Chapter 202: Novikov's Principle of Self-Consistency
However.
Tamara had barely taken ten steps away from Hermione's side when the merciless punishment arrived exactly on schedule.
[Ding! Warning! Detected that the host has left the Anti-lost Mutual Aid Mode!]
[Punishment program initiated: Level 2 High-Voltage Electric Shock!]
The system's perky, artificially sweet voice echoed in her skull just as a violent spike of electricity detonated at the base of her spine.
Even though she had braced herself the moment she let go of the mudblood's hand, subconsciously locking her muscles in anticipation, the sheer neural overload bypassed all physical defenses. Her adolescent body, still developing and fragile, convulsed violently.
Yet, for a Dark Lord who had endured this damned system's tortures countless times in this wretched shell, she had cultivated a grim tolerance. The current no longer delivered that soul-shredding, pure agony. Instead, it mutated into a sickening, bone-deep numbness. Dense clusters of electricity writhed like thousands of microscopic tentacles, burrowing frantically into her nerve endings.
Her knees gave out. Her previously imperious, steady stride shattered into a clumsy stumble.
She threw her hand out, slamming heavily against the freezing stone wall of the corridor. Her nails scraped harshly against the rough masonry, dragging down an inch before she managed to lock her joints, barely saving herself from the utter humiliation of collapsing to her knees.
A suffocating wave of powerlessness hijacked every muscle fiber.
Tamara slumped against the wall, her chest heaving as she dragged ragged breaths into her burning lungs. All color drained from her face, leaving behind a deathly, porcelain pallor. A sheen of icy sweat beaded across her forehead. Her body, previously rigid with calculated fury, now trembled uncontrollably under the residual, bone-scraping static.
"Ugh..."
A broken, suppressed groan slipped past her lips before she could bite it back.
'Damn it...' she cursed viciously in her mind, her vision swimming.
Cold sweat soaked through the back of her uniform, icy droplets trailing down her cheeks. She needed to stand. She needed to move right now. If she delayed any longer, that wretched marauders map would fall right into the hands of that monumental idiot, Harry Potter!
However.
Just as Tamara gritted her teeth, fighting the nauseating weakness to push herself off the wall, the scuffing of hurried footsteps echoed from the corner ahead.
"Even Hagrid can't sign it for me... Am I really going to have to rot in the castle like an absolute fool this entire term, just staring at the walls..."
A boy with a perpetually messy bird's nest of black hair rounded the corner without warning, his head bowed in dejected muttering.
Harry Potter.
The Savior of the Wizarding World. Freshly rejected by Hagrid for his Hogsmeade permission slip, wandering the corridors in a cloud of frustration, he turned the stone bend and nearly walked straight into Tamara.
Their eyes locked.
The air in the corridor seemed to freeze solid.
Harry's miserable expression stalled. His bright green eyes widened in shock as they took in the sight of the Slytherin girl. She was ghostly pale, her chest rising and falling erratically, looking as though a stiff breeze would knock her over.
Not even an hour ago, she had stood in the corridor and coldly declared that she didn't need his cheap sympathy or his self-righteous attempts to help her.
And now, here she was, looking like a shattered porcelain doll.
Harry felt a sudden, intense surge of frustration. She was truly infuriating. Why did she always do this? Why did she always appear before him looking so tragically beautiful and fragile right after she had stabbed someone with the sharpest, cruelest words possible, leaving them bleeding?
But what annoyed him even more was his own treacherous reaction.
His rational mind was screaming at him to let her fend for herself, to stop looking for trouble. Yet, his feet felt glued to the flagstones. That cursed, bone-deep Gryffindor saving-people thing, tangled with an emotion he entirely refused to name, made it physically impossible for him to just stand there and watch her collapse onto the freezing floor.
"Tamara? What's wrong with you..."
The words tumbled out of his mouth before he could stop them. He stepped forward quickly, closing the distance, and reached out to support her trembling shoulders.
However.
Just as his fingertips brushed the fabric of her robes, Tamara's pupils shrank to pinpricks.
'Don't touch me, you filthy half-blood!'
Anyone else could see her like this. Even if Professor McGonagall caught her and threw her into a month of detention, she absolutely, categorically refused to let this pathetic state—where she couldn't even hold a wand steady—be witnessed by Harry Potter!
She didn't even have the breath to spit out a vicious curse.
Tamara bit down brutally on the inside of her cheek. The sharp spike of metallic pain sliced through the static fog in her brain, forcefully overriding the numbness in her legs.
She slapped Harry's hand away with a vicious, unhesitating strike. Spinning on her heel, her dark robes billowing sharply in the draft, she stumbled away. Her steps were frantic, uncoordinated, yet fueled by pure, desperate willpower as she fled toward the far end of the corridor.
She left Harry standing there entirely alone.
His outstretched hand hung suspended in the empty air, stiff and incredibly awkward.
Harry lowered his arm slowly. His emerald eyes swirled with a chaotic mix of loss, confusion, and a sudden, sharp ache in his chest. He stared fixedly at her retreating back until she vanished into the shadows at the end of the hall.
She would rather drag herself away in agony than accept even a fraction of a second of help from him.
"Hey, Harry! What are you doing standing around here? Still trying to hunt down someone to forge your guardian's signature?"
Two bright, identical voices broke the heavy silence. Fred and George Weasley popped out from behind a nearby mix, flanking Harry on either side.
Harry quickly shoved his hands into his pockets, blinking hard to mask the raw dejection in his eyes. "Nothing... Fred, George. What are you two doing down here?"
"We were just helping little Ginny track someone down," George said with a wide grin, throwing a casual arm over Harry's shoulder. He followed Harry's lingering gaze down the empty corridor, scratching his bright red hair in confusion. "Eh? Blimey, that figure running away just now... was that the little Slytherin snake?"
"How is that possible?" Fred snorted, shrugging his shoulders with absolute certainty. "She went back to the dungeons with her cat half an hour ago. You definitely saw wrong, brother."
Harry's mouth twitched into a bitter line. He didn't bother arguing. He knew exactly who it was, but the heavy weight in his chest drained any desire to explain.
Just then, a faint rustling sound caught their attention.
A neatly folded black paper crane fluttered out from the gloom of the dungeon stairwell. It rode an invisible current of air, circling once before landing lightly on George's shoulder.
Harry didn't know what was written inside, but the moment the dark paper brushed past his nose, he caught it. A crisp, cool scent of cedar.
It was the exact same fragrance that had lingered on the warning note Tamara had slipped him back in their first year.
George plucked the crane off his shoulder, his eyebrows shooting up in surprise as he unfolded the crisp parchment.
"Well, look who decided to send us some emergency intel!"
Fred leaned over his twin's shoulder, reading the elegant, sharp handwriting aloud.
"Snape is in a foul mood and appears to be hunting for contraband. If you have any pathetic little gadgets that you'd rather not have confiscated, you had better find a Slytherin to help cover for you—I am currently in the dungeon corridor."
There was no signature at the bottom. But with that familiar, condescending phrasing and the utterly arrogant tone, who else in the entire castle could it possibly be?
"What the—!" George laughed, stuffing the note into his robe pocket, thoroughly amused. "When we bumped into her on the stairs earlier, she had a face like thunder. Looked ready to hex someone into next week. I definitely didn't expect her to be kind enough to tip us off!"
"Maybe Snape docked her points and she wants to use us to annoy the old bat? Whatever the reason, thanks, little snake!" Fred grinned widely, throwing a mock, exaggerated salute toward the dungeon stairs.
The twins were delighted by the turn of events.
But standing between them, Harry felt the temperature in his blood plummet to absolute zero.
His face drained of color, looking even worse than Tamara had just moments before. His green eyes widened, filled with a sudden, suffocating realization and deep, piercing pain.
She didn't hate Gryffindors. She didn't care about blood status or house rivalries.
She was willing to tip off the biggest troublemakers in school. She was even willing to proactively offer them cover from her own Head of House. She could sit patiently and guide Hermione through complex theories. She could tolerate Ginny hovering around her. She could use and collaborate with the Weasley twins.
She didn't hate anyone.
She simply, purely, and thoroughly felt repulsed by him. Harry Potter. And only him.
Harry dropped his gaze to the stone floor, staring blankly at the hand he had just offered her. A bitter, hollow laugh threatened to bubble up in his throat. He felt utterly, completely ridiculous.
Noticing the sudden, oppressive shift in the atmosphere, George and Fred exchanged a quick, serious glance.
Seeing their friend looking more thoroughly devastated than if he had been kissed by a Dementor for three days straight, the twins finally dropped their usual playful banter.
"Listen, Harry." Fred reached into the inner pocket of his robes, pulling out a large, seemingly blank piece of folded parchment.
"To soothe that broken teenage heart of yours—because you can't go to Hogsmeade, and, well, maybe for some other reasons..."
George took the parchment from his brother, solemnly pressing it into Harry's hands. He gave Harry's shoulder a firm, grounding squeeze. "Take it, mate. Cheer up."
"This is the secret to our success. At Hogwarts, it can take you anywhere you want to go."
Just one wall away.
Hidden deep in the shadows of an alcove, Tamara leaned heavily against the freezing stone bricks.
Because she was so close, every single word of their conversation drifted clearly into her ears.
Tamara's breath hitched. Her lungs seized.
The timeline had just formed a perfect, inescapable closed loop.
Her dark eyes pierced through the dim light, staring fixedly at a blank spot on the wall as a wave of sheer, ridiculous fury exploded in her chest.
She had humiliated herself! She had made a deal with that insufferable mudblood, endured this damned system's electric shocks until she was half-dead, all just to intercept the marauders map before these three Gryffindor idiots could cross paths!
And the result?!
If it hadn't been for her past self from half an hour ago—who was sitting safely in the Slytherin dungeons and had casually folded that wretched paper crane on a whim to tip off the Weasleys—that idiot Potter never would have received the map at this exact, cursed time!
The great Dark Lord had calculated every variable, plotted every step, only to be spectacularly sabotaged by her own trivial whim.
But right now, she didn't even have the physical energy left to be enraged.
[Warning! Host has been away from the Space-Time Guide for too long!]
[Level 2 punishment has been stacked!]
'Shut up...' Tamara roared weakly in the confines of her own mind.
The static numbness had seeped so deep into her bone marrow that her limbs felt entirely paralyzed. If she didn't drag herself back to that mudblood's side immediately, this fragile body might actually go into shock right here in the dirt.
She bit down on her lip again, tasting fresh copper, relying on the sharp sting of pain to force her leaden legs to move. She dragged herself along the wall, stumbling blindly.
With every agonizing step, the electrical current spiked higher.
She could hear her own rapid, broken gasps echoing loudly in the empty corridor, sounding pathetic and small.
Just as the last shred of sensation vanished from her legs, dooming her to collapse onto the cold floor.
"Tamara!"
The frantic slapping of shoes against stone rang out. A familiar figure sprinted out from the blind spot of the staircase.
Hermione Granger.
The insufferable Miss Know-It-All, the girl who valued school rules more than her own life, had ultimately abandoned her instructions to stay put, driven out of hiding by sheer panic.
When Hermione saw Tamara—looking like a freshly reanimated corpse, drenched in cold sweat and swaying dangerously on her feet—her heart nearly stopped in her chest.
Without a second thought, she lunged forward. She caught the collapsing Slytherin in a tight, desperate embrace, her hands locking firmly around Tamara's thin, trembling shoulders.
"Merlin! What happened to you? Are you suffering from a time backlash?!" Hermione's voice cracked, thick with a very real sob of terror.
The exact millisecond Hermione's hands gripped her robes.
[Ding! Detected physical contact with the Space-Time Guide!]
[Anti-lost Mutual Aid Mode restored! Punishment lifted!]
The shrill electronic alarm in her skull vanished. The terrifying, nerve-shredding current receded as swiftly as a retreating tide, vanishing entirely within half a second.
A deep, overwhelming sense of relief crashed over her.
But while the active torture had ceased, the severe physiological exhaustion it left behind could not be magically erased. Tamara felt as though she had been dragged out of a frozen lake. She had zero strength left to support her own weight.
Humiliated, yet entirely helpless to stop it, she slumped forward, resting the majority of her weight against Hermione's narrow shoulders.
"...I'm fine."
Tamara closed her eyes, swallowing hard to force down the metallic taste of blood pooling in her throat. Her voice was a ragged, hoarse whisper. "Take me back... to the Room of Requirement."
Hermione's eyes were red-rimmed. She didn't dare waste time asking another question.
Gritting her teeth, she used all her strength to half-carry, half-drag the weakened Slytherin. They stumbled through the shadows, dodging patrolling ghosts by the skin of their teeth, fleeing all the way back up to the eighth floor.
The heavy wooden door of the Room of Requirement slammed shut behind them, sealing them inside.
Hermione carefully eased Tamara down onto a plush sofa, her hands fluttering anxiously as she turned to grab the Vigor Potion resting on the nearby table.
"No need. I'm fine."
Tamara leaned her head back against the cushions, raising a trembling hand to stop the Gryffindor's frantic movements.
She opened her eyes slowly. There was no relief in those dark, fathomless depths. Only a deep, suffocating gloom and a bitter, self-mocking edge.
Her gaze drifted down to the golden hourglass resting against Hermione's chest. It was still emitting a faint, ethereal glow. She thought of the utterly absurd sequence of events that had just played out in the corridor below.
The tyrant who had sought to control time had ultimately been slapped across the face by a thoughtless action of her own past self.
Tamara's swollen lips twitched upward into a chilling, humorless chuckle.
"Time..."
"It really is an arrogant thing."
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