Chapter Text
Hero was gone when Harry woke.
It was later than he normally got up—Aunt Petunia always had him up at six, to get a head start on the cleaning and make breakfast so that her precious Dudleykins didn't have to wait for his food when he got up, and here in this alien world he was usually woken by the monsters burning outside with the rising sun. He couldn't place where he was for a moment, just that he was tired and his face was all sticky from crying.
He got up and wiped off his face with a splash of water from a water bottle, left over from potion making. Hero was going to come back, right?
That's when he saw it. Sitting on the table was a smooth wooden bowl, shimmering faintly with the purple glint of enchantments. Runes gleamed on it, and while he couldn't read the magic squiggles as well as Hero could, he could guess what kind of spell must be on it, because when he tentatively reached out to touch the bowl, it was pleasantly warm. Inside of it was a little pasty in what looked like some kind of buttery piecrust. Beside it was a note in Hero's cramped, draftsman handwriting:
Harry, I had to leave this morning, Harry parsed out, but I will be back later today, and I'm not angry about yesterday. I hope you're feeling better. Also, there's breakfast on the table—go ahead and eat it while the enchantment lasts.
Harry blinked—so it was for him—and reached out to pick up the pie. It was still warm from the magic plate, and when he cautiously bit into it, it tasted of carrots and potatoes and mushroom and some kind of meat that was like chicken but a little bit more gamey*1, and the crust was melt-in-your mouth soft and rich. It wasn't very spiced, but given that Harry had been used to cafeteria slop and Aunt Petunia's "anything more spicy than salt is too much", it was flavorful as anything. He finished it in an embarrassingly short amount of time, cramming it all into his mouth in a few gulping bites. Then he stopped, because he didn't know what he was going to do with himself until Hero returned. Hero had taken the brewing stuff with him (and honestly, Harry didn't think he'd like to try to make potions without Hero, that seemed kind of dangerous), and Hero had directly said that he shouldn't enchant anything without someone with him.
He dressed himself in a soft leather tunic and pants, and pulled on his shimmery enchanted boots, prickling with magic, and then went to the door to look out.
The sun was already high in the sky. Before he'd even stood there long, there was a vwoop, and Hero appeared, along with Dusklight. The lanky, purple-eyed creature gave a cheerful chirp that sounded for all the world like 'what's up?'
Hero gave a tired-looking smile. Harry couldn't help thinking that the older man looked…well…worn. His brown hair was tied back in a messy bun with a scrap of spider-silk, and there was something half-haunted lingering in the creases on his face. "Harry," he said. "I brought something new for you to try."
Harry wanted to be excited about it. But "Mr. Hero, are you ok?"
Hero blinked. "Am I ok…? I am now," he said after a moment. "Just bad memories. It's been…a morning."
"I'm sorry," Harry said after a moment. He couldn't help being curious, but he wasn't going to bother Hero about it—it was probably not his business, and Hero didn't really look like he wanted to share.
"There's nothing for you to be sorry about, kit," Hero said gently. "Everything that I was remembering probably happened years before you were even spawned, and a lot of it was probably my fault."
"What happened?" Harry couldn't not ask now, and he didn't think Hero was going to slap him for asking an adult question if he hadn't already—he wasn't Aunt Petunia.
"I had a…friend," Hero said, after a long moment, and Harry could see him calculating in his head what he thought he should share. "Or at least I thought he was my friend. His name was Null, and I loved him greatly."
Harry wanted to ask him 'wait, loved like I loved Johnny in primary school, or loved like Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon', but he kept his mouth firmly shut, sensing that Hero didn't much like talking about the subject. He felt perhaps he shouldn't even have asked, but Hero was still talking.
"What I didn't know, when I met him, was that Null…was not a good person. He had done a lot of bad things, and he hadn't changed, to the point where a lot of people outright hated and distrusted him. But I believed him when he said they just hated him because he didn't look normal, and because he had powers like mine that made him scary. I was much younger then, and I didn't know when to trust, and besides, I have met people who fear me because of my eyes, or because I can summon lightning, and it made sense they would fear Null because he looked like he was a living shadow."
There were a lot of questions that Harry wanted to ask, but first—"Wait, you can summon lightning?!"
Hero smiled a little. "Yes. If you stand back, I can show you."
Harry hurriedly backed up to let Mr. Hero do his magic.
Hero tilted his head to the sky, and his white eyes went from their usual softly glowing white to a glare that seemed like spotlights. Sparks gathered around him, and the skin of his hands seemed to fritz out into a million colored dots, like they were made of the same material as a cracked telly screen. Then a bolt of lightning crashed down from the sky, setting the grass at Hero's feet momentarily alight. Harry stared.
"Whoa. Can you show me how to do that?" Harry whispered.
"Not quite," Hero responded. "To my knowledge I am the only one who can do it, except maybe John Entity, and he's been dead for a few centuries now. Besides, it's a bit dangerous for a kit—you could hurt yourself without meaning to. I do have something almost as good to show you in a moment though,"
Harry eyed his pockets and the bundle at his hip, wondering what strange thing he would pull out next. But then—"You said Null looked like he was a living shadow?"
Hero got an odd, sad look on his face. "Yes. His skin and hair and everything else was very dark, a kind of shadowy black, and he had black eyes with silver pupils in them. He liked wearing gold enchanted armor, because it looked pretty against his skin. There were a lot of people who thought he looked strange or scary, especially because he could change himself to look like anyone he wanted, but he honestly wasn't that strange, especially when you consider that we both knew someone who didn't have a face at all."
Harry was starting to think when Hero had said "I loved him," he meant like marriage love. Which, if Null was a bad person, must have been even worse than if they were just best friends. He suddenly wanted to say anything to wipe that softly sad look off Hero's face, and rushed to think of something to say to change the subject. He finally settled on "Someone who didn't have a face?", suddenly registering the last sentence.
"Oh yes. He could see and talk and everything, but some kind of glitch prevented his head from rendering properly, so he typically wore a diamond helmet, so that he just looked like he was in armor. His name was Kuznetsov, but he went by 'Error 422', because he liked to joke that he was just so good looking that the game couldn't handle processing his face. He was very good at brewing potions."
Harry admittedly didn't know what to do with that. He would like to think that he would have been friends with the bloke just the same, but he couldn't help thinking that someone not having a face was just a bit freakier than having really dark skin or white glowy eyes. Then again, he knew what it was like to be hated because he was "freaky". Still, from the way Hero talked, it sounded like that friend was long gone too, and suddenly he was grasping around trying to remember something else to change the subject. Finally, he settled on "What are we doing today?"
Hero's sad face broke into a grin. "I found a trident for you."
"A trident?"
Hero reached into that pocket of nothing-space where he always put things, and started pulling…and pulling…and pulling. Out came a long shaft of some blue-greenish metal, which eventually ended in three points that looked as if they'd been made with some kind of shell or rock. It was all covered in waterweed, and Hero took a moment, pulling the weeds off and using the ubiquitous cloth in his belt to wipe green gunk off of it. "I didn't clean it off when I got it," he said, "so it might be a minute."
"How do you get one? You said that you couldn't make tridents, right?"
"I fought a drowned until I could steal it from him," Hero responded. "For some reason, they are uncraftable— even when you want to repair one, you have to either use parts from another trident or enchant it with mending so it can collect life-energy from the air around itself. From what I understand, the methods used to make them no longer exist, but I think the spines are made with prismarine, although I still don't know how to make prismarine hard enough to repair a trident with. Anyway, the drowned are the only ones who still have access to tridents*2, and as they can't talk, I'm not sure where they're getting them."
"They don't talk?"
"No. The only mobs which speak in a way understandable to players or entities like us are endermen, villagers and their kin, who I don't think you've met yet, and pigmen*, which I sincerely hope you haven't met yet, as they live in another dimension and typically don't come to the Overworld since it makes them sick. Other mobs, like iron golems and allays and some other species, may understand limited sign language, but drowned are like zombies—they don't speak in any way comprehensible to us. A lot of the time they also have water in their lungs, since they generally use primitive gills to breathe, so they're usually just going to sound like they're gargling salt water."
Harry did not want to meet a drowned.
"Anyway, I don't have another trident to use to repair this one, so I figured I'd make this an object lesson in how to use an anvil." He handed the trident to Harry with a "careful of the points" (Harry was very careful, though he did lift it to see how heavy it was. It was surprisingly light) and reached into his space-pocket again, this time with both hands. "An anvil is not something most people have around, as it is expensive and very heavy, but it's incredibly useful if you do have access to one, because not only can you repair most things with it, you can also apply the exact enchantment you want, instead of just hoping you get something good from the enchantment table. It's super messy, but very effective, and you always get the same thing every time, so I tend to prefer it over the table." After a moment of rummaging, he pulled out an enormous metal…thing, so tall it came up to a little past Hero's waist, and Hero was not a small man. He heaved it onto the grass by Harry's house, and Harry hopped up onto the crafting table to see better as he reached into his space-pocket again and pulled out…a book?
"This," he said, "Is a mending book. Incredibly powerful, incredibly rare, and typically only found in abandoned treasure chests or through fishing, although if you meet a skilled librarian villager he can copy one for you. It's also the only way to repair a trident unless you want to waste another trident's parts." He took the book out and showed it to Harry, tracing the gleaming runic symbols along its spine that read, alternately, "Mending" and "ᒷリ↸╎リ⊣"*3.
Harry flinched a little, realizing that he was looking at something that was obviously super hard and expensive to get. "I hope it wasn't too hard to find?"
Hero's face softened. "Don't worry, I have plenty of mending books. I cured a villager from zombification once, and he sold me a bookshelf-full of mending books for cheap. Plus I don’t usually use it on my tools, except for my pickaxe. Back in my day, we didn't have mending books, so I never really remember I have them unless I need to repair a trident. Of course, we didn't have tridents either, but I don't usually use ranged weapons anyway. I don't use weapons much at all, actually—a pickaxe is good enough for me. But you're smaller, and mobs will probably think you'd make a nice snack, so I want to make sure that you have something that's long enough to smack a zombie before he gets close to you."
That was…oddly sweet, for all Hero was talking about giving Harry something he could use to kill people with. Harry inspected the trident up close—here he could tell what Hero meant about needing to repair it before using it, as fine cracks were threading down it from the top of the shimmery metal(?) shaft to the bottom, and one of its spines, which seemed to be of a material kind of like a seashell if a seashell was also rock, was chipped. There was also some slime still in the grooves on the handle that Hero's cloth hadn't gotten to.
"…So what you do,"
Harry hastily looked up, suddenly remembering that Hero was trying to explain how to use an anvil.
"—is lay down the enchanted book on its spine, with the pages open, like so. It doesn't matter what page it opens to, just that the pages are visible."
He proceeded to do so, flipping the mending book open and laying it on top of the anvil, where the pages splayed open, shimmery-pale with the purple gleam typical of enchanted things. Harry couldn't read anything on the pages—the words were not only in the weird gobbledygook that he was only barely learning to read but also constantly flipping upside down and right-side up, sort of like how one of his classmates had said her de-something-or-other worked—but it was covered with weird magical symbols.
"Next, you lay the thing you want to enchant on top of it." Hero reached out, and Harry hastily gave him the trident, nearly missing scratching the underside of his chin with it. "I am going to do this for now, because while there isn't much actual danger, I don't want you getting too close to a heated anvil, particularly since you're closer to the ground than I am." He laid the trident down on top of the book, and the shimmery purple film of enchantment over it popped and warped like water dropped into a heated pan.
"Make sure to keep your distance if you ever need to do this," Hero said, stepping back until he was beside Harry, still crouching on the crafting table. They both watched as the anvil started to heat up, glowing faintly orange. The book shimmered and grew brighter, and then the film of magic stretched to cover the trident, which took on its glow. The book, below it, crumbled into pure magic and disappeared. After a moment, the anvil stopped glowing.
Hero approached, touched the anvil with an index finger, and seemed to conclude that it was safe to touch, as he picked it up and handed it back to Harry. It still looked exactly the same, except it was glowing.
"You're going to need to charge it with life energy to get it to mend," Hero said, "as the Mending book doesn’t automatically do that. Normally you get life energy doing everyday things, but in a pinch, you can use these. Bottles 'O Enchanting." He pulled out a leather belt with a bunch of loops, all of which were holding enchanted glass bottles that shimmered with an inner greenish-yellow light, each corked with a little plug of wood.
He tugged one out and handed it to Harry. Harry stared. It looked kind of like a potion bottle, if said potion bottle was made of glass that already gleamed with enchantment, but the inside was full of little orbs of light, swimming around each other in a mesmerizing swirl. Harry hefted it, but while the bottle was about the size of an apple, enormous in Harry's cupped hands, it felt almost as if it didn't weigh anything at all.
Harry stared at his reflection, warped in the glass, and the light swirling behind it, all shimmering-bright. Something inside him felt like it was being tugged on.
"Harry. Harry!"
Harry yanked his eyes away. "I'm so sorry, Mr. Hero—"
"No need to be sorry. You're looking at the magic that drives everything in this world, it's understandable. I just didn't want you to be lost in it."
Harry hastily shoved the bottle back in Hero's hands.
"Was I supposed to, like, drink it?"
"No. I don't think you could, even if you wanted to—it's not liquid, it's literally trapped energy. What you do is you smash the bottle on the ground. The glass is enchanted to disappear, so you don't need to worry about stepping on broken glass, but it releases the energy, which will be drawn to the trident and repair it, like so."
Hero picked up the trident, holding it with the butt towards the ground, and then took the bottle and threw it at his feet. It smashed, and as Hero said, the pieces of lavender glass slowly started to disappear, like snowflakes on asphalt. Shimmering orbs of green and yellow light rose from the breaking point, swirling around Hero almost as though they were alive…or as if they once had been. Slowly, they alighted on every inch of the trident and dissolved into it. Cracks disappeared as if they had never existed, the chipped prong glowed a little bit and regrew a point. Any of the gunk which might have remained on it vanished, leaving the surface pristine as if it had only just been made. One of the orbs left over floated towards Harry, alighting on his shoulder like a curious butterfly, and all at once it sunk into his skin as if it were trying to mend him, too.
He felt…alive, as if every bit of energy he'd ever had had returned to him. Some part of him wanted to run, and run, and run. He looked over to Hero, who was using a fresh cloth to wipe off the trident and smiling indulgently over at him.
"It feels special, doesn't it."
Harry nodded breathlessly.
"Experience orbs, or life-energy, as I call them. They're in anything which is or was alive. Bottles O' Enchanting are usually only able to be bought from Master-Level Cleric villagers— if you don't know any Clerics, you'd normally just go and mine some coal, since coal used to be plants, once upon a time, or you could cook some fish or smelt some metal, and some of the energy that used to be that fish or used to be the wood that you're using to smelt the metal will come out as life-energy.
"You could also kill animals or monsters for their energy, or you could even use your own, but I don't suggest that as using too much of your own energy can make you tired and sad."
"How do the Clerics get the energy to put into bottles?" Harry asked cautiously.
"I've never asked," Hero said, "And I'm honestly not sure I want to know. Villagers—even Clerics—are nonviolent by nature, so I'm assuming they don't go around killing monsters or chickens or something. They do buy odds and ends like rotten meat and rabbit's feet and the scutes from turtle shells and dried netherwarts that are too old to make potions, though, so I can only theorize that they do something to recycle the life energy from things and give it a new use."
"Huh." Harry wondered, perhaps morbidly, if some villager-person would be able to make magic out of his bones, if he died from one of the monsters of this world. Then he hastily decided he didn't want to think about that. Had the magic that landed on him been someone, once?
"Can I see the trident?" he said after a moment. He was still so sped up—not like when he'd had that Speed potion, but like the rare times when Aunt Petunia had let him sleep in, like when she was on her diet and wanted to cook herself instead of having him do it, and he'd had a long sleep and managed to get a snack and the sun was hot and he could just run—not because Dudley and his gang was chasing him, but just because. He felt as though there was too much under his skin, and he felt an almost unbearable impulse to let it out through his fingertips.
Hero handed him the trident, telling him again to be careful of the prongs, particularly now that they'd been sharpened. He inspected it, noting the new-looking shine to it, the perfect points—they really did look like pieces from some long-fossilized creature. This felt…right, to him, in a way that the sword—and even the bow—definitely didn't. This felt like his.
Later, he would never have been able to explain why or even how he did it, but all at once, he felt a sudden, near-unbearable something building up in him, inexorable in the way a sneeze might be. His palms heated up, and all at once the trident started to glow in his hands, then shine. Hero's eyes went from normal points of white light to enormous spots of brightness, and he hastily reached towards Harry, but nothing happened. Nothing even hurt, except that Harry felt a little tired and sore inside, like when he'd had a good long bicycle ride, before his old bicycle (Dudley's castoff) got "mysteriously" smashed into a tree. The trident was glowing a little more brightly now, runes gleaming along its length.
"Harry, are you ok?"
"Um, yes? I don't know what happened!"
"Calm yourself, I'm not angry. Can I look at the trident?"
Harry hastily passed it over.
Hero took it, and sat down on a nearby block, laying the shaft of the weapon over his lap so he could trace his finger along the writing that had etched itself in the gleaming metal. Harry watched as the worried crease in his forehead smoothed out a little. He looked…pleased?
"What is it?"
Hero looked up. "Well, I think we can safely say that you like tridents. I'm not sure how you did it, but it is now enchanted with Loyalty, Channeling, Impaling, and Riptide, which is normally impossible to do, since Channeling and Riptide are incompatible magically. And it now has your name etched in it in Galactic."
"So I did a good thing? I just kind of…felt it."
"You did a very good thing. I'm not even sure how, but this is a formidable weapon. I will however have to teach you more carefully, as an enchanted trident is more dangerous than a standard one."
"What do the enchantments do?"
"Loyalty means that your trident will come back to your hand when you throw it, which is handy if you're trying to reach targets that are farther away. Impaling makes it sharper, so be sure to keep it away from your face or anything you don't want to get stabbed. Riptide means that if you're holding it while you're swimming, flying in the rain, or ice-skiing, you go faster. And Channeling? Well, you were just asking me if you could learn how to call down lightning…"
"Wait, seriously?" Harry breathed.
"Yes, seriously. I think it only works if it's already raining, but basically if you hit someone or something with a channeling trident while it's raining, whatever you hit gets struck with lightning."
Harry looked at the trident in Hero's hands with new nervousness. "So I could accidentally blast someone with lightning?"
"…I suppose so, but in general I'd assume you wouldn't be pointing a trident at someone you didn't want to hurt. Right?" he said, giving Harry a stern look.
Harry nodded meekly.
"However, it isn't raining right now, so it will be considerably less dangerous to teach you how to use it, although I will thank you to point it away from me and any of the animals around here," he said, nodding to the duo of sheep which had been peacefully grazing near them for the past few minutes. He laid the trident across the block he'd been sitting on and drew out the target block and assorted machine-things he'd brought over for the archery lesson, and set it up once again, so there was a short target, a tall target, and a target that moved. Finally he went back to pick the trident up.
"Now, a trident is unique in the sense that it can be used both as a melee weapon and a ranged weapon*5, though it is more powerful when used from a distance. You can absolutely still use it to stab a monster that tries to gnaw on your ankles though." He demonstrated, using a convenient block of hay to simulate an ankle-gnawing monster. "It goes without saying that the sharp end should never be pointed towards anything that you don't want poked, so do be careful with it." He reached into thin air and pulled out a wooden sword. "Swing at me."
Harry stared. "Um, Hero?"
"Swing at me—I promise that a bamboo sword isn't strong to seriously hurt me even if you hit me."
Harry swung very carefully at Hero, who raised the trident, and stopped the blow before it could reach him, bamboo useless against the shining metal. "A trident is also handy because you can block anything coming at you. It's not as good as a shield—I don't suggest you try blocking arrows with it, because while you could potentially do that with enough practice, it's really not safe for a beginner—but you can keep an armed husk or something from introducing his shovel or sword to your face."
Hero heaved the haybale aside and then took several more paces back, and Harry hastily followed him.
"However, you can also throw it. You will need to be farther away from the targets than with a bow, which is why I'm moving back. It's probably also a little heavy for you to throw one-handed like I can, but with enough practice and enough upper-arm strength, it'll be one of the most effective ranged weapons you can get. When you're practicing, you'll want to get in the mindset first. Take a few breaths to clear your head, like so." Hero closed his eyes, breathing deeply a few times. "First you want to make sure your trident is in good throwing condition. We can skip that tonight because it was just mended, but normally you'll want to make sure the shaft is straight and the prongs aren't loose or chipped. Next, you need to find the balance point. When you use the same trident enough times that'll get near instantaneous, but for now you need to take your time to make sure it's correct. Place the trident in the palm of your hand." Hero demonstrated, forearm tensing with the effort. "You'll want to keep adjusting it until it's balanced enough that you don't have to hold onto it to keep it from tipping. Now you grip your whole hand around the balancing point, like so."
He gripped it, carefully showing Harry how his hand wrapped around it, and the way the thumb tucked. "Once you know the balance point and you have a good grip on it, hold the trident up with your dominant hand like so, where the points are beside your ear and the shaft is parallel with the ground. This way you align your sight with the direction the tips are pointed. Now you'll want to get a proper footing. Take a step towards the target to get your momentum—that's the amount of physical power that you have while moving, which translates to the physical force you can exert on something—like when you draw your hand back to throw a ball farther—going. Angle your body and face slightly sideways, both so you can throw better and so that you're a smaller target for monsters to throw things at you.
He demonstrated again, stepping forward and adjusting the aim of the trident. "Get your stance ready to throw—your left foot should already be forward, closer to the target. You'll want to keep your feet shoulder-width apart—that is they should be roughly the same distance apart as your shoulders are—and make sure your knees are bent and ready to move. Your feet should make a letter "t".
"Now you'll want to run a few steps to generate speed, because the faster you're going, the faster the trident is going to go when you throw it. Tridents are more awkward to throw than spears—if I had my way, I'd be starting you out with a spear—but spears don't exist here. Anyway, once you've gathered speed, you'll want to pull your throwing arm back until your hand is a little higher than your shoulder height, and your trident is angled slightly up. Then you're going to twist your hips into the throw, launching the trident at the same time. It should remain straight, but don't force it—the evenness should come from a good throw, not you hastily trying to correct the trident while throwing it."
Harry squinted, trying to picture it, then watched as Hero indeed ran a few steps, pulled the trident back until the point was behind his head to the left, and twisted, throwing the spear evenly before him, taking a little sidestep as he did. It flew unerringly across at least a dozen blocks before landing with an unerring "thunk" in the middle target, quivering with the impact.
"Do you want to go fetch it?"
Harry nodded eagerly, then ran to pull it out. It took a surprising amount of force, and when he pulled it out, there were three, evenly spaced perforations in the cloth of the target, the second one going directly through the red spot in the target's center.
"Do you want me to show you a few more times?"
Harry nodded, and Hero went through the same procedure four more times, narrating how he was doing it each time. The third time, it went off-center, but the other three times the trident impaled the target not only in the same place but through the same lacerations, which widened with every impact. Hero was good.
"Now, I am going to show you how to practice safely." Hero reached his arm into his inventory and pulled out a long, wooden staff without a tip. "Obviously it isn't going to feel the same or have the same weight without the tips, but this is going to be easier for you to handle, and you can still find the balance point and figure out how to throw evenly without the points, and it's safer the first few times. Try to treat it like the real trident—it may not have points, but it's still a staff, and it can still do some damage when you throw it."
Hero handed him the staff, watching him carefully. After a moment, he asked if he could touch Harry to adjust the motion, and when Harry agreed, he came behind him, adjusting his grip and standing behind him as he struggled to find the staff's balance point and get his feet in position. Finally he wound up and pulled back, and the staff flew…a few feet. Harry stared down at the polished wood, but Hero looked excited.
"Excellent, for your first throw. It could use some more power behind it, but if you notice it flew straight, rather than going off to one side, which means you don't need to adjust anything, you just need to find how to throw harder without overextending yourself and throwing it too wildly. Part of it is probably because you're not used to heaving big sticks."
They continued until Harry's arms were aching pleasantly and the sun was already starting to descend in the sky. Then Hero hesitated. Harry had been looking a little sadly at the trident—he knew he was supposed to practice with something that wasn't sharp first, but he was learning how to throw tridents, not sticks.
Hero looked at him, and then at the trident. "So. Normally I wouldn't suggest trying to use a weapon beyond your current skill level, but would you like to try the trident? I do warn you it will be a little bit heavier, and it will be considerably more dangerous, but I have confidence in you."
"Yes? As long as I won't hurt anything?"
"I worry more about you hurting yourself," Hero returned. "But I believe you can do it, now that you've practiced the motions all day. And…here."
He drew from his inventory a potion bottle, full of faintly-glowing yellow liquid. "One sip, no more, no less. This won't stop you from having to practice, but it will give your muscles a boost the first time, and prevent straining. I do not suggest abusing this, or drinking the enhanced Strength potions, until you're grown up, but a sip can kickstart your body's muscle-building process."
Harry hesitantly took the bottle, uncorking it and taking exactly one small gulp.
He felt…strong. A tremor went through him, from his toes to the top of his head, and in its wake he felt an impossible warmth, and his muscles stopped aching and instead seemed to tense, feeling almost as though they were growing, although he knew that that was impossible. The trident still didn't feel light, but rather he felt as if lifting it was no trouble, as if he could lift twice that and be perfectly stable, like Hero. He picked up the trident, feeling for the balance like Hero had taught him, breathing deep. One hand wrapped around it, thumb tucked.
He held the trident up, ready to throw. Everything felt as if it were moving in slow motion. He drew it back, pulled the thing up until the points were by his ear and the shaft was parallel to the ground, adjusted his footing so his feet were like a t, shoulder-width apart, and his knees were all bouncy.
Then, without even looking towards Hero, he ran a few steps, pulled his hand back, twisted into the throw, and let go.
It flew to the target, and then all three prongs hit at once, stabbing directly into the first punctures Hero's throw had made.