A lifetime of combat experience kicked in as he faced down the young auror-in-training, and Billy's mind went as clear as driven snow, his body reacting on instincts beaten into him over the years much faster than his brain could direct.. His wand hand flicked twice, casting a pair of not particularly strenuous spells as he steeled himself for combat, the nervous excitement still weaseling its way into his mind after all these years.

The first spell had been something simple: a purposefully failed transfiguration of the man's chest cavity. Transfiguring the space properly took too much focus in the field, but just pouring magical energy and trying to shift it into [i]something[/i] before immediately stopping usually had the intended, fatal effect. Billy hoped the imperioused man didn't have the proper counterspells, but his second spell was him preparing for when his hopes were dashed.

He felt a comfortable weight of metal form in his hand, and in one fluid motion he raised his wandless arm straight, the service issue pistol matte black and sleek in his hand. He wanted to apparate, knowing that less experienced wizards neglected their rear defenses [as reinforced by this nation's bizarre fixation on dueling], but the powerful enchantments on the Ministry stopped him.

To most of his British charges, the use of firearms seemed paradoxical. The benefits in a war-zone, however, were myriad. Bullets traveled faster than spells, could penetrate through light cover unlike most spells, and were more reliably wound-inflicting, not to mention much harder to defend against. The obvious counterpoint to this is "why not simply use the killing curse?". A valid question, and the final unforgivable curse was no stranger to military wizards, but the problem with a curse that can not be stopped is that it [i]does not stop[/i] until it hits a target. Using the curse without forethought even in an area where there are likely no friendlies is a poor idea, and any use of the curse that does not result in the green bolt exiting the atmosphere on a miss could very well be tried as a war crime.

Billy was not in the habit of killing non-combatants, so it was with not a small amount of satisfaction he adjusted his aim slightly and fired his weapon directly into the smoke-belching man, the sound of the explosion magically muffled by one of the myriad enchantments on the weapon, the trio of muffled bangs and the accompanying three jolts of dampened recoil transporting his mind back more than a decade, hoping the imperioused man did not have the forethought to have strong kinetic-energy absorbing for just this occasion.