"Hmmm... Well, I must admit that only proves the famous Potter is infinitely stupider than a group of schoolgirls," Riddle decreed in a deliberately contemptuous tone. "Your little club has shown competence far superior to that of the so-called 'Savior'. His incompetence reassures me that my downfall must have been subject to fortuitous variables and hidden details... I find it unacceptable that a mere infant achieved such a feat," he expressed with frustration, before forcing himself to regain his composure. "Anyway, the fact that he isn't here and you are only means I have lost the opportunity to exact my revenge against the one responsible for my ruin... A true pity."
"Maybe he's just late and on his way," Lavender ventured, finally putting away her notebook with a sigh of lyrical resignation.
"It no longer matters... Truth be told, my greatest obstacle in this entire process has been Dumbledore. That decrepit old man has turned out to be much more perceptive than I estimated; I sensed he was on the verge of discovering me on more than one occasion. If it weren't for his constant vigilance, I would have consolidated my resurrection much sooner... Heh, I am even convinced that his current absences from the castle are nothing more than a crude decoy designed to lure me out of the shadows, but I will not take the bait. This was my last move at Hogwarts. Once I conclude here, I will abandon this place, reclaim my physical body, and finish the work my adult counterpart left incomplete," he sentenced with blind confidence, as if already tasting victory.
"We won't let you!" Hermione exclaimed, visibly shaken but with resolution etched upon her face.
In unison, all the other girls imitated her, raising their wands in perfect formation.
"A group of girls... who managed to unmask me and follow me down to the very foundations of the school!" Riddle commented, letting out a genuinely mocking laugh. "I must give credit where it's due... Organizing and training such a capable squad during their school years... Red possesses undeniable talent. As I mentioned before, great minds think alike; perhaps we would have been extraordinary partners... But before we finish, answer my final question."
As he delivered his speech, the young man deflected with a subtle and fluid flick of his wrist the silent hex that Penelope, taking advantage of her maturity and positioning, had attempted to fire treacherously to end the conflict the quick way. Riddle dissolved the attack with astonishing ease, sowing panic in the prefect. After all, the tension and reverent fear toward the name of Voldemort had caused Penelope's spell to lack one hundred percent of its actual potency.
"If he orchestrated all this... if he trained you and deliberately guided you here... where is he?" Percy interrogated, voicing his final doubt.
He received no answer. The girls exchanged sidelong glances or swept their surroundings; they were ignorant of Red's current whereabouts, and that lack of certainty began to chip away at the self-confidence of the less experienced ones.
"Bah, it doesn't matter. I assure you I will leave him a splendid reminder... To him, to Dumbledore, and to Potter himself. Your dismembered corpses will adorn this sanctuary... Well, assuming anyone manages to find it; otherwise, you will merely be a simple obituary in the pages of the Daily Prophet," Riddle laughed, turning his back on them with contempt.
The students startled. Those with a more tempered willpower attempted to unleash their hexes at Riddle's rear, but the soul fragment had already raised a powerful protective enchantment around himself and began to recite a series of sibilant, dark hisses in Parseltongue:
"Speak to me, Slytherin, greatest of the Hogwarts Four."
The girls froze. The ancestral mechanism activated, and the rumble of sliding stone alongside the terrifying sight of Salazar Slytherin's mouth opening wide paralyzed the atmosphere completely.
Everyone swallowed hard, gripped by an insufferable tension as they watched the statue move. The cleverest ones averted their gaze immediately, closing their eyes tightly to avoid the deadly reflection; Hermione, in particular, felt tears well up in her eyes as she recalled that traumatic experience. And while the fear of facing the basilisk invaded the students' hearts, Tom Riddle gloated, savoring what would be his final act of glory before vanishing with the monster and consolidating his resurrection.
However... nothing happened. The colossal mouth opened completely, but a deathly silence dominated the room. The girls who could no longer resist the uncertainty ended up opening their eyes, flabbergasted by what was happening.
"Come on! Get out here already!" Riddle repeated, losing his patience for the first time.
The only answer he received was an absolute emptiness that bewildered both the students and the Dark Lord himself.
"Hhhhere... Isss... ssscome... mastersss... ssss," a voice resonated from the depths of the monument.
Out of the statue's opening emerged I, stumbling deliberately and hissing an exaggerated, utterly mocking Parseltongue. I practically let myself fall from the structure, hitting the stone floor with a dull, theatrical thud.
"Red!!" everyone exclaimed in absolute surprise and relief.
"Where the hell is my basilisk!?" Tom roared, irate, frantically alternating his gaze between my position and the abyss of the statue.
I, feeling this clone body aching and exhausted after the brutal magical beating we had given the monster to leave it in a coma, didn't even deign to articulate a word. I merely raised an arm, closed my fist extending my thumb, and, with two casual motions, pointed first toward the statue's mouth and then turned my thumb firmly downward.
"You...!" Tom growled, the veins on his forehead about to burst from the mixture of anger, incredulity, and frustration.
In contrast, the girls were on the verge of jumping and cheering on the spot. Their expressions of glee and radiant smiles were impossible to hide upon confirming that I had taken care of the terror of Hogwarts on my own. The blind faith they placed in me dictated that this was the natural course of events, but corroborating it with their own eyes made it infinitely better.
"Damned redhead..." Tom muttered, leveling his wand at me.
"Hey... I am not your enemy right now," I snapped at him, narrowing one eye to look at him with absolute contempt. Then, I shifted my attention to my retinue: "Girls, the rest is up to you. Your official mission is to defeat the heir."
"What?" some reacted, blinking at Percy's possessed body and then looking at me. However, in the very next millisecond, the tactical formation snapped back into place, and they resumed their combat stances.
"Hahahahaha... You expect this group of girls to defeat me?" Riddle mocked, regaining his arrogance. "It is evident that subduing my pet has left you incapacitated, and now you are nothing but a nuisance unable to lift a finger. It will be a true pleasure to destroy you," he added, injecting venom into every syllable. "And I will delight in watching your face of despair as I massacre them one by one before your eyes."
"Heh... don't brag so much, it won't be that easy for you. I trained them myself, and each of them is infinitely more powerful than you think," I teased, giving my girls one final look filled with complicity. "Have total confidence. He does not possess the ability to kill you directly... but he can hurt you. So give it everything you've got... but make sure you don't kill him either."
As soon as I finished speaking, the clone exhausted its magical reserves, collapsed unconscious, and dissolved on the spot, turning into an innocuous puddle of fluid blood.
A frigid silence gripped the room. Tom, left pointing at nothing as his target vanished, spun around, but he didn't even have time to blink: a barrage of spells was already flying straight toward his position, forcing him to throw up an emergency shield.
"Let's go, girls!" Cho roared, having been the first to open fire with a seeker's reflexes.
Each and every one of the students bore a spark of burning fire in their gaze. Despite the disappearance of my clone, the certainty that the basilisk was no longer a threat, my final directives, and, of course, the subtle but effective [Aura of Courage] I had passively infused into them, ignited an indomitable passion in their hearts. They stopped trembling entirely; they now saw the possessed Percy simply as a worthy rival they had to crush.
"Miserable brats..." Riddle growled, deflecting the curses with fury. Determined to regain absolute control of the situation and break their morale, he opted to execute an exemplary punishment: "Avada Kedavra!!"
"No!" several screamed.
The flash of emerald green light ripped through the gloom like the ultimate symbol of death, freezing the hearts of those present for a microsecond. The infused courage seemed to evaporate as the fatal projectile streaked through the air, hitting Susan Bones square in the chest. The impact propelled her violently backward; her body struck one of the columns hard and slid down into a seated position, her arms slumped at her sides and her wand rolling across the floor.
"Susan!!!"
"No, why!"
"Red!"
The girls' shrieks were heart-wrenching, steeped in absolute devastation and helplessness at seeing their companion fall that way. Riddle let out a loud, malevolent laugh, feeding on the panic he had just reinstated... Although deep down, something didn't fit. The spell had not caused the classic clean projection that characterizes a crushing, fatal impact.
"Ouuuch... Merlin, that hurts..." a complaining, weak female voice was heard.
The girls, who already had tears overflowing their cheeks, froze completely petrified. Riddle experienced the exact same paralysis upon beholding how Susan's supposed corpse began to move. Well, it wasn't a corpse at all. The girl sat up with evident difficulty, wiping a trickle of blood coming from her lip; she complained of a sharp pain, but it was diminishing at a supernatural rate as the special brooch on her robe flashed with a faint golden light.
"How is this possible!?" Riddle roared, his eyes wide and distorted by panic. In the current annals of magical history, there was only the record of one person capable of surviving the killing curse, and that had entailed the destruction of his own being. Beholding the same scene play out casually before his eyes left him in shock.
"Am I... am I alive?" Susan asked, blinking as she finished standing up. She had been convinced of her demise, but looking around, she discovered her friends crying and her own hands covered in dust from the floor.
"He can't kill us..." Hermione whispered, her face lighting up with a staggering epiphany. "Girls! What Red said is literal: He doesn't have the power to kill us!" she exclaimed with a burst of glee, pulling at the brooch of her own robe to display it. "We are..." She couldn't finish, as she went flying.
The impact struck Hermione and dragged her several meters across the pavement.
Riddle's heart was racing with terror. His wand had unleashed a second green blast, firing another impulsive Avada Kedavra to disprove reality.
However, just like Susan, after a few seconds of agony, the Gryffindor began to get up. Her nose was bleeding from the contusion and she held her ribs in pain, but she was visibly recovering.
"Hurts like hell..." Hermione muttered, placing her palms on the stone and standing up with pure determination.
"Right... He can't kill us, but he can hurt us...", Penelope commented, remembering word for word the warnings I gave them.
A deathly silence once again dominated the chamber, but the oppressive, terrifying atmosphere from before dissipated completely... Or rather, it drastically shifted targets.
Tom Riddle, pale and with his confidence shattered to pieces, watched as the entirety of the group turned their heads in synchronization toward him. They stared at him, their eyes narrowed... like predators... They looked at him like cornered prey. For the first time today, the Dark Lord's heart experienced a shiver of authentic dread, which he immediately tried to bury under a layer of blind rage.
"That damned Red... He is an exceptional wizard... But if you assume I have no ways to destroy you, you are sorely mistaken! The killing curse isn't the only thing that can finish you off!" he roared, spinning on his heels to counterattack, but he was forced to raise an emergency shield to contain a storm of combined hexes. This time, his magical barrier trembled violently under the impacts.
Without the inhibitory brake of the fear of death, and with their combat passion fully reactivated, the girls' collective magic was unleashing its true and uncontainable potential.
"Get him!" a war cry resonated in unison.
And then... the battle erupted...