A burst of flame and spellfire and a yelp from Emma ("Hermione!") drew Sirius's attention to the screen now displaying an image of the interior of the Fort before the last echo of the gong died away — a quartet of veela (and lilin, obviously) doing that fire-walking thing they did, which the Hogwarts defenders had obviously expected. They'd had the presence of mind not to bunch themselves up, make for a single easy target, but one of them still went down immediately, flaming directly into some kind of trap jinx, and another got himself stunned like a bloody idiot after dodging into a flash-mine. His friends (including the one with the poor luck to flame into a trap) retreated without him, fleeing a very professional-looking cutting curse suppression grid and what seemed to be a tiny snowstorm.
The only people in the fort who didn't respond to the infiltration with offensive action were the violinist and one of Bill's younger brothers, talking at him — they couldn't actually hear what anyone was saying over the violin, though some bright spark (whoever was controlling the projections on the screens, probably) had cranked up the sound aspect of that particular suite of monitoring and transmission charms to provide background music for the spectacle — but it was obviously important, maybe keeping the musician informed of the progress of the fight, somehow? That would explain why only one of them was down there, if the other was observing from out here and reporting with the neat bonded twin telepathy thing. Was the violinist somehow coordinating or orchestrating the battle? That was a thing you could do with performative magic, Sirius thought, though he'd also thought that everyone would need to be able to hear the music (not just an illusory replication of the music) for it to work properly...
Bagman, that bloke from the World Cup who'd clearly taken a few too many bludgers to the head before retiring from quidditch to become the Director of Games and Sports at the Ministry, giving the English commentary, seemed more interested in the charms that had just been used to take out the veela (and that firewalking into the Hogwarts fort was "a dirty trick" — which it wasn't, really, kind of predictable, in fact), but that whole setup was just fascinating...
There was another mass of spellfire on another screen, most of it targeting one of the Hogwarts offensive squad — Rowle, according to Flitwick. As in, one of the nephews of Thorfinn Rowle, who was currently keeping a dozen or so other convicted Death Eaters company in Azkaban, and (according to Blaise) one of the idiot children who had attacked Bella at the end of last term. Kind of weird, actually, how he was taking most of the curses. If Sirius didn't know better, he might think she had used some kind of scapegoating ritual on him, make him useful as she got her revenge. Oh, who was he kidding, he was almost positive that was what had happened — the other girl, Bell, had only had to bat away a couple curses in the midst of the messy offensive volley she launched against all seven of the cowards who didn't have the balls to try to hex Little Bella or the Cæciné girl while they were distracted by each other.
Not that Sirius really blamed them, he wouldn't want to get in the middle of that fight. There were at least three elves focusing on them from different angles and perspectives, and it was clear from all of them that Little Bella and Cæciné were actually very well matched. Cæciné had used some blood magic thing to attune the land itself to her magic — Sirius didn't think Bella had recognised that, if she had she would almost certainly have been more concerned (well, excited) — and done a massive elemental light interference charm to disrupt access to the Shadow Plane — something he'd read about in historical accounts of the Italic Vampire Wars, but never actually seen.
Bella, though, was using runic casting alongside elemental lightning and was still far more mobile than Cæciné, even with her access to the Shadow Plane cut off. She didn't quite have freeform levitation down, yet, but she was getting pretty good at using freeform magic to instinctively lighten her steps, increase her speed and jump-height and so on. She might be getting tossed around a bit — that veela–lilin fire explosion trick was bloody awesome — but Sirius would be willing to bet she'd rather be blasted off her feet than pinned down and bombarded with light magic. And Cæciné had obviously underestimated her there, distracted by the lightning blasting hex fissuring the ground beneath her feet, lulled into thinking she had Bella's measure. Runic casting and elemental bloody lightning was a stupidly powerful, heavy-hitting combination, but didn't require much in the way of finesse — went well with her general lack of forethought and preparation, made her look even more overconfident, like she thought she could just brute-force her way through the fight.
She definitely hadn't expected Bella to start fighting intelligently, with more esoteric spells. That two-stage shield-piercer had clearly taken her by surprise. She'd looked seriously annoyed there for a few seconds, glaring at Bella like how dare this little shite actually hit me with something. (Not that it drew blood, the protective charms she'd cast on herself while Bella was standing around wasting her prep-time like an idiot were better than that.) Bella just grinned at her like a bloody lunatic — he could almost hear her thinking come play with me, Cæciné... Sirius was fairly certain he'd seen the exact second the Aquitanian girl realised that this wasn't going to be nearly as easy as she'd thought (and that was a good thing, because where's the fun in an easy fight?), drawing her second wand and shifting to a looser, more fluid stance.
Bella caught it, too, said something (probably a mocking something, teasing her about getting a warm-up in or some shite) between giddy I might be out of my league giggles, and then they were moving again... It was honestly one of the most beautiful things he'd ever seen, light and dark dancing together, conflicting power shivering and transforming between them, savage and vicious and graceful and perfect, both of them obviously surprised and delighted to realise that they were so well matched. (Though if Sirius was any judge — and he was — Cæciné was actually the better fighter. The only way Bella was going to win was if she managed to hold her opponent off long enough to exhaust her.)
Cissy was apparently thinking along the same lines, murmuring, "Gorgeous," with a little helpless sigh that was generally reserved for beautiful works of art.
Sirius wasn't entirely certain how they'd ended up sitting right next to each other, but at least she could appreciate what they were seeing here. He didn't think anyone else in their group had the same sort of background in battlemagic Bella had given them when they were kids. Even Flitwick and 'David' were more...civilised fighters. Dueling and law-enforcement (or even street-fighting against the average criminal thug) weren't exactly the same as a real knock-down, drag-out, slip-and-you're-dead fight with someone in your own league. (Meda might know enough to appreciate it, he supposed, but she didn't actually like fighting, so.)
"You know, we never did have a proper duel after I realigned my magic," he suggested, suddenly reminded of fighting her over summer hols when they were Little Bella's age, no holds barred, with Bella watching and lecturing them afterward on their performance... They'd been nearly as perfectly matched as those two, once, and that was while Sirius had been fighting with a handicap. Granted, he was still a little rusty from Azkaban, but he would bet Cissy hadn't been in a real fight since the war ended either, so...
"What? Dueling?" Her eyes flicked over to the screen Sirius had been watching. "No— Well, yes, they are very good, but look at the flying, Siri!" She pointed at a projection at the opposite end of the array, grinning like a child at the aerialist spinning and swooping between three Durmstrang students.
She dropped out of one line of fire with a sort of tumbling fall she turned into a flipping jump around her broom, throwing herself entirely into the air to avoid another spell, actually letting go of the broom for a second. She caught it again almost immediately, spinning back around and pulling it beneath her to land on the braces, wrenching the broom to a near-vertical orientation rather than the horizontal she'd been spinning around, then corkscrewed back up at an angle and paused to aim a stunner at the one who'd just...knocked his teammate out of the air with that bludgeoning curse, right. The stunner missed, but did drive him between herself and the third Durmstranger, who had to cut off whatever spell she was casting so he wouldn't be taken out by friendly fire, too.
The first thing that came to Sirius's mind watching was, "Seriously, did they put elves on brooms, or something? And how are they invisible?"
Cissy refused to look away even long enough to glare at him. "That was a Frankfurt Roll into a perfectly-executed hip-circle counter-pike, into a handstand-pull remount, into an ascending pirouette! And you're thinking about house elves? What is wrong with you, Sirius, I'd really like to know!"
"What? Nothing, she's good, but—"
"But nothing, Siri! If that girl isn't recruited by the Parisian Aerial Ballet before she leaves school, I'll recommend her to Louis myself — what's her name, Draco?"
"Er...Seran, Enyo Seran," the boy said, obviously somewhat taken aback by his mother's vehemence. Sirius couldn't say he was surprised, though. Cissy always had liked trick-flying. She wasn't bad herself either, or hadn't been when they were kids. Not in this girl's league, obviously, Sirius did know enough about the sport to recognise some of that shite was stupidly difficult — doubly so making the routine up off the cuff as she was to avoid her attackers' spells — and this girl was making it look easy, but.
"Yeah, okay, but you're missing Little Bella and the Cæciné girl over here—"
"Oh yes, it's such a shame I won't get to see Bella give the seven-billionth exhibition match I've watched her in, because there's a world class stunt-flying performance going on over here, and— Oh, bugger!" She cut herself off, leaning forward visibly anxiously — two more fliers were headed toward Enyo Seran and the two Durmstrangers she was still dancing between, abandoning their pursuit of Harry and the Diggory kid, which meant they were down to...three? Krum and two veela. What happened to—
Oh, a couple of them had crossed out of bounds — when Sirius looked up to the physical arena, he could see them hovering above the translucent silver plane that denoted the space.
Anyway, Harry and Diggory had come back together, racing across the arena knee-to-knee so they could huddle behind a single shield charm to avoid the veela-fire that had set the trees ablaze all around them, bloody hell... Harry seemed to be holding that while Diggory tossed off broad-angle charms behind them. That only lasted for a few seconds, though, as Krum conjured...something — Sirius couldn't quite make out what through the smoke before the elf popped to a new vantage point — in their path, forcing them to peel off in opposite directions as they came up on the Hogwarts dome...
"Ooh, good work, Longbottom!" Sirius turned to see what Andromeda was looking at — Alice's boy was standing on the wall of the Fort with his arms outstretched, looking very intimidating with green soulfire glittering around his hands as he directed a bloody enormous venomous tentacula to engulf one of the attacking veela. He managed to immolate it, of course, but not before getting at least a few jabs — he collapsed as he tried to struggle to his feet to join the Delacour girl and her one remaining companion in their retreat.
Another veela appeared beside him in a burst of brilliant gold a moment later to spirit him away, but there were more fighters crashing through the trees to help, leaving that Bell girl to be circled by three others — Rowle was nowhere to be seen, must've been evacuated for medical attention (not surprising, Sirius had seen him hit with about a dozen curses in the first thirty seconds of the fight). Not great odds, but not nearly as bad as the six on one it would otherwise have been, since Little Bella was still fully occupied by Cæciné throwing her into a fucking tree (grinning like Walpurgis had come early). Bell managed to circle around to get those two at her back, cut off half of the potential approaches, and actually seemed to be holding her own, mostly on defence, obviously, but...
The tone of the music shifted, from the frenetic, almost discordant madness which was the opening of the battle to a more regular, sustainable theme, as the various groups settled into their individual fights, seven or eight of them out of the game in just that first rush, mostly from Durmstrang.
Sirius grinned, leaning forward on the edge of his seat. This was the part where these things usually started getting good...
Giving you guys a second one because the first was super short ;D —Lysandra