Big A/N: I always appreciate feedback from my readers, especially when I get constructive criticism since this is practice for me in order to improve my creative writing. That which I can't address in the story without breaking the fourth wall, I'll address here.
Firstly, I'll address the… whatever the last chapter was. It was meant as a technical backside of the how and whys of Harry's magic, and what he'll be doing in this (and possably more, depending on how much I like it) stories. I should have probably noted that this is very much like a damn-near godlike Harry in this story. I didn't earlier, because I didn't know that it would be earlier.
That being said, for those of you who don't like figuring out what I meant by the different powers from reading in-between lines or connecting lightyear-distant dots, I'm going to outright state what his powers will look like here:
The nodules connected to his nervous system acts like and behaves like a seriously ramped up version of a biotic (Yes, like Mass Effect – I seriously love it when Mass Effect and [Prototype] are connected) only based on the idea that Mithril is the big brother to element zero. The Eldritch magic that permeates Harry's aura (and hence became his aura) act as the wizard's magic that Harry's used to, the magic that he'd been using ever since his first incident of accidental magic. The virus became the body itself, and in much the same way an average person would be able to flex their muscles so too would Harry be able to control the virus – with a bit of physiotherapy with the virus' mind being the nurse.
A Wizard's focus normally amplifies power being directed from the wizard's core since normally the inner ley lines of a wizard would limit the flow. In this case that amplification isn't needed simply because all his power is resting outside of him, ready to be used. Instead Harry need only relay his instructions in what to do which is why his amplifies intent, giving him the ability to relay clearer instructions to his magic, since it no longer leaves the body already knowing what it needed to do in the form of learned spells.
I also forgot to mention that the "divine intervention" in last chapter was supposed to be an Omake; it isn't part of the story and won't affect the story in any way.
Chapter 4: Awakening
When Harry woke for the first time in the centre of a thoroughly ruined forge, he made the instinctual decision that he couldn't be bothered just yet, and then promptly went back into the arms of Morpheus. When he woke for the second time, it was to the familiar stance of ready-to-battle, only to be replaced with the consuming pain of hunger.
He's felt hunger before, he had distinctly remembered a time when he'd been without food for four days, even so much as a crumb of mould to sate his need. However, that time was nothing compared to the one he felt when he woke properly.
Perhaps he hadn't eaten in more than four days, then.
It was completely possible that he did. He had no way of knowing for just how long he'd been under the merciful care of his magical recovery, that same beautiful magic that forgot to duplicate the contents of his stomach so that he didn't have to feel as hungry as he did at that moment.
He quickly tested out his new magical focus by using it on himself.
Only for the spell to fail.
Momentarily confused, Harry tried it again, with the same results. He didn't bother with a third time, instead he tested first his focus by casting a levitation spell onto a nearby piece of rubble, only for it to slam into the ceiling. He wasn't embarrassed by his lack of control of his magical power through the focus – it would take getting used to channeling it through such a device – he then went on to testing his magical power.
Only for another poor piece of debris to shatter against the wall. He sighed; getting used to his own magical power was not something he wanted to ever do again, he already reached his magical maturity damnit! That was eighty years ago, and now he was forced to adapt to his magical control like a newly minted adult! That was embarrassing.
Well, there was no reason for fretting.
His body quivered. Harry paused; why did his body quiver? It did again, followed by an intense wave of aching hunger. Well, that explained it then, but it didn't exactly get across why his body quivered instead of his stomach rumbling and gurgling as it was wont to do in similar situations.
Well, it was just another issue Harry would need to investigate later. Or not, considering it'd put him in the same situation just then and the pain of hunger striking didn't instill him with any kind of desire to replicate the scenario.
Harry focused his attention on his assembled resources he'd gathered during his earlier raids. The food easily came into view, and Harry hungrily tore the preservation charms off the food, getting ready to 'pace himself' in a veritable feast. The food didn't even get close to his face before tendrils burst from all over his body and imbedded itself in the food. His first reaction was that of mild disgust; he didn't exactly think that it was all that appetising to eat with a flurry of tendrils, he had issues when people slurped up their food as it was. The reaction following was that of immense curiosity mixed with a sense of resigned acceptance. It was never something normal that happened to poor Harry.
Well, another item for him to add to the ever-growing list of items for him to experiment with.
His immediate need almost satisfied, Harry allowed himself the luxury of eating what he thought to be a full ration for himself, and then storing the rest away into a travel pack with the rest of his supplies. He didn't think that the loud explosion and odd happenings would go unnoticed for long; he needed to find a new home.
If only he didn't attract the attention of one of the beasts that he'd found when he first arrived on the god-forsaken planet.
It didn't happen directly, as far as he could tell, and it didn't happen suddenly either. Strangely, it happened when he was on the move from his previous position. He'd only made it a few steps away from his 'front door' into the sprawling mass of dead flesh. His body quivered, and Harry knew that from his earlier feast that it meant his body was about to reach out for some food. Then, it did just that.
The next few moments were a blur for Harry, even with his vast experience with combat under his belt. His body split at seams that shouldn't exist, launching itself at beings that shouldn't be able to walk around, and it was a longer time than Harry would like to admit before he managed to will his own body into any semblance of order once again. It was a veritable feeding frenzy. Only, now when he took a step forward, he could hear the ground beneath his feet groan in protest.
Well, that answered what happened to the conservation of mass when taking in ten-thousand percent of what he estimated to be his original bodyweight. With a thought and negligent wave of his focus-hand, Harry applied a featherweight charm to himself, unworried if it managed to be overpowered. He'd flown under his own power, after-all, so he was confident he'd be able to maneuver with the gravity seemingly cut off.
He was mildly curious to see how long it'd last, considering his horrifying lack of control in the previous display. Or, he considered, it's because my body appears to have changed on a fundamental level. Maybe the usual charms just can't work.
His thoughts were cut off when he heard the telltale roar of the beastie he'd first encountered in the dead world he now called a hotel room; he had no illusions of staying on the planet longer than he had to, especially if there were no humans here.
He knew from his own training, being the trainer, and common sense that using an untested weapon in battle was never a good idea. Thus, Harry was less-than-confident in his abilities to stand up to one of – or was sounded like many – of the beasties in hand-to-claw combat with his at-odd body, wonky magic, and a lingering feeling of 'why me' from his teen years he thought he'd long since stamped out. So, Harry ran.
It was when he was running at a speed to put most top-of-the-line brooms to shame and was a good forty kilometers away from his previous position before he realised a few very important things. For one, he was right to think that he'd flub the lightening charm since he was basically flying over the ground, but he was still getting decent traction is that his feet somehow adapted to the situation of their own volition to account for the problem by sprouting spikes and grips out of his shoes. Two, he had an inexplicable urge to say 'meep meep'. Three, and one of the most dangerous, is that he was apparently being hunted.
It was another forty kilometers before Harry confirmed it by spotting an apparent roadblock ahead made of fleshy beings bridled with claws and bony spikes.
Harry glanced to a nearby skyscraper and put two and two together with his increased traction, lowered weight, roadblock, and scaling the side of the skyscraper.
Too bad common sense wasn't so common anymore, since he was breaking his own training in testing out his untested theory in what was shaping up to be a battle. With complete confidence, Harry ran at a wall, trying to confuse the waiting mass of muscle and pointy things into thinking he was heading for it. When he considered himself close enough he leapt off the ground, intent on letting his weird body figure out that he wanted it to latch onto the wall so he coul-
Unfortunately for him, just to add to his growing list of unfortunate events, Harry's weightlessness spell didn't lower his mass per se. Instead, it simply dampened the effect of gravity on his mass. Harry forgot that very crucial fact, but thankfully his body still knew what its mass was. How his body remembered and knew something about fundamental physics, Harry didn't know, but he was very glad that it did. Instead of Harry's planned transferring of kinetic energy from completely horizontal to completely vertical, he instead managed to only get there halfway before he contacted the concrete wall. Now, he was already moving at a respectable velocity of a fast car and his mass was about ten thousand kilograms – or ten megagrams. So when he contacted the concrete wall, and his body proved to be hastily reinforced for the impact, he continued past the concrete wall. In fact, he literally came in like a wrecking ball, since he was about two times the mass of 'large' wrecking ball. He also left like one, as he had enough momentum to continue past the initial half of the building.
Harry was just surprised he didn't feel any pain past a vague feeling that the situation was bad, and he should not be in it. He was so surprised he wasn't treated to his usual pain-from-mistakes that he looked behind him only to see a veritable hole in the once-untouched skyscraper.
Slowed by his detour through a building, Harry continued his oddly shaped gravity-defined parabolic arc up towards its vertex, which also happened to be close enough to the side of another building. Quickly casting a momentum cancelling charm on himself once he caught up with the side of the building, Harry allowed his feet and hands to latch themselves onto the side of the building.
It was when he reached the top of the building when Harry realised that he was about three times the size of a normal human being. Sure, it made sense in a strange sort of way: all the raw human meat had to go somewhere. He just hoped that it wasn't permanent; it would be a real pain in the ass for him to enter any sort of doorways. That, and it would be awkward for him to explain to a muggle. They might just shoot him on sight because of all the insanity infesting the island.
At least he wouldn't ever be teased that his own children were taller than him again. He blamed the Weasley genes coming through; his late wife blamed his bad upbringing.
Shaking memories back to the land of the forgotten, Harry continued with his task – running away from his pursuers so that he can get more situated. Then, then he'd decide what next to do. It was as good a plan as any that he'd had.
Meh. Not all had to be thought about in advance – he'd taught many of the up-and-coming Dark Lords and Ladies that before he'd killed them, and in killing them.
Only, he did need to find a way of getting away from his rabid fanbase before they overran him and ate him. It was already night before he had an inkling of how they were even tracking him. Of course, it was through scent! Harry felt like he should have seen that one coming, since the besties had a bit of a snout and not much in the way of eyes. They did have them, eyes, though they were an odd red-ringed purplish hue.
It was another hour of testing before Harry confirmed that it was something transmitting through the air, yet it wasn't his scent per se, since he'd tried every form of noise-cancelling, scent-concealment, and stealth-affinity spell. He even soared through the air, building to building, just in case it was connected to something about the vibrations themselves in the objects he interacted with. That was the point in which his body shivered, and liquified into a morass of biological components. His world revolved around the sense of touch in the form he unwillingly found himself in, where he could feel himself slowly leaking into the cracks in the concreate he'd previously landed upon, and then further into the ground below. The soil was clingy, the concrete rough, and his panic justified.
It only lasted a minute, but it was a minute he never wanted to repeat ever again. The fact that he felt fundamentally cleaner afterwards only mildly pacified him, along with the fact that the hunters could no longer 'scent' whatever it was his body was releasing and getting past his scent-concealment charms.
Harry looked to the sign hanging to the side of the modest building among the skyscrapers surrounding it. "Sirta Foundation," its proud lettering announced, followed by, "Non-profit biomedical research." Harry wondered on the wisdom of announcing themselves to be a biomedical research facility when humans tended to be quite diverse and radical in their ideology, historically speaking. Giving a shrug, ignoring his luck as always, Harry entered the building proper.
He pushed open the surprisingly unlocked glass front doors, and smirked when there was no blaring alarm to alert anyone of his presence. Proudly situated on the door was the security company responsible for the shameful security: Blackwatch Inc. "We take our client's security seriously," was their motto. Harry thought they needed to update it.
Harry wasted no time in heading further into the building, on the search for one of their biomedical labs. He wanted to find the underlying cause of what had happened to his body from his botched attempt at using a forge. There was no way, in his experience, that the magic had up and decided to mess with his biology at such a fundamental level without any intent or symbol in that direction. It should have either did what he asked of it, destroyed him, or did what he asked in a way he didn't expect but still within the parameters. Being able to spontaneously burst into liquid to figure out a way for your body to figure out – on its own – how to stop something from hunting you was not within those parameters.
It was within one of those labs where he'd found out that perhaps the non-profit organisation wasn't exactly all that they said they were. There was equipment in one of the rooms that didn't exactly scream ethics, as live subjects were tied town on operating tables, still struggling to get out of their bonds even with their chests torn apart for their complete lack of insides to be on display. He found cages filled with dissected animals, torn apart by each other, and paws torn and bloody by scratching at the wireframe walls.
There was one room that was filled with screens, powered by what Harry assumed to be an on-sight backup generator, displaying a roomed hunter along with another room filled with desssicated bodies – they'd obviously died of thirst, going by the image of the corpses. The camera tag beside the recording time on the hunter was 'subject H23441', while the one depicting the human bodies was simply 'Bait'. Harry shivered, and it had nothing to do with hunger or cold.
He'd seen some dubious things during his tenure as an unspeakable, but what he found in that facility was quickly topping that list.
Desperate to understand exactly what was going on in favour of relearning his own biology, Harry set off for an information terminal.
What Harry found in a terminal behind an office door with a 'branch director' title plastered onto it, was disquieting, in that he made quite a few startled and angry noises from what he found there. It was buried underneath e-mails and corporate password-protected servers, while some were offline and Harry had to bring the ones he could back to life. Needless to mention, Harry had busted out all his skills in corporate and international espionage just to get what he considered scrapes. He took all the nasty things he said about Blackwatch if they were responsible for their network and computer security.
They were still terrible, though, since Harry wasn't supposed to gain anything as incriminating as he did. Then again, it wasn't like they had any reason to believe that they had to keep out a world-class intelligence agency worker. Wasn't really his problem, though.
From what he surmised, and an oversimplification of the data he'd found, Harry had contracted a type of super virus that the local not-entirely-benevolent organisation had been experimenting with in the name of 'vaccinating' it. Well, the flubbed the process along the way, and had made a more dangerous version that had apparently been released in a subway station. Apparently, he contracted this virus in that subway station, from what he could tell. It would certainly explain the odd happenings of his body without his explicit permission, though not why he wasn't made into infiri like the rest of the humans on the island. It was possible his magic was a catalyst to that effect, even going further to say that the forge was involved since it happened after he was
It also appeared that the rest of the world went dark, considering what he received from what should have been the internet. It wasn't fully functioning to where he knew it should have considering the technological state that the people that lived there enjoyed. Some servers still pinged, but there were many that were shut down and Harry assumed it had to do with power grids failing due to lack of maintenance. The ones that he knew were powered by green energy and thus were less labour intensive to maintain were mostly pinging back.
It meant it wasn't an incident isolated to just the island he was on. It meant the entire world was affected.
Harry sighed, and considered all the items he'd found together, forming a nice big picture for him to look at.
It was, in a word, ugly. That wasn't even considering the ramifications of legalising human testing due to the outbreak of a world-ending plague.
He simply could not believe that humanity, lovably-stubborn and infuriatingly adaptable humanity, had managed to be wiped out by a plague-style pathogen that'd been found in a little-known country town. Redlight, they called it, and then when they accidentally made their own, worse version they called it Greenlight in honor of subject Green that they'd played at human testing attempting to find a cure to the Redlight outbreak in Hope, Idaho.
Subject Green became the greenlight virus by the Sirta Foundation playing at inoculating a pregnant woman with the supposed inoculation to Redlight. They just didn't realise that they'd make something a lot worse than the original plague-like strain. The inoculation killed the woman with the undiscovered child still 'living' on inside the dead mother. That child, whom had been infected with a mutated strain that the microbiologists thought was inert and a proper inoculation instead had instead latched onto the stem cells permeating the fetus' body. It mutated further, building in the genetic code within the stem cells, and the infantile brain, blood, skin, and other cells that had already been formed at the time. Ut applied it to itself, and consequently became self-aware.
The scientist's speculation continued in just how the mastermind behind the Redlight virus was borne. They supposed that a self-aware pathogen meant that it knew that it was inside of a host that it wasn't normally. Pathogens of all kinds normally never want to kill their hosts. It would mean that they'd have to look for a new host, or die. It was the equivalent to a human burning down their own house. It was idiotic. However, since the pathogen permeating the dead woman and dying fetus knew it was in a dead woman and dying fetus, it sought to rectify it.
It unknowingly re-created the effects of its mother strain. Only, it did it better. Instead of an eternally shambling, hungry body attempting to gain more sustenance for the pathogen, it became inter-connected.
It could no-longer be classified as a single-cell organism like bacteria, or less-than-alive RNA/DNA encapsulated in a single cell like a virus. It was a network of parts communicating with each other, infected cells acting as diodes, the nucleus holding the Boolean values of 'yesses' or 'noes', and the body itself acting as the circuit itself.
That was a pale example, though, as even one gram of DNA had the potential to hold around four-hundred and fifty-five exabytes of data. A human body also had about sixty grams of DNA in its body, on a rough average. That meant that the new form of life, later to be named greenlight once found, had about twenty-six point seven zettabytes of memory storage, filled to the brim with human evolution. Granted, a lot of that data was redundant as many cells were of the same type and functioned in the same way. However, it also meant horrifyingly enough also didn't take long for the network of 'yesses' and 'noes' communicating with each other, utilising methods not dissimilar to machine learning algorithms, to understand that neurons were exceptionally better at data processing than strings of Boolean values.
It created itself a brain.
With this new brain, decentralised to allow fair access to the flittering infectious material that would be associated most closely to a virus by sight under a microscope. Well, before that same 'virus' lookalike found out a way to build itself into a form of vocal cords to create an ultrasonic wave matching the exact frequency required to break the glass containment and then proceed to infect anything in contact with the air, even bypassing filters.
Such was the power of a brain.
In fact, with that same brain, the greenlight prototype had taken hold of its own body and exerted enough control to escape from the body bag that it was stored in. It didn't take long after that for it to become a figurehead, and a mind behind the Redlight virus. It became a thinking mind behind the infestation that was Redlight, and from there, it spread across the world, killing all.
It made Harry incredibly angry. All the inhuman testing, for nothing. All the pain and suffering, for nothing. Even more, all of Harry's effort in finding some civilisation before finding a way home, for naught.
Worse still, Harry knew that he wouldn't be able to leave well enough alone, either. He couldn't just leave Mother Earth crawling with humanity's mistake, he also couldn't just take what was recorded in the archives at face value; Harry needed to see for himself the purported absence of humanity.
The Grimoire:
Sniper's Hex: Chapter 1
Bolt of Intent and Emotion: Chapter 1
The Flaying Hex: Chapter 1
The Tanner's Spell: Chapter 2
First Kill's Spoils: Chapter 2
An Unspeakable's Identification: Chapter 2
A Wizard's Core: Chapter 3
Mithril: Chapter 3
Maelstrom of Forces: Chapter 3
Probability Bomb: Chapter 3
Hunger-alieving charm: A spell that would essentially duplicate the contents of one's stomach so that they wouldn't feel the effects of hunger. Due to Gwamps Law, it's impossible to create food, but by duplicating the food already there it effectively circumvents this. This means that there has to be something in the subjects' stomach in order to work. It wouldn't work for a vampire, for example, because they don't have a stomach where the blood is stored.
Weightlessness Charm: Weight is calculated by mass multiplied by the force of gravity in the area that the weight is being measured. This charm doesn't cancel out the mass portion of the calculation, probably due to the ineptitude of wizards in matters of science, but it almost cancels out the effect of gravity on an object. Thus, something that would weight 200 pounds would now weigh about 10 pounds, but would still retain their mass of 100 kilograms. Antigravity at the flick of a wand!
A/N: So there's that.
Hope you all enjoyed. I hope that I left this chapter in a good place. I originally planned for Harry to just leave the Earth to its fate, but then realised that it'd be rather out of character for Harry considering how I plan for him to act in this story, and his alternate history.