"Wait, I don't have to kill the guy to get the wand, right?"
"Nah, disarming him will work just fine. Not killing him would be an issue if you wanted to use it as your new wand, and you don't even need a wand."
"Oh, okay." I nodded.
Now then, where should this fight take place? Hmm… not at school that's for sure. I don't want to destroy the Quidditch pitch either if I could help it. I can live with shredding the school grounds, though.
"There is a big open space near the Northern exit. Let's have the fight there." I said to Pyra and made a portal leading directly in the middle of the grounds.
"Time to fight the elderly."
"You're enjoying this way too much."
"Of course I am. That guy is the strongest wizard alive. I want to see the pinnacle of this world for myself."
"Yeah, well, don't expect too much. He is past his prime, and you're… you." Pyra gestured at me with an odd expression.
"No duh, of course I'm me. Who else would I be?"
"That's not— never mind. Let's go." She shook her head and, in the end, just shrugged.
It was close to noon when we finished unloading all of our treasures. It was time for lunch, which meant that Dumbledore would be present. The man gotta eat.
"*EHM* *EHM* ALBUS PERCIVAL WULFIRC BRIAN DUMBLEDORE! COME AND FACE ME!" I cast the sonorus charm to make my voice as loud as possible and screeched as much as I could. There was no way he didn't hear me. Now that I think about it, they must have heard me all the way in Hogsmeade, right?
"Ugh— my ears! Emily…" Pyra grumbled and covered her ears, but whatever she wanted to say next came to a halt. The man of the hour had arrived.
"Tom… You should not have come here." Albus said softly. The man looked positively ancient and yet, at the same time, full of energy. What a strange contradiction.
"Why? I'm exactly where I want to be." I said with a slight tilt of my head.
"What do you wish to accomplish by coming here, Tom?" He said, and his hand was slowly inching toward his wand.
"I want your wand. Give it to me and we can avoid this fight. What do you say?" I had to try, you know?
"I cannot do that, Tom. The wand cannot fall into your hands. " He mournfully shook his head.
"Oh well." I sprang into action and appeared right behind him, but Dumbledore's reaction wasn't that far behind. The old man is surprisingly quick for his age.
A giant fire whip materialized from the tip of his wand as he spun it around himself. The single fiery tendril, reminiscent of a tentacle, moved with unbelievable precision to the exact spot I was standing just a fraction of a second ago, and upon impact, the scorched ground was scarred by a foot-deep gash.
I quickly shunpoed away and fired a simple stunner, and then did so again from a different spot. To Dumbledore, it seemed like I was attacking from two places simultaneously.
He managed to block the spells, but I was not stopping, I was speeding up. The only thing anyone could do was to deny me space to shunpo to, but while I'm doing it, I'm almost invincible. I only ever stay in one place just long enough for a spell to leave the tip of my wand before changing position.
Sunpo, Stunner. Shunpo, Expeliarmus. Shunpo, Confingo.
Again and again, it was like I was dancing around him, until the only thing he saw was a blurred image of me everywhere he looked, as the speed at which I was performing this was simply inhuman. It took me only about one-tenth of a second to cast a spell and shunpo to a new position. Dumbledore had no way of counterattacking, it simply was not a possible thing to do. The only thing Albus was capable of doing was casting Protego after Protego, and even that was possible because I was not going at full speed.
Why was I not going at full speed? Dumbledore was smart, even if he could not keep up with me, he must have already realized how to theoretically counter my fighting style. Wide-scale area denial was the only counter I figured out. I wanted to make the man desperate because I wanted him to use a specific spell – Protego Diabolica.
I continued my barrage of barely lethal spells, slowly sapping Dumbledore's magic away. If the sheen of sweat covering his face was anything to go by, he had barely any magic left.
"PROTEGO DIABOLICA!" There it was! I watched as the beautiful blue flames enveloped us both inside. What a spell this was! Why couldn't Voldemort learn that, instead of seventy-one torture curses?
"YES! HAHAHA! Beautiful~ You've shown me yours, how about I show you mine? INFERNUM MORS!" I laughed and made a giant loop above my head while casting, which made the fiery snake encircle the blue flames and start to consume them.
"You lost, Dumbledore." I said while walking toward the heaving man. He was pale, short of breath, and his hands were shaking. Clear signs of magical exhaustion. I can't blame the man, he must have cast at least a hundred Protego charms. Plus, his final spell definitely didn't help.
"Expelliarmus." I leveled my wand at his shaking form and cast the disarming charm. He had no will to resist the spell, and the Elder Wand wrestled itself out of his hand and flew into mine.
"Thanks for the wand, old man! Now then, I gotta go, I have treasure to look at. Get well soon. Bye Bye." I grinned at the stunned man. No, the man wasn't under any other spell, he was just absolutely flabbergasted by the sudden change of my behaviour.
"W-what?" He managed to say after a while.
"We robbed the place, Dumbles, and I have to say, we made out like bandits! Oh! *smack* I almost forgot! I have the resurrection stone. So if you could tell Harry that I can lend it to him and let him talk to his parents as an apology for taking the cloak, that'd be great." I said my piece and dispelled the green inferno raging around us. I immediately spotted Pyra.
"Heya! Got the wand. See?" I yelled and waved it in the air.
"I see that the Headmaster is still alive, good job for not accidentally killing him." She said with a grin, and I spotted a few unconscious bodies lying on the ground behind her. Looks like I wasn't the only one fighting.
"Who are they? Order members?" I asked while trying to peer at the bodies.
"Some of them, yes, the rest are the teachers. You didn't notice them arriving?"
"Not at all. I was having way too much fun with Dumbledore." I said, shrugging.
"I saw, well, more like heard. You were laughing like a maniac by the end."
"Of course I was. Did you not see that Protego Diabolica? It was awesome."
"*pft!* I'm glad you enjoyed yourself." Pyra snorted.
"I think we got everything we set out to get, and even managed to do so before lunch. How about we grab a quick bite somewhere?" I said and opened up a portal leading to some alley in London.
"Sure, fighting always made me hungry."
—
The Order was in shambles that night. The word of Voldemort's intrusion and Dumbledore's subsequent defeat plunged everybody in Grimmauld Place into deep depression. Everybody but Dumbledore himself.
The defeat stung, he had his pride after all, but it also revealed many great things and cleared out some of his doubts.
"Are you sure you can stand, Albus?" Molly Weasley worriedly fretted around him.
"Molly, dear. It was merely a magical exhaustion, I was not trampled by a herd of Hippogriffs." He placated the woman with a tired smile. He was the only one of the defeated that has already somewhat recovered. Alastor, Remus, and Minerva were still recuperating. Their injuries, while not life-threatening, were not light. A few broken bones, numerous bruises, and just like him, all of them suffered from magical exhaustion, making the recovery take longer.
"I worry, Albus. That— That monster is out there somewhere." She whispered.
"Worry not, that is something I wish to talk about with the Order, but I don't think that this person is a threat to you, or your children." If there was one thing he took away from today's fight, it would be that the woman, whom he previously assumed was Tom, was not him, or at least she didn't think so. Her mind was not protected in the slightest, and he had managed to catch a few glimpses after she defeated him.
"What do you mean?" Molly asked confusedly.
"All will be revealed shortly, my dear. Our friends should be arriving any minute now."
Ten minutes later, the usual bunch was sitting around the kitchen table, each of them sporting worried looks as they looked at Albus and Alastor, who demanded to be released so he could attend the meeting as well.
"How are you doing, Albus?" It was Arthur Weasley who broke the uncomfortable silence first.
"I've been better, my friend. Could've been a lot worse." Arthur just nodded and sighed.
"Do you have an idea of what Voldemort was after?" This time, Sirius asked a question.
"That I do. She wanted my wand."
""She?"" Came a cacophony of voices. Albus expected it. This was not an easy subject to breach after all.
"Hmm, yes. It was not Voldemort who stole the portkey from Nymphadora, and it too was not Voldemort with whom I clashed this morning. It was an entirely separate person."
"What do you mean, Headmaster? Harry saw him at the graveyard! We saw the memories." Sirius said with disbelief.
"That he did. Now I believe that this woman somehow thwarted the resurrection of Voldemort, and has been trying to fool us by acting like him." This was the only solution that made sense with the new information he learned today. This… Emily was after Voldemort too, and it looked like she was way ahead of them.
"You cannot be serious! Maybe Voldemort had somehow managed to fool you. Didn't Snape say that there were many similarities between them? How do you explain that?" Sirius shouted.
"Alas, it may be entirely possible, yet I doubt it. All of us present at Hogwarts this morning have survived, even I. That is not something Voldemort would ever do. That woman had not used a lethal spell till the very end, and even then, the unknown spell she cast was only used to completely subdue mine."
" If this person is not Voldemort as you say, then what, Albus? Do we have a new Dark Lady walking among us? Alastor said gruffly.
"That is something I am not quite sure of, but she had extended an olive branch of sorts, and I think we should take it." Despite being at the brink of collapse, her words seared themselves into his brain.
She had the Resurrection stone, and it worked.