Disclaimer: tenth verse same as the first. I don't own any of the individual pieces of media used to construct this work, though it'd be cool if I did. I'm frankly amazed that I've reached even this far, and a lot of it's because I know people like this. You're all awesome.
Also, bumping the ages up two years because it was starting to feel weird with how mature and collected the Legion were acting. So Hogwarts starts at thirteen, with that being everyone's ages except Hermione's who is 14. Gonna go through the previous chapters and fix things up so they make sense.
A skill-diverse exorcist, a nascent dragon, a body-bound guardian spirit and an umbrakinetic assassin in training sat in a train compartment. Contrary to first glance, this wasn't actually the setup for a joke but a group consisting of school friends, discussing the specifics on what they were planning on doing for christmas.
"We built this giant obstacle course that takes ages to get through because it's never exactly the same twice!" Su cheered, waving her arms around.
Hermione was rather confused. "How does that work, magic?" she asked. "Unless you take it apart and reconfigure it each time, the course should stay the same, right?"
"Not magic, macro-mechanisms! The entire thing was built over decades, made specifically so that while the button at the start of the course gets all the moving parts active, while the ending button stops them and reconfigures the course to the next combination! We still haven't reached the end of the list either. It's like the world's biggest clockwork puzzle, but you explore the insides as well!" Su giggled.
Harry just smiled at their enthusiasm. They weren't going to see each other for a couple of weeks, not helped by the fact that three of them were going abroad, all to different countries no less. Still, even with each of them going to a location they wouldn't be able to contact, everyone agreed; while training was fine, they would take time to rest. Admittedly that was mostly aimed at him and his workaholic tendencies, but still.
Then he blinked. "Wait, if you have access to what sounds like every freerunner's wet dream, why did you keep pestering me about learning parkour?" He inquired.
"Family rules say you aren't allowed to use it until the year you activate your dragon magic in full." Su shrugged.
The bell rang as Harry entered the shop, the small public area not having changed in the five months since he was last there. The books were stacked on the counter in the same haphazard manner, the shelves of wands still half filled and the sky light adding a mystical quality to the room.
Moving in front of the counter, Harry suddenly twisted, raising his left arm to point at the old man in the corner. "Do you just hang out there when you don't have customers, or what?" the boy snarked. Ollivander simply chuckled and moved behind the counter, before beckoning Harry to follow.
Going to the back of the wand shop, they descended a long flight of stairs. Arriving in a workshop, Ollivander spoke up as he approached an octagonal device with handles on the sides. "Normally we'd use something similar to an artificial Senkaimon, but my end is broken and I haven't had the time to fix it, so we'll be using this portkey."
"Neat." Harry reached for one of the handles. "What are portkeys like anyw-oh dear god noooooo!" the preteen yelled as it activated, sending the boy careening through what looked like a kaleidoscopic hurricane, only for it to end just as suddenly and slam Harry into the ground. Groaning, the Quincy stood and stared at his new environment.
A massive room, larger than Hogwarts' great hall and painted sky blue, covered in craggy rocks and dead trees. Up the far wall was a thin ladder, little more than a line at that distance. The ground was pockmarked by craters, scorch marks and split ground littering every significant surface.
Over in a corner was a large table with five easily recognisable figures, even at that distance. Tessai's large size even when sitting down stood out, as did Yoruichi's bright orange jacket and Urahara's mostly green ensemble. From there establishing the identities of the smallest figures was simple. Ururu and Jinta were the only children consistently 'round the Urahara shop, after all.
"You know, I'm actually a tad bit surprised that Yoruichi didn't do her usual 'I'm a cat' routine," Harry commented once he was close enough. Sitting down, he helped himself to the coffee pot.
"Ha! Told you I should have done it!" Yoruichi cheered. The others looked at her, deadpan. The others except for Ururu that is, although even she threw a doubtful look towards the older woman. "What! It would have been hilarious, do you know how little I get to use that trick these days?" She complained.
"... Right," Harry ventured. So, how are we doing the training anyway?" He asked, turning the conversation towards business. The way the three shinigami's heads turned to him sent a shiver of trepidation down Harry's spine.
"Well," Urahara drawled, speaking for the first time. "Based on the data you sent, the three of us came up with a setup that would make the most of your stay here while still giving you plenty of relaxation time. However to summarise: you'll be doing 'Flame' research with Tessai," the large man raised a single hand in greeting.
"However," Urahara's voice carried a sadistic edge even as he covered his face with his fan, "you'll be training alternately with me and Yoruichi in an area I've set up to accelerate your use of Flames, using a version of the dial mechanism connected to remote tanks."
Harry's head hit the table with a dull 'THUNK', "this is going to hurt, isn't it?" At the ominous laughter, he groaned, "fuck!"
"Maybe when you're older, kid." Yoruichi giggled as Harry looked up to glare at her. "As it is now, you use the Flames as a tool, which they are to an extent. But they're supposed to act as your schrift, a part of you as much as a zanpakuto or resurrectÃon is to their shinigami or arrancar." Her grin widened to Cheshire cat levels. "And by the time you leave, it will be ingrained in you to your soul."
"I feel like this is karma from everyone else's training," Harry muttered blankly. That garnered snorts from across the table.
Scene loop 2: Harry/Su/Blaise/Hermione- that order
Lifting a new canister, Harry attached it to the clamp and grabbed the etching tool. "Got a letter from one of my friends. She managed to get involved in something stupid." Tessai looked up from setting up the centrifuge. Harry found the process of making things therapeutic, and the variety of devices and techniques Tessai and Urahara had at their disposal was dizzying.
"On a scale of one to ten, how stupid are we talking?" The large Kido expert asked as he grabbed a drink and sat down. Pulling one of the design sheets over, he had to whistle. While Tessai was far from an expert on runes, he'd worked with them enough to know that the array would be effective, if still crude. "This one of her designs?"
Harry didn't even have to look up to know which one he was talking about. "Yeah, it's supposed to be a way to fuse the anti-hollow aspect of Quincy training with her Zanpakuto, but at the moment it's just a Holy HandGrenade against Fullbringers. As for how stupid?" He paused to think. "She managed to get dragged into a Spirit-side gang war, and spent the last four days fighting increasing levels of combatants, to the point she heard her Zanpakuto's true name."
"Ah, Yoruichi on a bender, got it." Tessai nodded, and Harry snorted, almost ruining the latest carving. Levelling a mock glare at the older man, he raised his hands in surrender. "Speaking of which, how's your training with her and Kisuke doing?" Harry paused.
("Rah!" Harry yelled, pale red light emanating from his hand. It seemed to almost carry him forwards faster than he could actually run, but the blonde man simply leaned out the way. His overextended fist led to the teen losing balance and hitting the ground, where the dirt started to crumble at the contact with the light. A flash of Intuition made him scramble to the left, a foot carving through the earth that had been under his head.
"So, that's five if I'm not mistaken." The lackadaisical tone just made Harry groan as Kisuke poked at the spot of greyed out ground. "It appears that the 'Storm' aspect disintegrates both at a particular rate and order, starting with the part of the chemical formula that decides pigmentation of the material. It also works to a limited degree on air."
"Eh?" Harry asked. "I mean, that makes sense I guess, but how do you figure?" He didn't see or feel anything, nor did he feel more light-headed than he was during training the previous day.
"Your momentum. You were moving too fast, not by much but enough for skilled or fast opponents to notice." Yoruichi answered, shaking the dirt from her feet.
"So opponents like you and Urahara then," the green eyed Quincy deadpanned.
"Yes, like myself and Yoruichi, yes." Kisuke chimed back in cheerfully. "On top of that, the actual mechanism behind your added speed was you getting dragged forward by the vacuum. Which in turn made you overextend on your attacks and lose balance, because you didn't know to compensate for the slipstream effect."
"Cool, so now that we know this are we going to set aside some training time to work o-GAKH!" Harry started, before being sent flying by a foot to the gut. The perpetrator, Yoruichi, simply grinned as she blitzed forward into a roundhouse that was barely blocked.
"Nope! Back to your usual, we'll work on your Elements once your Schrift is up and running properly." Yoruichi said, possibly too peppy for someone who just kicked a child across a training field.)
"...Yeah, it's certainly been something. I'm going to be covered in bruises for weeks," Harry grumbled under his breath. Putting the etching tool down, the boy held the canister up to the light. "So these special Ginto are supposed to make my flames themselves, right? Giving me emergency reserves, as it were?"
"That's the general idea, yes." Tessai answered. "The dials - or flames, I suppose - were an attempt at an artificial Schrift, but the initial Sky dial was too strong for anyone using it. Eventually we figured out how to separate it into the other six signatures, but that didn't solve the problem, only mitigate it. Honestly it was a lucky break finding that your blood was the only thing they would react positively to, since it would have gone on the shelf of overly successful projects otherwise."
"Really, leave it to Kisuke to develop an entirely new branch of magic by accident." Harry nodded. On getting to Kurakara the bucket hat obsessed scientist had revealed that he didn't actually know what the limits for each dial was. He'd placed a small device in the wrist of the bracer to monitor his brainwaves, and made it so that when patterns associated with certainty synced up with him speaking about the dials, the unlocking procedure would start.
Thinking about it, Harry supposed it made a lot of sense. Handing control of them grated on the user's soul, which in the case of weaker people or civilians, was lethal. A couple of the few things they could figure out was that people tended to lean towards certain flame types, and normally only used a few tricks depending on which one. Even Harry was doing the same, although that might change when the Flames fully bound themselves to his body.
"Still really grossed out by the fact we're using my blood to enamel the runes, by the way. Like I know I was the one to do it before you could stop me, but still." Harry said. Grimacing, he made a shallow cut along his palm, letting the blood flow into a bowl before he accelerated the healing process with Sun Flames.
"To be honest, so are we." Tessai chuckled. "Hell, I think Kisuke was either grasping at straws or kidding when he said that. But look on the bright side, you can officially say you've done demonic blood rituals."
The thirteen year old snorted. "Careful, that idea sounds tempting. It might even be enough to give the Dursleys a collective aneurysm." Grabbing the canister from where he put it off to the side, he checked the carved lines for errors. "Take the centrifuge off the motor." The words were out of his mouth before he realised it.
Tessai hit the button without thinking about it, and on checking the mixture, he raised an eyebrow. "If I'd left that on there, the result would have probably exploded. How did you know to take it off the machine?"
"Hm?" Harry looked up. "Uh, intuition I guess."
Flipping out of the way, Harry narrowly avoided a trio of lightning bolts. His shadows weren't as lucky, getting speared through and dissolving into wisps of lilac mist. The sixth and final aspect, Mist, seemed like a perfect fit for an illusionist or psychic. With its aspect of Construction, there were practically no limits if you were creative enough. Unfortunately that didn't matter much when you were being hamstrung in both energy production and creativity.
Still, there were a couple of work-arounds. Weaving to the right, the teen dodged another sweeping knee from Yoruichi and managed to make eye contact before she blurred out of the way. "Karma," Harry intoned, and ethereal chains phased through the ground to lock her in place. They weren't real, he didn't have the raw power for solid illusions apart from things he was extremely familiar with.
His Shadows were one of them, however they still had the durability of wet tissue paper. But by making eye contact, Harry could have the target take on part of the strain for maintaining a pre-packaged illusion. With the additional trick of using that same method to sneak Cloud Flames across the link and increase gravity's hold on them, and while the blisteringly fast fighter wasn't actually being weighed down by the chains, she certainly felt otherwise.
Of course, that didn't matter much when your opponent could deadlift more than twenty times their own weight without effort. Yoruichi cracked the ground as she tore through the projected falsehoods, blurring into a jab that was barely parried with some careful use of Lightning and Sun.
A sudden intuition made Harry use Yoruichi's arm as a pivot point to flip over the speedster, narrowly avoiding Kisuke's blade. Landing and spying a loose rock on the ground, the Quincy charged it with energy, covering it in a purple aura before kicking the rock at them. It went wide, but that wasn't an issue as the second charge of Storm Flame turned it into a cloud of dust, disabling their sight.
Of course, Harry knew that they could disperse the cloud easily, so using the distraction he cracked the ground and turned the broken earth into a greater ocular hazard, before infusing the now-thick air with Lightning and Mist to strengthen and sense through the artificial fog.
"Very impressive, you weren't able to use combinations of more than two Elements yesterday but you've managed to double that today," a voice sounded behind him. On instinct he dragged all of the Lightning Flames to a field between his hands as Harry spun. The impromptu barrier held against the force of Kisuke's swing, but barely, the blonde's weapon carving though half of it before grinding to a halt.
The scientist's narrowed gaze over the top of his sword nearly caused Harry to forget that this was training, and that slip up as adrenaline rushed anew through his bloodstream let Yoruichi get in a mule-kick at his side. The teen was sent tumbling across the deadened ground, rolling to a stop just before he hit a boulder. Stumbling as he pushed up from the ground, Harry looked at his opponents.
Not a hair out of place. He knew that this training consisted of Harry getting his shit kicked in, but he thought he'd be able to put up a better fight considering they were in their base states, and wearing three layers of seals besides! Grumbling, Harry took a breath and a gamble, and closed his eyes. Across the field, the Shinigami duo watched curiously at what he was going to do.
(Play: End of an Era by Marianas Trench)
Raising his arms slowly, Harry crossed them and made as if to grab onto empty air. 'The beauty of the Flames is that they weren't meant to be mastered. The Sky is immeasurably huge, and to grasp even a portion of it is no small feat. The same can be said for the Elements it contains, every time someone thinks they have completely mastered the Sky, they will inevitably discover further reaches to explore.'
Sparks of Reiatsu started crackling across Harry's slightly opened fists, focussed around the gaps. First to appear was the typical light blue of a Quincy weapon, then royal purple, followed by golden yellow, sea blue, emerald, crimson and a heavy lilac. Last to manifest was a deep orange. 'When that realisation of their futility sinks in, there are two ways they will react. Either breaking with despair, or rejoicing at the infinite potential and freedom.'
A smirk played across his lips, as the energy gathering in both of Harry's hands grew brighter, swirling together to form shimmering rainbow outlines. 'And I think I just figured out which one I am.' Out loud, he only said, "Shrift, Neo R: the Resonance," and his fists blazed with orange fire, the constructs becoming solid; revealing them to be wicked looking combat knives.
A tongue of the same amber fire burst to life on Harry's forehead, and the teen opening his eyes revealed similar sparks travelling across his irises. "Ready for round two?" he snarked, before immediately ducking to the left as Yoruichi tried to blindside him with an axe kick. He let out a little hysterical giggle at the automatic Intuition. 'That's insane, it's able to predict Yoruichi… Sky Flames affect my instincts that much?'
Blasting a jet of Flames from his foot to launch upwards, Harry avoided an air pressure wave from Kisuke, before falling to the ground and having to engage both adults in close quarters. Diverting a swipe from Kisuke's cane sword, Harry kicked him in the chest to make distance and tried parrying the bare handed Yoruichi in turn, but forgot to account for his new weapons, the arc of his swing being too wide for anything but a punch.
As if in response to his need, his attacking hand's dagger dissolved into Flame, reforming as a lightly armoured gauntlet. The sudden change managed to finally knock his more physically inclined opponent back, just in time for Kisuke to try and immobilise Harry. There was no way for him to predict it, both the movement of the projectiles and the incantation were silent.
Despite this, Harry spun around, wrapping Flames around the trio of glowing yellow spikes. Continuing the rotation, he eventually let them fly back at their creator. The redirected Kido went wide, but that didn't matter when the surprise at such a manoeuvre had the bucket hatted blonde frozen in place regardless. Once he'd processed the counter, however, he smirked.
"Hoh, so the Sky's attribute of Harmony is strong enough to override and control attacks? And I thought the way it resonated his mind with the environment to make a pseudo-omniscience was scary!" Kisuke rambled in a way that conveyed he was both mocking and impressed. "Still, if he can handle us now, why don't we change that?"
The returning feral grin from his friend was all the man needed to release the seals on their raw physical abilities. "...It appears I've made a critical error," Harry muttered, before his own grin grew in response. "Ah well, in for a penny, in for a pound," he laughed, before jumping back into the fight with a yell!
Word count: 3360
Guess who finally managed a chapter, bitches! Time for a training arc!
In all seriousness, I wanted this entire thing out months ago, but some things weren't clicking, and it took a while to figure out what. For starters, I wanted all my major narratives at the time (Harry, Su, Blaise and Hermione in that order) in one super chapter, interweaving the scenes. But that wasn't working, not being able to get past the first scene loop.
Another was that I hadn't cemented the character's powers, not just with the perspective characters but everyone in the group. Hell, I wasn't even sure what I wanted in terms of the feel of my writing! It made figuring out where I want them to go difficult, and that held me up from getting further for a bit.
However, I finally have the first part of the Awakening arc ready, and that'll be taking up this and the next four chapters. Hopefully we have year one done by the next summer, and if I push myself I should have this minor arc done by the end of the calendar year. If it wasn't already obvious, I'm godawful at scheduling. Still, I hope those of you who read this train wreck of a series enjoyed, and will continue to enjoy.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to figure out how to write parkour. Which sounds easy, until you're doing it with a character whose work ethic resembles Izuku from Locked In Digital (good read BTW, over on AO3) complete with ripping themself apart under their own force.
Ja ne!