It said something about Harry's life that men pointing automatic weapons at him wasn't the scariest thing that had happened to him that summer. If he included the whole last year, it might not even be in the top five. Staring down the barrel of a gun that clearly shot bullets rather than paintballs, he was just getting enough of a drip of adrenaline to let him focus.
It might not be totally healthy to live this way, but it certainly helped in a crisis.
His biggest asset, he quickly realized, was also his biggest liability: they didn't know he could do magic, but he wasn't allowed to let them know. Whatever he did, he had to try to keep it subtle… plausible… deniable. Happy probably shouldn't find out either.
Which was the point where the paint-drenched bodyguard himself glanced at Harry, weighed the options for getting him out of there safely, and tried, "Big bunch of guys with guns, huh?" Bet you aren't brave enough to make this fair!" Happy put his fists up like he was ready to brawl.
"Ah, a boxer, no?" the leader said, with interest, slinging his rifle back and falling into his own martial arts stance. "Very well."
"We don't have time for this," the other man said, now having to keep both Harry and Happy in his field of fire, since the rest of their team had run off to hinder the remainder of Harry's group. It was hard to tell through the paintball mask muffling his voice, but Harry thought he sounded vaguely Eastern European, not French.
"It weel be but a moment, you secure the boy," the Frenchman disagreed. "Show me what you 'ave," he ordered Happy.
Happy shot a look at Harry, clearly conveying that this was his time to run. He didn't disagree, but was worried what would happen if he left Happy behind. They were in a bit of a clearing on the trail, with a steep hill rising up to Harry's right (where the bad guys had ambushed them from) and a descent to his left that probably would drop off suddenly a ways into the trees. If he could just break line of sight, maybe he could get away.
But first he needed to do something about the guns.
Wandless transfiguration was hard. He'd barely managed to do any of it, except for the most basic lessons. Fortunately, the most basic lessons involved simple changes to metals. You didn't have to do much to the inside of a gun barrel to make it more dangerous to the wielder than the person on the other end. In principle, at least. Pretending to raise his hands in surrender, he tried to subtly do the gestures that worked for changing material forms, and hoped he'd gotten it right and that nobody would notice the orange glow inside the two men's guns.
It really was even harder when he couldn't touch the thing he was changing, but he thought he felt something happen.
As Happy squared off with the Frenchman, Harry waited for the other guy to lower his gun and withdraw a large zip tie. He could probably snap that no problem, but why wait? Putting his hands forward as if to comply (and not even having to pretend to be scared, because of the face-concealing mask), he lowered his weight and rushed off downhill, off the trail. "He's running!" the man yelled.
"Well catch 'im, zen!" his leader ordered, already beginning to brawl with Happy.
Harry had dropped his paintball gun in the clearing, so was only encumbered by the very sturdy SHIELD paintball outfit (he'd barely felt it, the one time he'd been hit earlier, and Happy wasn't complaining despite being covered in paint) and a belt pouch with extra ammo. Meanwhile, the other guy had to hold on to his rifle (hopefully non-functional). Dodging trees and managing to bound over fallen logs and other ground obstructions, Harry felt like he was quickly opening up a lead ahead of the sound of crashing through the trees and cursing behind and above him.
And there was the ravine he'd expected, the hill suddenly shifting from a steep but manageable incline to a basically-vertical drop at least thirty feet down. He'd need to time this right, since the guy behind could probably still see him as he moved between trees.
"Kid, don't!" the man tried to order, as Harry leaped out into the open air and rapidly plummeted downward.
Hoping that he'd broken line of sight, Harry let his invisibility cloak unspool from around his neck as he summoned an energy whip and managed to snag a sturdy-looking sapling growing out of the side of the hill. He narrowly cleared the ground where it started to level out again beneath him, and then was swinging upwards.
It turned out pulling a Tarzan like that hurt, and Harry winced as his arm informed him that he would be very sore later. But he managed to hang onto the spell and rode an elliptical arc back up, dismissing the whip and scrambling back onto steep-but-climbable hill just as the bad guy picked his way over the rise and looked down to see if he'd fallen to his death or serious injury. Seeing all the trees he could have George-of-the-Jungled his way into, Harry decided that whip travel was something he either needed to practice before the next crisis or never try again.
Fully invisible and only a few yards away from his confused pursuer, if a bit lower along the edge of the hill, Harry carefully picked his footing along ground that didn't look like it would make too much noise and got behind the guy just as he was shouting, "Kid! Did you fall behind a tree? Yell if you broke your leg."
As much as he wanted to quip at that straight line, Harry instead kept his mouth shut and gave the man a push down the hill. There was a short shriek of surprise and then the sound of pained cursing as he hit the spot where the ground leveled out. Importantly, the groaning continued, so Harry didn't think he'd killed the guy, but hopefully he was injured and out of the fight for a while.
Running back up toward Happy and the presumed-Frenchman, Harry massaged his arm and tried to figure out what he was going to do next. Spotting a short but stout-looking fallen tree limb, he managed to snap it off down to a length that would fit under his cloak and then continued on.
By the time he got back up to the clearing on the trail, Happy looked pretty roughed up. His mask had been knocked off and he had a black eye already forming. The leader of the bad guys was using some kind of kick-heavy martial arts style, and, if anything, seemed to be toying with Happy, enjoying the battle. While Happy's recent attendance at martial arts classes meant he had some idea how to defend himself, he was clearly still a boxer who was more prepared for punches than kicks (at least from someone his own size and with more skill). He was also trying to fight with a heavy backpack containing the Mark V suit.
"A strong right, but you leave yourself exposed!" the guy cautioned as Happy threw a punch that he weaved out of the way of, landing his own punch to Happy's stomach which got a groan. He followed up with a knee that he somehow turned into a shoving kick that sent Happy sprawling. "I do appreciate ze spar, but perhaps come back when you've more experience, no?"
The assailant grabbed his rifle and leaned down to roll Happy over and take the backpack, thus he only had a moment of warning as something moved through his peripheral vision and then several pounds of wet wood cracked with all of Harry's strength into the back of his head.
He didn't even have time to curse, as he collapsed to the ground.
"Uh, do you think he's alright?" Harry asked, letting the cloak once again retreat to its scarf positioning.
"Where… where did you come from?" Happy asked, blinking, pretty certain that Harry hadn't been standing there a second earlier, but, then, he had taken a couple of hits to the head.
"Tricked the other guy into falling down the hill and doubled back?" Harry said. "Come on, we have to help the others." Fortunately, the sound of gunfire back towards their friends kept Happy from disagreeing, and he managed to scramble up. He went to grab the rifle from the downed attacker and Harry suggested, "I don't know if that's going to work."
"Not going to work? It's a gun, and we need it," Happy argued petulantly, managing to detach the strap and make off with it from the unconscious assailant.
Harry grimaced and tried to undo his transfiguration subtly. He wasn't sure if he'd gotten it. From what he understood about guns, a barrel was much easier to screw up than to fix.
At least Happy didn't try to order him to stay back. The whole Stark Industries management team was starting to realize that Harry Potts was going to run into danger, and they might as well just keep an eye on him and hope for the best. As they ran back up the trail, Happy huffing a bit as his injuries from fighting started to catch up to him, the sound of automatic fire increased, as if the remaining attackers had found much more of a fight than they'd expected.
Harry also heard the distinctive sound of a repulsor blast interspersed with the chattering of machine guns.
"Get the case to Tony. I'll sneak around!" Harry suggested, then ran off into the woods before Happy could object. He'd be way more useful invisible. As the cloak settled back down around him, the sound of his feet crashing through the underbrush diminished, but didn't cease entirely: there was only so much the relic could do to sensory impressions other than sight. Harry figured it wouldn't be too noticeable with all the gunfire, and he could slow down once he got close.
It was hard to pinpoint the noise as it echoed across the hills, but Harry figured the bad guys were probably in between them and their friends, so he just oriented toward where the sound of gunfire seemed to be coming from. His guess was rewarded by finding three of the attackers behind a paintball barricade. He wondered why they were taking cover, but then noticed all three had discarded their paintball masks since the visors were covered with paint from accurate strikes. As he slowed to walk up, one guy popped his head up for a moment and took a paintball directly to the eye from somewhere in the trees, and he shrieked in pain and dropped down, rubbing at his face.
The other two guys seemed to take that personally, and popped up to try to shoot in the direction that the paintball had come from. Harry hastily repeated his trick to try to transfigure their gun barrels. The first guy's gun went click, seeming to have just jammed. The second, perhaps because he'd been faster on the trigger or his barrel was hotter, screamed as the end of the rifle basically exploded in front of him. It was almost like an Elmer Fudd cartoon.
Taking advantage, it was only a couple of seconds later that Natasha was flipping over the barricade, slapping both men in the face with some kind of discs that seemed to be compact tasers: each spasmed and collapsed. She followed up with a punch to the man who might have lost his eye, fist sparking with some kind of electrical gauntlet that also knocked him out.
Harry held very still as she stared around, maybe suspicious about what had caused both of their guns to fail simultaneously. With the three shooters down, Harry was pretty sure that only left two more at most. In the sudden silence, he heard Happy shout, "Here!" and felt like he could hear the mechanical ratcheting of the Mark V. Moments later, Tony's voice, amplified by the suit, announced, "Time's up! Everyone out of the pool."
"Die, Stark!" another voice with an Eastern European accent announced from deeper into the woods, where Harry could barely make out the flicker of the red and silver Mark V armor moving through the trees. "For Sokovia!" the man yelled, spraying bullets at the Iron Man.
Full auto was loud. Harry crouched down just in case of ricochets as he saw Natasha doing likewise. He could see the sparks of deflected bullets and heard one ping off a tree above him as Tony strode forward into the hail of bullets. Within seconds, it was done, and Tony said, "Night, night," before Harry heard the whine of a repulsor and the thump of the guy hitting a tree. "Anyone else want to try that? You?"
"No. I surrender," the last man announced, from over where Tony must have him cornered.
"Three down here," Natasha announced, turning back toward the rest of the group. That gave Harry a moment to sneak off out of her line of sight and try to find a place to reappear. From the sniper shot, he suspected Clint was somewhere where he might see Harry become visible if he didn't take precautions.
"There were only seven of them, and we got two," Happy shouted.
"Where's Harry?" Rhodey's voice said, sounding a little strained. "Also, I think I might have gotten shot."
That got everyone's attention, and Harry found another paintball barricade to duck behind, looked carefully to make sure he didn't see Clint or anyone else who could spot him, and then once again allowed the cloak to retract. "I'm over here!" he yelled, getting up and running toward where it sounded like Rhodey was.
Everyone else was also converging on the Colonel's position, where he and Dean had taken cover behind a barricade. Tony was clanking over with the last Sokovian at repulsor-point. Rhodey had pulled up his mask and was checking his torso, where there was, indeed, a bullet hole in the center of his chest. But he poked at it and said, "Is this… bulletproof?"
"I told you, it's SHIELD training gear," Natasha raised her own mask and smirked, as she moved to bind the conscious soldier in his own zip ties.
"They were coming for Dean," Rhodey explained.
"Must not have been sure which of us was me," Harry explained. "They were trying to kidnap me and steal the Mark V."
"And you took two out on your own?" Rhodey said, glancing between Harry and Happy.
"Don't look so surprised," Happy pulled himself up, though the swelling on his face showed he hadn't come away unscathed. "Big French guy wanted to do a little martial arts. Savate, I think?"
"French, or Algerian? Could be Batroc," Clint said, emerging from the woods where he'd been restraining the unconscious men. "There were rumors he'd gotten into the country."
"You beat Georges Batroc in a brawl?" Natasha asked, skeptically. Seemed like the guy was world class.
"Well…" Happy said, "I distracted him long enough for Harry to hit him in the back of the head with a log."
"And I tricked the other one into falling down a hill," Harry added. "I don't know if he's out or not. He may need a doctor."
The suit augmentation making his voice sound dangerous, Tony turned to Natasha and asked, "Did you know about this?"
No flicker of guilt across her face, she simply said, "We picked up some chatter that you'd be here. We think someone worked out your plane's flight plan and Colonel Rhodes paying for the event were related. But we didn't know if anyone would use the information. So we took precautions."
"And if those precautions let you roll up a few terrorists by using me and the kids as bait…" Tony scoffed. "Next time, I expect a warning."
Harry said, a little guilty, "Next year, we should probably just assume someone's going to try to kill you on my birthday."
"That's… not a bad point," Tony sighed, flipping the face plate up on the armor. "Are we done here? I think we're done here. Didn't we pass a ye olde German pub on the way in? I want lunch and a beer."
They weren't totally done, as Clint and Natasha needed everyone's help dragging the unconscious men back to the base camp. The guy Harry had shoved down the hill had, indeed, broken a leg and and arm and was in pretty bad shape, but alive. Batroc, if that's who they were fighting, had managed to get away. The scared guests at the camp described him staggering through a few minutes earlier, getting into a black van, and peeling out.
Said guests got a lot less scared when they realized they'd been playing paintball with Tony Stark all morning, and wanted to get selfies with Iron Man.
In the car ride on the way back, full of pub food, Rhodey finally asked, "Tony, did I or did I not tell you not to modify your paintball gun?"
"I didn't change the firing speed or the force! At all!" Tony argued.
"You put a repulsor in it!"
Tony shrugged, "And it was useful. I might put repulsors in everything. The Mark V is good, but if Sokovian terrorists are just going to jump out of the woods at me…"
"How did you power it?" Harry asked, not having seen Tony using his paintball rifle like a sci-fi raygun.
"Cable that ran up my sleeve and clipped to the reactor," Tony explained, tapping his chest.
"Do you still have that plugged in?" Dean checked. "Can I charge my phone?" he grinned.
"Can you… can you charge your phone?" Tony boggled, feeling called out. But then he started to think about it. "You know, that's not the worst idea… a universal USB adaptor wouldn't be too hard to clip in…"
Rhodey said, "I just want to apologize. Next time we'll do Disneyland or something."
"Strictly spontaneous trips," Tony agreed. "I can't believe they're tracking my jet. That's not fair."
"Civilian flight plans are public information," Rhodey shrugged. "I thought you knew that?"
"I should get SHIELD to get my jet counted as a military vehicle," Tony groused. "They owe me for no warning today. I should have known Agent Romanoff didn't want to be friends."
"It's probably hard to make friends, when you have to keep secrets all the time," Harry suggested.
Happy shot him a look in the rear-view mirror from where he was up front driving. Harry figured he probably ought to keep the theatrics to a minimum for his last month home, and give everyone most of a year to forget all the things he'd gotten away with that summer.
Pepper grumbled a bit about how only Tony and Harry could get attacked by international mercenaries while playing paintball, but mostly seemed glad that SHIELD had been there and that she hadn't. Since they were already in New York, a couple of days later Harry just went with Dean to "summer camp" by heading over to the Bleeker Street sanctum.
As they finished getting situated in Kamar-Taj's guest rooms and joined back up with Hermione and the Patils, they were surprised that the Ancient One greeted them in the study room, light playing across the brick-tiled floor through the diamond-latticed wood paneling that surrounded the space. "Are you teaching us this time, ma'am?" Hermione asked.
The bald woman nodded from where she was sitting at a table in front of a low bookshelf in the cozy room. "Indeed. Because you've been asking so much about sling rings, I thought it best to give you a bit of a crash course in the dimensions. And what can go wrong if you don't respect the ability to move between them."
"I thought sling rings just moved about in the same dimension," Parvati said what most of them were thinking.
"Mirror dimension," Hermione got out before realizing she'd stolen the Ancient One's thunder. She'd been getting better about not disruptively showing off her knowledge in class, but it still leaked out.
The Sorcerer Supreme merely smiled fondly and said, "Exactly. Teleportation requires the sling rings, because they are anchored to the Mirror Dimension in a way that we cannot be, even with a bargain. As the Mirror Dimension touches every place at once, magical items anchored to it can allow us to skip along this dimension and, ourselves, eliminate the distance between two locations. However, without a sling ring, even the greatest of sorcerers can become trapped in the Mirror Dimension."
"I bet whoever found that out first had a bad day," Dean said.
"Quite. Walk with me," she commanded, getting to her feet and leading the five teenagers out toward one of the exterior doors of the building, which exited into a busy alley in Kathmandu. They took a few steps down the street before she asked, "What changed?"
"Are we already in the mirror dimension?" Harry asked, realizing something was off. Though he could see the citizens moving around them, they seemed not to notice the crowd of kids. And sounds, smells, and sensations like the wind were diminished. He walked toward a holy man sitting in an alcove across the way, and as Harry moved the man seemed to stay just out of his reach, the space in the alley bending subtly and everything around him twitching in geometric distortion, as if he was stuck in a kaleidoscope.
"Don't go too far from the group," the Ancient One suggested. "But, you are correct. The sling ring can also bring others nearby into the Mirror Dimension, and do so far more subtly than opening a portal for travel. Though it's considered polite to make the transition more obvious than I just did. We find this an ideal method to enact surveillance, practice dangerous spells, and to keep magical battles we cannot avoid from others' notice."
"Why not just drop bad guys in here and leave them?" Dean checked.
The Ancient One motioned them to follow her, and as they moved the kaleidoscope effect became more pronounced, the buildings around them folding away and duplicating geometrically, particularly in the distance. Yet they still seemed to be making progress down the street, for all that it was seen through funhouse mirrors. "While few beings can escape without a sling ring, the resourceful may still travel and invisibly plot. Threats challenging enough that we need to use magic to fight, and, thus, to bring here are unlikely to politely sit still and starve to death. Each one left is a potential deadly surprise for other sorcerers using the dimension later." She considered for a moment and added, "Plus, the nature of the space means that it's often difficult to get far enough away from an enemy to concentrate on opening an escape portal until that enemy is incapacitated anyway."
"So where do you imprison people?" Harry asked. "I know the Vanir have some place called Azkaban? I guess that's not the Mirror Dimension?"
"I hate that place," she sighed. "We tend to imprison wrongdoers as humanely as possible. Each of the sanctums has a few cells in its basement heavily enchanted to suppress abilities and prevent escape. And it is rare that we need long-term incarceration. The Vanir however… insist on cruel and unusual punishment as a form of deterrence. Thus, the place known as Azkaban is an island they have carved out in the Dark Dimension."
Hermione gasped, "The Dread Dormammu?"
"Just so." Receiving a lesson while walking and talking through the Mirror Dimension was a brand new experience. Even now, they were walking up the wall of a brick building that had started as one story but was duplicated and stretched so it extended for yards ahead of them. "They made a deal with that entity to guard the prisoners, and got few concessions to keep them from being ruined. A sentence of any significant length is a pathway to madness, and even should they wish to release an inmate early, the wardens guard them jealously."
"They were going to send Hagrid," Harry growled, "just to be seen to be 'doing something.'"
The Ancient One frowned, sadly. "Perhaps you would like to see it? To know the injustice at the heart of the Vanir wizarding government?"
Four Gryffindors steeled themselves and nodded, and Padma rolled her eyes, knowing she was outvoted. And she kind of wanted to know anyway (which was why Hermione agreed as well, if she was honest). "Yes, ma'am," Padma spoke for all of them.
The Ancient One did some kind of somatic gesture none of them recognized and spun open a portal, the rim flaring purple rather than the normal orange. "Do not step through," she ordered. "I shall not draw his attention today. Merely look."
Through the viewing window, it was very much like staring at one of the enhanced NASA photos of a nebula in deep space, patches of cloudy color over endless blackness with no rhyme or reason. In the foreground, however, it was more like looking at a 3D render of cells in the body, small and oddly-organic planetoids linked together by looping tendrils and interspersed with geometric objects of unknown origin.
The Ancient One moved her hand and caused the window to spin, and the view moved as if zooming in. "This is Azkaban," she explained, as a grayish planetoid grew to fill the whole window. Whorls of seething purple fire divided the whole sphere into discrete spaces, and the children realized that they were essentially a collection of ritual circles. Within each space, a person sat, hunched over, clearly tormented. Between the "prison cells" walked lanky humanoid forms, seemingly naked and gray-skinned, a single red light burning in the middle of their faces. "The wardens," she explained.
"Do they just… sit there?" Parvati asked. "Do they get to move around? What do they eat?"
"There is no time in the Dark Dimension. They do not experience hunger, or tiredness, or even age. Simply the crushing attention of the Mindless Ones. And, once they go completely mad, they will become a Mindless One themselves. It can take centuries, from our point of view."
As the viewing window passed over the space, the occasional mindless one glanced its wide red eye upwards, but then turned back to its duties, unconcerned. None of the inmates seemed to notice. That was, until a man with shoulder-length dark hair and a short black beard looked their way, his eyes widening and mouth gaping. Something about him seemed very familiar to Harry, but he couldn't explain why.
The Ancient One frowned and gave a last, fast swipe of her arm, causing the portal to spin closed and wink out. "It's not good to give them hope of escape," she explained. "But, now that you've had your curiosity sated, let me explain a bit more about navigating in the Mirror Dimension…"