"Fiendfyre, rage and rise!"
Unholy blue flame poured out as if from some infernal depth, taking the shape of a colossal bird whose shriek tore across the sky. Aurors moved fast, several together crying "All Curses Cease!" to check the firebird's spread.
Tom had never expected Fiendfyre alone to do much real killing. His purpose was simpler: to split their attention, to thin out how many wizards could strike him at once. If dozens of curses landed on his shield in the same instant, it would crack. Any more than that and it wouldn't hold long at all; past a hundred, it would shatter outright.
Every Auror on the field could loose a curse or two a second. Together they amounted to something like spellfire from a machine gun.
Once he'd fed the Fiendfyre enough power to sustain itself, Tom left it to burn on its own, wand lifted to the sky, weaving through the barrage of curses as his arms swept through wide, sweeping arcs, the kind of spellwork only a handful of wizards alive still knew how to perform.
Thunder cracked across the horizon. The clouds let out a low, rolling boom, and from the churning dark, silver lightning coiled loose like snakes, striking down without pattern or mercy. The whole manor was swallowed in a sea of lightning. Almost no one there could believe that in so short a span of time, "Grindelwald" had summoned a weather curse on such a monstrous scale.
For a moment the field dissolved into confusion. The Aurors pressed their assault while trying to keep themselves shielded. Fortunately, every one of them wore at least one protective amulet, which bought them room for error.
Tom realized, with some irony, that he'd boxed himself in. If he'd been fighting under his own name, he could simply have triggered the backdoor built into those amulets and set them off like bombs. But as Grindelwald, he could only rely on the crudest methods to break through their defenses.
"Veil of Mist!"
He cast another field-wide spell, pouring in enough power that the fog resisted even a gale's attempt to scatter it. He drifted through the haze, using his magic-sense to track the Aurors directly. The pattern was always the same: a first strike to break an enchanted trinket's defenses, a second to subdue the wizard, then binding him in a cage prepared in advance.
His reactions outpaced everyone else's on that field. That edge had nothing to do with spellcraft; it was simply his alone. But the Aurors had an answer of their own. They clustered together, backs to each other, watching every direction at once.
Tom broke from the fog without warning and was met by a hail of curses thick as rain. He had no choice but to abandon the ambush and throw up a shield.
"He can't touch us!" Having beaten back this latest push, the Aurors grew loud with excitement. "He's alone, and he's already burned through half his big spells! We don't need Dumbledore. We can beat him ourselves!"
"Ha!" Tom found their ignorance almost funny. He'd meant to deal with them as an ordinary wizard would, but since they'd decided to hide inside their shells like turtles, they could have a taste of something well beyond the ordinary scale.
"Embrace the end!"
"Raaagh!"
A rotted, shrieking cry tore itself from Tom's throat, and the sound turned solid in the air, slamming into every mind on the field. Friend and foe alike went blank for an instant, and then terror and despair came flooding in behind it, an undertow dragging them toward madness.
Screams broke out across the ranks of Aurors, one after another, and they dropped where they stood, collapsing into something between sleep and death.
The defense that had seemed unbreakable a moment before came apart entirely. Over a hundred Aurors lay unconscious. The ones still standing held on through sheer will, clutching their heads, dazed, barely keeping themselves upright.
This was the Lich's own gift, the Scream of Terror, both a mental assault and an assault on the soul itself, one that slipped clean past the amulets' magical defenses. Wizards had no real answer for an attack like this. It was warfare from an entirely different plane.
The Aurors stationed at the outer perimeter, holding the anti-Apparition wards, were the lucky ones. The sound's force faded with distance, and after a moment of disorientation, they recovered.
But the battle was already lost.
The three hundred Aurors leading the assault had been broken. Wherever Tom walked, he gathered them up, dead or unconscious, treating both the same, binding each first with a Petrification Charm before collecting him.
"He's not human! He's a monster! Run! Run!"
Watching his companions vanish one after another, one of the Aurors holding the perimeter finally broke. He turned and fled without looking back.
Then, like dominoes falling, the rest scattered in every direction. Tom made no move to chase them down. Capturing more than three hundred people in a single engagement was already enough to shake the wizarding world to its core.
Then, abruptly, he went still.
High above, Usagi had already caught sight of Dumbledore.
"The rest is yours, old Gellert."
Without hesitation, Tom blasted the ground into a cloud of dust, and under its cover, traded places with Grindelwald once more.
Grindelwald went on "collecting the dead." By the time only a dozen or so people remained standing on the field, Fawkes arrived, carrying Dumbledore with him.
Grindelwald turned aside a last thunderous barrage and finished securing his final prisoners before lifting his head, unhurried, to meet Dumbledore's grim expression. A faint smile crossed his face.
"Albus. You're looking a little old these days."
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