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Harry Potter and all of its characters belong to J.K. Rowling.
I own nothing but the original characters I create.
"Dialogue"
'Thoughts'
-Author notes-
Chapter 284: Ambushed
"Dawlish!" James exclaimed.
Moody was about to poke his head out of the window when, all of a sudden, their teammate jumped in.
"We are surrounded, this is an ambush!" Dawlish screamed in a panicked voice.
"Surrounded? That's impossible," Moody said back. "I have been constantly using my magical eye to scan the surroundings. If anyone had gotten close to the house, I would know it," he said with absolute confidence.
"You can go check yourselves! There are dozens of figures lurking among the trees," Dawlish was extremely shaken up.
"Did you see what they looked like? Were they wearing white masks?" James asked.
"You think they are Death Eaters?" Moody asked.
Dawlish shook his head. "I... it's too dark in the forest; I couldn't glimpse any details."
"Fine, I'll go out there and take a look. You two stay here and take cover, then we can t-"
"Moody!" James exclaimed in alarm.
The veteran Auror felt a tug on his leg and looked down.
They had all been too distracted by what was happening on the outside to notice that the rotten corpse had been moving across the floor with its one remaining arm and was now clutching at Moody's leg, getting ready to take a good bite out of it.
"Depulso!" James was the fastest one to react and take action.
Dolohov's corpse was sent flying until it crashed against the fireplace, making a series of very unpleasant noises as its already decomposed body continued to break apart.
Unfortunately, he did not act fast enough to prevent Moody from suffering a quick bite.
"Is that a zombie?!" Dawlish exclaimed in horror as he stared at the still-moving corpse.
Its remaining arm had been destroyed, so it couldn't do much more than twitch and look at them with its white, dead eyes.
"Oh, this is bad! Zombies have a cursed bite." James glanced at his mentor with worry, but then he realized something. The zombie had chosen the worst target.
Moody huffed. "Aye, they do. But this one," he tapped on his artificial leg, "missed the mark."
James sighed with relief. But they soon started to hear noises coming from outside. They were far from safe yet.
"Our brooms are outside; there is no way we can get them back now," Dawlish pointed out.
"We can still apparate, but…" James didn't finish his sentence.
"If whoever set us up has at least half a functioning brain, they have put up some anti-apparition charms," Moody said.
"Bloody damn it!" Dawlish had just tried to apparate away but was unable to do so. "What about our emergency portkeys? They can get through some wards. But I haven't gotten mine back since they took it." Dawlish glanced at James, who shook his head.
"Me neither…"
"I should have been more paranoid about this," Moody lamented.
"We don't even know what is outside. If they are just a few zombies, we may be able to blast our way through them and escape by just running until we are out of the wards," James suggested.
They then realized something and shared a look with each other.
"The noises outside have stopped…" Dawlish pointed out.
The three of them approached with care to the window hole to take a peek outside.
They could see them clearly now that they were in the open, under the moonlight.
They were humanoid-shaped, but there was hardly anything human left in them. They were little more than skeletons with a thin layer of grey skin left over them and a pair of creepy red eyes.
There were not dozens but hundreds of them. And, although they could not be completely certain, it was likely they were completely surrounding the house.
"Those are not zombies…" James said.
"Inferi. Bloody hell, no wonder I could not detect them. My eye doesn't work on dead things!" Moody huffed.
"This is much worse than zombies, and there are so many of them. We have no way to run past them!" Dawlish added.
Like zombies, Inferi were reanimated corpses, but there were some key differences among them that made them much harder to deal with.
The zombie is simply reanimated by placing a curse on a corpse. The curse will take control of whatever remains of the body and only move if a living being gets too close to it. Getting bitten by a zombie has the risk of having the curse spread through the bite. If not removed in time, the curse will kill its victim and reanimate them as new zombies.
Inferi were made with a purpose in mind. They were constructed using corpses as materials. In reality, they were closer to golems than other undead creatures.
Compared to normal golems, the Inferi were completely autonomous, but they always followed their creator's wishes.
Their bodies had also been restored to achieve perfect mobility, despite their gruesome skeletal appearance.
To sum it up, Inferi were smarter and… much faster than zombies.
"They are moving!" Dawlish yelled as he saw the first row of Inferi take off running at them.
"Use fire!" Moody commanded.
"He was right…" James muttered while staring at the undead army.
He knew there was only one individual capable of having something like this.
'Voldemort is back… Harry was right.' If he had any doubts before, they were now gone.
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