A maze was, of course, a maze. The Ten-School Tournament version had pushed the Undetectable Extension Charm to its limits in order to accommodate more contestants at once.
This maze covered ten thousand acres—forty square kilometers in metric units. Rumor had it that even Hermione would still be wandering around in it by tomorrow morning.
Harry had been running at first, but after two hours, he was starting to run out of steam.
Left turn, right turn, then left again. Several times, he found himself walking into dead ends. He cast the Directional Charm once more and realized he had gone too far east. He doubled back, turned right, and saw a strange cloud of golden mist floating ahead.
Harry cautiously approached it, pointing his wand at it. It looked like some kind of magic, and he did not know whether he could blast it apart.
"Confringo!" he shouted.
The spell passed straight through the golden mist without affecting it at all. Harry thought he should have expected that. The Blasting Curse was meant for solid obstacles, and golden mist was not solid. He should have used Finestra, but unfortunately, that was not a skill he could perform alone.
Just as he hesitated, a scream suddenly tore through the surrounding silence.
"Fleur?!"
Harry called the girl's name. He knew her at first because she was one of Hermione's foreign friends.
But later, Harry actually became closer to Fleur than he was to Hermione, despite them attending the same school.
Though Fleur's English accent was quite strange, the girl generously admitted that she liked melancholy boys like Harry Potter. The more melancholy and pitiful, the better.
"It can't be helped. French women are just so easily drawn to sorrowful men, like how we cannot help stopping when we see fallen leaves