361 Explosive Greetings
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It was sudden.
The day had started as normal with the morning rush of people going on with their lives. Adults rushed to their work, and children made noise on their way to school with many shops and stores already up and running for the day.
*Boom!*
A whip-like shock wave jolted everything in its path, followed by the sound of the blast. There was a burst of fire, followed by a plume of smoke rising up in the sky from an old, dilapidated building that looked as if it had been abandoned for ages.
Eyes turned to the building with people halting in their ways to look at the accident that seemed to turn more horrible by the second. The fires grew higher and hotter, and the building began to crumble brick by brick. The sound of harsh but familiar sounds of sirens followed after. The firetrucks had arrived to extinguish the fire before it spread to the neighboring buildings.
“It’s not going down!” yelled a firefighter from behind his face shield. “We need more people and trucks down here!”
“They’re on their way!” barked back another firefighter. The burly man turned towards the building when he thought he heard cars backfiring. “Did you hear that?”
“What?”
“The pops.”
“No—! Look! The fire’s going down!”
The fire that didn’t seem to want to go down suddenly looked like it couldn’t wait to be extinguished as if it was working on unpaid overtime and wanted to leave work as soon as possible. In mere minutes, the fire died down, leaving behind a badly burnt building. The firefighters entered the building to sift through the debris to find the cause behind the fire and what they found horrified many of the brave men inside.
Slumped against a wall sat a burnt to the crisp body. The body had sustained so much burnt damage that, except for the humanoid shape, one couldn’t tell that the figure was once a person.
“Squatter or an arson for murder?”
“. . . That would be revealed through the post-mortem, but if this is a murder—.” The firefighters’ eyes blurred and out of focus. Everyone in the room stared blankly, unmoving.
Two Aurors people suddenly became visible in the room. They exchanged looks briefly and immediately got to work. One of them carefully laid the burnt body into a body bag that stiffened after a wand wave. The other Auror waved his wand on the wall that the body was leaning against, and the part had remained relatively unharmed because of the body acting as the cover burned to match the rest of the surroundings. The Aurors then wiped the memories of the firefighters and modified them so that they won’t remember seeing the body.
“I am done,” an Auror said.
The other Auror looked around the burnt room, then at the body, before nodding. “Everything’s here is done as well. Let’s leave.”
Both turned invisible at the exact moment, and after a clapping sound, the firefighters awakened as if a paused video had been resumed with the two men going around the room, sifting through debris to find clues behind the fire.
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-(Scene Break) –
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“So, what is the decision?” asked Shacklebolt as he entered the cold morgue below the Auror’s Office. “Who is our dear fellow, and how did he die?”
A medi-healer with sunken cheeks turned away from the bunt body and turned toward Kingsley and the two more Aurors who came with him.
Kingsley, who had met more than his share of medi-healer who worked in the morgue, furrowed his brows. Most of them were pale and looked as if they hadn’t seen a single ray of light and seemed as if they were made from slabs of stones— but this one somehow seemed like a dead body had come to life.
“You won’t like this,” said the mortician. “I was fixing the body to answer the first question. . . but ended up finding out the second one as well.”
He stepped aside and motioned for the Aurors to step closer.
Kingsley looked down at the body, which was lying on its back. He sucked in a cold breath when he realized what he was looking at. Etched on the man’s back which had been fixed, was a large Dark Mark in the darkest of the blood reds.
“Oscar Willow’s the name,” said the mortician.
“Willow!” Kingsley gasped. “Wasn’t he a part of the Improper Use of Magic Office? I heard he was up and coming in the Ministry.”
One of the Aurors behind Kingsley spoke, “He was about to become the next head of his department.”
“How do you know that?” asked Shacklebolt.
“My wife works there.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot about that.”
The mortician cleared his throat to gain the Auror’s straying attention. “Before he was burnt to death, the victim had gone through various physical and magical injuries.”
“Burnt to death?” asked Kingsley. “He was alive when he was burnt?”
“Yes, the cause of death was immolation.”
“Poor man. Those bloody Death Eaters,” Kingsley sighed. “Anything else?” ρꪖꪕᦔꪖꪕꪫꪣꫀꪶ
“Nothing for now. I’ll have to do some more investigation to find additional clues. But there’s something—”
The mortician couldn’t complete his sentence. The Dark Mark on the corpse’s back began to glow in an ominous red, and a red liquid that looked like blood began to leak out of the corpse onto the cold slab.
“What is this?” Kingsley’s eyes darted around the body with his hand on his wand.
“I-I don’t know,” said the mortician.
Suddenly, a hiss sounded out from the body with the blood pooling around the body platform, and with the rate at which it dripped, it looked like it would flood the morgue.
“Evacuate and seal the morgue,” Kingsley issued an order.
Looking at the scene, none complained. They backed away and had just turned to run away when the Dark Mark flooded the morgue with a blood red light. . . and then with a blast.
*Boom!*
An explosion burst in the heart of the Ministry. Moreover, it was below the Auror’s Office, the place with security only next to the Department of Mysteries. The entire Auror’s Office block walls were thickened and reinforced for protection, but even the explosion ripped through those thick walls and spread through the basement like water out of a dam.
The structural walls were cracked, and the tremors that originated in the base traveled up to the central Ministry building and even up to the above-ground non-magical Whitehall buildings.
When the dust settled, the basement was decimated with destruction everywhere, and in the middle of that chaos, a glowing orb of blue became visible.
Shacklebolt dropped the shield and immediately whipped his head around while calling out, “Rory! Brynn! Tegan!” He jerkily stepped around, almost stumbling to the ripped-up ground. In the moment’s action, he had pulled up a shield, but in that rush, he hadn’t had the time to cover the others.
‘Rory and Brynn would be alright— but Tegan. . .’
But then Kingsley’s foot caught in something, and he fell forward onto the ground.
“Wha—!”
Kingsley felt his stomach come up. He had tripped on a body. . . and when he saw the torn and muddy Auror robes, he knew who it was— at least one of the two who it was. Then it hit him that he hadn’t heard anyone call out to him or even a single groan of pain. He crawled to the body and shortly waved his wand, only for the spell to give no response— there was no life in it.
Kingsley shot up and waved his wand in a flurry. All the rubble in his view rose and was strongly pushed towards the walls, leaving behind a navigatable space. But it also made him what he was hoping not to see. Just a few steps away, there laid two bodies. Kingsley’s breathing grew labored when he saw that there weren’t two bodies. . . he could only see one and a half bodies— the half body being the lower part.
“No, no, no, no. . .”
He began muttering as he rushed to the complete body, which he could identify as the mortician from the clothes. He tested for life, but again, it came out as negative.
Kingsley collapsed on the floor with his ears ringing and eyes swarming, but it was only for a second as instinct took over, making him stand up. His Auror ways etched into the bones commanded his body as he moved towards where the exit was when.
The steel gate that had become mangled and twisted was knocked open before Kingsley could get to it. Aurors came running in and almost invaded like an army.
“Shacklebolt!” Robards shouted when he saw his haggard subordinate and friend.
“Rory and Brynn,” came out of Kingsley’s mouth. “Brynn’s body wasn’t even—.” Shacklebolt’s body slumped against Robards as he muttered with labored breath.
Robards supported Kingsley, and while the man didn’t seem like he wanted to ask, the question came out of his mouth, “What happened here, Kingsley.”
“Dead body from arson had a Dark Mark on the back. It was some sort of explosion. Took out everything. . . everything. . .” Kingsley’s eyes widened as he stood straight and stared at Robards. “. . . Basement. What happened outside of the morgue?”
“We don’t know yet,” Robards pursed his lips. “But it doesn’t look good. The blast spread out of the morgue— coming down here, the picture was similar. . . the possibility of casualties is large.”
Kingsley closed his eyes shut to hide his pain.
“It was a trap,” he said with anguish. “The Death Eaters set a trap. They. . .” he couldn’t speak up as the effects of blocking the blast had sucked a lot of magic out of him in a very short time.
“I understand; no need to speak anymore; rest up,” said Robards. The Head Auror carefully shited Kingsley’s to other Aurors who led him out.
He turned, and naturally, with Kingsley’s clean-up, he saw the three bodies lying on the ground. Robard closed his pain-filled eyes for a moment, and when he opened them, there was hard steel reflecting them.
“Singh!” he commanded, and a Senior Auror stepped up. “I want every part of the bobby trapped body gathered and bagged up. . . . Then I need the mortician’s, Rory’s, Brynn’s bodies handled carefully with the utmost respect.” He turned to another Senior Auror, “Give me a statistic of the casualties, injured, and damages— I need to be updated regularly.” Another order came up to another Senior Auror, “Get the Juniors ready. We’re going to patch the damage by ourselves without any external help. I want everything cleaned and repaired as soon as possible.”
Finally, he turned to the team presents and declared,
“I don’t care what Scrimgeour says. I don’t care if Bones comes down against us. From today, this moment onwards, the Auror’s Office is at war with the Dark Lord and the Death Eaters. They took two of our people today. I’m going to drag every single one of those fucking degenerates out in the open and have them answer with blood.”
The Aurors present were stunned for a moment when they heard the always-stern, by-the-book Head Auror Gawain Robards speak so vehemently with such burning anger. But when they saw the bodies, something inside them screamed out in the agreement.
They clenched their fist and stared at Robards with matching emotions.
It was final. . . the Auror’s Office was at war.
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Kingsley Shacklebolt – Captain Auror – Bed rest for a week.
Gawain Robards – Head Auror – I’m going to make them pay.
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