Albus strolled down the second floor corridor casually, he had once again asked Hogwarts to find Harry Potter and the castle had responded instantly. Few knew that Hogwarts tracked everyone on the official register, this included everyone from students to teachers. It wasn't as if it was a huge secret but few had ever read Hogwarts: A history.
What was curious was twice now Albus had asked Hogwarts to find Harry and both times the answer had been instantaneous. If he had asked Hogwarts to find a teacher it would've taken a matter of seconds, finding a prefect would take a bit longer. If it had been another student Hogwarts normally took several minutes to find them.
Putting the mystery to the back of his mind Albus carefully opened the door to the second floor bathroom and looked inside, as he expected Harry was kneeling on the floor by the entrance to the chamber of secrets. He noted how the boy's eyes were glowing slightly, a recent development which seemed to happen whenever the boy used his mage sight.
In order to not disturb him Albus gingerly sat down next to Harry, after he had cleared away the dust and debris. He couldn't help the pang of grief when he saw how serious Harry had become, it was far too easy for him to forget Harry was only twelve years old.
Internally Albus wondered just how far Harry had gone since he had first met him almost two years ago, by all accounts the boy had grown remarkably. His teachers regularly praised his achievements in class, even Nicolas was impressed by how fast the boy had learned the basics of Alchemy.
"Oh, headmaster, I didn't see you there"
Albus chuckled lightly and said "No matter, I often find myself lost in thought often. Tell me, what did you find out?"
"Well it confirmed my theory that my saber can cut through almost anything, you remember when I told you how the pipe is actually a portal? I reckon this portal moves or at least has multiple openings… Anyway from what I can tell the wards that protect this opening are meant to cut the connection if it is forcibly opened…" Harry trailed off, waving awkwardly towards the opening
"And yet when you forced entry with your wonderful saber the magic failed to activate?" Albus prompted
"Exactly! From what I can tell from what's left of the wards there used to be a conditional ward that triggers this disconnection which can only activate when the perimeter is broken, when the entrance opens it deactivates the ward… well my saber basically deactivates the ward as far as it was aware the entrance had been opened properly."
"So did you learn anything about the wards while you did this?" Albus had already spent significant time examining the remains of the wards the night after Harry had left the chamber. He had thoroughly searched the chamber and had placed a compulsion over the bathroom so people wouldn't think to enter.
"Well for starters even the strongest ward can be broken by my saber… or at least the strongest normal ward, the mithril ward just shrugs off the saber like it's nothing. It also… tells me I shouldn't depend on just wards when I need to hide something?"
Albus considered Harry's conclusion, he had been wanted Harry to understand the second point by himself. Nodding encouragingly he said "Precisely, although this isn't limited to just wards. In my experience relying on just a single branch of magic - no matter how powerful that branch may be - will always leave you open to defeat."
Rather than reply Harry activated his gauntlet and handed it to Dumbledore, it was the first time he had gotten a good look at it and he took the time to look it over. Albus was slightly concerned about the amount of magic that was bleeding off the gauntlet and there was a sense of mistrust from it, Albus knew that if he tried to put the gauntlet on the best case scenario would be that he lost his hand.
But he remembered the gauntlet had been a smooth silver the last time he had seen it with a bright red pattern that had looked like veins, now however the silver had become a faint but vivid green and the metal felt rough
when he touched it. When Albus looked closer he saw small lines of dull red around the extremes of the gauntlet that seemed to subtly flicker like a flame.
"I assume this discolouration is due to the basilisk venom?"
"Yeah, when I turned it into its ring form I saw the band of the ring had gone green so I activated it and it looked like that. I've checked it and as far as I can tell it's fine although I wouldn't go tasting it."
Albus went back to examining the gauntlet and marveled at its design, unlike a traditional gauntlet there were no gaps for movement. It was just made up of one continuous piece of mithril much like a glove, yet despite this it moved easily and freely.
"I must admit I have never seen another like it, to the best of my knowledge even the goblins have never made anything as strong as this gauntlet."
"That's probably due to the fact the goblins never had access to a philosopher's stone, most of the gauntlet was made by the Stone not me. When I made it I only covered my hand in mithril."
"Perhaps… But just because you didn't make it doesn't take away from its strength and who knows, maybe in the future you will be strong enough to make something even stronger."
Harry scoffed as if he disagreed but Albus had no doubt that in a few short years Harry would be capable of feats beyond his own imagination.
"Well we shall see with time, now I didn't just come here to chat. I wanted to know what your plans over the summer are, my home is always open to you and with Tom out there I would prefer you to be somewhere I can keep track of you. Tom cannot afford to make a public appearance but he wouldn't think twice about attacking you if he could get away with it."
"Well Luna invited me to join them hunt for mythical creatures later in the summer and I thought I would go… other than that I guess I was planning on just winging it I guess, although I wouldn't mind staying at your house."
"If I recall correctly I still owe you a visit to the University of Transfiguration and I have been asked to hold a lecture the first week of summer, if you wanted you could join me and we'll have a tour of the university after the talk."
"That would be great!" Harry said excitedly, Albus was pleased to note the boy had a gleam to his eye that was sadly missing most of the time.
Harry looked at his shield critically, despite the fact the shield hadn't even been used against Voldemort it looked damaged. It turned out that while mithril was almost completely indestructible it anything made of mithril could still be deformed.
Of course the density of an object also affected how easy it was to damage it, his mithril table could probably survive several hits from a hammer while something thin or hollow like his shield and the mithril ward casing could be dented in just a few hits.
From what Ron had said the large dent across the width of the shield is where the tail of the basilisk had swung round and bashed into it, the shield had completely absorbed the blow. Harry suspected that as the force from the basilisk's tail was just kinetic energy and the mithril was made of pure magical energy the shield was able to convert the kinetic energy into magical energy.
If that were true then Harry could potentially harness other forms of energy, meaning the shield wouldn't just resist elemental attacks like fire it could use the energy from the fire to power itself. It was a form of alchemy although he would need Nicolas to help with it.
Harry had learned that the main reason barely anybody bothered to learn alchemy wasn't because the actual art was hard, at its most basic it was just using the laws of equivalence to transmute an element into another element. It gets harder when you try to transmute multiple elements at once or use a transmuted element to make an elixir but it wasn't harder than NEWT level transfiguration.
The difficulty came from the fact that it took a lifetime to learn and memorise the laws of equivalence, that was unless you had a teacher that had already memorised everything and was able to pass on that information freely without needing to travel the world and test every reaction.
Nicolas had been almost 100 years old when he had finished the Philosopher's Stone, it had taken Nicolas' own master a lifetime to figure out the laws of equivalence. From what Nicolas had said his master, Ortolanus Lortholain, had developed a unit of measurement he called a 'Conpar'.
Ortolanus had started by giving 1kg of rocksalt a conpar of one, then worked out how much it took to transmute salt into the desired element. For example to get 1kg of nickel you needed 2kg of rocksalt, giving it a conpar of two. Once he had a system in place it was just a matter of getting a hold of enough materials to test everything.
But rocksalt doesn't just change into nickel on its own, there needs to be a form of energy to transmute the materials. In the muggle world extreme heat was often used such as in stars where materials are constantly broken down and reformed, luckily for wizards they had magic.
The difference between the desired material and the working material affected how much magic was needed to transmute said material. If you had a large enough power source, such as a philosopher's stone, then you could transmute nearly anything. This included the air itself which was why the stone got so famous, almost any alchemist could turn lead into gold at the cost of a lot of magic, but nobody could just make a gold bar appear out of thin air.
But there was much more to alchemy than just making gold, alchemy could also work with energy stores including magic. This was one of the reasons Dumbledore had been able to just wade through battle was because he didn't need to use his own magical supply. Harry suspected dementors worked in a similar way by drawing on nearby thermal energy, it would explain why dementors seemed to make everything cold.
If he could get his shield to draw from nearby energy sources then the magical protections could be much more powerful. The first thing Harry needed to do was make a mithril core for the shield and add some strength ideologies, he also wanted to ensure that any kinetic energy that struck the front of the shield would be absorbed.
He also needed to find a way to burn off excess energy, he couldn't use heat or light as both would make it harder for him to defend himself. Ideally he would send the magic somewhere but that just moved the problem, for the moment he would just push the magic into the magical shields.
The next issue was he needed a way to call the shield to him, he had been able to summon the javelin because he could trick the return to sender ideology to see him as the sender rather than Ron. As a temporary measure he made a sleeve of mithril form inside his arm and made it undetectable and adaptable, this would hopefully mean it wouldn't limit movement in his arm.
He then linked the sleeve to his shield and told the sleeve to summon the shield when it received a pulse of magic, with that done he started improving the shield. He was going to put the mithril core in the centre of the shield, in theory this would be the strongest part of the shield and would ensure the magic would cover everything.
For those affected by the basilisk the end of term exams had been canceled but for everyone else it was business as normal. Harry noticed the exams were much harder than the year before and figured that next year he would need to pay more attention in class, they had now covered almost everything he had taught himself and were moving into new territory.
He had picked divination, arithmancy and ancient runes for his electives, he already knew the basis of arithmancy and runes as Bathsheda had needed to teach him them to get the mithril ward to work. For divination he was curious to learn how witches and wizards determined the future with magic, from what he had read on the subject divination was also included finding out about current events with scrying which looked useful.
Lockhart had still not returned from Saint Mungo's and as there had only been three weeks till the end of term Dumbledore had taken over the class till the exams, in private Dumbledore had told Harry what had happened.
"Did you never wonder why Tom took both Miss Weasley and Miss Lovegood? It is my belief he needed Miss Weasley's magic to make a body and then was going to use the other students' lifeforce to enhance his power. Gilderoy managed to hold off Tom long enough for the students to flee, only Miss Lovegood stayed behind."
"I didn't take Lockhart as the type of person to sacrifice himself for someone else."
"Perhaps at the beginning of the year he would've ran but he has grown since he was first employed, helped in no small part by yourself."
The ride from Hogwarts seemed to pass quicker than it had the year before, this year he had Luna to talk to and Colin had visited a few times over the journey. Once they had arrived at London Harry had gone with Luna and Xenophilius to their home where Dumbledore would pick him up once he had finished at Hogwarts.
While they waited for Dumbledore Xeno filled them in on what they had missed while at Hogwarts, of course being Xeno he told them of his search for the Crumple-horned Snorkack and the resurrection stone.
When Dumbledore arrived they were invited to have dinner with the Lovegoods, it was the first time Harry had felt like he was part of a family. It gave him hope that while things looked bleak they could always get better.
As many of you seemed shocked I made Lockhart a good teacher I was thinking about making divination a useful subject…
The alchemy in this chapter is loosely borrowed from 'Nobody told me the rules' by Zaxaramas and 'The mind arts' by Wu Gang.
The shield is probably going to end up a mix of Percy Jackson's and Captain America's shields and as for the gauntlet I realised I've changed how it looks a few times now... the way I see it is a long glove that is made of metal with a fist sized gem on the back of the hand. As for what hand the gauntlet is actually on... When Harry made the gauntlet he made it to pick up the Stone which would imply right hand as he's right handed, but he also uses the gauntlet and wand and would want his wand in the right hand and gauntlet in the left, then against the basilisk he used his left hand to stop the fang.
My answer is he either swaps the gauntlet depending on the situation or it moves of its own accord without Harry really noticing.