Boom.
The smell of ammonia and gaseous hydrochloric acid wafted in the air as the grenades hit the ground and shattered into sharp pieces. Debris and ashes flew everywhere in a total warlike mayhem. Streaks of blood and lifeless fleshes decorated the streets and what remained of the make-shift huts. Screams and war cries of soldiers were barely audible among the incessant explosions.
"Ehre sei dem...Führer.."
Thwack.
"Your artist leader has been dead for fifty-three years, you dunce."
Harry whacked the head of a soldier who lost a leg and a third of his jaw. Seeing the enemies that had more or less similar faces and "killing" them was getting awfully tedious, like the same mobs spawning over and over in a mediocre FPS game. The repetitive patterns of the defense mechanism were surprisingly simple and disappointed Harry.
"Surely there has to be something fun," Harry muttered, eyeing a tower ten metres away that seemed so out of place amongst the landscape tattered by blood and deaths. The tower gleamed in ivory luster, "I guess that has to be where I should be."
"Harry, you are not there for fun. We got an intel to collect from this Nazi bastard," said a voice in his ear.
"Fun isn't mutually exclusive to a successful completion of my mission, Dean," Harry quipped. Dean admonishingly said something else, but was unable to be heard as a big horde of Nazi soldiers charged at him out of nowhere. This time, however, they seemed similar to the Nazi wizard whose memory Harry had delved into, and much better guarded. He noticed a few soldiers wielding wands instead of firearms.
"Wow, finally real wizard enemies in a wizard's head, not some copycat bot number two-hunred-and-one." Harry tumbled sideways to dodge stunning spells and death curses.
"I guess you are close to the sealed memory."
"Yeah, it's somewhat shoddy that it took this long for the subconsciousness to put up a decent fight. I am wondering if this man's secret is really that valuable."
"Well, we couldn't undo the self-oblivion spells on our own, so…"
Harry pulled out six daggers and threw them toward the wizards. The daggers pierced right in the center of the foreheads, incapacitating them. A confident smile crept on his lips - a good mental focus could achieve absolutely anything in a mindscape as long as it wasn't too strong enough to eject him out of the subject's psyche. The satisfaction was great enough to compensate for the fact that he couldn't cast a simple levitation spell in a real world. Cherry picking memories, excavating buried secrets that even his subject couldn't remember, laughing at the dirty human desires, or even fiddling with their superego…deeper he went, more perilous it got.
It was nothing but a playground of surrealism, one that only excited Harry as more dangerous it got.
Harry detached a middle-sized bazooka from his right leg and launched it to the approaching enemies. The rocket exploded mid-air, dispersing a putrid yellow gas, making the soldiers holler in pain of peeling skins and membranes of their eyes. Not missing a chance, Harry put a gas mask and strode, pushing the soldiers sideways.
"Dean, I think I am approaching the source," said Harry as he shot a sniper on a third floor of the ivory tower. A green anchor emerged from Harry's palm, which he flung in a circle and threw at the third floor opening. The anchor latched onto the window aisle with a loud clang.
Boom
Two missiles hit the tower's exterior and almost threw Harry off his balance who just started to climb the wall. Looking back, three American fighter planes could be seen a hundred metre away.
"Are you really shooting your allies?" Harry feigned a surprise, dodging another missile, "blazes, at least get your aims right!" He yanked the rode, and the rode started to rewind back into the hook, and Harry ran up the wall with the rode tided to his waist, nimbly side-stepping away the incoming missiles. The small debris scattered and made small cuts on Harry's face. Harry jumped into the third floor right before the missile hit his ankles…
...only to find an army of Nazi troopers aiming at Harry.
"Well, guess it can't be helped,"
"Harry, don't exert any more pressure than you already have-"
"Settle down, Dean."
Bullets and spells were showered at Harry. His piercing green eyes focused on one of the troopers on the back row. Destination.
I am going to bulldozer them over. Determination.
I am going to surprise that dunce right now. Deliberation.
The spell and bullets hit the empty floor and some flew out of the building. Only the dusts and pieces of flooring splattered. The troopers shouted in confusion, "Wo ist das niedrig angelsächsisch?"
"Right behind you," Harry whispered, startling his enemy. He knocked off the other's head with his pistol and covered himself with that soldier's body as the soldiers who were disoriented by Harry's sudden reappearance started to shoot spells and bullets again. The poor soldier shouted to stop, but his body was ravaged by his allies' frenzy attacks.
"Poor sod," Harry scoffed. He pushed the body and looked how the blood seeped into his clothes. The enemies aimed at Harry, but the hands were trembling.
"You, you are a wizard?" One skinny sorcerer spoke with a thick accent, "but why are you using guns-"
But the flabbergasted soldier collapses, blood splattering from his face as bullets exploded on it.
One, Two…
Harry's feet fluidly danced in circles and his fingers firing away explosive bullets. One arm aiming behind his back, another arm facing forward, his body being kept on a tip-toeing balance…
Three, four…
The blood-curdling screams and noises of walls breaking down were buried in his gunshots.
Five, six.
"Rückzug, Rückzug!" One soldier uttered his last words in despair before bullets exploded on his back.
Seven, Eight.
Harry stopped his spinning body and loosened his finger grips on the guns. None of the enemies survived or escaped in time - their bodies laid in pools of blood and damaged innards, faces frozen in shock and horrors. The demolished walls were decorated with blood and bits of flesh, presenting a grotesque gallery of "lives" that were lost.
But Harry showed no fazement at the gore - after all, why mourn the death of pigments of memories when the real people already died decades ago? It was just all thrill and excitement for Harry, just like muggle boys playing shooting games. Something that never failed to entertain him -
"Harry, you have to get out as soon as possible!" Dean shouted in his ears.
"Alright, alright Dean." Harry scowled. Fatigue and soreness started to take over him. Harry laid his eyes on a box that wasn't damaged one bit during the short carnage. The box emanated powerful protective magic in layers and intricate arithmancy and runes. This must have the spells that Dean had tried to dismantle before Harry was assigned to this mission.
Harry pulled out a knife with silver ornaments that resembled a lion and eagle sigil. It was shoved inside the chest's key box and twisted sideways.
The box screamed.
"Harry, be careful!"
"I got this Dean," Harry winced at the howling scream. The screams simply served as last desperate, but weak attempt of self-defense, as the object knew that it was done for. Harry twisted the knife more, and forced the box to open. The screams were lost in echoes, and the box dissipated a blue fog, revealing a notebook with an iron cross symbol.
This must be it.
Harry grabbed the book and stabbed his neck with the knife.
"Harry, you did it!"
Dean grinned brightly and helped Harry get up from his reclining chair. Sweats rolled from Harry's forehead, and his arms were slightly trembling from soreness and stress.
""Did you think I wouldn't pull it off?"
"You were really close to being expelled," a tall blonde woman who stood by Dean said, " Dean, bring me an empty, new notebook."
"Accio!"
A white, plain notebook flew across from the dimly lit, dome room. Sunset light shone through the ceiling windows, shining on Harry. Harry winced and put his right hand on the notebook cover. The cover instantaneously transformed into the exact notebook that Harry recovered from his target's memory. A white cover was taken over by a black leathery substance with a large iron-cross symbol in the middle, forcibly opening. The pages flipped swiftly, being filled with the sinister contents being copied into, as the new pages were produced.
"That's a lot of pages," Dean commented when he counted over two hundred pages of the replica.
"Happy, Valerie?" Harry smiled.
"Very happy," Valeir thinly smirked. She skimmed through the first six pages with little changes in expressions. Ten...twenty...thirty pages, her face started to scrunch.
"This is a lot more...gore than I thought," said Valerie. "Summoning demons like Drude and Mare, and extracting their powers to combine them into chemical gas weapons and spread them to civilians. Mass Paranoia, mass psychotic breakdown. Oh, this one mentions creating nachzehrer, similar to Inferi, but a lot easier to mass-produce from dead bodies...and uhm, some of them are just rough ideas about using demon powers to pollute soil and air, and awakening Nidhogg?"
"I thought Nidhogg is from norse myth."
"This shows an elaborate step to summon Nidhogg, which includes...quite gruesome steps, such as burning two hundred children alive, stabbing two hundred adults between twenty and thirty, a large-scale rune circle big as Black Forest in Germany...but looks like this one became obsolete. Too much work and time. Might as well just burn a whole country. And there it is: I should tell Master Grindelwald to reconsider this plan."
"So, Grindelwald was working with muggle Nazis!" Harry clapped in excitement, "are there other known Acolytes there?"
"Bauer seemed to have contacted at least three Acolytes. By the way, what poor handwriting," Valerie squinted her eyes, "Instruction from Ms. Rosier, Ms. Carrow Ms. Goldstein. Transfer their funds to Britain muggle accounts and then funnel them to respective Gringotts vaults. So, money laundering. Next, procure the following items for Mr. Hesse-"
Cough, cough.
The wizard whose memory Harry invaded harshly coughed. His eyes were sunken and deep in dark circles, his pupils were bloodshot from days of intense interrogation. A slight odor of urine wafted as he violently squirmed in his straightjacket.
"You!" Bauer yelled.
"Yes, me. How can I help you?" Harry grinned.
"You filthy mudblood, what did you do to me? Did you do something to my memory? Why am I remembering all my dead Aryan comrades?" The hateful eyes shot daggers at Harry.
"I was looking for this?" Harry took the notebook and waived at Bauer. Bauer's jaw dropped.
"How did you - why are you not dead?" Bauer whispered. "I made sure that even I can't remember where I buried it. And it was cursed with torture spells, how are you not dead?"
"A mundane, non-magical copy that I made from your memories wouldn't have such scary curses, right?" Harry shone an infuriating smile. Bauer's face paled with terror.
"How is that even possible?" Bauer teared up. "You mudbloods destroyed our master's Utopia five decades ago, and now you are trying to do it again? Working for heinous muggles like a lapdog as if it will save you. One day, muggles will decimate us-"
Valerie's nonverbal stun spell hit Bauer's chest with a bright red flash. "Take him to a Dormant Chamber, Thomas," said Valerie with an utterly bored tone as if she just went through three hours of biology lecture. "He has no use for us… for now. We can't kill him yet. Human rights and all that fancy shites. You two may retire now-"
Poof.
"Fletchley?" Harry blinked at the brown-haired wizard that just apparated into the interrogation room. It was rare for him to directly come to Harry's division since Fletchely's jobs were more focused on surveilling the activities in the wizard society, but given the unusually alarmed expression on his face, Harry figured something insane - and hopefully exciting - just happened to wizards. "What in blazing hell are you doing here?"
"They know."
"Know what?" Valerie stared at the flustered wizard.
"They know you are alive! They just arrested Dumbledore!"