Chereads / Dark Lord Dumbledore / Chapter 32 - Chapter 32

Chapter 32 - Chapter 32

Chad suddenly appeared in a livingroom with a seemingly drunken man stumbling around while spraying blood everywhere from an amputated right arm. Firing off a stunning spell at the already mostly incapacitated wizard made the room go quiet. Quirrell had darts sticking out of him from all different places while a severed hand clutching a wand was on the floor a two metres away from the now unconscious wizard.

"Restrain him, but be careful and don't go near him. Clear everything around him, even his robes." Chad ordered, not caring about the blood flowing at a steady rate from the missing limb. Quirrell was fated to die as soon as he started working for Voldemort.

Quirrell was then magically striped, and the sofa near him was magicked away, leaving a naked, bound and bleeding wizard in an empty room. Before Chad could set up a containment field to stop the ghost of Riddle from escaping, a nebulous black form with a screaming face zoomed out of Quirrell's head. Whether it was trying to hurt Chad in revenge from ruining his plans or just a knee-jerk reaction, the Voldemort cloud of creepiness flew at him.

Chad thought this was an incredibly reckless thing to do because a soul not bound to a body would lose to a wizard any day. Even a wizard not trained in Legilimency could hit it with a killing curse or use a shield spell to fend it off. And that's not including the overpowered sacrifice/love protection that Chad had as Harry Potter from Lily doing her thing. How Voldemort didn't burst into flame in canon, when he flew through Harry after Quirrell crumbled to ash, was a mystery. Or how the soul piece in his head could survive, maybe it slipped in before the protection could target it as an enemy.

Either way, it was foolish of the minor Dark Lord to come straight at Chad as that was what he wanted him to do. Gathering his will, he dragged the corrupt and tattered soul into his mindscape. Just as before, a snake faced man in black robes appeared at the outskirts of the apocalyptic town. Chad was not going to take any chances with the main soul of a recognised master of mind magic, not with the extra juice it had compared to the other pieces.

Loudspeakers in the raider camp blasted out all examples of Riddle's failures while surprise attacks from both the sky and underground assaulted him. Vertibirds unleashed a hail of bullets down from up high while molerats tunnelled out at his feet to distract him. Deathclaws appeared from behind buildings with their pants-shitting aura of death, while super mutants unleashed the destruction of the heavy weapons they favoured. Chad had brought out the 'big guns' so to speak, to not only test how they faired against a fully powered Voldemort, but to also end the fight quickly.

He was disappointed that the killing curse had no problem killing off the deathclaws, even with their legendary damage resistance, but was surprised at the success of the weak mole rats. Although they did little damage, the shock of an enemy exploding out of the dirt was enough to distract Voldemort from the real damage dealers. Multiple enemies also forced him to use different spells and get creative with area-of-effect damage. Energy weapon-wielding synths confused him when they survived an Avada Kedavra to the chest, but an exploding charm following it up exposed the mechanical abomination for what it was.

With five times the power of the previous soul pieces, it was easy to see how Riddle was able to bulldoze through other wizard's mental defences, but he was still just as unimaginative. Even though he was aware of muggle weapons and their destructive power, he never used them, probably disdaining them because they were muggle. Instead, he wasted time trying to use spells to destroy the mechanical birds of death high up in the sky. This left him open to other attacks and surprises that chewed up his limited supply of power.

Chad had not even expended forty percent of his mental 'energy' that represented his willpower, and Riddle was already on his last legs. Sure, he had laid waste to the already dilapidated town above and had killed anything that moved, but he had achieved very little in his goal to find Chad's mental avatar. Destroying every speaker that had him froffing at the mouth in rage at their insults and insinuations also achieved nothing. Inevitably, Voldemort fell to the seemingly endless waves minions as they cost little effort to create.

After a run through the Vault-Tec computer to purge any memory and emotion that contaminated the soul, Chad cut it up into manageable pieces to consume over time. The power boost would still be the same, but the assimilation would be safer and not stress his body or soul to bursting. All in all, a reasonably underwhelming fight, but a safe one. Voldemort had empowered both his body and soul through rituals that gave him the juice to throw around Legilimency attacks like they were nothing, but didn't try to improve his techniques or think outside the box.

It was also curious that Voldemort never consumed soul pieces like Chad was doing, instead choosing to sacrifice wizards and witches in rituals to claim their power. But just like Chad's method, there was a limit on how much the body or soul could take. The body housed the soul, and if the soul became too great for it to contain, it would burst at the seams. Likewise, a soul could only develop so much before it became unstable or started affecting the mind emotionally. Voldemorts problem was that he never tried to replenish what he kept cutting away or take a break to regain balance and heal.

Of course, this could have been Dumbledore's influence, who knows how far that old goat's machinations went. At any rate, Tom Marvolo Riddle had been taken off the board except for three soul pieces in the Diary, Hufflepuff's Cup and Ravenclaw's Diadem. The unconscious Quirrell at his feet would disappear, and it would appear as if he successfully stole the Philosopher's Stone and resurrected Voldemort. Since Quirrell had to die to complete the ruse, there was something he could help Chad with before he shuffled off this mortal coil.

Chad had been thinking about what he felt from the Philosopher's Stone since he had the pleasure of examining it. With a command to Boppy, he once again scanned it with his senses once it was retrieved from a quarantined magical loot site. Since Chad would need time to experiment with it, he had sealed Quirrell's stump to stop him bleeding to death. After an hour of examination and testing, he was confident he knew how it worked. With all his testing of souls and the power gained from eating them, he now knew why the Stone's energy felt familiar.

The Philosopher's Stone was made of crystallised life force. To create a stone this size must have taken thousands of souls channelled into it to form and stabilise it. How it was done, Chad had no idea, maybe a ritual of some kind. But one thing was sure, there must have been at least a thousand magicals sacrificed to achieve this result. Well, that or a hundred thousand muggles as their souls held less power. Either way, with that massive amount of souls channelled into one place, it was little wonder that Flamel could break the magical rules of creating gold or make potions to restore his life force and extend his lifespan.

Flamel was over six hundred years old, and in that time, there have been a great many wars. Both muggle and magical. It would be easy for the crafty old bastard to set up a ritual nearby and harvest the souls of the dying. Whether he engineered the wars or just took advantage is debatable, but it was rather cunning of him to claim he used alchemy to create the Stone. And the fact that he only was able to create one!

Chad supposed that using the Stone to turn things into gold was the perfect misdirect, but stupid in the first place for exposing the Stone's powers. Maybe he had been found out and needed an excuse. Either way, it shouldn't be too hard to refill the Stone eventually, with all the death he planned to reap in his world conquest. There would always be people with armies willing to use force against his figureheads. Particularly since he had moved his operations into Africa.

The hard part of creating the Stone was already done, now he just had to guide the souls into it as it would automatically absorb them and prevent the energy from dissipating. He hoped. It was a pity the Resurrection Stone did not function as advertised. Chad was expecting an artifact that would allow him to summon a soul to the world of the living so he could communicate with it but was disappointed when it was merely a memory made corporeal. Less substantial than living bodies, but much more than ghosts, it was as if the Stone used the memory of the dead target and channelled magic into giving it form.

If the Resurrection Stone could summon real souls, he would have an unlimited power source! A pity the real Stone couldn't even create a ghost of someone you didn't know personally, and they couldn't even speak! Slipping into Quirrell's already damaged mind from Voldemort's takeover, he destroyed any resistance that had recovered and ripped his soul from its anchor. The experimental thugs had given him a lot of experience in this. Then it was a simple matter of using his will to guide it to the Philosopher's Stone and watch as it was sucked into it with a scream of terror and a red glow.

Well, now he had a means of getting the most out of his enemies that were not worth enslaving. 'Go, Green! Always recycle!' Chad chanted out in a mockery of the environmental movement's slogan. He wondered how they would react if they knew he was recycling souls instead of trash. Well, in a way, he was still recycling trash...