Part of my reason for demonstrating the guns to the aurors had been self-serving. I'd wanted to get my hands on them and see if I could duplicate them.

I didn't know enough about the inner workings of rifles to adequately transfigure them. I'd spent much of my career carrying pistols, and even with that I hadn't been an expect by any means on their internal workings.

However, I was able to transfigure objects into things that looked like rifles, especially when I had a template to look at.

The hardest part had been making the switch. I'd told Moody that I'd needed time to practice because I hadn't used guns since I was in America.

He seemed reluctant to believe that I had any experience at all, until I showed him at short ranges.

I'd spent two hours practicing, and then thirty minutes more firing the guns with my insects while I worked on the duplication. Moody had been concerned that I was going to provoke a Death Eater attack, and so he'd been more concerned about the perimeter than my possibly stealing a gun.

He'd been quite vigilant that I not take any with me, to the point that he'd left the disposal of the guns to the junior aurors while he escorted me to Hogwarts himself.

I'd simply used one of my time turners to ambush the junior aurors and make the switch after we'd both left. Five guns went into the chest they were using, and if they opened it, five guns would appear to be there if they bothered to open it again.

I took the originals and I hid them in the Chamber.

"Hold the door," I told Hagrid. "The Death Eaters are coming, and they want Harry dead."

His eyes widened and his posture stiffened. His loyalty to Harry was unquestionable, and while he was tired, I had no doubt that he'd protect Harry with his life.

"Yeh can count on me. Where are you going?"

"I'm going to thin the herd a little," I said.

In the distance we could hear a familiar sound of explosions. Right, It looked like it was already starting.

"Do you have the time, Harry?" I asked.

He looked at his watch.

"It's six forty five," he said.

I nodded. "That'll be useful."

I needed to know when to start the attack after all, since I wasn't going to be able to depend on my insects for fear of alerting my past...current self.

"You can't do it on your own," Tonks said.

"I'm not on my own," I said. "I've got me."

I stepped through the teacher's door and the moment I closed it, I switched into my animgaus form.

I'd practiced enough by now that I could transform with all of my belongings, and it was a matter of only an instant for me to enter the ventilation system.

I could have had my insects bringing up the time turners, but the sooner I was gone, the better.

I decided to have a few brought up just in case.

My wasp form was small enough to fly through the holes in the grate, and I found myself heading down the ventilation corridor.

The parts of the corridor within sight of the grate were meticulously clean, kept that way by scrupulous House Elves and their magic. As soon as I turned the corner, everything changed.

I dodged a monstrous form lunging out of the darkness at me. With the only light coming from the opening behind me and to the left, the figure seemed like a bear.

A dodged the rat, and I sent black widows to take care of it, as it was trying to follow me.

I dove into a mass of thousands of black widows and I was carried by them back toward the drop off that led to the chamber.

I'd mapped the ventilation ducts when I was trying to master my animagus form. Knowing the ducts like the back of my hand had seemed like a smart idea at the time, even if it was the Ministry I was trying to escape instead of the Death Eaters.

It seemed like forever before I reached the Chamber, even though it was likely less than a minute. In this form, the basilisk smelled terrifying.

I transformed back, and I heard the sound of scales sliding over stone.

"Little speaker," it said. "Why have you come? It is not the usual time."

"I have to kill vermin," I said. "And Harry is in danger."

"The Speaker?" It asked. "How?"

"Men," I said. "Men who believe they are better than the Heir."

"One who thinks he is the heir?" the snake asked. It's voice was quiet, and I froze.

"Maybe," I said. "Who would you support? The Heir that was, or the Heir that is?"

"I won't fight the Heir that was," the snake said. "But other men?"

"I'll speak to you as I did once before, with the insects," I said. "Be ready."

I reached down and I grabbed the time turners, stuffing several into my fanny pack.

As I did, I felt thousands of legs crawling on me as bugs entered my fanny pack. I put as many as I could carry.

I'd practiced the shrinking charm in the dark for just this kind of opportunity. Shrinking the guns, I stuffed them into my fanny pack.

I contracted my insect control as far as I could around myself.

I then gave one time turner one twist; one hour would be more than enough time to do what had to be done, and if it wasn't, I'd give it four more chances.

If necessary, I'd keep going back until I got it right.

I found myself outside my room, and I barely caught myself as I teetered on the stairs. I held my breath as I heard myself turn in the bed.

I'd contracted my insect senses down as much as possible, but I didn't need to wake myself up by stumbling on the stairs.

I disillusioned myself, and then I turned into a wasp.

The ventilation system was more dangerous now; without the ability to see the rats coming, I was at a disadvantage. My senses had contracted to the point where I could only see a few feet ahead, and I had to depend on my own senses.

I'd purged the ducts of rats multiple times; partially it had been to feed my spiders, and partially because of the inconvenience of being attacked while you were just practicing flying in dark spaces.

They'd always come back. I'd heard that a single mother rat could birth nine hundred rats in a year in the trenches of World War I. Where these rats were getting their nourishment I still wasn't sure.

I found myself on the fifth floor, and I found an auror sleeping on the job. Likely he was one of the first to have breakfast, and being a larger fellow, he looked like the sort who liked to wash his food down.

Setting up the machine gun was easy. Apparently it was stolen from the British Army. This version might have been called an L-7A1 but I wasn't sure. I wasn't terribly familiar with it, except for my short practice session, but I'd learned enough to put the muzzle through the wand slit.

It had a capability of shooting up to 1000 rounds a minute. I only had a belt of two hundred and fifty bullets, and I wasn't going to be able to reload. I set it to a rate of seven hundred and fifty a minute.

I'd managed to steal the tripod. I'd had to modify it so that it was easier to move the gun back and forth. Putting the barrel in the wand slit would keep it from going too far in one direction but would leave me with a good field of fire.

I already had spiders making braided webbing to attach to the trigger. They had to work on the surface of my body in order to avoid my past self noticing present me, and it tickled.

Once I was sure that the field of fire was good, I moved to the next auror.

This one was sleepy but had managed to stay awake barely. His reaction time was slow, though, and so I easily stunned him from behind.

A quick confundus and I was setting up my second gun. I only had once of each; Moody had been leery of giving me multiple versions of the same gun for some reason, and so this one was the Glock.

I expected this one to fail; they'd have seen the damage of the first weapon, and so they'd be expecting it the next time they saw a shield.

The Barrett was the third gun, and for this one I found a hallway that didn't have aurors in it, and I stole a second shield from another corridor without an auror.

The auror that was supposed to be there was asleep on the toilet; another early victim of the poisoning. I then levitated the shield to the ceiling and attached it with a sticking charm.

Setting this one up took longer than I would have liked; it involved me with a broomstick hovering and trying to levitate the Browing into place. Considering that it weighed more than a heavy bowling ball, it wasn't exactly easy.

I had disillusioned myself, the shield and the gun, and several people walked below me without noticing that I was there.

All of them seemed like they were in a semi-daze. One advantage to the Draught taking slow effect was that they'd be less likely to notice that everyone else was unnaturally sleepy.

With time running out, I barely had time to transfigure pieces of dinner into caltrops, and to transfigure a steel wire to run at the base of one of the Moving staircases.

There were ventilation shafts in all the places I'd trapped.

I had the advantage, because I knew that they were going to head for the Great Hall, the place where they assumed that the sleeping aurors could be found.

That meant that the routes they could take were very limited. If they were smart they'd use brooms, but that could be dangerous too.

Hiding in one of the ventilation shafts, I surrounded myself with bugs. All of them were touching me and were touching each other so that I wasn't controlling any of them remotely.

My inability to use my full powers until my other self was gone limited me drastically, as did the possibility of someone discovering my guns and raising the alarm.

One field of thought was that the Time Turners could not change the past; if that was true, then I could do almost anything because the alarm wasn't raised in the other timeline.

On the other hand, I'd heard rumors about time travelers erasing themselves and other people.

The Ministry had forbidden research into time travel by anyone outside the government, and so I hadn't been able to find out much about it. That meant that I needed to err on the side of caution.

I flew out and the other bugs flew with me. I was surrounded by a mass of bugs the size of my new body's arm, and we managed to reach the wire I'd strung from the trigger.

A moment later we'd gotten the wire back into the vent. From an insect's perspective, the trigger was tighter than what I'd remembered from my human self.

Then we waited. The only senses I had were those of the insects attached to me and to each other, and most of those were obscured by the sounds of their own stirring bodies.

It felt claustrophobic and I felt almost as though I was blind and deaf. I'd gotten so used to having my insect senses on at all time that being limited to even the superior senses of my wasp form was like having an arm cut off.

The waiting seemed interminable.

Our point man was a dragonfly that I was mentally calling Peepers. He had the best sight of any of us, so he was the one peering out of the vent.

I had a sudden urge to make a little top hat for Peepers. Maybe later, when everyone was safe.

The door at the end of the hall opened and a man peered out.

The shield was visible, but the gun was disillusioned. The point man cast a human revealing spell; I recognized the wand motions.

He stood up and gestured to the others, and they began filling the hallway.

I immediately began to pull on the wire, with all of the bugs attached to each other grabbing anything they can and pulling. Several of them died in the crush.

I felt a sudden horror as I realized that we weren't pulling hard enough to activate the trigger.

I redoubled my will, and even more insects died.

The point man had almost reached the shield when the trigger finally gave way.

The sound almost made me want to curl up into a ball. At this size it sounded like the hand of God.

Blood splashed across Peepers body, dousing him and all of the bugs that were near the entrance.

There were only enough bullets for twenty seconds, but those twenty seconds were devastating.

Bullets passed through multiple men, men who didn't even have time to raise their wands before they died.

A few of the men in the back tried to raise their shields, only to have others who were panicking run into them, disrupting their concentration and leading to their being killed.

In seconds the hallway was an abattoir, blood covering every surface as the men in the front were cut up into a chunky salsa.

The gun stopped and I forced myself to move.

The advantage to what was happening was that it was likely that the people on the other side of the portal didn't know what was happening.

I could hear shouting from the Prefect's bathroom now; the officers who had just shown up were demanding that their men press forward.

Moving through the ventilation shaft, I readied my pistol attack. I didn't expect it to kill anyone, but it would set up the expectations and make the men overconfident.

It worked just as I'd thought.

Bullets bounced off shields and the men rushed forward but when the magical marbles I'd dropped startled the men into tripping and falling, I managed to kill more.

As I moved through the ventilation ducts, I could hear the men murmuring uneasily to themselves.

The Browning was going to the the hardest of all to pull, but if my sense of time was right...

I opened my metaphoric senses and did not sense my previous self.

The enemy soldiers were moving more slowly now, looking for attackers.

Setting them up now that I could use my full insect powered was easy.

I had tends of thousand of bugs in the ducts now, and I had spotters on the men.

They saw the shield, and they moved forward, confident in their shields.

I shot them in the back as quickly as I could.

They immediately whirled, hearing the sounds of the shots, but six more men were dead and on the floor, and I discovered that a Browning could penetrate some of their shields, but not all of them.

By the time I was done, ten more men were dead or dying on the floor.

I could hear the muttering of the men echoing through the hall in a half dozen languages.

They reached the stairs, and I was as startled as they were to see Taylor Hebert standing on the other end of the stairs.

They immediately rushed forward with their wands, only to see her face open up into something with a thousand teeth and a gaping maw.

I heard one man scream as he staggered back over the side of the stairs.

Other Taylor Heberts were appearing; one, two, now half a dozen.

Some of them had deformities, faces that were halfway transformed into monstrous features. I saw at least one partial werewolf, and another me looked like a gigantic house elf.

It wasn't a good look for me.

The mercenaries in the front were backing away, green light flashing.

"You can't kill me," one of the Taylors said. "You think a Dark Lord would send you to kill one little girl? He's sent you to die!"

Why were the Boggarts here, all of them?

It was the fear. The fear of over a hundred men, so thick that even my insects could smell it. It had to attract them like bees to nectar.

One of the Taylors was crawling up from underneath the stairs, with her legs transforming into those of a giant spider. Another man stumbled back and fell.

Green light flashed everywhere as men panicked; they knew that some of these were boggarts, but the possibility that one of them was actually me fueled their fear.

Ordinarily Boggarts weren't this lethal. Had they picked it up from me, or were they trying to protect the castle in their own way. It might just have been that ever death increased the fear that remained to levels they weren't used to from children.

A few of the men were trying to cast Riddikulus, but other men were bumping into them as they tried to flee.

I dropped Peruvian Darkness powder and then the magical marbles.

The splats as the men on the stairs hit the floor below was satisfying. Those who were still alive found themselves choking to death as insects filled their noses and mouths.

Someone created a mighty wind to disperse the powder, something I hadn't even known could be done. By that point it was too late.

The men in the group had scattered into a half dozen groups of men each with twelve or so men.

It was time to get to work.