Harry shivered, which was only natural given the situation, but he did it quite deliberately. As he did so, his wand moved ever so slightly so that the tip rested lightly against his leg. At the same moment, he began speaking, drawing attention away from his wand.

"Teacher. Did not try to desstroy your true life, before. Had made decission the insstant you sstarted sscreaming. Decided that killing your body, delaying you for a time while you ssought hosst, wass a good idea. Sso I would have more time to devisse sstrategy to defeat you. Plan wass already sset in motion before you ssaid you were vulnerable. Your cursse iss only disspelled if I sseek to end your true life"

Harry was babbling. Voldemort would think it stress, but the truth was Harry needed time. He had a Transfiguration to perform, and he could not perform it in under sixty seconds. The instant his wand had touched his leg, Harry had begun visualizing the form of steel as a pure abstraction apart from any material steel, and was now imposing that substance on the shape of a thin sliver of skin cells running down his leg into the ground, continuing into the shape of a thin line running through the ground and splitting thirty-six ways, to then continue up through the material of the Death Eater's shoes and robes until finally it was the shape of a thin disk of flesh and bone bisecting the neck of each of the robed figures.

Every part of the shape was as thin as Harry could make it, and so the volume was not great, but it was still difficult for a first year, and Harry needed to delay his death until he could complete it. His statement about his intentions in Parseltongue had been deliberately vague, to force Voldemort to take the time to probe him further. While he had not thought he would truly kill Voldemort when he had decided to shoot him, Voldemort's exclamation that his Horcruxes had stopped working had caused Harry to hope that it was true, and that he might have a chance to end his enemy permanently.

That probably meant that the Riddle curse was indeed broken, but Voldemort would have to waste a few seconds asking him about his intentions at the last moment, but Harry would take as long as he dared evading, before finally admitting the truth. Then Voldemort would angrily hiss that the curse was still broken, and demand Harry's secrets from him one last time. Harry would delay as long as he dared, before beginning to explain about Dementors and the Patronus Charm. Harry would then explain his secrets in as much detail as he could, buying as much time as he could, as he continued to concentrate on the abstract from of steel.

...

...

Several minutes later, as Harry was just beginning to run out of relatively safe secrets to tell, and wondering if he should start explaining timeless physics, his Transfiguration took hold.

Beneath the moonlight glints a tiny fragment of silver, a fraction of a line decapitating thirty-six Death Eaters...

(black robes, falling)

...blood spills out in litres, and someone screams a word.

"WHAT?!" screamed Voldemort, in utter shock as his Death Eaters fell in a shower of blood. He hesitated barely a moment before firing on Harry. But that brief surprise was long enough for Harry to activate the second half of his shaped partial Transfiguration, and a sheet of kevlar burst upwards from the line in the ground Harry had been Transfiguring, just as Harry threw himself to the ground behind it.

The bullets impacted the kevlar with a dull thud, there was a pause in the shots, and Harry burst out from behind his cover sprinting as fast as he could perpendicular to the floating Voldemort.

Oh please let him not be an expert marksman, please let him take a second to aim.

As Voldemort took a moment to adjust his aim to the moving target, Harry pointed his wand at Voldemort and cried "Wingardium Leviosa!"

Voldemort tried to dodge, but the Hover Charm was a continuous beam and much easier to aim than most spells, and Harry brought his magic into contact with the Dark Lord.

The pain was incredible, and Harry screamed, his hand flying to his now bleeding scar. But just as on that fateful day in 1981, the resonance between their magics affected the older, more powerful Riddle to a much greater extent. Voldemort had far more magic to fuel the resonance than Harry did, and Voldemort screamed a high, piercing scream as he caught fire. The burnt husk of his body fell to the ground.

Harry did not know how much time he had just bought himself. He needed to gather up Hermione and his quest items and return to Hogwarts immediately, to begin sounding the alarm. He approached the altar on which Hermione was beginning to wake.

"Um, Hermione?" Harry said in a very small voice. "I think I owe you a really, really, really big apology."