"Just as I thought!" Neville sighed with some feeling. "It's a shame I didn't realize that at the time."
"Hehe! Seeing you attack so frequently, I figured it out anyway." George rubbed his nose, barely able to suppress the smugness at the corners of his mouth. "Since that was the case, I thought I might as well tease you a little more."
"Tease me?" Hearing George say that, Neville realized something. "So that was why you counterattacked like that?"
"Exactly!" George spread his hands and said righteously, "You moved so fast, and you were so sensitive to magical fluctuations, so all we could do was wear you down slowly!"
"Since you couldn't see me but I could see you, I copied what you did with that longsword earlier—casting spells from tricky angles to scare you."
"That way, you'd definitely get even more nervous, thinking I could be hiding in any direction and might rush out to settle the score with you at any moment."
Listening to George's analysis, Neville nodded repeatedly in agreement. "I really did get more and more nervous back then! I kept feeling like you could ambush me at any moment!"
"So I tried to increase the frequency of my attacks, hoping I could find where you were. In the end, I just couldn't keep up physically."
George waggled his eyebrows. "So Miss Abbott had to 'kindly' help you sit down, right?"
He deliberately stressed the word "kindly," making his tone especially suggestive.
Neville turned to glance in Hannah's direction. Their eyes happened to meet, and they immediately looked away in panic, their ears turning even redder.
"Um... um..." Despite the embarrassment on his face, he did his best to explain, "I was mainly just really tired... Luckily, Hannah helped me."
"See? That's the difference!" Fred nudged