Notes: the finale. It's been a fun journey.
The Great Hall was alive with demons and fear. Panicked screaming pierced Harry's ears as he shot to his feet, wand and Sangreus slipping automatically to hand. The latter buried itself firmly in the Ravenclaw's chest and fell to the floor with a clang when false human flesh turned to slime. Some kind of body double or flesh copy, but not a Doppelganger, thankfully. That might be trouble.
Irrelevant for now, though. Harry exchanged a speaking glance with Ron and Hermione. This was the worst sort of situation.
"Herd them into a corner and I'll cover them," Hermione said grimly, referring to the screaming, useless mass of flailing human bodies.
Heatless ivory fire already popped over Ron's outstretched hand. "I'll cover them," he disagreed. "You handle the breach." She nodded.
Harry gave the fistful of Soulfire a disdainful look. He summoned his knife back in hand and moistened it with a line of blood from his arm. "Fine. You two play shepherd, I'll take the front."
The corner of Ron's mouth rose in the beginnings of a nasty smile. This was no place to deck him for being an ass, though, so Harry hiked his way over the Gryffindor and Hufflepuff tables to the center of the action in time to sink Sangreus into the back of a Pride as it scythed down at a Hufflepuff firstie. Her dusky skin was bleached pale with terror as she shrank beneath the table.
Harry began a spell-chain, launching a few volleys around the students that served as inadvertent meat shields. He spun on a heel to bury Sangreus in the face of a charging Lust, drew a line up in a slashing hex that bisected a summoning Greed by the end of the Ravenclaw table. Instinct bit and he lunged over the Hufflepuff table, scattering dishes and dinner all over the floor and himself as a bolt of crimson rocketed through his previous position. Through the red haze of breaching he saw multiple oozing batlike monsters wing around for another go. Blood-goyles.
"Everyone, get down!" Harry rolled to a crouch on the tabletop. Jerk-snap, tri-loop, circumscribed- "Glacius flagulatus longus!"
Fifteen feet of frost lashed a circle around him. The elevated ice spell trapped a handful of enemies in icy prisons and killed a few outright. A few reductor curses shot out from students below the table to shatter the frozen Hells. Harry ignored the rest in favor of the blood-goyles, rolling to avoid a charge. Sangreus sank into the heart of another. He turned his wrist, redirecting the frost whip to impale a third, and shattered it with a motion.
The air gonged. Incoming Sloth teleport. Harry hiked over a vicious scythe strike. Sangreus leaped obediently into his open hand, and Harry sawed through the sandspun flesh of the Sloth's neck.
The lethal front that was Ron's Soulfire expanded. Harry cast Caelum praesidium as a stopgap as he wrapped himself in a second frost circle, releasing the whip in a final blast of glacial power to clear a landing spot when he leaped to the Slytherin table. There he took momentary pause to consider threats. Some blood-goyles persisted; one was in the process of dividing as he watched. The eerie haze of breachwending vanished, but energy still made the air vibrate with the onset of reinforcements – a Greed, where?
There, near the door. It was out of the way of crossfire but with enough free space to go about its business without issue: surprisingly smart positioning for a Hell's Army grunt. "Discutio!" The spell ripped through its defensively-raised coffin and the Greed exploded into sand.
The damage was done, though. Harry kept an eye on the wavering summon energy as he switched targets back to the half-dozen blood-goyles. How to take them down quickly? Thinking quickly, he hiked into the air, shaping a gale to hold him there, and sent a knockback jinx smashing into the ice-encrusted table. A sweep of his wand caused the knife-sharp shards to fly up and shot them rocketing toward the demons. A volley of blasting curses turned their stoned forms into dust.
He heard a yell. "Watch it Potter!"
There was someone under his piece of table. Harry laughed out loud. "Aw, Parkinson, did I scare you?"
"Not just me, you lunatic!"
The Greed's last summon snapped into place. Two tall figures coalesced from the smoke. The new enemies were covered from head and toe in downy white feathers and brandished lethally-sharp lances of blue light. Multiple pairs of thin wings pumped the air as they wheeled around and fixed their attention on Harry.
Fallen. This could be fun.
Harry hiked over to the open space by the doors to the Entrance Hall, where there was more room and no cover for students to cower behind. When the Fallen did not immediately follow, he made a come-hither gesture with Sangreus. "What's wrong? Scared?"
Swooping! Harry sidestepped once, twice. Sangreus skipped over the surface of a gleaming protective wing as he spun on his heel. Holly sketched a loop and a jab for a percussion curse at the second Fallen, which floated backward through the wall. Hairline cracks formed in the ancient stone.
Fallen were one of the few lesser demon breeds capable of phasing through ordinary matter. Harry needed to stay close, but they, wisely, seemed inclined to keep their distance.
Too bad, he thought.
He wet Sangreus' edge again. Jerk-snap, five loops like a rounded star, jab- an incantation, and a stream of seething black flowed from the wandtip, sizzling and popping with heat. Harry swept the extensor burning curse in a loop to his side as he waited in place, tempting another lunge. It came and he turned, avoiding the lance strike with a quick motion as the burning whip coiled around the demon.
It shrieked, long and loud. The second Fallen swooped in to support, slashing its lance like a longsword. Harry jerked his wand to the side, tossing the first Fallen into its partner. He dashed forward, throwing the momentum behind a savage strike to the trapped Fallen's side. Deceptively brittle bones snapped as he twisted the knife and then tore it free. Feathers and flesh stank as they burned.
The demon keened. Its protective wing fell away from its body, limp and twitching.
"If I had a face like that, I'd hide it too," Harry gibed lightly. He reversed his grip on Sangreus and plunged it deep in the center of the demon's eyes, turned and ripped.
Intuition bit.
Harry abandoned his weapons to backstep in time to avoid the light lance that sprouted from below. The second Fallen phased out from the floor, manifesting another lance that it used to swipe at him. Harry ducked under the attack, throwing out an arm in a wordless invocation of wind that caught the Fallen's wing and set it spinning.
The first Fallen wasn't quite dead yet. Harry left his knife and wand where they kept it incapacitated, instead reaching up behind his shoulder. His hand curled around Ginevra. Eris peeled free from the sword to wreathe his arm in fire, sloughing off the aversion spells that hid it as she went. As the Fallen came in for another attack with its lance, Harry met it with the wet edge of Ginevra. The lance shattered. Fire welled in Harry's fist and he pressed forward, slamming it home on the demon's protective wing.
The Fallen recoiled. It tried resummoning its weapon, but Harry was faster. Ginevra cut across, rending the wing into a mess of ruined feathers and sinking deep into its naked true face. The demon dissipated into light too quickly to even scream.
Harry slung Ginevra across his back again, snapping his fingers. First his wand and then Sangreus flew back into his hands. The second Fallen struggled feebly as the removal of the knife gave it the opportunity to regenerate. Too little, too late. Harry dropped his hand, and demonic fire scorched the air and the demon to ash.
"Too hot to handle," he remarked, sparing a smirk at his own poor humor before he turned back to look over the Great Hall.
What a mess.
The tables were trashed. Piles of demon dust spattered all over. Frost from Harry's attacks layered the Slytherin and Ravenclaw tables, and the other two tables were almost entirely gone, victims of Ron's Soulfire. Harry smelled human blood mixed in with the smell of magic. He neglected counting, though he saw several bodies. It was a foregone conclusion that not everyone would survive an incursion in the middle of lunch. In that light, maybe he should try to look less satisfied than he felt.
Another time.
He turned to face the doors. Demonic energy webbed over them. Some kind of sealing spell, but not conventional magic. Alohomora was of no use here, but maybe the Gamemaster's cards...
Ron's footsteps approached. "Going for the professors?"
Harry nodded. He was willing to place a stiff bet that the Great Hall was not the only place in the castle attacked. However skilled they were, he and his friends were only three people. To clear the castle they needed the professors, who were outside dealing with whatever problem the fake student mentioned. "If you could get up to the Tower, the map could help you round the students up. This time of day, if they aren't here, they could be anywhere."
"Of course that would be the only thing you don't carry with you on a regular basis." Exasperation, and the familiar note of anger Ron would never quite be able to hide; Harry did carry Ginevra, after all. "Whatever. How do you plan to get past the seal? Blasting curses will take forever."
"Not sure I could afford that kind of repair bill, anyway," Harry said dryly. He fished around in his small mokeskin pouch for one of the Gamemaster's cards. "Imagine what Snape would say. 'Even worse than that arrogant lout you call a father! He never had any respect for lesser people either!'"
Ron snorted. "Speaking of... your roots are showing."
"That'll be fun to explain. Stand back."
Harry swept his white fringe from his eyes. Holding the card lengthwise between his middle and ring fingers, he extended it toward the sealed doors. Strictly speaking, unsealing the doors was not a requirement to passing through. It was sufficient to move them elsewhere for the time being. Concentrating on that thought, he fed the card his Devil Trigger. His blood was practically boiling with it from the previous fight, but the drain left him cold with fatigue before-
shing
-the card shattered. Space warped. A hole opened up in the sealed doors, painted shifting red and black from his Devil Trigger. Through it Harry saw the Entrance Hall and a handful more lesser demons.
"To think we played strip poker with those things," Ron commented, face twisted. "Good luck."
The 'bit of a problem' out in the forest had spilled out onto the grounds by the time Harry got there. Death Eaters ducked in and out of a veritable crowd of demons, everything from blood-goyles and Prides to Abysses and Vanguards. A small army of animated statues worked to keep the demons from scattering past the line of professors, courtesy of McGonagall; golden mist shimmered around them, Flitwick's enchantment twisting spatial perception; Thompson was a whirling dervish of ice and earth. Dumbledore was invisible, hidden from sight by the two Hell Vanguards tag-teaming him.
Harry frowned.
By keeping the conflict at the forest edge, the Death Eaters forced the defenders to limit their arsenal or risk setting the forest ablaze. Fiendfyre and Soulfire were out on that consideration. Still, although complete invocations were as a rule unsafe in groups, Harry and Ron both managed it, so Dumbledore certainly could – why wasn't he fielding an Angels' Anthem?
What's going on here...?
Discarding the thought as irrelevant for the moment, Harry pulled his wand. He let his mind wander, grasped the feeling that was both warm and cold, soft and knife-sharp; the Demonic Invocation of Air caused the light breeze around him to build into a howling gale. The fiendish intelligence in it seethed and writhed against him as he molded it into the form of a hunting bird and fed it the image and idea of the demons and Death Eaters and make them all die.
The airhawk shrieked a warcry and plunged into the horde, sending up a tornado of dust and a small fountain of gore. Harry came up beside McGonagall.
"Potter! What are you doing here?"
"There are demons in the castle," he said without fanfare. "Thought you'd like to know. What's going on?"
"Demons in the-" She looked thunderstruck. "But that couldn't- it would have to be- he's targeted the students?"
In the seconds of horrified staring that ensued, a few demons made it past the defensive line. Harry mentally tugged on the airhawk, which peeled out of the main horde and made a loop-dive, streaming death behind it to dust the escapees. He felt something akin to Devil Trigger which made the hair on his neck stand up.
"We have to protect the students... but we can't just let them overrun the grounds. We need-" McGonagall stopped. She gave her wand a wave, and the ground sprouted a huge fist of rock that scooped up a group of approaching demons and crushed them. She looked at Harry, her expression troubled. "We need to stop them coming. We can hold them here, but the Death Eaters won't let us get through to investigate. Even Albus is pinned."
By... geez, four Hell Vanguards now. Where in hell were they all coming from?
The strange energy peaked. It sparked over him, teasing at his Devil Trigger. Harry clamped down on it to keep from transforming.
McGonagall scowled grimly. "More reinforcements. Someone has to be manipulating the breach in the forest."
A standard breach might attract demons or a devil who could summon more, but unless it tapped the Bloody Palace it wouldn't pass demons in waves. There weren't a lot of people with the knowledge to manipulate an interplanar breach like this.
"Voldemort." Hopefully. They already knew they weren't dealing with the violent revolutionary from the first war, but if the dark lord had gone so far as to teach his servants advanced breach manipulation...
"...possibly." McGonagall pulled a face. "Mr. Potter, I am reluctant to ask, but-"
Harry stopped her. "I'll handle the breach." An echo from earlier came to mind and he smirked wryly. "Taking out Voldemort may not be my job, but I've always been partial to the idea."
From her staggered look, that was not at all what McGonagall intended to ask. Before the professor could protest, he pulled together a few stray gusts of wind. Harry hiked well over the crowd, channeling scraps of infernal energy into aerial platforms for extra height. Then he Triggered, catching the gusts in his wing-flaps to go soaring over the horde. The airhawk traced him at the surface, scissoring anything that tried to intercept him, and Harry landed safely just in the forest perimeter.
Relaxing back into human form, he brought up a shield with his wand to block a scythe from nowhere. He ghosted Sangreus' edge across his forearm and thrust it into the face of a Hell Lust. He wheeled around, sidestepping another scythe-thrust, and launched a reductor curse into the face of a Gluttony. Then, bending his will, he sent the airhawk for a direct charge through the woods in the direction he sensed the infernal aura.
"Sorry folks, but I've got some business to take care of." He gave the remaining lesser demons a mocking wave and tailed the fiend of wind.
It was easy to see when Harry came closer to the location of the deep forest breach. Foliage grew more and more sparse, the only survivors being tendrils of Greater Hydra or Devil's Snare or similar plants that fought as savagely as any monster. Demon dust piled around, staining the dirt, and there was a distinct scent of rot and rancid meat from the corpses of animals that had run afoul of the demons.
The effect of the infernal energy grew more powerful, half-sparking Devil Trigger periodically. It fed the fire in his veins. Almost jittery from the excess energy, Harry made short, brutal work of the few demons unfortunate enough to cross his path.
Where most breaches were only visible by magic or while something traversed them, the forest breach was a swollen crimson scar in space. It stretched some thirty feet across, hovered about chest-height in the air on one side, and plunged underground on the other, bleeding energy that lit the ravaged hollow with weak neon glow. By now adjusted, Harry's eyes picked up the tall, slim figure that leaned over the scar, back to him. He'd been right: it was Voldemort. Except... not.
Several things fell into place.
"Does it count as a family reunion if we're kin by a dark ritual?" Harry asked mildly. "I gotta say, Voldemort, time has done you no favors."
The hunched figure chuckled. "I beg to differ, Potter. The past five months have served me wonders. A bit like yourself, I imagine." Voldemort turned on his heel, startlingly quick. His eyes gleamed a familiar scarlet that seemed to glow in the dimness. The pasty pallor from the graveyard had grown over with hard red-brown scales, the long fingers terminated in thick talons, and as he spoke, flashes of fang were visible. "I'd wondered if I would see you today. It seemed unlikely that the old fool would let you face me."
Harry shrugged. "He's a bit busy, and I don't have a good record for following his advice recently anyway. The lecture I got after you set those demons loose in Hogsmeade – well, he wasn't happy with me." That was an understatement. How weird was it that Ginny's mother understood his intent better than exalted onlookers? Moving on. "I'm curious: just what about the past months has helped you? There's no political objective in slaughtering children, and no challenge in killing defenseless Muggles or emaciated prisoners or – most of your recent targets, actually."
"Don't be naive," Voldemort replied, irritation in his sibilant voice. "The blood that changed me came from you. Half-breeds, maybe, but we are demons. Psychic predators. Don't pretend not to understand the power that can be won through a little extra death."
So he was right. Fear, horror, pain. Voldemort was milking the wizarding world for misery. For what purpose, even? Not for any grand scheme like he professed. The taste of misery was sweet and power was even sweeter. Harry knew it well enough.
But misery was cheap. Misery wasn't the power that beat the Gamemaster. Harry preferred what did.
"So much for the great revolutionary. You're an addict, Voldemort, an animal." Harry's lips curled into a sneer. He took his wand in one hand and Sangreus in the other. For once, he left the knife dry. The magic in his blood was of no use here. Harry beckoned with the weapons and a mocking smile. "I think it's time I put you down."
"A year ago you escaped with your life only by several turns of good fortune," said Voldemort. His taloned hand disappeared into his robes and brought his wand to bear. "It will be fun to destroy you once and for-"
Harry chucked Sangreus at his face.
Voldemort ripped his wand up in an aegis shield and then followed into the motions of a spell-chain: a blasting curse, a severing curse, something unfamiliar, a lightning spell, the Cruciatus -
Harry nimbly dodged, summoning his knife back into his open palm. He waved at the ground, wrenching an array of lethally sharp spikes from the earth beneath his enemy. Jerk-snap, five loops like a rounded star, circumscribed: "Exsectus flagulatus – exsectus effluo!" Seven feet of hissing, spitting maroon energy lashed out in a circle, spraying shards of slashing hex all around.
Voldemort ascended into the air to avoid both attacks, but not quite fast enough. Spell scatter ripped through the tail of his robes and sliced clean lines in the sparse plating of his legs. The cuts bubbled blood but sealed in seconds. Devil regeneration. He drew a curve at the earth.
Harry cursed as dust-turned-acid chewed through his shoes and bit into the flesh of his feet. A quick air hike removed him from the pool. He molded the stale air into a howling gale to slow his descent and buffet the hovering dark lord. "Conglaciare!" The pool turned to a block of solid ice, and Harry dropped to the ground with a blasting curse that fed the air acid knives. His wand moved through the motions of his own spell-chain, substituting Sangreus for the fire.
The volley smashed into a conjured silver shield. Voldemort snatched the knife from the air, eyes narrow with annoyance, and countered with a confining barrage of alternating blasting curses and sizzling lightning strikes. Rather than consign himself to an aegis shield, Harry Triggered and launched forward. The spells glanced off transforming flesh. His hand fisted about Ginevra and he swung her in a broad horizontal arc that turned the hollow bright with carmine energy.
Voldemort laughed out loud. He abandoned flight to avoid the slash, catching Ginevra's edge with Sangreus. His wand rose to Harry's face. "Homus putrefacio!"
Backpedaling, Harry turned on his heel and prodded the dregs of his wind invocation to wrench the fallen chunks of ice into the path of the forest-green bolt. Seizing the opportunity, Voldemort darted in with his knife for a quick stab. A mistake: Harry pushed the arm aside and plunged the free Ginevra into his torso, twisting and tearing savagely. He jumped back when the dark lord released a furious snarl, narrowing avoiding a point-blank bludgeoning curse.
"Looks like you've been picking on weaklings for so long you've forgotten how to actually fight," Harry taunted. Devil Trigger turned his voice guttural. "Here's a hint: stick with weapons you know how to use."
Eyes blazing, Voldemort threw Sangreus to the ground where it sank hilt-deep into the broken soil. "And you, Potter, should learn to finish enemies while you have the chance."
The shadows grew deeper, warping and writhing in the corners of his eyes. Long fingers of blue-black pinched free from the dark, opening electric-blue eyes as they hissed at Harry.
"Phantom snakes?" Harry shrugged his shoulders in exasperation, something that probably looked strange in devil form. "Would you like to buy some originality?"
The shadows dived as one, a dozen pairs of needle-sharp fangs. Harry leaped out of the way, a reflex that put him directly in the path of an advanced bludgeoning curse. His ribs cracked and he flew back with a strangled scream, skidding over the ground on his back. Breathing harshly he crossed himself with Ginevra, barking the incantation for a deflective ward that blasted the shadow-snakes back while he flipped to his feet.
The serpent familiars swam through the air to surround him, lunging in all at once. Harry nailed a few with blasting curses and hiked over them, pulling in a swell of wind to avoid the barrage of brilliant green spell-glow that homed in on his new position.
Obviously the tactic here was to keep him on the run, but Voldemort was no Gamemaster. Harry lowered his hand, stretching out fingers of magic to wrench an earth barrier between he and his opponent and imbue it with an aegis shield. With a mental twist, he diverted a fraction of his Trigger toward his own shadow. Doppelganger rose from the darkness. Harry gave it a mental command to keep the familiars occupied and side-rolled out from behind the wall just in time to avoid the backwash of a Killing Curse that blew it to dust. Harry brought Ginevra around and sliced twice in a cross pattern, lacing the air with lines of carmine energy that closed in on Voldemort.
The dark lord flew back gracefully, tracing a negligent arc. Harry threw himself to the side as a circle of dark blue appeared beneath him. The earth rumbled, and the inscribed dirt exploded toward the sky. A lance of bright green bore down, bracketed by maroon streaks of slashing curse and backed by the red-white shock of a lightning spell.
Harry turned Ginevra so her point drew a line in the ground. Stone molded from the earth to form a shield that shattered upon intercepting the Killing Curse. The fragments caught his wind spell and a spell-chain volley rocketed toward Voldemort, who sneered as he phased his shield back into existence.
Just as planned.
Harry snapped his fingers. Eris leapt to answer the call, threading sinuously over his shoulder and down his arm. She fountained into a pillar of fire wide enough for fringe embers to spill over the edges of the silver shield, grasping with fingers of flame for the power behind the shield: Voldemort's very flammable wand. It turned to ash and the shield dissipated. Harry stabbed Ginevra into the dirt and dropped out of his devil form, pressing his advantage. His wand moved into a spell-chain.
"Glacius! Accio! Arduro!" The ice-encrusted wizard flew toward Harry. The momentum imparted by the summoning charm magnified the effect of the percussion curse, and there was a satisfying crunch before he crashed to the ground. Harry tossed his wand to his off hand and took up Ginevra.
Reduced to a groaning splat on the forest floor, Voldemort looked up, wild, wounded fury in his scarlet eyes. Something thrummed in the air, different from the infernal aura that even now crackled and popped.
Instinct made Harry move. He hiked out of the line of fire and threw up an aegis shield at the zenith of his flight. It was for nothing; the blue-black wash of Voldemort's deathspell flew past and under him, catching him in the edges, heading for-
The crimson scar that was the deep forest breach tore wide open. The dark forest canopy gave way to a starless night sky, a shallow sea of blood, and a seemingly endless army of Hells. This was more than he could handle alone. Grimly, Harry beckoned Doppelganger from its fallen foes and back to his side. His best hope was to drive them back enough to reseal the gap, but even that would be tricky in the face of so many...
"Looks like you could use a little help here, kid."
Startled, Harry wheeled around to brandish Ginevra in the face of the sudden speaker. Dante looked cross-eyed at the point, nudging it away from his face with a finger and a nonchalant expression. Wasn't he supposed to be away on Ministry business? Moreover, "Why is it you keep showing up after all the important bits?"
Dante threw up his hands in an expressive shrug. The dark gauntlets that were once the pegasus gleamed. "Would you really want me to show up earlier?"
"I suppose this way is a bit more fun," Harry admitted. He reached for one of the Gamemaster's cards. "Shall we?"
With the castle overrun, to no one's surprise there was no choice but to send the students home prematurely. They were strongly advised to remain home until Voldemort's death could be proven and his now-manic followers corralled. While most of the exams were canceled, the OWL and NEWT students were scheduled to do their tests off-site at a secure Ministry compound.
Harry, Ron, and Hermione were called in to the stuffy, poorly-ventilated building to take their tests at the end of June. In the mornings they were assigned to drastically separate desks and given special quills bewitched with an anti-cheating charm to work through the theory portion; in the afternoons, the desks were cleared, and the proctors took subsets of students to test their practical.
All of his training didn't keep Harry from getting his Divination examiner's life and love lines mixed up in a palm reading or from forgetting why the wizards of Liechtenstein refused to back the formation of the International Confederation of Wizards, but he did finish his written exams for Charms, Transfiguration, Defense, and Potions in a third of the allotted time. The practicals were likewise a joke; the only interesting thing that happened was a thorough discussion of the strengths and vulnerabilities of lesser demons with the examiner in Care of Magical Creatures. Apparently Tofty did freelance devil hunting in his younger years... back in the eighteenth century.
After two weeks of this, they received a special notice to come in for the defense of their project.
Harry sat with Ron next to the speaker's dais where Hermione took point on the last part of their talk. Harry had taken the first part, with the background and a demonstration of Fiendfyre; Ron had followed with an explanation of light invocation and a plume of Soulfire. Now, Hermione was knitting the concepts together and explaining their line of experimentation.
"...both of these spells are immensely powerful on their own but suffer the downside of being extremely difficult to control," she summarized. "However, our hypothesis was that they, being aligned to the same element but of opposed spiritual type, would display a resonance effect when pair-cast. The resonant would possess the power of the individual spells but lack the near-sentience that makes them dangerous."
"Um, Miss Granger?" The examiner at the end of the table, ancient with a terrible combover and pasty skin, raised his hand like a student with a question. "Just to clarify, you are proposing the creation of a spell matching the destructive power of an invocation without the inherent risk to the caster?"
The examiner panel were almost unanimously pale at the idea. Tofty, the exception, looked thrilled.
"Not a spell, sir," Hermione disagreed. The panel relaxed; Harry and Ron stifled snickers. If they thought that was a relief, the panel was to be sorely disappointed. "Unfortunately, we discovered very shortly into our investigation that while the spiritual element does in fact cancel out, the effect is of little obvious utility: it explodes. In the interest of limiting danger to the caster or casters, a massive explosion is little different than the original invocations. So we changed our tactics. Harry? Ron? Would you please?"
She cleared the dais with a wave of her wand.
Harry reached back to curl his fingers around Eris' bottom. He held the hand back out with an ember crackling in his palm. Ron tapped his palm with his wand to stoke a tongue of Soulfire to life. Slowly, carefully, Hermione went through the motions that wrest the two sparks together and temporary arrest their catalytic resonance. The sparks became encased in what looked like a glass bauble, the size of a snitch. She cupped it in her hand and held it up to display it to the panel.
"Fourteen years ago, Sirius Black was accused of blowing up a street and a dozen Muggles. The blast was powerful enough to crack open the sewer system. It was considered a staggering, terrifying feat of magic. By comparison, the last time a fire invocation got completely out of hand of the caster, we had the Great Fire of London." Hermione paused for emphasis. "No, examiner, this is not a spell. It's a bomb."
A moment of silence, before a wispy-haired witch near the center spoke up. "I am afraid I don't approve. What possible purpose could such a thing have?"
Almost on cue, a loud bang and a swell of screams cut short their defense. Wizards and witches began to spill into the testing room from the security checkpoint, fleeing what Harry sensed was a minor planar rift and a few lesser demons. Distantly, he heard a groan before another explosion rocked the compound, turning the interconnecting wall to rubble. A Hell Wrath.
Demons and their timing. Harry palmed his wand and Sangreus and gave the witch a disconcerting smile. "I don't know ma'am. Why don't we find out?"
END PT X: DO UNTO OTHERS