Last month: Green snooped around the boss door to investigate the odd feeling Blue had reported emanating from it. He discovered that Vaati was doubling the time in the area, layering a younger version of the dungeon directly atop its current existence, straining reality as he did so. Elsewhere, Red and Blue dodged the lasers of a massive Beamos and discovered the scene of a massacre that had happened centuries before.
This chapter fought me for weeks and weeks...and then, suddenly, the words flowed like water. I'm extra excited to post this one because this chapter features my favorite boss design out of those I've come up with so far! I drew the initial concept ages ago—back in 2017 or 2018, I think—and kept rotating it in my mind since then. I even did a cross stitch of one of its more elaborate pixel designs, and you might recognize it from my Ao3 profile pic! It's time to meet the ruthless queen of Beamoses, Ashkoma the Ancient Wonder!
(Fancy portraits of her two different forms can be found under my "dungeon 6" tag on Tumblr, or over on Ao3!)
Content warning for severe burns, children (temporarily) losing limbs, and someone suffering a sensory overload. Descriptions of injuries will not be egregiously graphic, as per usual, but this boss is a powerful one, and the Harrys are going to get pretty hurt in this fight.
Harry saw a shadow appear and start growing on the floor. He assumed at first that it was Shadow Harry, but a wordless shout of alarm from his sword made him jump aside.
A big golden key topped by a horned eye dropped from above to land where he'd been standing. It chipped the moon-patterned tiles, bounced up, and landed neatly in Yellow's arms.
After a frozen moment of astonishment, both boys let out a cheer. "Red and Blue must have done it!" Yellow exclaimed. "We can get out of here!"
"Yeah, this time-stuff is giving me a migraine." Harry massaged the base of his skull. He and Yellow had just gone through a room that just would not stay put. Young and old and young again—nothing could just pick a damn time! He'd convinced the Four Sword to stop screaming, but its fear still spiked painfully whenever a phantom appeared or some part of the room suddenly had to share space with its younger self.
As that time-weirdness had been happening, he and Yellow had had to trudge through a Leever-infested sand-pit that went up to their knees, dodging knife-traps and laboriously hauling themselves up onto solid platforms whenever they could. And after all of that nerve-wracking, head-hurting, leg-torturing effort, what had they gotten? A gold Rupee. Which—okay, Harry wasn't exactly complaining about finding that much money—but he'd have liked to find a spell scroll! The back of his head felt like it might cave in from all the Four Sword's anxious flinching, and his legs might as well have been burning pool noodles!
'Ungrateful. You're being ungrateful and entitled again,' he thought with a sigh. This dungeon had just been so long and the time in here felt so bad.
A rocky grating noise and a sharp thud announced Red and Blue entering the room. "Yes! We fixed the statue!" Red proclaimed. "I was worried we'd gone through all of that for nothing."
Harry looked up at the Medusa statue, which he'd long gotten bored enough to stop paying attention to. Its sun eye was lit and its moon eye was now unlit. That must have been the signal for the boss key nearly landing on him.
"What did you go through?" Yellow asked. "We had to practically swim through all this moving sand in order to get to the other end of a big room. There were so many Leevers ramming into us and knife-traps trying to cut us in two! Green looked green the whole time, too, with the way so many things in there kept switching times. The Four Sword doesn't like it, apparently."
"We just saw and lived through this place's laser robot apocalypse," Red said. "So there's this huge room that's all dark, right? And full of ReDeads. Ten of 'em, Blue said. And at the back are these Beamos eyes as big as billboards, and just as crazy powerful as you'd think."
Yellows eyes went wide. "Giant Beamoses? They come in sizes?"
"After playing laser-tag with zombies, we found a control room," Blue said. "It had been attacked by another Beamos a lot larger than the vase-bodied ones we've been blowing up. This one had far more accurate aim, too. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a smaller, more advanced model based on the eyes mounted on the wall." He folded his arms in front of him, gripping his elbows. "Some of the ghosts there were reliving a previous day—perfectly boring and ordinary—while all the others were running and screaming and falling around them." He dropped his gaze to the floor. "The scientists here were idiots who built terrible, dangerous things, but they didn't deserve to die like that. It looked as though they had no warning at all."
"To make things worse, Vaati turned the less-vaporized ones into ReDeads and had them standing guard," Red said with a pinched set to his mouth. "Like they hadn't been through enough already."
Harry grimaced. "I bet we can all guess what's on the other side of that, then." He jerked hid thumb toward the golden doors leading to the dungeon's final chamber.
"Four little Harrys, fighting the k-killer robot that m-murdered all those people," Yellow said tremulously. He clutched the golden key tight. "Do you really think we can do it, Green?"
No, but that hadn't stopped them before, had it? They'd do what they had to do, even if it seemed impossible on the run-up and was utterly horrible in the doing. Harry had been doing it on a smaller scale with his chore-load all his life.
He stood tall and squared his shoulders, casting a determined look toward the doors. "It's only a fancier Beamos, right? We know at least some of the trick to killing it already," he said firmly. "It might take a while of ducking and dodging until we figure out the rest, but we know that hitting them in the eyes with their own lasers hurts."
The four Harrys lined up in front of the golden doors and took a deep breath. Whatever happened in there, a good chance existed of it being worse than Ignikanos. One of them could die, too quickly and terribly for even one of the two fairies they'd collected from the Great Plateau to do them any good. Wasn't that something to look forward to?
Harry stepped forward with the key in and pushed it into the lock. It spun itself around, and both lock and key dropped to the floor with a sound like a gunshot. Harry took another long breath to steady himself as he pushed through to the next room.
Like many of the rooms in this underground complex, this was another atrium bigger than it ought to be. The ground was coated in a thick layer of sand, studded with a grid of pillars spaced ten meters apart and rows of flashing red lights mounted on metal sticks. Additional rows of lights in the ceiling ensured that the whole place was dyed a bloody red in between moments of cave-black.
"Great, it's another testing chamber," he heard Red mutter.
Harry scouted the room for billboard-eyes on the back wall and found none. Instead, a rounded, lumpy-looking hulk took up the center of the room. The brothers cautiously approached it, hugging close to the pillars whenever they could.
"Shadow Harry, do you have anything to say?" Harry asked when the tense silence stretched out long enough to strike him as odd.
They paused to listen. No fifth voice spoke up.
"I think he's been gone for a while now," Yellow said with an air of realization. "Green, he hasn't made fun of you even once since the Wolfoses, has he?"
Harry shook his head. "Not even when I almost drowned in the sand after that Leever knocked me over," he confirmed.
"He was going to talk to Vaati about how bad his new magic anchors are," Red recalled. "That's when he left."
Blue hummed in thought. "I thought the Shadow of Hyrule was practically indestructible, but…Vaati might have done something that managed to stick. At least for a bit."
"What do you think might have happened to him? Could Vaati have hurt him so much that he can't come back to us?" Yellow asked. "What if he needs our help?"
"We can't find him, so we can't help him. I doubt he'd even want our help in the first place," Harry said. "We should focus on getting out of here for now. Once we're back outside, we'll have more options."
His brothers nodded with more focus in their eyes, though Yellow's brow was still pinched. Without Shadow Harry's usual speech, they crept up on the dusty monument of cracked stone and faded metal.
The monster looked like the detached head of a Medusa statue several times larger than the one in the last room—roughly five meters high and wider across, with the width added to by a tangle of "hair". It had a close-lipped mouth with small metal tusks, a chipped human nose, two gaping holes in its forehead, and a broad split down the middle of its face revealing dark gears that currently lay still. Many-segmented metal tendrils extended from a hairline that circled behind the thing's mask-like face, each ending in a mouthless head that looked a bit like a child's drawing of a snake. Two more simplistic serpents curved on each side of the head in place of ears, made of heavily-tarnished pale metal that almost blended in with the aged gray stone it was attached to. The ancient hulk was damaged in a way that couldn't be explained by age, pitted with tiny dents and scratches all over and cracks in random places; it had clearly been through many a battle.
The worst thing about this Beamos, though, was that it had three eyes.
Blue swore. "Like two wasn't lethal enough!" he cried, barely holding his voice back to a whisper.
They kept approaching it, though, because they had to. What else were they going to do, give up?
When they were ten meters away, a low rumble sounded. Yellow-green light flashed through the openings in the robot's split face. Electricity tingled in the air as giant clockwork began ticking for the first time in ages. Three deadly eyes flickered to life.
Harry jumped when the eyes swung in his direction without the head moving a millimeter. Oh, that was just perfect; this Beamos could look around!
His astonishment compounded when, with a thrum that shook their bones, the head lifted off of the floor. It revolved slowly to face its prey, every one of its snakes glaring directly at them with eyes that were cracked and missing lenses, but no less eerily alive. Though its fixed mouth lacked the ability to smile, Harry imagined the disembodied head giving them a hungry, wicked leer. Its eyes began glowing brighter.
"Split!" Harry commanded. The boys broke away from one another to find cover. With his sword whining in his mental ear, Harry found it difficult to follow his own order; the time was especially screwy in this room, and many of the pillars were of the newly-painted, silently-rattling-apart kind. He had to skip past two columns in the row until he found one that he could touch without his head pounding.
The Medusa calmly watched them all run, then gave a little bounce in the air and began following Yellow. Its lower pair of eyes dropped to the floor, while the one on the forehead stared intently at its target. Twin red beams, each several times as broad as a normal Beamos's narrow laser, drew across the ground to nip at Yellow's heels.
Yellow was running as fast as he could with the sand dragging at each step. His frantic pace was enough to keep the lasers from slicing through his ankles, but he was quickly losing steam with all the speed and effort he was pouring on. He'd duck behind a pillar, and the monster would sweep around to the other side in a spray of sand. "There's nowhere to hide", it seemed to taunt. The lasers never stopped and never wavered; as the head swooped around Yellow to keep him running, its eyes slid around to keep him perfectly in focus.
Harry's bow jumped into existence in his hands as he went into the motion of drawing an arrow. Intent on getting the robot's attention, he nocked one of the precious few Fire Arrows he'd collected from monsters on Death Mountain. Immediately, he ran into the conundrum of his own inexperience; the beam-firing portions of the Medusa's eyes were proportionally rather small, made up of an undersized pupil and iris gliding across a curved plane of dark metal on cross-shaped mounts. In addition, the head was constantly veering around and the vulnerable portions of its eyes were repositioning themselves to maintain its aim; Harry wasn't sure even Avoka would have been able to land this kind of shot.
Yellow stumbled, and one of the lasers grazed him. Searing psychic pain sliced from the outside of Harry's right calf up to his mid-thigh. Yellow didn't collapse, but he couldn't run as fast with cauterized slices skimmed off of his leg.
"Screw accuracy," Harry muttered. His brother needed help. He aimed as best as he could and fired.
The arrow bounced off of the monster's forehead. It didn't do any damage, but the brightly-glowing projectile seemed to confuse the robot's systems. The lasers jerked up and away from Yellow before cutting off. Some of the snakes on the Medusa's head turned to look in Harry's direction with their broken red eyes.
Catching onto Harry's plan to distract, Red jumped out of cover. "Oi! Look over here!" He conjured his Mirror Shield and angled it around in an effort to catch some of the arena's pulsing red lighting. More snakes looked in his direction, though the Medusa's wide gray face seemed intent on looming over Yellow with feverishly glowing eyes. Red banged on his shield with the hilt of his sword and raised the heavy piece of equipment up. "You know this symbol, right? I'm betting you don't like it much!"
Though Harry had no idea what his brother was on about, Red turned out to be correct. With racket of angrily grinding gears, the monster spun around, its snakes flaring out and coiling with ire. Red had its full, undivided attention.
In a mere three seconds, light built and flared in the lidless eye on the monster's forehead. A single shot fired across the room. Directly. No trailing across the floor, no trying to find its way whatsoever.
With a low "gonnnggg", the white-scarlet blast hit Red's shield and ricocheted. Molten rock showered from the ceiling as the searing shot ploughed into the sandstone. At the same time, Red was knocked off his feet, landing hard enough on his shoulder for Harry to feel it. Red had no time to haul himself up and run; the Medusa had abandoned its pursuit of Yellow in favor of looming over this new target and his (apparently) hated shield. Its eyes flared, and Red had to curl up entirely under his shield before twin shots took half of his limbs off. Plumes of sand and droplets of glass hissed and clattered on the shimmering-hot surface of his protective shell
The other three Harrys sprang out of hiding and summoned their own Mirror Shields. "This-a-way, robot lady!" Yellow shouted, banging the hilt of his sword on his shield. Blue flashed the mirrored surface of his shield around like Red had, while Harry twirled his shield by its handles to make the sun-pinwheel spin.
Three eyes meant there was plenty of attention to go around. The Medusa went cockeyed as it drew a bead on all three boys at once. Harry dropped to his knees behind his shield and braced himself.
Light slammed into the round wall in front of him with the force of a Moblin's punch and the deep ring of a church bell. His shield vibrated horribly with the sound, numbing his left arm even through his robes and leather bracer. As soon as the heat of the shot had washed past him, Harry hopped up to his feet and started running.
Skssh! Sand exploded behind him as he pumped his legs for all they were worth. His Mirror Shield, which he had to hold with both hands to keep it hoisted up as he ran, threatened to overbalance him with each flying step. Another shot landed just short of him, slamming into the sand right next to his ankles. Hot glass pelted him, rattling off of his shield and burning through the clothes on his unprotected half. Bright spots of pain lit along his legs, stinging harshly with every movement. Harry kept on running.
The ground in front of him erupted like a small volcano. Putting his shield ahead and above him, Harry ploughed through the searing orange rain and leapt over the simmering, sticky-looking crater. He was almost to the nearest pillar when the robot decided to swing around in his direction and chase him off with a laser that carved across the floor. Once Harry was back in the open space between pillars, the Beamos resumed pelting him with a rain of short shots again.
Three seconds. Three. That was all the time Harry had before another shot came screaming in like an artillery shell. A mere ten meters of distance between spots of cover was turned into a real marathon as he dodged and stumbled around the blasts now landing ahead of him. The robot was aiming for where it predicted he'd run next, the clever bastard, landing shots between him and any pillar he tried to reach.
Another volley of shots lit up the room. One hit Harry's shield while he was mid-step. Unprepared for the sudden punch, Harry was launched sideways. He vanished his shield mid-flight and landed in a roll. Frightfully aware of how little breathing room he had to work with, Harry tucked up and re-conjured his Mirror Shield over him. The next shot pounded him into the sand, but was safely reflected away.
His brothers on other sides of the room weren't as lucky. Psychic fire lanced through one of his ankles and clipped the back of his calf. Not unexpected; as big as the Mirror Shields were, they didn't cover an entire Harry while the boy was busy running, which made their legs terribly vulnerable. He was worried for whichever one of his siblings had just gotten hit in the ankle, though. The pain had had a peculiar sense of "something missing" to it. Why had it traveled up his leg, but not down to his foot?
There was an organ-rattling buzz-crackle from above him, and way too close. Instead of the sound cutting off, as it had with the Beamos's vicious shots, the deadly droning drew even closer. Scarlet light leaked in under Harry's "shell" from the direction of his feet. Sand blew in through the narrow gap on a scalding lash of wind.
Harry's eyes widened in alarm as he watched the light grow in intensity. What was the monster doing?
Heat and incredible force pressed down on his shield. Harry was squashed into the soft ground beneath it. In his sideways position, his own bony limbs acted against him. His knobby elbows compressed against his ribs, squeezing the air from his lungs; his knees, locked together, felt like wrecking balls in a competition to see which would break first.
The Mirror Shield was magically reflective, but it was still metal. Heat began shimmering through it almost immediately under the sustained assault. The underside of the shield became a pocket oven, so hot that Harry was sure he was cooking his lungs with every short, gasping breath. Orange began to show through the thick metal disk, adding to the crimson light beaming in from all sides.
All the while, Harry's left arm was pressed hard enough against the underside of that shield for his bones to creak. Harry's desperate thoughts of escape were quickly overwhelmed by the fire eating its way through his flesh. He screamed hoarsely in the brief, terrible breaths that were available to him. His vision flashed white and red, torn between pain and reality.
It was only when his arm began going numb that Harry regained enough thought to realize he needed to act. Whatever his brothers might have been doing beyond the private hell under his shield, it wasn't enough to distract the robot from its current tactic. He needed to do something before his siblings had to watch him die.
Harry closed his eyes, withdrew from the pain in his tingling-screaming left arm, searing lungs, boiling eyes, and blistering skin, and focused on his muscles. Avoka had taught him that even small, slim people like themselves were capable of surprising strength if they could coordinate a movement across their body with everything moving in a synchronous flow. The boy had compared it to moving like an express train; no stops, no hesitations, just speed and power along a through line.
Harry planned the movement in his head, then launched into motion. He brought his right elbow down against the ground and threw his weight against his shield, pushing off from the sand with both his good arm and his right knee. With this, he managed to thrust himself up into a kneeling position.
Tears streamed freely from Harry's eyes as he forced his tortured arm to continue holding firm. There was one last thing to do, though.
Harry curled his right arm behind his shield and, fighting the pressure crushing against him, tilted his shield up.
BZZZRRR—POW!
The drone of the laser cut off with a noise like a car backfiring, followed by a grinding clatter of gears. Harry toppled forward when the pressure ramming against him abruptly lifted. He lay there on his superheated shield and the molten sand, absently noticing the sound of his enchanted clothes sizzling and too exhausted to do anything about it.
"Green, you idiot!"
Harry was yanked off of the ground and pulled up into someone's lap. He stared dazedly up at the muddy tear-tracks running down Blue's face.
"You okay?" Harry asked. Blue didn't often cry. He was like Red that way.
The ground shook with the sound of a muffled, hissing explosion. Blue uncorked a bottle of Red Potion with his teeth and downed it. Healing swept over Harry, hitting his brain like a lightning strike. He jerked upright with a gasp and clutched his left arm.
His armor was gone. The left sleeve of his woolen robes had charred and crumbled into black ash, leaving the ragged bottom section hanging limply from the armhole. The leather bracer underneath must have cracked its straps under the heat and fallen off, because it was no longer there. More of his robes had been burned away over his left knee, which had been curled under the hot spot under his shield and pressed against it to a lesser degree. The linen trousers underneath had burned away more dramatically, leaving a gaping hole over the side of his leg. All of his clothes were smoking and blackened, regardless of their materials; he smelled worse than the bathroom after Aunt Petunia had used the curling iron all morning.
It was one of Harry's more inane thoughts that made it out of his mouth first: "I don't think I can mend this." Reparo could fix rips and holes that Harry would normally have to patch or darn, but it couldn't replace a whole sleeve or un-cook the entire garment.
Blue went red in the face. His lips peeled back in a furious snarl before he began to rant, "That's all you have to say? You should care more about this! You just got cooked, you bloody—mmf!"
Red leaned around Blue, whose mouth he'd just clamped one filthy hand over. "The monster's down, Green," he said in sharp, businesslike tones. "Are we going to go for it, or are we using the break to figure out how the hell to hurt this thing?" He looked across the room, and Harry followed his gaze.
The Medusa was on the ground in a bowl of sand displaced by its weight, looking as close to unconscious as an expressionless robot could get. Its lower eyes were half-shut—as far as their cracked golden eyelids could fall—and its snakes sagged so limply that their weight had partially sunk them in the sand. A black scar traveled up the left side of its face like a tear-track, ending at the great green oval of its eye. Said eye was sparking, but not with the angry, crackling light that Harry would have expected. No, the sparks flying from the monster's injured eye were a quiet, rumbling kind of energy instead. The color of it shifted between pure white and an unnatural dark rainbow.
Harry sucked in a breath. He recognized that oil-slick lightning; it was Vaati's magic. It had to be doing something—repairs, maybe? Had Harry not hurt this thing after all?
He needed all his heads together for this. Groping around blindly behind him, he located Yellow and drew his brother in. Yellow tucked close to his side without a word. His eyes were red and puffy, his cheeks even muddier with tears than Blue's.
Guilt panged in Harry's chest. If he'd acted sooner to reflect that robot's laser, he wouldn't have given his brothers such a scare. He'd do better if he got pinned down again.
"We need to get that robot's hull open if we're going to do any real damage to it," he declared. "Its eyes are touchy like a normal Beamos's, but Vaati has them rigged up with some sort of self-repair. How do we get to something we can really hit?"
"I-Its ears," Yellow said. His voice was shaky and soft. "Those big earring-loops on the sides of its head are too weird-looking not to be important."
"And it's got some of its guts showing through the holes in its face," Red said. "I don't know about those holes in its forehead, but that wide split down the middle seems important, too."
"What if we used our whips to get a grip on its ears?" Harry suggested. "We could pull to either side and see if that divide through its face really goes all the way through."
"Beamoses burn a lot of energy, and Gerudo batteries don't seem to have been invented at the time this place was built," Blue said. "If that robot has any internal weaknesses, it's probably going to be an onboard power generator of some kind. Its head might be designed so that it can open to admit a maintenance team for that generator and all the clockwork around it."
"Sounds like a plan!" Red said. "And I'd say that whomping on whatever its weak point is with our hammers will probably do more than smacking it with our swords. Metal on metal, and all."
"We'll just have to be careful to get out of that thing's head before it claps shut," Harry said. "I'd rather not find out what happens when a person gets caught in gears that big."
His brothers shuddered. "Crunchy spaghetti sauce," Red said solemnly. Blue swatted him on the arm.
The Medusa was nearly back online now. Its eyes were open but dim, struggling to re-light with coughing click-whirr sounds reminiscent of a cold engine trying to start. Sand began to float up around it as something caught and light flashed from within the gaps in the Medusa's face.
A powerful surge of emotion hit Harry like a train. He doubled over, gagging and coughing. His heart was suddenly beating twice as fast, and far harder than it should. The room shimmered; the Four Sword screamed.
Harry opened his mouth to warn his brothers, but words failed to come to him in time. Existence lurched around them. Colors smeared and the subtle vibration of every time-doubled object in the room built to a bone-shaking roar.
Everything was suddenly, violently new again. The pillars were all brightly-painted and whole, no longer bearing the scorch marks and missing chunks of past battles waged in this room. Obsidian scars vanished from the sand pit, whose color shifted from an inconsistent muddle of black flakes, gray ash, glittering broken glass, and beige sand to a pure sheet of pale orange. The lights sticking out of the sand switched out their red bulbs for white ones with a soft click that rippled across the room. The resulting yellow-white glow made it feel like a small sun had been hung between the endless rows of pillars.
A well-oiled whirr and a hiss of sand made Harry's attention snap away from the room. With horror rising in his throat, he looked back at the Medusa now floating up from the floor.
It was beautiful.
Those three eyes, once bare diodes with all their mechanisms exposed, were now rainbow-paneled windows to a nonexistent soul. The monster's metal shone—brilliant gold, satiny copper, and newly-painted olive green. Huge golden horns now curved up from where the crumbling holes in its forehead had been. A line of unbroken copper shielding filled in the gap between the sides of its smooth gray face. If Harry hadn't seen the gears that lay underneath, he wouldn't have known the decorative-seeming metal inset hid any weakness at all.
With a low, engine-like purr, the monster kicked high off the ground. The fresh, clean sand underneath it dramatically cratered and flew every which way as the robot shot up to hover face-down just under the ceiling.
"The way it floats isn't magic! That was weight under it, not Bluestone thrust…" Harry heard Blue mutter.
"Don't get distracted!" he shouted to his siblings. It was difficult to follow his own order, with the way every one of his nerves now screamed that the world was ending. "It'll be stronger than before!"
The Medusa's snakes splayed out around its face. Their eyes, previously cracked, dulled, or bare of their lenses, were whole and bright. Their murderous red glares brightened dangerously as the air hummed with energy.
Harry threw himself behind a pillar and hunkered under his shield. His sword's ongoing silent scream blared in his head and hammered at his temples. He gasped for air, tears squeezing from his eyes against his will. There was so much wrong-wrong-wrong around him that he could barely sense the giant death-ray floating overhead. His skin was burning; his head felt fit to explode.
And then death began raining from above.
Lasers of different sizes hammered the sand like cannon shots and machine-gun fire. The temperature of the room jumped as great swathes of the floor were turned into rippling lakes of craters. The pillar standing over Harry was haloed by scarlet light as the wave of lasers swept toward him.
Harry curled up tight under his shield, terrified and overwhelmed. Leaden rain pounded around him and bounced off the edges of his shield. BOOM-patta-tatta-BOOM! His robes, splayed carelessly around him, were sizzling with a renewed reek of burnt hair. Molten glass splashed on the ends of his boots, searing his toes and the bottoms of his feet. Harry didn't move or make a sound.
After the volley of shots had passed over him, he made no attempt to move. He lay there with his shield arm folded behind him to cover his back and his chin nearly resting on his knees, beyond comprehending the discomfort of the awkward position. His wide-eyed gaze was fixed blankly ahead. Each panting breath ruffled the sand centimeters from his face.
He couldn't move. His muscles might as well have existed in another dimension. The blinding light, the rolling thunder of hellfire rippling across the room, the hot, foul-smelling air clawing through his body with each breath…it was—he couldn't—
Too much, too much, too much! Loud, loud, LOUD! Everything was pressing into and stabbing out of his brain, every sensory organ shouting nonsense. It was so much that he felt everything and nothing simultaneously; he was balanced at the point between agony and the numbness that came after.
Nothing in his brain would stick together. Everything was fire and needles and swarming bees. There were no footholds—nothing he could even begin making sense of.
'What…happening?' he struggled to mentally put together. He hoped he'd pushed it at the Four Sword, but there were no directions. He couldn't see.
Instead of answering in a flurry of thought-feeling-words that would have only added to the chaos, the Four Sword sent forth the image of a Moon Pearl. It hovered serenely in the midst of the hurricane that had taken up Harry's mind. While everything else burned and shattered and sliced at him, the blue-black orb stayed perfectly whole and still.
Harry clung to the Moon Pearl. It held fast as he scrabbled to hold onto it. He felt its cool, smooth surface under his cheek and watched its deep blue depths slowly shift. All else was pushed out of his mind. He just had to clutch his anchor tight until the storm was over.
Slowly, the storm in his head settled. His senses began making sense again. He could hear the artillery-fire around him and watch from under his shield as it swept over his similarly turtle-shelled siblings. The ability to think came back to him, and he made the unpleasant realization that the Medusa hovering above had a tendency toward siege tactics. If he and his brothers were going to get anywhere, one of them would have to put themselves in the line of fire and risk losing a body-part in order to get their shield angled right for a counter-shot.
It was so tempting, especially with the migraine pounding through his skull, to give into the urge to simply hide. That was a tactic that wouldn't have worked on most of the other boss-monsters the Harrys had fought before. With this one, though, not getting hurt was as easy as finding somewhere out of sight, curling up, and lying there for a while. All Harry had to do was obey an instinct that had helped keep him safe all his life.
Focusing on the burning pain in his feet brought sharpness to Harry's foundering sense of determination. Harry Potter wasn't someone who'd ever gotten the choice to take the easy path. He wasn't about to fall for the trap of that false option now.
As shots rippled over where Yellow and Blue had run to, Harry speedily conjured his magic bag, took his Goron work gloves out of it, and re-summoned his shield. While he was at it, he conjured his Dragon-Fang Necklace to protect against some of the heat. It was awkward, shuffling those gloves on whilst ducking the laser-fire that hammered his meager cover seconds later, but he managed. In the next moment of relative quiet, he conjured his Magic Rod to mend the open, flapping toes of his boots. His feet were still burnt badly enough that the skin felt wet and wrong, but he knew he could run on those injuries. He was going to have to.
It took all his willpower to wrench himself out from behind the pillar. Harry waved his gloved hands up at the Medusa before conjuring his shield overhead. Shots from the robot's snakes, punctuated every three seconds by a round from its main eyes, pounded into the shield almost as soon as it had appeared on his arm. The weight of it forced him to kneel or risk his knees involuntarily collapsing. Harry bit hard enough into his lower lip that, with a bright sting of pain, it began bleeding. He'd meant to stay standing!
Even so, he began angling his shield. He was aiming blind for three small potential targets, so he knew it would be a while of enduring. Luckily, the monster didn't seem likely to abandon what it saw as an effective strategy.
'Come on, where is it?' Harry thought as he slowly rolled his shield this way and that. The vulnerable sections of this thing's eyes were small, but not that small, surely? Was the robot moving again, or was Harry just that bad at tracing the trajectory of its shots?
Something other than the roar of artillery fire hit Harry's ears. It sounded like one or more of his brothers shouting. Nothing of it was intelligible over the BOOM-hiss and ratta-tatta-tashhh of shots and sand falling around him, though—
A shot hit the ground behind him.
Right behind him.
Harry's ears started thumping with the sound of his pulse. Fuzzy cotton pushed against the insides of his temples and the backs of his eyes. Dread, cold and certain, closed around him like a vice. Something was wrong. That cannon-round shouldn't have landed that close. Something was supposed to be in the way.
One of his brothers was running toward him. Scarlet light bounced off of his shield like scattered rain. That looked pretty cool…
The next heavy-caliber round that hit Harry knocked him backward. With his knees already under him, Harry sprawled out over his lower legs—
Oh. His lower legs. They weren't there. Not all the way, at least.
Harry laughed bitterly. Burned toes were the least of his problems now!
Red crouched over him. Now his eyes were red and puffy with tears. Harry had made all three of his brothers cry now.
"M'sorry," Harry said. The words were swallowed by the sound around them.
Red picked up Harry with one arm and held him tight against his side while he fended off the deadly rain. He bellowed at the ceiling, teeth bared and tears flashing in his eyes. Harry couldn't tell whether he was speaking at all, or simply voicing a flood of rage. It was so loud. His legs were getting loud, now. Felt like he'd jammed a live wire into each of his calves. How did something that was missing feel so very there?
At least half of the volume stabbing at his poor, overburdened brain went mercifully quiet when an explosion sounded above. The cannon-fire stopped. A few seconds later, though, the Medusa crashed into the sand like a mountain falling from the sky. Harry buried his face in Red's side as pain exploded in his ears.
Running footsteps crunched across the sand. Healing swept over Harry, forceful and LOUD. He whimpered as energy clawed across his nerves. The world had gone from moving too slow to going too fast.
A hand clamped firmly onto his shoulder. "Are we going for it this time, Green?"
Harry looked over at Red, whose determined eyes were boring into him. He ground his knuckles into his forehead, trying to force the shivery, hyper-sensitive sickness away. "Mmhm," he said. "I've got—I've got my legs, right?"
Because he'd just lost half his legs. His legs. Both of them. In the blink of an eye.
"Yellow just drank a Blue Potion, so yeah," Red confirmed. "Can you run?"
Harry climbed to his feet—his bare feet, since his reliable Hylian boots had been reduced to ash. His legs were surprisingly sure beneath him. "I can," he heard himself say. Before Yellow and Blue could catch up, he sprinted toward the downed behemoth a dozen meters away.
His headache built as he approached the source of his woes. The time-wrongness wasn't just vaguely tied to the temple and coincidentally strongest in this room; it was radiating straight off of the bloody robot and infecting the whole underground complex from there. No wonder being in the same room as this thing hurt so much!
'Here's hoping that giving you a good thrashing will set this room right for a while,' he thought, brandishing his Vine Whip. He snapped it at the robot's shining golden loop of an ear and started hauling back. His feet crunched and slid on the mixture of glass and sand that lay underfoot, every pull bringing with it a chance of crashing onto his back in the bed of slick, glittering shards.
Another whip quickly joined his, and Harry glanced over his shoulder. Blue was scuffling at the sand behind him, a look of grim determination on his face. With Yellow and Red now pulling from the other side, the four of them all dug in their heels and gave one coordinated yank.
A sharp click sounded from within the robot's head. With many ticks and whirs of its unnaturally young gears, its face opened up without further prompting on the Harrys' part. Displaced sand formed hills around the halves of its chin as they shoved themselves outward.
Harry ran around to the front of the great hulk and hesitated at the sight of the green-lit, toothy copper maw before him. A crackling steel orb inlaid with pulsing yellow-green runes lay at the back of an enormous, intricate geode of clockwork. Harry had never seen so much bare machinery before.
He shook himself when his brothers rushed past him. Right, he had something to do and not a lot of time to do it in. All this grinding wrongness in the air was making him spacey.
Conjuring his hammer, he bore down on the Medusa's power source with nervous gusto. With every forceful heave of his heavy weapon, he warily kept an eye and ear out for signs of their attack window closing. There was always a warning before a monster's window of weakness snapped shut, right? He dearly hoped so.
When Harry was four strikes in, the dented generator rumbled powerfully enough to send a buzz through his innards. The elaborate labyrinth of stilled gears around them began turning, stuttering at first before gaining speed.
"OUT!" Harry barked, grabbing for the sibling nearest him. He threw said brother—Red, as it turned out—ahead of him as he sprinted for the opening in the monster's face. Said opening was narrowing, pulled in by coils of woven steel rope on gear-driven reels.
The Harrys spilled out of the robot and scattered. Behind them, the halves of its face secured shut with an echoing thud.
Harry tossed looks over his shoulder as he ran. The pinned-back time in here was slipping; the doubled coil was winning the fight to spring back into a straight line.
The Medusa seemed to notice its youth would soon fade, too, because it jumped off the ground with a frantic, clumsy wobble and quickly flared out all its snakes. Harry caught the edge of a pillar and slammed himself behind it.
A hail of narrow laser shots blew across the room. They scorched their way past the edges of Harry's cover, trailing a wave of boiling air, before pounding into the walls. Phantom pain lit in one of his wrists, where it felt as though one of his brothers might have just suffered a hole being put through it.
Harry was grinning, though, because the salvo petered out after less than a second. The sand shimmered, then lost its fresh coating of shiny craters. It was grayish again, with its mix of crematorium ash and scorched glass. His surroundings faded as their bright paint and new polish peeled away. The light level in the room plunged back into pulsing emergency-red, which had Harry blinking spots out of his eyes. The sound of grinding, age-roughened gears echoed around the room.
Time flowed again, with only a few speed bumps from sections of the room still affected by the spell. Harry melted against the pillar in relief. The nerve-wracking tension screaming through his body evaporated away, leaving a sense of aching tiredness behind. Even so, he felt far lighter and more energized than he had in the last several minutes. Everything was so blessedly quiet again.
"Not so fancy-eyed and fit anymore, are you?" Red taunted from a few pillars away. There was the twang of a bowstring, and a plain arrow sparked off the tarnished green "white" of the Medusa's left eye. The robot hovered in place for a moment, its eyes flickering in thought, before swooping toward the boy that had antagonized it. Red had to start running as great heavy lasers thundered at his heels. The room's pillars seemed enchanted to be invincible against the Medusa's weapons (and wasn't that a feat!), but they weren't much protection when the robot wheeled around for a better shooting angle.
While Red kept the Medusa's attention, occasionally pausing to try his luck at reflecting a shot into its eyes, Harry plopped down behind his cover and conjured his magic bag. Now that the sand in the room was old and full of broken glass again, running around barefoot was just asking to have the bottoms of his feet torn to shreds. After a moment's thought—punctuated by the boom-sizzle of Red reflecting a laser into the ceiling—he pulled a set of worn Muggle trainers out of his satchel and shoved his feet into them. Though his Goron boots would have provided a lot more protection, the iron plating would have dragged him down.
Pain exploded in his right shoulder as Red went down in a flash of crimson light and a spray of liquefied sand. Harry groaned through gritted teeth as his vision flashed red and white, but didn't let the pain hold him back. He conjured his bow and sprinted out of cover. Some of the robot's snakes were already pointed in his direction, and more turned his way as they took notice of his lack of defense.
Drawing an arrow as he ran, Harry shot haphazardly at the cluster of green trailing from the Medusa's head. He didn't have to hit anything important; he just had to get this thing's attention.
By some miracle—or perhaps the happenstance of a handful of snakes being clumped together—he managed to plant the arrow in one of the serpents' eyes. It was an eye that was already missing its protective red lens, too, so the projectile soared straight on in. Sparks sprayed from the snake's eye socket, flying all over as the snake twitched fitfully in silent pain. Without a sound, the metal serpent collapsed. It hung like a limp pasta noodle with its eyes dark, its fellows crowding around it in concern.
The entire Medusa turned around. Slowly, menacingly. Its internal generator revved as electricity built in the air. When it had come most of the way about, Harry saw all three of its main eyes glowing at once.
Harry didn't need the Four Sword's warning yelp to let him know his lucky shot might turn out to be his death in the next few seconds. He dropped hard to the ground and conjured his shield over him. A moment later, his world lit up.
In a crash of sound, Harry lost all sensory tethers to his surroundings. He was crushed against the sand—no, flying through the air—no, lying in the sand? Sound, deafening, on and off. But also soft and mumbling? Pain, so much—but no, not enough?
The only constant was the heat. Fire consumed him. That, he could be certain of.
He awoke to the feeling of a potion's healing and energizing effects body-slamming him once again. Harry curled up on his back, tears springing to his eyes. Red Potions were unpleasant enough, but blue ones were awful. It felt like his body was being painlessly taken apart and put back together. With the greater sensitivity to reality that this dungeon had imposed on him, he could feel time shiver as its strings were lightly plucked by the potion's injury-rewinding effects.
"Guhhh," he groaned before hauling himself to his feet. 'Either Red or I must have lost a limb this time. Probably both of us,' he thought with a level of resignation that surprised him. He could guess, by the state of his smoking robes, the heat visibly radiating off of his gloved left arm, and the furrows in the sand leading up to where he'd awoken, that he'd been flash-roasted and catapulted several meters away from the melted crater that lay where he'd started.
'Note to self: don't aim for the snakes,' he thought, sweeping the ashes off of what remained of his clothes. At the rate this fight was going, he and his brothers were liable to run out of potions trying to regrow incinerated body parts! Silently cursing the scientists who'd built such a ridiculously effective doomsday weapon, he conjured his bow and threw himself back into the fray.
Yellow and Blue had teamed up to keep the robot's attention, pelting it with rocks and arrows dipped in Exploding Solution. Plumes of colorful flames popped harmlessly off of the Medusa's hull as the robot irritably swung back and forth to target its attackers.
Harry ran up behind the floating head. If he could run underneath it and loose a close-range shot at its face, he had a decent chance of hitting it in one of its eyes—
"DON'T!" Blue commanded sharply.
Harry halted before he could think about why.
Blue caught a laser on his shield and bounced it toward the robot's face. It must have been a near-miss, because he cursed in frustration. "There are metal plates under the sand that it's pushing off of to float," he called over to Harry. "It's using magnets and physics, not Bluestone magic! If you walk under it, you'll be affected by what's happening under it. Crushed, fried—I don't know! Don't let it swoop over you, either!"
Harry's eyebrows went up. He'd noticed a lack of Bluestone domes on the robot's underside, but hadn't realized there was much difference between one kind of floating and another. Edging around the heavy dip in the sand beneath the Medusa, he nocked and drew an arrow. Though a few of the snakes were watching him, the robot's attention was still solidly split between Blue and Yellow.
He dashed out in front of the robot during one of its annoyed swivels toward Yellow. Whirling around, he came to a sliding stop as he aimed up at its face. Only two of its eyes were locked onto his brother; the third, on its forehead, slid down toward him in surprise. Harry was the one to fire first.
In the middle of gathering energy to blast Harry, the robot's third eye shattered and violently backfired in a fountain of red and orange sparks. The Medusa flinched backward though the air before its hover-system quit, dropping it gracelessly in front of him. Harry was running toward it before it had crashed. He jumped when it made landfall to keep from getting knocked over and guarded his face with his arms as a wave of displaced sand fell from the sky. "Time to pull!" he shouted to his brothers.
The Harrys lined up in pairs and yanked hard on the robot's earrings. Like before, a loud click sounded and the face opened up without further prompting. Dry, tarnished gears grated and sparked as they were forced to move in a way they likely hadn't in centuries.
Time shivered, making Harry shudder and stumble as he ran into the robot's opened head. Vaati's curse was going to reactivate soon.
Swallowing against the nausea that welled up in his throat, Harry summoned his hammer and pushed himself to catch up with his siblings. If the curse reactivated and set all his nerves alight again, he'd like to have at least dealt some decent damage first.
Harry poured all his ire toward the damned robot and its damned limb-disintegrating lasers into a furious flurry of hammer-strikes. His shoulders and elbows would be sure to complain at him later for flinging such weight around so enthusiastically, but he was sure they'd be quieted with another healing potion soon enough. It only took a slight mistake for this robot to take a major body part clean off, after all.
A glowing crack—hairline-thin, but undeniably there—formed at just the same moment the gears around them grated back into motion. Harry was reluctant to give up the attack when they were clearly getting close, but he was even more reluctant to be chewed between a huge pair of gears, so he sprinted out as fast as any of his brothers.
Time rippled again, like one of Mrs. Figg's cats about to cough up hair on the carpet. Harry clutched his chest and breathed hard, fighting to stay on his feet. He had to get behind a pillar before the robot changed forms!
Heart hammering, stomach twisting, Harry forced his shaking legs to drag his feet across sand and deposit him behind a column. The stone pressed against his back rumbled and roared, sending cold prickles through his skin and a panicked psychic stab from the Four Sword through the back of his skull. Around him, the room slid out of focus and then sharpened into crisp youth.
Harry spared himself a couple of seconds to groan at the unpleasant pressure pushing against him from all directions before he dutifully curled up under his Mirror Shield. As he'd expected, the Medusa reveled in the time-shift with a fireworks display. Harry watched with frustration as a stream of destruction roved around the room. When it passed over Blue, Harry felt his shield arm burn. As it paused on Red, he felt his feet and ankles scream and tingle like they'd been pressed against a hot stove.
It wasn't like the last boss-monster they'd fought hadn't required them to put themselves in danger to stun it. They'd had to let its heads—the things trying to eat them—get close enough for them to whack them with cartoon hammers! Trying to knock down this Medusa, though, was like challenging a battleship to a game of Chicken. He really didn't want to lose a limb again. It did…something, in his head. Set off a kind of fear that went so deep he wasn't sure he'd ever be able to learn to ignore it.
'Maybe it's going to turn out to be a new trauma thing,' he thought with dark humor. The rain of lasers swept in his direction, and he braced himself.
Hot thunder fell upon him. Even though he knew what to expect, the sound of it was no less overwhelming. He ground his forehead into the sand, clenching his hands as tight as he could. It didn't help with the pain, but the sensations were something solid to hold onto.
When the rain of lasers had passed him, he took a moment to recover his senses before doing as much of a pat-down as he could without leaving the safety of his shield. He had both arms, could feel the fingers of his left hand, and could breathe without it feeling like he had fire in his lungs. His shoes weren't on fire, just soft and sticky along the rubber bottoms. While his senses had been overloaded with other things, a rivulet of molten glass had flowed under his shield and cooked a charred divot into the outside of his right thigh. That was fine; even if it was a bad burn, it was only a small one.
Watching the stream of laser-fire sweeping across the room, he rolled into a crouch (ow, said the burn in his thigh) and came up with his next plan of action.
Running out into the open would just make him the robot's main target, and he knew from experience (he forced down thoughts of his halved legs) that he couldn't afford to take such a strong barrage of fire on his own. If all the Harrys stepped out at once, it would split the robot's attention, but that came with its own risks. Each injury the brothers suffered was still reflected across them to a pretty high degree, so one Harry getting hurt would make the others prone to mistakes that might get them hurt, which would make more pain bounce across them and worsen their chances.
Maybe he could convince the robot to change tactics? That came with an unpleasant chance of it coming up with something even worse to throw at them, though.
Harry had to duck and cover as the Medusa's vast array of eyes swerved in his direction again. With his ears ringing and his nerves rattled, he climbed back to his feet minutes. Yeah, he was going to try changing this thing's tactics. He was getting tired of being held under siege.
He conjured his bow, nocked one of his Fire Arrows, and waited. When the Medusa's face angled in his direction again, its eyes aimed at another part of the room, he leaned out of cover and took aim.
His arrow was a pitiful candle flame easily lost in all the heat rippling the air, but it hit right on target. With a tiny sound swallowed by the cacophony around it, the projectile bounced off of the Medusa's nose. Like the overgrown Beamos it was, the monster paused its barrage to ponder what had just sparked right in front of its eyes.
"Fire at it! All at once! Stay in cover!" Harry bellowed across the room during the brief silence. The deafening siege resumed thereafter.
Harry fired two arrows at the Medusa's snakes—up and away from their eyes—before taking aim at the robot's face. Those latter arrows were predictably vaporized mid-flight. His brothers' arrows began flying in, too, either burning up in transit or bouncing off of the robot's skin. The Medusa twitched in irritation, its long sweeps of concentrated laser-fire becoming shorter and more scattered bursts as it tried to hit multiple targets at once. It seemed to get more and more frustrated, its aim getting wilder and wilder, until finally…
The robot lowered its eyelids and hovered in place. Its third eye, lidless and undefended, flickered in thought as it slid around to avoid arrows.
Harry chewed on his lower lip, nervous at the sight of this thing thinking. What new tactic might it come up with?
Whatever electro-magical brain the Medusa ran on, it worked quickly. After a few seconds, it raised its eyelids and began spinning. Then, in addition to spinning, it began bobbing up and down.
'What is it doing?' Harry wondered as the robot gained height and rotational speed. Had its internal computer gotten confused? Harry certainly was.
The Medusa's snakes splayed out, their slim heads pointing in random directions all over the place. With one final kick off the ground—at an angle that flung it across the room instead of straight up—the robot began firing.
Lasers flew across the room at erratic, bizarre angles. When the robot had been hovering overhead like a wrathful god, the trajectory of its shots had been predictable enough for Harry to simply duck and cover as needed. Now, with it spinning and flying and bobbing—
Scarlet light flashed in his vision, so close that Harry was blinded. White-hot fire sizzled across his face. Incredulity froze the boy in place for a moment before he managed to conjure his shield. Harry let the heavy piece of equipment fall on top of him as he struggled to figure out what had just happened.
His face was still burning. Harry felt around and found the frames of his glasses. Pressing on them made the burning feeling increase, so he fumbled them off with one gloved hand. They weren't glowing, nor had the lenses melted (thank Merlin), but they'd been scorched all across the front and he could see the air around them warping with heat.
A voice snapped through the air. "Green! MOVE!"
Harry shoved his glasses into his pocket, vanished his shield, and was off running before he was fully upright. Seven leaping steps into sprinting away, he was nearly knocked off his feet by a wave of hot air and unseen force shoving at him. Sand pelted his back and slithered into his clothes from above.
The sound of cannons was suddenly so close.
Harry conjured his shield onto its accompanying strap on his back so it could protect him like a turtle shell as he legged it. Lasers slammed into the ground around him, terribly loud and chaotic and impossible to keep track of—
In a flash of sizzling pain, he was knocked off his feet. Harry swore, both in anger and fear, and curled up helplessly under his shield. Again.
From the blinding warnings wailing in his brain and the agony radiating up through his thigh, Harry put it together that he'd lost a leg. Also again, but this time higher up than his knee. Goddammit.
The sound of shooting was farther away now. Harry lifted his head, spotted the blurry shape of a column, and began crawling toward it on all threes. His stump (don't think about it, don't think about it) scraped against the hot, glass-strewn sand as he slithered on his belly toward the pillar. It made even more flashing lights blink in his eyes—made the faint feeling attempting to steal its way over him that much stronger. Harry kept moving.
'Sorry about that,' he thought at his less pain-tolerant siblings once he'd made it behind the pillar. There hadn't been much thought to spare about how they might have been handling his constantly re-transmitting injury.
The Medusa was still bouncing around to make its hover-system crush anything underneath it, still shooting with perfect unpredictability. Harry had to duck behind the pillar and his shield as he was blasted from rapidly-shifting angles.
Quickly, he learned there was no cover. The robot had figured out how to get around its main obstacle when it came to turning all these tiny interlopers into dust. None of the Harrys could conjure his magic bag to fetch one of the remaining Blue Potions they had on hand because there was no telling where the Medusa might decide to do its disco-ball routine next. Harry couldn't even call up his Magic Rod to repair his scorched glasses!
As if to test just how far the universe could go with his streak of bad luck, the Medusa decided to drop right in front of him. Heat and force shoved Harry hard against the pillar at his back, knocking his head into it. Sparks danced in his limited vision and blackness pulsed around the sides. He couldn't think—couldn't remember where his—he was going to—
It took a few seconds for consciousness to click back into place. When it did, Harry realized he was being stared at.
The Medusa hovered right in front of him. Almost close enough to touch. All of its eyes were aimed at him, snakes and all. It glared down its nose at him with emotionless contempt.
The robot wanted him, specifically, dead, and it wanted him to know it. It wanted him to know his coming end as it loaded a shot with slow cruelty—feel the tingling burn on his skin and watch the power build in its eyes.
If he drew his bow, the robot would instantly fire. If he tried to curl up behind his shield again, it would fire. Damn its revenge; it was too smart to let him get a shot off at this range or try to weasel out of things. He could sense it.
So, taking the nonsense option, Harry drew his sword instead. And threw it.
With those eyes so close, so enormous to him now that they weren't flying around a dozen meters up in the air, even a half-blind teenager suffering from a fresh amputation couldn't miss. The Four Sword sank into the fuzzy red-orange blob glowing on its forehead.
Harry cackled breathlessly as sparks and broken glass showered him. "That's what you get for trying to show off!" he shouted. "How's it feel?"
He conjured his magic bag and was trying to remember how to use it when his brothers arrived. "I did it!" he crowed, pumping his fist and waving his stump around. "Wheyyy!"
All of his siblings looked some degree of gray and ill. "Damn, Green, I think you win the getting-maimed contest today," Red said. "I thought cot-rized stuff wasn't supposed to bleed?"
"There's a major artery passing through that area. If it weren't at least partially cauterized, he'd have died in under a minute," Blue said. "Yel—no, Red, you drink a Blue Potion. I'm out, and Yellow's trying not to be sick."
Red nodded and followed orders. Harry tried to brace himself for the rush, but it socked him right in the brain anyway. He hunched over, clutching his head. With the robot right here and a vibrating pillar behind him, his time-senses and the effects of that potion really weren't getting along.
"Okay, let's go kill this thing before it recovers," he said, pushing up onto his feet. "There's no way I'm pulling that off again."
If anyone noticed that he deliberately didn't look down or at the sand leading up to the pillar, they didn't comment.
They pulled the robot's face open, and Harry was the first inside. He already knew what he was going to do. Conjuring his Dragon Hammer, he went straight for the hairline crack he remembered seeing in the side of the robot's generator casing. He didn't have to see clearly to know where it was. As his brothers hammered away at the rest of the metal shell, he slammed his hammer directly into the crack. Over and over and over, until it was as wide as the thickness of his hand and surrounded by a spider's web of other glowing cracks. Tongues of electricity lashed from the generator's insides, reaching through the openings spreading across its casing.
Just one more thing. Harry conjured his bow, aimed at the bright fuzzy line he'd opened in front of him, and released the shot.
Something inside the generator's capsule shattered. The light within grew brighter. The gears around them started turning again—too fast and jerky. Out-of-control.
The boys ran for the exit. Though the mechanical cavern around them was moving, it wasn't trying to close. No, it was screaming. The machine was being pushed past its limit. Things were spinning too quickly, beginning to glow with heat. Harry ducked as one particularly hot gear broke off a tooth that embedded in a spinning shaft to his left. The gears attached to the shaft started screeching and throwing up sparks, their teeth bending and snapping. Sounds like gunshots went off as more of the ancient machinery chewed itself to pieces.
They made it out. Red stopped to look back, and Harry hauled him forward by his arm. The machine might have been dead, but there was one more thing—
WHAM!
Harry wasn't sure whether it was a feeling, a force, or a sound, but it knocked him down all the same. With the curse's anchor destroyed, time reasserted itself once and for all. Harry could feel existence jerking back into a straight line like kinks in a derailed train being yanked out. Precisely as gentle as that.
"Khhh," he breathed out into the sand under his face. His awareness of the time-wrongness around him was a long thorn being eased from the back of his head. Once the feeling was gone, he felt marvelous.
"Oh wow," he said, easily sitting upright. "Oh, wow." Without all that nasty weight dragging him down, he was walking on clouds!
The room was dark and pulsing red again. Harry sensed more than saw his brothers' worried gazes. "Are you okay, Green?" Yellow asked. "You've been through a lot today."
Harry ran a hand through his hair. Half of it had fallen out of the rubber band he'd used as a hair tie, the other half hanging in clumps around his shoulders. Sand and tiny shards of glass poured out of it. "I lost my legs three times today," he said faintly. The urge to laugh was there, but so was the urge to be sick.
"We need to find that power crystal for our sword—assuming there's one in here—and get to Oasis City," Blue said in a low voice to Red. "After all this, we need to sleep. Not on the ground, either. Mental exhaustion definitely isn't going to help the psychological effects of taking all those strong potions. People aren't designed to lose limbs and just have them snapped back on."
"No duh," Red whispered back. "Red Potions are one thing, but those Blue Potions really feel like they're frying your brain."
"Do you need help getting up, Green?" Yellow offered a hand to him. "You look kind of…out-of-it."
Harry slapped his cheeks and shook his head, trying to get a normal sense of things again. Taking his glasses out of his pocket—somehow, his fried robes still had those—he used his Magic Rod to put them right and slid them back on. With the world now back in crisp focus, he made an attempt to salvage his robes. Four Mending Charms in, he gave up. The sleeves had restored themselves unevenly, one forming a crooked partial hemline at the elbow. At the bottom, his robes regrew in a confused mishmash of square ends and pointed coat tails, like the fabric wasn't sure what to make of all the large gaps left by the blast holes.
"I'm sorry, robes," he said, taking them off. Looking the garment over, he said. "I'm going to have to turn you into something else now." He conjured his magic bag, gave his faithful robes one last nod, and put them away. Then he pulled out a spare set of robes from last year.
"Oh, yeah, that's a good idea," Red said, looking down at himself. Scorch marks littered his robes, and there was a circle of bared skin around his right shoulder. The leather armor on his chest hung crookedly due to its missing straps and pauldron.
"Here's the plan: we sort ourselves out, we go into the next room and see if it has a power crystal, and then we get the hell out of here," Blue said, looking around at all of them. "Does that sound doable, Green?"
"Very," Harry replied. He wasn't mentally floating away or anything, but he could use a few minutes to get everything feeling more solid around him.
Everyone mended their clothes (or switched out what they had to), had a drink of water, and ate a non-magical snack. They did the traditional, useless Harry exchange of "are you okay—yes, I'm fine" all around. Once they all felt alive and fully-limbed again, they picked themselves up out of the sand, walked past the smoking corpse of the defeated Medusa, and entered the next room.
On an altar decorated with a pinwheel sun, a yellow globe of crystal hovered serenely.
Red let out a victorious yell and clapped Harry and Blue on their backs. "It's here! Our Hero luck won out! We found another one!"
Tears of relief and exhaustion gathered at the corners of Harry's eyes. "Thank Merlin," he managed to croak. Fighting that terrifying battleship of a robot had been worth it after all!
Yellow ran forward to scoop it into his bag. Even in one of his brother's hands, Harry was hit by a pleasant zing of its powerful magic. Scratching at the stubby tip of one of his ears, he wondered how long they'd be by the end of this year.
Beyond the pedestal lay the exit, a long staircase leading up to the surface. Harry looked up it with trepidation. The storm continued to rage outside; its howls and hisses had been ever-present across the dungeon. An icy, sand-laden breeze trickled through the night-dark vents overhead.
The boys exchanged nervous, resigned looks. It was either cower in here or trek blindly through the vastness of the desert in search of civilization. Though the storm was sure to end sooner rather than later, now that the lynchpin of Vaati's magical hold here had been taken out, they couldn't be sure that it would blow itself out tomorrow, or even the next day.
Without a word, they all trooped up the stairs together. Wait in safety? No, that wasn't the Harry way. They'd take their chances.
Notes:
-If the Harrys will it, their swords can actually move farther than 3m/10ft away from them. They just haven't tested it much because that short leash is actually pretty convenient most of the time. If they ever wound up in a Dimensional Links or Linked Universe situation, all the other Heroes would probably have a heart-attack from how casually and often the Harrys yeet their legendary magic swords lol.
Next month: A kidnapping! And a rather strange phone call.