Twenty years had gone by in the blink of an eye.
The years of war had been ugly, but it had hardened the people into Wizards who could actually fight.
They'd come up with tactics that had never been imagined in Voldemort's day, things that even Taylor admitted that she hadn't foreseen.
Their enemies had learned from their tactics and had come up with their own, which they had learned from and modified.
Hermione spoke into the receiver in her ear.
"Are the assets in place?"
The teams began to sound off, one after the other. She nodded when the final tally was listed.
Everything was in place.
They knew where Scion was going to show up, and where he would likely go if the initial encounter went well. Twenty years with the Machine had given them every opportunity to study the probabilities.
The fact that more and more independent Seers had been having prophecies over the past few years, confirming the machine's predictions was helpful.
"The muggles want to know if they can help?" Malfoy's voice said.
"Tell them to standby," Hermione said.
Relationships with the muggles were strained at the best of times. Only the fact that she was herself a muggleborn and was Minister helped them make peace with the idea that Wizards had essentially carved independent kingdoms in the middle of their territory.
Fortunately, Taylor had chosen to stay out of those discussions. Her forte tended to be biblical retribution, not diplomacy. It was part of the reason she'd decided not to run for Minister herself; it had seemed likely that the world would always be at war.
The world knew about Scion already, and citizens in affected areas had already been evacuated.
Hermione only hoped that the Machine was right. The greatest disaster would be for something one of them did to change it's decisions for targets. There had been no way to evacuate every city; where would they have gone?
Even if they'd somehow managed to create a portal to the other universes, there was no way to predict where the monster would attack.
"Taylor?" she said. "Are you ready?"
"I've been ready for twenty years," Taylor said.
Likely she said it as much to raise the morale of the teams involved as from any sense of true bravado. While she still was pants at diplomacy that didn't involve force, she'd learned how to raise morale well enough.
A golden light appeared on the horizon.
Invisible snitches floated around the city of Cardiff. Each carried high tech cameras, and each were fortified with every charm Wizardkind knew how to make. They were as unbreakable as was possible with current magic.
The world was watching with baited breath, and Hermione watched the display in the corner of her glasses.
She hissed.
"There he is," she said. "Operational silence starting now."
The entire world watched as the man began to destroy the city with beams of golden light. He was blasting entire square miles with each blast, and she could see the light on the horizon from where she sat on her broom.
Taylor had not been in favor of her leading from the front, but she'd learned as much about morale in the intervening years as Taylor had.
Predictions had been that there were cities that they were simply unable to save; attempts to save real estate would lead to infinitely worse outcomes.
Evacuations were the best they could do.
Televising everything was an attempt to get the muggles on their side. The only way they'd believe that the threat was real was to see it for themselves.
Fighter jets flew past them.
Hermione didn't curse. The Machine had said this was inevitable too. The muggle politicians and military had to be seen to be doing something.
It was necessary because Scion wouldn't be satisfied with simply destroying empty houses. He wanted blood.
Furthermore, it was proof to the muggles that this wasn't simply a scheme by the Wizards to become popular in defiance of the hardcore religious zealots.
She ducked as a beam of light disintegrated an entire fighting wing of jet fighters. The beam passed a mile over her head, but the impulse was almost uncontrollable.
Fortunately, no one was looking in her direction. Every eye was focused on the horizon, which was lit up like the sun.
Scion was capable of burning his way to the Earth's core; the only reason he hadn't was because he wanted to kill as many as he could by himself.
They needed to keep him from changing his mind.
"Release the boggarts," she said.
The hard part had been finding a way to have portkeys affect boggarts.
Within a moment, boggarts began to appear on the ground. Their forms varied with whoever they had last been around, although Taylor Heberts seemed to be the form at least a third of them took.
They were merging into something that was inhuman; it looked like it was the size of a city, and just looking at it made Hermione feel nauseous.
It didn't say anything; apparently the Entities communicated by means other than sound. The fact that boggarts were able to use that mode of communication would have surprised her if it wasn't for the fact that it was magic.
The monster blasted and blasted at the thing; fortunately, Boggarts had never been born, and they did not die. They only faded away from a lack of terror, and at the moment, the entire world was filled with nothing but terror.
Every boggart in the world was swelling with power, and all of them were attracted to the scene where so much attention was focused.
Fortunately the other teams were ready as the monster fled. The field of boggartology hadn't existed when she was a child, but the variant Hogwarts boggarts had aroused interest in the subject.
They'd learned how to control boggarts, and now...
"He's done a runner," a voice in her ear said unnecessarily. She could see it in her visor.
"He's at site two," a female voice said.
Hermione hoped that the Chinese had listened to their advice. They'd been the most recalcitrant of all the muggle nations about the evacuations, and she'd had her doubts that it would be completely carried out.
"Team two, release the boggarts," she said.
The muggle and wizard video team that was projecting the broadcasts obligingly switched their view to Shanghai.
They weren't leaving him as much time for destruction; Taylor and the projections said that the important thing was to keep him off balance. Hopefully speedy execution would keep him from destroying too many people.
There was a blinding flash of light.
"Damn," Hermione hissed.
Projections had been mixed as to whether the Chines would attempt to use nuclear weapons.
It looked like the cameras made it out all right; it took a little time for the cameras to regain their image. Only magic kept them going now.
The damage by the nuclear weapon had done far more than Scion had yet done. Worse, there would be fallout to deal with, even if everything went as plan.
The anti-radiation spells Taylor had asked for eighteen years ago were sounding like a better and better plan, even if their area wasn't wide enough to make that much of a difference.
The boggarts were unaffected, and they were rising into the same figure the Cardiff boggarts had turned into, presumably giving the monster the same message the others had.
"He's at site three," the voice in her ear said.
"Release the bludgers," she said.
He was at the site where Brockton Bay had been in Taylor's initial universe; there was nothing there in this world but a stretch of empty shoreline.
The boggarts had already been released here; they didn't need to form.
Hermione had been afraid that the bludgers wouldn't be ready; they were the pinnacle of magical technology.
They were designed not only to be invisible, inaudible and not to give off any sign of their passage, but they were designed to conceal any damage that they had done.
More importantly, they were transdiminsional.
Scion's universe was locked off by some power that they still could not overcome, However, in order to interact with their universe, he had to leave some point of contact.
That was the theory anyway.
"Bludgers deployed," a woman with an Indian accent said.
He was in Calcutta now, presumably trying to find places with the most people.
There was a pause, and Hermione and the other witches around her waited with baited breath.
"Success," the woman said. She managed to keep her voice stable. She wasn't speaking to many of them; this project was beyond top secret.
The bludgers were even now plowing through Scion's real body, seeking out the shard that served as his brain.
Magic was keeping Scion from realizing that thousands of shards were being destroyed as a single bludger began to replicate itself over and over and over again with contact with Scion's living shards.
How they'd managed to get hold of shards to experiment with was a question that Hermione had been careful not to ask.
Plausible deniability was even more important now than it had ever been.
Each of the bludgers was moving at five hundred miles an hour, each designed to maximize its distance from every other bludger while focusing on things that lived.
Hopefully the battle with Scion wouldn't last an hour. It was unlikely that he had his brain within a five hundred miles of his body.
The bludgers likely weren't even destroying the individual shards; there had only been so large they could make them without making them detectable.
There had been discussion of enlarging them to do more damage, but it hadn't been compatible with other magics.
Even worse, the things were layered with so many different magics that the spells on them would begin to break down. The gemino spell wouldn't last longer than five minutes; as long as the bludgers were in a sea of living shards, they would replicate at a geometric rate.
However, replicated objects tended to degrade faster than the original, and after five minutes that many copies would all begin to disintegrate despite the spells cast on them.
Of course, doubling at a rate of one every six seconds, there would be a thousand bludgers in a minute. Within two minutes, there would be a million. Within three, a billion.
In normal combat the bludgers would replicate over and over until the enemy was dead. They'd learned that in the war with the Russians. However, the bludgers had never replicated at the rate they would inside the body of a creature the size of a continent.
They'd replicate like a cancer, burning through the flesh they could reach and hopefully crippling the monster without letting it know that it was even losing capabilities.
The likely result was going to be numerous damaged shards; some researchers hoped that it might actually decrease Scion's intelligence somewhat. It was impossible to know, because without access to the creature they couldn't tell if the shards acted like human synapses, or if the intelligence was held in the central node.
Hermione thought it unlikely; they'd hardly be likely to give up so many powers if if made them noticeably dumber. However, they were alien, and Taylor wasn't even sure that they were fully sentient.
This entire plan rested on his being dumb.
Apparently, in her original timeline Taylor had bullied the thing into killing itself. All they needed to do was drive it away. If they made it easier for her to do what she had done in the future, all the better.
There had been Wizards who had been convinced that there should be a legion of Wizards to fight, that a thousand killing curses cast at the same time would kill the thing.
They'd been shown the error of their ways by the Secret Police.
Taylor was there, facing the creature.
It wasn't actually Taylor; it was just a bug clone. Taylor herself was actually miles away, projecting her will through Ministry created Relay bugs.
She had relay bugs all over the world now, and it was thought by those in the Ministry who knew about her power that she had access to every continent except Antarctica and the arctic.
Hermione had seen requisitions for breeding cold resistant bugs. She'd approved the budget.
The world wasn't seeing what was happening next. Hermione had a private feed, though, and the people running the cameras were Taylor's people.
Taylor was blasted into smithereens, only for another Taylor to appear near her. There were bugs clones and boggarts surrounding the monster, which blasted and blasted. Some of the Taylors vanished, only to be replaced a moment later.
The sky darkened, and the sun was blackened out. Taylor had been collecting bugs for weeks, drawing them to this section of uninhabited land.
From horizon to horizon the sky was blotted out by bugs, and they formed a face.
Hermione couldn't hear Taylor, but she knew what she was doing.
She was breaking the monster down psychologically, tearing its will to shreds.
Her original self had driven the monster to suicide, and this one was setting it up so that her original self could deliver the finishing blow.
The monster blasted the insects, lighting the sky with a blinding flash that would be seen from over a thousand miles away. Satellites were destroyed and the beam blasted away into space.
A moment later he was gone.
"Ask the question," Hermione hissed into her microphone.
It took time for the Machine to deliver its answer. The wait was long and drawn out. Everyone around her was tense.
If this wasn't over, they were in trouble. They'd given it everything they had, and they knew that more conventional weapons weren't going to do anything at all. The thing had survived a nuclear detonation without noticing, after all.
"It's done," the answer came back.
Hermione heard cheering all around her, and she felt herself go weak in the knees. Only years of experience kept her from cheering like the people around her.
"All right," she said. "Tell the President of the United States and the British Prime Minister that it's time to stand down. The press release will be in ten minutes."
She turned to the people around her.
"Thank you for your service."
Having the Minister for Magic in the air during the crisis had been an empty gesture; Scion had been able to find anyone he wanted.
She apparated to her usual spot for press releases.
People were cheering there as well. It was time to let the muggles know what had happened... or at least the version the Wizards wanted them to know.
Hermione blinked as the hair and makeup Wizard clucked over her, gesturing with his wand. It was hardly her fault that she'd been stuck out in the wind.
It took only a few moments for her to be presentable.
Moments afterward, she spoke in a conference call to the American President and to the British Prime Minister. The premiere leader of China as well as the leaders of France and Germany were on the telephone.
The conversation took most of the ten minutes, and it left her feeling drained.
Despite this, she still had her duty to the world.
Malfoy was already waiting for her.
They approached the podium, and the cameras began to roll.
"Today has been a day of triumph," Malfoy began.
He'd had two speeches prepared, one for victory, and one for failure. Fortunately victory was in the making, and she could see the relief in the way he held himself, even if he seemed outwardly self assured.
"Wizardkind has worked hand in hand with its brethren to help defeat the greatest threat mankind has ever faced."
As far as the muggles would know, Wizards would have defeated Scion with some kind of secret magic. It would make them worry, but it would also make them rethink attempted purges like those in the Middle East and Africa.
"Wizards and witches and non-magicals all stood together under the same threat," Malfoy said.
Non-magicals was the preferred term now. Muggle was considered somewhat pejorative, and was no longer used. Muggleborn were now called First Gen...first generation Wizards.
The mysterious appearance of thousands of first generation wizards over the past twenty years had altered the balance of power likely forever.
Hermione smiled when she was supposed to, and she said what she was supposed to say.
She hated these kind of things, and she suspected that was part of the reason that Taylor had put her here, so she wouldn't have to do any of the work.
"General Hebert was an integral part of this battle," she said. "She would be here to speak to you all, but I am given to understand that she is planning to go to a beach and have a long drink."
She wouldn't have long, of course; the fallout from the Chinese nuke would likely hit the beaches in a few hours.
The cleanup would likely take years.
"Hold your family and your friends," Hermione said. "Today went almost as well as it could have gone."
There might have been thousands of deaths in China, but if it had happened it was because they hadn't listened.
The muggles... Hermione found herself thinking of them that way when they were being particularly difficult, they argued all the time.
Only the fact that the Wizarding World was now united gave them any bargaining power at all. In that, Taylor had been right.
Finally the interview was over, and Hermione heard a breathy voice in her ear.
Taylor could speak to anyone in the world now, and she rarely needed a cell phone. The muggles didn't know about her insects, but they knew about her reputed ability to know everything about everyone.
"There will be more, you know," the voice said. "We'll have to figure out how to deal with them more permanently."
"Right," Hermione sighed.
Humanity was going to have to reach for the stars if they were going to defend themselves from the entities. Wizards were going to help them get there.
She ruled the Wizarding World; they just had to convince the muggles to follow.