Azkaban.
Azkaban.
Azkaban.
Iain's heart was pounding at a rate that showed absolutely no consideration for its owner's feelings, running wild like a hamster trapped in a wheel and refusing all discipline.
He stared at the robed officials from the magical world standing not far down the street, wands in hand, and only one word kept echoing in his mind.
I'm finished. I'm going straight there to have Dementors breathing down my neck... Azkaban, that island prison where even your smile gets taken away. How was an eleven-year-old supposed to survive in a place like that?
"Calm down! Calm down! They don't know I did this!"
At such a delicate moment, Iain's mind abruptly became crystal clear. He forcefully shoved all his earlier emotions deep down and locked them away.
Super-brain.
Iain's precious genius brain.
Really, it was trying its best.
"You... are you exorcists here to save us?"
In the span of barely two seconds, Iain's expression completed a perfect transition, from terror to blank confusion, from confusion to fear, and finally to a pitiful look that practically screamed I'm just an innocent little boy and I know absolutely nothing.
He staggered backward a few steps, creating the impression that his legs had gone weak with fright. After years of playing the role of a child, Iain had become quite practiced at putting on a performance.
"Exorcists?"
The bald Auror at the front, Kingsley Shacklebolt, future acting Minister for Magic in a far more chaotic time, looked at the frightened child before him at once.
His scar stood out sharply in the lamplight, but his eyes were even sharper, dark brown, like polished amber.
They carried the trained scrutiny of a professional.
Iain endured that gaze for about two seconds, and his heartbeat sped up by another degree. But he did not look away. He knew guilty people looked away.
"Mr. Exorcists! You finally came! Just now... just now there was a very bad man! He did this! He caused all of it!"
"Just because I petted his dog, he told me he wanted to play a game with me. He said he wanted to see whether I could live long enough to make it to sunrise!"
"I only touched his dog! He must be some demon crawled out of Hell!"
At the crucial moment, Iain's full capacity as King of Storytelling came roaring out, tears in his voice, reasoning fierce, his tone laced with exactly the right degree of helpless sobbing and desperation.
Several of the Aurors froze for a moment.
Their brows knitted.
"Black wizards are often like that. Inhuman. They take pleasure in tormenting children and enjoy watching their victims struggle in despair before they die."
Kingsley did not doubt him.
After all, no normal person would assume that a child, even a young wizard, could possess enough power to create a spectacle as terrifying as this.
Not even the legendary Dark Lord Who Must Not Be Named had been this wicked at that age.
So Kingsley believed Iain's cry for help.
He turned his eyes away from the boy and looked back at the corpses, then raised his wand and pointed it at the nearest one.
Aunt Mary from the orphanage.
"Finite!"
A beam of cold white light shot from the tip of his wand and struck Aunt Mary squarely in the chest. Her movement paused for an instant, and then...
nothing happened.
The corpse did not fall. It did not vanish. It did not even stop opening and closing that jawbone. The twisted version of "Silent Night" continued to leak in broken fragments from her tongueless body.
"Damn... how does something this hard to dispel show up in a Muggle area? This feeling... this reeks of ancient magic."
Kingsley's frown deepened. The three Aurors behind him exchanged glances, their grips tightening unconsciously around their wands.
"Captain, magic of this level should probably be reported up the chain," one of the Aurors murmured, having also discovered that his own Finite had achieved almost nothing.
"I know." Kingsley cut him off, voice low. "But if we want to undo all of the effects completely, it could take a very long time."
"And too many Muggles are already involved."
As he spoke, Kingsley looked toward the surrounding buildings, where pale-faced people kept peering out from behind half-closed windows.
Some even had cameras, trying to take pictures.
"If we want to solve this quickly, we'll need to find the caster first. If we wait too long, it may already be too late."
Kingsley had reached exactly the right conclusion.
He looked back at Iain. There was less suspicion in his gaze now, replaced by the professional manner of someone taking witness testimony.
"Child, that very bad man. Which direction did you see him go?"
Kingsley knew he needed clues from the eyewitness.
To avoid frightening Iain further, he even softened his tone a little.
"I think he went that way..."
Iain parted his lips, just about to invent a black wizard who had never existed.
"Iain!"
Suddenly,
a jumble of footsteps and overlapping cries came from behind him.
The newly awakened young wizard turned his head and instantly went numb.
The entire orphanage had charged out after him.
Younger brothers, younger sisters, older brothers, older sisters.
All of them "fully armed."
Tommy led the charge, holding up a rolling pin he had apparently stolen from the kitchen, his face wearing the expression of a Spartan warrior about to march into battle.
Behind him came Galen, carrying a pot lid in each hand and using them as shields. Michael, meanwhile, was armed with a rusty sickle that no one knew the origin of.
Catherine and Caesar, the two shrieking banshees, were in the lineup too.
"Let us lend you all our light! Transform into the hero you promised you were!" Caesar and Catherine were both clutching bare, brushless brooms.
"Yes, yes, exactly! And don't you remember what you told us? That when you were born, all of London was whispering your name? That must mean you were born with a mission!"
Michael, being older and therefore more inclined to draw broader conclusions from Iain's stories, stepped forward and offered him a paper crown that looked as though it had been folded moments ago.
Across it, in crooked letters, were written:
SAVIOR OF THE END TIMES
"..."
Iain now deeply regretted just how addicted he had once been to playing the plagiarist. Dozens of little children clustered around him as though preparing to crown him for some grand destiny.
"Iain is our savior!"
"Our savior! Our savior!"
"He'll lead us to fight the zombies!"
"Fight the zombies! Fight the zombies!"
The children were all excited, as though they were about to follow Iain into some glorious undertaking.
Kingsley and the Aurors, meanwhile, stood a short distance away, completely dumbfounded.
The expressions on their faces had progressed well beyond mere shock.
"?????"
Countless question marks bloomed in every Auror's mind. The seasoned wizards first looked at the slowly moving corpses in the yard, then at the swarm of children waving pans and kitchenware, then back at the corpses, and then finally, for lack of any better option, back at the children.
The Aurors genuinely could not understand it.
One fearless child would have been strange enough.
How was it possible that an entire nest of children were all this reckless?
Was there something deeply unusual in the local atmosphere around here?