"

"If you're comfortable with sidelong apparating..." She trailed off, waiting for him, and was unsurprised when he shook his head. More paranoid than Mad-Eye Moody...well, not really but still a bit irritating. "Alright, then how about the floo?" He shook his head again, and so Skye rolled her eyes. "There's not exactly many ways to get to a good place to train then, since I'm sure if I suggest portkeys..."

He shook his head again. "I don't trust magic that takes me to a place I don't know about. There's a space-expanded training hall place right here in Diagon Alley we can use." Skye let an eyebrow rise as she kept her gaze on him, not removing her gaze even as he began to get a little uncomfortable. "You can take it out of my pay." He eventually relented, to which she nodded once. He was the one being difficult, she wasn't going to pay it just because he was too paranoid to let her take him anywhere.

Sure, he was the one lacking in cash, but if he wanted to be paranoid, that would come out of his pay, she wasn't kind enough to pay just because he wanted to feel safer.

"Alright, that's good, keep that up for a few minutes."

Staring at the still-hooded man, Skye debated whether or not to punch him in the face and go back home. Right now they were at the training hall, and she wasn't training in a way she expected, learning how to dodge spells and fling them back. No, she was...to put it simply, she was jogging around the hall. And the annoying part was that this wouldn't help her at-fucking-all. She needed instincts and ingrained things, things that would stay with her. Physical fitness was useless to her, it didn't come back with her.

Transfiguring herself meant she had the rough level of fitness she had been at when she transfigured herself, and she had tried to make herself more fit, but that didn't work, so she couldn't just give herself the ability to jog for hours on end, unfortunate as it was. There was probably some law of magic somewhere that explained it, but she didn't know it, nor did she care. The point of the matter was that jogging in circles was honestly useless to her.

Still, she kept at it, and was rewarded with an odd feeling in her chest. After a second, her legs locked up suddenly and she was forced to fling her arms in front of herself, lest she take the landing on her face. Once her hands touched the ground, she winced as she slid along the lacquered wooden floor and gave herself some lovely friction burns, though the fact he had just pulled a move like that was far above that in her list of priorities.

Once she came to a stop, she turned her head, slowly, towards him, just so he could get a picture of how utterly unamused she was. "You need to develop a sixth sense for magic being cast at you. You can see 180 degrees ahead of you, that's a whole half of your surroundings you can't actively see. Magic isn't something you can easily learn to detect, and I don't know how else to teach it than to distract and then cast spells until you learn how to isolate and react to the feeling, figuring out the direction of incoming magic on the fly and throwing up a Protego to protect yourself. Of course, depending on the level of magic, a Protego will do little to save you."

He then gestured back at the room, waving his wand and dispelling the binds around her legs. Getting up slowly and giving her hands a quick look, she resolutely didn't grind her teeth, stomp her foot or do anything petulant. She wanted training, and he had explained what he was doing to train her, so complaining because she didn't like it was fucking stupid. So, she got back to jogging, trying to focus on the feeling that she had felt for just a moment before getting her legs locked.

After a good few minutes, during which she admittedly had started zoning out, she felt it again. Focusing on it as much as she could, she didn't get long to actually do such a thing before her legs were locked up once again, though this time she had slowed down enough that she didn't skid along the floor when she landed, having expected the leg-lock to come. "Again."

Grumbling just a few choice words within her own mind, she got up once again as his spell was dispelled and began to jog for a third time. This time though, she seriously thought about what he said. He wanted her to be distracted, he was trying to make it an unconscious reaction. But...that made little sense. It'd be far better if he taught her first how to sense magic being cast, then what direction, and once she could do that, then he could reinforce it.

Coming to a stop, she looked at him. "This is stupid. Not the idea, but the way of doing it. I can feel something already, but it'd be better if I could just focus on that feeling and you just cast spells until I can do it accurately, none of this stupid tripping me up shit. You can give me a good reason why, then I'll keep doing it, but otherwise, I'm not gonna stick with something that's stupid."

"This is how I was taught and it worked." He spoke in a very aggressive tone, his arms folding over simultaneously. "You don't like it, then go find someone else to train you. I intend to train you the way I was trained, the way I know works." Staring directly at him, Skye honestly felt very tempted to simply go find someone else to train her. She was paying him after all, he didn't exactly have any leeway to be a cunt about things.

And so, she folded her arms over. "You tell me why this method works better than what I suggested, I'll keep doing it. If you can't, we either do something else, or I pay you for an hour and we're done. You aren't the only person who can train me, you aren't some rare and valuable commodity I have to bend over backwards to keep here." Skye retorted just as firmly, not wanting to waste her time putting effort into something that was a waste of time in comparison to other methods.

He remained silent for a good ten seconds before speaking again. "Because doing it this way teaches you multiple things at once, and faster than the standard way. You don't want to focus on the magic consciously, otherwise you'll have to unlearn that when you want to do it without thinking about it even a little. Having the magic come whilst you're distracted means you'll start learning to detect and adjust to it without having to take thought away from whatever else you are doing in such a situation. Satisfied?"

"A little. It still sounds stupid though. I'd guess if I asked why you feel the need to make me trip repeatedly is as an incentive to learn fast?" He gave a single, curt nod, prompting her to snort. "Sadist." She muttered lowly, rubbing her fingers against her palms, then getting started on her jogging once again. This time, she didn't think about what he was doing or waiting for, and instead simply tried to zone herself out and stop thinking about much except jogging in circles.

Of course, that meant when he threw a spell at her, she had even less time to react than when she was expecting the jinx to come, which led to her hands becoming hot and sore as she stopped her face from being smashed against the floor. "Again." Clenching her hands a little, she got right back up and continued, again resolutely not focusing on the wizard or the magic that was coming, losing herself in the motion of jogging, of her legs rising and falling, arms raising and swinging. She still ended up skidding on her hands and momentarily wanting to throw a spell or ten at him and go home, but she also understood that he was essentially pulling a Yoruichi by dropping her in training that was unreasonably difficult and sucked, but would help her train faster than if she learned conscious recognition, then had to turn that into unconscious action.

Though, that didn't stop her from cursing him to hell and back in her mind.

After a month of training, interspersed with studying different spells, keeping her potion-brewing skills up, and doing other things to prepare herself, she was finally able to reliably dodge spells, even when distracted.

Honestly, the fact it only took a month kinda surprised her, and it surprised the guy teaching her, even if he didn't really show it much. She theorized that maybe since she was constantly 'seeing' magic, her brain was just adapted to detecting magic? Whatever the case was, when he cast a spell at her, she could 'sense' it in an intangible way and would know roughly where it was coming from, as well as her body moving on instinct to avoid the spell.

Of course, that relied on her not being in a compromised position, if she was unable to dodge it, well, then she was unable to dodge it, as simple as that. But so long as she maintained a steady position, she would dodge the majority of spells cast at her. He had tried to teach her to use Protego as well for added protection alongside slowing down the incoming spell, since whilst it wasn't blocked by it, Protego did still apply a small modicum of slowdown to the Killing Curse. Not a lot, definitely not, but it would buy her an extra tenth of a second to try and get the fuck out of the way.

The problem was that she couldn't do wandless casting of Protego yet, and couldn't do it wordlessly either. As such, it would require her to have a wand in hand and turning, casting it whilst she turned, and also not messing up the position of the shield. In the end, she decided that it wasn't worth the effort. Later on, when she managed to actually cast Protego without a wand, she would definitely get him to teach her how to do that, but for now, it was enough just to be able to dodge spells fired at her from behind or while she was distracted.

Honestly, it was going to be more used to dodge jinxes and hexes from other students more than anything, she didn't doubt that the house rivalry between Slytherin and Gryffindor was going to get nasty...then again, without 'The Girl Who Lived' there to exacerbate it by being shown blatant favouritism, maybe it wouldn't actually get too bad. Whatever the case was, even if she wasn't dodging spells thrown by her classmates, she still had to deal with a few problems, and she would rather not be forced to wait ten years every time she fucked something up.

After she had been trained to detect and dodge spells without being able to see them, for which the final exam was being blindfolded, they moved on to combat scenarios. Transfigured objects became various forms of cover and concealment, occasionally he would release fog and mist into the room to massive reduce visibility, and he began to train her to rely even less on her vision, and more on her other senses. Taste obviously was useless in a combat situation, and touch wasn't too effective either. Smell was vaguely useful, if she could smell her target she could at least know they were close, but it was basically next to useless.

Hearing on the other hand was almost as essential as sight. If she could listen, not only could she track an opponent that she couldn't see, but she could even tell what spells they were casting. Not applicable to those who could cast wordlessly, but the majority of people couldn't do that, it was too engrained in their minds to speak the words of the spell they were casting.

That was something that definitely seemed to annoy her teacher, considering how much he ranted about how stupid it was. And honestly, she agreed. Hogwarts and other schools taught their students to use the words because it made it easier to actually cast the spell. Without the words, it was a hell of a lot harder, because the words pushed the intent to cast the spell outwards. Doing that without speaking the words of the spell was...difficult, to put it mildly. Of course, for those with significant willpower, or those who had a strong intention to cast a particular spell, it wasn't necessary.

Case in point, when Harry Potter cast Expelliarmus at Voldemort in their final duel, which he did without a single word or even the correct motion. He had such a strong will and intent to cast the spell that it simply worked. Eleven-year-old Harry would never have had the will or intent to push a spell out without the correct motion or the verbal name. Wandless was a bit of a different ballgame though, that required a lot more fine control over magic, lest the caster blow their own hand to bits trying to use it as a faux-wand.

But still, she accepted his training, learning how to track a target by footsteps, how to listen carefully and identify what spell was being cast, alongside watching his wand to deduce exactly what spell is being cast by the motion. Then of course he set about teaching her to start identifying when she was being misled, since one of his favourite tricks was to perform the motion for one spell, mouth the words for that same spell, and then fling out an entirely different one, catching her completely by surprise.

However, it did end up that he proved the fact he wasn't a good teacher. All it took was a spell in the wrong place at the wrong time and instead of sending her flying backwards into a wall, she had open air behind her, so as she was suddenly and violently repulsed, she also started to flip, and despite trying to stop herself, she ended up hitting the next closest wall head-first, which led to a sudden and completely unexpected reset.

She honestly just sat there slightly dazed, since having it suddenly hammered home that she could literally just suddenly die from a broken neck hadn't actually really occurred to her. That sort of death never happened in the original story, it was always in battle or something else dramatic that did people in, but for her, it was just a mundane accident.

Honestly, what annoyed her more was just the fact that she wasn't done training, but she knew enough about the man teaching her to know he would get suspicious about her if she approached him again, now knowing his mannerisms too well. With Snape, she could get away with it, he was observant, but not paranoid. Her teacher had the paranoia of Mad-eye Moody honestly, so...that really fucking sucked honestly, because sure, she fucking hated the bullshit he pulled, but he also knew how to fight. Not the fanciful 'duels' that wizards partook in, but actual knock-down-drag-out kicking ass.

Losing that honestly took her vague plans and kicked them in the dick.

Just gonna shamelessly plug my Pat reon again, because I could do with a bit of cash honestly.

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