Both Harry and Ron were actually quite clever.
During the month before school started, Tris had studied and trained hard under pressure from the system. Combined with the knowledge he had accumulated over the past few years, he had more or less mastered the beginner spells.
Yet Harry and Ron had only practiced casually over the holidays and had already mastered two basic spells.
Their talent was practically overflowing!
Tris knew Harry was talented. His aptitude for magic had always been good; what dragged him down were fiddly, tedious subjects like History of Magic, Astronomy, and Potions.
He was particularly gifted at Defense Against the Dark Arts.
But his own brother Ron's talent came as something of a surprise to Tris.
Compared with Harry, Ron was lazier. Rather than practice magic, he preferred lying around, playing a couple of games of chess, or playing cards.
Even so, he had mastered both basic spells in just two or three attempts.
Tris reckoned the difference between this Ron and the one in the films he had watched came down to his wand. Now that Ron had a wand that suited him, his magic flowed more smoothly than Dove chocolate.
Tris had also used Charlie's old wand in private and felt that his former limitations had vanished, further confirming Ollivander's theory.
To think that a basic magical item really could choose its owner. Tris had never believed it before, but now he seemingly had no choice.
Before the train departed, the twins dropped by and introduced their partner in mischief, Lee Jordan. Lee Jordan also came from a wizarding family and had grown up hearing stories about Harry, so he was thrilled to meet him.
His way of showing that excitement, however, was to proudly present Harry with a large spider.
Harry broke out in a cold sweat, while Ron immediately fled as far away as he could.
Tris knew Ron was afraid of spiders. What he hadn't known before was why. Now, though, all he could say was that Fred had really done his little brother dirty.
An announcement on the platform warned that the train would depart in ten minutes.
The train was already getting noisy. Young witches and wizards pushing their luggage along poked their heads into compartments, seemingly looking for ones with fewer occupants. Seeing three people in theirs, none showed any inclination to enter.
Tris kept watching the doorway, hoping to spot some recognizable characters from the story.
Unfortunately, the Hogwarts Express had more than one entrance, and their compartment was fairly close to the front. Even after watching for ages, he hadn't seen any familiar faces.
Meanwhile, Harry and Ron had taken out the chessboard and started another game.
Harry had developed a liking for wizard's chess at the Burrow. Its rules resembled ordinary chess, with the added requirement of communicating with the pieces, so mastering it presented him with no difficulty.
He was using Tris's pieces-Tris had stopped playing after confirming that he couldn't beat Ron and couldn't earn points by playing anyone else.
Harry had been using them for the past month, but they still hadn't developed any trust in him. In his hands, the pieces were constantly slaughtered by Ron.
Wizard's chess pieces took after their first owner, and Tris had a short temper. When Ron thrashed him, he couldn't bring himself to give Ron grief, so he took it out on his own pieces instead.
The pieces had learned from him, and now they were giving Harry endless grief.
"Do you even know how to play? Sending me there is sending me to my death!"
"I'm not going. Send the rook. It's not like you know how to use it anyway."
"Keep yapping and I'll break your bloody horse legs!"
Harry had been a little uncomfortable at first, but he was soon led astray.
Tris had discovered another difference from his recollections. The Harry he remembered was a sweet, innocent little angel. Apparently, that wasn't quite the case.
When Harry gave the pieces an earful, he wasn't as foul-mouthed or sarcastic as Tris, but his tongue was still pretty sharp.
With a low whistle, the train slowly started moving and pulled out of the platform. Harry, who was already losing, swept the pieces into disarray and turned toward the window.
"We're moving, we're moving! Huh? This doesn't look like London."
Upon leaving the platform, the train had emerged straight into open countryside. That clearly wasn't right.
King's Cross Station wasn't in the city center, but it wasn't on the outskirts either. They should have had to travel through the city for a while after leaving the station.
But that wasn't the point. The point was the chessboard Harry had scattered.
"Harry, you're cheating again." Ron grumbled as he gathered up the pieces, but the scenery outside caught his attention too. He turned to Tris and asked,
"Tris, what's going on?"
"King's Cross Station is just the entrance. The Hogwarts Express isn't actually inside a London railway station," Tris said with a smile. "It's just a simple, fixed Portkey mechanism."
Ron had never used a Portkey, but he knew what one was.
Harry didn't, so Tris explained it to him.
"Then why don't we just use one of those to go straight to Hogwarts?" Harry asked, puzzled.
"They did use Portkeys before the nineteenth century, but they aren't as convenient as you might think," Tris explained. "Putting them somewhere easy to find without having Muggles touch them by accident is a real headache.
"And using a Portkey has some very unpleasant side effects. A lot of young witches and wizards couldn't handle them, so they eventually switched to this."
Ron trusted Tris completely. If Tris said it was very unpleasant, then it definitely was. He immediately lost all interest in Portkeys.
Harry nodded too, but judging by his expression, Tris suspected he was still extremely curious.
As the ever-curious Harry pondered how he might get a chance to experience a Portkey, someone pulled open the compartment door, which had been left ajar.
A small, platinum-blond head poked inside.
"Ha, found you." The boy at the door brightened immediately when he saw the three of them.
Tris gave him an odd look.
The newcomer was, of course, Draco Malfoy.
Judging by his words, he had clearly been searching the compartments one by one. How long had they even been moving? Had he started looking before the train departed?
"Malfoy?" Ron's cheerful expression immediately soured when he saw him. "What are you doing here?"
"What else? I've come to teach you a lesson." Draco pulled the door all the way open, revealing the situation outside.
Three other people had come with him.
Two were stocky boys-not particularly tall, but very broad. Their waist measurements probably exceeded their height.
Behind them stood a girl with short black hair and delicate features, though she had her chin raised as if determined to look down her nose at everyone.
Oh?
Tris raised an eyebrow.
Draco and his two useless lackeys?
His memories of the two stocky boys hadn't been particularly clear. Thanks to the Memory Palace's special effects, he could retrieve information about them from the films he had watched in his previous life.
Crabbe and Goyle.
Apparently, their parents worked under Lucius Malfoy, so they had arranged for their children to follow Draco at school as well.
To be fair, it wasn't a bad choice. Both came from pure-blood families, and whether it was because of inbreeding or something else, neither seemed particularly bright.
Given their circumstances, they would most likely have been bullied at Hogwarts, especially in Slytherin.
With Draco as their leader, though they often got yelled at by him, at least far fewer people would bully them directly.
As for the girl, Tris also dug her identity out of a corner of his memory.
Pansy Parkinson.
A Slytherin girl who liked Draco, the very picture of a Slytherin believer in pure-blood supremacy. Still, she apparently hadn't ended up with Draco?
"Teach us a lesson? You?" Ron glanced at Draco and the two stocky boys behind him, then at his own side, and decided they weren't at a disadvantage.
Surely Tris's daily workouts hadn't been for nothing?
The thought filled Ron with confidence. "Forgotten how you and your dad ran off with your tails between your legs in Diagon Alley?"
"You're lying!" Draco flew into a rage.
After fleeing Madam Malkin's Robes for All Occasions with Lucius that day, neither father nor son had mentioned the incident again.
Both found it rather embarrassing.
Draco had been carried away at the time, heedless of everything. Once he calmed down, however, he realized that picking a fight then would have meant certain defeat.
On his side, there had only been him and his father.
The other side had a full eleven people.
Even with one little girl who couldn't fight, their strength had still outnumbered his side's many times over.
Hagrid in particular brought words like savage, bear, and gorilla to mind just by his appearance. Draco, who hadn't mastered any proper spells yet and could only fight with his fists, had absolutely no idea how he could beat someone like Hagrid.
Although his father had dragged him away that day, Draco was still deeply unhappy about it.
Remembering that the Weasley family and Harry had all been buying new robes and were probably new students, he had decided to find a chance to get revenge.
Just before school started, his father's two lackeys had introduced him to two lackeys of his own. Draco felt he finally had a chance to settle the score.
That was why he had started looking for Harry and the others as soon as he boarded the train.
He hadn't expected Ron to mock him before he even had a chance to show off his strength.
Seeing Draco's pale little face, which he had found so irritating before, flush red with anger delighted Ron. Grinning, he said,
"Harry saw it, so he'll know whether I'm lying. Harry, didn't he and his dad make a very embarrassing escape that day?"
Harry already had a poor impression of Draco because of his arrogance and the nasty things he had said about Hagrid that day. After receiving the Weasley family's warm care over the past few days, it was obvious where his loyalties lay.
He would side with his friends rather than worry about who was right-and besides, Draco and his lot hadn't been in the right anyway, had they?
He immediately nodded in wholehearted agreement. "That's right. You and your father ran away with your tails between your legs. What, do you want to run away again?"
"Hmph. Let's see if you're still so mouthy in a minute." Draco was beside himself with rage.
"What, you want a fight?" Ron stood with a chuckle.
Harry followed suit.
Seeing this, Tris stood up as well, though he thought watching children squabble would have been more entertaining.
Hiss!
Draco sucked in a sharp breath.
He suddenly realized-why were Ron and Tris so tall?
Back at the robe shop, his attention had mostly been on Hagrid and Harry-the former was too huge not to notice, while the latter had been the focus of his interest.
Although his attention had briefly shifted to Tris afterward, Tris had been standing beside Hagrid, which made him look tiny by comparison.
Now, facing them at close range, Draco discovered that both boys were nearly half a head taller than him!
"Then let's fight! You think I'm scared of you?" Despite feeling a little uneasy, Draco refused to lose face. He spoke loudly while taking two steps back, putting Crabbe and Goyle protectively in front of him...