Last month: After wandering in the desert for most of the stormy night, the Harrys were kidnapped by the Yiga for their own safety. They quickly broke out with the help of their magic, but now had to contend with Koume and Kotake causing chaos, the labyrinthine nature of the Highlands Enclave, and the storming, dangerously hot, impossible-to-navigate desert outside.
Art for this chapter (there's a fair amount) can be found over on garden-eel-draws under the "dungeon 6" tag or on Ao3. (I went way too hard with one of the pics I drew this month, lol. It's a pic of a minor item on the same level as the Trail Finder, but my hand just kept moving and all these details came out!)
Also, because something strange has been going on: Either there's an odd sort of bot-fest happening on FFN or there's a handful of artists using similar business-speak templates to offer commissions, but I keep getting PMs about how people are inspired by my work and want to draw it. I recently got a couple of reviews like this, too. If those are bots, then color me confused, because FFN certainly isn't the best site for trying to post literally any kind of off-website link, let alone spam links. If those are people, then I'm flattered, but I don't commission artists. This story is already illustrated on Ao3; I prefer to draw my own "official" art to keep my skills sharp. If fan-artists are inspired and wish to draw fanart on their own time, all power to them, but this story genuinely isn't in need of all these commission offers!
Content warning for a mention of dead bodies.
Harry crept along the rafters with one hand extended to maintain his balance and the other holding his Invisibility Cloak closed around him. Yiga agents of all sizes and classes ran around below like ants in a kicked nest. No one knew where the twins were or where they might turn up next, and the agents were split between bravely defending their base and getting as far away as they could.
Spotting a few Footsoldiers agilely skipping across the rafters, Harry ducked to the side to let them through. The low, indirect light and plain pattern of the uninterrupted stone walls up here made it easier for his Invisibility Cloak to work its magic.
In exploring the hideout's ceiling, Harry and his brothers had come across a few supply rooms in the upper levels and lightly "perused" the contents. After collecting a few bunches of bananas (why were there so many bananas?), a couple of Hydromelons, four potions that Blue had identified as Chilly Elixirs, and an awesome-looking black sickle sword that none of them had the faintest idea how to wield, they'd left the rest. They already had a fair amount of food hoarded up, so there was no need to completely clean the Yiga out. Besides, those agents had kind of helped them by kidnapping them and Yellow looked like he might cry from guilt if they stole any more.
They hadn't spent too much time on distractions, though. Finding Agent Hebbi was the main priority, as they kept being reminded every time they heard a chorus of screams among the panicked babbling and barking of orders. Luckily, since Iron-Class agents were a lot less common than Footsoldiers and mid-sized Fighter-Class Yiga, he and Agent Koumo weren't difficult to pick out of a crowd.
Harry spotted the large duo below them as he led the way across what seemed to be a training hall. Agent Hebbi was laying out some kind of plan to a pack of quivering Footsoldiers standing at attention in front of him, speaking what must have been the Yiga language. Amusingly, his American cowboy drawl still carried over. The Footsoldiers bore the scorches and ice-patches of having run into Twinrova, and there weren't many of them. Harry supposed they must have been the ones that had been able to walk away after the elemental twins blew through their work stations.
"Alright, let's go," Harry whispered to his brothers. He tucked his Invisibility Cloak into his bag, conjured his Magic Rod, and leapt down from the rafters.
"Hey, Mr. Hebbi, can we talk?" he called out, casting a Falling Spell with a wave of his arms. "I think we can help each other."
The five Footsoldiers assembled between the Harrys and Agent Hebbi spun around with shrieks of surprise and alarm. "More Gerudo demon brats!" a masked woman screamed, throwing a knife at him.
Harry conjured his Abyssal Vase, which soundlessly swallowed the blade. He dismissed the Zora cannon just as quickly. "No, no, we're different brats!" He waved his empty hands. "We're not going to hurt you unless you hurt us first, I promise."
"We're Link's cousins!" Blue lied to back him up. "Related to the Bluesmiths, but with different magic."
The Footsoldiers didn't find that reassuring. "P-Please don't tear my a-arms off," one whimpered. A large section of his sneak-suit had been burned away at the shoulder; the skin underneath was red and blistering. "I'm j-just a janitor here, I swear!"
"Pitiful," Agent Hebbi spat, striding through the crowd. He slapped that agent upside the half-helmet, knocking his connected mask askew. "They just said they don't have Bluesmith magic, you dolts. Do these kids look like they could rip your arms off? They're even smaller than Link!"
"Twinrova don't look like they could kill us, but that's what they do!" another Footsoldier cried.
"Those brats will tell you up-front that they want you dead. These ones just offered to help," Agent Koumo countered as he followed at his partner's heels. "That's at least one difference."
Agent Hebbi stopped a few meters front of the Harrys with his beefy arms crossed over his armored chest and his mask canted in suspicion. "What do you think you can do for us, and what do you think we can do for you?" he rumbled.
'Talking to this bloke is a lot scarier without a cell door in the way,' Harry thought with a nervous gulp. If the man had decided to step within arm's reach before coming to a halt, Harry wasn't sure he would have been able to speak at all. "Erm, well, we, er," he stuttered before finding his mental footing. "We're battle mages, sir. Powerful ones, by Hyrule's standards. Twinrova would have a harder time of killing us than killing you."
"They also don't want to kill us," Blue added. "All they want to do, and all we want to do, is get out of here. We can use that to get them to listen to us in a way that your agents can't."
"The problem here is that we don't know where you've put the exit, our Navi Slates are too cheap to be of much use out in the desert, and we don't have clothes that'll protect us against the storm long enough for us to reach Oasis City," Green said. "We can get better clothes once we get there, but we need to actually get there first."
"Here's the deal: if you give us directions out of these caves, a way to find the city, and some all-over suits like yours, we'll show the twins the door and get them back home," Blue concluded. "And, since I assume Twinrova is part of your whole Ganon-worshipping thing, we'll promise not to do anything to harm them."
There was a distant explosion. The room vibrated, traces of sand falling from the ceiling. Several more explosions followed, making the red decorations hanging from the rafters clatter and jingle.
"That sounded expensive," Agent Koumo observed.
Agent Hebbi ground his knuckles against his masked brow. "That was most likely one of our caches of explosives," he groaned. "Accordin' to a field report I got five minutes ago, the captains are all on an 'undercover mission' to booze n' schmooze in Oasis City. Meanwhile, we're gettin' blown up for their mistake!"
Red winced in sympathy. "That sucks."
"How about that deal, then?" Harry nudged. "Do you think it could work out? We can try to keep the twins from hurting more people once we find them, too. Tell the agents to run, that sort of thing."
Agent Hebbi drew in a big breath and let out a long sigh, inflating and deflating like a big red balloon. "Why'm ah in command right now? Ah'm just a dart n' sword guy. This ain't mah job," he moaned in a thickly-accented undertone before standing up straighter and raising his voice. "Alright, fine. If it doesn't work out, we'll mail your bodies to Link after Twinrova freeze-fries you so his sister can figure out the funeral." He swept a hand out to the side and snapped his fingers. "Footsoldiers, fetch a Wayfinder, four first-year trainee uniforms, and a Guidance Stone with a map of the base."
After exchanging puzzled looks, the cluster of scrawny agents darted off to fulfill the command. Two scurried up the walls, another dropped into a trapdoor hidden in the floor, and two made a couple of hand-signs before just plain disappearing.
"How did they do that?" Yellow exclaimed. "They vanished! No wand or magic cloak or anything!"
"Unlike Sheikah, most Yiga clansmen have enough magic to be shadow-mages," said Agent Koumo, who'd stayed behind with Agent Hebbi. "Even Hebbi and I do, though we hardly do anything with it. Who needs illusions and trickery when you've got awesome muscles?" He flexed one bicep as big around as Harry's thigh. "Magic training is boring, anyway."
Agent Hebbi put his hands on his hips. "Now that all the grunts are gone, you can explain who and what you really are," he growled at the Harrys. "You definitely ain't from anywhere in the known kingdoms and those swords must be some kinda magic. No matter how many times we tried, we couldn't pry 'em off of you." He angled his mask accusingly. "Are you Heroes? Are you comin' after Lord Ganon? Which divine blade is that?"
"Oh, wow, you're smart!" Yellow praised him. "You figured that out fast."
"We're from a scarier world on the other side of this one—the Dark World. That's why our magic is different. It's also why we look like Link; technically we're him, just from a different version of Hyrule," Harry told them. "We don't have anything to do with Ganondorf or the Master Sword, or all that divine destiny stuff. We're the bearers of the Four Sword, and our job is to stop the evil mage who's trying to take over our world by stealing things from yours: Vaati."
"He's been causing storms, conjuring monsters, messing with sections of the Spirit Tracks, stealing and scrambling old buildings, and sucking up magic from anywhere he can get it," Blue elaborated. "Did you notice the stretch of gray that was growing in the Golden Cliffs and killing anything that walked into it? Vaati was the one behind that."
Agent Koumo jumped excitedly and shook Agent Hebbi's shoulder. "Aha! I knew it wasn't Lord Ganon making those monsters attack us! Master Kohga was right; the signs were wrong, and this is just another pretender-king attacking Hyrule. Captain Kukumo was a fool to doubt Master Kohga!"
His partner snorted. "Captain Kukumo's a fool in general."
"We meant what we said, that we won't hurt you if you don't give us a reason to," Green said. "Ganon's dead right now and our sword doesn't have a grudge against him, as far as we know, so we can just leave each other alone."
"We don't want to kill people. Just monsters," Red said in his simple Hylian.
Agent Koumo laughed. "What makes you cute little kids think you even have the magic to—"
Agent Hebbi clamped a hand over the lower half of his mask to cut him off. "You idiot!" he seethed. "We've already got two baby battle mages rippin' this base apart, and you want these ones to prove how much damage they can do?!"
"Right, right, sorry, I forgot." Agent Koumo raised his hands and patted at the air. "No need to get your fundoshi in a twist."
The Footsoldiers soon returned bearing the requested items. Each Harry received a set of tights that were a little different from what the small agents wore—almost completely red, with a set of leather shorts and non-spiked bracers that looked a lot easier to strap on. Harry was delighted to learn that young Yiga got to wear knives on their shins just like the adults. They all conjured their Navi Slates and received a download of the hideout map, one by one, then got a brief lecture on how a Wayfinder worked from Agent Koumo.
"This is the 'finder' on the end, here. It'll pulse faster when you're pointed at wherever you want to go, and turn blue and brighten as you get closer to it." He pointed to the bead of Bluestone mounted on the end of the antenna sticking out of the gadget, "And this is the thing that chooses what you're looking for." He twiddled the metal dial in the middle of the oval of iron that formed the main body of the device.
The dial had five settings marked by pictures engraved around it: a Yiga eye, a Gerudo symbol, a Molgera's wide-open mouth with its tongue sticking out, a Safflina plant, and a lady standing tall with her hands on the hilt of a downward-pointing sword. In order, they indicated the hideout to the north of the desert, Oasis City in the middle, Molgera Wastes to the west, Vaboorin Garden to the south, and the Warrior Monument to the east. "Navi Slates are expensive and we can't afford to buy one for everybody, so each Yiga enclave has a particular Wayfinder they use to keep their Footsoldiers and trainees from getting lost in sandstorms or snowstorms or whatever," Agent Koumo explained. "These doohickeys are matched to enchanted navigation stones we've planted in all the places they can point to."
"Could we make something like this that points to anywhere we want, as long as we place a matched navigation stone there first?" Blue asked.
Harry turned over the device in his hands. It did look like something they could easily have Link put together for them. The simple magical gadget consisted of nothing more than a thick plate of iron fashioned into the shape of a Yiga eye, a red dial with a pointing arrow, some engraved symbols around the dial, and a teardrop-shaped antenna with a modest Bluestone dome embedded in it.
Agent Koumo shrugged. "Sure, I guess. If I were you, I'd just mug a Yiga from another enclave if I needed a Wayfinder for a different region, but I'm lazy like that."
A Footsoldier limped in, half-carried by an Iron-Class fellow almost as big as Agent Koumo. The reason for the smaller Yiga's limp clacked against the floor with every other step; her right leg had been locked in a thick chunk of ice from the knee down.
"Twinrova found the main storage cavern," the Footsoldier gasped. "They're destroying everything. Half of it's on fire, and the flames might spread out to other caverns."
Agent Hebbi swore in a long, continuous streak, while Agent Koumo was more optimistic. "At least we know where they are and that they'll be busy for a while doing something other than taking out our agents," the latter said. "That sounds like your cue, mini-Links."
Yellow raised his hand. "Erm, can we help the Footsoldier lady first? Magical healing isn't going to work very well if there's still ice around her leg."
"…Sure," Agent Hebbi said slowly. "Just don't hurt her worse, or you'll regret it."
"Okay!" Yellow rushed over to her, calling up his Magic Rod. "Harrys, come on! A few Warming Charms should have this sorted."
The four boys knelt around the injured Footsoldier, who watched them with tense apprehension as they magically melted the ice around her leg. Their relatively gentle approach (as opposed to throwing Incendios at it, which would have been Harry's method) had the solid block dripping cleanly away within a minute with no harm done to anything around or underneath. Yellow took a rice ball out of his bag and handed it to her. "This has pickled radish in it, so it'll heal you," he told her. "I hope the rest of your day is better than it's been so far!" He skipped past her and led the way down the hall. "Now let's go find those terrible twins!"
To avoid getting trampled by agents fleeing or running toward the commotion, the Harrys took to the rafters and raced across them as quickly as their sense of balance would allow. Harry glanced at his map at every junction. These caves were a real rabbit warren of tunnels and caverns; it was no wonder Koume and Kotake had gotten so thoroughly turned around. There were few exits and many more hidey-holes and turn-arounds, making the enclave both difficult to get into and difficult to escape for anyone unfamiliar with the intentionally confusing layout.
When the air started getting hazy with smoke, Harry motioned for his brothers to follow him and then stepped off of the rafters. He caught himself with a Falling Spell and ran down the hall. Yiga agents dotted the sides of it like morbid versions of the red ornaments that hung from their ceilings. Some were moving, or at least had moving chests, but some laid still. Harry bit down hard on the inside of his cheek and pushed himself to keep on going.
He paused in the doorway to the underground warehouse to take stock of the situation. Many boxes were on fire; a lot of others had been frozen into dark shapes under a glistening hill of ice. The handful of Yiga lying on the floor were difficult to tell apart from the mounds of destroyed supplies, having been destroyed themselves in the same way. One Fighter-Class Yiga, miraculously alive, was whimpering as he struggled to scoot toward the exit. The ends of his legs were frozen into craggy knobs of ice.
While his brothers hurried forward to drag the man to safety and give him a Red Potion, Harry stepped farther into the room to keep an eye out for Twinrova. The Four Sword pushed memories at him with increasing urgency as he crept toward the sounds of elemental destruction and flashes of light coming from behind a wall of frozen crates. Those crones had been among the most powerful mages in the entire long history of the Old Kingdom; they had been adoptive mothers to the King of Evil himself.
'I know! You don't have to keep telling me,' he mentally hissed at the blade. The difference between him and the Hero of Time, among many other things, was that he wasn't an enemy to these two and had no reason to pick a fight. Furthermore, these girls were a lot younger and possibly a lot more innocent than their previous incarnations, even with their horrifying homicidal tendencies. Technically they'd only been killing enemies of their kingdom in this place, even if their methods definitely would have broken some kind of war rules in the Dark World.
"Hello? Koume? Kotake?" he called out over the sound of fighting. "We're here to show you the way out, if you're ready to go home now!"
The blasting noises stopped, leaving only the sound of flames as they ate through the crates and their contents. "You little voes are still in here, too?" one of the twins asked in surprise.
"Wow, you guys are lame!" the other proclaimed. "What makes you think you can help us?"
"We stole some things that'll let us get out of here," Green told them. "We have a map of the base and a Wayfinder that we can use to get to Oasis City."
"Oh, really?"
The twins stepped out from behind the crates with sly looks on their faces. "What's to stop us from knocking you down and stealing your stuff?" Koume asked, flicking her hand upward. A tongue of flame flared from her fingertips.
Using his past interaction with Gerudo for inspiration, Harry pointed his Magic Rod at one of the larger sections of fire spreading across the cavern. Discreetly planting his feet, he incanted, "Aguamenti."
Water sprayed from his staff as if from a firehouse and kept going as Harry consciously fed magic into the spell. The flames fought back with great gouts of white steam, but lost the battle as the boxes they'd been climbing across were soaked through. His brothers, having returned from helping the Yiga by the entrance of the room, took a look at what he was doing and started melting the ice and putting out the rest of the fires.
"We're battle mages like you," Harry told Koume and Kotake, who were gaping at his brothers' efforts. Yellow had even started putting some of the less damaged crates back together with Mending Charms. "Would you rather we helped you, or fought you?" He conjured his Navi Slate and turned it around to show the map onscreen.
The twins looked entirely out of their depth, their wide amber eyes flicking between Harry, the computer he'd plucked out of thin air, and the other Harrys cleaning up the room with casual shows of "impossible" magic. Kotake was mouthing incredulous curses, while Koume was opening and closing her mouth like a landed fish.
"Er, yeah, sure," Koume finally managed to stammer. "Help would be nice."
"I guess you might be useful," Kotake said with a nervous titter. "No need to steal what's being offered, right?"
Harry held in a smirk. Spite was radiating into him from his not-memories, and he was willing to bet they were the ones that belonged to the Hero of Time. "Great!" he said cheerfully. "Let's get out of here, then. My brothers and I will escort you." 'And by "escort", I mean "restrain",' he thought before waving his siblings over.
They arranged themselves with Harry in front, the twins in the middle, and Red, Blue, and Yellow bringing up the rear. In case Koume and Kotake decided to try their luck taking out the Harry in front, they would have three more ready to light them up from behind.
Harry alternated between his Navi Slate, Mirror Shield, and Magic Rod as he led the way through the corridors and caverns, only some of which had been wrecked by the twins. "Get out of here!" he barked at a handful of Footsoldiers who tried to block their way. He cast a fizzing Incendio over their heads that had them ducking and swatting at sparks. "Either move or get blasted! We're escorting Twinrova out!"
The mention of the twins' Old Hyrule name had the agents skedaddling at once. They weren't allowed to hurt the girls, who were obvious reincarnations of their beloved Lord Ganon's surrogate mothers, and the Harrys were only doing what they'd been hoping to accomplish themselves.
"Don't you call us that, too!" one of the twins groaned behind him. "It's bad enough the Yiga do."
"That's what people called those nasty old hags that raised the Great Traitor! Do we look gross and wrinkly to you?"
"Our names are only a coincidence. Mother gave us traditional twin names and we turned out to have powers to match them later."
'Huh,' Harry thought. It had never occurred to him that someone could dislike a version of themselves from a past life. The reincarnating spirits he was most familiar with were the ones consistently named Ganon, Zelda, and Link, and the stories about those three had never mentioned them disagreeing with their souls' past actions.
"Does that mean you aren't reincarnations of them?" Blue asked with clear skepticism.
"Of course we aren't!" one of the girls burst out. "There are probably, like, five sets of Koumes and Kotakes running around the desert right now. The Great Traitor got his name outlawed for all future kings, but nobody thought those crones were worth banning such nice names over."
"The words are Old Kingdom Gerudo for 'ruby' and 'sapphire', you part-blood dweebs," her sister sniffed. "Your ancestors' language isn't evil just because you're too lazy to bother learning it."
"But you have ice and fire magic and you kill people," Yellow pointed out. "That's kind of evil."
"No it's not! Our parents gave us permission," the twins huffed.
"The Yiga Clan keeps raiding nomad caravans and city farms and leaving people to starve, so Mother said they're fair game," one went on to explain. "We're proper warriors and everything."
"Spears and all!" the other said proudly. "Although we left those back at Daddy's hideout. They were too clunky to sneak through the air ducts with."
Harry studied his Navi Slate for a few seconds before leading them around a corner. "Your dad has a whole hideout?" he asked. "Why?"
"Because he's the king that the wind has been yelling about kidnapping, stupid! Why else would Koume and I be princesses?"
Harry halted in his tracks, causing the twins to dodge to either side of him. "You're what?" he said hoarsely. Twinrova, born as Gerudo royalty? Twinrova?! What, was the world trying to fill in the gap left by Ganondorf's lack of a reincarnation?
The girls laughed. "Wait, you didn't know?" Koume gasped. "You were really helping us just because?"
"I didn't know losers like the ones in our baby sibling's Hero comics could be real," Kotake breathed, her expression close to awe. She crouched down closer to Harry's height and gave him a wicked grin. "You must be a real doormat, huh?" She pinched his cheek hard enough to leave a mark. "Or maybe you're a sucker for a pretty face?"
Harry ground his teeth. Unlike Malfoy, these two were a brand of haughty and abrasive that he was certain he'd never be able to get along with. "I live in a world where, if a kid disappears, it's close to a sure thing that they've been murdered if they don't turn up within a day. You're lucky the 'bad guys' in this world are a lot nicer than the ones in ours," he said sharply. "We're helping you because it's the right thing to do. If that makes us 'doormats', then whatever." He consulted his Navi Slate and then stepped past the dumbstruck twins to resume leading the way.
"Why only a day?" he heard one whisper to the other. "And who murders kids? What's the point? Most of them aren't useful yet."
"Revenge against their parents, maybe? I don't know," her sister muttered back. "Even if Korva gets annoying sometimes, I wouldn't want her gone."
Their whispers shifted into the Gerudo language from there, and Harry was content to ignore them.
They reached the round front welcoming room of the cave system without running into any more Yiga. Agent Hebbi's command to withdraw and hide had traveled quickly, it appeared, and the Yiga turned out to be good at both. In some of the halls, he'd noticed scuffed bloodstains where casualties of the twins' rampage had been dragged away.
"My brothers and I are going to have to change our clothes for the storm," Harry told the twins with a glance toward the curtained door. The wooden gate that normally blocked it had been raised for their departure. "Don't freak out and blast us, okay? We only stole them."
Ducking under their Invisibility Cloaks, since the girls didn't seem likely to turn around, the boys switched their Hylian tunics and matching armor out for the skintight red shirts, fabric gloves, and metal-backed leather bracers of their new Yiga outfits. The sealed edges of the shirt would keep sand from blowing into their upper clothes and scratching up their torsos. Harry hesitated at the sight of what he pulled out of his bag next, however.
From the back, a Yiga mask consisted of an ovular wooden bowl with white paint in front, tiny holes drilled around the bottom, an attached two-part iron helmet with sliding pins inside to let the lower section raise up, and a buttoned strap to secure it tighter to his head. Eye-holes were nowhere on that list. The mask would block sand a lot better than the Lenses of Truth, though, and it looked like it was rounded enough to squeeze his glasses in underneath. He just didn't want to be both suffocated and blind, trapped in a contraption of wood and metal.
Kotake saw him hanging half-out of his magical cloak, chewing on his lower lip as he considered the mask, and rolled her eyes. "The Yiga manage to wear those all day and night without keeling over, and it's not just because a lot of them are too stupid to die," she told him.
Koume tapped her red-slippered foot impatiently. "Either put it on or don't, already. We've got places to be!"
Harry suppressed the sword-induced urge to send them a dark scowl, which had been growing every time they opened their mouths. Taking his glasses off, he pulled the helmeted mask over his head to test the feel of it. Immediately, the dark inside lit up with a view of the room. It was crystal clear—clearer than his actual sight, in fact. It was as though he'd lowered a big glasses lens right in front of his face. Pressurized air pushed lightly against his nose; when he breathed in, it was as though he wasn't wearing anything on his face at all.
"Oh, wow," he gasped.
Blue had pulled on his mask as well. "The visuals must be from some kind of illusion magic," he remarked, knocking on the wooden surface in front of his cheek. "What a clever application!"
Koume sighed loudly. "Can we go now?"
Harry removed the mask, adjusted the length of the strap, and downed a Chilly Elixir before sliding the headpiece back on. His glasses went into his magic bag for the time being. "Yes, we can go," he declared. "Do you two need anything? Cloaks, potions, whatever?"
Kotake blinked, looked down, and patted at her arms. "Damn it, I forgot they stole our sandstorm dresses after they knocked us out."
Koume shuddered. "That's so creepy."
Yellow took his black school cloak out of his bag. "You can borrow some of our clothes, if you want. Just try not to lose them, please."
The girls scrunched their noses, but they were smart enough not to refuse the help. Blue and Yellow leant them their school cloaks, all the boys pulled on their new masked helmets and put their magical cloaks away, and then the six teens trooped out the door.
Wind clawed at them as soon as they left the shelter of the caves. Heat pounced on the unaccustomed brothers' backs and shoulders, only just kept at bay by the effects of the potion Harry had taken. The Yiga had built their hideout right next to the desert, in one of the hollows that pocked the side of a series of cliffs and plateaus. They stood on one such plateau, staring out across the lighter beige upper layer of the sandstorm.
Since the princesses loudly and emphatically turned their noses up at the idea of the Harrys hauling them down to the ground via Falling Spell, the boys took the risk of using their brooms for the descent. Using the Quidditch skills they'd practiced during the stormy autumn months that year, they ferried the princesses down as gently as they could while fighting the hurricane-force winds. Harry had to pry Koume's hands off of his broom once they'd landed, shouting repeatedly over the howling of the storm that she'd get dashed against the ground if she tried to fly off in such violent weather. The habits of a past life died hard, it seemed.
Reassuming the formation they'd used to travel through the Yiga hideout, this time with Harry using the Wayfinder instead of his Navi Slate, they trudged through the violent conditions of Vaati's latest tantrum. The fact that it was daytime did little to improve the visibility. Harry nearly walked into several cacti as he focused on keeping the Wayfinder's pulse going as fast as it would go. Kotake even yanked him out of the way of one once, before irritably plucking one of the spiky fruits off the top and pelting it at the back of his head. Harry was glad she hadn't frozen it solid first.
An hour into their hot, exhausting journey, he felt a pang of danger. Harry swung an arm out to the side to halt the group, then shoved the Wayfinder in his bag. Drawing his sword and conjuring his Mirror Shield onto his left arm, he waited for the tingling sense at the back of his neck to flare into bright alarm.
He heard a hiss through the sand underneath the sound of the storm. At the same time that hiss ended in a gurgling battle-cry, the Four Sword's unease turned into a yelp of warning. Harry swiveled toward the noise and jerked his shield forward.
With a loud clang, the Electric Lizalfos's pale, curved sword bounced off of Harry's defenses. The lizard was sent off-balance by the force of its own strike, its sword arm knocked high. Harry swung his shield out to the side to slash thrice at the lizard's middle before both of them jumped back. While the yellow Lizalfos landed in the sand and went into the usual hopping dance the creatures were prone to, Harry knocked into someone standing behind him.
"Ow! What are you doing?" Kotake cried out indignantly.
"Go toward the monster, not us!" Koume snapped. She lunged past him, one hand wreathed in fire. The fireball she threw at the Lizalfos was captured by the winds and flung into the sand. "Gods dammit!"
Another mental alarm had Harry throwing a Banishing Charm some meters to the right of the Lizalfos he was fighting. The edge of it clipped the second giant lizard that had come flying in from the haze, knocking it out of the air. Red ran up to engage it at close-range before it could start dodging around. He was slowed by the sand and his weariness from trudging through it, though, and the monster managed to dart away from him.
Harry had to shift his attention back to his own enemy, because it was dashing in for a strike. He waited for it to stand up tall to take a swing at him, and then—
Was blinded by a field of white that bloomed across half his vision.
Shocking cold painfully sucked the heat from the right side of his face before dimming into a more ordinary sense of having an ice-cube pressed to his skin. He staggered to the side, losing track of where the Lizalfos had gone in the rush to wrestle his frozen helmet off.
'There's a fifty-fifty chance she did that on purpose,' he thought, inspecting the damage. Kotake's blast had frozen the Lizalfos into an ugly sculpture, as well as spreading a thick ice shell across the right side of Harry's helmet. If he hadn't been wearing it, she might have done some serious damage to his face. Not that the girl would have cared, he was sure. He conjured his little punching buckler to whack the ice off, then strapped the Yiga mask back on.
In the back of his mind, he saw flashes of Twinrova's shots being reflected back at the opposite sisters—the Four Sword's way of egging him into a fight. 'Kotake just has terrible aim, then. Of course she hit me by accident,' Harry thought forcefully to spite the blade. If he was going to get into a stupid, pointless battle, it wouldn't be because he let such unsubtle mind-control get the better of him. The sword would have to do better than that.
"—just mad because my magic still works and yours doesn't!" he heard one of the twins crow behind him. Turning, Harry saw Kotake skipping away from her sister, who was trying to set her trousers on fire. "You've got a weakness and I don't!" the former cackled gleefully.
"Like you would do any better if we were on Death Mountain!" Koume said with an indignant stamp of her foot. "All elemental magic has at least one weakness!"
"Yeah, but at least mine can't be countered by Korva the Kiss-Arse!"
"She could never!" Koume threw a fireball at her sister, who barely had to dodge as the storm redirected the attack well over her head. With a scream of frustration, Koume chased after her giggling sibling with her outstretched hands trailing fire.
With the princesses occupied for the moment, Harry decided to check whether the Lizalfos was actually dead. Conjuring his Dragon Hammer, he crunched through the sand to the creepy ice sculpture. After taking his time to aim carefully, he delivered a jet-powered blow to the top of the lizard's head. As he'd thought, the ice had frozen around the monster, rather than through. Its thin limbs and long tongue flew out like wet noodles as its jaw slammed into the ground. Harry gave it another whack to the noggin, deciding overkill was better than not enough, and hurried to grab the body parts it dropped before the storm could catch hold of them.
'Being able to freeze monsters in place seems like it could be useful,' he mused, ignoring the shrieks of the sisters' squabble. It wasn't clear whether freezing a monster did any damage to it, but being able to put an enemy on hold for longer than an arrow to the head could manage seemed like something they could use to turn the tide of a difficult fight. Was there a wizard spell strong enough to do that? Or an Ice Rod they could hunt down?
He ambled toward the strong Illumination Charm that Blue had sent up. Yellow and Red were each holding one of the princesses back with a desperate grip around their waists, getting dragged forward through the sand as the much larger Gerudo teens strained to claw at one another.
"Koume, Kotake, we're in the middle of a sandstorm, Merlin knows where in this desert, and you're picking a fight with each other?" Harry hollered into the wind. "Do you want to die out here?"
"She insulted my magic!" Koume whined. "Make her apologize!"
"I just made a joke! Get over it, you weenie," Kotake sniffed.
Harry was somewhat tempted to leave the girls to their quarrel and take his brothers the rest of the way to Oasis City. That would be a horrible, selfish thing to do, though, even if Koume and Kotake ground on his nerves.
"Kotake, this weather is messing with your magic, too," he declared. "Your spells are heavier than Koume's but the wind still screws up your aim. Unless you meant to freeze half my head?"
Kotake crossed her arms. "You were in my way!"
"Someone with good aim knows how to aim around things," Harry argued. "You don't hit walls all the time just because they're in your way, do you?"
As her sister puffed up angrily, Koume laughed. "She wastes magic on walls all the time!" she said.
"Well, there you have it," Harry said. "Either this wind is affecting your magic, too, or your aim isn't as good as you'd like to think."
With one sister appeased and the other somewhat miffed, they set off again. Lizalfos attacks became more frequent as the Wayfinder's light brightened, as though Oasis City were a siren call for any monsters in the area. Harry shouted instructions in English to his brothers to make sure at least one of them kept an eye on what Twinrova were doing, lest one of the twins hit a Harry with their elemental magic instead of a monster.
So long as the Harrys made sure to stay out of her way, Kotake proved to be quite an effective fighter in the storm. Perhaps trying to prove a point about her "poor" aim, she viciously fired gobs of ice at anything that showed up to hassle their group. The monsters emerged from the ice weaker and slower than they were going in, and the frozen statues made easy targets for the boys' Dragon Hammers.
Harry's legs were close to giving out by the time they finally spotted the walls of Oasis City jutting out of the sand. In the last however long, he'd drunk three of the Chilly Elixirs they'd stolen from the Yiga hideout. The last one had worn off around ten minutes ago. He swayed on his feet, prickling all over with sweat and breathing heavily as he forced himself to keep up the pace.
The last few minutes of the home stretch were miserable, as the Harrys had to struggle out of their dangerously identifiable Yiga clothes and put their woefully inadequate tunics and Lenses of Truth back on. When they finally saw the lights of a city gate shining through the orange haze, the Harrys held onto one another and cheered in their parched, raspy voices. They'd made it!
In contrast to the entrances of Castle Town, which usually had one or two bored-looking City Guardsmen standing watch, the gate of Oasis City had more intimidating protectors. Six of the tallest people Harry had ever seen—taller than any of the other Gerudo he'd met so far—stood in front of it with appropriately enormous spears and two-handed swords at the ready. They were shrouded in pale hooded jackets and gowns that covered every inch of their forms. Even their faces were fully hidden, protected by veils with dark eye-screens. In the fuzzy, dreamlike environment created by the storm, they looked like towering colorful ghosts.
"Princesses!" one of the guards boomed in surprise. She latched her spear onto her back and rushed forward to address the twins. "Your parents have been frantic since you disappeared!" the woman exclaimed. "The King insisted on returning to the city in the middle of the storm in order to arrange a search for you."
"And Mother thinks we're reckless!" Kotake said. "What if the wind outside or the monsters in the escape tunnels had eaten him on the way here?"
"Actually, I think the voice in the wind gave up on that kidnapping plan," Blue told her. "In fact, this storm should fizzle out in a day or two."
"We gave the guy who started it something else to think about yesterday," Green said.
The guard seemed to take notice of them for the first time. "Hello, there. Who are you?" she asked, leaning down closer to their height. "Did the Princesses find you wandering in the desert?"
Koume shuffled her feet. "They kind of…erm, they found us, actually," she confessed.
Harry stared at her in shock. He never would have expected either of the girls to admit to any sort of weakness or needing help. 'See, they are different from the Old Kingdom ones you remember,' he thought at his sword.
The guard reached out and clasped his forearms, making Harry jump. "Thank you, young voes, for bringing our princesses home safely," she said earnestly. "You will be rewarded for your efforts."
"Oh, er, you don't have to—"
Blue put his hand over Harry's mouth. "Thank you, ma'am. It was our duty as Gerudo, even just part-bloods," he said with a bow.
"What are your names? What family will you be staying with?" the guard asked. "Once the storm clears up, I'm sure the Royal Family would like to be able to track you down to thank you."
Harry and Blue exchanged a panicked glance. While Agent Hebbi had talked about Link having a grandmother who lived out here, he hadn't said her last name. They were only familiar with the paternal side of their dimensional double's family.
Yellow was the one who piped up to say, "We call ourselves by our colors, and we're related to the Bluesmiths! Do you know them?"
"Ah, yes, the engineers! That little Link Bluesmith is such a polite vei," the guard said brightly. "I'll see you at the Volkar residence tomorrow morning, then."
Kotake frowned skeptically at Harry. "You're pretty dinky for Bluesmiths or Volkars," she remarked, "but whatever." She unwrapped the school cloak she'd been borrowing from her shoulders and shoved it into his hands. Koume balled up the cloak she'd been wearing and threw it at Blue's face, and then the two princesses ran happily into town. Another guard peeled off from the gate to trot after them.
"Make sure you follow the city rules and don't try to go into the Vaikorodan—the Women's District," the guard said. "Only full-blood Gerudo vais are allowed into the city's heart without a royal summons."
According to the Four Sword, the Harrys were lucky not to have been greeted at spear-point and told to walk back out into the storm, so Harry found that to be a pretty fair policy by comparison. "Yes ma'am," he said. Harry led his brothers into town—he and Yellow fighting to keep the nervous guilt off their faces and Red and Blue putting on a good show of looking like they belonged.
Through the volume of sand in the air, their first impression of Oasis City was a stone hedge maze dotted by a rainbow of ghosts. There weren't many people out, and the few that were had shrouded themselves in protective clothes like what the guards at the gate had been wearing. Around them, rather than buildings, there were only walls interrupted by doors, lights, and carved stairs and lofts. Everything was built into the two-story-high walls of the town square they had entered. The only things that stood independently were the concentric circles of palm trees that were bent over and flailing in the wind, a fountain and accompanying shallow moat that were dry and filled with sand, and a black and luminous yellow-green statue the size of a ground-tap generator, but surrounded by a high stala fence for whatever reason.
There was a low buzz in the air. It wasn't quite audible, but it droned in Harry's ears all the same. The tips of his ears and the back of his neck prickled as if in anticipation of a static shock.
As someone born in the era of electronics, he'd developed a sense for when the power was on and when it wasn't, even when locked in the dark cupboard under the stairs during the night. There was a kind of alive-ness to the air when the power was on, and a disturbing quiet when it wasn't. In this town, in a world where people didn't know what electric insulation was, they'd found a way to turn the power on.
Due to the lack of free-standing buildings, there were few places for the Harrys to tuck themselves away and regroup in relative quiet. They wandered around, holding hands to stay together, until they came across what appeared to be an unoccupied sales stall. It was a square hollow built into the end of a wall with a carved-out desk within and a windowless opening in front. After making certain it didn't lead into someone's house and that no one had left anything inside that they might be accused of trying to steal, the Harrys piled in.
"We're so not supposed to be here," Yellow whimpered, tucking himself under the desk. It was designed for a Gerudo, so all of the Harrys could have sat underneath it with plenty of head-room to spare. "We're going to get arrested!"
"Technically, we could be part Gerudo," Blue said. "Going thousands of years back, sure, but in a land without genetic testing, simply looking the part is sufficient." He drew a finger down the bridge of his nose.
"We're Indian! We don't even have abs like Link does!" Yellow despaired. "Ohhh, I shouldn't have lied at the gates. They're going to find out we're not related to the Volkars or the Bluesmiths as soon as they knock on that door tomorrow. We've already broken the city's rules!"
Red ducked under the desk to throw and arm over Yellow and pull him in close. "If we get arrested, we'll just break out," he said. "We've escaped one prison already. We can get out of another, easy-peasy. That goes double once the storm ends and we can fly away on our brooms."
"Green, what if we tried finding the Volkar family anyway?" Blue asked. "Agent Hebbi said his partner was calling round to see who we could be ransomed off to. That means the Volkars must have heard about us."
"That doesn't mean they'd let us stay in their house," Harry said. "That's a bit extreme, isn't it? Hearing about some kidnapped strangers over the phone and then deciding they look enough like your cousin to let them stay over?"
"Link let us stay the night at his house after we showed up in the middle of a rainstorm and passed out at his dining room table," Red pointed out. "Gaebora doesn't mind us cooking with stuff from her fridge, either, as long as we make enough for her to have some when she gets home from work."
"The people in this world are a lot more willing to help us than the ones back home," Blue agreed. "The Volkars might take pity on us. It's worth the effort to find a Gossip Booth and try calling them, at least."
Harry cringed at the idea. That sounded too much like taking advantage of people. He felt bad enough letting Link feed him, and now Blue wanted to intentionally wheedle more of Link's family into taking care of them?
Yellow voiced Harry's thoughts. "Blue, that sounds like a horrible thing to do! Making people help us just because they're nice Light-Worlders who don't know any better."
"We wouldn't be forcing them, or anything!" Blue defended. "It isn't as though we couldn't pay them back for their kindness, either. We have money now, remember? We could give them some Rupees or one of the Gleeok scales we have left."
Yellow's ire subsided. "I guess so," he conceded with a mulish frown. "I don't much like using people, though."
"Question is, where would a Gossip Booth be in this city, and how would we reach a singular member of the family with one?" Blue wondered, rubbing his chin. "We know the surname, but not a first name or an address."
Red snapped his fingers. "We could call Link first! He'd know."
"Wait, I haven't agreed to this!" Harry protested.
The incoming argument was averted by a passer-by poking their head through the window. "Oh! It must you, then!" the pastel pink figure declared. Her deep Gerudo voice was young-ish, putting her in her late teens or early twenties. "I found you!"
Blue and Green stared owlishly at the cloaked giant. Red crawled out from under the desk to do the same, while Yellow folded himself farther underneath it. "You did?" Red asked. "Why were you looking?"
"Because my vaba and uncle got a call about a handful of maybe-cousins that had gotten kidnapped by the Yiga!" the young woman exclaimed. "The guy hung up when they said they didn't know anyone matching your description, and since my vaba—my grandma—didn't know the Yiga's name, she couldn't call him back! Uncle Banda and vaba Komake were so worried that that those creeps might have turned you loose in the desert in the middle of this storm. I'm glad you managed to get to town safely!"
"Why?" Green asked.
The girl laughed. "What do you mean, 'why', silly?" Looking over her shoulder, she bellowed, "UNCLE, GET OVER HERE! I FOUND THEM!"
Soon, a pastel green specter jogged over, this one taller and broader than the pink one leaning over them. "Wow, they really do look like the Yiga said," the man remarked. His voice sounded about the same as any Gerudo woman's which was a tad confusing, but Harry supposed he must have been a man because the girl had called him "uncle" and his sandstorm clothes ended in billowy Turkish trousers instead of a skirt. If he was a Gerudo man, though, shouldn't he have been king?
"Do you have a family to stay with?" the smaller stranger asked. "More people are allowed in the main city than in the Vaikorodan, but part-blood voes like you need to have a family that can vouch for your relation. Otherwise, you'll be arrested and kicked out of town."
"We're technically related to Link, but not in any normal way," Blue told her. "Our 'proper' relatives don't live here."
"We kind of had to lie in order to get in," Harry admitted, shame warming his cheeks.
"Well, I mean, you were just kidnapped. I don't blame you for doing whatever it took to get to safety," the girl said. "A lot of us living here think the city's rules for entry are unfair, actually."
"If you need a family to stay with, you can bunk with us," the man behind her offered. "We've got a nice big chunk of wall to ourselves, and you four wouldn't take up much space."
"Four?" the girl repeated. She folded over the window ledge as she looked around the stone kiosk. "The Yiga on the stone said four, but I only see three."
Yellow reached a hand out of his shadowy shelter and waved.
The girl gave him a high-five. "Hi, little guy!" she greeted. "I'm Rabi Volkar, Link's cousin, and the voe with me is my Uncle Banda. What's your name?"
"I-I'm Yellow," he answered nervously. "Can we really stay with you? One of the ladies at the gate said she wanted to check up on us tomorrow, and the only family we could think of was Link's. Sorry."
Harry tensed, worried they might have to explain why a member of the City Guard (or whatever this city called its police) would want to check up on them, but the girl nodded like that was normal. "Yeah, even if they don't actually follow upon it, they say stuff like that to smaller voes all the time. There are a few Hylian voes out there who can kinda pass as short part-bloods, and they're real paranoid about it."
"If it's alright with you, we'd like to stay the night," Blue said. "Tomorrow, we can answer the knock from the guards, buy some better clothes for this storm, and set off for Hylian country."
"There's no guarantee the sandstorm will be over by tomorrow," Mr. Volkar said. "It's already been raging for far longer than these things usually go on for."
The Harrys shrugged. "That's fine," Harry told him. "We'll buy some sandstorm clothes and potions before we set off. We've already got a way to navigate; it's really just the heat that we have trouble with. Everything else about the storm is only annoying." The Harrys could cast Illumination Charms to regroup if they got thrown apart by the wind and could endure the cold nights with their English temperaments and woolen school clothing. As long as they had outfits that wouldn't cause them to burn and wouldn't let in the sand, the only weather-related nuisance left was the searing daytime temperature.
The two Gerudo exchanged a masked look. "Yeah, we'll see what my vaba has to say about letting you tiny voes walk off into the worst storm we've had in decades," Rabi said. "Now come on out so we can get you some real shelter from this weather!"
(Minor) Item Get: Yiga Wayfinder (Highlands Enclave). Wayfinders are a low-budget solution to the difficulty of making sure everyone can make it to and from a home that's intentionally hard to find. Most Yiga carry one, and guard it jealously. Different Enclaves will have a local Wayfinder unique to the region.
Notes:
-It isn't uncommon for the disguise-experts and more skilled illusionists of the Highlands Enclave to "infiltrate" Oasis City whenever they feel like relaxing. Unfortunately, this can sometimes result in children born to mothers who didn't know who they were truly sleeping with. If those children are born only half-Gerudo (and therefore visibly of Yiga parentage), it isn't uncommon for them to be abandoned to the west of the city for the Yiga or the hot sands to claim, or shipped out of the desert to a Hylian orphanage. Rape by deception is a crime taken very seriously in Gerudo territories, and hatred for Ganondorf and his deluded followers runs deep among the Gerudo. That hatred also extends to shiira-vehvis ("shadow children"), the unwanted half-Yiga offspring that many a deceived young woman has been left with over the centuries.
-Shadow-mages are exclusive to the Shadow People (Sheikah and Yiga). Though they have shallow internal pools of magic, there are many things they can use it for. Illusions and short-range teleportation are talents unique to these mages. While it's possible for others to cast illusion enchantments, none can match the natural ease of a shadow-mage.
-While playing through BOTW, I got the sense that, if Link weren't the enemy of the Yiga Clan's beloved Ganon, he would just be Some Guy to them. Sure, they'd probably still try to mug him or proselytize at him like they seem to do with travelers that pass them by, but that would be about it. That's the kind of energy I'm trying to channel with how the Yiga and Twinrova regard the Harrys. They're just Some Little Guys off on a sword-quest that has nothing to do with Ganon or the Triforce or all that Destiny stuff.
-Fundoshi are a kind of traditional Japanese underwear. They look kind of diaper-ish in front, with a twisted line of cloth going over the hips and between the buttocks. Yiga wear these more often than Sheikah do.
-I've posted an article on my blog (and linked it on Ao3) that explains specific elements of the sandstorm clothes and spears the Gerudo soldiers in this chapter were sporting. Civilian women wear the same protective clothes during sandstorms, minus the leather corset, boots, tasseled waist drape, and narrow pinstriped sash. Those are military and voe (with some cross-over into vei) accessories; any civilian vai caught wearing them would get misgendered at best and hit with a 100rp fine at worst.