Chapter 21 - The Death Eaters at the Quidditch Finals
The Irish had won the game by 10 points despite the Bulgarian's seeker Krum catching the snitch. Since he didn't want to parade around his new apprentices, and with the two of them disliking Quidditch even more than him, Ash went to the game alone.
His grandmother and great-grandmother would rather cast a Lumos Maxima right into their eyes than watch a single second of Quidditch as they had so eloquently put. Luna and her parents were currently camping in Switzerland to find some sort of Fuzzy Longbrowed Cheesegnome, and Nym was already at the finals, though in her capacity as an auror.
Harry, Sirius, and Hermione were also already here with the Weasleys and sat next to the young professor for the duration of the game. They had invited him to their tent, but something felt off, so he shadowed the young auror Nymphadora Tonks in his animagus form instead.
The gold-hearted hunting crow sat on top of a tent that was swaying heavily despite there being no wind. He had perched up there and stopped following behind his auror friend because he heard saw something in the distance. He heard cries that weren't part of the revelry of the Irish fans.
Less than two minutes later, the first people running in panic crossed Ash's perch, and he flew into the direction they came from. He landed on a tree and regarded source of the panic.
A group of white masked, dark robed wizards and witches terrorizing a muggle couple and their daughter with the Levicorpus jinx and several curses ranging from short bursts of the Cruciatus, the torture/pain curse to Timere Visia, the fear vision curse.
Golden eyes scanned around and counted two groups slowly forming. Fourteen were headed straight into the general direction of where the tent of the Weasley family was, another group of seventeen enjoyed cursing a group wizard and witches they had already rounded up.
'Aurors were in the direction of the smaller group. Surely, they aren't all useless. I'll have to trust Nym and her colleagues,' Ash thought with reluctance. 'Why are these cowards never fighting back? There's almost a hundred of you. Just shoot one Stupefy per person, and they'd be toast. I don't get it...'
Hidden inside the tree, Ash changed back into his human form and cast a quick silent spell to reinforce the branch he was standing on so it wouldn't make a sound, or worse yet, break under his weight.
With that done, Ash took a full stock of all his battle potions and was glad he came prepared. He'd have to ask for Ilia to deliver some more karma potions to torture them with nightmares before a potential prison break, but that could wait until after the aurors had taken care of the wards preventing apparition.
He slipped on another ring, a christmas gift from a certain Beauxbaton professor he was hoping to meet after summer, took out a few paper talismans that he was gifted in Magical Japan and some of his potions.
With silent casting, Ash levitated several bottles of 'Purple Mists of Distraction', the potion that turns to gas once exposed to air and creates and irritating, hurtful itch on every affected body part, high into the the sky.
At the same time, he threw the paper talismans and banished almost twenty bottles of 'Full-Body-Blue-Glue' toward the group of drunk Death Eaters.
The paper talismans went off and blinded everyone present with bright and colorful fireworks. Then, the glue potions exploded midair thanks to a sort of timer enchantment and covered thirteen of the Death Eaters from head to toe. They received less of the mass than Fenrir Greyback had so some could still move, but that was solved by Ash blasting the bottles of the purple mists potion apart and creating a sort of whirlwind scattering the dust everywhere by casting a household charm called Aconita that would usually help dusting a room.
Ilia was devastated on the day she learned that Ash had taught himself such a spell.
Only after he was about to swear a magical oath that he would never use it for actual chores did the house elf relent.
Twenty wizards and witches. That's how many people they had already killed or tortured. Twenty of them who couldn't do what a few bottles of potion could do. Twenty wizards and witches who he saw getting caught while screaming bloody murder with his own eyes and not fight back.
And that was not counting the tens of people he saw fleeing. Disdain bubbled up inside Ash before he squashed it.
'Something is wrong with this country. And I will be there to change the next generation so that this shameful display doesn't happen again,' Ash thought as he cast a disillusionment charm over himself and floated himself down the branch with as little sound as possible by levitating his shoes and flexing his core to stay upright.
Slurred speech and verbal curses were being spewed by all of these Death Eaters. They demanded for the coward who attacked them to show himself. They threatened to kill someone close to him and everyone around them in an attempt to goad him out. But it only increased his disdain, his loathing.
Now that most of them were disabled. He banished a few more glue potions on those who still had too much mobility. Three of them were still able to dodge despite their crazed cries for relief from the itching pain.
"You despicable, craven bastard! Show yourself! Avada Kedavra!" One particular wizard shouted from inside the group with a distorted voice. Whoever he was, he had used his colleagues as a human shield from the previous glue potion attack and began to start cursing anything in sight. The first killing curse landed on the muggle father before the young potions professor could react.
But it left this particular man open and from his advantageous position on top of being invisible, a silent Reducto cut off this particular wizards hand before he was glued to one of his comrades.
Another killing curse was fired, this time aimed at the position he was at. But Ash was quick enough to conjure a few birds who tanked the spell for him. Ash fired off a Stupefy followed by the Jelly-Finger curse Locomotor Complecti. His opponent was able to shield against both, but Ash, who had put on that particular ring that was gifted to him, suddenly shifted two meters to the side with a refreshed disillusionment charm.
Having lost his target, his opponent looked around warily. He was clearly the best fighter of them all, but he couldn't get a read on his enemy.
Suddenly, a shiver ran through his spine, and the Death Eater looked up. There it was, the dark mark. Someone was foolish enough to cast the mark of the Dark Lord. He needed to get out of here quickly. No matter the cost, before all the aurors in Magical Britain had this place surrounded.
With gritted teeth a quick flurry of his wand, he turned into black particles and flew away quickly, narrowly dodging another Stupefy and a few other curses.
From high in the air, he dared to turn around only to see that his last standing companion had been hit by a Reducto right to his face, breaking the mask and likely killing him in the process.
And the fleeing Death Eater finally got a good look at who had decimated their team.
A young man with brown hair and amber eyes stared in his direction with so much loathing that he thought the Dark Lord had decended once more.
He had half a mind to pull his only son out of Hogwarts now that he saw who it was. It wasn't that Ash could have recognized him, but they had bad blood between them already.
Ash looked at all the Death Eaters he had caught and calmly began his next work. The wards were still up preventing apparation, so he'd have to wait a little on Ilia. Or would he?
"Ilia!" Nobody came.
'These must be some pretty advanced wards, impressive for maggots.'
One by one, he flipped the dropped wands into his hands and broke them. Before they were unmasked, these weren't pureblood wizards and witches. No law would protect them from what he was about to do.
For every wizard, he didn't have enough karma potion on hand, Ash used a cutting curse to cut off both hands and smeared the stumps with glue potion. That way, it would take months, maybe years before they could wield a wand again depending on how good a potion master they could recruit to help them.
When the wards broke, the air noticeably changed. He needed to be fast.
"Ilia!" The elf popped in next to him, visibly paling at all the blood around her. She quickly regarded her master, but he reassured her first.
"None of it is mine. Go to my study. Grab the Mokeskin pouch with the 'dark days' stitching. Please be fast about it."
The house elf quickly popped away and, not even ten seconds later, came back with a pouch in hand. Sadly, it was still not fast enough.
"Put down your wand!"
Ten aurors apparated around him in a circle formation.
"I said, put down your wand!" The auror once more shouted.
"Yeah, sure. Let me just drop my only means of protection after I just fought over a dozen Death Eaters. Are you nuts?"
Ash wasn't his usually jovial self, and he hadn't calmed down yet. This wasn't the time to get angry, though. He took a deep breath and holstered his wand when he noticed two aurors among them that he had spent time with in Hogwarts.
"Death Eaters? What nonsense are you saying!?" The same irritating auror once more spat.
"Well, Mister...?"
"Head Auror Scrimgeour," the other party answered with disdain laden in his voice.
"Head Auror Scrimgeour then. I wish we would have met under different circumstances, but as you can see, there are sixteen people with white masks here. The dark mark is on all of their arms, and someone dared to use the curse Morsmordre. Ergo, all of this filth belongs to Voldemort. And it was me who defeated them, so could you please lower your wands already?" A few aurors took a breath through their teeth at Ash speaking 'his' name.
"What if you're just one of them in disguise? We have no obligation to listen to you. And even if you aren't, these suspects were clearly mangled with dark spells. You're under arrest, so drop your wand already," Rufus Scrimgeour shouted as he commanded one of his aurors to step forward to apprehend Ash.
"Why are you not going forward! I ordered you to apprehend this dark wizard!"
"Sir... that's Ashbert Starkey. I know you have a habit of skipping the first two pages of the Daily Prophet, but even you must have heard about the new potions professor at Hogwarts," the auror responded while shaking in his boots.
He was one of those who were still at Hogwarts when he started his Exchange Hall, so he knew Ash quite well and the young professor was likely the only reason the auror had the required potion grades to become an auror in the first place.
"And him being the newest pet of Dumbledore absolves him of the suspicion of being a Death Eater spy or a dark lord in the making? Arrest him already!"
Before the auror could step forward, a few more aurors arrived with the usual crack of apparition.
"Stand down! Scrimgeour, explain to me why none of the Death Eaters are in handcuffs and you're all in a standoff with a Hogwarts professor!"
"Madam Bones! I don't care that he's a professor. He's standing here among a group of badly hurt suspects so he could just as much be a-"
"A what? A Death Eater? The young man who had most of his immediate family tortured to death by a turncoat uncle when he was a toddler?"
Scrimgeour could only direct a foul look toward Ash, who had not moved from his spot since the aurors arrived.
"I'll have to ask you and your house elf to remain behind to ask some question and until we've gotten a hang of the pull picture, Ashbert," Amelia Bones, Head of the DMLE ordered as she stepped forward to assess the situation with some aurors following behind her, Moody and Nym included.
"You took them all out on your own? Describe it to me," Amelia once more ordered as she looked at the corpses surrounding the place as well as the glue-covered, moaning, supposed Death Eaters.
She had seen these glue potions with Moody's newest apprentice and would love nothing more than to equip all her aurors with a full set. But Auror Tonks was with her, so all of them must have been apprehended by the young professor.
"I felt the wards go up, so I changed to my animagus form to observe what was happening until I heard cries and saw people running away from a certain direction. After flying in that direction, I saw a group of these... supposed Death Eaters torturing these three muggles over there as well as fire dark curses into crowds of people. Nobody fought back, so these idiots got overconfident and split up. One group of fourteen headed deeper into the tented area where I had observed Auror Tonks patrol to be earlier, so I stayed behind to deal with these seventeen," Ash began his explanation.
"There's sixteen here, boy," Moody interrupted as his magic eye spun around to take in all the details.
"Ah yes. I'll get to that. Now, as I stood in that tree over there in my animagus form, hidden from their view, I noticed several things from their non-existant vigilance and obvious drunken state to their overreliance on fear tactics. So I simply levitated a bunch of my airborne pain inducing potion, threw a bunch of Japanese firework paper talismans as a distraction, and banished a good dozen blue glue potions at the group. It took out well over a dozen of them in an instant," Ash explained to the approving nods of most aurors present.
"Like I said, they had no vigilance and all that was left for me to do was fight three of them, who had already been hit by the pain potion," to which Moody gained a proud smirk. "I took one out by hiding with a disillusionment charm which sadly resulted in the non-wizard father of the three people family over there to die to a killing curse mid air. After that, I fought the one who sadly got away. He was an above average dueler, and I'm only a meager potions professor a year out of Hogwarts, after all. So our fight was a draw at best because of my strategy. Seeing me disable the last other wizard with him, apparently, scared off that man as he flew away with a spell I don't recognize that turned his body in black particles. That allowed me to finally take out that one with the broken mask."
"And what happened to all their wands? Snapping a wand could be considered a serious crime, Starkey," Moody asked once he noticed that sixteen wands laid broken among the crowd.
"Well, in a fight 1vs17 I was of course fearing for my safety. Since all of these were masked criminals, nobody could rightly expect me to identify these vile attackers as a pureblood lord and snapping the wand of a nobody while under duress is permissible under our archaic, outdated laws. Before you ask, the same is true for a Lord of a House who wants to disable the wand arm of a nobody who they defeated in honorable combat."
Madam Bones and the aurors looked at the apprehended Death Eaters who they relaxed around after hearing their wands were snapped and quite a few eyes bulged out when they saw that under all the blue glue most of these suspects were missing their hands.
"Ashbert... most of them are missing both hands," the head of the DMLE spoke in disbelief once she counted all the missing appendages.
"I fought 17 lowlives. Do you expect me to remember which hand they used as a wand arm!? And look, I was even fair enough to close their wounds so they don't bleed out. Clearly, I can be considered quite merciful under the circumstances," Ash argued back with righteous indignation.
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