The metal token felt cold and heavy in his hand, the twisted red-brown runes glimmered faintly in the dim light, like pulsing veins.
William—now "Crawford Leighton"—casually clipped it onto the belt of his brown leather armor.
The poacher controlled by the Imperio curse stood silently behind him, the eyes behind the mask slightly vacant, like a puppet waiting for orders, while the real Leighton and the others had long disappeared. Charlie hadn't even seen the process of how those Magic Patterned Stone Statues obliterated the bodies.
In the foul-smelling air, only the uneasy breathing of the Antipodean Opaleye remained.
Actually, it wasn't so tense originally, after all, the people in front of it were "Great Druid" William Richard, Pokemon Master Newt Scamander, and Charlie Weasley, a Fire Dragon Keeper... But there was nothing to be done, Norbert really had no sense of boundaries—
Looking at the Norwegian Ridgeback sniffing its own behind, the Antipodean Opaleye's gaze was somewhat dazed.
Isn't this buddy... Which good fire dragon family greets like this?
At this moment, Charlie's face was a bit pale—he wasn't unaccustomed to life and death, and his work at the Fire Dragon Reserve was also filled with danger, but witnessing so many deaths at such close range had a massive impact on him, as he usually just cared for fire dragons. The man instinctively glanced at William's calm side profile, those blue eyes behind the mask as deep as a cold pool, without a ripple.
"..."
Charlie began to wonder if he was being overly dramatic.
"Plan?"
Newt asked softly, his gaze turning to a spot not far away, where a dark gray Ukrainian Ironbelly was crouched behind a cage, silently watching this direction. Newt very much wanted to break the cage now to rescue that guy but understood he needed to remain calm at this moment.
"Proceed deeper."
William replied concisely, the voice distorted by the mask carried a hoarse metallic quality, he began trying to mimic Leighton's earlier bluffing tone, "We're now 'upstream', we must find the source of that thing on his neck—" he gestured with his chin towards the Antipodean Opaleye, which had already turned its back.
"You heard it just now, this potion can affect wizards too—"
"How do we proceed?" Newt nodded, then continued to ask.
"His name is Raz, one of Leighton's men. He knows where to go to get the next share of potion for a fire dragon, we'll head there first."
So, the lift groaned again, struggling under their weight, bearing them upward.
Norbert no longer needed to maintain his disguise, he shrank back to a smaller size and lay on William's head while the Antipodean Opaleye, also reduced in size by William, was placed into Newt's all-purpose suitcase.
"... War, did that person just mention war?"
Riding the elevator once more signified that the story had entered the "Talk" phase again, Charlie was the first to speak, shaking his head, forcing himself not to look at the miserable state of the surrounding fire dragons but instead asked to divert his attention, "Who's the war with?"
"I don't know."
William shook his head—he truly didn't know, his understanding of these poachers wasn't as in-depth as Newt's. Besides knowing they mostly became Animagi, liked to run circuses to cover their tracks and real identities, William actually had little knowledge of the poachers before this.
After all, if the Goblins were to declare war, their target would undoubtedly be humans, Centaurs, Merpeople, even House-Elves are all the same, while these poachers—who knows who they plan to war against.
... Hope it isn't me.
William fell silent, for some reason, he had a strange premonition—that these guys might be coming for him.
Finally, the lift stopped before a smaller, deeper rock cave platform than below, no longer had fire dragons but had an opening facing the lift, a heavy metal door inscribed with dull runes, its material pitch black, forming a sharp contrast with the rough rock walls nearby.
"This is it, Cap... Captain."
Raz said stiffly and numbly, "Return the empty bottles, retrieve new Furnace Potion... all behind this door."
The brow under William's mask furrowed slightly, driven silently by William's will, the man moved forward mechanically like a programmed rigid puppet, extending hands clad in fingerless leather gloves, and with some effort, pushed open the heavy door panel in front of him.
"Screech—"
The grating sound of friction reverberated within the tight space, the metal door slowly swung open inward, a suffocating sensation seemingly capable of clogging human lungs rushed in.
Behind the door was a cramped space, dug into a natural cave, currently packed full with various bizarre alchemy tools.
Under the dim light, numerous metal copper-colored pipes of varying thicknesses snaked like the veins of a giant beast, crawling along the uneven rock walls and ceiling, inside which faint sounds of flowing water could be heard, like blood surging.
The air was filled with a humid, scorching steam mixed with an unfathomably dense strange odor.
In the corner, a massive cauldron was bubbling away—this was it.
Looking at the cauldron's red-brown unknown liquid, William narrowed his eyes slightly.
Seems unsurprisingly, this is what the poachers referred to as the Furnace Potion, capable of driving fire dragons into a frenzy—
But clearly, there was someone in this room, William's gaze moved away from the potion and turned to the other side of the room, where there was a long stone table piled with cauldrons of various sizes, parchments messily scribbled upon, rusty metal knives, and oddly shaped glass vessels.
And sitting behind the table was a figure.
The person was clad in a deep gray, water-stained long robe that looked relatively soft, contrasting sharply with the hard leather armor of the poachers outside.
At that moment, he was holding a deep gray bone-handled small knife, meticulously scraping the membrane from the innards of some black-shelled creature, utterly focused, ignoring the commotion at the doorway.
William cast an aggressive glance up and down this man with Snape's signature greasy black straight hair style, finally focusing on the man's waist—where an inconspicuous iron chain belt was fastened, with two emblems hanging off the end of the chain—
One of them was naturally the universal emblem of the poachers, on an obsidian background, the red-brown Magic Wolf emblem seemed poised to devour anyone.
And the other... William finally couldn't suppress a squint, this was the first time in two months that he felt surprise—saw on the red emblem a long gray serpent coiled—a familiar sight—Ashwinder, the same emblem as a hundred years ago.
But... hadn't those guys already been wiped out by him?