After stepping forward, Justin first took off his outer robe and handed it to a classmate beside him.
With his wand in his right hand, he loosened up his arms and legs, then took a starting stance and looked at Douglas.
Douglas looked him up and down, then tossed the mouse out.
Justin sprinted after the mouse.
A young witch murmured, "Isn't this..."
Before finishing, she hurriedly covered her mouth, then stole a glance at Douglas.
Douglas wore a faint smile as he watched Justin's movements.
It seemed Justin had gone back over the summer to learn some Muggle athletic techniques. The wizarding world had nothing like this running start, or those moves where he grabbed rocks to vault over them and slid along the ground.
With a smooth sequence of movements, Justin dodged many magical traps.
Before long, Justin had run more than two hundred feet, and the other students had to run along the side to watch.
Suddenly, Justin stopped.
He had suddenly realized that the mouse, which had consistently stayed two or three meters ahead of him, had vanished without a trace. Before him lay nothing but a stretch of perfectly level lawn.
He looked around and found that his classmates had caught up. They, too, had noticed the mouse's disappearance.
"Justin, be careful. There's definitely something more to that lawn."
"The more ordinary a place looks, the more likely there is to be something wrong with it..."
Justin nodded at their words. He first looked around and saw that the moving stone statue was still about fifty feet away.
He raised his wand and shouted at the lawn ahead, "Confringo!" Then he took two long strides and scrambled behind the nearest rock.
The students from wizarding families did not yet understand what Justin meant to do,