Harry Potter. A name. A legend.
The man in question reflected upon the weight his name carried in that fickle world he has had the dubious pleasure of inhabiting.
Nights like this one, stalking his prey, gave him ample time to rethink his life. Really, he had been stalking the wolves for a few weeks now that he's been back in Britain. He's done lots of thinking.
A lot has changed since he had been told of his wizardly nature. He made friends and enemies. He lost friends. He killed enemies. He never graduated from Hogwarts, but he had travelled a lot and learned more than any NEWT student could boast. Life was the greatest teacher and experience the greatest lesson.
Harry Potter waited in the darkness of the brush. He wasn't invisible. He wasn't hiding behind his cloak. The wizards the world over underestimated muggles. A little of bit of camouflage and a suppressor on his rifle did most of the work, the runes the rest.
After he watched poor Ron get torn apart by a pack of rabid werewolves, something inside Harry broke. He fired off a dozen Avadas into the furry beasts that terrible night. Beneath the stinking mass of wolf, Harry found many pieces of Ron, but not all of him. That night, he ran away. He backpacked across all of Europe. He walked through Siberia. He swam to Japan.
The wolves are sensitive to magic, and to wizards. They could spot them from a mile away. Harry was a mile and a half away. Wolves weren't very sensitive to a runed-out rifle and bullets. Contrary to popular muggle belief, werewolves aren't weak to silver. Harry simply liked to use it for bullets because it was easy to rune out as a magically stable element to give his bullets some extra bite and quieten the bark.
There was a pack meeting that evening. The three largest packs of the UK were gathering to choose a direction forward, for someone had been picking off stray wolves. Something like forty or fifty wolves might show, Harry mused.
Harry's scope was auto adjusting. Hermione had helped him with the runes for that one. The rifle barrel he had done himself. It would never heat up. At all. Never needed any cleaning either. The suppressor was closer to a true silencer, but it wasn't there yet. The bullets, even though they were super-sonic, were runed silent against the sonic boom. They also exploded with the power of Semtex on impact. Nothing to be done about that boom. He still called them Quiet Little Semtex, or QLS, bullets.
He eyed the creatures that appeared in the clearing. Arrogant and angry. Voldemort had been working with them. Some were truly grotesque to look at, knowing what they they were and what they did.
Harry's walkie-talkie crackled. No words. Yet the code was clear. In position, ready for phase one.
The core group of the D.A. had died alongside Sirius that night. Harry had actually contemplated ending his life, but he wouldn't give that satisfaction to his enemy. Taking your friends on a mission and watching them die was not easy. Neville. Luna. Ron. Ginny. God rest their souls.
Hermione wasn't the same either after that night.
His index squeezed.
Click. Click. Click.
Harry had the time to fire off three shots before the first bullet hit its target.
He had aimed the first shot into the wolf's hindquarters. A half-changed wolf. Legs ripped cleanly off, guts bursting out.
He liked them to suffer agonizing deaths for what they did to Ron. They had ripped apart the boy's stomach, pulling his guts out, while others crunched on his feet and hands. They wanted to extend his suffering, and now the tables have turned.
Click. Click. Click. Click.
The disadvantage of being so far away was that the targets had time to move in the second it took for the bullet to reach its destination. No more clean shots. Now Harry just aimed for the crowd.
Harry kept firing. He had twenty rounds in his HK G3 battle rifle magazine. He reloaded. He started picking off the wolves one by one now.
Maybe half of the wolves had time to scatter, maybe less, but there was at least a couple dozen dead or dying. He smiled grimly.
He knew Hermione was out there somewhere. He clicked his walkie-talkie in the code to say ready-to-go for phase two.
Hermione broke radio silence.
"Too many escaped."
Harry didn't answer.
He clicked the code again to her. She clicked back, that she was ready too.
He disassembled the rifle, securing the scope and everything into a case. A little wave and flicker of his trusty wand and the case was the size of a zippo, safe in his pocket.
He pulled a vial out of another pocket and drank the disgusting slime down. Moments later he could see in the night, better than ever in his life he could in the day. He could smell as a human never would. His hearing was super sharp. He took his glasses off. He wouldn't need them for a little while. He was overwhelmed though. Too much sensory information. He shut his eyes for a second and focused his mind. Basic occlumency. Still didn't have the hang out of it, but it did help with the potion.
He unsheathed a wicked dagger he had brought back from his travels and calmly walked towards the clearing after getting his bearings. He could hear the whimpering, and smell the burnt flesh, and ripped-open guts from a distance away. Good. His wand was in his other hand.
Hermione was out there somewhere. She would have control of the perimeter. She was a surprisingly agile flyer these days.
"Hey Big Bad Wolf. What big wounds you have? Is it the better to die with!?"
Harry stuck the tip of the blade into the back of the closest wolf. Not very deep at first, but then he twisted and pushed it in deeper.
"Impedimenta!" He launched a spell against a wolf some meters away trying to escape into the darkness. "Crucio!" His wand was in his left hand. It wasn't his phoenix wand. It was his special wand for special missions.
A few tried to scamper away, one or two hurled some insults at him, but the next half-hour had passed slowly for the wolves.
Harry had developed a fondness for bone-breaking spells. He used it on the paws of the wolves, as they had used their fangs to crush Ron's limbs.
Fenrir hadn't been fully changed. He liked the in-between state, half-man half-beast.
With a clean swipe of his wand, he severed the head of the now-dead Fenrir Greyback. He had been the first to get shot that evening. He had bled out after losing his lower half of the body.
Harry found a nice branch and made it into a makeshift pole to mount the hideous beast's head on.
As the sun started to rise, the mangled corpses of the wolves didn't change back. They died as wolves, and their bodies would stay as such. Most were a lot more mangled than after the barrage.
All in all, he had gotten another thirty-two that night. More than the previous outings put together. He wondered how many Hermione had gotten. He clicked the walkie-talkie, but only silence responded. She must be out of range, he figured. After the wolves, Harry wasn't sure what his plan was. Would he stay in Britain? Would he go after Lestrange? Would he fight a conflict against Voldemort and his Deatheaters? Decisions, decisions.
Harry looked around at the carnage. All his bullets exploded entirely. There would be no fragments left. He had picked up the casings of the rounds. Nobody would come this deep into the woods to investigate the slaughter of were-wolves. No aurors, no Scotland Yard. Harry didn't even think that the Ministry monitored the use of magic this deep into the forests. But more wolves would return. They would come back for their brethren. So, he piled them all together into a nice bunch.
Naturally, he peed to mark the territory.
Walking away from the mess, Harry contemplated taking a trophy. He returned to Fenrir and yanked out a fang. Looking around, the wizard was suddenly inspired. He would harvest some ingredients. He wasn't sure what was worthwhile, but fangs, claws, eyeballs, hearts, livers, and a variety of other ingredients went into special containers he kept on his person at all time for harvesting. A lesson he learned in Siberia.
Finally, he faced the carnage. "Fuck you," he spat on the leftovers of the beasts. He summoned Fenrir's head to side and set about on twirling his wand in a complex pattern. He let out some fiendfyre to clean everything up. It was always difficult to manage, but he willed the flames away after a few moments.
The ground was still hot, but he trudged into the center of the ashes with Fenrir's head on a pole and stuck it into the burned out clearing, now free from corpses. He peed again, to make sure the smell stayed.