Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or any of the characters attached.
Reviewers:
Potterfanforever: why would anyone notice them vanishing; a thousand students is a lot to keep track of, and Hogwarts is a big school, someone could easily vanish for a couple of hours. The sleeping arrangements needs a bit of work on it, and in the re-write of the story, it'll get addressed.
The arm, well, it only really has one more role to play, and then all it does is give Harry full use of both limbs.
Chapter 27: The Beginning Of An End.
"Blaise, Fireflash everyone back, Ron, gather the teams and portkey them to my suit when I give the signal. Rose, when you get there send the team that is on alert a.s.a.p." Harry quickly ordered, sending the room from panic to confusion. Harry had had one team on alert every day in case of an attack, operating on a rota, he wasn't sure who it was today.
Harry quickly drew his wand and mumbled the switching charm, while tapping himself on the head, causing his suit of armour to be instantly switched with his clothes. Where Harry was stood, now stood an imposing black armoured man that seamed to emit an aura of power and strength. His helmet was almost entirely made up of an emotionless black glass visor. The order looked on in a mixture of awe and fear, even the Weasley twins had never seen the suits being worn, and they'd made them.
In a fraction of a second, the rest of the students vanished in a burst of flames, followed a split second later by the armoured man, that, though they tried, they just couldn't connect with Harry.
They never noticed that the left breast had the likeness of the DA amulet on it, even if they did, they wouldn't know what it meant.
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Harry arrived behind the death eaters, springing into action as he felt another team appear around him.
'Hiya Harry.' Daphne called to him through the amulet, it was her on alert then. He quickly sent his greetings, and then shot forwards, curses springing from his palms as he dove at the death eaters, spinning to the side to avoid an AK, he flicked his wrist, causing a bludgeoning hex to blast out of his palm and smash into the offending death eaters chest, crushing his ribcage.
After a less than a minute of fighting, he heard Ron tell him that the rest of the DA was ready, in return, he told him to only send in half of them, but keep the rest on standby.
As Harry dove to the side, he launched a bone breaker at a death eater that had just succeeded in knocking Su Li off her feet with a fireball, when she got back to her feet (without a scratch to the armour), the death eater was already dead, his skull crushed with fragments stuck through the skin.
'At least the armour works.' She sent to him, causing him to blink, how come her mental English was better than her spoken English?
Spinning on his heel, he saw that the half of the DA he had requested sent had just arrived, within moments, the death eaters had been pushed into a corner and were about to portkey out, when the Aurors in the fight, turned and ran.
When Harry turned to see why, he felt his blood run cold.
Voldemort had arrived.
The death eaters tried to fight their way back to their master, but were crushed by the DA within moments.
"Voldemort!" Harry shouted, using the armour to distort his voice into a high pitched mechanical drone, and distracting the monster from his hobby of killing Aurors.
"Who are you? You have destroyed my recruits, and do not fear me! Who dares be so insolent?"
Harry smirked as more Aurors turned up, these ones were the veterans, and unlikely to run from the monster, who was now surrounded by a hundred of his best death eaters. Not the weaklings that he'd just flattened.
'Ron, send in the rest of the DA, Dean, activate a PAAPW when they're all here.' Harry sent through the amulet while smirking an unseen smirk. The DA was forming up instinctively, three ranks deep, the front kneeling, and the back ready to activate a specially created, interlocking shield, called testudo, or tortoise, that would protect the front two ranks against all but the unforgivables by merging with the ones around it.
If it came down to a fight, the DA would most likely win, without the help of the Aurors, but with them, the win would be a certainty.
"Who I am is of no matter. What does matter…" Harry paused as the rest of the DA arrived and he felt the Portable Anti-Apparition and Portkey Ward rise. "…Is that we out number you, one hundred of the best Aurors, and a hundred of us, verses a hundred of you, only feared because you torture little children."
"And you are feared?" Voldemort mocked.
"No, those who should fear me are dead, they just don't know it yet."
Voldemort just growled, before turning away, he could feel that the armoured man was very powerful, add him to the fact that Dumbledore had just arrived through The Leaky Cauldron, and he wasn't sure he could win this, so he ordered the death eaters to retreat through knockturn alley, which was behind them, and use the floo to escape if necessary.
The skirmish was over before it had really started, but it wasn't going to be much of a battle to start with.
Their requirement fulfilled, Dean dropped the ward and the DA portkeyed out.
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"How many death eaters were taken down headmaster." Harry asked headmaster Dumbledore, it was the day after the skirmish at Diagon alley, and the wizarding world didn't know what to make of the black armoured people that fought Voldemorts men with utter ruthlessness, some people hailed them as heroes, others as demons, and believed that their symbol, on the left breast of the armour, was their version of the dark mark. Everyone demanded to know his or her identity.
"About a hundred, Harry. Though I find myself curious about who our armoured helpers were." He said with a raised eyebrow, he knew who they were, but wanted Harry to confirm it.
"They are the people who are going to win the war for us." He answered evasively.
"Are they the DA?" Dumbledore asked bluntly, he'd realised that he'd only get a straight answer if he was blunt.
"Yes. They are the defensive army, they are just teenagers, but they are probably the best equipped and trained fighters in the world, and they won't let themselves be beaten."
"Can I ask what your plans are." Dumbledore stated, it wasn't a request but a demand.
"Sorry, but we're are operating sub rosa." Harry stated.
"Why are you teaching and leading them into a fight that they aren't ready for?"
"They are ready, just like every other witch an wizard, the difference is that we WANT peace."
"How is teaching them to fight going to bring them peace."
Harry sighed, he'd hoped that the professor would get the subtle reference, so Harry guessed that the phrase never made it into the wizarding world, or Dumbledore really was going senile.
"I know you understand Latin professor, I don't know if it's known in the wizarding world or not…I suppose it isn't, cause then you'd have less problems. There's a Latin phrase that is quite well known in the muggle world: si vis pacem, para bellum. A man who wants peace, prepares for war."
"We want peace."
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"Harry, how do you do it?" the voice was familiar, but when Harry was about to speak, he spotted the scar across the girls face. He blinked, he'd never noticed before, but those two girls even had the same voice.
"Do what Parvati?" he asked, he was sat in the RoR relaxing, while his girls were in a lesson.
"Live with knowing you've killed. I'm struggling to get through one day at a time with out seeing the face of someone I killed. Most of the DA is struggling." He knew this was coming, but he wasn't sure that he was ready to face it. Though he was curious about something.
"Why have you come to me about this now? Why not after the Hogsmeade ambush?"
"The Hogsmeade ambush was so fast and chaotic that we all got by, by telling ourselves that our spells didn't kill them, it was someone else that did it. But at Diagon alley, it was fast, sure, but it was a massacre, nearly everyone killed, and everyone that did saw them die, saw the horror in their eyes as the life left them." Harry put his arms around the now sobbing girl and pulled her down to sit next to him while she babbled about being a murdering monster and that she didn't deserve to live.
"Was it a man?" he asked, not hearing the door open behind him, or the footsteps of his girls entering the room.
"Yes." The hysterical girl sobbed out through deep heaving breaths. Good, he thought, that makes this easier to deal with.
"Would you kill a man that was about to rape you?"
"Yes."
"Would you kill a man that was about to rape Padma?"
"Yes."
"What about if he was going to rape another woman?"
"Yes."
"Then that's how you justify it. How many women had that man raped? How many little girls would he have raped if you hadn't killed him? You aren't a murderer, you're a protector." Harry smiled as he felt a drop in her self-loathing. He sat with her for a few more minutes before he placed a hand on her forehead and put her to sleep with a wandless sleeping spell.
"I could have used some help you know." He said as he pulled the cover over her.
"Yeah well, you were doing a good job by yourself. You'd better not be inviting any more girls into our bed; Daphne's more insecure than I am."
"What? I am not!" Harry just rolled his eyes, the girls bickered almost as much as Ron and 'Mione, and had a constant need to out do the other, in everything, which lead to an enjoyable sex life, but soon got tiresome. He was drawn out of his thoughts by the drop in sound coming from the girls, when he looked, they had their arms crossed and their backs to each other.
Harry smirked, walked up to the girls and put his arms around each of them, forcing them to look at each other. Placing his hands on the back of their heads, he pushed them closer, until they were forced to kiss each other.
Harry felt his jaw drop, normally the girls sprang away from each other once he removed his hands, but this time, they kept on kissing, and kissing, and kissing. Then he smirked, tonight was going to be more fun than usual.
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"Okay, Harry, all of the sensors are in place and activated. We should start getting information back any minute now."
"Brilliant, where have they been placed? And how? What sort of coverage have we got?"
"We used that prototype spy probe to place them in the ministry and Diagon alley. We placed them by hand in and around Hogwarts and Hogsmeade. Each sensor detects everything in a half-mile radius; we've placed them in interlocking circles radiating from Hogwarts and Hogsmeade, giving us a radius of about three miles in all directions. The ministry sensors are placed, one on every floor, each sensor will cover the whole ministry complex. Diagon alley has one at each end, and one down knockturn alley."
"Each sensor shows absolutely everything inside its coverage radius, it's transmitted to this network core, and routed to these projectors which will activate in about ten seconds."
As Padma spoke, she indicated a large red spherical crystal the size of a fist, and pulsing at a regular pace, just like a heart. Harry recognised it as a telepathy network core, identical to the one that kept the DA in contact with each other, except half the size. The crystal was mounted on a gold circular stand, etched with runes and having several sockets for a computer to attach to, the computer was then attached to an amulet and several holographic projectors that would create a three dimensional image of one of the areas.
Shortly after she finished speaking, the projectors lit up, before an image began to form above them, the computer recognised neutral people as white figures, confirmed death eaters were red, Aurors blue and DA members were green. Dark creatures were purple while animagi were orange with a ring around showing which faction they are with.
Harry had been surprised when he discovered that when an animagi was in animal form, the sensors could easily identify their allegiances without knowing their identities.
He looked over the images, first Diagon alley, which was a lot busier than one would think, the sensors could pick up the dark mark, but the computer couldn't yet identify it, so he didn't know if any of the white people moving around the alley were unknown death eaters, however, there were a few Aurors moving around. Knockturn alley was surprisingly empty, with only about ten white figures moving around, no red, and no green.
When Harry looked over the image of the ministry, he saw a mixture of green and white people moving about, with several red ones hidden down on the tenth floor in holding rooms.
There was one projection for both Hogwarts and Hogsmeade, and a separate one for each, showing far more detail than the combined one. Concentrating on the combined one, he noticed two red figures near the edge of the image, around three miles from Hogsmeade (in the middle of a small wooded area.), that were locked in the middle of doing something that made Harry and Padma, who was the only one in the room with him, blush bright red.
Other than those two red figures, the rest of the people were white or green, showing that they were under no current danger, but if more than five DE appeared in one area, then the alarms would go off, and send a signal through the amulet to alert someone to help.
Harry was about to flame in and interrupt the two death eaters when they sprang apart and disapparated. The computer logged their method of transportation, but not their destination, showing that it was under the Fidelus charm.
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Bella sat down heavily, she was now four months pregnant, and was beginning to wonder if she'd made a mistake about wanting an heir, the cravings alone were driving her mad, she had always been proud of her figure, and would like to regain it after her daughter was born, but with some of the foods she was craving, she didn't think that it would be possible at all.
Several other death eaters; Amycus and Alecto Carrows, Antonin Dolohov, Gibbon, her sister Narcissa, and a few others surrounded her, she'd asked them to come for a careful discussion that had the possibility of coming back to bite her in the ass, but if she played it carefully, she knew she could get anyone in the room to agree.
Which was the reason her husband wasn't there, he was ready to kill her as it was; she had gotten pregnant off someone that wasn't him or the dark lord, so he was naturally opposed to anything she said, and what she had to say was dangerously close to what death eaters considered treason.
"All right Bella, what do you want?" Her sister asked in an unusually annoyed voice.
"Can you all pretend that your not loyal to the dark lord for just a moment, look at every decision that the dark lord has made and tell me what you think of them."
"they were all good decisions." Frank Zabini said.
"were they? Don't they all seem to be focused a little too much on a certain Harry Potter? The dark lord will succeed eventually, but how long will it take? How long will we have to wait before he attacks the ministry? We have the forces, why not attack? Because he's losing his focus, and we have to do something about it."
"What do we do?" frank Zabini asked while nodding in agreement.
"We build a back-up fortress, if the dark lord kills Potter then takes the ministry, which is what I hope will happen, then we give it to him as his own ice palace, a surprise present to show our approval of a great victory. If he gets beaten, which has happened before, then we have somewhere to run to, so than we can regroup and strike back."
Bella smirked at the murmurs of approval, she would have to be careful around these people for a while as there was only one sentence she said that was keeping her alive, if they told the dark lord, then she'd be killed without a second thought and she knew it.
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Two weeks later, the plans were in place for the defence of Hogsmeade, the people on both sides were ready, and getting sick of the waiting, when the dark lord finally made the decision to begin the attack.
As the portkeys activated, many of the hundred death eaters taking part in the initial assault found themselves wondering at how many of the pre-Hogwarts girls would still be alive for them to play with once they had taken the village.
None of them thought of the possibility of a defence even existing.
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Sub Rosa is Latin for 'under the rose', which means secretly (the roman senate used to hang a rose branch over a meeting to show that what happened was to be kept secret).
The mechanical drone that Harry addresses Voldemort in sounds like a synthesiser.