Chapter 40

Eight-Legged Freaks.

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It's Saturday evening in the second week of December, and Dave has been studying his advanced Arithmancy text for a few hours while Luna and Mindy are alternating popping into and out of the Pensieve constantly while they make notes. Lots of notes. And it's the third day they have been working on this, whatever it is.

Arithmancy he finds isn't nearly as hard as most of the students seem to say it is. Of course, probably seventy percent of it is just higher math that he already knows between his aborted college education and the multiple engineering degrees' worth of skills he leveled up on Remnant. The last thirty percent is more or less a huge amount of memorization so you can accurately measure the magical forces involved before you break it down to an equation.

Spells broken down to math. His buddies back home would be so disappointed to learn that was even possible. He can make out the: "You Shall Not Pass!" From here.

Ancient Runes is a bit trickier, but mostly that is because they involve applying intent to an object. Deciphering intent and then using runes to lock that into an object in such a way that no matter what the activating person's mood is when the device is used the runes take the available magical energy and filter it down to that specific intent. It's a very exact science that masquerades as a very strange amalgamation of poetry and algebra as far as Dave's concerned, but he's getting better at it. At least it is consistent. Once you have a rune scheme sorted out, copying it exactly will net you the same result every time.

The last month or so has actually been damn good. Destroying the rest of the Horcrux, aside from Harry anyway, had been downright easy to accomplish. They'd handled it the first Weekend that Sirius was out of Saint Mungos. A couple of weeks ago now. Thankfully, most of the defenses that Riddle put on his toys were basically mental attacks. Even the ring that came with a withering curse counted on a compulsion charm to get you to put it on.

Gamer's mind for the win.

After careful consideration and discussing things with Albus and Filius, they have added one more task that they would like to look into aside from the Acromantula colony. Either during the Christmas break or perhaps during a weekend sometime afterward, but whichever they choose they want backup for it. While they aren't particularly worried about dying, a lake full of inferi with who knows how many wards and curses might be involved seems like it would be silly to not bring experts in on. And there is no doubt in any of their minds that it needs to be dealt with before somebody comes around with the intention to build condos or something and sets the things loose on the countryside.

Finally getting curious enough to ask, Dave uses a bookmark in his text the next time they pop out and looks their way with an eyebrow raised.

"So, what are you two so excited about?"

Mindy looks at him with a wide smile.

"Wouldn't you like to know?"

Dave smirks and shakes his head, opening his book.

"Well, yes. I would. But if you aren't in the mood to share, that's fine."

Mindy sends him a look of pitying contempt.

"You are no fun sometimes, you know that?"

He hides his smirk behind his book. "I'd heard a rumor, but you know how those are here."

Luna giggles at their antics, shoving Mindy once and eyeballing their notes. Mindy rolls her eyes.

"Fine, you win. Remember how the blade the goblin's rented to us worked?"

Dave nods cautiously. "Yeah, runes on the blade and a matched control stone. But I thought we'd decided that it was too slow to be practical in combat except in ridiculously specific conditions?"

Nodding gleefully, Mindy smirks back at him.

"Yeah, but I'm not interested in trying to move around a few tons of razor blade, so I don't need to put everything into strength. I'm planning on doing something similar with a rope knife and then cranking the speed through the roof. I figure I can just wear something that has the control runes on it, and then use it mentally. Actually, planning on making two. One with a rope and one without. I can think of good ways to use both, even if I can't actually control them at the same time."

He shakes his head in admiration.

"That sounds pretty cool, I might need to look into something like that when you get it worked out. I take it you are copying the runes on the goblin's blade to get a better idea of what you need?"

Mindy smirks at him.

"Yeah, plus I was thinking about a version for you and I might have something. Mostly because I have officially given up on you ever learning to get the hell out of the way. What would you think about a round shield with a sharpened outer edge that behaves like you're in TRON? It'd give you a decent ranged attack without having to get a gun out, and something to hide behind so maybe you won't get so damn beat up all the time."

Dave considers the idea.

"I'd be down a morning star, but I suppose having an option to shield bash might be fun, especially if the bash includes a blade. Need to work up a rune for a sticking charm that turns on and off if I want to wear it and be able to use it at range quickly. How fast do you think you can get this stuff to move, screwing around with the runes like this? And what range?"

She shrugs. "We're still working that out, but pretty fast. Between a hundred and fifty and two hundred miles an hour probably, mine a bit faster since it's smaller and yours on the lower end. Faster than a fastball in the major leagues by at least half again, and baseballs aren't made of sharp steel. It'll do some damage. Range I'm not sure about, but the runes for that are the same ones that you'd use for the spell Potter used to get his broom for the first task. So probably a hundred yards at least. But really, the main reason I want to do this is because every damn place we go has different ammunition. So our guns just aren't really reliable if we get stuck somewhere we have to use them for a while, and I'm not sure I'm thrilled about using magic to make copies of ammunition when copies can actually vary a bit depending on how skilled you are. Good way to wreck our guns, I'd rather wait until we can get a portable shop put together somehow, like we had on Remnant. In another big vertical space expansion or something. Make the stuff right. Besides, this will be a lot quieter than a gun would be."

Dave smirks. "You know, I can believe that you mean all that. But for the record? You can just admit that you like to stab things. I won't think less of you." He laughs at the look of mild annoyance he gets. "Look, I'm all for it. But for the record, we're making mine black with a color change charm built into it, so it can't get scratched up looking. Besides, if I got too close to red, white, and blue I'd probably end up getting sued for copyright infringement or something." He turns to Luna. "You making something for yourself? Only got a week before you go home and I don't trust Malfoy not to do something stupid while we're not there."

She shrugs. "If there's time before I leave I was thinking about a pair of hair sticks that used the same magic and a control stone built into a necklace, but I am not really all that concerned about it. After three and a half months, almost four now of training with you two? I'm not worried about anybody that's going to be on that train."

Mindy smirks. "What are you going to do if they come after you?"

Luna shrugs. "I was thinking about putting them in a bliss locker."

Mindy blinks a couple of times. "A what?"

Luna gazes at her, wide eyes giving away nothing as her mouth develops a cute little pout.

"Well, sometimes you talk about putting things in a hurt locker, and I don't really want to do that. It's not me or something I want to become." Her eyes dip down for a second. "It's fine for you, it's just not me." Then her head raises and she grins wickedly. "But I could see myself clear to a combination of overpowered tickling, cheering, sticking, and silencing charms. Then I suppose that I would have to find somewhere else to sit, unfortunately. Maybe use a spell to seal the door after I go."

Mindy looks at her blankly for a moment and then smirks.

"Let me see if I have this straight. Your solution to Malfoy and his twin morons is going to be sticking them to the floor..."

"Oh, no. To each other mostly. Then the floor. I may have to stun them first, but my plan was to put every head in a crotch and then stick them there. Then all the rest of it. Pants on, of course. I don't want to break them, after all." She blinks. "Did I forget to mention that part?"

Mindy is failing at this point to hold back her giggling.

"And that is somehow better than just leaving them bleeding on the floor?"

Luna nods enthusiastically. "My hope is that by the time we arrive in London, they'll have embraced their obvious bisexual tendencies and can stop being so unbelievably irritable all the time. Besides, if he'd ever smile and stopped being mean constantly Draco would be gloriously adorable. His feminine build, his unflinching loyalty to family, he would be the cutest little bishounen ever. I can even imagine the way he would stamp his little feet in denial. I bet that embracing his true self would drive all the Wrackspurts away and he'd be a far better person for it."

Her mouth is set in a dreamy smile, but her eyes twinkle with mischief.

Dave looks at Mindy with his mouth wide open. "So, other than research into the current project, dare I even ask what else you have been exposing our dear friend to in that Pensieve?"

She rolls her eyes like she is dismissing his concern, but a blush breaks out on her cheeks. "Just some TV from our home dimension. I did do things besides fight crime and go to school. Just some, you know, Japanese animation. Stuff."

Dave tries, he really does. But the giggles overwhelm him and he stands, picking up his text as he does.

"I think I'll go over here and read. You two girls don't have too much fun, okay?"

Luna's voice is definitely a stage whisper.

"Let's watch the one with a character that looks like Dave again. He's so cute!"

Dave stops. Thinks for a second. Then resolutely decides that whatever they are talking about? He officially no longer wants to know and keeps walking. The giggling behind him is pleasing to the ear and yet annoying to the brain.

Must be more of Luna's Wrackspurts.

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"I think I see some webs off to the right, swing around."

Dave glances over at Mindy and follows her on his broom as they try to find an acromantula nest on the first day of the Christmas vacation. It's cold as heck wearing their armored suits. But since they aren't actually going to have to deal with being sick past tomorrow morning even if their ridiculous constitutions somehow fail and they get ill in the first place, they decided this would be a good time to work on their cold resistance.

"Yeah, I see them. They look kind of pretty in the snow."

Looking down again, Mindy has to admit he's right. The strong webbing has caught snowflakes from the first real snow of the year last night and now as they get closer to the nest the entire area is covered in frozen, shimmering strands.

"It won't last. The temperature has to be right about freezing now, and by noon most of this will be gone." She sighs. "It's gonna be a half-frozen swamp down there by lunch."

Dave shrugs as they come in to land, putting their brooms back into their inventories and dropping the last twenty feet or so. In the event that something ambushes them, they'd rather not have to worry about the brooms getting damaged.

The things were freaking expensive.

"We can get a lot done by then if we stick with the plan. Kill 'em here and chop 'em up just enough to fit in the inventory, then deal with the rest in the RoR later." He glances around as he stands up straight from the crouch he landed in.

"You suppose they aren't active when it gets this cold? I was kind of expecting more when we first got here."

Mindy shrugs. "You read the same stuff I did. They look like a spider and act like a spider, but they're warm-blooded and use real lungs. Probably how they have a voice. Without any fur or feathers though I'd guess they try to hibernate when it gets too cold. I mean, the things are from Borneo, the little hairs they have aren't going to protect them from a serious cold snap. They'd have had to adapt at least some or they'd be dead. First bad winter would have wiped them out."

Dave looks curiously at the thick forest around them.

"Well, if I was a spider the size of a small car and I had to hibernate in a forest like this, the only options would be a cave, a burrow, or possibly..." He points to a giant pine tree to their south maybe nine yards away that has branches that reach the ground. "At the base of one of those. The way the branches lay, they tend to be dry underneath and they make a natural windbreak."

Mindy smirks at him. "More from that eighty-year-old Boy Scout manual?"

He nods, smiling. "I tell you what, it's a handy one. We'll have to see if we can find another one for you at some point. Or even just some normal survival manuals." Then he frowns. "How do we want to do this? I mean, we were expecting to get attacked." He looks around. "If they are holed up, what do we do?"

Mindy rolls her eyes. "We knock, dip. What else would we do?"

She pulls her wand out of her inventory and holds it to her throat, obviously casting something.

Dave puts his hands to his ears as he knows what's coming.

Mindy lets a slight smile grace her lips, and then she screams out in a massively amplified voice that can probably be heard a mile or more away even in the dense forest.

"HELLO ACROMANTULA! I'D LIKE TO INTRODUCE YOU TO YOUR LORD AND SAVIOR!"

The sound knocks snow off of trees and webbing, the air around them becoming a glistening sea of particulates. Not anything that would mess with visibility, but it does add a bit of surreal beauty to the nightmare swarms of spiders that start making their way toward the two from under the trees, inside hollow logs, burrows that had probably been stolen from whatever luckless thing was in them before. With a will and a hunger, they come.

She sets the wand to her throat again and a quick cancellation has her putting the wand away and getting out her swords. Her expression is a fierce snarl.

"Come and get it you freaks."

Dave is holding back a laugh as he gets out his maces. Sadly, he hasn't gotten around to forging their new tools much less getting the rune-based enchantments on them. Mostly because while he could secure garbage iron and steel here easily enough, they would rather not count on durability charms like wizards do for the bulk of their tool's ability to take a hit. It'd be just their luck if the next place they went the magic didn't work and they'd get broken or something. The tentative plan is to either make it to a muggle source during the holiday or potentially, the goblins.

"Back to back, I'll bash and you hack."

She giggles as her first swipe of the day removes two legs from a smaller one.

"Oh, Kick-Ass. You're just the poet of my heart."

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They do eventually stop coming, but it takes almost two and a half hours and a few bites for that to happen. Fortunately, most of the smaller ones are easily able to be put in their inventory without modification, sometimes two or three to a slot once they are tied together. The larger ones are almost all still small enough to be segmented by the natural breaks in their exoskeleton. Only a couple need to be broken down more than that, and the truly huge ones must either winter elsewhere or were smart enough to see how things were going and decide not to interfere. That said, they'd still killed a lot of them, and rendering them all down was going to take a few days, probably.

The flight back to the castle is quick, and a couple of cleaning charms to get the ichor off before they swap back to their school robes is a must before they actually walk in.

Entering the great hall, they can see that lunch is currently being served to the students and staff that remain, which isn't all that many. Maybe twenty students. Most of the senior staff of the school, but the majority of the teachers that don't have 'head' in their titles somewhere have taken off. As such the room is practically empty in comparison to normal. The two see that Dumbledore is seated at the head table and make their way over. He's flanked by a few teachers, though Lockhart has already been ousted from the castle and McGonagall is having some stern words with a pair of her Gryffindors over at their table. The old man looks at them warmly, though his eyes do dart over to where Hagrid is sitting and chatting with Flitwick. They take the warning for what it is and make it quick and quiet.

"Dave, Mindy. How did it go?"

Mindy offers the slightest of smirks. "Pretty well. It's going to take us a few days to prepare them though. Can you have your guy make it here maybe a couple days after Christmas?"

The old man rubs his beard, curiously.

"Days? How many?"

The innocent smile that graces Mindy's lips really should have been a warning, but he finds himself sipping his tea as she answers.

"A little over four... Hundred."

Mindy's a touch disappointed when the system doesn't pop up an achievement for getting the Headmaster to do a spit-take.

The man's eyes are wide as the rest of the hall is now straining to hear them.

"That many?"

Dave nods. "Yeah, they wouldn't back off for a long time. But we need to get started or we'll be at it for the whole break. So, food and then we'll be in our training spot. You can come on up and take a look if you like."

The man nods and waves them off. His potions professor is looking at him curiously, and deflecting the man's questions will no doubt be easier if the two aren't here.

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It's about three hours later, and the two of them are finally getting into the groove of doing this. The books Xenophilius sent covered all the basics, but as usual, they needed to actually do some work to really get to know what they were doing. Fortunately, between their gamer learning curve and the fact that they are churning through hundreds of copies of essentially the same animal, some size differences aside, their skill ceiling soared. At least for rendering giant bugs. Rather than deal with trying to use the little kits that they bought for a job this size, they had the room provide them with the magical world's equivalent of a spider processing plant that the two are working at a pretty good clip. Complete with glass front freezers, hooks to hang things, and drains in the raised floor to catch the ichor for later bottling. The temperature in the room is kept at a steady forty degrees Fahrenheit both to help keep the smell down and to stop the rot from starting before they can get everything packaged up in the huge assortment of boxes, jars, and vials that they have on hand. Most of which they had to purchase mail order, as it turned out there weren't as many in the room of lost things where Voldemort had hidden the Diadem as they had hoped when they started going through the place.

They try to spend an hour a day working that room, the sheer variety of items in there almost guarantees that they will eventually find something useful. Besides, they are masters of the repair charm now, a lot of this stuff they have been fixing and then handing over to Filius and Pomona so it can get used again.

They stop when they hear from the doorway a voice.

"Merlin's balls, this was in the forest?!"

They can see that Dumbledore, Filius, and Pomona have walked in. Filius being the one who is speaking. Mindy laughs and Dave shrugs a shoulder while he uses a tool to start removing the eyes of the one he is working on. He legitimately isn't sure he even wants to know what the magical world uses them for, but they aren't cheap to buy so they should be good to sell.

"Yeah, they stopped coming after a while though. I'm not sure how many are actually in the forest, but if you assume this was a small sampling? Then your problems are going to get seriously bad in another decade or so. We never left the clearing we started in, and we never saw Aragog. So unless they were coming from pretty far away? Yeah. It could be bad."

Dave finishes up what he is saying as he gently plops the last of the eight eyes into the preservative fluid and pulls over the next corpse while Mindy takes the one he was working on and pricks the venom sack with the extractor.

Dumbledore is looking at the mass of corpses and shaking his head in shock. He'd expected them to kill three or four, and come back with a tale to tell. But this? Filius and Pomona had tried to tell him how deadly these two are, but even with the basilisk to their credit, he had assumed luck and the goblin's blade saw them through it.

Mindy pulls out her wand and mumbles a spell. "Spongify." Then she begins simply cutting and peeling the now rubbery carapace off the creature, uses a press on it, and cancels the spell. Leaving a perfectly flat section of Acromantula chitin that is ready to be reworked into whatever the person might need.

The three teachers are still standing there in shock as the two work. Quickly. Efficiently. At a level of quality that Albus would easily consider journeyman, and they seem to get better even as he watches. Finally, after another five minutes and seeing Dave move on to stripping the legs off of the torsos of the set of fifty they are currently working on, the old man speaks.

"May I... If it is not too much trouble and if you don't mind, may I see the memory of the battle that produced such a harvest?"

The two look at each other and shrug. Dave walks back over the room entrance. Where the yellow-outlined break area still sits, and thanks to the magic of the room is still comfortably warm. He sets down the Pensieve, but it takes him a few moments longer than normal as he actually places quite a few memories in there.

"For your viewing pleasure, the culling of an Acromantula nest and a highlight reel of the combat we were in during our last three inter-dimensional deployments. Call it a Christmas present, I can guarantee you that you won't see anything like it anywhere else. Might want to hit a bathroom and grab something to drink and snack on before you start, there's a lot in there." He smirks. "Normally we get in a lot more combat than this when we have to go fix things. Believe it or not? This trip has been pretty easy so far." Then he scowls a bit. "In an attempt to make you understand why I also included a bit of background we learned on each of these because a lot of the time we are actually killing people. Or in the case of our first place, what were people." Then he shrugs. "Anyway, there ought to be about ten hours in there? Like I said, just a highlight reel. Enjoy!"

Then he walks back over to his workstation as the three teachers look at each other and finally make their way over to see what there is to see.

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Nine hours and forty-five minutes later when it is approaching midnight, the three teachers are back in the real world and looking at each other with different emotions dominating their features.

Filius makes his way back over to them, followed at a distance by a troubled-looking Albus and an openly weeping Pomona.

The part goblin's face is caught somewhere between awe and pride.

"I knew you were holding back with your spars in my classroom, but I never dreamed how much. That was an amazing display, and I have so many questions about these places you have visited."

Albus decides that he has to get his question in before they get started.

"Did you... Did you truly have to kill so many? Was there nothing you could have done? No way to redeem them?"

Mindy shrugs. "Most of the time? No, actually. The guys in black armor from our first dimensional outing were mutated by technology into thugs, basically. No way to fix them and even if we did somehow figure out a way, we didn't have the resources. The head-crab victims were locked in, and couldn't do anything but feel pain and watch as their body went on a rampage. Think of it like the Imperius Curse except instead of euphoria, you feel the pain of having your brain invaded and all your bodily functions run through the crab. It leaves, you die. With them, it's a straight-up mercy killing."

Her face takes on a look of disgust for a moment.

"Breen was a traitor to mankind as a whole. He sold out every other man, woman, and child when he cut a deal with alien invaders. What exactly would you have done to someone like that?"

She pauses for a moment to finagle a particularly irksome fang from its joint. If they're broken the value drops to a third.

"We only killed a couple of people on the second place we visited, most of the carnage there was on those Grimm things. But the ones we did were attacking a school. What exactly were we supposed to do? We didn't have magic at the time and a drawn-out battle could have killed who knows how many. And the last place? Dave told me that he included that disgusting talk we overheard. That was an invading army that was bent on raping, pillaging, and human trafficking. When we tracked them down at their base we discovered that they were all in on it and all as evil as your damn Voldemort in their own way. You'd have let scum like that go when you had no way to contain them, no way to rehabilitate them, and no way to banish them? You need to understand that they don't send us to places that are salvageable without huge effort. Even here, getting this place back onto something that might be the right track required killing that basilisk and then destroying a man's soul. I mean, I don't regret doing it. But that's what we did, don't kid yourself. And like Dave said before you went in, this place has been downright pleasant in comparison to some others. This is a vacation. Who the hell knows what we'll face next time?"

There is silence for nearly a minute as Albus looks at the floor, and then he turns toward the entrance to the room and makes his way, saying not another word.

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Going to be maybe two or three more chapters here? Lots of time skips while they learn some stuff and try to get geared up again as best as they can again for the unknown.

No, Dumbledore isn't going to do anything stupid. He's just in shock. Even Grindelwald's war, as bad as it was, couldn't completely prepare him for this. Though legitimately that is because I don't think he actually made it to the concentration camps or the areas that Japan was controlling. Squaring that level of carnage in his mind as actually being needed will take some time, never mind that the people that did it all now look like a pair of first-year students.

Thanks for reading, reviews are wonderful!