Upon seeing the earthen figure, Rhys understood everything: a thousand years ago, Helga had come here. Perhaps there had been a fierce battle, or perhaps it was a spur-of-the-moment decision—whatever the case, she had left behind an earthen doppelgänger…
…which had now brought him endless trouble!
Rhys remembered that back when they were still at Hogwarts, Helga's "puppet-creation magic" produced constructs with time limits. But it seemed she had since improved the spell, overcoming the limitation of the puppet's lifespan.
Maybe the puppet could endlessly absorb magic from its surroundings? Rhys made a quick deduction, then turned his focus back to battling Helga's construct.
At first, both sides were probing each other—but even these "tests" involved spells lethal enough to kill.
With a flick of his wand, Rhys sent a wall of fire stretching across the great hall, the roaring flames sweeping toward Helga's puppet in a half-surrounding arc.
The puppet raised a wand made of sculpted earth, summoning a wall of dirt as large as the wall of fire. Rhys's flames slammed into the barrier like waves crashing onto a reef, shattering into hundreds, even thousands of sparks.
Seeing his spell fail to break through, Rhys didn't panic. He gave his wand a subtle flick, and all the sparks exploded in unison, blasting Helga's summoned earth wall into rubble.
While dueling with the puppet, Rhys had never stopped trying to expand his domain. But the progress was slow—so far, only a dozen or so square meters of ground around his feet had been transformed into thick, viscous mud.
There was no denying it—fighting Helga Hufflepuff's puppet in a desert environment was a massive disadvantage. The air here was so dry that even though the great hall was buried deep underground, the moisture content was negligible.
And Helga Hufflepuff specialized in earth-based magic, putting Rhys at a natural disadvantage in this environment.
Spells flew back and forth between them, tearing up the floor of the hall inch by inch. Many of the columns were blasted in half, and clouds of dust and debris filled the air.
Swoosh!
Several sharp spikes shot up from the ground, piercing straight through Rhys's feet. But his expression didn't change in the slightest—because what flowed from the wounds wasn't blood, but thick, tar-like mud.
The difficulty of expanding his domain was one thing—being able to do it at all was another. At the very least, within the dozen or so square meters around him, Rhys could still execute a wide range of techniques—including those earthen spikes, which he had intentionally allowed through as bait.
The moment the puppet thought it had landed a decisive blow, Rhys triggered the traps he had secretly planted during the earlier spark explosion.
Boom!
An explosion erupted beside the puppet, forcing it to dodge. But as it moved, several more explosions followed along its escape path, blasting multiple cracks into its earthen body.
Dust swirled into the air as the puppet conjured several earthen shields around itself, firmly enclosing its form in layers of protection.
Under the protection of the earthen shields, the puppet and Rhys were once again pulled apart by distance, and the traps Rhys had hidden within the dust earlier had all been completely exhausted.
Sand drifted through the air, gathering around the puppet and slowly filling in the cracks blasted into its body.
It raised its head, and its dirt-formed eyes stared directly at Rhys, making him frown. This puppet… it didn't seem like just an ordinary construct.
Did Helga leave behind something hidden within it?
As Rhys pondered the secrets the puppet might contain, the construct gripped its earthen wand with both hands, dropped to one knee, and thrust the wand into the sand beneath it.
Rhys: !!!
A bad feeling crept over him. That movement—there was no way it was part of some ordinary spell.
Magic surged at the tip of Rhys's wand, and he summoned a long whip glowing with dark light, which he lashed toward the puppet—not to injure it, but simply to interrupt its casting.
But halfway through its arc, the whip was stopped. A massive sand-formed hand erupted from the ground, grabbing the whip. Then a second hand rose up from the sand and effortlessly tore the whip in two, as if snapping a strand of hair.
The next moment, the entire great hall began to shake.
The sand covering the ground surged madly toward the puppet's location. After tearing apart Rhys's whip, the two giant hands slammed down on the floor in unison, like a man pulling himself up during a chin-up.
The surrounding sand began to merge into the puppet's body.
Rhys's expression darkened instantly. Just from the prelude alone, he could tell this thing wouldn't be easy to deal with.
He fired off several more spells, but hitting such a massive summoned creature barely left a scratch—not even enough to be called superficial wounds.
Soon, the true form of the puppet's summoned monster was revealed: a colossal sand golem. The sand golem was round and bulky, with a nearly equal length and width. Its legs were extremely short, while its arms were thick and long.
It slowly emerged from the ground, and as the sand golem took shape, nearly all of the sand that had been covering the floor was consumed. In some areas, the stone floor beneath was even exposed.
The great hall was at least fifty meters high, and when the sand golem finished emerging, its head had already reached halfway up. Judging by that, the golem had to be nearly thirty meters tall.
The puppet stood atop the golem's head, looking down at Rhys from above.
Rhys: …
He suddenly remembered a long time ago, when Helga had once shown them a whimsical magic trick—she could summon a small clay figure about half a person's height, and make it perform all kinds of silly antics to amuse them.
This round, bulky sand golem looked exactly like that little clay doll—just magnified hundreds or even thousands of times.
The puppet pointed at Rhys, and the sand golem raised its massive fist, slamming it down toward where Rhys stood. As the fist swung through the air, it stirred up a sandstorm like a raging tornado.
Rhys instantly dissolved into a puddle of mud and sank into the ground.
The next second, the golem's fist crashed into the floor.
A thunderous boom echoed through the hall like an exploding artillery shell, and the entire structure trembled. The golem's fist drove deep into the ground, splattering sticky mud everywhere.
It was as if it had plunged its hand into a swamp. When it pulled its arm back out, half of the golem's arm was now smeared in filthy, clinging mud.
Rhys poked his head up from a short distance away.
That seemingly devastating blow hadn't actually caused him much harm—and it had given him a glimpse into the puppet's strengths and weaknesses.
If Helga Hufflepuff herself were standing here, then he wouldn't stand a chance—fighting her in the desert was far too disadvantageous for him. But bullying this clumsy puppet a little? That wasn't a problem at all.
Even if this puppet could wield nearly the full strength of Helga Hufflepuff.
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