Last chapter before the boss fight! It's Miniboss Time~

Spoilers for the squeamish: this chapter features a fight that's a bit like BOTW Link springing up from his coma and running out to slay a black-level monster with a Traveler's Sword. Harry at this point does have some sword skills, but he's currently wearing a T-shirt and swim trunks and instead of HP/hearts, he has actual sword wounds inflicted upon his fragile meat body. This battle will be one of those with a more drastic injury. Please skip the two paragraphs starting with "You really were" and ending in "finger-painting session" if blood makes you queasy. Harry is going to learn a valuable lesson about the usefulness of armor and shields today.

Content warning for dissociation, mild gore (no guts or anything), and severe injury.

Tingling, stabbing pain erupted in Harry's arm and made his hand go numb. He massaged it with a grimace, and not for the first time. Hitting the electrified water, he'd learned upon regaining consciousness, was the equivalent of being struck by lightning. His hand had only brushed the surface after Hermione's Levitation Charm had caught him, and yet he'd awoken with branching electric burns going up his arm. According to Hermione, it was dumb luck his heart hadn't stopped, since the burns traced a clear path to his chest.

He placed a hand over his heart, which ached in a way he had initially found alarming and now just added to his emotional exhaustion. His body could keep on going, thanks to the temple giving him just enough energy to continue moving his heavy limbs, but his mind was ready for a week-long nap in the coziest blanket nest he could construct. His eyes glazed over at the sight of the next electrified stretch of water. It just never ended. They were on the fourth floor of the tower, but it felt like the tenth. He wasn't even afraid when he looked at the liquid lightning anymore, just tired. His head was lifting off into that numb place it had gone after he'd come back from the sea caves, and he had half a mind not to catch it before it flew away.

"Green?"

At the sound of Yellow's voice, the building mental static faded into background noise. Harry shook himself slightly and looked at his brother. "Yeah?"

Yellow peered at him closely. "You've been staring into space for a couple of minutes now. Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," he said, treading on the end of Yellow's question. It was one his brother had asked at least five times so far. Harry knew he wasn't fine, but he couldn't afford to be useless. If he broke down now, the cursed rain wouldn't stop and the countryside would drown. He was a stand-in, but he was the only Hero around. Even though wasn't the one meant to find the Four Sword (because Harry certainly didn't think he was a good fit for the role of fighting a reality-warping god), he and his brothers were the only people with the power to break Vaati's spell. In order for all four of him to do their best, Harry needed to keep his head on straight and set a good example, even if his brain was busy trying to float off like a balloon.

Yellow put a hand on his shoulder. "You're not okay," he declared. "You should sit down."

Harry rolled his eyes and brushed his brother's hand away. "I'm not that injured. Hermione healed my burns."

"That's not what I'm talking about." Yellow's eyes bored into him with a level of intensity he reserved only for his siblings. "We both know you and Hermione shouldn't be here right now. So why don't you sit and rest for a moment?"

Harry's lips pressed together. He knew why Blue had put Yellow in his group rather than pairing him with Ron; it was because Blue had wanted Yellow to call him out. Ron just needed support, not someone to see through the false smile on his face. In a circumstance that didn't involve saving Hogwarts and the surrounding area from a Biblical rainstorm, Harry wouldn't have minded. However, having someone put a sensible puncture in his false confidence right before he led his group through another deathtrap wasn't something he found particularly helpful.

"We don't have time for that. I'll rest once we're done with this place," he said shortly. "It's the last one, so there'll be plenty of time later." He pointedly turned his attention away from Yellow's deepening frown.

'Alright, let's see…' he thought, putting his hands on his hips. Electrified water, ceiling hooks spaced rather far apart, no visible platforms but for the one with the pull-switch, and a floor switch to his left. The floor switch probably raised a set of timed platforms between the hooks.

"He's not okay," Harry heard Yellow mutter to Hermione behind him.

"I know, but what else can we do? This temple isn't just another anchor trapping everyone at the school; it's probably the linchpin to the same magic maintaining the clouds flooding everything," Hermione whispered back. "All four of you need to get through this place and past the final monster to fix everything."

Ruka tapped Harry on the shoulder. "I understood some of that," he said. "Where's your head at, kid?"

"I can do this!" Harry snapped. Why did everyone else want him to just give up? Didn't they realize why they were here? Vaati had dumped several meters of rain in the last three weeks on a swath of Scotland that went at least as far as one could see from the castle, if not farther! He was using Hogwarts castle as a foothold to drag chunks of his home dimension across reality! What would happen if he threw all his magic into dropping a city on them next time instead of a blanket of pouring rain?

Harry drove his weight onto the floor switch with angry strength, making it unstick with a rusty screech. Stone columns spiraled up from the water between the hanging hooks, as he'd predicted. The timer started sticking immediately. Harry snapped out his whip and gave his group a challenging glare. Though the others were still giving him worried looks he didn't like, they didn't keep him from stepping up to the first gap.

Getting past the temple's physical challenges was becoming practiced tedium, after seven rooms of electrified water and various methods of crossing. The timing of latch, swing, and release no longer made his electricity-battered heart patter with anxiety. He simply sighted which of the scattered platforms would set him on the shortest path across the room and swung across. He landed roughly a few times, but hardly felt it. Cotton resided where the ability to care about the unpleasantries of fear and pain had once sat. His movements weren't robotic, but they felt…mindless. It was like making breakfast and morning tea for the Dursleys when he was running on no sleep. He could perform those tasks successfully and retain no memory of having done them, since not a single conscious thought or emotion had crossed his mind in the doing.

He banged his knee hard on the ground when he made his final landing, only noticing because his leg folded when he stood up. Harry fell and almost bashed it into the ground again, finding the mechanical grace he'd used to cross the room suddenly gone. His feet abruptly left the ground and Harry found himself staring up into large yellow eyes.

It took a few seconds for Harry to process what had happened. Ruka had scooped him up in a bridal carry to save him from hitting the stone. That had been nice of him. "Oh, hi. Thanks for catching me," he said. "Did Yellow get hurt?"

"He'll be fine, kid, but not if you throw yourself at death without bringin' your brain with you," the Zora scolded. He sat Harry down and started tutting at the state of his knees.

"Didja even notice you were bleedin'?" he asked. "You're goin' to give Hermione a heart attack at this rate. You've needed a dose of magic three rooms in a row now."

"It's not that bad," Harry said, though the fuzz was clearing and he was beginning to feel the consequences of his careless landings. Both of his knees were definitely bruised, one of them cut vertically across. He must have dragged it over a broken edge in the mosaic tiles atop the stone columns. His left arm was also complaining at him from shoulder to fingertip, the nerves sending up a deep, aggravating pain that reminded him of a toothache. He felt around his shoulder until he found the most sensitive point and drove his thumb into it. Enduring his arm's tingling protests, he massaged at that spot until the pain went into a small retreat.

Yellow and Hermione joined Harry and Ruka, Yellow's feet touching down in the last few ticks of the timer. The background noise of buzzing water stopped. Harry rubbed absently at his ear. He hadn't even noticed the sound until now.

Yellow stomped across the platform, stepped over Harry's legs to straddle them, and leaned over to fill his field of view with an expression that made Harry shrink back in fear. His brother reeled him back in by the front of his sweater. "If you move from here without letting Hermione do whatever she thinks is necessary, I'll put you in a sleeper hold and pour that Wiggenweld Potion down your throat once you're unconcious," Yellow said in a low, even voice. His golden eyes blazed with cold fire. Harry didn't doubt for one second that his usually cheerful brother would carry out that threat. "Next time I tell you to sit, you're gonna sit."

Harry shivered and looked away from Yellow's steely gaze. "I'm sorry," he mumbled meekly.

Yellow leveled an accusatory finger at Harry's face. "You'd better be sorry," he said harshly. "People care about us now, and scaring them for no good reason is ungrateful. Listen when people say they're worried next time." He sat down cross-legged next to Harry and fixed him with a razor-edged look—a silent threat to stay put or pay the consequences.

Hermione sat by Harry's knees and stared wide-eyed at Yellow.

Yellow turned to her, giving Harry a reprieve. "Sorry for scaring you. It's just that I'm the one with the most self-control," he explained, cheerfully apologetic. "Even though I didn't stop him from going on this trip, that doesn't mean I'm going to let him push himself to death. I had to step in and remind him to be sensible at some point."

"I know, but…'People care about us now'? Making them worry is 'ungrateful'?" Hermione quoted. "Yellow, that's—"

"Professor Lupin's already on the case," Yellow cut in, his tone light and soothing. "We've talked to him and he's handling it. Things are going to turn out alright, Hermione." He smiled reassuringly. "You don't have to worry about that anymore."

'Now who's the one putting on an act?' Harry thought, rolling his eyes. Yellow was just as certain as the other Harrys that Lupin was only going to stir up a whole mess of trouble that they'd have to sort out once they went back to the Dursleys' over the summer (or much sooner, given how likely it was for the school to go on a long recess after they broke the containment spell). While it seemed on the surface like Blue would be the best liar among the Harrys, that dubious honor went to Yellow. His lying talent was very specific, but when it came to smoothing over unpleasant situations and dodging conversations he didn't want to have, Yellow could and would say absolutely anything with a perfect mask of sincerity. Which only made it all the more irritating that he'd been picking at Harry's attempts to seem functional for the last eight deathtraps.

Yellow caught Harry's eye-roll and sent him a sharp sideways glance that made Harry flinch and start studying the cracks in the tiled floor. "If you have any spells that help with bruising, I think those would be the best to start with," Yellow said to Hermione. "He hit his knees hard enough that I could feel it. That's why he fell, not because of the cut."

Hermione did a diagnostic charm and then cast a few spells over his knees that reduced the ache and made the blooming purple shadows fade. "What happened, Harry?" she asked before starting on the cut. She vanished the blood and then fixed him with a concerned frown. "You've been throwing yourself around so carelessly for the last few rooms. You're not normally this reckless."

"Honestly, Hermione, I'm fi—"

Yellow's head turned in Harry's direction. "I'm sorry, you're what?" he asked with a brittle, toothy smile.

Harry's voice cut out with a croak. He cleared his throat. "My head is little floaty," he admitted. "It's, er…It's like how I was last Saturday. Just a bit." He chewed on the inside of his cheek. "I couldn't feel it when I got hurt. I just knew I had to keep going."

Hermione clapped her hand on Harry's lower leg. "Harry!" she said, aghast. "Why didn't you say anything?"

"It can't be helped, so there's no point in whining about it," he said. "Even if I laid down and wasted an hour napping, I wouldn't be magically better when I woke up."

"It couldn't hurt!" Hermione exclaimed. "We came here on a Saturday for a reason and if you need to take a rest, none of us would blame you. That shock you took earlier could have killed you, and you've still been leading the charge into every room."

"You could take at least one little drink of the healing potion," Yellow said.

Harry rubbed his temples, which were starting to throb. They didn't get it. Just seeing the smooth blue-gray stone of this area of the temple was dragging at his mental strength like a lead weight. It was the same stone he saw in his nightmares—that was, when he was forced to see anything more than the shifting false stars. Then, on top of that, there was the water everywhere, the constant ache of his nerve-damaged arm, and the knowledge that he didn't know when they might come across the kind of cavern that would make him lose his tenuous grasp on his marbles. The best thing for it was to get out of this place as fast as possible, but that wasn't going to happen for as long as Hermione and Yellow insisted on slowing them down. "The longer I'm in here, the worse I'm going to feel," he said. "I promise I'll be more careful from now on, so can we just go?" He gave his group members a plaintive look.

Hermione sighed deeply and resumed treating his knees in response. Yellow wasn't pleased, but he wasn't giving Harry another talking-to, so Harry took that as a victory. Ruka, who had given up on following the rapid English, just sat patiently by his legs and continued studying the mosaic mural on the ceiling. The tiles looked like they were meant to be part of a floor, forming a path to nowhere from the woven tendrils of a giant squid.

The Zora dropped his gaze when the talking stopped and gave Harry a slow blink with his secondary eyelids. "Did you all decide something?" he asked.

"They're letting me keep going so long as I don't get myself killed," Harry said. "Unless you're going to tell me to take a nap, too?"

"If you don't want to, I don't see the point in forcin' you," Ruka said. "You're a little big for me to be layin' you down like a toddler, even if you're about the same age."

Since Harry was the only one that had gotten hurt, it didn't take long for them to get back to making progress. They lined up and pulled the switch with their combined strength, filling the room with water, then swam back the way they'd come. Without any prompting, Yellow took the front position in Harry's place. Harry was happy to fall behind Hermione if it meant them continuing through the temple.

They entered the tower that had become the central hub of their exploration so far. Harry forced himself not to look down. The water was now deep enough to make his stomach clench with fear. He followed Yellow and Hermione up to the fifth floor, dragged himself onto land, and let his brother lead the way into the next room.

He was surprised not to see water or hear the snapping buzz of electricity. Instead, the room was host to two frilled yellow and blue jellyfish, a small pedestal bearing a wave-patterned enamel vase, and two closed stone doors.

"The Abyssal Vase?!" Ruka squawked. "How'd it wind up here, of all places?" He rushed to the podium and picked the vase up reverently. Behind him, the two jellyfish began crackling. Their giant eyes were locked on the Zora, the only one close enough to catch their attention.

"Ruka, look out!" Harry shouted, dashing forward. The jellyfish glowed brighter, then drew the energy into their eyes.

At his warning, Ruka coiled his legs and sprang a few meters up. Two balls of lightning sailed underneath him, narrowly missing Harry. The Zora flared his fins to slow his fall and landed lightly on his feet. Then he dragged Harry out of the range of fire and started gushing over pottery.

"Do you know what this is?" he asked, holding up the vase. "This thing's a myth! I went lookin', but I never thought I'd find it!" He made a guttural chirring noise and happily spun around with the clay pot clutched to his chest.

"What's an Abyssal Vase?" Harry asked. It definitely wasn't something he had sword-related memories of. To him, it looked like nothing more than the kind of household decoration that his cousin would break to get Harry in trouble.

"Well, it's, uh…So, there's this creation myth among the different oceanic Zora that Nayru poured the Great Sea from her endless water vessel and that, if the mortals of Hyrule are ungrateful and poison the waters, she'll return and suck the sea back into her pot so it can be purified for the next age of mortals to properly appreciate," Ruka explained in a rush. "Abyssal Zoras worship through mimicry, so they were workin' for ages to magic up somethin' like Nayru's endless vessel. My grandma said it was one of our ancestors who managed to do it a couple thousand years ago. And then she went on a whole spiel about where the 'greater side' of my heritage came from and the importance of keepin' traditional stories alive despite our rich blood being diluted among surface-skimmers, and blah-de-blah." He rolled his eyes. "She's pretty racist for someone who became the matriarch of a 'skimmer' clan by choice. But she has good stories, and most of them are true. Grammy's usually as accurate as a treasure map, but I still can't believe I was the one to find this! My ancestors have been lookin' for ages." He lifted the vase up, planted the bottom of it against his chest, and held it in place by gripping the handles from underneath. "If this works like in the stories, it can suck things in and spit them out like Nayru's vessel—even magic bolts, which are so hard to enchant against," he said, grinning eagerly. "I can't wait to test it!"

Harry noticed that, while the vase looked normal on the surface, the inside of it was unnaturally dark. Even black enamel still shone, but there wasn't a single mote of light within the wide mouth of the pot. "Are you sure that's what you think it is?" he asked. "Because if you're wrong, you're going to get electrocuted."

"I'm old enough to pay for my screw-ups," Ruka said. He turned on his heel with his vase at the ready, then jumped in surprise. "There's another one! How?!"

"Magic," Harry said. "There's this kind of evil guy who looks like me—we call him Shadow Harry—and he can enchant artifacts to multiply like that. He's made it so each of us can take one."

Ruka laughed. "I think Grammy would keel over if she heard that some land-dweller managed to copy a holy Abyssal artifact. Wizard magic's a helluva thing!" He charged into the middle of the room with a confident smile on his face.

Hermione tugged urgently on Harry's sleeve. "What is he doing?" she hissed.

"According to his grandma, who's the same type of Zora as the ones who live in these caves, there's this magic pot out there that can catch things and fire them out," he explained, keeping his eyes on Ruka. The jellyfish were currently loading their shots. "That vase is what Ruka was looking for when Vaati snatched him up. At least, he thinks it is. I'm hoping he's right."

The jellyfish fired their ball-lightning across the room. Harry inhaled sharply, Yellow echoing him. Ruka had said he'd face the consequences if he messed up, but Harry didn't want to imagine what would happen if the Zora got hit. He hadn't touched any electricity for the whole dungeon, so Harry honestly didn't know how he'd take it.

Ruka landed one shot in the mouth of the vase, swiveled quickly, and caught the other. He crowed exuberantly and pumped his fist. "I can't wait to see Grammy's face when I tell her the runtiest skimmer in the family was the one to find the Abyssal Vase! Oooh, she's gonna lose it," he said gleefully, sounding even younger than he looked. Harry had to wonder what seventy-five translated to in Zora years.

While Ruka distracted the jellyfish, Harry, Hermione, and Yellow crept forward to snatch their own vases off of the little pedestal. Harry hurriedly fumbled with his. The sooner he figured out how to properly hold it, the sooner he could get Ruka out of the line of fire.

"Oh, hey, what's this do?" Ruka peered curiously at his artifact, then squeezed the right handle.

A blinding blast of electricity leapt from the void within the vase and hit the floor not too far from the Zora's feet, since he'd let the weapon dip while he'd been looking at it. The shot exploded outward in a fountain of sparks and zig-zagging tongues of lightning. Ruka's surprised curse cut off with an inhuman shriek as the residual energy seized him. He jittered on his feet before his legs gave out. Harry rushed forward to save him from cracking his head on the stone. He managed to make it in time, but it was less an act of catching the Zora and more like forming a cushion underneath him. Yellow and Hermione rushed forward to provide defense as he struggled to crawl his way free. Ruka hadn't been exaggerating when he'd said he was around twice Harry's weight! Harry had to assume his ability to glide was more about speed and power than being light enough to ride the wind.

Hermione caught three shots from the jellyfish, then turned toward one of the creatures and pressed the right handle. Like before the vase spat a blazing ball of lightning like a cannon blast. She and Yellow scrambled back, huddling by Harry as all of them watched to see what would happen.

The returned fire hit the jellyfish and boiled it apart without leaving the slightest scorch mark behind. A shiny red triangle was all that remained.

'Shoot the monsters and nothing else. Gotcha,' Harry thought. His misfiring nerves and stuttering heart could definitely do without him getting caught in an electric explosion.

Now that they knew the method to defeating the jellyfish (and not defeating themselves in the process), Yellow quickly dispatched the other monster. Once it had exploded into pieces, the stone doors on each side of the room grated open.

Harry laid down Ruka's head carefully, lacking any extra clothing to fold up as a pillow, and went to scope out whatever nonsense the temple felt like throwing at them next. Through the left door lay an electrified obstacle course. Harry aged ten years just looking at it. This one was set apart from the others by a mix of wooden and stone platforms and water whose crackling switched on and off in ten-second intervals. The wooden platforms were little more than lashed-together logs, looking like they'd bobble and halfway sink the second they were stepped on. They were scattered about the water like wheat biscuits in a bowl of milk. Between them lay slabs of floating stone, not nearly numerous enough for someone to leap directly from one to another. At the end of the room, on a raised floor made reachable only by a ceiling hook, lay a pair of floor switches.

Harry gave the switches an odd look. No door to continue to another room, yet no pull-switch either. Would the floor switches raise the water level, or were they part of some other element of the room? There wasn't any way to tell without two people making the crossing, and Harry would rather put that off if he could. Going to the other doorway, he checked to see what other option was available. He poked his head into a room featuring a fathomless black pool, a floating wooden battleground, and two large swimming creatures that were initially hard to see over the water they were kicking up. Harry stood and watched them for a bit, mentally piecing together an image. He saw horned snouts, bulbous chameleon eyes, and yellow and orange stripes. Lizalfoses—they had to be. The only ones he'd seen so far had been green, though. The ones in the Forbidden Forest had also carried spears, which he had no idea how to defend against with only a sword. He hoped these ones were unarmed.

Harry stepped away from the doorway before it could lock him in with the monsters. By now, he knew an ambush room when he saw one. Returning to his clustered teammates, he said, "Good news and bad news. Bad news—"

Yellow put up his hand to stop him. "No, no, good news first," he said. "Go on."

Harry paused to reorganize his thoughts. "Er, good news…Well, one of the next rooms doesn't have electric water," he said.

His (conscious) teammates' eyebrows rose. "No electrified water?" Hermione said, sounding suspicious. "I'm going to guess there's a catch. This temple certainly hasn't made things easy so far."

Pain sparked in Harry's injured arm and made his fingers tingle. He jammed his thumb into his shoulder joint. "You're telling me," he said dryly. "Yeah, there's a couple of catches. Bad news is there's a room with electric water we're going to have to go into eventually. Also, the room without an obstacle course has a pair of weird-looking Lizalfoses that we'll have to fight. They're yellow, for some reason."

Hermione's expression crumpled in dismay.

A jolt of alarm went through Harry, making his heart pick up its tempo with a warning pang. He put a hand to his chest and rubbed at the ache. "Why is that bad? Does the color mean something?"

"According to Zelda, the monsters dark mages summon to attack Hyrule often fall along a certain color system," she said. "Zelda didn't say much about Lizalfoses, other than them being rare and difficult to fight, but yellow monsters tend to be associated with electricity. The water in that room may not be electrified, but the Lizalfoses could be."

Harry covered his face with his hands and groaned into his palms. At this rate, he was going to wind up with an irrational fear of electricity on top of being afraid of deep water and the dark. "Even better, we have to fight them on a wooden platform floating in the middle of a bottomless pool," he said, sliding his hands across his cheeks. "Augh, I really wish some bloke named Link went to our school so he could have found the magic sword first. The first temple was interesting, the second was cool in a horrifying kind of way, and even the third one looked nice where it wasn't flooded. This one is just bad memories and electrocution." He paused, taking note of Ruka's continued unconsciousness. "Speaking of electrocution, is he alright? Is his heart still going? Mine almost stopped, remember?"

Hermione nodded. "He has a pulse. I just can't magically rouse him," she said, giving the Zora's shoulder a shake. "This is all we can really—"

Ruka shot upright, nearly cracking heads with Hermione. "I'm up! Whatssgoinon?!" he croaked. He coughed, clutching his throat. "Ow. A lotta screamin', apparently."

"You caught the backlash from the vase," Harry explained. "The shots explode if you aim them at anything but monsters. Which we didn't know until you did that, so, er…thanks?"

"Glad to be of use," Ruka said with a tired smile. "I just wish it didn't hurt so much. Feels like a train rammed me in the chest." He thumped a fist on his sternum and then climbed to his feet. "Alright, what's the next deathtrap?"

"Two Lizalfoses. Electric ones," Harry said with a grimace. "You'll probably want to sit this one out. Lizalfoses are hard enough for me to fight, and I've got a magic sword."

"Have you even slayed a Lizalfos before, kid?" Ruka asked skeptically. "Coulda sworn you told me you had to run away."

Harry blushed. "Only the first time! My brothers helped me fight them the next day." Having three Harrys on hand had definitely made dodging the Lizalfos's vicious stabs a lot easier. Harry had to wonder how well they would have done if the monsters hadn't been magically weakened by being out of their home dimension, though. Would one of the Harrys have died via a bladed spear through the gut?

"I've beaten a fair few of 'em. The last Hero of Hyrule started out as a sword-kid not much older than you, and it took him a while to save the kingdom his first time." Ruka nodded at the sword hilt sticking out over Harry's shoulder. "Out on the islands, we were fighting off waves of Lizalfoses and Electric ChuChus for a couple of years, so I learned monster-fighting young and quick. Fried or not, I'm comin' with you, so let's go." He started walking toward one of the doorways.

Harry sighed. Ruka would do what Ruka would do. It wasn't like anyone else in his group would be able to hold him back. He jogged over and hooked his arm through the Zora's. "It's the other one," he said as he towed him in the right direction. Over his shoulder, he called, "We're fighting the Lizalfoses now. Any tips for success, Hermione?"

"I didn't know to prepare for electricity in specific, so all I can say is 'don't get hit'. Ruka might know something, though," she said. "I assume that's why he insists on going?"

"Oh, right, he said he's fought them before." Harry looked at Ruka to switch back to Hylian. "Do you know how to fight Lizalfoses?" he asked. "Is there a trick?"

"They like to jump back and forth to throw people off. The trick is hittin' quicker than they do when they run in to slash you. If they aren't attacking, don't run at 'em first; they're faster than you'd expect," Ruka said. "And if they have shields…uh, don't hit those. You might drop your sword." He grinned and gave a double thumbs-up. Then he hissed in surprise when he suddenly bounced off of thin air.

Hermione glanced at Ruka in confusion, then hit the same unseen barrier. She wobbled back a few steps clutching her nose. Her mouth moved in something resembling a curse, but no sound seemed to come out.

Harry and Yellow, who had walked easily into the room, exchanged a look of dismay and backpedaled toward the exit. A hand clamped onto each of their shoulders. "Ah-ah-ah, no chickening out allowed. Just leave your vases by the door and step on in," a voice identical to theirs drawled. Shadow Harry stuck his grinning face between them. "I'm giving you a pop-quiz, Heroes. Hope you've been studying."

Harry recoiled from Shadow Harry and stumbled out of his reach. Yellow just turned around with a nervous smile. "Wh-What do you mean?" he asked.

Shadow Harry patted him on the head. "Well, I've noticed you kids have a habit of running from Moblins. I've also noticed that it takes at least two of you to kill one, which," he tsked and wagged his finger, "isn't something to brag about. As bearers of the Four Sword, you should both be capable on your own and together. That goes double in your particular case, since your malfunctioning sword inflicts all of you with the full pain of any injury. You four each need to learn how to pull your own weight, otherwise you'll die before I can properly kill you; therefore, I'm giving you a test of your skills." He gestured toward the Lizalfoses circling the wooden platform with a flourish. "I added the deep water ten minutes ago just for you, Green. All it took was breaking the floor, moving the switches farther down, and letting the sponge this place is built on do the rest," he added with a cheeky smirk. "I've been keeping an eye on you, kiddo. The sea caves left quite an impression, didn't they?"

Fire lit in Harry's eyes and he unsheathed his sword. "You meant to mess with our heads!" he shouted in outrage. "You arsehole!" He swung his sword at the spirit's skull with feverish fervor formed from a week of tormented, drugged sleep. "Screw you!"

Shadow Harry shoved Yellow out of the way, conjured a sword, and blocked Harry's overhead strike with an easy gesture. Grinning, he flicked Harry's blade upward and swung for his undefended midsection. Harry did his best to assume one of the defensive stances he'd been learning, but his sword arm was up way too high and he wasn't fast enough to block. All he could do was watch in horror as Shadow Harry's dark blade closed in on his vulnerable right side.

"Just kidding!" Shadow Harry chirped. His sword stopped just short of Harry's flesh. When he pulled it back, Harry saw that it had left a slice in his clothes. "You should buy some armor next time you go to Hyrule. And get yourself a shield like your redhead friend has," the creature advised. "It'll keep that creamy center of yours in one piece." He poked Harry in the middle, snickering when Harry took another furious swing at him, and then disappeared into the cracked tiles underfoot.

Harry almost threw his vase down in frustration. Reason intervened just in time, however, and he laid the piece of pottery down with passive-aggressive care. Putting on a high-pitched voice, he mockingly shrilled to Yellow, "'He doesn't seem that mean,' you said." He glared at his brother. "Oh, he doesn't? Really? You think so?"

"To be fair…"

"No, don't be fair. He definitely isn't."

"…he could have killed you instead of just messing with you and then giving good advice," Yellow pointed out.

"He made me swim through a bunch of horrible caves in order to get back home! If Malfoy hadn't found that spell scroll in time, all four of us," he gestured between himself and Yellow, "would have died! Besides, Shadow Harry said himself that he likes torturing people."

"At least he's fair about it. He has rules about being mean, which is better than some people we know."

Harry sent a wary look at the doorway. It was now blocked with a solid circle of shadow, so Hermione couldn't have read Yellow's lips. "The Dursleys don't try to kill us with deathtraps."

"These aren't Shadow Harry's deathtraps, they're Vaati's," Yellow said. "And throwing us at Lizalfoses is just him teaching us a lesson."

Harry mimed throttling his aggravatingly forgiving brother. "Arguing with you is the worst!" he exclaimed. "Let's just go fight these things. If they kill us, I was right." He jammed his sword in its sheath and dove into the deep pool. If the Lizalfoses were just circling the top, he figured they weren't likely to notice an approach if they did it from a few meters down.

The trouble with that was he'd forgotten how deep the water was in his act of stomping off. Harry's eyes widened to dinner plates when he looked down at pit yawning beneath him. It was lit, far, far below, by lights too small to make out. He couldn't tell whether they were jellyfish or proper lamps. He stared, paralyzed and slowly sinking. They had to go all the way down there? Just to hit some switches? Down?

Yellow swam up behind him and hooked an arm around his waist. He started towing Harry toward the wooden platform. Surfacing right next to it, they dragged themselves up as quickly as possible. They rolled to their feet, unsheathing their swords. The Lizalfoses stuck their heads up from the water, then swam with alarming speed toward the battlefield. When they reached land, they dashed up even faster. Harry saw a metallic glint and swung with frantic speed. He only grazed the monster before it jumped back.

Harry and the Lizalfos circled each other, Yellow and whatever he was doing forgotten. The monster was both armed and defended, with a boomerang-shaped sword in one hand and a crude metal shield in the other. Harry conjured his whip in his left hand and snapped it at the monster's sword.

The Lizalfos jerked its shield up and out, slapping aside the prongs of Harry's whip. Harry hesitated, the show of intelligence catching him by surprise.

In a flash of steel, the Lizalfos shot in to seize the opening. It straightened and moved its shield, which would have given Harry the advantage if he weren't caught off-guard, and brought its sword up. Harry mentally scrambled to figure out the right block. How did you even defend yourself against a bladed boomerang!?

Despite his moment of indecision, Harry managed to put his sword between him and the Lizalfos's strange blade…just not quite at the right angle. He staggered forward once the monster's weapon had stopped screeching against his and missed a chance to counterattack before the Lizalfos leapt back.

Harry readjusted his sword grip, raising it defensively in case the Lizalfos decided to strike first again. He'd been unsuccessful, but so had his enemy. A draw was perfectly fine with him.

The Lizalfos ran up to attack again. Harry knew what to expect this time and didn't let its rapid approach startle him. Like before, the monster slowed down to stand up and bring its sword to bear. Harry seized the opening. He caught the edge of the Lizalfos's boomerang on the flat of his blade and took advantage of the weapon's strange angle to slide it off to the side. Then he hit the Lizalfos in the chest with one quick slash and three of the fastest, deepest stabs he could manage before the agile monster hopped back out of range. Harry grinned. He'd won that round.

They circled each other once more. The Lizalfos watched him with its head cocked, its shield low and its serrated, crooked sword held in a relaxed position at its side. Even Harry knew that was poor form. He dropped his defensive stance and ran in to take advantage of the opening.

The Lizalfos's shield shot up to block his attack. Harry had a moment of dreadful realization, watching the sparks fly, and then found himself tumbling backward with a line of overwhelming sensation consuming his reflexively raised forearms. Harry stumbled to his feet, but he didn't have time to check his injury (or even begin to fathom the amount of pain he was in) before the Lizalfos was zooming into his personal space again. He clumsily managed a two-handed block that made the fresh wounds in his arms flare so badly he couldn't suppress a scream. Weakness washed over his hands and he had to struggle not to drop his sword when the monster withdrew. Then the fried nerves in his left arm started going off, making the limb hang painfully at his side.

The Lizalfos didn't press the attack again, to his momentary relief. Instead it stood still, eyeing him in a challenging way, and rolled its neck. The horn on its nose crackled.

Harry jumped back so fast that he didn't have time to think of a landing. He hit the floor on his left shoulder, setting off another firecracker of pain that filled his vision with sparks. It got him out of range of the dome of yellow electricity that bloomed around the monster, however, which made the increased uselessness of his arm worth it.

He climbed to his feet and matched the Lizalfos's twitchy gaze as it continued to generate its protective dome. Harry had made a stupid mistake, ignoring Ruka's advice. This monster was too fast and too skilled for him to run up and start hammering away. Moblins were slow enough that superior speed and numbers were enough for the Harrys to take one down, but there was no such wiggle-room for sloppy tactics here. He'd have to treat this monster like he had the corrupted Deku Queen at the end of the last temple.

The Lizalfos dropped its electrical field and Harry assumed a half-crouched stance with his sword angled to the side. He stood still while the monster paced and hopped back and forth, trying to throw him off. This was no different from the Deku Queen's zig-zagging. He needed to bide his time and hope his hand didn't give out before the monster decided to act. His fingers were shaking madly and the pain in his forearm was eating its way through his grip strength. Blood ran steadily down his arm as well, and he couldn't tell how long he had before the loss rendered him helpless. His brain already felt like it was leaking out his ears. Harry gritted his teeth and willed his trembling fingers to hold on.

With a rattling cry, the Lizalfos ran toward him. It kept a low profile as it sprinted forward, putting the armor on its back to good use, but popped up to its standing height to take a swing at him. Harry struck first. He poured his weakening muscles into making those two horizontal strikes count, knocking the lizard off-balance. Harry stepped in even closer, ducking under its head to slice at its belly before driving his sword up at its throat. The Lizalfos hopped out of range and then lashed at him with its tongue. Harry cried out as the surprise attack caught him in the cheek, just below his eye. It wasn't as bad as getting hit by one of Dudley's heavy punches, but it came at him so fast that he didn't have time to plant his feet. He stumbled into Yellow, who had been backing away from his own enemy, and they knocked heads.

"Argh!" Harry clutched his skull. Not only did he feel his own head hurting, but he also felt Yellow's echoed pain. It made the mild injury almost incapacitating.

Yellow shoved at Harry. "Back up, back up!"

Harry watched with wide eyes as the Lizalfos he'd been fighting rolled its neck. "No, don't—!"

The monster's energy dome stopped just short of Harry's toes as he pushed back hard at Yellow. Behind him, he could hear the hair-raising buzz of another electrical field. His scalp tingled at the proximity as he and his brother stood on their toes and desperately held one another still.

Harry let his held breath whoosh out in relief when the Lizalfoses dropped their barriers and switched back to baiting the brothers into making a mistimed attack. He'd had enough of this electrical nonsense. He would never look at a toaster the same way again.

He waited for the monster to dash at him and stabbed it through the underside of its jaw once it raised its head. It got its shield up in time to block his next jab, and oh—

At the collision of steel on steel, debilitating pain jangled up Harry's right arm. His fingers took this as an excuse to give out and his sword fell to the ground with a heart-stopping clang. Fortunately, when Harry screamed and fell on his back, the Lizalfos's swipe at his chest missed. Harry scrabbled to his feet, snatched up his sword with both hands, and heaved it in a desperate diagonal strike.

For once, luck was on his side. He caught the monster's shield at just the right angle to knock it skittering across the platform. While the Lizalfos watched its shield skip over the wood and into the water with clear disbelief, Harry used his two-handed grip to drag his sword down the monster's body from chest to belly. He prayed he'd weakened it enough beforehand for this to be the final strike he needed; he didn't have the strength left for another.

The monster collapsed with a dying cry and vanished in a cloud of smoke. It left behind a purple gem. "Yes," Harry breathed, letting his arms drop. His sword absorbed the magic triangle as it scraped against the ground.

He heard Yellow slay his own Lizalfos and let himself slump to the wooden floor. The adrenaline drained out of him like an exhaled breath. "Thank Merlin," he said, his chin resting on the cold, sticky surface of the platform. His head was spinning, his arms were alight with so much pain that he wasn't sure whether they were even attached anymore, and his heart was feeling funny in his chest as it frantically stuttered away. He'd won, though, and that was good enough. "I'll take that nap now, I think."

Yellow wrenched him up roughly, forcing him into a sitting position. "N-No…No, Green, I'm not letting you sleep now. You can't," he said, sounding far more frantic than Harry thought was warranted.

"We beat the Lizz…the Lizalfsesses and won, though," he said, confused. His tongue felt weird and slow. All of him did, actually.

"Shadow Harry was right when he said we needed armor," Yellow said. He pulled his bag to the front and took out the potion within.

"Wait, I don't need that. Don't use it on me," Harry protested. "Use it later."

Yellow unwrapped the potion from its cloth cocoon. "You're bleeding out. That thing might as well have slit your wrists." His urgent tone sent a dull ping through the heavy blanket of exhaustion falling over Harry's mind. This was bad, wasn't it? Bleeding was fine, but this bleeding was too much to be fine. Wasn't it? "The Lizalfos sliced your arms open, too deep for me to fix it. I don't know that kind of healing magic yet," Yellow explained as he worked the bottle's cork free. It came loose with a loud pop and he let it drop to the floor. "Drink this." He pressed the opening of the bottle against Harry's lips.

"Y'shure?" Harry slurred. "Can' be 'at bad—"

"Drink the bloody potion," Yellow snarled.

Harry obediently drained the bottle. Thankfully the brew didn't taste bad enough for him to choke on it, just a tad bitter. Its effect was instant. The deep, gnawing pain consuming his forearms was whisked away. His tingling nerves went quiet and the terrible ache weighing down his left arm lifted. The leaden pull of seizure-induced exhaustion in his muscles disappeared. His head was still a bit foggy, but the lack of pain and soreness did quite a bit to counteract the feeling of blood loss. Suddenly he felt twenty pounds lighter! He'd thought the temple had been compensating enough that he hadn't taken much damage so far, but it seemed those bumps and nicks had been tallying up without him noticing.

"Whoa," he gasped. "I was in terrible shape, wasn't I?"

"You really were," Yellow said grimly. "There was more than just blood coming out of your arms, Green. It was like the insides were leaking out. I think that monster cut into the…into the meat under the skin. It probably nicked an artery, too, given how much you were bleeding." He looked down at the wooden platform.

Harry followed his gaze. His stomach clenched with nausea. There was blood tracked all over the wood like dance steps across a ballroom floor. He could hardly believe all of that had been inside him. How had he not noticed it going so drastically missing? Harry inspected his forearms. They were healed and whole, but coated with blood along the undersides from his elbows to his fingertips. His left hand, which had been hanging at his side, looked like the end result of a macabre finger-painting session.

He stood up, which didn't improve the nauseating dizziness. Swaying, he fought the feeling back. If he was low on blood, he couldn't afford to have an empty stomach. "We still have to swim down there," he said, looking into the deep, daunting water. It was clear enough that he could see the broken edges of the mosaic Shadow Harry had smashed through to join this cavern with the one below it. Ugh, Shadow Harry was such an arse. "If I pass out, you have my permission to sit me down on one of the switches anyway."

"You're not going to swim now, are you?" Yellow said incredulously. "You were just bleeding out!"

"I'm not going to get any better standing around, am I?" Harry said shrugging. "We didn't bring a Blood-Replenishing Potion with us, so I'm stuck like this for now. Once we get out of here, we should see if that portal in the Forbidden Forest still works and get some armor from Hyrule. We still might have to fight Vaati after all this." He dove into the water and struck out for the distant bottom, ignoring the terrified hammering of his heart. 'Just one more flip of the switch, and we'll be on to the next part of the temple,' he thought over the sound of blood rushing in his ears. 'We're almost out of here. Just keep it together!'

Notes:

-Poor Yellow is just about at the end of his rope in this dungeon. It's not going to get less stressful for him from here lol.

-Those mentions of the temple compensating come from the fact that Dark World dungeons in this fic give adventurers just enough energy to keep going, in case that's been forgotten. This is powered by the souls embedded in the Temple of Sacrifice, which exists in an ancient city that was paved over and forgotten in the intervening millennia. Vaati dredged it up to make a puzzle-box and the Harrys banished it back to its grave.

-There are certain puzzles that don't translate well in writing (or that I don't know how to translate into writing yet), and the floor switch one might be one of those. Essentially, instead of four people reaching a singular pull switch, two people have to get through each challenge room to hit the floor switches and raise the water level in the tower.

-This is far from the last time I'll maim a Harry, but in the future, they'll have more healing options and armor to make these situations less dire.