Holly Potter: The Bookish, Burgling, Badass (Hp x Mcu) by Personfour

Chapter 28: Year Five (III)

Summary:

Voldemort and Holly escalate their mental fight, the effects of sleep loss begin to pile up, Holly deals with the cost of her decisions, and meets her match.

Notes:

I'm not sure if I'll be able to post next month, my semester isn't going well and college is absolutely kicking my ass. Depends on how much writing I get done over spring break.

Edit: Just realized that one of my professors assigned a major project deadline for right after break. So sorry, but that's going to take up a ton of my time.

Sleep loss is an insidious thing.   Under normal circumstances it was harmless.  Hogwarts implicitly required it thanks to their (pointless) astronomy classes at midnight.

But these weren't normal circumstances.

Over the summer, when Adult Tom attacked her mind nonstop for ten days, she hadn't suffered too badly.  Sure, it was a miserable and painful experience, but she'd acclimated to the constant pain.  Meditation, naps, and potions dulled the worst of it.  It worked then and she forced Adult Tom to back off.

After that failed he'd switched tactics to random attacks.  His nonstop attack felt like a drill boring against her head; now, at any random moment, she felt like she was being stabbed in the forehead with a molten knife.  The unpredictability made it worse since it stopped her from being able to brew potions; potions that, until then, had relieved the worst of it. 

Despite that, she'd known even then that it'd get worse- he wasn't disrupting her sleep schedule with his attacks yet.  Adult Tom wasn't stupid.  She knew he'd figure it out sooner than later.

That day had arrived, Holly knew, when she was forced awake in the middle of the night feeling like her brain was on fire.

It hadn't even been a week since she'd attacked his mind! 

She hadn't taken advantage of his weakened mindscape because she'd wanted to sort through the memories she'd stolen; something she was regretting now.

Could he really have repaired his mindscape already?  Or was he reckless enough to lash out without protecting his mind first?

'Only one was to find out' Holly thought, and sank into her own mindscape.

---

Standing on her mindscape's metaphysical outer wall overlooking their mental connection, Holly was finally about to 'see' what Adult Tom's mental attack looked like. 

'Or not,' she thought, as she was immediately forced to cover her eyes with her not-arm.

Conjuring eye goggles on her avatar, Holly looked around.

Adult Tom's attack had taken the form of a sandstorm.  Her mental wall was blocking most of it, but the fierce winds still managed to blow across the ramparts.

That... was probably a bad sign.  Maybe it was the metaphysical representation for her not being able to completely block out the pain? 

Whatever it was meant to represent, clearly she needed to reinforce her defenses further.  Especially with how she could see sections of the metaphysical wall being worn down by the wind.  That was certainly a bad sign.

Interestingly, she didn't see an avatar of Adult Tom attacking, but felt his attention or perhaps his awareness within the not-sandstorm.  That wasn't surprising.  Holly herself had gotten the idea of using an avatar from video games.

As for as she knew, 'normal' mental attacks took two forms: using brute force to completely overpower someones defenses – like Adult Tom's metaphysical sandstorm – or were precision strikes, where the attacker found a weak point in the defender's defenses and forced their way in there.