160AN1: I've agonised over writing a fic for Nier Automata for a long time, to the point where the guys on Discord even made memes about it lol. But it's finally here: a Harry Potter/Nier Automata crossover. For those who aren't familiar with Nier Automata, there is a video game and an anime adaptation too. The anime is recent, its 2nd season finished airing in September this year.
"I came for the ass, stayed for the story" is a popular saying when it comes to Nier Automata. Many people got baited into playing the game by how gorgeous 2b is (I was a victim too), but they end up sticking around because of the good story. . . and then they get hit with depression. And when you think the story could not get any more tragic, you get hit in the head again.
I want to give 2b a happier ending. I want a2 to find peace. Devola and Popola deserved so much better. And poor Pascal, he probably had the most terrible fate of them all. I want to change all that.
This fic might not please the hardcore Nier fans who probably enjoyed the tragedy and misery of it all in the canon but I want to give the characters I liked a happy ending. In the end, I always write primarily for myself; it's the same with this fic too. I'm writing things that I would like to see in a fic if I were a reader.
Pairing: Harry/2b is certain. I might include a2 as well, but it's not a guarantee.
Chapter 1 - Prologue
The Death Eater aimed his wand at Hermione and screamed:
"Avada-"
Harry threw himself at the man with his entire strength, shooting for a double leg and making him lose his balance.
Arms flailing in the air from the boy's tackle, the Death Eater's Killing Curse went way off the mark, hitting a glass cabinet nearby that contained many hourglasses of various shapes and sizes. The doors of the cabinet exploded, and so did the hourglasses within, sending countless glass shards and grains of sand everywhere.
Neville and Hermione watched transfixed how the cabinet fell to the floor and burst apart, glass flying everywhere, then sprang back up onto the wall, fully mended.
The shards of glass belonging to the hourglasses also flew back, seemingly about to mend themselves, but the sand that had exploded a moment ago was now all over Harry's and the Death Eater's clothes. The two found themselves floating and being sucked towards the cabinet.
Being closer than Harry to the cabinet, the Death Eater screamed with such pain in his voice that one would think he was being flayed alive.
A bad feeling washed over him, and, running on instinct, Harry shouted:
"Protego!"
And it was not a second too early. He watched in horror how the Death Eater's body was contorted and compressed as though it were imploding on itself to fit into the hourglass. Harry's own blue Shielding Charm started bending like a tennis ball in a hydraulic press.
The Death Eater let out one final scream before he was squished into what appeared to be a tiny marble and sucked into one of the hourglasses in the cabinet.
Harry knew at that moment that if his Shielding Charm gave out, he would die instantly, just like the Death Eater before him.
Holding onto his wand with both hands, he let out a cry as he poured all his magic power into the spell. His arms trembled from how hard he was squeezing the handle of his wand, and his back bent under the weight of the unknown spell that was trying to shrink him, but he did not give up.
Vaguely, he could hear Nevill and Hermione shouting something at him, but he did not register the meaning of their words.
A bright white light took away his sight as the cabinet exploded a second time. His shielding spell broke, and he knew no more.
⁂
An involuntary moan of pain came from his mouth when he regained consciousness. As he opened his eyes, a skull-splitting headache assaulted him, and he gripped his head with both hands.
Knowing that he was in the middle of the battle with Voldemort's Death Eaters and that all his friends depended on him, Harry forced himself to stand up.
It was pitch black, so dark that he could not see his hand in front of his face.
"Lumos."
The pale white light coming from his wand helped, but he still could not see anything distinguishable nearby.
A sense of vertigo came over him, and he fell to the floor again. Panicking at the thought of falling onto his wand and breaking it, he twisted his body at the last second, hitting the ground with his shoulder.
The expected pain did not come, or rather, it did not hurt as badly as he thought it would because he had fallen onto something soft.
Momentarily, even his dizziness appeared to recede when he took a better look at what had cushioned his fall. It was the Death Eater's corpse. His arms, legs, and spine were bent at unnatural, horrifying angles.
He rolled off the dead body and crawled backwards as if burned from his contact with it.
The good part about that jumpscare was that it looked as if his headache and dizziness had all but disappeared. Adrenaline still coursing through his veins, Harry glanced around himself in confusion.
"Hermione? Neville?"
His voice echoed in the dark room, but he did not receive an answer.
Raising his wand higher above his head to better illuminate his surroundings, Harry realised that he could not recognise the place he was in. The glass cabinet with hourglasses was nowhere to be seen, and the door—there was no door in the room either! In fact, the room was completely empty, with not even one piece of furniture or a painting hanging on the walls. There was nothing.
Pointing his wand at the ceiling, the bulb of white light flew up and floated in the air by itself.
Avoiding looking at the Death Eater's mutilated corpse, Harry started walking around the room, trying his best not to start panicking.
"Revelio!"
He made a tour of the room, walking near the walls and casting the Revelio Charm every two or three steps. Maybe the door was hidden with a charm. Maybe it was just another one of those strange rooms in the Department of Mysteries with various traps and spells.
'I can't waste my time here!' he thought, pacing around in distress.
Ron, Hermione, Neville, Luna, and Ginny were out there, greatly outnumbered by Voldemort's much stronger and more vicious followers. He had to go help them! He would never forgive himself if any of them died because of him.
"Revelio! Revelio! REVELIO!"
But no matter how many times he cast that spell, no doors appeared. In desperation, he aimed his wand at a wall and shouted:
"Bombarda!"
If he could not find an exit, he would create one by force!
The wall exploded, pelting him with sharp pieces of debris and filling the entire room with dust. Covering his mouth with the hem of his shirt to block out the dust, he went to the wall to inspect his handiwork, and the light bulb spell followed him too.
To his elation, fortune seemed to have smiled upon him because he saw another room through the hole and that one had a door. Or at least the frame of one because there was no actual door.
With every step he took, clouds of dust rose in the air, forcing him eventually to cast a Bubblehead Charm on himself.
But when he arrived at the door, he noticed that it was blocked by rocks, soil, and dirt.
'Did the battle with the Death Eaters demolish the whole place?'
All sorts of anxious thoughts assaulted him. What happened with his friends? Were they alright?
'There's so much dust everywhere; how many days passed while I was unconscious? And how come nobody had come after me?'
For better or worse, he was in the Ministry of Magic. Someone was bound to find him sooner or later. . . right?
⁂
He did not have a watch, so he did not know what the time was or for how long he had been stuck in the room, but he learned one thing very quickly: casting the Bombardment Spell indiscriminately had been a very stupid idea because it was not only the wall that had collapsed but the ceiling of the room too, trapping him underneath the rubble.
Over the course of his short life, Harry had been through many difficult and terrifying situations, ranging from being chased by Aunt Marge's fierce bulldogs as a child to nearly being eaten by a colony of hundreds of car-sized spiders and being bitten by a gigantic Basilisk in his second year at Hogwarts. Fighting against a hundred Dementors two years ago and being tortured by Voldemort last year were high up on the list too.
But none of those scenarios from the past could compare to what he was feeling in the present because they had been rather short and filled with adrenaline.
The present was different. He was stuck, buried underneath the rubble for what had to be hours, hyperventilating and panicking from being unable to move a muscle. Anxiety was gnawing at him, filling his mind with dreadful thoughts about the fate of his friends and Sirius who, as far as he knew, had been captured by Voldemort.
The only saving grace was that his wand had not been broken by the collapse of the ceiling and that his Bubblehead Charm was still holding on, allowing him to breathe.
However, stuck in complete darkness, with his body completely immobile and his mind conjuring all sorts of nightmarish scenarios, terror engulfed him.
'Am I going to die here?' he couldn't help asking himself.
He had dodged death many times, and, despite never talking about his fears with his closest friends, Harry would have not been surprised if he one day met his end at the claws of a deadly beast or at the hand of Voldemort and his Death Eaters. But he had never expected to die like that, buried alive, deep under London, completely alone, in darkness.
His magic thrummed.
Was it reacting to his fear of death? Or was it reacting to his burning desire to live? Or maybe it was a mixture of both?
Just like when he was a child and Dudley and his gang started chasing him through the corridors of the school and he suddenly and inexplicably found himself on the rooftop, his magic responded to his unconscious desire and whisked him away once more.
⁂
When he opened his eyes, the bright light blinded him. Having spent hours in complete darkness, it took him a few good minutes to regain his sight.
Unable to see and feeling the muddy water all the way up to his knees, he realised that he was definitely somewhere outside. Nearly dying had made him more cautious than before, so he cast a Shielding Charm around himself while he waited for his eyes to get used to the light again.
It had to have been less than three minutes after casting the Shield when the spell trembled slightly from an external attack.
Looking behind him, his heart almost jumped out of his chest.
"Bloody hell!"
It was a crocodile. A whole, four-metre-long, real crocodile! He watched in morbid fascination how the fierce beast tried to bite through the shielding charm, its enormous, gaping maw filled with yellow teeth no smaller than this thumb painting a terrifying sight.
"Stupefy!"
As the red bolt impacted the reptile, it slumped underwater like a bag of bricks, the bubbles rising to the surface being the only thing revealing its location.
'What is a damned crocodile doing in the UK?!'
It was common knowledge that crocodiles did not exist in the wild in the United Kingdom. Reptiles like them could not survive in a temperate oceanic climate.
As he thought of that, it suddenly came to him that it was sweltering outside. It was hot to the point where his upper body was sweating buckets after only a few minutes spent in the sun.
"Wait… am I still in the UK?"
When his magic responded to his will and Apparated him away, Harry had been thinking about the Burrow. It was the most peaceful, comfortable, and safest place he knew, the complete opposite of his situation back then, buried underneath rubble in the Ministry of Magic.
But there were no corn fields around, the Burrow itself was nowhere to be seen, and the entire place was unrecognizable. As far as his eyes could see, it was just one massive swamp.
He grimaced in disgust at the feeling of water and mud in his shoes, between his toes. Finding out his exact location would have to take the second seat for a while. What he needed now was to find the closest Muggle or Wizarding settlement and get in touch with Dumbledore and Sirius.
Holding onto that thought, an idea came to his mind. What if he tried to Apparate again?
He knew the risks that came with unsupervised Apparition; he had heard plenty of horrific stories about wizards and witches who had splinched themselves, losing entire limbs or even dying in the process.
'But I've done it twice already, with success.'
He closed his eyes and tightened his hold on his wand.
'What were Fred and George repeating every day when they were training to get their Licence? They called it the Three Ds…'
Destination, Determination, Deliberation.
Picturing a clear destination in his mind, he focused intensely on his will to teleport there. Then he imagined himself disappearing from his spot and reappearing at his destination.
A small smile formed on his face when he felt the telltale, uncomfortable sensation of being squeezed through a tube. It worked.
⁂
Three hours later, Harry found himself standing on a moss-covered, rocky hill overlooking the Thames River (at least he thought it was Thames) flowing in the distance into the sea.
He had Apparated multiple times during those three hours to many different locations: his aunt and uncle's home, the primary school he had attended in his childhood, the playground where the Dementors attacked him last summer, in front of Grimmauld Place, the zoo where he had first talked to a snake, Hogsmeade, on King's Cross, and a few other iconic places that had left a deep impression in his mind.
In desperation, he had even disregarded any concerns he might have had about the Statute of Secrecy and tried to Apparate in front of the Big Ben tower, in London.
'Either my Apparition sucks or something is terribly wrong.'
Regardless of where he tried to Apparate in London, it was just a variation of a swamp. As for Hogsmeade, he ended up on a forest-covered hillside. No matter where he went, there were no buildings, no streets, no cars, no bridges, no signs of civilisation whatsoever. Swamps, forests, and grassy fields were all he found.
There was only one option left.
'They might really snap my wand this time. . .'
But he could not afford to wait any longer. He did not know what happened to Sirius and his friends. He could not simply bumble around and wait for god knows how long until he found a way back to civilisation.
"Whatever. I'll cross that bridge when I'll get to it."
Saying that, he raised his wand towards the sky and chanted:
"Periculum!"
A bright red flare erupted from his wand and flew into the sky before exploding like a firework. It was one of the spells that he had learned last year, during his training for the Triwizard Tournament.
He recast that spell another two times and then sat down and waited.
'Any moment now, I should be getting an owl from the Ministry, right?'
But 20 minutes passed and no owls arrived.
'Maybe the Trace isn't triggered because there are no Muggles around?' he theorised.
He raised his wand above his head and chanted again:
"Periculum!"
The sudden growl and the sharp pang of pain coming from his stomach made him realise how hungry he was. How long has it been since his last meal? Licking his chapped lips, he became aware of how thirsty he was too.
"Aguamenti."
Luckily, he knew how to conjure water with his magic, but conjuring food was outside the scope of his abilities, or anyone else's abilities for that matter. He was sick of how many times Hermione had recited the 5 exceptions to Gamp's Laws of Elemental Transfiguration to him.
Food could be duplicated or engorged, but it could not be created out of nothing. Transfiguring a piece of wood into a loaf of bread would not fill his stomach either because that sort of food had no nutritional value.
He let out a sigh and walked towards the river. If there was a river, there had to be fish.
'And crocodiles,' he mused, half-amused, half-exasperated.
His earlier encounter with the crocodile and the fact that his Apparition seemed to be wonky were still making him doubt whether he really was in the United Kingdom or not. his current location felt and looked more like how he would imagine a swamp in Brazil to be like.
"Accio fish!"
A sizeable carp fish was yanked out of the water, flying straight into his open hand. But Harry had never caught living fish barehanded before, so he wasn't ready for how slimy it would be to the touch or how much it would struggle to escape, so it slipped out of his hands.
Alas, another Accio and one more Stupefy Charm later, the fish was back in his hands, this time unmoving.
⁂
Although he had sometimes fried eggs and bacon for the Dursleys as a child, Harry was no chef. He definitely did not know how to cook fish. The only thing he could think of was to slice off its head, remove its scales as best he could, and take out its spine and intestines.
After washing it with clean water, he started up a fire and stabbed the fish into a stick of wood that he had conjured with his magic because he could not find a clean, dry branch anywhere around.
"It's so hot," he complained, and, raising his wand above his head, he conjured a stream of cold water to cool his head off.
But it was not just hot. Harry wasn't sure whether it was because of his hunger and exhaustion or if there was something wrong with the swamp he was currently in, but he was having difficulty breathing.
If he did not know any better, he would think that he was hundreds of metres in the air; that was how thin the air felt. He was familiar with the thin air at high altitudes because he had tested the limits of his Nimbus and Firebolt broomsticks many times before.
Because of that, Harry felt the need to continue breathing through a Bubblehead Charm.
He had been working on preparing the fish for cooking for the better part of an hour, and now that the fish was slowly getting roasted over the campfire, his stomach started growling even louder and more often than before.
Despite that he did not have salt or any sort of condiment, his mouth watered at the thought of eating fried fish. As the saying goes, hunger is the best sauce.
His daydreaming was rudely interrupted when an ear-grating, screeching sound like that of metal scraping against metal was heard. His head shot towards the sound, and, for a split second, he was stunned, not knowing what to make of what he was seeing.
It was 1.5 metres tall, with a round head and a cylindrical body; it looked extremely similar to the droid from a popular Muggle movie that he had watched as a child.
"Kill! Kill!" a robotic-sounding voice came from the clunky-looking thing.
It was speaking in English, and, for some reason, it appeared to harbour hostility towards him.
Due to its clumsy appearance, Harry was startled to see the grey robot jumping so high up in the air that it would put kangaroos to shame.
"A-Android, Die! Diiie!"
Although baffled by this completely random and inexplicable encounter, Harry was quick to cast a Shielding Charm, protecting himself and the campfire with his fish hanging above it.
'What on earth is that thing?'
As far as he knew, Muggles' technology was still nowhere near close to creating a robot capable of that sort of movement.
"D-Die, Android! Die! D-D-Diiiie!" the robot kept shouting in a broken speech while smashing its round head against the blue dome of light, injuring itself in the process as though it had no sense of self-preservation.
'Why is it attacking me? And why is it calling me an Android? What the hell is going on?!'
He was starting to get fed up with all the strange things occurring that day.
Cancelling the Shielding Charm, he aimed his wand at the robot and shouted:
"Depulso!"
The machine was flung backwards violently by the spell, rolling more than five times after it crashed back on the ground.
Now that they were far enough from the campfire, he aimed his wand at the robot once more and cast a deadly spell:
"Expulso!"
The machine exploded with a great bang, sending chunks and shards of metal in all directions.
Harry would have liked to take a better look at the robot and investigate it a bit more, but curiosity took the backseat in front hunger and he quickly returned to the campfire.
Unfortunately, it looked like he was just fated not to enjoy his fish in peace because the ground started shaking almost like during an earthquake and a sound similar to that made by the robot from before was heard. But this time, the sound was several times stronger and it was not coming from one direction but from all around him.
"Merlin...!" he gasped when he glanced into the distance and saw what appeared to be a legitimate army of robots coming in all sorts of shapes and sizes.
The small, cylindrical robots (like the one from before) were the most numerous, but there were also plenty of variations among them. Some were bare-handed while others were wielding circular saw machines, enormous screws, or metallic clubs.
Aside from those, some units stood out through their sheer size. They were gigantic, as big as the troll that he and Ron had defeated in their first year! Aside from those, there were also flying machines that looked like a strange amalgam between the upper part of a regular cylindrical robot and a UFO.
Harry was completely dumbstruck by their appearance. What he did not know was that the Periculum spells that he had cast earlier that day had not been entirely useless. While they may have not alerted the Ministry of Magic as he had hoped, his magical fireworks did what they were intended to do and attracted someone else's attention.
The machines.
He was not allowed much time to ponder on the situation before the flying machines fired what looked like a hail of red bubbles, covering the sky with their numbers.
Those red bubbles looked rather slow. Their movement was slower than the travel time of most spells and definitely slower than bullets but, for a reason that he could not fathom, a bad feeling crept in his heart at the sight of them.
Harry grabbed the stick with his half-cooked fish and, after taking one last look at the army of machines surrounding him, he Disapparated.
⁂
A flock of birds took flight startled when a loud crack was heard and someone materialized out of thin air.
'What the hell was that?'
Since when did Muggles' technology advance that much? Why would there be so many robots in the middle of the swamp? And why were they so intent on attacking him?
'Was I, perhaps, close to a secret military base?'
His mind was filled with questions, but his hands did not stay idle. He started making a small fire and continued cooking his fish.
Assuming that the place he had just left was London, his current location was Hogsmeade. Allegedly. The previously vibrant Wizarding Village was unrecognizable; not only that there weren't any houses or streets, but even the small river that used to flow at the outskirts of the settlement was nowhere to be seen.
Alas, he decided to think about it after he filled his stomach.
Half an hour later, the fish appeared to be cooked well enough. As hungry as he was, he barely registered its taste and cried out in pain from swallowing the carp's bones multiple times. But, eventually, the ordeal was over.
Now that his hunger and thirst were satiated, a feeling of lethargy took over him. There were still many things to do. He should try to Apparate a few times more and find other people. Or, at the very least, he should have found a safe place to spend the night.
However, the anxiety of his incomprehensible encounters that day, the fact that he appeared to be lost and that he did not even know if he was even in Great Britain anymore had drained him mentally and physically. He was too tired to move an inch from his spot.
Taking out the Invisibility Cloak from the pocket of his trousers, he covered himself with it before lying on the grassy ground in a curled-up position. He fell asleep as soon as he closed his eyes.
AN: Most of you probably know this already, but I'll mention it just in case. Accio works on living beings too, not just inanimate objects. The perfect example is the bullfrog that Harry summoned with Accio in Book 5, chapter 18.
For those unfamiliar with Nier, I have posted screenshots from the anime with the type of machines that have appeared in this chapter. You can find them on Discord.
As for those who wish to support me, you can find 2 additional chapters on ptr on, at /grumpywolf. Until next time!