Hero Against Own Will

Chapter Five. The Temple of the Damned.

They have arrived to a dead end on the road several hours later. Snake got out in a decisive move that made all others follow him doubtlessly.

"We walk from here. The entrance to the caves containing the temple is over there," Max explained as he checked his gear to be in place. Snake extracted a simple-looking 12-gauge shotgun from his backpack and led the team into the trees, Neville readying his rifle and Harry nervously checking how Ravenwing was doing in the sheath on his back.

"Caves?" Neville asked cautiously as they approached the edge of the trees.

"Yes, the entire complex is located under the ground. Best place to hide it, right?" Max replied with a grin as he nodded at a large shapeless rock protruding from the side of a hill they were next to now. "We go in there."

"In there? Is there a button or something so we can open it like civilized people?" Harry asked.

"Says the fabled archaeologist. I was more like expecting to put some explosives to use..." Snake started, but Max cut him off.

"You're right Harry, there is one."

Having said this, Max stepped up to the rock, activating some hidden switch or something, since the rock suddenly slid away from him as lightly as some cats can't even dream about.

"Now that's what I call an archaeologist's dream - hidden entrances that open themselves!" Harry noted merrily as he stepped forward through the opening.

*****

"Is it just me or those aren't normal torches?" Snake asked as he nodded at a torch hanging on one of the walls. Harry had previously noticed that they gave off an almost eerie greenish light that made him feel as if he was walking into a part of a fairy-tale.

"A life of a Squib among Muggles for several years straight can do that to you..." he told himself, wondering once again why Snake helps them, hides his face, and acts completely not wizard-aware at the same time.

"They're sustained on a low-level magical radiation emitted by an abandoned adamantium mine nearby. The ground was extremely unstable at the time, so it was left to fall and wither away... Until my comrades claimed the burial grounds of their predecessors for themselves." Max's voice sounded somewhat unearthly, resonating from the walls of the corridor. "There was another, although smaller, clash of Demonhunters and Demons here in the early 16th century. The Demons used the same trick as in Germany, during the last major stand of my Order - when they were sold out to the Lord of Darkness by a traitor, an army of the Unholy Ones stormed the village the Demonhunters were staying in. And this temple was built around the middle of the 18th century, when the one under London was flooded with the Undead."

"Flooded?" Neville and Harry asked in unison.

"Yes. A necromancer's experiment gone wrong. The Ministry of Magic had a field month back then," Max replied with a slight chuckle, but quickly stifled it. "We're near. Stay silent from now on," he whispered cautiously as he pointed to the turn ahead, where several human-shaped shadows were moving on the wall - apparently the movement was caused by the dance of the flame on a torch, since the shapes themselves seemed to be motionless.

Harry nodded in reply, straightened himself out and boldly stepped forth, praying inwardly that his camo outfit would protect him from any problems. There were two guards here, standing and talking about something - he could not quite make out the words yet. The shadows were cast by the torch one of them was holding, as it turned out. Harry nodded to them in some kind of greeting, got an identical pair of nods in reply and went on about him own business past both of them. They didn't seem to suspect him even when the handles of both of his daggers went down on the bases of their heads, knocking one out at once and alerting the other - but Harry simply turned the weapon over, sinking the blade of the dagger into the guard's spine.

"It's clear!" he announced to his three companions. He almost felt them frown as he wiped the dagger on the clothes of the very man whose neck was a bloody mess now, but none of them said anything. They moved onwards after packing the two bodies, one dead, one unconscious, into the nearby locker room (more specifically, into a pair of lockers).

*****

"So, and I say 'To hell with you, woman! If you're fucking four men a night, making each of them think they're the only one, are you human then?' , and she went like 'But you fuck only one woman a night - me - and make me feel like I'm fucking a mannequin, are you a man then?' and then--"

What happened then nobody ever found out as the guard who was telling the story dropped onto the floor, revealing that a masked man was standing behind him.

"Hello, gentlemen! I am called Snake and this is a hold-up! Please drop your weapons onto the floor or you will die from a heavy overdose of bullets," he announced, raising his shotgun.

"And you expect to stop us with that?" one of the guards roared, drawing his own assault rifle that made Snake's shotgun look outdated, outpowered and outnumbered.

"Yes."

The answer came just as the rifles of the guards sent their streams of metal towards Snake, while he himself dropped onto the floor unloading the first two shots into the nearest guard, the buckshot tearing the fabric of the man's uniform into shreds and the skin and bones of his chest - into a bloody mess.

"Who's next?" he asked, but the words became a bit slurred as he rolled to the side, narrowly avoiding the next burst sent at him and picking off the head of one of the remaining three guards with a single well-aimed shot.

"Take this!" one of the two still-alive guards yelled, throwing a live frag grenade in Snake's general direction.

"No, thanks. You keep it!" Snake replied merrily as he skilfully caught the grenade and tossed it back. The explosion wreaked havoc upon the two guards, littering the floor and Snake with small fragments of them.

*****

"Great plan. Now most of the compound knows we're here!" Harry hissed through gritted teeth. He and Max were crawling along the wall of the temple, avoiding sight of the guards.

"Correction. The compound knows he's here. They only saw one, they only fight one. Neville will look after him so that Snake will make it out alive though," the Demonhunter replied assuringly.

"I wish I had your faith..." Harry muttered in reply.

*****

"Hey, this guy's actually very good..." Neville mumbled to himself as he watched Snake's antics against the steadily diminishing opposition.

He himself was placed strategically on a small naturally-formed balcony on one of the walls of this large cave, and this gave him clear visibility upon almost everything happening inside and outside of the compound, although a large (but unimportant to Max's plan, luckily enough) portion of it was hidden from view by buildings and walls.

"Nice shot!" he commented merrily as he saw another of Snake's shotgun blasts take out yet another guard, "If he keeps going on at that rate, we won't need Harry and Max to infiltrate silently, there will be no-one left alive."

But as he just finished speaking these words he saw that his comrade below was put into a bad position as the newly-arrived backup of the guards drew their flamethrowers, putting Snake to a major disadvantage as they chased him with their fire across the yard.

"Here I come!" Neville whispered to himself and put his left eye to the sniper scope. Several moments later, one of the guards below lost most of the flesh in his neck as Neville's bullet ripped it away. Snake took advantage of that immediately as the last shell of those he loaded into his shotgun before the operation went into another flamer-wielding guard's chest, proving experimentally that one should keep their metals in their blood, not their lungs.

*****

"Alright, get the grappling hooks!" Max ordered. They arrived to the place, and, as soon as Max tied the extra length of rope to the hook, Harry loaded it into a special gun.

"OK, ready!" he said and, after Max's nod, pulled the trigger, sending the hook flying upwards and fixing itself onto the wall.

Both of them started ascending the rope as soon as they made sure that it was fixed steadily enough, and, coincidentally, both hoped that Snake and Neville will draw the attention of the guards upon themselves for a few more minutes.

*****

Snake stood up, calmly reloaded his shotgun, put it away into his backpack and welcomed the newly-arrived guards with a stream of shots from a machine gun he borrowed from one of the less live guards. The more live ones understood this as a gesture of extreme dislike towards themselves and went scrambling for cover. Surprisingly enough, two of them even managed to avoid Snake's and Neville's shots long enough to actually do so.

Snake turned to face where Neville was, gave him a thumbs-up, reloaded his salvaged gun with some ammo he scooped up from the fresh dead arrivals and moved on, disposing of the remaining two guards along the way.

*****

"Is it me or is this door really locked?" Harry asked casually as Max tried to get himself into a sturdy-looking metal door. Max shot an angry glare at Harry in reply.

"What do you suggest?"

"Stand back."

Harry drew Ravenwing, his eyes pausing for a few moments on the black metal of the blade, and thrusted it forwards into the door. There was a blinding flash of light as the blade went straight through, taking Harry after it. The door fell into two neatly cut halves with a double BANG! but nobody seemed to have noticed it - they were too preoccupied with Snake.

"Nice way of getting in, eh?" Max said with a grin as they entered the hallway beyond the destroyed door.

It ended with another modern-day metal door that seemed to have been built to last for centuries, regardless of the approach chosen to remove it, unless that approach included use of the door's key (which was conveniently removed from this base and stored in a high-security safe in an office in the Ministry of History).

"Now this is trouble," Harry said as he heard the sounds of battle draw a bit closer to where they were.

*****

Neville had a hard time keeping up with Snake's erratic movements among the guards of the fortress, as the man jumped and strafed and jumped again, avoiding their fire and almost causing them to hit one another - but also not letting Neville shoot them in fear of hitting Snake himself.

"Oh man, just stop for a moment, alright?" he hissed to himself angrily.

Almost as if by magic, at that very moment Snake paused in his jumps, taking his time to shoot down two more soldiers, while Neville got one himself; but the man below was instantly punished for his mistake as several bullets seemed to have finally hit him. Snake collapsed as his wounded leg became unsteady (and hurting a lot) - three bullets at once entered the flesh of it, two of them leaving the leg as fast as they entered it, making the bleed even larger. The third, unfortunately, seemed to have hit the bone, and although there was no fracture, the pain it dealt was quite immense.

Neville swore to himself quietly and shot another guard, sending him to the ground. The remaining guard of this batch was a tad smarter than the others, as he looked up, trying to find the source of the shot - and pointed someplace roughly in Neville's direction. Neville swore again, louder this time, and shot the radio out of the man's hand - but too late.

*****

They turned around just in time to see three well-armed (and well-armoured too) guards enter the hallway. Apparently, the sight of a fellow guard with a magical sword told them enough (that such a guard isn't really a fellow one), since they opened fire at the first sight of Ravenwing. Max dove to the floor at once, sending a couple of throwing knives in the guards' general direction - one of them collapsed with both knives sticking out of his face - but Harry stood his ground, moving like a blurred shadow as the black blade of Ravenwing repelled the bullets one by one.

"Gotta love this blade!" Max smirked as one of the repelled bullets went through the foot of another guard, sending him to the floor. The Demonhunter's knife sent the third and last one onto the floor by ending up in his throat. "Hurry up and break this door too, mate!"

"Hold your horses!" Harry muttered in reply as he swung the black sword over his head and into the door. It cracked, but didn't move at all. "I think we've got a slight problem."

*****

Neville dashed out of his nice little cover and turned into the corridor leading downwards - he had to get Snake out of there before it was too late, and now that the guards knew where his sniping spot was, he had to move fast. He knew that by taking the route he took - the longer one - he risked running into them a lot less than if he took the other one, despite it being closer to Snake. He was, after all, a professional, so he would be able to stand his ground even with a hurt foot, Neville thought, so he could wait a bit. He had his rifle behind his back, a simple gun in his hand - a rather old, but nonetheless reliable, Colt 1911 - just in case, although he was quite a dreadful shot with a handgun - and he was a bit shaky from the running.

Twice he had to stop and check for footsteps, once he even had to hide in a small niche in the wall (miraculously enough, he wasn't found), but he finally made it down to the temple. Snake was still there, keeping the guards at bay - he had crawled over to a collapsed part of the temple wall that had covered him from the enemy's shots safely. Neville ran up to him, ducking under a stream of bullets sent his way and diving for cover behind the same wall.

"What are you doing here?" Snake hissed in a very snakelike manner when Neville landed.

"I'm here to save your sorry arse, my friend. Take it or leave it, but decide quickly before they remember that they have hand grenades we ain't got," Neville snapped back. Just to prove the rightness of his words, three hand grenades came flying over the wall and landed neatly in front of the two saboteurs. "Too late," he added grimly.

*****

On the fourteenth hit, Harry's hands were hurting so much that he couldn't even feel anything but pain anymore. On the seventeenth the door seemed to move. On the twenty-third it collapsed with a horrible noise and Harry sheathed Ravenwing with the thought that his hands would fall off if he didn't.

They walked into the next room with a strange foreboding feeling, Harry drawing the camera from his backpack. The temple's central room was decorated with various runes spreading over several different centuries, each of them looking different, yet alike at the same time.

"Er... Max... Do I have to film all of it?"

"No, just the ones that look like the ones on the blade, all others are irrelevant now, although they won't be useless to us if you do," Max replied, looking around.

"Alrighty..." Harry replied in a slightly confused manner and turned the camera on. After running it over all of the walls, the altar and the ceiling, he turned to Max again. "Is that all?"

"Yes. We have to run now," the Demonhunter replied, pointing at the window, "Neville and Snake are cornered."

*****

Without thinking too long, Snake tossed all three back over the wall.

"Stupid idiots didn't hold out the fuse so they'd blow once they land," Snake replied in such a tone that made Neville shiver involuntarily.

"Let's go!" he said in a decisive voice, but Snake's hand stopped him.

"Wait. Max and Harry are coming out through here, they can pick us up. Rush out now, you get shot. Rush with them, there'll be nobody left to shoot you," Snake said in a calm and almost detached voice.

"Fine," Neville snapped back, feeling overpowered and humiliated due to being overpowered by a wounded man.

*****

None of the guards found out what hit'em when Ravenwing went through their bodies like they were made of paper, not flesh and bones and wearing armour. Only one of them even had enough time to scream, and that scream was quite short due to the black blade piercing his lung shortly afterwards.

"You're a butcher, mate. Could you aim for the heads and not spill so much blood?" Max asked in an almost snobbish manner.

"You want speed or you want to stay clean? Don't like the blood, stand where it won't splatter you. If I'd stand around and aim, they'd be standing on our dead bodies by now," Harry protested as the two men crossed the courtyard, gave a wave-off to Neville and Snake, who stumbled out of their cover, Neville slightly bent under Snake's weight.

*******

"Alright. Let's review."

Hermione's voice echoed through the almost empty meeting hall of the HQ as the few people present watched her - Harry, who was sporting several bandages over his hands; Max, who looked like he swallowed a stake and it kept him upright, still and silent; Neville, who was cleaning his rifle; Snake, who was bandaging his hurt leg and several more people who looked like they were important to the Resistance, judging by the way they acted, but whose names Harry didn't know.

"You walked in, slayed almost all of the guards, took the necessary footage and walked out without so much of wounds except Mr. Snake's foot?" her voice was laden with disbelief, "Sounds like science fiction to me."

"Science fiction or not, we've got the footage. We've got the guts all over us, we've got the scars and cuts and the like. Now stop acting like we're in the army and you're the evil sergeant," Harry snapped back, "We did what we wanted; we found out what we needed; we haven't lost any of our people; we killed lots of enemy soldiers. What else do you need? The attack probably won't be in tomorrow's newspapers, trust my words. Nobody would like to know that their beloved government can't stand its ground against a bunch of rebels with a single magic sword to their name."

"Listen. You may not trust us all you want, but you do have to admit that we're alive, we're back and we've got what we wanted. What other proof do you need?" Neville asked calmly.

"Proof that we didn't make a deal with them, of course," Snake observed coldly in a manner that reminded Harry of his old Potions teacher, Severus Snape - the same cold, calm, yet hateful manner, "Proof we can't give unless we have an inside man in the SS, which we don't. Now if you excuse me, I'll be on my way, I still have a fake servitude to them to lead so I'm not arrested for being caught talking to you." Having said this, he lifted himself up from the chair, his balaclava still hiding his face, and walked off, limping slightly.

"The guy has a point, Hermione," said Max, "You can, of course, not trust us, but you do at least have to acknowledge that now we can do our search for Demonslayer."

Hermione waved at him dismissively. "Fine. Go ahead, look. But for security measures, I'll have to ask you to remove yourselves from this base so we can move it to a new spot - the time of this one seems to have ran out."

Harry got up, nodded to Hermione in a semi-acknowledging, semi-goodbye manner and left, dragging his backpack along into his room. Max and Neville followed him after saying (or, rather, muttering) their goodbyes and filed out into their rooms to pack.

The next morning, the car Harry, Hermione and Dean took from Seamus Finnigan took the three treasure-seekers out into the city...

**********

A/N Alright, it took a truckload of time, I know. I had exams, I had a hard time living through the a-little-less-than-perfect-results my parents nearly killed me for (just for being one (1) point below maximum possible!), and I got addicted to the Castlevania games. Well, it's done now, no? I'll be updating Games Gods Play next, and HDR2 and Cyberpunk Nightmare will follow shortly (whichever of the two comes first). Maybe I'll finally post the first few chapters of Dark Avenger once I find myself a beta (any volunteers?)...