Story Title: Harry Potter and the Fall

Rating: M

Author: Jaing

Contains magitech.

A/N: Also, note: Just as in the Harry Potter and the Dawn of Honor universe, my wizard-count is far higher than what we would assume to be the case from the books. Expect large battles - they serve a purpose.

Chapter 2: Shadows in the Darkness

1200 hours, Zulu time; Area 7777, Massachusetts-

"Settle down, and pay attention.

This is the situation: Our intelligence sources tell us that the Magical Government of Britain has finally completely fallen to the forces of Tom Riddle, also known as Lord Voldemort. Contrary to popular belief - hope, really - he did not, in fact, die seventeen years ago at the proverbial hands of Harry Potter.

Approximately five weeks ago, Riddle assaulted the last bastion of British resistance - their school, Hogwarts. Somewhere between seven to eight hundred students were in attendance at the time, and from what we've gathered, five to six hundred of those were sent home for being underage and/or of the Slytherin House. That left the castle with around two hundred defenders, and they got reamed.

We haven't gotten any sort of casualty estimate, but the odds weren't good to begin with. It seems that after the majority of the Slytherin students were removed from the building, they joined their parents in the assault on the castle. Not all of them, we believe, but most.

However, given the lack of public boasting that Harry Potter and all the resistance died at the castle, we're operating on the assumption that they managed to flee the castle's complete destruction. This, Specter, is where your team comes in.

We need to know whether or not the lights of freedom still burn in Britain, and we need to know it ASAP. The Army's Magical Division is mobilizing for combat, and they're going to need to know whether or not they'll have in-country aid or not. Additionally, reaching Potter and protecting him from harm will be a top priority, regardless of how impressive his record is or isn't in your eyes - and to mine, it is. The boy - no, the man- is a symbol, a living pair of upright middle fingers jammed into Riddle's eye sockets. We'll need that sort of symbol if reports of Voldemort's support on the Continent are true.

You will be leaving aboard an MMC-130J transport in three hours, bound for Scotland. You mission is to recon the Hogwarts ruins and look for clues as to the whereabouts of the survivors, if any. The one MAGUS sweep we got of the area showed fairly heavy Death Eater patrols, probably doing the same thing you're about to be. Try to stay undetected, but if you must get into a fight, be as quiet as possible. We don't want them to know we were here.

Dismissed."

"So..."

"So."

"So."

"So... what? It seems pretty clear to me, folks. We're headed to England to figure out whether or not old Moldyshorts finally managed to off the Chosen One." The leader of the group said, raising an eyebrow to his team while stuffing a MOLLE pouch with round-ended canisters that faintly glowed a cool, electric blue.

"Oh no, it's not that, Echo. I'm thinking that was a general expression of 'Well then.'" piped up the snack-sized redhead on the other end of the room, checking the switching mechanism on a weapon that transformed from an under-handed weapon, to a rear-toggled one a la a machinegun, to an overhanded weapon like a rocket launcher. The snub nose of the weapon bristled with roughly two dozen wand tips, and she loaded an upsize version of Echo's canister into her weapon's breech. "See, people tend to do that when they want to know if their peers have precisely as little to contribute as they do."

"Speak for yourself, Lizzie; I'm distracted by thoughts of a beach in Cancun at the moment." rumbled a tall, dark-skinned man, older than the rest of them. Zach checked the feed from the drone in his hand to the visor on his eyes, the four stubby little broomtips that held it aloft and zoomed it around the battlefield dormant and folded into compact mode at this moment in time. His weapon was cradled across his lap, a revolver-barreled grenade launcher with a muzzle the size of a man's fist.

"Bah, Mexico. It's too hot and the internet there sucks. I prefer San Fran myself." muttered a tiny blonde with pixie hair. Her hands flew over the virtual keyboard of her magically-shielded, military grade tablet, wireless signals surging into the comm node on her hardpack, and from there to space. She took a moment to pause, and finished organizing her pack to her satisfaction, before closing the lid of her computer and sliding it into the armored storage slot specifically built for it. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a goodbye to make." she said, leaving the room. Echo's raised eyebrow tracked her every step of the way, before turning his attention to Zach, demanding an explanation.

True to form, he shrugged. "In case you haven't noticed, LT, she's a bit OCD about stuff like this. Thinks that if she doesn't do everything she does in the exact order and manner she does it, she'll die. At least, that's how she explains it to me."

Echo made a face that was somewhat a cross between amusement, bemusement and just pure "Huh", slapped a canister into the butt of his weapon, jerked the charging handle and watched the little, overbuilt, mass-produced core-wand light up a shifting array of colors. Pulling his wallet from his pocket, he picked his vest up, and withdrew a picture from behind his license. He looked at it a moment, brushed the picture across his lips and placed it into a pocket he'd sewn into the inside of his vest, directly over his heart, the same way he did at the start of every mission and exercise.

He supposed he could understand Sarah's habit of making a last call home.

Twelve hours later, Specter Team - officially known as Force Recon Team Sierra, Magical Division, US Army - was finally done with being shaked and rattled about on the inside of the magic-hardened MC-130J cargo plane, flying over Scotland at three hundred miles an hour.

"Remember, our mission is reconnaissance. Our job is to get in, and get out, without them ever knowing we were here." Echo said, his throat-mike picking his words up and transmitting them over the short-range, heavily encrypted radios his team wore. All of them wore helmets, sporting various optical arrays and a universal comm antenna, their faces masked with balaclavas for warmth against the high-altitude night chill. "We go in, we find evidence of the survival of Potter and the rest of the Hogwarts students, and we get out. Should we find said evidence, we go off and find them. If we don't, we start figuring out how to cause as much mayhem as possible for the Death Eaters. Copy?"

"Copy, Echo." Lisabelle.

"Gotcha, chief." Zach.

"Roger that." Sarah.

The massive bay doors opened behind Echo, and he grinned at his team mates, switching a digital toggle on the multifunction data display on his forearm, the featherweight unit packing more power than many full-sized computers sixty and seventy times its size. He began to disappear, the small array of wands in his hardpack coming to life and Disillusioning him. "Then let's go." he said, as the red wait light switched to green, and he stepped backwards off the edge of the door/ramp and into empty space.

His team followed, and the wind whipped around him as he fell freely through space, arms flat against his sides, streamlining himself as he flew towards a clearing in the huge forest that bordered the castle. As he closed, he flipped backwards, facing his feet towards the forest. He keyed his internal-systems channel with a grind of his teeth. "WITCH, deploy brakes." he said, calmly and clearly, and a pair of pods on either side of his hardpack began to glow as the magic-charged fluid inside them put power to the broom-ends that made up the brake system. He began to slow rapidly, coming to a sluggish hover over the clearing, and dropped the last few feet to the ground, rolling with the impact and coming up with his weapon raised, the Disillusionment charm flickering as the impact strained its ability to hide him.

One by one, his team mates skidded in beside him, the most graceful of whom was Zach, who had been doing this longer than they had. They spread out into a loose arrowhead formation with Zach at the tip, and began to press on into the Forbidden Forest's interior. Creatures of the night howled and shrieked and made all the billion and one unnerving sounds that such creatures make, and every member of the team had to focus on their surroundings even more than usual, if that were possible, because a magical forest like this contained things that no other forestland on earth did, almost all of which could and would attack a human.

"I have movement. One possible hostile, two o'clock, two hundred yards. Just passed into a thicket, might come out the other side." Zach noted, and moments later, surely enough, a bright thermal signature showed on Echo's visor, lighting the figure up like a candle.

Then it turned away from them.

"Uh, Zach, I do believe that's a centaur."

"I did say possible hostile, didn't I? Still applies, now that I think of it."

"Truth."

The team continued on, and by the time they reached the edge of the forest nearest the castle, the sun would rise in only an hour, and so Specter had to move quickly. Disengaging their charms to conserve magic, they silently jogged towards the castle's ruins, only to stop abruptly as a quartet of Death Eaters loomed in the darkness, and they re-engaged their charms as they took up positions among the brush and scattered trees. The Death Eaters were laughing among themselves, cackling and speaking of the things they had done here just weeks ago, the tales and excitement still fresh on their minds. Echo's trigger finger itched, and the outline of Sarah's rifle told him all he needed to know as she swept the barrel back and forth over the Eaters at head height.

But they stayed their fingers; the Death Eaters moved on, unawares of how close they had come to death, and Specter moved forward. They encountered six more patrols, each time with the same result - they had not realized Specter was even there. Echo was simply glad that there hadn't been any werewolves among them - even in human form, werewolves could have smelled the Americans, or heard the ultra-quiet whispers of their breath and the few fans that cooling their systems required. By the time they reached the ruin, after so many stops and starts, the sun was peeking over the mountains, and the sky began to turn a beautiful orange-pink in the direction of the sun.

Echo scaled the crumbling side of the East wing with a burst from his pack's broom-thrusters, landing inside a huge hole torn in the building's side, surveying what lay within. The corpses of Death Eaters and magical animals alike were strewn about the inside of the building like some child's obscene ragdolls, interspersed with the bodies of the students and adults who had died defending the castle from all comers. Echo bowed his head a moment, fighting back bile, and then bowed his head deeper in respect, before moving on, searching the upper portions of the castle.

They searched the castle for hours, only occasionally talking over their WITCH systems, discussing a few notable finds.

"Found a student. Slytherin. Not dead, amazingly. Looks to be under a stasis field, maybe. Good lord, but she made a mess of these Death Eaters..."

"There's a bunch of traps on the second floor. Beware the instant swamp."

"Roger, bring that student to me, Sarah. We'll extract her when we leave."

"Hey, everyone - I've found something on the seventh floor you all will want to see."

When they all gathered at the seventh floor, Lizzie decloaked and showed them what she had been talking about. "See this door?" she said, pointing to the door that had appeared out of nowhere. "This wasn't here the first two times I combed this corridor. I was trying to figure out why all the Death Eaters' bodies seemed to be headed in this direction, and well... I think the reason's through here."

Echo shrugged. It was as good a place to start as any.

The four stacked up on either side of the door, and the two nearest pulled it outwards as the rear two surged through the gap - into a room entirely composed of hammocks and school House wall hangings of the various houses. A painting on the far end of the room stood ajar, revealing a secret passageway behind it.

"I think we've found our escape route."