Chapter 132.
"I didn't. But." With a lazy snap of his fingers, a large transparent display appeared in the air in front of them, partitioned into thirty sections. Each one showed a different person, all of them watchful, all of them waiting for something. "In the last few days the wolves have caught three separate people trying to get into the grounds."
Nagini studied the images, moving from one to the next. Her gaze stopped on one in particular: a man in dark clothing, still and grim where the others looked tense. "That one's the leader."
"Sharp." Severus reached out to stroke her, and she looked pleased. "Which is the problem, or part of it. I could have all of them dead in under a minute. On the other hand, I'd rather not. I've also been meaning to put together a unit for some time now, something dedicated to surveillance and targeted elimination. So now I have thirty people sitting outside my house, and a decision to make."
"Do what you think is right."
"You hate killing."
"Half true." She flicked her tail. "I hate killing people who haven't done anything. These ones are trying to break into our home. I have no feelings about them at all."
"Now I feel like an absolute bastard," Severus said mournfully. "Corrupting an innocent snake."
"I will actually bite you."
She couldn't, or not safely. The immunity he had built up after that ritual was no longer sufficient protection against her upgraded venom. It would not kill him, but two days of fever and real pain at the bite site was not how he wanted to spend a week. He had verified this personally, because he'd needed to establish how his body responded in order to build the right antibodies. He would not be doing that again. Still, it had been worth it, and small exposures no longer affected him much at all.
"All right. So what would you do?"
"Having a unit like that would free you up considerably. You could hand them the small problems and focus on what actually matters."
"My thoughts exactly." He glanced at her, winked, then looked back at the screen and snapped his fingers again. The backgrounds behind the Black Star operatives blurred, shifted, and reformed: the stark empty clearing they had been standing in had become a dense, dark forest.
The reaction was immediate. Most of them panicked. A handful, including the leader, kept their heads and had their wands out while the others were still looking around in confusion.
"You could have just moved them to the basement directly."
"I could." Severus did not disagree. "But I want them frightened first. Frightened people cooperate. I've blocked their magic, so they'll have to run for a bit, and the wolves are perfectly safe."
On the screen, the ones who had figured out they couldn't cast anything were already pulling out daggers. They began to cluster together, gravitating toward one spot. Severus brought up a second display beside the first: a map, twenty-nine red points moving steadily toward a single black one.
"Good instinct, trying to regroup. Except..." The direction they were converging on led directly past the Chimera's lair. The weather was clear, which meant the chimeras were awake. He reached out to the Lion telepathically: "Don't kill them. Frighten them."
Most of them never reached the leader. The hellhounds found them first, drawn by the noise and the scent of prey and genuine fear. Daggers against magical wolves were useless under any circumstances, but they were a particularly poor match against animals that had spent their entire existence in a place that tried to kill them every single day. The wolves were fast, coordinated, and utterly unhurried about it. Within seconds of contact, nearly every Black Star operative had been disarmed and pinned. A few managed to leave scratches before going down. That was the full extent of the resistance.
Severus watched with idle interest. He understood now, in a way he had never quite managed to before, why certain types of powerful people enjoyed organizing these things as entertainment. There was something to it. He was not about to make a habit of it, but he could see the appeal.
When it was over, he moved them all but the leader's group to the basement dungeon, using the house's capacity to manipulate what sat within its territory.
Out in the forest, the Chimera King had dealt with his daughter, who had been very eager to take part in whatever was happening, and was now pushing through the trees to meet the remaining guests. He could already feel their auras from a distance, faint and weak. He felt nothing but boredom.
Why does he bother with people like this? the Lion thought, shouldering through the undergrowth. Twelve of them came around a stand of trees, led by the man in dark clothing, and walked straight into him.
"What... what is that..." One of the Black Star men let out a sound rather than a sentence. His face had gone completely white. The others froze. Under the chimera's gaze, not one of them was capable of voluntary movement.
The Lion looked at them with undiluted contempt. In his years in the jungle, he had met human beings. Some had run. A few had attacked. These were simply standing there waiting for whatever came next. He had not encountered this level of collective spinelessness in a very long time.
His gaze fell on the one whose aura was at least marginally less pathetic than the others. The man had already fainted. The Lion felt an impulse, faint but genuine, to put him out of his misery as an act of mercy.
Instead, he inhaled and let out a roar that he had deliberately kept to about a fifth of its full capacity. Even so, the nearest trees bent under the pressure wave. The wizards went down one by one, until every single one of them was unconscious. The Lion gave them a single final look of professional disdain, turned around, and walked back to his lair.
Inside the house, neither Severus nor Nagini felt any particular need to comment on what they had just witnessed. Nagini, to be fair, understood those people better than she would have liked to admit. Three days ago, flush with confidence after her evolution, she had challenged the chimera to a fight and had been comprehensively humiliated. He had immunity to venom, courtesy of his own snake tail, which had removed her primary advantage entirely. She had taken it as a personal objective: sooner or later, she was going to beat that insufferably smug creature.
"Shall we go down to the basement?"
"No." Severus kept his eyes on the screen showing the leader's group.
Nagini tilted her head and looked back as well. A few seconds passed. Then the leader moved. He pushed himself slowly upright, looked carefully in every direction, and began to take stock.
"He faked it? He managed to fool the Lion?"
Clever man. And a cold one. He realized almost immediately he couldn't win, went limp, and let the chimera focus on everyone else. His plan was almost certainly to slip away once the Lion was done with the others. Severus snapped his fingers and moved the remaining operatives to the dungeon. All of them, including the leader. "Gorby."
A house-elf appeared beside him, dressed in a neat white coat with short sleeves. Gorby had come from the Lestranges, at Nagini's request. He dropped immediately to his knees.
"What can I d-d-do for Master?"
"Stand up. I've told you, I don't like this." A languid wave of the hand. "They should have explained that to you already. No kneeling."
"F-forgive me!" Gorby scrambled upright, but kept his eyes carefully off Severus's face.
"Thirty people in the basement. Keep them alive. Feed them once a day, something completely tasteless. Don't let them die. And remove the cots."
"I thought you would go to them yourself."
"Let them sit for a while." He looked over at Nagini. "Remember what I told you about the slave seal?"
Nagini thought for a moment. Then she understood. "You want them to ask for it themselves. Voluntarily. That makes it stronger."
"Exactly. Five days should do it for most of them. The leader's a different matter. I'll speak to him separately." He exhaled. "I'm just tired of having alarms go off eight times a day. I've spent the entire week trying not to kill these people." His expression made it clear this had required more self-restraint than it probably should have. "Understood?"
Gorby nodded carefully.
"Good. Off you go."
"Yes!" Gorby vanished.
Severus dismissed the screens with a wave and got up from the sofa. He settled Nagini around his neck and looked at her with a relaxed smile.
"Want to go somewhere tomorrow?"
"Very much," Nagini said cheerfully, already looking forward to it. She had been wanting to get out of the house for days.
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