Last-chapter recap: The Harrys received a Moon Pearl from the Great Fairy Hora, got some of their gear tuned up, and set off to find passage into the Dark World. After hunting down a dismantled puzzle room left by the Hero of Lights, they found a weak point in the Veil and traveled through. Now, their mission is to navigate Light-poisoned London to power up their swords and destroy Vaati's power generator.

Content warning this chapter for a mention of past suicidal ideation, the use of a slur against people with intellectual disabilities, and a mention of animal death (because hunting is a thing in this fic).

Avoka shouldn't have been shocked that the Dark World version of his home had been decorated differently on the inside, but he couldn't help his mouth falling open in surprise when he strode through its huge entrance doors. From the outside it had looked extremely similar, if dreary and dingy and missing many decorations, but the inside…

What had they done with the place? Where were the great tapestries, the painted designs, the vivid statuary, and the polished floors? It looked like the castle had been left to decay for the better part of a millennium and then moved back into. The incredibly creepy moving portraits dotting the walls (as if portraits themselves weren't creepy enough!) and nonsensical sets of armor standing around didn't hide the fact that these people clearly didn't know how to treat a castle. And was that a rusty bracket he saw holding up a torch over there? Didn't these silly wizards know that rust could cause deadly lockjaw? Metal wasn't painted just to look pretty!

Someone snickered. "Look at his face as soon as he walked in! That's a version of Malfoy, alright."

The voice reminded Avoka of one he was somewhat acquainted with, but off. He glanced to the side. Oh, it was Roma—no, wait—

"Are you a boy?" he asked incredulously. Romani was proudly a girl who liked other girls and dressed like a boy for reasons that Link's big sister had explained made sense to women like them. This mage ("Ron", not "Rom", his memory supplied) was younger, flat-chested, scruffy-looking in a less-workmanlike way, and gawping at him like he'd said something utterly mad.

"What else would I be?" Ron sputtered. "A girl?"

"Well, yes," Avoka told him. "The Light World version of you is. Her name's Romani, and she works on a dairy farm near Castle Town." He saw her on occasion when he went to the Milk Bar to make attempts at socializing with other people his age. Unfortunately, without Link there to curb his worse impulses (because dairy made Link incredibly ill and also offended his touchy senses) or Maple to make him seem polite and normal by comparison (because the girl had even less free time than Avoka did), his attempts to build a wider friend group hadn't succeeded. Romani and Cremia sometimes gave him free milkshakes, though, if he used his knife-threatening and Royal Guard scariness to bounce rowdy drunks from the adult side of the bar out the door.

A few of the young mages standing by the castle entrance—Malon's lookalike and three of the kids with gray and green neckties—snickered as Ron's face went red. It immediately got Avoka's hackles up. While a younger sibling giggling at an older sibling's embarrassment wasn't unexpected, he recognized the nasty tinge to the amusement of the other students. He was sure they were some of those "pureblood" rich kids that Green had talked about Malfoy keeping company with.

The cluster of students in green ties was broken up by a girl with bushy brown hair shouldering her way through. She stuck out her hand for Avoka to shake, beaming despite the number of annoyed frowns being sent her way. "Hello, I'm Hermione Granger!" she greeted enthusiastically. "The Harrys have told us all about you. Is it true you can throw ordinary knives hard enough to pierce stone?"

It took Avoka a moment to figure out how to respond. People weren't generally excited to see him, Link being the main exception. Despite Avoka's genuine efforts to keep himself humble, other kids tended to view him as a bossy killjoy. "Erm, hi? I'm Avoka of Hateno." He shook the girl's hand. "And yes, I can do that. I just don't, generally, since people don't like me putting holes in their walls."

"Why are you dressed like a samurai ninja?" Malon's lookalike asked. "Seems rather hot for a day like this."

Why did these foreigners keep calling him a "ninja"? "I don't know what either of those words means," he said. "I'm a third-year Royal Guard trainee of the Central Kingdom Division. This is what younger castle sentries wear."

"Why d'you have so much hair?" one of the large boys in a gray-striped green cravat wanted to know. He looked oddly like the long-removed descendant of a Goron.

The boy next to him, who had a similar boulder-ish look, added, "Must be hard to keep track of all of it."

"Well, I cut it short enough not to sit on it, and it's usually tied up—" Avoka began, only to be hit by another question.

"Is your name short for 'avocado'?" inquired a short boy with densely curly hair and a sly, foxlike set to his mouth. He had the same gray and green tie as the last two.

"What's an avocado?" Avoka wondered, lost.

"Yeah, what's that?" asked one of the boulders.

Malfoy, who'd been standing off to the side with his face scrunched like he'd bitten into a green Wildberry, snapped, "Alright, you've all seen him! Now shove off! Go make fun of Weasley being a Hylian milkmaid here, for all I care! Shoo!" He pushed the two large boys, then the smaller one. The curly-haired boy didn't reproach him for the shove, instead grinning like he'd found a treasure trove of blackmail. Avoka recognized that look from dealing with Koume and Kotake.

Avoka put a hand on Malfoy's shoulder. The aristocrat bared his teeth in response—very Zora of him, but still pitifully unintimidating. "Now, now, Malfoy. No need to banish your friends. I came to meet them, after all," Avoka drawled, ignoring his alternate's reptilian hiss of displeasure. "You know, see what my double gets up to when he's in his own element and observe what kind of people he likes to surround himself with."

Malfoy's eyes narrowed suspiciously behind his dark green sunglasses. "What did the Potters tell you?" he demanded in a low growl.

Avoka smirked. It would show beyond his mask as a curl at the edges of his eyes. "Enough."

The Harrys had told him his double had grown up at the top of his society, well-ensconced in a grand and lonely family manor. They'd gone on to explain what they knew of wizarding racism, as well as the kinds of prejudice they were used to in the non-magical side of their world, and Avoka had been able to take an educated guess on Malfoy's background from there.

Malfoy's social group would have been tightly controlled, a small circle hand-picked by the adults around him. Everyone he interacted with would have spoken the same way about the same things, weaving a cocoon of "this is what the world is and how it should be" around him that disregarded the reality most others lived in. He would have grown up surrounded by walls of rules meant to ensure he represented himself and his pedigree in a way that made their societal superiority unquestionable among similarly important people. Such rules would have dictated what he could and couldn't wear, what he could and couldn't say, who he could and couldn't talk to, what kind of vocabulary and gestural language he reserved for whom, and so on. Those were the circumstances that had undoubtedly replicated themselves across worlds for two thirteen-year-olds with the same face.

The point at which their paths diverged was that Avoka had started fighting back once he'd become old enough to realize he was never going to be able to fit between all those invisible walls without wanting to throw himself down a long flight of stone stairs, while Malfoy had happily followed every rule and internalized every lesson without ever giving pause for independent thought. Avoka avoided being on thin ice with those who governed his life purely through having gained a sense of where he could push and where he had to concede; through long, patient campaigns of one step forward, three-quarters of a step back, he'd won small measures of freedom. He'd come close to breaking on many occasions, but he kept up the fight because it was the only way for him to keep living. Malfoy, by contrast, was a boy who, until his revealed heritage had forced him to reexamine some of what he'd been taught, had been a perfect, spineless puppet for his twisted parents.

With those realizations made, seeing this boy was like looking in a ghastly mirror of what-could-have-been. Avoka was glad that there were several things fundamentally wrong with himself; if not for the very flaws that made him a paranoid headcase and a future family embarrassment, he would have turned out like this kid. Of course, he didn't have evil parents who told him that anyone below his social level was a mere servant or a stepstool unworthy of his respect, but even the thought of rhyming with how Malfoy had turned out made a chill crawl up his spine.

"You came all the way out here just to waste your time hanging around Snakes?" Ron asked, drawing Avoka out of his thoughts. He sighed in disappointment. "I wanted to hear about what you've been teaching Harry. And what Link is like, maybe."

Malfoy's upper lip curled with disdain. "Bluesmith is just Potter, but a slow-talking, gullible retar—"

Avoka punched him in the throat.

Consequences and regret for his poor impulse-control were things that Later Avoka would deal with. What mattered was now.

As the wizard doubled over, choking and coughing, Avoka hauled him up by his collar and said in soft, dangerous tones, "Link isn't here to remind me to be nice, so I'd advise you to remember your manners for your own continued well-being." He thrust Malfoy backward with a look of disdain. One of the large boys caught him as the wizard stumbled. "Link is more intelligent than you or I, but even if he were a simple person, he would deserve the same measure of respect you ought to afford anyone else. Use that word for him or anyone in my presence again, and you'll receive more than a mere telling-off. I have little patience for bigotry."

He'd seen the kind of treatment that Link got from unsavory customers at his family's shop and certain jerks on the street. Most of those people, Avoka had threatened with his knives once Link wasn't watching. Despite his strength, Link was too sweet and gentle to defend himself. The day Avoka had met him, the ten-year-old vei had just been stomped into the ground by a group of boys who'd taken offense to the new skirt he'd gotten for his birthday. Link had been crying and confused, his forearms arms littered with defensive bruises and his knuckles correspondingly bare of any. Since his best friend was too nice to fight back, Avoka performed that duty himself. With pleasure.

The mages around him had gone silent and wide-eyed at his minor show of violence. "Erm," one of the boulders said. "Crabbe and I are, er, kind of supposed to protect him?"

Avoka drew a kunai out of his sleeve and twirled it through his fingers before stowing it away. "Do you wanna fight? Because fair warning: I've been training to handle these weapons since I was five and I might be better at dodging your spells than you are at dodging my knives."

The other large boy—"Crabbe", presumably—shook his head. "Nah, we're good! Thanks for the heads-up, though."

"You suddenly sounded a lot more like Malfoy when you got angry," the clever-looking, curly-haired boy remarked. "You wouldn't happen to share any family circumstances with him, would you?"

Avoka snorted, though inwardly he winced at his lapse. His grasp on his commoner dialect tended to slip when he got heated. "My parents died in the last attack on Hyrule, when I was a mere infant. My surname is 'of Hateno' because I'm an orphan from Hateno City. 'Avoka' just happened to be a Sheikah name one of my Hylian caretakers had heard before. The only thing I have in common with Malfoy is a guardian who can make babies cry with a look," he said. "Speaking of, Malfoy, how did the Dark World version of Commander Impa's evil cousin wind up being your godfather? He's not an infamous poisoner in your world?"

"He's our Potions professor, so close enough," said Ron. "Also, he's threatened to poison us with our own bad brews before."

Hermione glared disapprovingly. "You know he never would have gone through with it. He just makes threats to make us pay more attention to the instructions," she said. "Yes, he's not a pleasant person, but has he ever actually made us drink our own potions when they clearly aren't correct?"

Avoka thought back on the dour, dark-humored man who'd haunted the halls of Hyrule Castle in his earliest memories. His uncle had made macabre jokes and half-threats like that fairly often. Avoka had never been able to tell which ones had been more literal and seriously-meant than others. Given that the man had later been found out to have opened the doors to the monsters that had slain Avoka's birth mother and thrown smoke bombs full of poison gas into as many rooms as he could during the day of the attack, perhaps he'd just been bringing up more ideas he wanted to use later.

"This 'Snape' hasn't conducted any grand betrayals or sworn fealty to anyone called something along the lines of 'the King of Evil'?" he asked skeptically. Because that man had looked almost exactly like his uncle after he'd switched sides. Maybe the wizard didn't have to dye his hair like Kobu "Kobura" Takao did to blend in among the raven-haired Yiga, but he otherwise appeared like a strangely-dressed, dark-eyed Hylian version of the same man. Sour expression, suspicious air, and skulking posture included.

Malfoy went pale under his heavy make-up. All the other kids' eyes shot to him.

"Yeah, was Snape in business with the 'Dark Lord', Malfoy?" Ron asked with a raised eyebrow. "Because if anyone's got 'former Death Eater' written all over him, it's that git."

"Harsh teaching methods are no excuse to accuse someone of terrorism," Hermione admonished him. "Don't you know how serious that sort of thing is?"

Malfoy drew himself up with a put-on, pompous sniff that made Avoka raise an eyebrow. Ooh, how suspicious. "Professor Snape is a loyal ally of the Headmaster, Weasley," Malfoy declared. "Dumbledore would never keep a servant of the Dark Lord within his inner circle. Don't you think a wizard like him would be able to tell?"

Hermione nodded. "Exactly. Just because Professor Snape isn't a pleasant person, that doesn't make him evil."

"Mmhm. Right," Ron said. He and his sister shared a look.

"I think I'd like to see more of what he's like," Avoka remarked, glancing over his shoulder at the adults now streaming through the door. "Commander Impa doesn't want me sitting in on the big meeting, but is there a time I could see him after?"

"Knowing him, he'll probably seek you out first," Malfoy muttered, rubbing his throat. "And I'm going to tell him you're a Muggle brute who hit me."

The kids with green neckties recoiled from Avoka. "He's a Muggle?" the as-yet-unnamed large boy asked. From his tone, he might as well have said, "He's a cockroach?"

Avoka was briefly tempted to say he was a Muggle. Maybe he'd be able to teach the green-neckties to have some respect for the people they thought their magic made them superior to. But then again, these kids could be far enough up their own arses that they wouldn't listen to the words of a mere Muggle. Bigots were often unwilling to believe that those they looked down upon had anything of worth to say, and thus any defense those "lesser" people put up was often brushed aside. He'd seen such stubborn prejudice aimed at Link on several occasions.

Decision made, he flicked a knife into his hand and lit it up with his magic. The brilliant gold-white steel threw a glow across their faces. "Like Hermione said, I can embed knives in stone walls," he told the students, "and it's not just because I've got a great throwing arm. There's more to magic than staff-waving."

Impa's voice snapped against his ears. "Trainee, what did I tell you before we left the castle?"

Avoka jumped and nearly dropped the knife. He hurriedly shoved it back in its holster and spun around. "I'm still on my best behavior, ma'am! I was only showing these mages what Light World magic can look like."

His aunt gave him a doubtful look. "If I see you waving around a blade in this castle again, you can consider your holsters confiscated until further notice."

A burning blush rose in Avoka's cheeks as he felt eyes drill into his back. "Yes, Commander. I'll be careful."

"I'll hold you to that promise, Trainee." She continued down the hall with the other adults.

The foxlike boy smirked at Avoka in a way that made the back of his neck prickle. "Knife-waving is a problem with you, is it?"

"No more than threatening to curse someone is for Malfoy," Avoka countered. Green had told him that non-magical people, which the average Dark World mage would consider him most similar to, were commonly characterized as violent and uncivilized by the kinds of mages who believed in blood purity. "Magic Rods are just as much weapons in your hands as blades are in mine."

"Ninja Malfoy's a knife-wizard," not-Malon whispered to her brother, which set them both to giggling.

Avoka put his hands on his hips. "My magic works on all projectiles, not just knives. Arrows are overkill and a clattering sack of pebbles is hard to sneak around with, so throwing knives and needles it is." He turned to stare down the kids in green cravats. "Well? Am I magic enough to associate with you Greenies for an afternoon?"

Ron laughed, while Malfoy rubbed his temples. "We're Slytherins," Malfoy sighed with great exasperation. "The House of ambition."

"That's nice," Avoka said. "What's a 'House', if not a building?"

"Merlin help me," Malfoy groaned.

Hermione swooped in front of Avoka, buzzing with excitement. It reminded him of Link's bubbly glee when someone asked him about spell-crafting or the annual number of deaths caused by improper Hookshot operation. "Well, our school is divided into four groups called 'Houses'. Each represents a particular personality trait, and you can tell who's in which by the colors on our ties," Hermione explained. "Slytherin for ambition, Gryffindor for courage, Hufflepuff for the hard-working, and Ravenclaw for the erudite! Slytherin is green and gray, Gryffindor is red and gold, Hufflepuff is black and yellow, and Ravenclaw is blue and bronze. Oh, and there are animals! In order: a snake, a lion, a badger, and a raven."

Avoka looked down at the hand the girl had latched onto his arm in her enthusiasm. Again, it was quite unexpected for someone to be so pleased to talk to him. Surreal, even! Most people had a natural aversion to touching a uniformed agent of the Royal Guard who casually made weapons appear and vanish in his hands and had a demonstrated tendency toward violence.

He was starting to get a little lost trying to follow this new and unexpected kind of social interaction. What was he supposed to do when the peers he was talking to weren't Maple, Link, a version of himself, or weirded out by him? If they weren't planning to beat him up (like his classmates), argue with everything he said and impose their will upon him (like his parents), or deploy the nearest excuse to make him go away (like pretty much everyone else), then what other paths could a conversation take?

Taking a leaf out of Link's book could work. The blacksmith was very good at getting other people to talk, emanating a sense of being a patient, calm, and nonjudgmental ear to blather at. When Link wanted to set Avoka to rambling so he had background noise for whatever activity he was doing, he'd just ask a question about something his friend would want to go on about and poke him with prompts every now and then when the tempo of the words started slowing down.

"…I only know what two of those animals are," Avoka chose to declare, forcing the uncertainty out of his voice. Even if he wasn't sure where he was going here, the best policy was to put up a confident front and pretend his actions were informed and intentional. If people couldn't see him floundering, then he wasn't floundering at all! "What are lions and badgers? And ninja, for that matter? Could you explain?"

That sparked a shocked round of "you don't know?!" from his audience, just as planned, and then the mages carried the rest of the conversation for him.

Blue sat on the ground, watching his hand with fascination as he slowly waved it through the air. In the shadow of the car he and his brothers were huddled behind, they had all become composed of the same half-solid smoke as Shadow Harry. It wafted off of his skin and clothes in mesmerizing swirls with every movement.

Green nudged him. "Focus, Blue. I need you to help me with tactical stuff." He was peering around the car, down the riverbed.

Red poked his head out under Green's. "Tactics where?" he scoffed. "It's a group of Moblins barely bigger than Bokoblins and way dumber. We can kill those, easy."

"For the third time, Red, we don't have magic," Green said with annoyance. "All we've got are our swords and our tools."

Red shrugged. "Just pretend we're back in one of the first four dungeons we did and fight like we had to back then."

"On top of the fact that we can't use our magic, we're going to start having the life sucked out of us as soon as we step back out into the Light," Blue reminded him. "We'll hardly be able to move!"

"Do you think stealth could work?" Yellow asked. "Sneaking from shadow to shadow until we get to the generator?"

Green shook his head. "To break the eyes that Shadow Harry saw around the generator, we'll need to have our swords powered up. That means slaying monsters for Force Gems."

Blue leaned out over Green and Red to survey the area ahead. "Yellow's suggestion holds some merit," he said. "I think maintaining a measure of stealth would be wise."

Their goal, the generator flinging those blinding ropes of energy into the yellow sky, lay at the end of the riverbed, about a kilometer away. It was a kilometer filled with hulking Moblins, cackling Wizzrobes, scuttling Octoroks, and bobbling Buzz Blobs. A few shadowy Keese fluttered around like wayward Halloween decorations, perching on wrecked and abandoned cars.

Blue's main worry was the Moblins. Those monsters were still a challenge, and he doubted they would stop being one no matter how skilled the Harrys became with their swords. Moblins were big, brutal, magic-resistant, and capable of devastating hits both armed and unarmed at close range; they were essentially the opposite of wizards. The Harrys' best tactic for fighting them without magic involved speed, and if they were being pummeled into the ground by magical radiation, they wouldn't have much of that on hand.

He pressed his fingers against his temples as he thought. "What if…What if we lured the Moblins to where we can fight them?" he asked Green. "Like the shadow of that building over there." He pointed past Green's shoulder at an appliance store sitting at an ominous tilt in the mud of the basin. That angle gave it a sizeable silhouette under the toxic light beaming from the sky—enough that a couple of Harrys could fight without running into each other if they kept a close eye on the boundaries of the tight battlefield.

Green nodded. "You and Yellow can pick off the smaller monsters with arrows, while Red and I handle the Moblins."

Blue bit the inside of his cheek. While he didn't want to fight Moblins (or Lizalfoses, or any color of Bokoblin that wasn't red) without magic, he didn't appreciate Green deciding that for him. "I am capable of close-range combat, you know," he groused. "I've got all the same skills as Red!"

"Yeah, but you suck at using them 'cause you never practice like I do," Red said.

Blue ground his knuckles into the top of his brother's head. "It's not like you've been the one doing weapons training with Avoka! You just go out in the woods, pick up everything your hands land on, and offload a bunch of gross stuff into my bag when you get back. I found out you stuck a dead pigeon in there two days ago!" He'd been reaching into his magic satchel for his wallet, gotten distracted by the sight of a pigeon strutting among Cuccos on the street, and wound up with his hand brushing across an unexpected lump of feathers.

"A dead pigeon?" Yellow asked, horrified. "Red, did you kill a poor bird?"

"You managed to hit a pigeon?" Green asked, impressed. "How far away were you?"

"Yes, Yellow, I killed a bird so Link could show me how to turn it into food. That's where the cottage pie he made came from, by the way. If we're gonna be in the wilderness, I reckon at least one of us should know how to hunt and handle game," Red answered. "And I was like fifteen yards away while it was pecking around the ground, Green. Pigeons are way easier to sneak up on than deer." He raised an elbow behind him and nudged Blue in the side. "Do you still want to fight the Moblins? Because I'll let you do it instead of me, sure, but it's probably better that Violent Harry does the up-close fighting and Smart Harry does the shooting."

"I'd say you aren't 'Violent Harry', because that's kind of a mean thing to call yourself, but you shot a pigeon when there's a grocery store down the street from the inn," Yellow grumbled.

"I saved us thirty Rupees for a whole bird! Meat is expensive, and we'll need a lot of it if we want to get buff," Red said unrepentantly.

"Violent Harry can handle the Moblins," Blue relented. "Come along, Yellow. Let's find a better vantage point to shoot from."

Blue and Yellow slunk from shadow to shadow, skittering through areas of light like spooked mice. Leaving the darkness felt like taking a bat to the chest. It knocked the air out of Blue's lungs and pushed him off balance, weighing down the entirety of his being with its obnoxious self-righteousness.

"I…am not…evil," he panted as he dragged his aching carcass into the shaded confines of a ransacked boutique. He didn't need purifying, dammit!

The inside of the shop, being a patch of darkness and safety, was painted in shades of black. When Blue and Yellow conjured their Magic Lamps, they barely pierced the harsh shadows. A chaotic room full of strewn clothing, broken mannequins, and overturned racks was reluctantly revealed in twilit shades of yellow and violet.

Blue leaned down and started picking through the patchy layer of clothes covering the floor. All of this stuff would be a write-off anyway, as damaged as it was, and he'd like to have a few nice shirts and trousers that fit him—

Yellow hooked an arm around him and half-carried him toward the stairs. "Stealing is bad, Blue. Besides, our brothers are waiting on us to help," he said sternly.

"It's not like I'd get caught, if the owners are in the Shadow Realm!" Blue protested. "Besides, what are Muggle clothes-sellers going to do with monster-trampled merchandise? They can't legally sell it, I'm sure, since they can't magically clean and fix it, so why can't I take some before it goes to the dump?"

Yellow rolled his eyes and sighed heavily. "Alright, setting aside the fact that stealing is bad, our brothers are waiting on us," he said, tugging on Blue's arm. "Come on. You can go looting once we've cleared the monsters some."

They went up some stairs, unlocked a "Personnel Only" door with a quick Alohomora, and wound their way through the upstairs offices until they found a couple of windows facing in the direction of a cluster of monsters. After prying them open, Blue and Yellow conjured their bows and got to work.

Blue aimed at bigger targets, leaving the trickier shots to Yellow. Drawing back an arrow, he sighted a Wizzrobe hovering over the sunken roadway. It caught the projectile right where its spine would have been with an echoing squawk of surprise. When it whirled around and vanished, Blue readied another arrow while he waited for it to appear. Then—a shot to the head! The Wizzrobe crumpled in the air and sank toward the ground. He hit it with another few arrows while it was down, and the monster vanished in a cloud of smoke.

Yellow picked off two Keese with one arrow, then killed a Buzz Blob with two hits. A Moblin went down in five rapid strikes—two to the head and three to the chest. Yellow pursed his lips and lowered his bow. "Hmm. I don't know about this," he said, with a frown. "Arrows don't do a lot of damage on their own, and it's not like we have infinity of them." He summoned up his bag and rummaged around in it.

Blue attempted to hit a Keese, but the zippy little shadows were harder to get a bead on than the heavier-built flying eyeballs in the Light World. His arrow landed in someone's shattered windshield instead. Ah, well. At least it had already been broken. "What's your idea for remedying that?" he asked. "Arrow Spells aren't going to cut it if we need to save our magic for when it really counts."

Taking out one of the bottles of Exploding Solution that Fred and George had foisted upon them before they'd left, Yellow uncorked it and sat it on the floor. The bottle looked strange in the shadowy dark, the faint luminosity of the potion within making the glass and a small patch of the floor around it look twilit and solid. "Don't knock this over," Yellow warned as he dipped an arrow in the potion. "It'll definitely set us on fire, and maybe blow us up." He nocked the dipped arrow and aimed at another Moblin. "Let's see what this stuff can do!"

Yellow fired. The arrow became a glowing red streak, then hit the Moblin in a plume of brilliant rainbow flames. As the fire caught on the monster's skin, it shifted to a more natural orange-yellow. With a wild toss of its lantern, the Moblin started slapping at itself to put the fire out. Yellow watched the creature suffer with a shrewd look on his face.

"I think the trade-off with this is more damage in exchange for not being able to collect our arrows if we miss," he reported. "I'm going to take that bet." He dipped another arrow in the bottle and took aim. This time, a yellow Wizzrobe went up in flames just before it completed one of its summoning spells. While the bird frantically flapped its arms/sleeves (Blue wasn't quite sure what was what, there) to put them out, Yellow took it down with two more arrows to the head.

"You're ruthless with a bow," Blue remarked. He liked being able to slay monsters from afar, but he vastly preferred using magic to do it. A bow required more patience and better aim.

Yellow's brows pinched together. "Am I?" he asked worriedly. "Should I tone it down?"

Blue raised his bow and nocked an arrow. "Think of it like this: do you think a Moblin would care if it killed you?" He took aim at the one Yellow had set alight. "Do you think they feel guilty about killing travelers, or would stop and consider their decisions before clubbing a child to death?"

Yellow scrunched his nose. "That's really dark, Blue."

"Would they, though, do you think?"

"…No, I guess not."

"Then feel free to show them the same mercy they would show you." Blue nailed the Moblin in its forehead and pumped his fist as the monster toppled. Having been previously weakened, its form dissolved into smoke. "Yes, headshot at thirty meters! I wish Red were here to see that." Switching out his bow for his Magic Rod, Blue used a Summoning Charm to gather all the dropped Force Gems to him. He unsheathed his sword and waved it around the pile of triangles that had flown through the window and scattered on the floor. A pleasant zing ran through his arm as they jumped into the blade.

Yellow sighed and lit a Buzz Blob on fire, which caused the monster to discharge all of its electricity at once and blow apart into greenish yellow jelly. "Killing things isn't a game, you know."

"Killing these things is, and I intend to win." Blue conjured his Bomb Bag, took out an explosive, and chucked it out the window. The bomb rolled over to a wrecked car being savaged by Moblins before blowing up. A spectacular explosion went off as the vehicle's gas tank lit up a split-second after the bomb. Blue winced at the noise, but cheered at the sight of four Moblins vanishing into smoke. "Three cheers for destructive efficiency!" he crowed.

Yellow's jaw dropped in horror. "That was somebody's CAR!"

"Pfft, that car was a 'was' before I got to it."

Harry stepped into and ducked under a strike from the Moblin, using his raised buckler to redirect the monster's arm. He swiped his sword twice across the man-sized creature's broad chest and hit it with a quick jab before hopping back.

Not for the first time, he thumped shoulders and elbows with Red. They cursed in unison. The fighting style that Avoka had been drilling into Green for individual combat against monsters larger than Bokoblins ate up more space than they'd realized. It consisted of keeping one's distance and avoiding the monster's longer-reaching attacks until there was an opening to land a flurry of sword strikes. Because each separate Harry was, in the Sheikah's words "too wimpy to block, too clumsy to dodge anything tricky, and too tiny to have reach", their best bet for fighting a Moblin solo at their current skill level was staying back far enough for most attacks to miss, thus forcing the creature to adjust its footing. That lunge forward or roar of annoyance would give a singular Harry the opportunity to counter with his greater speed and launch an attack of his own.

At a mental jangle of danger from behind him, Harry dove to the side. There was a whoosh of air accompanied by a grunt, clang, and dull throb of pain in his arm as Red turned aside a heavy blow.

"You know dodging is an option, right?" Harry asked. The Moblin he was fighting raised its spear, and Harry jerked to the left to avoid a quick jab.

"I'm a fighter, not a gnat!" Red countered. A meaty thud and a squealing howl marked the death of his fourth opponent. "Also, you can't deny that fighting the dumb way works."

Harry conjured his whip into his shield hand and attempted for the second time to break his target's stubborn grip on its weapon. The monster yanked its spear free of the wooden fingers, sending Harry stumbling forward, and stabbed at him. Harry dropped to all fours to avoid catching a spearhead to the chest, then aimed his whip at one of the monster's legs. The weapon caught one narrow ankle and ripped the Moblin's right hoof out from under it. As the monster fell backwards, Harry dropped his sword, switched out his weapon for the Dragon Hammer, and pounded the Moblin into the mud. When it vanished into smoke, a Moblin-shaped depression was left in the river basin with a dark, rainbow-pulsing crystal sphere at the center.

"That was my fifth," was all he said to Red.

His brother's face fell. "And you haven't had to heal yet?"

Red had had to eat two of the truffle-flavored, vegetable-stuffed Sheikah oyaki that Link had made for them and taught them how to cook for this trip. He'd needed one for a broken left forearm and another for a few broken ribs.

"Nope," Harry replied. He used his sword to smash open the crystal and ran around to collect the blue and green Force Gems it showered everywhere.

Red picked up a broken chunk of brick and hefted it. "Dammit. I wish I were strong enough to fight the way I want to," he grumbled before pitching the stone at the back of a passing Moblin's head. The Moblin turned and pointed at him with an offended squeal.

"I'm getting there," Harry defended. "Link keeps feeding me for some reason, and Avoka said he was going to start having me focus on muscle-building and flexibility after I got my sword and bow skills up to a decent level."

They both jumped out of the way as the Moblin charged into the shadows with its spear held out like a lance. Once the monster was in their domain, Harry distracted it by cracking his whip at its weapon and Red hit it with a flurry of sword slashes.

"That makes it five and five!" Red crowed once the monster had turned to smoke. "We're even now!"

Harry huffed good-humoredly. "Alright, sure," he said. There were few things his brother took more seriously than his fighting prowess. "I think that takes care of all the Moblins in this area, too. We'll have to find a new shadow to fight from."

Red clucked his tongue and peered around, the faint scarlet lights of his eyes swinging back and forth across the shadowy mass that was his head. "That's going to suck."

The river bed was littered with all sorts of debris, some of it easily large enough for the Harrys to duck behind. In theory, there was plenty of cover to protect them from the glaring yellow sky. In practice, however, even one step into that light was almost paralyzing, and every step that followed the first came slower as the weight of the world bore down on them. Five steps was an eternity—particularly for Harry, who had a harder time enduring the Light than his brothers for some reason.

Harry stood at the edge of the large, square shadow he and Red had been battling monsters in. Thanks to Blue (it had definitely been Blue) blowing up the nearest car, the next patch of darkness was ten yards away, under the crown of a scorched, beaten, formerly manicured city tree lying on the ground. As for the next battleground, that would be the shadow of a Chinese restaurant partially sunk into the river muck a discouraging fifty or so yards away.

Three Wizzrobes, two Buzz Blobs, and a swarm of Fire Keese barred their path, all of them out of shooting range. At this point, Harry could hit what he aimed for often enough within a distance of thirty meters, but his aim became more miss than hit beyond that unless he spent a minute or so to line up each shot perfectly. And even then, he could muck up his compensation for factors like wind, distance-to-height-to-speed, target motion, and so on at that distance. Though Blue had made him part with two hundred Rupees so the great Fairy Hora could lay a blessing on their bows, the fairy had only been able to improve the power of the weapon's shots, not the distance a children's bow was capable of or Harry's decent-for-a-beginner aim. He and Red would have to fire at those monsters from a closer vantage point or attack at close range with their swords if they didn't want to waste their limited ammo.

Nervous jitters danced in Harry's hands. There was a part of him—a part that felt almost foreign in its emotion—that was deathly terrified of stepping back out into the purifying Light. It had taken him some time to identify and he couldn't explain why, but the feelings seemed to radiate from his throbbing scar. In fact, the whole right side of his forehead was puffy and hot from the force of his scar's silent screaming, the pain radiating deeper to pound in his temples and curl around his right eye. Red's scar wasn't having any reaction to the magical atmosphere whatsoever, beyond an echo of Harry's pain, so they figured it must have had something to do to whoever was holding the real Four Sword. It was a rather inconvenient allergic reaction to have, Harry thought. Like the yellow sky trying to burn the life out of him wasn't bad enough!

Still, he forced himself to leave the cool safety of the shadows. A shocked huff of air rushed out of him as the Light World's judgment rammed against his body from all sides. Unlike the pain of activating spell scrolls, the sharp fire and deep ache of being stabbed, or the blinding disorientation of catching a Bokoblin club to the skull, there was no way to mentally adjust to this pain. It cut straight to the core of his being in its crusade to stamp him out.

"Hate this, hate this, hate this," he chanted under his breath as he skirted around the burning car between him and the next pool of darkness. Each step was so heavy it knocked through his knees and rattled his hip joints. He couldn't keep up his chanting for long because each breath soon became too precious to waste.

He dragged himself under the raised trunk of the fallen tree once he reached it. The sight of hundreds of pounds of wood suspended over him by nothing but the resistance of the half-crushed crown wasn't enough to unnerve him at this point. If he got squashed, he got squashed. Whatever. At least he wasn't in the oven anymore.

Red scooched in next to him before long. "I don't know…how much harder…that could've sucked," he said between gasps of air. "Wow."

"I think I'd rather the sky was raining arrows than doing what it's doing," Harry agreed tonelessly.

They rolled onto their bellies, then army-crawled to the wider, patchier section of shade under the sagging, creaking crown of the tree. Spots of glaring yellow light slid across Harry's shadowy arms, burning temporary solid streaks into his robe sleeves and the flesh underneath. Ignoring the unpleasant sensation, he holed himself under a cluster of thick branches and conjured his bow. From here, there were a few more monsters he could reach.

Harry targeted enemies that, while not easier to hit, were less likely to turn around and chase him if they didn't die from the first arrow. With the safe area under the tree as tight as it was, he couldn't afford a fight here. Octoroks, Buzz Blobs, and Keese disappeared in puffs of smoke. He felt a little bad using up arrows on small-fry when there were monsters like Moblins and Wizzrobes who'd drop much bigger rewards. 'Every little bit counts,' he thought in an attempt to appeal to his own stinginess. Once he'd shot all that he could, he cast a Summoning Charm to bring the scattered Force Gems to him. Using magic when part of him was exposed to the Light felt like a kick to the ribs. One would think he'd tried picking up a boulder instead of a handful of little blue and green triangles!

"You done on your side?" he called behind him to Red.

"Yeah, I figure," his brother said. "What's the next checkpoint, Boss?"

Harry led the way to the scant shadows cast by a lamppost and a city trash can, then behind an abandoned cab, then to the sinking restaurant. He fell to his knees once he'd become black smoke again, struggling to catch his breath. Spots swam in his eyes. Terrifyingly, his energy seemed to keep draining despite the fact that he'd reached safety. Wasn't the darkness supposed to protect him?

Red's voice buzzed in and out of his ears like an announcement coming through a faulty train station speaker. "…out there, still. Moblin…Looks like…stuck. Hold on, Green."

"Whaa?" Harry asked hazily.

Red ran out into the sun. "Be right back!"

The vacuum sucking at Harry's chest suddenly intensified. He gasped for air that didn't reach his lungs, clawing muddy furrows in the riverbed as he fought to breathe. A ringing began in his ears, then swelled into a pulsing roar. His vision went white—

"—hell happened to you, Green?"

A multitude of hands pried him up from the mud and held him vertical. Harry lolled in their grasp, too tired to resist. His lungs hit him with a demand for air that no amount of exhaustion could stop, and his aching chest automatically swelled to comply. All the while, the inside of his head felt like TV static.

"Hey, Green, can you hear us?" A dark shape reached out and made a popping noises in front of Harry's nose.

Harry blinked. The emptiness in his chest was a little less now. Something had trickled in to fill it. With that small return of essence, his ability to think was coming back to him. For a scary moment there, though, his mental radio had lost its signal. His thoughts had all become blank gray noise.

"Green?" Golden eyes stared at him worriedly from a shifting, hazy face.

"…I can think again," Harry said. He laid a hand over his chest. A tight hollowness seemed to rest there. Like he'd harmlessly swallowed a potion bottle and it had lodged somewhere near his heart. Within that hollow, a pittance of his missing something swirled around.

"What happened to you?" Blue asked. "Why did you collapse if you were already in the shadows? They're safe zones, aren't they?"

"I think I know what happened," Yellow said, his voice soft and heavy with guilt. "It was us, Blue. When we got held up fighting that Moblin on the way over here. We wasted time out under the sky."

"Why would that hit Green, though?" Red wondered. "Neither of you got hurt, so it couldn't be the shared-pain thing. I didn't feel it, either."

"Green's magic is what half-repaired the Four Sword," Yellow told him. "If he hadn't picked up it would have broken completely, and if he didn't have magic it might have killed him trying to make its spell work. Either way, I don't think it would have been able to multiply him with whatever juice it had left." He gestured toward himself, Red, and Blue. "Since he's partly powering the spell, that means when something drains the magic out of us, it's also draining that out of Green. Our magic is Green's magic."

A set of grayish yellow eyes appeared in the darkness behind Yellow. "Yes, that's exactly right!" Shadow Harry proclaimed, clapping his hands together. "Too bad that should have been blatantly obvious to all of you from the start."

Harry grimaced. He hated to admit it, but the spirit was right. Symptoms like splitting sickness and the potential lethality of storing the Four Sword in a Bag of Holding were unique to him for a reason. The other bearers of the same sword hadn't had to deal with such things. Why? Because they'd been Muggles wielding a youthful and functional Four Sword instead of a wizard whose magic was being used as makeshift fuel for an exhausted, dimensionally-rattled, incredibly old weapon. Some of the strain had been taken off of him by adding a power crystal to the blade, but Harry wasn't off the hook yet. He ought to have anticipated that being a factor in this kind of situation.

"We'll be more careful," he said, pushing himself up onto unsteady feet. As long as he stayed in the darkness, his magic would return to him in time. He was glad for that; if he could help it, he'd rather not get flipped back into Shadow Harry's natural plane of existence anytime soon. Even if his magic would recover more quickly there, being in that place felt like having his heart and stomach stuck in his throat as he fell up toward the ground. The looming void of a sky, a perfect canvas for his new fears to paint themselves across, didn't help either.

"You'd better, because I'm fed up with helping for today," Shadow Harry huffed. "Next time we see each other, I hope it's because I'm trying to kill you again. Things have been getting too cozy between us lately." He crossed his arms with annoyance and faded into the sooty blackness underfoot.

Yellow's face fell. "He's going to throw monsters at us again?" he said. "But what's wrong with being nice? I mean, he got us Christmas presents and everything!"

"He's a dark spirit, Yellow. Being nice is probably as hard for him as being mean is for you," Red told him. "I, for one, hope he's finally gonna let us sword-fight him soon."

Harry pressed his lips together. Part of his sword training with Avoka involved short bouts of sparring—short, because he couldn't match the Sheikah's rapid strikes and footwork well enough to last long. Avoka was someone with a true talent for blades. Mostly small, short ones, but he could maneuver the lightweight wooden swords they used during lessons with as much skill as he could a set of daggers. Harry was lumbering and clumsy by comparison, slowed down by trying to remember katas, where to use what, and how to string them together. His swordsmanship was either at the same artless level as beating something with a sharp stick or strictly textbook, with little in-between. At this point, his biggest issue, aside from being in the process of building muscle and endurance, was a lack of natural affinity for sword-wielding. He was improving his flow and familiarity with the Four Sword, but training with a teacher had given him a clearer perspective of his skill level. Where he'd once been ignorantly confident that he could run up to Vaati and slay the former Minish like a common Octorok, he now knew better.

He decided against popping Red's bubble for now. Informing Red he was worse at combat than he thought would only start a nasty argument. If Shadow Harry decided to toy with them soon in a test of their current skills, his brother would be taught his lesson then. Red was someone who learned best by doing, anyway.

As if sensing Harry's restraint, Blue decided to say what he hadn't. "Shadow would mop the floor with you, Red," he sneered. "However skilled you think you are, halve it and you'd be closer to the truth. That goes for all of us."

Red puffed out his chest. "He might kick your arse, but some of us actually bother doing sword practice," he declared. "That's why Green puts me out front in fights, while you and Yellow go to the back."

Harry put his face in his hands. Oh no.

"Being able to stab something real good isn't everything there is to a battle!" Blue snapped, stepping closer to Red. "Green knows that long-range combat is far more effective against Hyrule's monsters than matching their brutish tactics one to one."

Red leaned forward to get in Blue's face. "Then why does Green fight next to me, huh? Maybe it's like he understands what the Four Sword is for, innit? After all, our magic is peanuts compared to what our weapons can do."

"The Four Sword can't pitch a Moblin off a cliff!"

"But it sure can kill the thing so we get its guts and money!"

Yellow hopped in to pry them apart. "Both of you are good at different things! It's okay to be different!" he cried. "We're all valuable in different ways. Magic skills, stabbing, shooting—if we all work together, we can combine what we're best at!"

As his brothers' bickering became a match of name-calling interspersed with Yellow's attempts to calm things down, Harry walked up to the edge of the large shadow they stood in and started scouting enemies. He conjured his bag and took a bottle of Exploding Solution out of it. If Red and Blue wanted to fight, then fine. He'd give them something more productive to work their anger out on.

Summoning his bow and quiver, Harry dipped an arrow in the potion and took aim at a yellow-hooded Wizzrobe nearby. Those monster-summoning monsters were the biggest pains in the arse that this riverbed had to offer, as well as one of the biggest payouts of Force Gems: the perfect distraction. Harry landed an arrow between the Wizzrobe's shoulders, grinning when the giant toucan whirled toward him with a squawk. A swarm of Fire Keese was soon sent in their direction, followed by their cackling conjurer.

"Hey, guys!" Harry announced as he dipped another arrow and aimed his bow at a Moblin. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure his brothers were looking, then fired. His arrow stuck in the monster's thigh and colorfully exploded, knocking the Moblin to its knees. Recovering quickly, the creature went into a charge toward him with its spear held out in front of it. "Looks like we're going to have company!"

Red and Blue shoved one another away before going to stand behind Yellow in a V-shaped formation. "Way to change the subject, Green," Red groused.

"Very clever," Blue grumbled with heavy sarcasm.

Harry shrugged and tucked the potion bottle back into his bag. "Yeah, I thought it was." He conjured the Dragon Hammer as the Moblin approached and turned its spear aside with a twirl of the long-handled weapon. As the monster's charge turned into a redirected stumble, he followed up with a swing of the hammer toward its center mass. The Moblin fell on its arse and skidded backwards through the mud. Harry drew his sword and clove it down through the swarm of flaming bats now swooping upon them. "Now, let's clean this place out!"

Notes:

-The differences about the castle that Avoka is noticing is Hyrule Castle is a contemporary, lived-in Medieval building. It's constantly being scrubbed down and fixed up, and is decorated like the palace it is. Alnwick Castle, where the HP movies were filmed, is an ancient building that has intentionally been allowed to look its age. Hogwarts is technically younger than the Ship of Theseus that is Hyrule Castle, but it's been allowed to settle onto its old bones for longer.

-The Milk Bar, in this "era", is a business made up of two halves. One is an alcohol-serving bar supplied with mostly apple and rice-based booze, while the other side is like a Medieval soda shop with milk-based drinks/desserts and fruit juice cocktails for under-seventeens and sober adults.

-I'm hoping that at this point, some readers have noticed certain glaring inconsistencies in Avoka's internal and external dialogue regarding his backstory. Is Impa his aunt, or is she just the government agent looking after him until he turns seventeen? Does he have parents or not? Why would Link say that his friend has an adoptive sister who wears only pink clothes? If Avoka of Hateno doesn't have a registered family tree and was found as a nameless orphan, why does he know the names of ancestors famous enough to be spoken of millennia after their deaths? If he was raised in an orphanage and then taken in by Impa to be trained as a castle guard, how would he have found the time to experience a suffocating aristocratic upbringing similar to Malfoy's? What high-society pedigree does he keep thinking about, anyway?

-In this fic-verse, an HP mage grows stronger the more they use their magic, deepening their power reserves and increasing their recovery time after heavy casting. Since Harry is burning a high level of magic just by existing as four people right now, let alone fueling the spells all of them cast, his power level is going to shoot through the roof once the Four Sword lets him off the hook. For better and worse.

Next month: It's a chapter of "Oops! All Malfoys!" Draco and Avoka butt heads as the young Royal Guard agent gets to the bottom of how any version of him could turn out like THAT.