The Library Heist

The Slytherin common room was finally quiet. The fire in the grand fireplace had dwindled to a bed of sullen, glowing embers, casting long, dancing shadows across the expensive furniture. Outside the massive windows, the Black Lake was an inky, bottomless void, the occasional phosphorescent creature drifting past like a lost star. Evelyn sat on the arm of a brocade sofa, perfectly still, watching the digital clock in the corner of her vision tick past midnight. The last of the older students had finally stomped off to their dorms.

The whole dungeon was asleep.

[Stealth Mission Initiated: The Library Heist]

The notification bloomed in her mind, crisp and familiar. She slid off the sofa without a sound, her movements economical and precise, honed by countless hours of navigating treacherous in-game environments. Phase one of her gear grind was officially underway.

Getting out of the common room was easy. The real challenge was the journey through the castle itself. Hogwarts after dark was a completely different level map, its familiar daytime routes now fraught with new dangers. The grand staircases, which were a chaotic mess of shifting platforms during the day, were now eerily still, their silence somehow more threatening than the daytime noise. The portraits that lined the walls were all snoring softly in their frames, their painted chests rising and falling in a gentle rhythm. To Evelyn, they were just sleeping NPCs, but she knew a loud noise could wake them and trigger an alarm, summoning a prefect or, worse, a professor.

She moved like a shadow, hugging the walls, her path pre-calculated to avoid the trick steps that would swallow a person whole and the suits of armor that had a nasty habit of creaking at the worst possible moments. She thought of it in terms of game mechanics: avoiding aggro radiuses, staying out of the line of sight of potential sentries like Peeves the Poltergeist, whose patrol route she had memorized from the game's lore. It was a simple stealth run, but the stakes—getting caught and losing her operational freedom—were high.

She reached the massive oak doors of the library. Locked, of course. A first-year might have tried a simple Alohomora and given up when it failed. But Evelyn knew better. She could feel the faint hum of a more complex ward woven into the wood—an Imperturbable Charm, designed to repel simple unlocking spells and alert the librarian to tampering.

She pulled out her crappy willow wand. She didn't need a lot of power for this, just precision. Instead of trying to brute-force the magical lock, she aimed at the physical one. "Resono."

It was a Resonance Jinx, a clever bit of magic that sent a tiny, specific magical frequency into the lock's metal tumblers, a spell from a discipline that blended magic with acoustic physics. It didn't unlock the ward; it vibrated the physical lock itself, causing the tumblers to align perfectly for a fraction of a second as if the correct key had been inserted. At the peak of the vibration, she heard a soft, satisfying click. She pushed the door open, slipping inside before the tumblers could fall back into place.

The library was a vast, cavernous space, filled with towering shelves that created canyons of shadow. The air smelled of old paper, leather, and beeswax polish. Moonlight streamed through the high arched windows, painting the floor in silver and black. She let the door swing shut behind her with another quiet click.

She froze.

A pair of glowing red eyes stared back at her from the darkness.

Crap, she thought, her calm instantly returning. A roaming mob. Low level, but has a linked aggro radius to the main area boss.

Mrs. Norris, Filch's skeletal-looking cat, was perched on a table not twenty feet away, her tail twitching like a metronome. Her hiss was like the sound of air leaking from a punctured tire. Any second now, she'd let out a screech, and Filch would come running.

Evelyn didn't panic. She didn't even raise her wand toward the cat. Instead, she pointed it at the floor near the opposite end of the aisle. Without a word, she cast a simple, scent-based charm, creating the irresistible, spectral smell of a field mouse scurrying behind a bookshelf.

Mrs. Norris's hiss cut off mid-hiss. Her head whipped around, her glowing eyes fixated on the source of the phantom scent. Her predatory instincts overrode her duty as a guard. With a silent leap, she shot off the table and disappeared into the shadows, hot on the trail of her spectral prey. In the distance, Evelyn could hear the shuffling footsteps and grumbling voice of Filch. "What is it, my sweet? Did you find a naughty firstie?"

Evelyn didn't wait around. She moved deeper into the library, her target clear: a wrought-iron gate that cordoned off a single, dark aisle of books. The Restricted Section.

The gate was secured with a heavy, ancient-looking padlock, but she knew that was just for show. The real lock was the faint, shimmering runes that glowed with a sickly purple light on the bars of the gate itself. This was a high-level magical seal, far beyond what a simple charm could bypass.

She examined it closely. It was a standard Warding Sigil, sequence 7B, designed to trigger a howling alarm if broken. But like any piece of code, it had an exploit. You didn't break it. You just... paused it.

"Rune-script, sequence 7B, sub-charm of binding... there, she muttered to herself, tracing the patterns with her eyes. She had 'read the source code' of this spell a thousand times in the game's codex, analyzing its structure and weaknesses.

She raised her wand—the one with the flawed but powerful Cerberus whisker core she'd fashioned. This would be its first real test on a complex piece of magic.

"Dissolvo Stigmata," she whispered.

It was a Runic Deconstruction Charm, a spell so obscure it probably hadn't been used in centuries. It didn't shatter the ward. It simply caused the magical threads of the spell to temporarily unspool, like pulling the starting thread on a sweater. The spell sent a counter-frequency into the runic array, causing the symbols to lose their cohesion for a few precious seconds. The purple glow on the gate flickered, sputtered, and died.

The ward was down.

With a faint groan of old metal, the heavy padlock popped open.

Evelyn pushed the gate open and stepped inside. The air instantly changed. It was heavy, cold, and tasted of dust, dark magic, and secrets. The books here were bound in dark, unmarked leather, chained to the shelves as if they were prisoners, their very presence seeming to absorb the light and sound around her.

She had breached the final gate. The loot room was open.

A slow, satisfied smile touched her lips in the darkness.

It was time to find her upgrade.