A Much Deadlier Tournament Chapter 18 (Patreon)

Chapter 18:

The Perfect Candidate

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Lucius landed on the familiar, snowy ground the portkey. He was back inside of the tree hollow that Wormtail had whisked him away from by portkey minutes earlier. A portkey programmed to take a person back to where it took them from? Brilliant!

He stepped out of said hollow in time to get drenched with the blood and innards of an unfortunate Auror being ripped in half by his good Collique Fenrir Greyback. Clearly, he was late for the party, but thankfully not too late as it definitely wasn't the myriad of werewolves slicing sad stunners around like they were meant to do anything against the spell-resistant hides of fully-transformed werewolves.

He smiled and joined in the butchery without further ado.

He walked in lockstep with Fenrir as they advanced on the closest Auror. An older gentleman from the international confederacy, base on the blue stripes on his robes he was from China. He waved for Fenrir to strike him down and he obliged, allowing Lucius to cover his flank for incoming spells with lazy deflections and flicks of his wand. And thus began their workflow.

His hesitance to throw deadly spells before identifying his targets would have given the Aurors the necessary time to defend themselves, but he worked around this by casting deadly spells anyway and using the time it took to mentally incant and make the wand movements to examine his targets. He focused on aiming at limbs until he recognized them as somebody nonimportant, which he usually did before finishing his casting with enough time to redirect his spell at center mass or a clean headshot. It worked as a nice fake out for the somewhat skilled Auror who needed to be misdirected to hit.

In truth, such was not the skill level of these Aurors. All of the decent ones were out looking for his master, leaving the less skilled but numerous recruits or Aurors in training to hunt him down. Fools thought him an easy target that they could handle, and a few minutes ago they had been correct, but now they were leaves against the storm that was Lucius Malfoy, a name they would learn to fear again.

"Percusio, Diffindo, Bombarda." Lucius incanted his spells one after another with lazy ease.

One Auror was brained, a second lost both legs, a third was flung against a tree as the ground beneath him exploded as if by an artillery shell.

The Aurors wizened up and begin hurling uncancerous charms and variations of the binding conjuration. The conjured ropes, chains and barbed wire did their job, tying up most of Lucius' companions quite nicely. They would soon discover it was a mistake.

Waving his wand in a high arc over his head he cast a wide area transfiguration. Every single piece of barbed wire, rope, chain and vines transformed into serpents with a wide-area serpensortifor. Remembering his master's instructions, he remembered to will them into non-venemous serpents.

With that done he took cover behind a large stump and placed the tip of his wand onto the Dark Mark of his forearm. He had to actually look at it to get the very tip of his want to the snake's mouth so as to be touching its tongue. He immediately felt his master's will enter his body and his approval for what he planned to do.

And so he spoke the noble tongue.

"Go. Bite. Tear. The red robed men!" Were the words he yelled, but what he heard came out as illegible hissing that only the snakes could understand.

He removed his wand from the dark mark and nearly collapsed at the full body migraine that always resulted from drawing on the Dark Mark's powers, especially parseltongue, but held fast and charged back into the fray.

The army of snakes bared down on the scattered Aurors like a great hydra and they couldn't vanish or otherwise kill the snakes before the biting and crushing began. Lucius took this time to try and identify any of the people on his master's list were among them, and dismissing those that the werewolves already pounced upon as a lost cause.

And then he saw her. Layign mere meters away from him and tangling with a particularly large anaconda. He knew her by her vibrant green hair and the fould language flowing out of her mouth like vomit.

"Oh yeas, you'll do nicely." He said sweetly as he stood over the girl.

She had enough time to look up into his eyes, only for hers to go wide as he stunned her and canceled the transfiguration on teh anaconda. It returned to the form of thick ropes and with another twirl of his wand it wrapped around and bound her.

Taking a deep, satisfied breath through his nose, Lucius raised his wand skyward and uttered his most favorite word in any language, an incantation he hoped to say regularly in the coming days, months and years.

"Morsmordre!" He screamed

The jet of green light struck like a thunderbolt into the sky, bathing the entire forest in that lovely, eerie glow to signify the killing he had done in his master's name that night.

With that done, he merely grasped the medallion on his neck, grabbed hold of the girl by the scruff of her robes, and returned to Ogden's place.

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Tonks came to and immediately recognize that she was bound and gagged. It took a moment to realize the soft fur pressing against her back was of a polar bear taxidermy that she was strapped to and was in a lovely study, save for the roaring fireplace across from her with a large, black cauldron of boiling liquid. The mantle and chimney had been demolished to make space for said cauldron and the debris littered the ground.

On closer inspection, the study wasn't all that lovely after all, not least of all because of the two men standing beside the cauldron. The first she recognized as her uncle Lucius, the other was a balding, pudgy man with an unnaturally rat like face. Neither were men she wanted to share a room with even were she not bound and gagged, but then she saw the thing seated in the loveseat beside them.

"Ah. Nymphadora awakens." Voldemort greeted. "We were just discussing you, actually."

Tonks tried to scream at the horrific visage and realization that Lord Voldemort himself had captured her and was now speaking to her, but the gag had a silencing charm on it.

"She wasn't even on the list." The rat man said. "But she is an excellent choice all the same. The girl is a metamorph, and now master will be as well. Are we certain her being a woman won't cause any issues?"

"It will have absolutely no bearing on the ritual, actually." Voldemort said. "Either for better or worse."

Voldemort then turned his eyes on her and she shuddered.

"I apologize, young lady, but we couldn't do all of this while you were stunned. The magic of the spell affecting you could have had unforeseen consequences." He said. "But don't worry. It'll all be over soon."

The implication that she was about to suffer something terrible was not lost to her. The further implication that they had some method of transferring her metamorphic abilities to somebody else, something she knew was impossible without very dark magic, concerned her even more.

"Lucius... You may begin when ready." Voldemort ordered.

Lucius drew a long, silver knife and the horror truly began.

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Their walk back up to Hogwarts had been lovely, despite the horrid cold of these islands. Fleur's mood was much improved by the clown duo of Remus and Black, to say nothing of the handsome and charming duo of Harry Potter and Severus Snape, respectfully. All of this loveliness came to a screeching halt when Harry Potter and Severus snape both collapse to the ground screaming in agony.

Despite the other man being her "date" to the Yule ball, Fleur immediately went to Harry Potter's aid. Putting a hand on his shoulder she tried to steady him.

"What eez wrong?" she asked. "What eez happening 'arry?"

Harry, though clutching his head and screaming. seemed to be outright having a seizure based on the muscle spasms. Turning to the professor she saw he was Snape clutching at his arm at his arm, shoving it into the snow to cool it off. When he withdrew it and ripped off his sleeve it was to reveal a vicious black mark crawling across his forearm and enveloping his hand. It grew, twisting, like black vines and where the skin where it enveloped erupted in ugly boils that burst with black puss and blood.

Fleur could do nothing but stare in horror as the clearly dark curse climbed up his arm and was neared his elbow, but she was certain that if it wasn't stopped the man would surely die.

Still screaming, Snape withdrew his wand and, pointing it the joint of his elbow, uttered a single word.

"Sectumsempra!" He incanted.

She didn't recognize the incantation, but it must have been a severing curse of some kind as it removed his arm in a single, clean cut. This was a huge improvement.

Dark curses? she wasn't exactly an adept at handling. A bleeding out man? That she could help with.

"I 'ave you." Fleur said as she crawled over and began weaving her wand about the rapidly bleeding stump.

It is much easier to stem a bleeding limb and bandage a wound if said amputated limb wasn't your own. Snape clearly knew this as he chose not to object to her doing exactly that. It took her mere seconds to bandage him up, but in that time his severed arm had rotted away into a bubbling mass of black and red tar with smoky, snake-shaped whisps.

In that same amount of time Harry had gone unconscious and the trio of men behind them had heard the commotion and joggled up to join in said commotion.

"What happened?" Kingsley demanded as he gently pushed past fleur to the puddle of sludge.

He proceeded to cast some series of detection charms on the rotted appendance while Fleur explained.

"I do not know. They both collapsed screaming, and monsieur Snape cut off his arm." Fleur explained. "I zink it was cursed..."

Snape still remained quiet. She could tell he was barely conscious and struggling to remain out of shock after the impromptu amputation and loss of so much blood. Sirius Black and Remus Lupin were kneeling over Harry's prone body but seemed hesitant to move him. He gave them all quite a fright when he suddenly sat straight up with a bit of a shellshocked look on his face.

"So, anyways." He said almost cheerfully as he blinked away what looked like delirium. "Voldemort's back."

"In... indeed." Snape managed to meek out before collapsing himself.

"Huh." Harry said, almost apathetically. "The hell happened to him?"

Notes:

My chapters are getting shorter, yet so much more information dense. I think it's because I do it all in one sitting now instead of amortizing it out over a week or more? The story flow just works so much better now that I'm writing like this.