The Admiral of Hogwarts

The moment Voldemort regained his physical form, he immediately had Quirrell lower his hood to survey their surroundings. To his astonishment, the stretch of the Forbidden Forest where they had been standing had vanished completely, replaced by a crater seven or eight meters deep and over thirty meters in diameter, filled with raging flames. The surrounding trees, ablaze like torches, created a scene reminiscent of hell.

Clearly, after becoming ship girls, the Veneto sisters possessed far greater accuracy in their shooting than they did in their warship forms. This allowed them to concentrate all their shells within an extremely small area. Naturally, any target within their impact zone would suffer the most severe damage.

Even Voldemort sustained considerable injuries under such circumstances. Although the explosions and flames didn't harm him too severely due to his timely use of appropriate magic, forcibly taking over Quirrell's body and casting spells in his current state still caused him significant damage.

Seeing this, he decisively abandoned his pursuit of the unicorn and returned to the castle. Fortunately, he had used Quirrell's identity to purchase a good amount of raw materials from Knockturn Alley and concocted some potions. In addition, he had also drunk some of the unicorn's blood scattered around, so he managed to suppress the damage caused by the magical backlash and pull through.

“What was that just now? I don't remember a dragon being that powerful, do I?” Voldemort thought with lingering fear after he had fully recovered and suppressed Quirrell. “But no matter what, I should abandon the plan to hunt unicorns in the Forbidden Forest for now. This incident will definitely attract Dumbledore's attention, and going back to the Forbidden Forest would be too dangerous. Most importantly, my plan is about to succeed—”

While Voldemort was feeling paranoid because of the shelling, Hugo was overcome with excitement. Those few shells from tonight had earned him 3.5 Destiny Points in one go.

More importantly, they had concealed themselves to the greatest extent possible during this operation. This was mainly because the ship girls could completely erase the remnants of their fired shells, leaving no traces except for the craters. Therefore, even if Dumbledore went to the scene to investigate later, he wouldn't be able to reconstruct what had happened.

“Gaining these Destiny Points was within expectations.” At this moment, Hugo had finished washing up and was lying in bed, listening to Victory analyzing the events of the day through the admiral network. “From today's incident, I can confirm that the amount of Destiny Points you gain should be directly proportional to the extent of your meddling. For example, the Forbidden Forest incident was just a minor event in the original text, but because your actions significantly altered the plot, you gained so many Destiny Points.”

“So, in the future, I should try to actively change the plot as much as possible?” Hugo asked after hearing what Victory said. “But I'm worried that some plot changes might cause things to develop in a worse direction.”

“I must say that your understanding is somewhat biased,” Victory said. “Considering all factors, I think that selectively changing the plot is the best way to maximize benefits. Therefore, I personally suggest that you consult with us on this matter in non-emergency situations so that we can help you filter out the best solution as much as possible.”

The next day, Harry and the others vividly described what they had encountered in the Forbidden Forest the night before. According to him, there should have been a dragon passing through the Forbidden Forest last night, successfully driving away the being that was attacking the unicorn. However, because the dragon had set the Forbidden Forest on fire, they had some conflicts with the centaurs. Fortunately, Dumbledore arrived in time to quell the conflict.

Because the ship girls had left very few traces, even Dumbledore, the most powerful white wizard of the 20th century, failed to discover too many clues. In addition, the entire incident didn't cause too much damage. Therefore, this shelling incident was ultimately concluded as a dragon passing through.

Harry's experiences did cause a small stir among the students, but it quickly subsided. Because for everyone, the end-of-year exams were the most important thing at this stage, and the dragon in the Forbidden Forest was just a minor episode.

However, from a certain perspective, this incident was not a bad thing for Harry. At least, without facing Voldemort face-to-face, his exam preparation was less affected than in the original text, and he didn't experience any anxiety or headaches. It's just that because the Gryffindor students still didn't pay much attention to him due to the previous point deductions, he often went to the library with Ron to study with Hugo and the others.

Hermione also showed some signs of being a teacher at this time, such as helping Harry and the others highlight key points and correct previous errors in their studies. But because the two sides were from different houses, both Hermione and Harry were careful to control their emotions. Therefore, the overall learning atmosphere was very good.

Hugo was quite relaxed in his end-of-year exam review because his repeatedly strengthened body had greatly improved in all aspects, so he only needed to spend half or even a third of the effort of others to complete all the review tasks.

But this didn't mean that he was much more relaxed than others during this time. Because the summer vacation was approaching, he and the two ship girls seized the time to record as much knowledge as possible from the school's library, the Room of Requirement, and Ravenclaw's own small library, preparing to conduct research during the summer vacation.

It was also during this time that Hugo discovered the characteristics of these three places of concentrated knowledge: the school library contained the most and most complete knowledge, but unless one was willing to risk screening books in the Restricted Section, one could basically not obtain much advanced knowledge.

The Ravenclaw library mainly recorded some unpopular information and various ideas, which were not systematic as a whole. From a certain point of view, the information stored in this library was very valuable, and it could open up new ideas and solve certain problems for everyone. But on the other hand, these materials, mostly from ideas, required a relatively long research time to be perfected to a usable state, and basically could not be used to improve strength in a short period of time.

The books in the Room of Requirement were the most chaotic in content. Some of them contained some extremely valuable knowledge that could not be found elsewhere, but most of them were dirty and repetitive textbooks, some books that were only suitable for reading alone in private occasions, or some notebooks where people recorded their thoughts or useless information.

And their biggest gain in this search came from the Room of Requirement. They found an ancient notebook inside, which recorded knowledge about how to use the Killing Curse. After obtaining this knowledge, they uploaded the knowledge in the book to the admiral network as soon as possible, and then directly destroyed the notebook.

As time passed, the weather began to slowly become hot. Although staying in an ancient castle in the Scottish Highlands was obviously much cooler than Hugo's previous life, for most students, facing the exams, they could feel the inner fire and outer fire intertwined, making them extremely irritable.

But no matter what everyone thought, time still passed day by day. Finally, the day of the exam arrived.