No plan survives contact with the enemy, Hermione reminded herself giddily — watching their plan go off without a hitch. Beauxbatons' plan, though, was certainly suffering.

Granted, it would've been better if they'd been able to take out a few more of the firewalkers, but one down was still one down, and she sincerely doubted that they'd try another blitz attack like that, now that they'd lost the element of surprise (and knew the Hogwarts team had anticipated it, anyway).

"Fred, keep an eye on the interior, sound the alarm if there's so much as a lick of fire in here," she ordered the Weasley twin. He didn't pause in the commentary he was muttering to the violinist, but he did nod, so. "Mallory, reset the traps! Violet, check Theo! Everyone else mind the walls!"

Because if Hermione were trying to coordinate an attack on their fort, she'd want to try to make an external strike while they were still recovering from the sudden appearance and disappearance of the strike team, to assess their defences if nothing else. Of course, everyone aside from Violet and Theo was already on the walls, but directing them to turn their attention outside couldn't hurt. Neville, for one, was sort of just staring down at the unconscious veela boy as though he couldn't quite believe they'd just done that.

They had, admittedly, spent most of their time and energy on the external aspects of the fort, further shaping the walls to make them steeper and smoother than the simple hillfort spell could manage; transfiguring earth and stone to create a physical palisade of bronze spears inside the ice-moat (and of course the moat itself); enchanting the palisade to withstand and ground out physical force as well as magic (because Nick had suggested that a transfigured cannonball carrying a blasting curse could go right through their walls, with the right propulsion charms behind it); mining the area around them with trap-hexes; conjuring ice and detritus to make footing more difficult—

But they had put some effort into shaping the interior as well, to make the walls easier to defend. The profile of the circular wall, before they'd started modifying it, could be described as a simple bell-shaped curve. They'd squared off the outside a bit, and cut a sort of shelf into the inside, giving them a circle of level ground about seven meters in diameter inside the walls. The wall was only about four feet tall, from the lowest point at the centre of the circle, but the way the base of the curve sloped toward the centre had made it difficult to stand too close to the wall without flattening the ground, and equally difficult to scramble to the top of the wall if they wanted to cast something over the palisade (which was about two metres high and several meters out, on the other side of the ditch). The excess earth from flattening the interior had been piled into a trio of ramps, allowing for easier access to the top of the earthen rampart. The flag, which the rules stated had to be prominently displayed in such a way that it was visible from outside any defensive structures, was raised on a conjured pole at the centre of the ring.

The defenders had arranged themselves on the wall and peppered the interior of the fort with traps as well, anticipating that the veela would flame to the level ground at the centre of the space — either in a small group, back-to-back to more easily defend each other (which was what Hermione would have done), or spread out with their backs to the walls, hoping to surround the Hogwarts defenders (which was what Gabrielle's sister had decided to do). In either case, it made sense for the defenders to take the high ground within the fort, and since they had gone with the latter approach the Hogwarts students had actually been behind the veela when they'd appeared. They'd only had a second's warning, fire flickering into existence very briefly before the veela stepped out of it, but that was enough to get their wands trained on the right spots.

Of course, Beauxbatons hadn't chosen anyone for their strike team who wasn't also a very good duelist — two of them had blocked most of the Hogwarts team's initial attacks (Hermione, Neville, and Violet stuck to Stunners and Trigger-Drop Disarming Charms and Stutter-Step Jinxes for the most part, all two- or three-syllable spells so they could get them off more quickly) and started to throw a few curses of their own, but one had fire-walked right into one of the Weasleys' transfiguration-based trap jinxes, her legs fusing together into something like a mermaid's tail in the brief moment before she switched back to bird form.

Theo took a blast of veela-fire he only partially managed to deflect, but he still managed to cast one of the elemental curses Cassie had told them about in Defence, forcing his attacker to flee ahead of a bloody blizzard (it followed her over the wall, chasing her right out of their ward-dome), as Fleur and one of the others had flamed out to avoid a flood of broad-angle cutting curses from Nick and Mallory (specifically chosen so that no single shield charm would stop all of them). The fourth member of the strike team had attempted to dodge the initial attack, stumbling into a flash-bang trap which disoriented him badly enough Hermione actually managed to stun him before he could escape.

"Jones is injured, too, Granger!" Mallory called from somewhere behind Hermione.

She didn't look, keeping an eye out for a follow-up attack. "Badly?"

"No!" the boy snapped off to her left, guarding the western approach.

"You're bleeding all over the place, Jones!"

"Shut up, Prince, I'm fine! Vi, help Nott, that looks nasty."

"Violet, use your best judgment!" Hermione called over her shoulder.

"Sit down and put pressure on that cut before you faint, Nick! I don't have a Blood Replenishing Potion for you, and if you fall out of the fort, I swear to God I'll leave you in the ditch!"

Right, so Nick was out for at least a few minutes while Violet dealt with Theo's burns and then did whatever she could to patch him up. "We've got movement in the trees! Mallory, take the west side! Neville, stay on the east! I don't want anyone sneaking up on us!" Especially being able to just fire-walk around the battlefield like they did, it would be all too easy for them to take the defenders by surprise...

The second assault began only seconds later, with a long-distance conjuration — a shield-wall, protecting the attackers from defensive spellfire as they flamed in directly behind it, they then repeated the process, quickly coming within spell-range of the palisade. The ice might've been a mistake, it wasn't slowing them down — in fact they were using it to push their wall closer rather than conjuring a new one, dispelling trap jinxes and throwing dozens of different charms and transfigurations at the bronze spears as they did. None of them stuck, they'd anchored protective charms to them and Mallory had turned them inside-out like the plinth the Goblet had been sitting on in the Entry Task, protecting the protective charms and making the spears invulnerable to casual attacks like those, but Hermione wasn't keen to let them keep trying, especially since they realised they weren't making an impact, either — they switched to analysis charms, which couldn't possibly bode well...

"Neville! You have a few active vines and things waiting in the wings, right?" The Earth-Speaker might not be able to summon triffids for them, but he was confident in his ability to summon and manipulate some of the simpler magiflora which made their home in the canopy of the Forbidden Forest. Creepers and strangler-vines, mostly. Devil's snare and vampire lianas and so on.

"Yes, but it will take a couple of minutes to get them over there!"

"Do it, we'll distract them!"

She broke the spell maintaining the ice, the water they'd diverted from the stream to supplement their conjuration turning the ground to mud instantly. The solid metal shield, holding up surprisingly well against everything she and Mallory were throwing at it, caught immediately, the Beauxbatonnais' own efforts to slide it tipping it over as the bottom edge suddenly became stationary.

A bludgeoning curse got through before the Beauxbatonnais managed to recover, throwing one of them into the mud a short way away. He wasn't out, though, and the way he was slipping around trying to get back to cover made it bloody impossible to hit him with any of the charms Hermione knew would go through that orange-ish light shield charm.

Rather than conjure another physical barrier, Fleur cast both a Protego and an Aegis (she'd brought a second wand as her secondary focus, bloody fabulous...) — together those would stop about ninety per cent of all curses and physical attacks (including every spell Hermione knew) — while her teammate dried the ground around them somehow, steam filling the air around them completely obscuring them, at least from here. And when it cleared, they'd put up another barrier, damn it!

"Mallory! I'm going to conjure mirrors behind them, see if you can hit them with a ricochet! On three!"

"Better idea — parabolic focusing shield to redirect sound!" she called back, throwing some obscure divining charm at the shell behind which their enemies were hiding. "And be ready to drop a bomb on them!"

Hermione hesitated for a second, wondering what the hell the older girl was planning on throwing at them, but it didn't really matter. She did know a spell that should work for that, an OWL-standard charm with a silly (and misleading), non-Latin incantation: "Vexious convexius!"

The arced shield spell appeared exactly where she envisioned it, a bare half-second before Mallory's charm — what the hell was that? Hermione had never seen a spell that had a visible waveform to its casting path! — reached it, reflected back onto the Beauxbatonnais with a low-pitched, almost throbbing whomm. It was uncomfortable from where Hermione was standing, had to be positively miserable right at the centre of it — and it was only growing louder as the metal shield the veela had conjured began to vibrate...resonating with the sound, like a bloody tuning fork...

That. is. brilliant...

(Mallory was actually just kind of brilliant in general — Hermione couldn't help wishing she'd met the older Ravenclaw years ago. Now she was going to be graduating in less than a year...)

The boy who wasn't behind the shield vanished it and dispelled Hermione's focusing spell, revealing his teammates to be dazed and staggering — Fleur looked as though she was retching, the other girl on the ground keening, covered in flickering purple fire, but apparently unable to focus well enough to change and escape... (Holy crap...)

"Granger!"

"Bombarda!" She cast the spell deliberately short, because she honestly wasn't certain the boy would be able to get the lilin girl on her feet to run or shield them quickly enough to avoid actually being blown up, but the impact still threw them back, stumbling in a cloud of dust.

They wisely decided to retreat, then...just after the nick of time — Neville's venomous tentacula had finally managed to make its creeping, pseudo-serpentine way to the centre of the field from the trees at the edge of the clearing. It struck even as the boy was helping the disoriented lilin to her feet, wrapping itself around his ankles, thorn-like barbs digging into his flesh. He tripped, allowing more tendrils to ensnare him, and shrieked, a pained, furious, bird-like sound. The plant burst into near-blinding flames, but it was too late — the boy collapsed attempting to pull himself to his feet, apparently unconscious.

The lilin girl heard him scream, tried to turn back, but Fleur pulled her on toward the trees. Probably the smart choice.

Another veela, a girl in white with a red medic's cross emblazoned on her back, appeared at the boy's side a few seconds later, evacuating him in a burst of gold and white flames.

"Good work, Nev! Violet! How are the boys?"

"We're fine, Granger," Theo drawled, as he and Nick came to stand beside her at the northernmost point of the wall.

"Good, you can keep watch, then. I'll be down with Weasley, keeping up with the commentary. Call out if you spot anything." She managed to say that much with a straight face and get halfway down the ramp before breaking into what she felt had to be a disturbingly Lyra-like grin.

Okay, maybe this was actually kind of fun...

Hermione has gotten her first taste of command, and she likes it (to the surprise of absolutely no one who's ever been in a group project with her). —Leigha