— Hey, who do you think is up there? Doesn't look like Aurors, they don't operate like this! — a wizard asked his partner as they walked together to check the remaining two exits. — Hey, are you listening to me? What's wrong with you?
The werewolf frowned upon noticing that his companion, who had taken the first step out of the corridor into the hall, had frozen dead in his tracks. But the moment he crossed the threshold himself, he understood everything—and was rendered equally speechless from shock.
Directly before them rose a massive, majestic stone throne. Victor sat upon it, lounging casually against the backrest. The crimson pattern of the Sharingan spun wildly in his eyes, and a quiet, hauntingly gentle smile played on his lips.
— Hello, hello... — his voice sounded softly yet clearly in the sudden silence.
Antoine and his group, having completely sealed the last exit with a cave-in, were moving swiftly down the only surviving tunnel. The commander moved as fast as he could. Even though he utterly disliked Victor, the boy was still Madame Flamel's named grandson, and Antoine couldn't allow him to come to harm.
Camille struggled to suppress her gag reflex. The air in the underground passage was literally saturated with the suffocating, sweetish stench of burnt flesh. Looking down at the charred, contorted corpses beneath her feet, she refused to the very end to believe that an eleven-year-old boy had single-handedly wrought this horrific slaughter.
— Antoine... — one of the wizards whispered fearfully as the burnt bodies began to form a solid carpet underfoot.
— Doesn't matter. Focus on the mission, — the commander snapped, though he himself was beginning to strongly doubt whether Victor even needed their help.
Finally, the mercenaries emerged into the central hall. The sheer scale of the werewolves' underground base was breathtaking, but even more horrifying was the sheer number of lifeless bodies littering the stone floor.
And then they saw the colossal throne.
Right in front of it, dozens of surviving wizards knelt with their heads hanging limply. Antoine and his people, stepping silently over the corpses, began to cautiously approach the dais.
Suddenly, a frantic, choking scream shattered the hollow silence of the cave.
The mercenaries whipped their heads toward the sound and froze in absolute numbness. An unknown force had literally impaled one of the werewolves right onto the top of the stone wall. Slowly, with the wet crunch of tearing tendons and snapping bones, his limbs began to stretch in opposite directions. When the wretch's screams finally choked on bloody froth, his severed arms, legs, and mangled torso crashed down onto the stone slabs with a dull thud.
Victor, seated on the throne, inspected the fresh splatters on the wall with almost childish, genuine curiosity, as if evaluating his own work. Judging by the dozens of similar brownish stains around, this werewolf was far from the first.
— Madame Flamel... What hole of hell did you find your grandson in? — Antoine whispered in shock, deathly pale.
— Bleh... — Camille couldn't take it anymore.
Her psyche, exhausted by the suffocating smell of scorching heat and the sight of hundreds of deaths, completely broke at the sight of the cold-blooded quartering. The girl fell to her knees and frantically began vomiting her stomach out right onto the bloodstained stones.
Victor didn't even turn his head toward the newly arrived mercenaries, continuing to inspect the crimson streaks on the stone wall with a thoughtful, almost academic expression.
Antoine's people helped Camille, pale as death, recover and get to her feet. Without relaxing and keeping their wands at the ready, the wizards slowly approached the dais and fan-out on either side of the throne.
At last, Victor leisurely lowered his gaze—wherein the crimson Sharingan pattern spun mesmerisingly—onto the werewolves standing limply before him. Scanning his eyes over the kneeling crowd, he mentally tallied the survivors. Of Greyback's once formidable pack, a paltry twenty-eight people remained at best.
A sudden, deep pride swelled in his chest. He had done all of this himself. Alone.
Though Victor clearly understood: had he faced such a number of wizards—even mediocre and untrained ones—in an open area, he would undoubtedly have had to retreat. But here, in the dark, intricate labyrinths of the underground caves, he was the absolute sovereign. The basilisk had mowed down a good half of them at the very beginning. Then, while the survivors scattered in panic through the tunnels and frantically gathered their belongings, Victor systematically hypnotized them, set them against each other, and personally cut down the isolated squads one by one.
Victor slowly rose from his throne and lightly leaped down, landing silently on the stone floor right in front of the frozen captives.
— Well then... It seems there are no longer any among you who refuse to obey? — Victor said softly, yet horrifyingly distinctly, as he surveyed the crowd.
The werewolf near whom he landed panicked even harder. Cornered like a trapped beast, his final instincts kicked in: not out of pride or loyalty to the pack, but purely out of wild terror. The man leaped up from his knees and drew his wand. But the moment he aimed it at the boy, he froze dead.
The crimson three-tomoe Sharingan pattern was etched into the werewolf's dilated pupils.
Victor merely smirked patronizingly and tilted his head slightly to the side. The paralyzed wizard obediently raised his own hand, clamped the opposite end of the wand tightly between his teeth, and slavishly bowed his head before Victor.
Victor neatly took hold of the tip of the wood protruding from his mouth with two fingers.
Bang!
The werewolf's head detonated from the inside in the blink of an eye, blowing apart into bloody shreds. The headless body hit the stones with a dull thud, forming a rapidly expanding crimson puddle.
The remaining captives trembled even harder, fearfully pulling their heads into their shoulders. It was precisely because of this primal terror of the unknown that they now knelt so submissively. When the survivors first ran into this hall, there had been far more of them. But confronted with the sinister, unexplainable magic of this child, the pack had broken completely. Those who tried to attack him suddenly began firing lethal spells at their own kin. And those who refused to drop to their knees to the very end were simply pinned to the wall by an invisible force and ripped to pieces.
Victor grimaced with annoyance and wiped away the single red-brown droplet that had managed to penetrate his magical shield and brush his cheek using the pad of his finger.
Inspecting his smudged finger, he let out a heavy, weary sigh. His magic was gradually running low. No matter how impressive his internal reservoir seemed, it was not bottomless after all.
— Dirk, stand up, please, — Victor looked with a soft, almost tender smile at the young werewolf who, just half an hour ago, had declared himself the new alpha of the pack.
Dirk slowly raised his head. Of that proud, determined wolf who had just passionately called his kin to mutiny against the elders, not a trace remained. He took an agonizingly long time getting up from his knees, his hands and legs trembling violently, sticky horror swimming in his wide-open eyes.
At that moment, Victor suddenly felt unbearably sick. He caught himself thinking that not long ago he had compared himself to this guy. Both had had difficult, scarred childhoods, both had ultimately found the strength to break free from the shackles of slavery... But looking at this trembling nobody right now, Victor felt only an overwhelming, revolting desire to chop his head off immediately.
— That is precisely why you never dared to challenge Fenrir during his lifetime, — Victor drawled in disappointment, placing his hands behind his back and closing his eyes. — You're too cowardly.
A faint spark of anger flared briefly in Dirk's chest—it was unbearably humiliating to hear himself called a weakling in front of everyone. But all his surrogate grandeur evaporated instantly the moment he looked back at Victor. The werewolf immediately glued his eyes to the floor and trembled even harder.
— What... what are you going to do with us? — Dirk exhaled, his voice barely audible and raspy with suffocating fear. — Turn us over to the Aurors?
Victor, without taking his hands from behind his back, opened his eyes and sighed in frustration once more. He had held out hope to the very last that this guy would show some real character at least now—dash at him in desperation or at least scream in rage.
— No. Ending up in Azkaban is far too light and merciful a punishment for everything you've done here.
Dirk shook as if a powerful electric current had been sent through his body.
— We... we didn't do anything like that! — he whispered frantically, holding out his trembling, bloodstained palms before him. — It was all Fenrir! We had no choice but to obey his orders! We were just his victims ourselves!
Victor looked at him and suddenly burst into genuine, heartfelt laughter. This clear laughter echoed loudly off the stone vaults of the cave, causing the surviving werewolves to curl up into even tighter balls. For while digging through the minds of the captives, Victor had managed to uncover another disgusting, vile fact about this dungeon.
— Victims, you say? — Victor stopped laughing and, continuing to smile softly, asked quietly: — Tell me, Dirk... Hundreds of you were hiding underground here. But among the survivors, I noticed barely a couple of women. Where are the rest? Where are all the women of your pack?
Dirk's eyes darted frantically from side to side, and his skin took on a deathly gray, cadaverous hue. He swallowed hard:
— Fenrir... Greyback only needed strong fighters. He usually didn't take women into his army, they were useless to him...
— Ha-ha-ha! Seriously? What a chauvinist this Greyback was, — Victor chuckled softly again. — What difference does a wizard's gender make when it comes to magic?
Dirk exhaled in relief and attempted a subservient, ingratiating laugh in response, hoping the terrible storm had finally passed.
Having finished laughing, Victor gradually calmed down. A soft smile still played on his lips when he suddenly asked in a completely mundane, even tone:
— Or maybe they just couldn't handle you constantly raping them, and died?
Dirk froze.
He stared in total numbness at the face of the smiling boy, but that kind, almost friendly smile coupled with the red-blazing eyes terrified him to the point of convulsions. The fear gripping his body proved so paralyzing that the werewolf literally turned to stone. He desperately wanted to say something, to make some excuse, but his lips refused to move; he dreamed of turning around and running without looking back, but his feet seemed permanently rooted to the stone floor.
Victor grimaced in disgust, noticing a dark wet spot spreading rapidly down Dirk's trouser leg, crawling swiftly downward.
— Ah... — Victor sighed in disappointment. — And yet you had the potential to become someone truly great. If only you weren't such a pathetic coward.
Slowly, almost lazily, he reached his hand toward the werewolf's chest.