I swear my word-count goals per chapter are in the 5k-7.5k range, but I've really been getting out of hand lately (T_T)

[OH SHOOT forgot to put warnings sorry 10/16/2022] Content warning for head trauma and broken ribs.


Something gave way under Harry's left foot and sent him tumbling down the pile of sand-coated iron scraps he'd been climbing up. Arrows clanked off of the metal behind him as he fell. Harry curled up to protect his head and organs from sharp metal edges as he bounced down the unforgiving iron hill. He squeezed his eyes shut and kept his jaw clenched, tuning out the knocks of future bruises and focusing on his landing. As soon as he'd stopped rolling, he sprang to his feet and sprinted away from the sand pit surrounding the junk-covered platform in the middle of the room. The sand seethed with armored worms that looked related to the one that had tried to digest him earlier. When Red had knocked one of the monster archers into the "moat" earlier, a pack of sand worms had risen up and dragged the shrieking Lizalfos into the depths of their domain.

Harry sent a Severing Charm at a Lizalfos standing on the line of grating that ran around the room and then ducked behind a heap of half-crushed machinery. "Find it yet?" he panted. "I've seen my life flash before my eyes about three times now." He sneezed on the grayish haze hanging in the air. His sense of smell had long been rendered useless by all the tiny flecks of rust and who knew what else that had stuck to the inside of his nose. His mask was doing its best, but a simple bandana could only do so much.

"I'm trying!" Yellow stood in an indent in the junk pile that he and Blue had created during their search. Blue levitated a car-sized, cracked metal bucket up from the mess and tossed it aside with a grunt of effort. Yellow ducked down and threw aside smaller pieces of recycling, using an improvised scoop to clear the sand blocking his view.

They were looking for a silver key that had dropped from the ceiling when they'd walked in, followed by several tons of metal scrap and a few truckloads of multicolored industrial sand. The cage of improvised walls they'd levitated into place once the shooting had started both protected Yellow from arrows and presented a potential crush hazard if he moved the wrong thing. While Yellow searched through the metaphorical haystack and Blue shoved the bigger obstacles out of the way, Harry and Red were running around to keep the monsters' attention off of their siblings.

A loud crack echoed across the room. "OW!"

Harry winced at the pain that bloomed in his cheek. Up on the wall, Red stumbled backward along a walkway, holding his face.

"Apparently you can use bows to whack people. Good to know!" he said as he lunged for the monster that had hit him. He grabbed it by the shoulder and punched it several times in the face with his buckler. "How does it feel?" He unsheathed his sword and stabbed the Bokoblin through the chest to finish it off. "Mine now!" Snatching up the monster's discarded metal bow, he held it up like a trophy.

"That's not how you use a shield, idiot! Even with Mending Charms, you'll wear it out faster!" Blue shouted. "Get some brass knuckles if you want to be a brute."

"Good idea!" Red said brightly. He turned around to throw his sword at the next archer in line, which had been taking aim at his unprotected back. The Lizalfos staggered backward off the platform and succumbed to the worms waiting below. "Ooh, I wonder if there are special punching shields for defense and offense." He blocked an arrow and snapped his Vine Whip at the archer that had fired it. "A punching shield would be so brill!"

Yellow paused in his search to stare up uncertainly at Red. "Do you ever wonder whether fighting monsters has made us more violent?" he asked.

Harry spotted a Lizalfos sneaking up on their digging pit and cast a Levitation Charm on a rusty circular saw blade sitting nearby. He winged it at the lizard's waist, cleanly slicing the creature in half. Purple smoke poured like blood before the body vanished. "I feel like we're only doing as much as we need to," he told Yellow with a shrug. "These monsters aren't people, or anything. They were created to attack the country, and that's what they're doing. Killing them isn't the same as murder." Peeking around his cover behind a hill of machine casings, he cast a Disarming Charm on blue Bokoblin to relieve it of its bow, then hit the monster with a Hover Charm. He mentally nudged it just far enough off the walkway that it wouldn't be able to catch the edge, then released the spell. The Bokoblin fell to the worms.

"Avifors!" Blue's spell hit a Lizalfos archer that Harry hadn't noticed. The monster's spiky metal bow twisted and shrank into a winged blob that resembled a beaked silver Snitch. The former bow fluttered away and settled atop a scrap heap to peck at a bent wrench. Blue snickered at the look of blank incomprehension on the Lizalfos's face.

"You said you wanted to learn more battle spells earlier, Blue. What kind?" Yellow prompted.

Harry raised an eyebrow. It seemed that Yellow was more concerned about this topic than Harry had assumed. He kept an ear out for Blue's answer.

"Shielding spells would be useful for fighting Hylian things and defending ourselves against Voldemort if he attacks us again," Blue said.

"Oh, that's good!" Yellow encouraged. "Defense is important."

Harry pressed himself flat against the junk as an arrow came from the side. Instead of spearing through his temple, it took a small chunk out of his nose and bounced off of one of Yellow's protective walls. Harry leaned out and fired a Softening Charm at the Bokoblin's bow. The weapon sagged like wet sponge in the monster's hands, all tension on its string lost.

"We could also use some more destructive magic," Blue went on. "The only magical offense we have right now are the Fire-Making Spell, Arrow-Shooting Spell, Severing Charm, and Stinging Hex. None of our other spells cause any real damage on their own; the Sunburst Spell is only good for slaying shadows, dead things, and curses, for all that it resembles a fire-conjuring charm."

Red side-stepped an arrow, conjured his Dragon Hammer as he ran forward, and brought the weapon down on a blue Bokoblin's head. The monster collapsed with an echoing crack of metal on skull, but didn't die. Red kicked the durable creature off of the walkway and into the worm pit to finish it off. "What, that's not enough for you? We should be learning how to get more awesome with weapons instead!" he declared. "We're always going to be a wizard, but what if we became a battle wizard? How cool would that be?"

"We ought to become a proper wizard first before we go around adding extra titles to it," Blue huffed. "As I was saying, our magical repertoire is hardly intimidating."

"Who needs intimidating spells when you can just bash the other guy's head in? Have you looked at Dumbledore? He's made of sticks! I bet we could take him if he didn't have his wand."

"Red," the other three Harrys said with exasperation.

"This isn't where I wanted the conversation to go," Yellow lamented, dumping out his sand scoop—a heavily dented wall panel. "I wanted all of you to consider that getting into the habit of stabbing and punching and lighting living-ish things on fire might be bad for—Oh! Found it!" He reached into the hole he'd just cleared and held up a large silver key.

"Can I keep stabbing things?" Red asked, waving around a bow he'd stolen off of a monster. "It's fun!"

Yellow sighed.

"Sure, just try not to get hurt. We only have one more Red Potion left before Blue has to brew more," Harry called up to him.

"And at least try to milk these monsters for treasure instead of feeding the sand worms!" Blue said. "Make it worth our time, waiting around for you."

Red gave him a cocky salute, then used his whip to grab a Bokoblin by the neck and yank it into melee range. "Can do!"

After some backtracking, the Harrys returned to the room full of moving platforms and fire-wheels and made their way to the other side. Harry nimbly hopped across. Basic "jump from here to there" challenges were getting easier after the crazy stuff they'd been through. If he could leap two meters across open lava from one speeding conveyor full of giant marbles to another, he could hopscotch across these slower, more closely-packed platforms with ease.

He waited patiently for an animated lava blob to leap and land in front of him, then jumped onto the last platform and rode it to the right side of the room. As he stepped off, he conjured up his map and flipped through it. They were still on Basement Floor 1 in an altered area of the upper furnaces, two levels away from where they needed to go. He chewed on the inside of his cheek, searching for a way down. If only this map were as mixed-up as this facility currently was! There was supposed to be an elevator down to the lowest floor right in front of him, but he couldn't be sure that was where the door led. For all he knew, that locked door two rooms away was the real way down.

Well, the only way to be sure was to check. At worst, the dragon they were looking for would be waiting behind that door. He'd already fought a dragon and a worm the size of a small dragon, so he could handle those odds.

Yellow stepped off of a moving platform and joined him by the door. "Are you sure we should be going this way instead of going back to check what we missed?" he asked.

"I figure it couldn't hurt," Harry said. "For all we know, forcing us to find a key is just a time-waster instead of a way forward. If the elevator on the map is really behind this door, we could skip going through the locked one back there entirely."

Blue and Red arrived, Blue stumbling forward from the change in momentum between the moving platform and static ground. "Did I hear 'elevator'?" he asked hopefully. "We're almost to the bottom?"

"Maybe," Harry said. "Vaati reorganized some things, so we'll see."

He went to the doors and unlocked them with his slate. The barrier slid aside to reveal a lift with flickering orange lights. Harry leaned in and looked askance at the equally flickering buttons. Did that mean the elevator wouldn't work, or…?

"Blue, what's the worst that can happen in a busted lift?" he asked. While his brothers stepped in, he hesitated in the doorway. "What causes one to fall?"

"As far as I know, a belt snapping, a pulley breaking, brakes failing, or a serious hydraulic malfunction," Blue said. "Since the elevators here seem to be moved by magic, I doubt any of those things would happen."

"Alright." Harry stepped in. The Four Sword hummed uneasily in his mind, but didn't seem to have anything specific to yell at him about.

He pressed the "3A" button and the doors slid shut, as one would expect.

Then the buttons and lights glowed violet. An echo of wicked laughter reverberated in the air.

The Four Sword screeched in Harry's mental ear as the elevator began to vibrate. "Get your Magic Rods out and prepare for a fall!" he commanded. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, the elevator threw itself down the shaft.

Harry shrieked curses in his mind as he found himself plastered against the ceiling. His wand arm was pinned to the metal like it had been magnetized. He couldn't get enough clearance to cast a Falling Spell!

"Immobulus!" A jet of blue light shot from Blue's Magic Rod and hit the wall.

The elevator's malicious faster-than-freefall turned into a usual lift-speed descent. Harry yelped and wind-milled his arms as he found himself peeling away from the ceiling. His drop turned into a gentle float just before he would have fallen flat on the floor. He landed on his side and lay there with his heart hammering and a scream still in his throat.

Blue's partially-effective Freezing Charm brought the lift to a jolting halt at the bottom of the elevator shaft. The violet glow faded, leaving the lights their previous uncertain orange and the buttons dark and useless. The doors slid open to reveal their stop, which was a meter up from where the lift had landed. Harry stared blankly at the stretch of polished, black-streaked stone in front of his face, still getting his thoughts back in order.

'How many times have I almost died today?' he wondered. He should start writing those sorts of events down. It would make for an interesting memoir, and his friends would want to know about that kind of thing. No wonder they stocked journals, parchment, and stacks of fancy stationery by the register in adventuring shops.

Okay, enough laying around. He pushed himself up from the ground. "Anyone hurt?" he asked. His head had been filled with so much white noise during the last few meters of the lift's descent that he wouldn't have noticed any transmitted bruises.

Blue rolled over, clutching his nose. "Broke doze," he moaned. He pointed his Magic Rod at it. "Episkey. Argh!"

The other Harrys reflexively clutched their faces as the spell lightly scorched the insides of Blue's nostrils.

"Ffffaugh, that stingsss," Blue hissed, clamping his hands tight over his healed nose. He pounded his fist on the floor as he rode out the rest of the pain, then sat up. "Alright, I'm okay." He sniffed a few times. "Missing some nose hair, maybe, but okay."

"I fell hard, too, but I just got some bruises," Red reported. "I might have done some accidental magic to bounce myself up a bit."

Blue scowled at him ruefully. "Lucky you."

Yellow shook like a leaf. His face was bloodless in the light trickling in from the next room. "F-F-Fine, I'm fine. Fine! Very." His pupils were black pinpricks in golden pools.

His brothers' heads whipped around toward him. "No you're not," they said in unison.

"N-No, really!" Yellow climbed to his feet and leaned against the wall, one hand pressed to his chest. Harry was sure that if Yellow weren't dressed in so many layers, his heartbeat would have been visible through his clothes.

Harry held up his hand. "I'm declaring snack time." He pulled Yellow back down to the ground and gathered him in a hug. His brother leaned into him, sniffling. Harry patted him on the back. "We're having pancakes and sausages and not thinking about dying for a half hour."

"Sounds good," Red said. "All this running and jumping and killing stuff made me hungry again."

"Let me check the temperature first." Blue took a jug of water out of his bag and poured a little on the ground. It didn't bubble or steam on the elevator floor. "Alright, I don't think the food will burn up in here."

Harry frowned at that. If they were on the lowest floor, shouldn't it have been hotter? He had a strong feeling that Vaati had just given them a hard shove in the wrong direction. With an exasperated inward sigh, Harry set the matter aside for Later Harry to handle. For now, his priorities were calming Yellow down and making sure everyone was ready to trudge on after their little break.


"What are we supposed to dooo?!" Yellow wailed as he ran for his life. The giant iron ball following at his heels almost drowned out his words with its rumbling on the metal floor.

"Since this is clearly a trap, I'm assuming the way forward is either hidden or nonexistent," Blue said from where he stood on the sidelines. The ball would only chase one of them at a time, and Yellow was its current prey. "If worse comes to worst, we can take apart the top of the lift and go up the elevator shaft."

Yellow whined in dismay. Death Mountain was officially the worst place he had ever been, and would probably remain in that top spot for as long as he lived. How could anywhere else be any worse? Lava, baby air-cannon dragons, fiery boulder rain, sand worms, Hell elevators, the ever-present danger of cooking to death—he couldn't handle it! Well, he could, but it made his head feel like it might explode. He could scream until he wore out his vocal cords and it still wouldn't feel like enough. Once he had access to a pillow, a blanket, and an empty room, he was going to have the hardest, ugliest cry of his life.

He cast a Freezing Charm over his shoulder. It didn't stop the four-meter-tall iron sphere threatening to crush him, but slowed it down enough that Yellow could turn and sprint in a new direction. The room was fairly small, lined in spikes that made his current task of distracting the death-marble that much more difficult.

"Red, Green, how is finding that exit going?" Blue asked. "It's almost my turn to be chased again."

"Erm…" Green was hopping along the spikes mounted on the walls, which stuck out far enough that they weren't too difficult to keep one's footing on. He clanged his sword against the wall, then paused to listen when Red did the same on the other side of the room. "Not well! I've circled the room twice and I'm not hearing anything hollow."

Yellow cast another Freezing Charm on the marble to give himself a little breathing room. He looked around wildly for any hint of an escape route. Out! He wanted to get out! Away from this dark hole, away from this horrible volcano! He wanted to go home!

His frantically darting eyes seized upon an iron grate by the ceiling. It was big for an air vent—larger than the average bathroom window. They could fit in there!

He conjured his whip, flung it out, and ripped the grate off the wall. "Exit!" he announced. "Go!"

"An air vent?" Blue said uncertainly. "I don't know—"

Yellow gave his brother an aggrieved glare. He wanted out, and there was no way in hell he was going up the elevator shaft. There was a chance that possessed lift might come back to life and smash them against the top of the tunnel. "Go," he growled.

Blue hustled across the room. "I'm going, I'm going!"

Yellow continued running in circles to keep the death-marble busy while his brothers floated one another up to the grate. When it was his turn, he leapt up to assist the Hover Charm his brother had cast and scrabbled into the metal tunnel with frantic speed. A second after he'd gotten his legs in, the giant iron sphere trying to kill him slammed into the wall hard enough to make the ventilation shaft shudder.

He let out a relieved sigh. Sure, they were now in a creepy tunnel lit only by Illumination Charms, but it was better than being chased in circles until they finally collapsed and wound up crushed under that scarily determined ball. And there were no traps in here! Probably! Maybe they'd get a few calm minutes to breathe.

"Oh, crap. Green? Green, you okay?" Yellow heard Red say up ahead.

"S-Sure," Green said in a small voice. "Yeah. I-I can…I can do this. Let's get moving."

Yellow instantly felt terrible. He'd been so fixed on escaping the trap that he'd forgotten Green's fear of the dark. The facility was well-lit for a place that had been shut down for fifty years, but there were no light strips in here. If not for the glow of his brothers' staffs, this passage would have been totally cave-dark. Yellow added his own Illumination Charm, as if that would change anything. He chewed on his lower lip. Poor Green…

They crawled and crawled and crawled. There was no way for them to tell what floor they were on, nor where they were on that floor. That elevator they'd come across hadn't led to the room it should have; since Vaati had wizard magic now, he might very well have used spatial trickery to make the elevator on the first basement floor go down to the same level it had already been on, or even one above it. There were perfectly flat halls in Hogwarts that started on one floor and ended on another, so the ancient mage could have taken inspiration from there.

When they came across a final dead end, Yellow almost lost his fight against the urge to cry. So many paths in this ventilation duct had been blocked by whirring fans that pushed the air along. What if they could only get out by crawling backward to the place they had entered from? What if they died in here and no one ever found them? Ron and Hermione wouldn't know to check the air vents of a facility that no one was supposed to be in!

There was the sound of a muttered spell and tearing metal from up ahead. "Need to go up," Green said hoarsely. "Red, could you—?"

"Yeah, I'm on it. Wingardium Leviosa!"

Suddenly, with only two brothers in front of him, Yellow could see the blue-tinted light now streaming into the ventilation tunnel up ahead. Oh, thank Merlin!

Yellow happily waited his turn to be levitated out of the vent and into open space. Once freed, he breathed deeply and stretched out his cramping limbs. His knees—bruised from banging repeatedly against the iron tunnel—creaked in protest when he straightened them out.

They'd emerged in a small room with sand and machinery piled up at the edges and a large cluster of raised iron pillars taking up the center. Red crouched by Green, speaking to him in low tones. Yellow hung back, wanting to apologize but reluctant to interrupt Red. Blue, meanwhile, was busy inspecting the pillars.

"This looks like something we need our hammer for," Blue said, rubbing his chin. "What do they do, though? Why are they here? I can't see an industrial purpose for a random cluster of pillars."

Yellow took note of the light globes embedded in the ceiling. They glowed a piercing blue, like the eye-grabbing accents of the Hero of Lights's obstacle course. The style these stone lights had been cut in was different from the utilitarian strips that illuminated the facility, too.

"There might not be an industrial purpose to those pillars," Yellow said. He pointed at the Bluestone spheres. "I think the Hero of Lights left one of her games here."

"You reckon?" Red dug through his bag and pulled out the Trail Finder they'd come across on the Hero's Trail. Its lollipop head flared blue and shone a beam toward the iron columns. "Oh, cool!"

Green climbed to his feet. "Hopefully it's a way out of this weird part of the facility instead of a chance to get even more lost," he said, looking disgruntled. He summoned up his map and poked at it, glaring every so often at their surroundings. "From all the sand, I'm assuming we're somewhere in the Sand Processing Sector on Floor 1B instead of the Deep Furnace Sector on Floor 3B, which is where that elevator should have led to. On top of that, I have no clue where on the floor this room is because it doesn't look like anything labeled on here. Argh!" He mussed his hair in frustration. "I should have just had us go back to that locked door! I led us in a stupid circle!"

"You couldn't have known Vaati had messed with the elevator, Green," Yellow soothed. "You were leading us in the right direction according to the map."

"I should have known better than to trust the map!"

"It's the only map we've got, and it's better than nothing," Red said. "I mean, would you rather fly blind in a place as big as this?"

Green sighed heavily. "I guess not…"

KUNGGG!

All of them briefly caught air as Blue decided to attempt solving the puzzle on his own. "Hmm, so that pillar and the ones adjacent went down," Blue mused. He brought his hammer back up. "Let's see what happens when I do this!" He slammed down another column. Some went down and one went up. "Ah, so the pillar and the four right next to it go down, and ones next to it that have gone down will go up. I see." He hummed in thought and started pacing around the square patch of raised metal prisms.

Yellow rubbed his stinging ears. "Could you please warn us before you—?"

There were three more deafening clangs as Blue played whack-a-mole with the iron columns. He studied the puzzle with the same level of focus he applied to his books of medical spells.

Yellow groaned, pressed his hands to his ears, and braced himself for the incoming racket. Blue had found a problem he wanted to figure out, and there was no steering him in a different direction until he solved it or got mad enough to try destroying it instead. Red and Green wandered around the room, looking up with interest at the gears on the walls. Yellow got up to study them too while the ground jumped under his feet. He'd mistaken the cogs for dead machinery like the processing equipment sitting around them, but there was a light glowing in the center of each. With the sand they'd been coated in knocked away by Blue's mini-earthquakes, Yellow noticed that they appeared newer and brighter than the other equipment—as bright as iron could look, anyway. They were mounted on the wall by sturdy pegs and seemed to be powered by an orange line that went from the biggest peg to…the cluster of pillars. Yellow wondered whether the oversized clockwork connected to the puzzle was there to open a secret door. There weren't any other visible exits, aside from the vent they'd popped out of.

He glanced over his shoulder. Blue was hammering like mad; with how the pillars kept going down and up, it really looked like he was playing whack-a-mole now. His face was turning red from exertion, but it didn't seem to be slowing him down. He hit a pillar. Three went down and one went up. Blue hit another. Two down, one up. The number of "down" columns was quickly outpacing the "up" ones.

In four more strikes, Blue sank all the pillars into the floor. He rolled out flat on his back, wheezing, as the gears on the walls started turning. "Wooo," he wheezed, flopping one hand in tired celebration. "I did it."

"Good job, Blue!" Yellow said. "I'm glad we have a Smart Harry around for tricky things like this."

As the gears turned, one side of the room split down the middle and pulled out to the sides. A layered ticking noise filled the air as hidden gears assisted the few that they could see. The walls retracted fully into deep slots and settled there with a clunk.

The room beyond was full of pleasant golden orange light. As Yellow walked toward it, he was also hit by a sense of moist heat. How could anything on Death Mountain be moist?

Glass-paneled walls formed a complicated glittering polygon around them as they walked through the large doorway. Terraces full of dark objects took up much of the space, leaving only a circle in the middle and four nubby pathways leading to the sides of the room. A pipe hung from the ceiling, spouting a constant stream of mist. The air in here was as dense as a cloud. It would have surely choked Malfoy, with his humidity-sensitive gills. Why on earth…?

Yellow got a better look at what lay on the terraces and did a double-take before freezing in terror.

Bomb Flowers. There was glass paneling because this was a greenhouse. Those were bombs flourishing in the mist coming from the ceiling pipe.

Yellow entangled his shaking hands in his hair and pulled hard enough to feel some of it tear free. They were in a room full of enough explosives to blow this facility to kingdom come!

"Hey, look!" Red rushed forward, sending an additional thrill of terror through Yellow. If they bumped a single one of these plants off of its base, they would die! How could Red feel comfortable making any sudden movements in here?!

Red leaned down and picked up a dull blue sack from the ground. "Is it another Bag of Holding?" he wondered, reaching into it. He pulled out a Bomb Flower. The wick burned merrily.

Yellow let out one of the many screams that had building inside him over the course of this horrible day. "PUT IT BACK!" he screeched once he could summon up words.

Red shoved the bomb back in the blue sack and yanked on the drawstring. "The bag will keep it from exploding, right?" he asked, looking desperately at Green. "Right?"

Green's eyes showed the whites all around. "Right!" he squeaked. "Now let's get the hell out of here!"

Just as they turned back toward the exit, the tucked doors shot back together with a heavy thud. It rang like a death knell in Yellow's ears. He reached out toward their blocked escape. "No," he said brokenly.

"Yellow, move!" one of his brothers shouted.

He sprang into a forward roll, the most distance-eating evasion he could think of. A whoosh of wind ruffled his clothes from behind. Yellow popped to his feet, turned around, and went into a panicked backpedal.

A red Moblin—one of those huge, more beastly versions native to Hyrule—loomed over him with a Goron hammer-sword clutched in both meaty hands. The blunt stone weapon looked like a small building in the three-meter-tall giant's grip.

"Oh Merlin," Yellow whimpered, looking from the huge destructive creature to the bombs on either side of it. As the Moblin took another swing at him, he dove between its short legs and sprinted to rejoin his siblings. He seized Green by the shoulders. "Orders, please!"

Green took the Bomb Bag from Red and shoved it at him. "If any of the plants get knocked loose, either stick them in this bag or use a Levitation Charm to get them away from the other Bomb Flowers before they explode."

Yellow took the bag of explosives, wishing he could banish it and this whole room to another dimension. "G-Got it," he choked out.

"Blue, you can switch off on bomb-sweeping duty and fighting if you want. Just don't use any spells that cause sparks." Green drew his sword. The Moblin lumbered across the room, its steel-tipped brick of a weapon propped up on one beefy shoulder. "Red, you're with me. Since this is a red Moblin, it shouldn't be too hard to take down. Just don't get hit. We don't have that kind of armor yet."

Red conjured his Dragon Hammer and gave a determined nod. "Don't get hit. Got it."

Green and Red sprang into action. They sprinted forward on either side of the Moblin, using a tactic that had been useful back at the castle. Moblins' odd posture and thick arms kept them from reaching behind them very well, so getting one Harry to run around back and hack away while the other(s) distracted the monster from the front had been an efficient way to put them down without getting too badly hurt.

Red cast a Disarming Charm as the Moblin wound up for a swing. The spell caused the Moblin to fumble with its weapon, but wasn't strong enough to make the beast drop it. Yellow's eyes flicked to the Bomb Flowers in the shadow of the monster's bat. It was kind of a good thing they couldn't send that stone blade flying to a random part of this particular room.

While the monster was occupied with getting a grip on its weapon, Green ran behind it and leapt up on its back. After getting a grip on the creature's thick waist using his Vine Whip, Green started stabbing. The Moblin dropped its sword with a roar and scrambled to yank the boy off. Green was too small, though, and tucked too well at the small of its back. Red, meanwhile, was ducking the wild swings of the Moblin's hands to jab his sword at its belly, forcing the monster to defend itself from the front as well as try to stop the attack from behind.

With a piggish squeal, the Moblin leapt up and threw its head back to shift its weight. The was a moment in which it seemed to hang there, when time stretched and the clicking of Yellow's mental gears outweighed anything else.

A combination of dread and mortal terror made Yellow come close to throwing up and wasting precious decision time. He knew what the Moblin was doing. All that bulky muscle easily put this monster at the weight of a car, and Green was right behind its torso—the biggest and thickest part of its body.

Yellow's mind went blank of every thought but "SAVE GREEN". He flung his wand hand out and pulled with his soul.

Green shot out from under the Moblin just before its weight would have crushed him. He skidded across the floor in Yellow's direction with a look of bewilderment. "What just—?"

There was no time to answer, because the Moblin's ground-shaking drop had jolted three Bomb Flowers from their seats. Yellow ran like the wind. He vaulted over Green, dodged Red, trampled over the Moblin now sitting up, and flung himself at the lit explosives. He shoved the two burning Bomb Flowers on that set of terraces into his bag, then turned to address the one on the other side. The blood drained from his face when he saw the Moblin's gold-lined ruby eyes glaring down at him.

"Rrrorgh!" The monster hit Yellow with a quick, vicious kick that knocked the air from his lungs and slammed him into the side of the terraces. Visual static exploded in Yellow's eyes as the back of his head cracked against the stone wall. He fell to his knees, wheezing for air and clawing at his throat. He reached blindly for leverage to pull himself up. This was not a good place for him to reflate his lungs!

"Wingardium Leviosa!" An explosion went off by the ceiling. Thank goodness there had been two Harrys on bomb-sweeping duty.

Red swooped in to drag Yellow out of the Moblin's attack range while Green threw his sword ahead of him to get the monster's attention. The Four Sword stuck in the Moblin's chest and Green came charging in after it with his Dragon Hammer. He swung the hammer up and brought it down on the hilt of his sword. The Moblin staggered back with a pained gurgle.

As his brother hauled him across the floor, Yellow managed to drag air back into his empty lungs. He regretted taking such a deep breath when the pain of a few freshly broken ribs lanced through his chest. Red yelped at the feedback across their sword-link and dropped him.

Yellow clamped down hard on the mindless urge to suck in as much air as he could. The amount of agony involved would definitely cause Red and Blue to pass out. He took several short, controlled breaths to get his oxygen levels up. "Sorry," he panted with a sheepish smile. "Green wasn't kidding…about not getting hit, huh?"

Red dug through his bag. "Yeah, I think the only kind of defense that would stand up to a Moblin is the enchanted sort. That kick you took would have dented even plate armor." He handed Yellow a Red Potion. "You've earned it," he said with a wry smile.

Yellow let out a wheezy laugh that caused tears of pain to form in the corners of his eyes. He sounded like a squeaky toy. "Thanks." He downed the bottle and watched with relief as Green hammered the Moblin to death. A nearby Bomb Flower was shaken off its mount, but Blue got it up by the ceiling before it could set off the room.

"The Bomb Bag is ours!" Red announced triumphantly. "So all we have to do is multiply it with the Spell Scroll and…" He trailed off at the pinched looks on Yellow's and Green's faces. "Oh, come on! Please? I promise to only use them on special occasions and check where everyone else is standing first. Pleeease?" He clasped his hands in front of him and gave Green puppy eyes.

Blue interlocked his hands under his chin and pushed out his lower lip, too. "I promise not to sneak behind your back and buy my own Bomb Bag in Castle Town if you let me have this one," he wheedled. "Pretty please?"

Green pinched the bridge of his nose. "Guh, I forgot about Bomb Shops." He looked skywards and closed his eyes. "…Fine, you can put it on our weapons list. A Bomb Bag holds ten, so keep a count of how many are already in your bag before adding more."

Blue and Red looked expectantly at Yellow.

"Please don't use any bombs while we're down here. This place already collapsed once," Yellow pleaded as he took the blank spell scroll out of his bag.

"Cross my heart and hope to die!" Blue and Red said in cheerful unison.

Yellow braced himself and touched the scroll to their new item. He really hoped they wouldn't come to regret this.


The Harrys dropped one by one through a door in the ceiling of the giant sand-and-conveyors room. Red jumped last and plummeted most of the way before floating down the last few meters with a Falling Spell.

"So we wound up on the ground floor by falling down that elevator, then?" he remarked, looking up. Upon beating the Moblin in the Bomb Flower greenhouse, they'd hunted around for a door and found one hidden under a weak section of stone in the floor. That was kinda neat! If Vaati got the hang of twisting space like that, he'd be able to come up with even cooler mazes!

"Augh!" Green tossed up his hands and stalked up the nearest ramp. "Vaati and his spatial nonsense. I hate not having a proper map for this place."

Red raised an eyebrow as he and the others followed Green. "We never used to be all that bothered by getting lost," he said. Exploring Diagon Alley had been great fun, and they hadn't needed a map for that.

Green flapped a hand at him. "Yeah, I know, I'm acting weird. The sword's been getting even deeper into my head lately. I think it's just doing its best to help by making me more like the people who used it before."

Yellow skipped ahead of Blue and put a hand on Green's shoulder. "Are you okay? Is there any way to stop it?"

Green shook his head. "I'm magically bonded to the sword for now, so I don't think there's any way to avoid this." His shoulders rose and fell in a defeated shrug. "At least it's not evil. I don't think it's changing me for the worse. It's just weird, how subtle it is. Sometimes I can't tell whether something is a change or something I've always done." He put a hand to his head. "It makes me wonder, though. What if I'm not Harry? What if I'm Green? A piece of myself, brought out and made louder by the sword? Maybe I'm acting different because I'm not 'me' at all!"

The other Harrys exchanged alarmed looks. They all knew with absolute certainty that they were extensions of the original bearer of the sword. It wasn't a fact that scared them; they had been brought out, and they would go back in when their job was done. They were all Harry Potter, and to Harry Potter they would return.

Red put an arm over Green's shoulders. "If you're having thoughts like that, you're definitely the original," he said firmly, staring into his sibling's scared emerald eyes. "Yellow, Blue and I don't think that way. We've got this sense of purpose in our heads us that tells us what we are and what we were created for. If you don't have that, you weren't made by the sword. You're still the original Harry, even if you're a little different now."

"You're sure?" Green's fingers curled in his hair.

"Totally sure!" Red clapped him on the back. "And even if you were sword-made like us, that wouldn't make you any less real. We're all Harry Potter here, just in different flavors."

Yellow giggled. "I'm banana!"

Green breathed out. "I guess I can be apple, then."

With that minor identity crisis averted, the boys clambered up the layers of moving and frozen conveyor belts to reach the locked door they'd found earlier. The bolted lock fell off with a single turn of its matching key.

"Alright, let's see what this next room is about." Green swiped his Navi Slate and the doors slid open.

Heat blasted Red's face, making his eyes water. A deafening racket of clangs and metallic squeals attacked his ears. He winced at the sound and leaned in to see what was causing it. Yellow and Blue recoiled from the noise and hid behind him and Green.

The room was a lava-rimmed highway of rumbling black treads that ran from a massive open furnace on one side to a line of vertically-running scoops on the far end. Raised metal braces zig-zagged through the air above the treads, hosting an impressive collection of giant tools that dipped down from their racks with a steady rhythm. The horrible noise drilling into his brain came from the giant pile-drivers, massive buzz saws, and merciless rollers brutally punishing the red-hot metal coming out of the furnace. Iron blocks went in and iron rods, strips, and panels spilled into giant buckets that carried them up and out of sight. The machinery was powerful, beating the solid metal into submission with industrial ease. Red felt fired up just watching it. That was so cool! If he could be a machine, he'd want to be one of those big flat hammers squashing the iron like putty.

He stepped onto the rolling iron highway and stumbled when it jerked underneath him. As it turned out, the lanes didn't move smoothly; they had built-in pauses to let the tools do their work. They would roll forward a few meters, halt for a couple of seconds, then move again. Red bent his knees to keep his balance as he got a feel for the pace. It was around six kilometers per hour between pauses. Not a terrible speed, but definitely enough to trip them up with its jolting stops and starts.

Green and Yellow dropped in after him. Blue hesitated before stepping down. He tripped upon landing as the road jerked forward. Red pulled him up by the back of his robes.

Blue looked around fearfully, his hands pressed over his ears. "WHAT DO WE DO IN HERE?" he hollered over the banging and screeching of tortured iron. His wide sapphire eyes were fixed on a set of buzz saws that reached down to smoothly slice a flattened iron block into square rods. A beautiful spray of sparks flew everywhere.

"WHAT, YOU CAN'T DODGE A FEW TOOLS?" Red yelled back. He picked a lane and ran along it to put himself between two iron blocks. The lanes jerked forward to move each block into position and the tools were timed to descend only when there was a block within reach, which left a couple of safe seconds when they were folding back up. It was like the guillotines in the temple of bones they'd been to, but more predictable.

A giant hammer came down on the block just to his right with a sound like a gunshot going off inside his eardrum. It was so loud that Red momentarily forgot how to see. Hot sparks spattered his face, and he slapped blindly at the stinging spray. Then the hammer came down again, this time on his left, and the process repeated.

"Owowow…" He rubbed furiously at his ringing ears as grayish after-images faded from his sight. 'Note to self: hammers are loud,' he thought. Maybe the saws would be a little less unpleasant to pass under. Or one of the big rolling flatteners? There were still some sparks there, but less sound and fury than the saws.

He rose up and jogged between lanes as he perused the tools up ahead. Yeah, he wanted to try a roller this time.

Oh, hey, what was that? Something caught his eye. A circle of orange shone softly against the ceiling. Since the magic-tainted furnace had the whole room lit up with a violet tint and the light strips in here were all blue-white, the warm orange glow stood out. Red put himself between two iron blocks headed for the steamroller and kept his head tucked behind his fireproof leather gloves as the massive steel cylinder crushed the hammered blocks on either side of him into sheets. He peeked out once the sparks and squealing had stopped and then returned to investigating the orange light.

Whatever was causing it was up on a catwalk mounted right under the ceiling. The path was made of solid, magic-twisted iron panels, so Red couldn't see what lay on top of it. He crossed his arms and pondered, jogging backward between lanes to keep his spot. Could one of his brothers levitate him up there? It seemed like the jolting movement of the road might cause them to make a wrong flick of their staffs. A supercharged Levitation Charm was a touchy thing when it came to picking up lighter objects; it was scarily easy for them to fling one another. A Hover Charm was too weak for this; the spell could float things up a short ways and hold them there, but it wasn't so great for raising things several meters or steering them with any precision. He needed a lift of about five meters. Hmm...

He turned around to face the rack of tools he'd just gone under. There was a square hammer on the far right—the same side of the room the walkway was on. He watched it rise back up to the top of its rack, and a sly smile spread across his face. That rack went up pretty high, didn't it?

Red ran against the moving highway, vaulting over the shimmering red blocks in his way. He could hardly feel the heat through his thick gloves and boots. Blue was going to kill him, but he wanted to see what was up there!

He heard shouts—mostly drowned out by the machinery—as he hopped on top of the piston hammer. If it dropped under him, it meant he'd land on his arse from five meters up. Still safer than passing under it, though! He kept his legs bent as it rose, then jumped just as it reached the top of its mounting. A sharp clang pierced his half-deafened ears as he cleared the one-meter distance to the warped catwalk. He caught the edge of it, swung a leg up, and pulled himself into a crouch. A line of zig-zagging, mismatched iron panels vaguely 30cm wide stretched out on either side of him. Red punched the air. Success!

Below him, the other Harrys were gaping up at Red like he'd gone mad.

"HEY, IF IT WORKS, IT WORKS!" Red yelled down. He stood up, ducking slightly under the close ceiling, and strolled down the catwalk. Despite its panels' chaotic shapes, the walkway felt solid underfoot. He walked easily past the racks of tools busily trying to kill his siblings and crouched down by the orange glowing thing at the end of the line.

Picking it up, Red turned the odd object over. It looked like…Oh! It was a lever like the one he and Blue had flipped to turn the facility back on! It was cleanly detached, like a light switch one might find at a hardware store. On the back was an orange globe of Bluestone with a stala claw around it. Red assumed that little hand would reach out and click into something when he put the switch wherever it was supposed to go.

He called up his Magic Rod, scooted to the edge of the platform, and dropped down. A Falling Spell carefully lowered him to the floor.

Blue pounced on him as soon as he landed. "What did you do that for?!" he shrilled. "Do you know the amount of mechanical power you were messing around with?!"

"I was on the wrong side of the hammer, Blue. It was safer than riding under it," Red said with a roll of his eyes. "Besides, it let me skip the rest of the tools, so I was being safer than the rest of you." He stuck out his tongue.

"Why on earth did you even go up there? Did you see another Rupee? The walkway itself would have blocked your view, wouldn't it?"

"There was an orange reflection on the ceiling," Red said, holding up his prize. "I wonder why there was a power switch up there. Is it like a key?"

Banging footsteps approached from behind and Yellow and Green leapt down from the catwalk. "Good idea, Red! I bet Vaati didn't think we'd be able to get up there," Green said. "Now, where to next…?" Jogging backward between lanes, he conjured his Navi Slate and started flicking through it.

While Green was busy with his map, the other Harrys looked around for an exit. Red was stumped. No doors anywhere, not even funny ones in the ceiling. The walls in here were metal-plated, too; whenever they'd come across hidden exits before, they had always been hidden behind bare stone. Could their hammers break stone defended by iron?

After putting the detached lever in his bag, Red jogged backward and frowned at the rising lines of buckets that the conveyor was trying to dump them into. On either side of him, iron sheets, rods, and panels dumped into specific buckets and rose out of view. More metal bits rained from above. Red ducked down a little to try peering up the shaft. Why was stuff falling down? Where were the buckets going?

"Okay, bad news: unless we want to a lot of backtracking and going around, we'll have to go backward down these buckets to get to the lowest floor," Green reported. "Good news: it'll be the lowest floor, so from there we just have to take one of the doors in the bottom part of the room to get where we need to go. Those are a little farther down on the same floor, so I bet that's the deepest they managed to dig before running into the temple."

"Huh?" There was a way to the lowest levels from here? Red looked down instead of up. "Oh." A violet-white lava lake sprawled across a huge cavern that stretched below the room they were in and disappeared beyond the edges of the opening ahead. The lines of buckets rose up into darkness, disappeared, and then went aaall the way down to a spot just above the lava before going up again. Very impressive and very big and just a touch scary. His stomach swooped at the thought of dropping blindly toward that sea of lava. Red didn't have much in the way of survival instincts, but even he had to draw a line somewhere. Could they ride their brooms, maybe? He didn't want to kill his broom, but he also didn't want to go for a swim in that pool.

"Are you mad, Green?" Blue asked incredulously. "We'll die!"

"How would we ride those buckets backwards?" Yellow fretted. "Hold onto the edges and just…fall?"

Green grimaced. "Yeah, basically. Hold onto the edge of one, let go, and grab onto the next one below you. Like, er, going down a giant ladder in the worst way."

"I'm not so sure about this," Yellow said as he moved up by Red to get a better view of what they were heading into. When he saw the lake of lava below, he clung onto Red's sleeve. "I'm really not sure about this!"

Green wasn't quite able to hide his unease. His eyes were no less wide than Yellow's as he watched the big metal buckets rise up the wide elevator shaft. "A conveyor has two ends, so the bottom of these treads must be attached to something," he said. "If these belts went straight into the lake, the buckets would be full of lava, so we know it doesn't head to nowhere."

Blue's eyes only got wider and wider as he looked from Green to the violet hellfire below. Red couldn't guess the number of scary of scenarios undoubtedly running through his smarty-pants brother's head. "Oh, great, our fearless leader doesn't even know where this thing ends," Blue snarked, his voice tight. His lips pulled back from his teeth as he spoke. "We could fall to our deaths going this way and you don't even know where we're going!"

"We're going forward," Green said sharply. "A way down to the furnaces is right here. Would you rather spend another few hours scouring the foundry for more doors that might lead to nowhere? We've already gotten turned around once, remember? This place stretches out under the mountain for kilometers and there isn't any magic keeping us alive in here. We can't afford to hunt down every probably-cursed elevator that's supposed to lead down to that sector."

"That's what our food and water stores are for! We could stay in here for a week and be fine!" Blue shouted over the sounds of banging and crashing behind them.

"Do we have a week's worth of materials for Red Potions? Because we've already guzzled our way through all the ones we had! At the rate we've been going, we'd need ten a day!" Green said even louder.

"We wouldn't need them if you had even a modicum of proper caution!"

"I do have proper caution! Would you rather just go down to the place we need to go, or try playing Cursed-Or-Not with another killer lift? We might not live the second time!"

"Okay, no." Red took Green by the shoulders and switched places with him. "We're in the middle of a really loud room that's making all of us super tense. Also, we're all running in place. Not exactly the best place for a shouting match." He could tell that Blue's and Green's nerves were pulled as tight as guitar strings. Their eyes were equally wild with fear and he could see the tendons straining in their necks. If Green or Yellow didn't declare a naptime, Red was going to. They'd been adventuring all day and he was sure it was after sunset now. Just because the Red Potions restored their physical energy, that didn't mean it kept them from getting mentally worn down. He was sure that even an experienced adult adventurer would be dead tired at this point.

"I don't think the bucket path is quite as bad as it looks, either," Yellow said. "It's going up in front, but it's going down in back because that's how conveyors work. The buckets are bolted on, so they've just flipped upside-down on the other side instead of falling off. We could go up to where the top of the conveyor is, hop off and calm down for a bit, and then ride the upside-down buckets to where the furnaces are."

Red took a closer look at the vertical conveyors and realized that yes, there were upside-down buckets going down on the other side. Not only did that explain the iron cuttings falling down from above, but it created a series of platforms easily big enough for a Harry to ride.

An embarrassed flush hit Blue's sweat-streaked face. "Oh. Well, then." He glanced away from Green. "I'm sorry for yelling."

Green sighed and pushed his hair back from his face. He had heavy shadows under his eyes that hadn't been there that morning. "Me, too. Let's just go, shall we?"

One by one, they hopped onto the buckets, throwing out some iron pieces to make space, and rode up into the darkness.


Item get: Bombs. Derived from flowers cultivated by Gorons for thousands of years, bombs are a good way to loosen stubborn rock when hammering it just isn't enough. When used against enemies, they cause significant damage and have a chance of setting things on fire. They have a short seven-second timer and can blow up in the user's hand just as easily in a Moblin's face, so precautions should be taken.

Notes:

-Among the elements that make this dungeon less difficult than those that are to come is the fact that knocking enemies into hazards to kill them more easily is an option. The enemy-eating sand worms in the first part of this chapter, for instance, are larval Molgera.

-Remember, the Moblins in this half of the story are still bulky, piggish Wind Waker Moblins, just ones scaled up to the size of BOTW Moblins and given a similar moveset. (I haven't posted art of them only because I find them incredibly difficult to draw). The Goron hammer/sword the one in this chapter was wielding was a Cobble Crusher.

-The magic Yellow used to pull on Green was the busted dregs of one of the Four Sword's abilities. It's not really working right now, but it'll come back into functionality as the boys feed the sword Power Crystals.

-Power hammers are what those giant industrial drop-hammer machines are called. I'm only mentioning this because it took me googling like ten different versions of "piston hammer" before I could find the actual name of the damned things. They're sexy, powerful machines that I love watching in action, but weirdly hard to look up.