I don't own Harry Potter

Chapter 9

"So Harry, how was detention?" asked Hermione expectantly as Harry entered the common room.

"Fine, Snape had me writing lines for some reason but at least he cancelled the next detention" said Harry; taking a seat by the fire and pulling out part of the mountain of homework the fifth years were being set.

"Wonder what he's up to?" mumbled Ron as he started inventing dreams for divination, "probably nothing good"

"Ron" chided Hermione, "he's part of Order, we should trust him." Ron grunted but otherwise didn't react. Hermione didn't say anything for a few moments before carefully asking "and how was the defence lesson you, taught, Harry?"

"It was fine, Hermione" said Harry stiffly, "how was charms?"

"What you expected… I was wondering, where exactly you were at break and lunch. You haven't really spoken to us all day"

"I've been planning the death of Riddle" stated Harry truthfully in a tired but blunt voice, "the Order and Ministry might be content to sit back while Riddle gets back to his former strength but I refuse to let that happen."

"But Harry, they are doing things and they know what they're doing. You can't j-" tried Hermione.

"Hermione, may I remind you about the correlation between what you think I can do and what I really can do. I am perfectly capable of actively disrupting Riddle's plans, anyone is but the Order seems to think that they should only work reactively or defensively. If the Order wanted they could have the adult Malfoy, Nott, Avery, Rosier, Parkinson, Selwyn and Yaxley all simultaneously assassinated, most likely by getting them into one building with anti-disapparition wards around it then bathing the place in Fiendfyre. If they did that, Riddle would lose almost all of his funding and the only rich families would have left would be in Azkaban, where they're even easier to kill. The Order knows Riddle's planning to attack Azkaban and release his old Death Eaters but do they do anything? Even when they know that not doing so will cause the deaths of hundreds of people more than if they simply killed the Death Eaters? No. So why do you think that they're the best people for the job, if I didn't know he was too stupid to come up with the idea, I'd think that the Order was created by Riddle in an attempt to make sure his main enemies thought they were opposing him when they were really doing fuck all, that and how even if they did meet a Death Eater, they'd only be using fourth year spells against them. So why, why do you think they can do jack to help stop Riddle?"

Hermione stopped for a good thirty seconds before answering, "Harry, I'm sure they know what they're d-"

"Fuck this" said Harry, getting to his feet as Neville entered the common room, "hey Neville, you up for a duel before bed"

Neville nodded and the pair departed the room, leaving Ron and Hermione to return to their arguing.

"Everyone ready?" asked Harry as he stood by the statue of the one-eyed witch in his full battle armour: dozens of long, feather-light, damn-near indestructible, black scales which coated a Nundu-leather jumpsuit with a large black visored helmet to cover the head and various bits of extra plating over more vulnerable areas.

The rest of his group were dressed in almost identical suits, only red for Neville, yellow for Megan, blue for Luna and green for Lily. They'd needed different colours to differentiate themselves in the eyes of their fellow soldiers and had taken their house colours as everyone liked them, the only exception being Harry who wore black as it differentiated himself from Neville and represented his more stealthy role in the group.

Everyone nodded and Harry drew a hollow black rod from one of the folds in his armour which functioned as a pocket. He placed his wand in the centre of the rod then squeezed, causing it to elongate into a long glaive – effectively just a long stick with a sword on the end which, in his case, could work as an optimally functioning magical focus as it had his wand in it.

Harry waved the glaive at the statue and with the slight sound of stone scraping against itself, the statue sunk and the passage was revealed.

The group slid into the tunnel, drawing their weapons as they did – a sword for Neville, a nasty looking battleaxe for Megan, a rapier for Luna and a trident for Lily – while shields appeared on all of their left arms.

It took only a minute walking through the tunnel under Hogwarts for Luna to declare that they'd left the boundaries of the anti-disapparition wards around Hogwarts. After a few more steps to ensure the minimum chance of splinching, the group all connected hands and with a crack they disapparated to a path on a hill overlooking a small village.

"So this is the mighty village where Riddle's parents come from" announced Lily while staring down at the dull looking, rural village.

"Yep" answered Harry dully, scanning the area to get his bearings, "the shack should be somewhere that way" he said, pointing directly into a bush.

"Natura Moventur!" called Luna, jabbing her rapier towards the bushes which immediately parted, revealing the way to a very decrepit looking house. "There are wards around the house but they're very well hidden, despite not being that well-crafted. It looks like Riddle created them in his youth, using his excess power to make up for his lack of knowledge and experience at ward-crafting and has returned to fix the stealth effects on them since."

"And can you remove them?" asked Lily, pulling Luna out of her rambling.

"Oh, yes, I doubt any curse-breaker would have much difficulty as they were designed to be invisible to wizards and that means they had to be built with less raw strength. Having said that, I'm pretty sure there's a muggle blitz bomb connected to a magical trip wire in there to catch out wizards who don't know what muggle weapons are and I don't want to risk missing a purely non-magical trap."

"I can get into the place and I still have my emergency portkey which'll activate the moment something pierces my armour" stated Harry, "admittedly I don't particularly want to be port-keyed to the other side of the galaxy but if you can get the wards down I'll do the rest"

Luna nodded and threw up a ward around Riddle's wards to ensure that none of his alert wards could get a message out. Satisfied that no one could find out what they were doing, Luna carefully poked her rapier through the wards and started conjuring small amounts of Fiendfyre on the other side to wear away at the wards from the inside, there were no anti-dark magic wards as they'd negate the effects of the Horcrux and so the wards fell in a matter of moments.

The moment the wards finally faded from existence, a vast sea of a vaguely green gas burst forth from the shack and the group found themselves throwing bubblehead charms over their already masked heads without even considering it.

"Nundu toxins" called Neville, "I think we're immune even without the helmets but we should get rid of it in case it wipes out the village"

Without pausing to agree, the five of them immediately started using vacuuming and vanishing charms to eliminate the gas while Luna threw an extra ward around them to dilute toxins leaving the area.

A few moments later the gas was gone in its entirety and Harry turned again to the shack. "Inuisibilitas pallium!" muttered Harry and his personal invisibility cloak – which had been woven into his armour due to its unnatural effectiveness after removing the tracing charms on it – activated, rendering him invisible, even to his companions.

Choosing not to take the obvious route through the front door, Harry carefully levitated himself over the shack until he was floating just over its roof. Due to the many years of nature's abuse, several very large chunks of roof were missing and Harry slowly lowered himself through the second largest one until he was hovering just above the floor of the shack, not daring to touch the ground.

After a quick scan of the room, Harry discovered exactly what he was looking for: a small patch of the floor which, not only was emanating dark magic but also was clearly far cleaner and less damaged looking than the rest of the rotting floor suggesting it had been hit with a Reparo.

Harry slowly levitated over to the boards then cut a perfect circle in the floor with his glaive. He slowly levitated the circle of floor into the air, keeping it away from the rest of the potentially trapped shack walls and prodded open the small box in a hole under the floorboards.

It creaked slightly as it opened and revealed a small ring with an odd symbol on it. Not daring to lift the ring with his glaive, as it was one of the objects capable of destroying a Horcrux, Harry waved his glaive at the ring and it floated into the air and followed Harry out of the shack.

"You got it?" asked Luna as Harry dropped his invisibility.

"Here, it's got a compulsion charm to put it on though so there must be some kind of nasty curse hidden on it" said Harry, floating the ring between them.

"Yep, looks like a nasty corruption curse of some kind" said Luna, examining the ring by waving her rapier around it. "Mundabis illud deiectionem mundate! In purificationem eius annulum! Conteret corruptionem!"

There was a flash of light and Harry felt around 20% of the dark magic on the ring vanish. "Ok, ring cleared" said Luna cheerily before placing the tip of her rapier on the stone in the ring. "This stone came into existence in… 1943. It looks like it's designed to imitate the effects of the resurrection stone and make apparitions appear to try and persuade the user to kill themselves. I guess Riddle must've made the fake and placed the original elsewhere. The ring is the 25% Horcrux though."

"Good, shall we go then?" asked Neville.

"I think we should check the prophecy first" suggested Harry, "we only know the end of it and it could be important"

"Good idea" agreed Neville, "I guess that'll be a stealth mission so me and Meg'll take back the ring while you deal with it. Oh and as it's past midnight we've only got five days until the ritual so we'll need a plan"

"I've got the basics down, we can talk about it when we get back" said Harry, "meet us in the come and go room in a couple of hours, oh and if we're not there, please don't storm the Ministry in an attempt to find us"

"Aww" murmured Neville, "and I was so looking forward to butchering the Auror department"

Harry casually rolled his eyes, "see ya." Grabbing Luna and Lily by their heavily armoured waists, Harry disapparated away.

"Welcome to the Ministry of Magic. Please state your name and business" asked the cool female voice as Harry, Luna and Lily arrived in the visitor's entrance to the Ministry of Magic.

"Boggis, Bunce and Bean" called Luna, "we're here to talk to the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures about a dangerous fox"

Despite the ludicrous nature of the request, three pins were dispensed by the phone box and Luna explained "the charm isn't designed to detect truth from lies or valid reasons to enter from invalid ones. You could say you were here to attack the Ministry and the box wouldn't care, we just need to give a lie so it won't record that we were here, on the other hand the Security Desk does care who we are so we should probably disillusion ourselves"

Three invisible figures stepped from the box, drawing some odd looks given the box had appeared to arrive empty. After silently passing through the atrium, the trio slipped into a lift then magically rendered themselves incoporiel and floated down through the bottom of the lift and straight down the lift shaft.

Stopping at level nine, the three flew through the lift wall and landed on the other side. They passed through the corridor and Lily stood guard outside the door to the Department of Mysteries while Harry and Luna pushed the door open and stepped in.

They stepped into a circular room with a dark marble floor that looked almost like water, candles emitting a cool blue light and twelve handleless doors. A moment later, the silence was broken as the walls began to rotate.

"Which way do we go?" asked Harry once the walls stopped moving.

"I can't tell from the wards," admited Luna, "I know that's the exit because the room opens the exit if you ask it to and I know that's not the right door because it's got extraudinary protections on it, which they wouldn't use to protect prophercies as they're already protected by the curse on them. I think our best bet it to try and detect the Order member protecting it. Homenum Revelio Maxima!" Nothing seemed to happen for a few moments until Luna pointed at one of the non-descript doors, saying "that way"

The pair entered the room and Luna waited by the door while Harry activated his full invisibility – with his invisibility cloak – and crept towards where he could see Tonks, hidden under an invisibility cloak.

Finally reaching Tonks, making less sound than the quietest cat, Harry very carefully placed his glaive a milimeter from Tonks' face before casting a silent stunning spell on her.

Leaving her unconscious on the ground, Harry checked the area and drew a prophercy labeled S.P.T to A.P.W.B.D, Dark Lord and (?) Harry Potter. Harry plucked the orb from its stand and shattered it.

Immediately, a ghostly voice called "The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches... born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies... and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not... and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives... the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord will be born as the seventh month dies..."

Harry let out a long whistle while vanishing the remains of the prophercy and conjuring an orb which looked identical but contained no prophercy. Placing the new orb onto the rack, Harry waved his wand over it, muttering a long series of spells to ensure that anyone – including Riddle – touching it would cause it to strike them with a killing curse, violently explode and shoot Fiendfyre at the taker.

Finished, Harry rennervated Tonks and snuck out of the department, taking Luna and Lily with him.