Harry could chase a tiny ball on a broom traveling over a hundred kilometers an hour. His reflexes and ability to track moving objects were far beyond those of ordinary people.
Yet Voldemort's sudden flames still caught him off guard.
Mostly, it was because Voldemort had attacked halfway through speaking, without so much as waving a wand. That was just dirty.
Why was he just like Tris?!
That was actually Harry's first reaction. Combined with the pain in his forehead scar distracting him, it kept him from dodging immediately.
And that gave Tris his opening.
Unlike Harry, Tris had been watching Voldemort intently all along. Plenty of villains died because they talked too much, but Voldemort had never struck him as someone who wasted words.
Take the way he killed Snape in the movie, for instance. Quick and clean.
He would throw out an Avada Kedavra without warning, without wasting a single word.
But Avada Kedavra had backfired on him against Harry before. Besides, he had no wand in his hand right now, so he might not go straight for the Killing Curse. That made the Skeletal Spirit Fire surrounding him his most likely means of attack.
Tris had guessed right!
Voldemort struck halfway through speaking, catching Harry off guard. Tris, however, reacted in time, lunging forward to knock Harry aside. Both of them rolled across the floor.
"Who?!" Voldemort roared.
He was not shouting at Tris, of course. Although wrapped in cloth, he had long since spotted that troublemaker through Quirrell's eyes.
But whereas Quirrell had become very concerned about Tris after Voldemort's failed attack, Voldemort himself paid far less attention to Tris than to Harry.
Even though Tris had just cast a spell that Voldemort had never mastered himself, but knew very well-Sectumsempra.
Snape was a subordinate he