Chapter 63: The Transport Team
Saturday midnight. High atop the spiral staircase of the Astronomy Tower, the biting cold wind howled through the stone arches, carrying the sharp chill of the Scottish Highlands.
"One, two, three... lift!"
Accompanied by a dull, synchronized grunt, a massive, heavily reinforced wooden crate was laboriously hauled over yet another stone step. Wood scraped against stone, echoing loudly in the empty stairwell.
"Whew... whew..."
Harry and Hermione immediately slumped against the cold steps the moment the crate settled. They gasped desperately for air, their chests heaving as if their lungs were on the verge of bursting. Sweat soaked through their collars.
Opposite them, Tamara Riddle leaned heavily against the freezing stone wall. She was bent over, her hands resting on her knees, completely abandoning any pretense of pureblood elegance. Her usually exquisite, pale face was flushed red and slick with sweat. Several damp strands of dark hair stuck messily to her forehead and cheeks.
'Damn... fat lizard...'
Tamara cursed viciously in her heart, her fingers digging into the stone. She felt as though her lower spine was about to snap in two.
Who would have ever thought that she, the dignified and terrifying former Dark Lord, would actually be reduced to playing the role of a midnight dock worker!
Originally, her plan had been flawless. She would simply use a subtle Levitation Spell to float the heavy box all the way up the tower. Elegant, easy, and completely effortless.
But just as they were about to lift the crate out of Hagrid's hut, the nightmare had begun.
[Ding! Warning! Detected that the creature inside the box is in an extremely unstable state of stress.]
The system's voice, dripping with that sickeningly perky and patronizing humanistic care, had chimed perfectly on cue inside her skull.
[Directly using magic to contact the box's exterior will cause magic fluctuations that lead Norbert to go berserk, triggering a violent explosion or a deafening roar. To ensure campus safety and protect the little life inside, please adopt the most primitive and reliable physical transportation method.]
[Triggered Task: Sharing Weal and Woe.]
[As the team leader, how can you stand by and watch your teammates suffer? Please set aside your status and sweat together with your friends! Use of any magic for transportation is strictly prohibited.]
Thus, the current miserable scene had unfolded.
Harry and Hermione, those two scrawny Gryffindor first-year brats, possessed pitifully little upper body strength. Naturally, the vast majority of the crushing weight had shifted directly onto Tamara's side of the crate.
Just a moment ago at the tightest corner of the staircase, Norbert had thrown a sudden fit inside his wooden prison. The dragon lashed its spiked tail, slamming hard against the wooden boards right where Tamara was lifting. The kinetic force had transferred straight into her waist, nearly knocking her down the stairs.
"I swear..." Tamara gritted her teeth, her voice barely a whisper over the howling wind. "Once we get this thing to Albania, I am going to order someone to starve it for three straight days."
Just then, the distinct, whistling sound of broomsticks cutting through the frigid air echoed from the night sky above.
Four shadowy figures riding flying brooms emerged from the thick, rolling clouds, circling like vultures before descending toward the tower's observation deck.
Those were the contacts Peritus had arranged.
Tamara immediately took a deep, steadying breath. She brushed the damp hair from her forehead, violently smoothed out the wrinkles in her messy school robes, and forced herself to stand tall. She locked her jaw, desperately trying to scrape together a fraction of the cold, oppressive dignity that rightfully belonged to a Dark Lord.
The brooms touched down on the stone floor with a clatter of boots.
They were four adult wizards, all looking thoroughly scruffy, weather-beaten, and more than a little crazed. They smelled faintly of cheap ale, dragon dung, and wet leather.
The leader was a burly, bald man with a thick, unkempt beard. He had the vacant, overly enthusiastic eyes of someone who clearly lacked basic intelligence.
"Yo! Is this the little guy?"
The burly man hopped off his battered broomstick and swaggered over carelessly. His heavy boots thumped against the stone as he casually glanced at the three children who looked half-dead from exhaustion.
"Hard work, kids!"
His crude gaze then fell directly onto Tamara.
Seeing her standing there, looking thoroughly disheveled despite her rigid posture and her best efforts to project an aura of untouchable dignity, the massive man actually broke into a wide, toothy grin.
"Especially you, little girl! Look how tired you are. This small frame of yours is quite sturdy to carry all that! Mr. Peritus said we were picking up a real treasure, but he didn't say the handlers were so cute."
Little girl?
The corner of Tamara's left eye twitched violently.
She slowly narrowed her eyes. The temperature around her seemed to drop. She prepared to unleash a fraction of her true, oppressive aura, aiming to give this reckless, filthy subordinate a silent, terrifying warning that would drop him to his knees and teach him basic respect.
However, the night was far too dark, and the bald idiot possessed zero situational awareness. He did not notice her lethal glare at all.
Instead, he reached a massive, dirt-caked hand into the pocket of his greasy leather jacket. He pulled out a handful of sticky, suspiciously lumpy candies and aggressively stuffed them directly into Tamara's open palm.
"Here, eat up! This is your reward from Uncle! Cockroach Clusters, they taste pretty good once you get past the legs!"
"..."
Tamara stood frozen. She looked down at the cluster of magic candy, which was still slightly wriggling and twitching against her bare skin. She felt the blood in her veins turn to absolute ice.
She was standing right in front of Harry and Hermione.
She could not lash out.
She could not draw her wand and cast Crucio until his vocal cords tore.
She could not summon a blade and slowly slice off this imbecile's fingers one by one.
Trapped by her own carefully crafted persona, she could only stand there stiffly, holding that handful of disgusting, twitching insect candy. A sickeningly sweet, entirely forced smile stretched across her pale face.
"...Thank you."
"You're welcome!" The man laughed loudly, slapping his thick thigh before turning to direct his crew. "Alright boys, tie the box to the harness ropes! Take off! Don't let those bastards from the Ministry of Magic catch our scent!"
The four wizards quickly secured the heavy ropes around the crate. With a synchronized kick off the stone floor, the four brooms hoisted the huge box into the air. It wobbled precariously for a moment before they stabilized and flew off into the dark night sky.
Tamara did not move a muscle until they had completely disappeared into the thick cloud cover. The moment they were out of sight, she violently hurled the handful of wriggling candy off the edge of the tower, treating it like a highly infectious plague.
"Finally... it's over."
Tamara let out a long, ragged breath. She reached back to rub her aching waist, her dark eyes staring coldly into the empty sky.
Although the entire process tonight had been a humiliating degradation of her pride, this move absolutely had to be made.
She had previously considered hiding Norbert inside the Room of Requirement. The magical room could indeed provide a perfect, undetectable hiding space. However, it could not violate Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration. It could not create food out of thin air.
A Norwegian Ridgeback in its period of rapid, violent growth required several heavy buckets of strong brandy and at least a dozen freshly skinned dead chickens every single day.
This meant they would have been forced to frequently smuggle massive amounts of supplies out of the Hogwarts kitchens. They might have been able to hide such theft from the House-elves once or twice, but a long-term operation would inevitably be exposed.
Once exposed, the ownership of the dragon would no longer belong to her. Dumbledore would never, under any circumstances, allow a first-year student to raise a Class XXXXX magical creature within the castle walls.
Sending the dragon away to her loyal subordinates was the only viable solution to secure the asset.
Harry breathed a long, shaky sigh of relief. He wiped a thick layer of sweat from his forehead, a bright smile of sheer survival appearing on his exhausted face. "We're really lucky. No one actually found us."
"Yeah, really lucky," Hermione echoed, leaning against the parapet. "I was terrified Professor McGonagall would see us hauling that thing past her office just now."
Tamara did not speak.
She stood perfectly still at the edge of the high tower, letting the biting night wind whip her long, dark hair around her face. Her sharp gaze remained fixed on the exact direction where the group of smugglers had disappeared. Slowly, she turned her head, her eyes sweeping over the sprawling, shadowed grounds of the castle.
It was quiet. Far too quiet.
Luck?
Not only did the deep tension in Tamara's eyes fail to relax, but a thick layer of icy dread began to surge up her spine.
If Hogwarts could truly be entered and exited so freely simply by relying on blind luck, then back when she was ruling as Lord Voldemort, she would never have had to go through all that agonizing trouble to map out secret passages and corrupt the wards.
This was Hogwarts. The most heavily defended magical fortress in all of Britain.
Although the Astronomy Tower was high up, it still fell strictly within the main defensive grid of the castle's ancient magic.
Four outside, unregistered wizards riding ragged brooms had just swaggered right through the airspace warning line. They had landed on the tower, loudly loaded a massive, illegal cargo, and then simply swaggered away into the night?
Where were the castle's Guardian Statues?
Where were the Anti-Intrusion Spells that should have shrieked the moment an unauthorized broom crossed the boundary?
Even Peeves, that wretched poltergeist who wandered the upper corridors all night looking for trouble, had conveniently failed to show up.
Everything had been too smooth.
So smooth, it was exactly as if someone had specifically opened the heavy iron doors to this cage, deliberately stepping aside so the children could throw that hot potato out without interference.
A layer of cold sweat broke out across Tamara's back, entirely different from the sweat of physical labor.
She could almost feel it. She could almost picture that high tower window of the Headmaster's office. She could see a pair of bright, piercing blue eyes looking down at this entire ridiculous farce, twinkling with quiet amusement behind half-moon spectacles.
Dumbledore knew.
That old goat had been watching the show all along.
"What's wrong, Tamara?" Harry asked, his voice thick with sudden concern as he noticed her rigid posture and the dark look in her eyes. "Is it because the place where the dragon tail hit you still hurts?"
Tamara snapped back to her senses. The gears in her mind spun at lightning speed, instantly adjusting her facial muscles.
She turned around. The fleeting, murderous gloom on her face vanished without a trace, smoothly replaced by a perfectly fitting mask of physical exhaustion mixed with a hint of innocent, ignorant bewilderment.
"Nothing, I just... I just thought those people looked a bit strange."
She had to play the part fully. Every word she spoke now was a performance.
"Mr. Peritus is clearly a very rigorous, respectable antique scholar. I just didn't expect the transport team he found to be in this... rough style."
Tamara was deliberately brainwashing Harry and Hermione, planting the seed of her innocence. More, she was loudly handing a verbal statement of intent directly to Dumbledore, who was undoubtedly eavesdropping on the tower through some obscure spell.
She was just a simple, kind-hearted first-year student who happened to know an eccentric scholar named Peritus.
As for whether that scholar was actually a Death Eater, or if the people he hired were black-market magical smugglers? She knew absolutely nothing about it. She was just a naive child.
She was innocent. She had merely been deceived by adult appearances.
As long as she firmly stuck to this narrative, even if she were summoned to the Headmaster's office tomorrow morning, Dumbledore would have no legitimate reason to expel her. After all, who could possibly blame a sweet little witch who mistakenly trusted an adult pen pal just to help her foolish Gryffindor friends deal with a dangerous pet?
"Anyway, it's good that the dragon is finally gone," Hermione sighed, rubbing her arms against the cold.
Tamara lowered her eyes, her thick lashes concealing the sharp, calculating glint within.
Yes, the dragon was gone. She now had use over Hagrid, her hidden assets in Albania had increased, and as for Dumbledore... as long as her acting remained flawless, she shouldn't arouse any fatal suspicion.
Not to mention, she had already carefully forged quite a few mundane letters communicating with this 'scholar' just in case her trunk was ever searched.
"Let's go quickly!" Harry said, his voice suddenly tight with nervous energy. "Filch might be on his midnight patrol."
The three of them turned and hurried down the dark spiral staircase, their footsteps echoing softly.
Halfway down the first flight, Tamara suddenly stopped dead in her tracks.
Wait.
Something felt wrong. Something was missing.
"Potter." Tamara turned her head sharply, her eyes locking onto the boy. "Where is your invisibility cloak?"
Harry froze. He frantically patted his robes, feeling his body. The remaining color instantly drained from his face, leaving him deathly pale. His whole person seemed to turn to stone.
"Oh no! I forgot it on top of the tower! I took it off just now so I wouldn't trip while we lifted the box!"
At that exact moment, Tamara's dark heart began to pound wildly against her ribs.
The invisibility cloak!
One of the legendary Deathly Hallows!
The mythical artifact that even Death himself could not pierce!
And right now, at this very second, it was lying all alone on the cold stone floor of the tower. An unclaimed, highly powerful magical object, just waiting to be taken!
"You guys go first!" Tamara made a prompt, aggressive decision. A greedy, hungry light flashed in her dark eyes. "I run faster. I'll go get it!"
"But Tamara, what if—"
"Go! Stop talking! Do you want to be caught by Filch and lose Gryffindor fifty points?"
Tamara gave Harry a hard shove down the stairs, not waiting for his reply. She spun around and sprinted back up the spiral steps, her exhaustion entirely forgotten.
This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!
Once she got her hands on that fabric, she could easily hide it in her robes. She could tell Potter she accidentally lost it in the dark, or simply claim she never found it on the tower at all. He was gullible enough to believe her.
She burst out onto the top of the tower, her eyes scanning the shadows.
Sure enough, there it was. That impossible fabric, pooling on the stone and flowing like liquid silver. It lay quietly in the corner, emitting a faint, charming luster under the pale moonlight.
Tamara lunged forward like a starving predator and grabbed it.
That cold, impossibly silky touch against her skin made her entire body tremble with sheer, unadulterated excitement. Power. True, ancient power.
'It's mine...'
[Ding! Detected that the host has picked up a highly valuable item lost by someone else.]
The system's ice-cold, mechanical voice dropped like a heavy bucket of freezing water poured directly over her head, instantly extinguishing the roaring fire of her ecstasy.
[Triggered Moral Task: Integrity in Returning Lost Property.]
[Task Description: Keeping a dear friend's lost property for yourself is a greedy, base, and thoroughly ugly act! An excellent leader should possess a noble, shining character. Not to mention, the anxious owner is still waiting for you downstairs!]
[Task Requirement: Please return the invisibility cloak to Harry Potter within ten minutes.]
[Penalty for Violation: Level Five Electric Shock applied continuously until the item is returned. A friendly reminder from your System: A Level Five shock to the brain might cause you to become a drooling idiot, with symptoms lasting for up to two full days. Please choose wisely!]
"..."
Tamara's hand, which was tightly gripping the liquid silver fabric, froze completely in mid-air. Her knuckles turned stark white from the sheer, crushing force of her grip.
Level Five Electric Shock?
She would definitely become a drooling fool.
She vividly pictured the outcome. If she were to suddenly drop to the stone floor right now, thrashing like a dead fish lacking oxygen, foaming at the mouth, her eyes rolling back into her skull... and then be discovered and dragged away by that filthy squib Filch like a dead dog...
All the pristine dignity and pureblood grace she had painstakingly accumulated in this new life would be completely, irreversibly ruined.
'He lost it himself! He left it on the floor! Why punish me?!' Tamara roared internally, her mind a storm of pure, murderous rage.
[This is called returning property to its rightful owner, host. Please do not be blinded by temporary greed. Be a good person!]
Tamara stared down at the invisibility cloak in her trembling hands. Her eyes burned with extreme unwillingness. She wanted to tear the fabric. She wanted to scream.
But she was terrified of dying, and she was even more terrified of absolute social death.
"Good... very good..."
Tamara gritted her teeth so hard her jaw popped. She squeezed the words out from the tiny gaps between her teeth, tasting the faint metallic tang of blood where she had bitten the inside of her cheek.
She truly, deeply wanted to reach her fingers into her own skull, dig this parasitic system out of her brain, and burn it to absolute ashes with Fiendfyre.
When Tamara finally ran back down the stairs, her face dark as a thundercloud, she caught up with Harry and Hermione at the corridor corner on the floor below.
Just as she arrived, the heavy, dragging footsteps of disaster echoed down the hall. They had run straight into Argus Filch, who was patrolling the dark corridor with a swinging oil lantern and his wretched cat.
"Who's there?! Students out of bed?! Stop right there!" Filch shrieked, raising his lantern to pierce the gloom.
"Run!" Harry hissed.
The three of them spun around and sprinted blindly through the twisting corridors, their lungs burning as they ducked behind a heavy mix and squeezed into a narrow, hidden alcove.
They held their breath in the pitch-black space, listening to Filch's heavy footsteps stomp past their hiding spot and fade away into the distance.
After confirming they were finally safe, Tamara turned to Harry. Without a single word, she violently shoved the bundle of silvery fabric directly into his chest. Her movement was incredibly rough, as if she were throwing a filthy, disease-ridden foot rag at him.
"Here."
"If you ever dare to throw this kind of thing around again, I will burn you along with it." Her voice was a low, hoarse whisper, vibrating with an ocean of suppressed resentment.
Harry clutched the recovered invisibility cloak tightly to his chest. He looked up at Tamara, whose face was ashen, covered in dirt and sweat, her chest heaving in the dark.
He had absolutely no idea what kind of horrific, soul-tearing inner struggle Tamara had just gone through on top of that tower.
He only knew what he saw. He saw that Tamara had selflessly run back into danger, risking being caught by Filch and expelled, all just to help him get his father's precious cloak back.
"Tamara..."
Harry's bright green eyes suddenly turned red. They filled with deep, overwhelming emotion. "For me... you took such a big risk..."
He reached out, his voice trembling with genuine awe. "You are really... so good."
Looking at Harry's tearfully grateful, utterly naive face, Tamara felt a violent surge of hot blood rush up into her chest. The metallic taste of sheer fury rose thick in her throat, nearly choking her.
This night.
She had moved heavy wooden bricks like a common laborer. She had been whipped by a dragon's tail. She had been handed Cockroach Clusters by a moronic, filthy subordinate. And finally, she had been brutally forced by a parasitic voice in her head to hand over a legendary Deathly Hallow she had rightfully stolen.
And now, to top off this mountain of humiliation, she was being handed a 'good person' card by the Boy Who Lived.
"Shut up, Potter."
Tamara leaned her head back against the cold stone wall of the alcove, closing her eyes. She felt like she desperately needed a massive bottle of strong, illegal sedatives.
"I don't want to hear your voice right now."
"Not a single word."
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