One wizard after another fell into brain death under Leonard's rough handling.
The bodies piled together still trembled faintly. Their bodily functions had not completely stopped yet, so every now and then one of them would twitch.
But their sacrifice was not without value. Leonard was already able to catch fragments of images during those brief intrusions into the brain.
Unfortunately, the images were too chaotic. Most were trivial slices of daily life, and even more were useless memories of banquets and the like.
Schneider had been right. He really had provided these people with abundant funds, enough for them to move openly through German wizarding society and bask in admiration.
And even a life of that much luxury and indulgence had not shaken their faith in Grindelwald. That alone showed that, when it came to ideological indoctrination, Grindelwald outclassed Voldemort by miles.
Just look at Voldemort. Nine out of ten Death Eaters were fence-sitters, and the last one was insane.
Another wizard was reduced to brain death by Leonard's clumsy experiment and casually tossed aside. Schneider stared numbly at the scene, dazed, as though he were trapped in a dream.
This had to be the most horrifying nightmare imaginable. If only he could wake up, none of this would have happened.
Thud.
Another wizard hit the ground, and the sound jolted Schneider awake. He looked up and found Leonard already standing right in front of him. All of Theodore's men had been reduced to brain-dead husks.
"Your turn." Leonard extended that sinful hand, the roots wound around his palm like the scythe of death.
As Schneider watched the hand slowly approach his face, the faith in his heart could no longer hold back his terror.
Is this the end? Are we really going to be wiped out without ever even seeing our leader?
Fear cracked the wall of faith inside Schneider. In front of Leonard, his mind was no longer defended.
Leonard saw the scene of Chercy and the others after they had been captured alive. They were being held in the dungeon of a castle, tortured and interrogated every day for information about the Wolfsbane Potion.
"Hm... so they're after the Wolfsbane Potion? Wait... the ones guarding Chercy and the others are... werewolves? Werewolves who also believe in Grindelwald?"
Leonard made his deductions while sifting through Schneider's memories.
He was not worried in the slightest that the formula for the Wolfsbane Potion would leak, because the werewolves responsible for brewing it were never sent out on outside missions.
Even someone like Chercy, whose status among the werewolves was relatively high and who could enjoy the most advanced Wolfsbane Potion, knew absolutely nothing about its exact formula or ingredients.
These people had chosen the wrong target.
Still, even if Chercy and the others could not reveal anything, Leonard had no intention of leaving them there. They were his and Midgard's subordinates, after all.
The next step was finding their location.
Schneider's memory placed enormous importance on the castle's location, and he remembered it in great detail.
Leonard not only saw the exact address of the castle and Schneider's entire route there, he also saw Schneider's conversations with the werewolves inside.
From those conversations between Schneider and the werewolves guarding Chercy and the others, Leonard discovered that this organization had been built for one purpose only. One day, they intended to rescue the imprisoned Grindelwald and place him at their head.
Even Leonard, an outsider, was almost moved by it.
This was practically disaster relief spirit.
"Tch. Is Grindelwald really that charismatic? You people are even funding his power base out of your own pockets?" Leonard sighed as countless tiny vines surged into Schneider's mouth and nose.
Schneider's body went rigid and shook violently. Blood vessels filled his eyes, only to be overtaken by pale green tendrils.
The vines wrapped around him quickly withdrew, leaving Schneider trembling where he stood. But unlike the other wizards, he did not simply collapse dead. Instead, in the middle of those convulsions, he slowly straightened up.
Tender shoots full of life pierced through his skin and wound themselves around his body. Inside him, organs that still retained vitality despite the brain death were occupied, replaced, and fused together with the plant shoots, forming entirely new tissue.
In the end, Schneider stood before Leonard with a pale face, while those eerie sprouts slowly withdrew back into his body.
He looked perfectly normal.
And yet the seemingly unchanged Schneider had already been completely overtaken by the Blood Grapes' vines. He had lost all consciousness and become a puppet of the Blood Grapes.
Across the grass, vines pulled their roots free of the earth and pierced into the bodies of the surrounding brain-dead wizards.
One after another, those dead bodies slowly rose under the Blood Grapes' control, swaying as they gathered around Schneider.
They moved stiffly. Those who had lost their legs crawled at first, but soon the wounds on their bodies were stitched together by green vines, and even severed legs were reattached.
Leonard quietly watched the group gather like zombies and slowly return to an outwardly normal state.
He already knew where the castle was, so Schneider no longer had any real value. Still, as the financier supporting that castle, he remained useful in one respect.
For example, he could lure those werewolves straight to their deaths.
The wizards turned into Blood Grapes puppets began to move, drawing their wands and using magic to erase every trace left behind.
Leonard sat on a rock and watched the scene before him. It looked busy and bustling, but in truth it was nothing but corpses moving about, without the slightest trace of life, like something out of a horror film. Lowering his head, he drew the symbol of the Deathly Hallows on the rock.
Now Leonard was even more curious about Grindelwald. He wanted to know what sort of man could make these wizards worship him like a god.
He did not actually know that much about Grindelwald. In his previous life, he had not watched the related Fantastic Beasts films nearly as carefully as he had watched Harry Potter.
But he did know that Grindelwald had been very close to Headmaster Dumbledore, and that in the Harry Potter films, Grindelwald had not played a major role and never left that prison in the end.
"I should make some contact..." Leonard thought aloud, wiping the mark from the stone and sitting there to wait for Schneider's smuggling team to arrive.
Bored, Leonard's mind drifted to the coming school year.
Because of him, Ron Weasley had been seriously injured and hospitalized. Leonard doubted he would get the chance to go to Egypt after his family won the lottery.
Which meant Sirius Black, currently in Azkaban, probably would not break out either.
If that happened, next year at Hogwarts was going to be a little dull.
The lack of an Azkaban fugitive was not really the issue. What felt truly regrettable was missing that iconic scene of Harry Potter beating up Snape.