You're Stronger Than Ten Malfoys Combined

The entire hall erupted into chaos.

"Damon? You—"

Malfoy's voice twisted grotesquely, like a chicken with its neck wrung.

A heavy fist slammed into his face!

At the same time, Damon's furious voice rang through the hall.

"I let you keep calling me Mudblood without a word, didn't I? I didn't even care. But why do you have to bully my friends?"

The rage on his face looked genuine enough, but after that single punch sent Malfoy to the ground, he made no further move. Instead, he turned and looked back at Neville.

Neville caught on instantly. His clenched fist moved faster than his brain could think, already swinging down at Malfoy!

Malfoy had just braced himself to speak when he was knocked flat again.

So he wasn't that tough after all?

Neville felt a surge of encouragement. Some kind of bloodline instinct seemed to ignite from that punch. He straddled Malfoy and drove fist after fist into him!

Damon stood by, wand trained on the crowd, his cold gaze sweeping over every Slytherin who dared to edge closer.

Among the crowd, a few Slytherin students hid behind others and tried to sneak curses at Damon in the chaos. He deflected them cleanly with a Shield Charm, sending them rebounding back. They broke out in pustules, burst into uncontrollable laughter, or started dancing on the spot—paired with Malfoy's yells, it looked like a party.

"What are you doing! Neville Longbottom!" Malfoy kept shrieking.

Neville didn't care anymore. He just threw punch after punch.

His form was sloppy, but he grew more confident, more spirited with each hit! When his left hand tired, he switched to his right, alternating until both were spent. Even then, he stubbornly clenched his soft fists and swung his aching arms, scraping blow after blow across Malfoy's face.

It happened fast, and it was stopped just as fast.

The professors seemed caught off guard that any student would be bold enough to strike someone right under their noses. On top of that, Damon's muttered words made their brows furrow—had a student really been using that slur all along?

But after a few seconds of stunned silence, Professor McGonagall stepped in and put a stop to it.

Malfoy was already sobbing.

"Boo-hoo! I'm telling my father! You're dead! Longbottom, Damon, just you wait! I'll have you both expelled!"

He shoved Neville off and sat on the floor, wailing loudly.

Seeing him like that, the other professors actually relaxed—if he still had the strength to cry, the injuries couldn't be serious.

Still, their faces remained stern. Professor McGonagall's brow was deeply furrowed, unable to understand how a usually mature and steady child could do something like this.

What made her even more frustrated and helpless was that the culprit behind it all showed no sense of wrongdoing. Instead, he calmly pulled Neville up from the floor and slowly straightened his loosened tie, as if the "catastrophe" they'd caused mattered less than Neville's disheveled attire.

That scene burned itself into the minds of many young witches and wizards. Even ten or twenty years later, when they brought it up, they still talked about it with relish.

They screamed and gasped while the professors' faces darkened, but the Duelling Prince only calmly fixed that chubby boy's tie, as if nothing else in the world existed. Their opponent, meanwhile, was still wailing on the floor.

If they could have traded places with Neville in that moment, they'd have gladly let the House Cup lose every last point.

"Good punch, Neville. You know what? You're ten times stronger than Malfoy. Don't ever be afraid of him again—make him afraid of you."

Neville's face was flushed red. He didn't even care about his scraped knuckles anymore. His eyes shone with excitement, brimming with exhilaration.

What happened next, in the young witches' and wizards' memories, felt a little fragmented.

The whole hall was in an uproar. Prefects struggled to keep order. The cursed Slytherins writhed and grimaced. The professors' expressions were stern but couldn't hide their shock. Snape looked at Damon like he wanted to eat him alive, yet the corner of his mouth twitched upward, making the young onlookers lose their smiles entirely.

Everything was chaos.

Cheers, screams, cries, shouts—all tangled together. Prefects' roars echoed through the hall. Latecomers entering the hall lit up and yelled, "What happened?" The noise surged like a river flooding the hall, every sound mashed into one.

But everyone there could only hear a single sound.

They saw Damon White pat Neville on the shoulder. They heard the tap of Damon's footsteps on the floor.

Damon White walked straight toward the professors.

No one heard anything else. They just stared blankly at that figure.

The farce was over.

Neville, Malfoy, and the cursed students were all sent to the hospital wing. Their injuries were very light—aside from the Slytherins who'd brought it on themselves, Neville and Malfoy only needed some ointment on their wounds and could even make it to class in half an hour.

The professors breathed a sigh of relief. But as the instigator, Damon lost a hundred points outright, and Neville lost fifty.

In the hospital wing, Neville had calmed down a little, but he still trembled with excitement over what he'd done.

Harry, Ron, and Hermione were utterly stunned by Damon's outrageous behavior.

Harry and Ron clenched their fists in excitement, imagining themselves being the ones to pummel Malfoy in front of everyone.

Hermione nearly cried over the lost hundred and fifty points, but she couldn't shake the powerful image burned into her mind.

All the Gryffindors huddled together, chattering endlessly. More and more students rushed into the hall. "What just happened!" echoed from every corner. Students groaned in regret that they'd missed such a spectacle.

The trio went to the hospital wing to visit Neville, praising his bravery. All four of them were happy. But then Ron asked a dazed question.

"Damon—will Damon be expelled?"

The other three realized the possibility. Their faces went pale. All traces of joy vanished.

"Expelled? It's going to be that serious?" Harry asked belatedly.

"Yes, didn't you see how grim the professors' expressions were? Malfoy's been bragging that his father's a school governor, and he seems to have quite a bit of power."

Ron's expression turned even uglier.

Hermione had no time left to mourn the House Cup points; she grew more agitated than ever before. "Is there anything we can do? Anything at all?"

Neville even looked like he was about to cry again.

Damon had stood up for him, and now this was the result... and if Grandma found out, would she scold him to death?

Even so, he mustered his last shred of courage and said resolutely:

"I—I'll go tell the professors that I was the one who wanted to do it—in fact, Damon only threw one punch; the rest were all me!"

"Neville, it's no use—we all know Damon was the one who started this."

At the thought of Damon possibly being expelled, Hermione suddenly covered her face with both hands, nearly in tears.

But she refused to let herself cry; she had to come up with a way to save Damon!