Chapter 102: On-the-spot Response
The Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom reeked. A suffocating, cloying cloud of forget-me-not perfume hung heavy in the air, thick enough to choke a troll.
Tamara Riddle sat by the arched stone window in the very last row, her face a mask of utter apathy. Her dark, cold eyes were fixed on the man preening at the front of the room, draped in robes of dazzling, eye-watering violet.
Gilderoy Lockhart.
This absolute buffoon. He had stolen the teaching position she had coveted for decades, and now he was pacing the podium like a peacock in heat, flashing his unnaturally white teeth as he handed out his carefully prepared first pop quiz to the second-year students.
Tamara pinched the edge of the parchment between two fingers, as if handling something diseased. Her upper lip curled in deep disgust.
Question one: What is Gilderoy Lockhart's favorite color?
Question two: What is Gilderoy Lockhart's secret ambition?
Her eyes skipped down the page, each line worse than the last, until she reached the bottom.
Question fifty-four: In what year did Gilderoy Lockhart win Witch Weekly's Most-Charming-Smile Award?
Staring at the printed words, Tamara experienced a deep, unmatched sense of magical sacrilege. If a sixteen-year-old Tom Riddle were sitting in this chair, Lockhart's mutilated corpse would be discovered stuffed inside a second-floor toilet by nightfall.
She did not even bother reaching for her quill. With a flick of her wrist, she pushed the offensive scrap of waste paper to the far corner of her desk.
Tilting her head slightly, she cast a sidelong glance toward the Gryffindor section across the aisle.
Hermione Granger sat hunched over her desk, staring intently at the quiz. Tamara recalled their encounter at Flourish and Blotts. Back then, the little Mudblood had treated Lockhart's published drivel as absolute gospel. But after Tamara had so casually exposed the man's fraudulent nature, Granger's blind admiration had suffered a fatal, unbridgeable fracture.
The results were playing out exactly as expected.
Granger took a sharp, deep breath. Her right hand, usually the first to shoot into the air to answer any trivial question, now gripped her quill like a dagger. With a vicious, tearing motion, she slashed a massive 'X' across the quiz, the dark ink bleeding through the parchment and nearly covering the entire page.
Dropping the quill, she crossed her arms tightly over her chest and directed a freezing glare at Lockhart, who was still busy admiring his own reflection in a polished silver mirror on his desk.
'Finally grew a brain.'
In the dark recesses of her mind, Tamara awarded the Gryffindor a barely passing grade for the very first time. At the very least, when compared to Lavender Brown and Parvati Patil, who were currently sighing and giggling at Lockhart's every movement a few seats away, Granger was not irredeemably stupid.
Half an hour dragged by. Lockhart stood at the front, rummaging through a stack of mostly blank or aggressively crossed-out papers. A faint flush of embarrassment crept up his neck at the sheer lack of student cooperation.
Desperate to salvage his crumbling image, he offered two loud, theatrical coughs and hauled a large iron cage out from beneath the podium. A heavy black cloth draped over it, concealing the contents.
"Well, since the quiz proved a bit too challenging for some, let us move on to some thrilling practical work!" Lockhart flashed his signature, award-winning smile and seized the edge of the black cloth. With a dramatic flourish, he whipped it away. "Cornish pixies!"
The iron bars rattled. Inside swarmed dozens of electric-blue little monsters, none taller than eight inches. They possessed sharp, pointed faces and emitted a cacophony of shrill, piercing screeches that sounded exactly like a flock of deranged, bickering parrots.
"Now, let us see what you make of them!" Lockhart declared, throwing open the cage door.
He might as well have unsealed the gates of hell.
The pixies shot out of the enclosure like electric-blue rockets, instantly plunging the classroom into catastrophic chaos. Glass shattered as they smashed ink bottles against the stone walls. They ripped heavy textbooks to shreds, flinging the torn pages toward the ceiling like confetti. Two of the beasts grabbed Neville Longbottom by his ears, hoisting the shrieking boy into the air, while another pair landed on a Slytherin boy's face, actively attempting to twist his nose off his skull.
The entire class erupted into panicked screams. Students scrambled over each other, diving under their heavy wooden desks for cover.
"Come on now, round them up! Catch them! Quickly!" Lockhart shouted, his theatrical bravado vanishing into genuine panic. He drew his wand, waving it wildly at the swarm. "Peskipiksi Pesternomi!"
It was glaringly obvious he had invented the incantation on the spot. The spell produced absolutely zero effect. Worse, a particularly aggressive pixie seized the opening, swooping down to snatch the wand right out of Lockhart's hand. With a gleeful cackle, the creature tossed the polished wood straight out the open window.
"Oh! My goodness!"
Lockhart let out a high-pitched squeal of terror. Realizing the situation had spiraled completely out of his control, the great and esteemed Defense Against the Dark Arts Professor made a tactical decision perfectly suited to his cowardly nature.
He turned on his heel and scrambled frantically toward his private office door behind the podium, desperate to lock himself inside.
"I will leave the rest to you! Just nip them back into their cage!"
With those parting words, half of Lockhart's body was already ducking behind the heavy oak door.
'Despicable coward.'
Tamara stood utterly still at the back of the classroom. An invisible, suffocating aura of low pressure radiated from her form. The chaotic pixies, driven by pure animal instinct, sensed the lethal danger rolling off the black-haired girl. Not a single electric-blue monster dared to fly within three feet of her desk.
She surveyed the ruined classroom with cold detachment, her gaze eventually settling on Granger.
The Gryffindor had not hidden under her desk. Gritting her teeth in visible anger, Granger drew her wand and slashed it toward two pixies attempting to shred her textbook.
"Immobulus!"
A sharp flash of blue light erupted from her wand tip. The two pixies instantly froze in mid-air, hovering like suspended statues.
Tamara watched the display with icy indifference. She had absolutely no intention of intervening. Since the Gryffindor girl was clearly capable of handling the pests, there was zero reason to waste another second in this farce of a lesson.
She calmly picked up her leather satchel, turned her back on the screaming students, and reached for the brass handle of the rear exit.
However, the very second her pale fingers brushed the cold brass.
[Ding! Sudden Mission Triggered: A Helping Hand of Friendship!]
That haunting, obnoxiously perky system voice exploded directly inside her skull.
[As an outstanding Hogwarts student overflowing with virtuous character, how can you possibly bear to watch your dear classmate Hermione Granger fight alone under the vicious siege of pixies?]
[Please show the entire class the true meaning of camaraderie and magical mastery. Step up and help her quell this chaotic farce!]
[Reward: Courage +2]
[Bonus Reward: Dumbledore's Suspicion Level decreased by 3%]
[Penalty for Failure: For one entire week, your wand will emit floating, pink heart-shaped bubbles every single time you cast a spell.]
Tamara's fingers clamped down on the doorknob. She squeezed the brass so hard her knuckles turned a stark, bone-white.
'Camaraderie?''With a Mudblood?''Think of it as a smokescreen for Dumbledore,'she rationalized, her jaw locked tight as she coldly weighed her options.'The more benevolent, heroic, and unbiased I appear in public, the lower that old madman's suspicion of me will drop. This is not charity. This is merely a highly disgusting political investment.'
She drew a slow, measured breath, forcibly burying the overwhelming urge to detonate the system, the pixies, and the entire classroom into a pile of smoking ash.
Releasing the doorknob, Tamara turned around. A chilling, absolute focus crystallized in her dark eyes.
There was no need to shout and flail about like that idiot Lockhart. With a smooth, practiced flick of her wrist, Tamara slid her holly wand out from her sleeve.
"Petrificus Totalus."
She delivered the incantation in a tone of absolute, freezing calm.
But what surged from the tip of her wand was not the standard, thin beam of light Granger had produced. Instead, a violently cold, silver-white ring of magical energy erupted outward, rippling through the air like a stone dropped into a still pond. The shockwave swept across the entire classroom in a fraction of a second.
The pixies, which had been darting wildly, tearing at hair and screaming at the top of their lungs, were instantly paralyzed. They froze in mid-air, entirely rigid, as if time itself had been abruptly paused.
The deafening chaos of the classroom vanished into pin-drop silence. The only sound left was the heavy, rhythmic thudding of stiffened pixies dropping out of the air, bouncing off wooden desks and hitting the stone floor like a shower of frozen hail.
Granger snapped her head around, her bushy hair whipping over her shoulder. She watched with wide eyes as Tamara approached with slow, measured steps. The wary distance that had lingered in the Gryffindor's eyes—born from having her blind faith in Lockhart so brutally crushed—was completely gone. In its place shone an extremely complex, deep sense of wonder.
As Tamara glided past the Gryffindor's desk, she paused, tilting her head slightly to deliver a haughty, aristocratic critique.
"Your casting speed is barely passing, but your magical output is dreadfully unstable, Granger."
"I..." Granger opened her mouth, clearly still reeling from the sheer scale of the magic she had just witnessed. But a moment later, her brown eyes sparkled with intense admiration. She hurried to close the distance between them. "Thank you! I really didn't expect you to stay and help... You are such a good person, Tamara."
Tamara had heard the words 'good person' directed at her far too many times in this new life. Yet, no matter how frequently the phrase assaulted her ears, it remained as violently grating as ever.
She did not mind being perceived as a saint; after all, hypocritical kindness was a remarkably effective lubricant for accumulating power and smoothing her path through the political landscape of Hogwarts.
But wielding a disguise as a calculated weapon was one thing. Being actively forced by a parasitic system to practice such cheap, mundane compassion was quite another.
Staring down into Granger's eyes, which were currently shining with pure, unadulterated gratitude, Tamara felt every single drop of dark blood in her veins screaming in protest. This sensation—this vile requirement to radiate a ridiculous, saintly glow of humanity—triggered an instinctive, soul-deep revulsion.
A muscle beneath Tamara's left eye twitched violently.
But before she could formulate a suitably polite yet venomous dismissal, Granger's fanatical thirst for academic knowledge overrode her gratitude.
"But how did you actually do it? Turning a strictly single-target Petrificus Totalus into a massive area-of-effect spell? Was it a subtle change in the wand's trajectory, or did you manually adjust the magic's resonance frequency during the incantation? There is absolutely no record of this modification in 'The Standard Book of Spells'!"
Tamara stared blankly at the Mudblood chattering away in front of her—a girl thirsting for magical theory who had just earnestly labeled the Dark Lord a 'good person'. A heavy, suffocating wave of utter frustration settled tight in Tamara's chest.
Just then, Draco Malfoy crawled out from beneath a nearby desk. His usually immaculate platinum blonde hair was disheveled, his robes dusted with floor grime. Catching sight of the exchange, his pale face twisted in deep irritation.
Why on earth was a filthy Gryffindor Mudblood receiving Tamara's attention and critique?
Entirely unwilling to be outdone, Draco snatched his wand from his robes. He aimed it at a few remaining pixies that were merely stunned and twitching on the stone floor.
"Petrificus Totalus!" he shouted.
Then, with a practiced, arrogant flick of his wrist, he levitated the stiffened creatures and tossed them straight out the open window like common trash.
Having disposed of the stragglers, Draco lifted his chin haughtily. He brushed the imaginary dust from his Slytherin robes and turned to Tamara, a terribly smug smirk plastered across his face.
"See that? It is really not that difficult." He stretched the words into his signature, aristocratic drawl, casting an utterly disdainful sneer in Granger's direction. "Tamara, there is truly no need for you to stoop so low as to discuss advanced magical theory with a Gryffindor. Some people can memorize 'The Standard Book of Spells' from cover to cover and still never comprehend what true, pure-blooded talent looks like."
Tamara looked at the bushy-haired Gryffindor who had just forcefully slapped a 'good person' label onto her forehead. Then, she shifted her gaze to the blonde Slytherin who was currently puffing his chest out, desperately seeking her praise like a pathetic peacock displaying its feathers.
Her fingers tightened around her holly wand. The irritation burning beneath her skin was becoming physically unbearable.
Just as she was seriously considering which of the two students to curse first to vent her pent-up rage...
Click.
A soft, metallic click echoed from the heavy oak door behind the podium.
Lockhart peered cautiously through a narrow crack. Seeing that the classroom was now completely silent, devoid of flying terrors, and entirely safe, he immediately pushed the door wide open. He stepped out, quickly smoothing down his slightly rumpled violet robes. Plastering a relieved, utterly shameless smile across his face, he strode forward, fully prepared to claim absolute credit for the rescue.
"Ah, marvelous! Well done, children, well done!" Lockhart beamed, clapping his hands together. "It seems you have all perfectly grasped my core teaching objective for today—on-the-spot reaction to a sudden, unpredictable crisis!"
Tamara: "..."
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