Chapter 79: Give It to Me
Tamara flicked a speck of gray ash from her pristine Slytherin robes, her upper lip curling in deep distaste. Behind her, the agonizing, shrill shrieks of the mountain troll were abruptly choked off, swallowed entirely by the roaring wall of cursed fire she had left in her wake.
She stepped through the stone archway. The air in the massive circular chamber ahead was stagnant, heavy with the scent of ancient dust and dark magic. The room was entirely empty, save for a single, towering object resting upon a raised dais in the dead center.
A magnificent, gold-framed mirror. The Mirror of Erised.
A pathetic little one-sided game of cat and mouse was currently reaching its climax at the base of the mirror. Harry Potter was slumped awkwardly against the cold stone steps. The boy savior's face was drained of all color, his chest heaving with panicked breaths. His knuckles were bone-white as he clutched something tightly against his chest, his emerald eyes wide and swimming with absolute terror.
Looming over the boy was a trembling, pathetic figure. The man had completely unwound his ridiculous purple turban, tossing the fabric aside like discarded rags. He had his back to Tamara, advancing on the cornered boy one agonizing step at a time.
Quirinus Quirrell.
But Tamara's dark eyes did not linger on the stuttering professor. Her gaze locked onto the grotesque, flat, snake-like visage protruding from the back of Quirrell's skull.
The main soul. Her main soul.
"Give me the stone!" The face on the back of the head twisted, unleashing a hoarse, wet roar that dripped with centuries of starved greed.
"Not a chance!" Harry yelled back, his voice cracking as the heels of his shoes scraped uselessly against the polished floor, desperately trying to scramble backward.
"Kill him! You absolute fool! Do not waste my time!" the main soul hissed, the sheer malice in the voice making the air temperature drop. "Get the stone, and I can finally be resurrected!"
Quirrell's arm jerked upward, his wand trembling violently in his grasp. He had struck a bargain with Tamara earlier, but beneath the suffocating, terrifying pressure of the Dark Lord's main soul, the cowardly professor did not dare harbor a single thought of defiance.
"Avada..."
The first syllables of the ultimate, unforgivable death sentence rolled thickly off Quirrell's tongue, a sickly green light beginning to spark at the tip of his wand.
Tamara stood quietly in the shadows of the archway, watching the spectacle with supreme indifference. Her holly wand remained pointed lazily at the floor. She did not lift it a single inch.
'Perfect,'she thought, a cold smirk playing at the corners of her mouth.'I cannot murder the little savior myself without that blasted system frying my brain, but I certainly will not lift a finger to stop someone else from doing the honors.'
The green light flared brighter. Harry squeezed his eyes shut.
[Ding! High-risk Alert!]
The system's overly cheerful, piercingly loud chime detonated directly behind Tamara's eyeballs. She winced, a sharp spike of pain lancing through her skull.
[Detected that Key Figure Harry Potter is about to die! The World Line faces an imminent risk of collapse!]
[Forced Mission: Guardian Angel.]
[Reward: Unlock all first-year spells.]
[Please stop this murder immediately! Once Harry Potter dies, your legal identity in this world will also be seriously threatened.]
'None of my business!' Tamara snarled internally, fully prepared to watch the boy turn into a corpse.
But before she could finish the thought, the system dropped its cheerful facade, its voice shifting into a cold, mechanical drone as it played its true trump card.
[Warning: Given that Harry Potter is the Fate Anchor of this world, if he dies an unnatural death, the World Line will completely collapse.]
[At that time, the system will initiate an emergency Rollback Program.]
[Punishment: The host will be forcibly stripped of all Magic Talent and deported to Wool's Orphanage in 1926 to re-experience your wonderful childhood in a state without any Magic Power.]
Tamara's fingers spasmed around her holly wand. Her breath hitched. Every single word from that mechanical voice acted like a rusted, poisoned dagger, plunging repeatedly into the deepest, most agonizing nerves that Lord Voldemort feared and loathed above all else.
To be stripped of her magic. To become a powerless, filthy little waste. To be locked back in that wretched, freezing room, bullied by disgusting Muggles in an orphanage that constantly reeked of cheap cabbage, mildew, and suffocating despair.
'I would rather tear my own soul apart again right here and now!'
"Dammit..." she hissed through clenched teeth. She wanted Potter dead more than anything, but it absolutely could not happen in a way that dragged her down into the abyss with him.
"Expelliarmus!"
Tamara whipped her wand forward in a vicious, slashing arc. A blinding bolt of scarlet light erupted from the tip, tearing across the chamber and striking Quirrell's wrist with the precision of a sniper's bullet.
"Ah!" Quirrell shrieked in sudden agony. The impact snapped his hand back, sending his wand spiraling high into the air before it clattered uselessly across the cold marble floor, sliding far out of reach.
Both Quirrell and Harry snapped their heads toward the arched doorway.
There, standing amidst the creeping shadows like a beautiful, vengeful grim reaper, was the black-haired girl in pristine Slytherin robes. A thin wisp of acrid smoke curled lazily from the tip of her wand.
"Tamara!" Harry cried out. The sheer, unadulterated joy and overwhelming relief in his voice made it sound as though he were gazing upon a literal angel descending from the heavens to deliver him from evil.
"You again..." Quirrell wheezed, slowly turning his body around to fully present the hideous, flat-nosed face on the back of his skull to the newcomer.
The main soul's slit-like, blood-red eyes locked onto Tamara. The raw, starving greed burning within those crimson irises was infinitely more intense than what he had directed at the Philosopher's Stone.
"That perfect... vessel..." the face hissed, its tongue flicking out over pale, cracked lips.
In an instant, the main soul seemed to completely forget about the legendary artifact clutched in the boy's sweaty hands. Every ounce of his dark, obsessive attention anchored onto the girl standing by the door.
"Since you have come... then stay!" the main soul roared, the voice echoing off the stone walls. "Kill her! Seize her body!"
Quirrell's limbs jerked unnaturally, entirely hijacked by the main soul's overwhelming will. Stripped of his wand, the professor reduced himself to a crazed, rabid beast. He let out a guttural roar and launched himself across the room directly at Tamara. He did not merely want to kill her; he wanted to tear her open and devour her very existence.
"Get back, Potter!" Tamara barked. She darted forward, grabbing the stunned boy by the collar and ruthlessly shoving him hard into the corner, simultaneously pivoting on her heel to let Quirrell's wild lunge sail past her.
"Petrificus Totalus!"
A jet of white light blasted from her wand, slamming squarely into Quirrell's shoulder. The impact made the man sway violently, his footsteps faltering for a fraction of a second, but his limbs did not lock. He did not fall.
The main soul was forcibly overdrawing every last drop of Quirrell's fading life force, burning the man's essence like cheap kindling to grant the host body temporary, brute-force immunity against such basic, low-level jinxes.
"It is useless..." the face on the back of the head cackled, a wet, rattling sound. "Such pathetic, childish tricks... cannot hurt Lord Voldemort!"
Quirrell spun around, his boots skidding on the marble, and lunged again. But this time, he did not aim for the slippery girl. He targeted the boy cowering on the floor. The main soul possessed a cruel, calculating cunning; he knew perfectly well that the fatal flaw of these sickeningly righteous Gryffindor brats was their desperate need to protect one another.
"Avada Kedavra!"
Even without a wand to channel the magic, Quirrell's hands twisted into grotesque claws. Drawing directly upon the main soul's bottomless reservoir of dark magic, he actually managed to condense a crackling, unstable sphere of sickly green death-light right between his bare palms. With a feral grunt, he hurled the lethal orb fiercely toward the cornered boy.
It was far from the refined, instantaneous beam of a true Killing Curse, but against a terrified, defenseless first-year student, a direct hit from that concentrated dark mass would be absolutely fatal.
"Dammit!" Tamara cursed, her heart skipping a beat.
She was standing too far away. There was no time to cast a proper shield charm, no time to physically drag the idiot out of the blast radius.
There was only one option left. Her black eyes darted past the boy, locking onto the massive, heavy object looming right behind him.
The Mirror of Erised.
"Wingardium Leviosa!"
Tamara poured every ounce of her magical weight into the incantation, swinging her holly wand upward with bone-jarring force.
The enormous, heavy gold frame groaned in protest as it was forcibly ripped from its stone pedestal. Acting as a colossal, makeshift shield, the ancient mirror flew across the chamber, the air whistling violently around it, before slamming down heavily onto the marble floor directly in front of Harry.
BOOM—!
The unstable sphere of green death collided violently with the reflective glass.
A blinding shockwave of chaotic magic washed over the room. Even an ancient artifact steeped in deep enchantments could not entirely absorb the raw, destructive malice of the Killing Curse.
A sharp, deafening crack echoed through the chamber.
The mirror shattered.
Thousands of razor-sharp glass shards exploded outward, filling the air like a glittering, deadly rainstorm. Harry remained entirely unscathed in his corner, the heavy golden frame having absorbed the brunt of the blast and shielded him from the deadly shrapnel.
Tamara, however, standing exposed on the flank, was not afforded the same luxury.
Several jagged fragments of enchanted glass shot toward her face faster than she could blink, slicing cleanly across her cheek. Warm crimson blood instantly welled up from the cut, tracing a stark, vivid line down her pale, porcelain skin.
Tamara did not flinch. She did not gasp, nor did she even raise a hand to wipe the blood away. She simply stood there, the red droplets falling from her jaw to stain her white collar. Her obsidian eyes remained dead and cold, fixed unblinkingly upon Quirrell, who had been thrown backward onto the floor by the sheer recoil of his own spell.
"Is that all?" she asked softly. Her tone was so flat, so unnervingly calm, that it made the hairs on the back of Harry's neck stand up. "It seems these truly are your final, pathetic death throes."
The main soul was entirely undeterred by the failure. The scent of blood and the thrill of the hunt only drove him into a deeper frenzy. He violently jerked Quirrell's broken body back up off the floor, preparing to force the man's hands to condense a second lethal strike.
But just as the dark magic began to gather again, Quirrell's body abruptly froze.
His hands, already mottled with sickening, purplish corpse spots, began to tremble uncontrollably. The flesh on his face and arms started to crack and peel away, flaking off into the air like edges of burning parchment.
The reckless, excessive overexertion of dark magic had finally pushed the fragile mortal vessel past its absolute breaking point.
"No... Master... I cannot..." Quirrell let out a wet, agonizing wail, his knees buckling beneath him.
"Useless!" the main soul roared, furious at the sudden rebellion of failing flesh. Quirrell's fading consciousness was instinctively, desperately struggling against the parasite draining his life.
It was a fleeting, once-in-a-lifetime opening. There was absolutely no way Tamara was going to let it slip through her fingers.
Her mind raced. The library of spells she currently possessed in this body was pathetically meager. The basic charms she had unlocked thus far did not include a single piece of advanced magic capable of targeting a soul directly. And the devastating, soul-rending Black Magic she knew by heart—the spells that belonged to Lord Voldemort—were locked tight behind the damn system's restrictions.
'To strip a stubborn parasite of that magnitude from its host body... a simple Levitation Charm will not even scratch the surface.'
It required raw, pure kinetic force. A powerful, concussive impact.
A memory flashed through Tamara's calculating mind. The inventory. The extra reward the system had forced upon her when she had to step in and save that unlucky brat Potter from falling off his broom at the Quidditch Pitch.
[Designated Skill Book x 1].
'System!'Tamara growled in her mind, her eyes narrowing as she closed the distance to the convulsing professor.'Consume the skill book! I want to learn the Knockback Jinx—Flipendo!'
[Ding! Item consumed.]
[Loading spell: Flipendo (Knockback Jinx).]
A strange, tingling warmth flooded instantly through Tamara's brain. Deep within her magical core, previously dormant circuits and pathways flared to life, illuminating one by one as the complex theory and wand movements of the spell were hardwired directly into her muscle memory.
Tamara lunged forward. Taking full advantage of the exact moment Quirrell's knees hit the floor, she drove the tip of her holly wand firmly against the center of the man's chest, right over his frantically beating heart.
It was the precise anatomical point where a parasitic soul's connection to the host was at its most strained.
"Get out," Tamara whispered, her voice a deadly hiss.
She mobilized every single drop of magical power coursing through her veins. It was a magic that shared the exact same dark, ancient source as the main soul currently residing in the skull before her, yet hers was infinitely purer, sharper, and younger.
"Flipendo!"
Originally designed as a rudimentary jinx meant to merely shove heavy obstacles out of a wizard's path, in Tamara's hands, the spell was forcefully mutated. She imbued the incantation with a terrifying, absolute rule of physical and spiritual repulsion.
A blinding, dazzling ring of blue-white light detonated outward from the tip of her wand!
The very fabric of space seemed to warp and distort under the sheer concussive weight of the strike. The overwhelming repulsive force acted like a massive, invisible hand, plunging violently through Quirrell's decaying flesh, wrapping its fingers around the dark entity residing within, and ruthlessly tearing it free.
An ear-piercing, unearthly scream tore through the chamber as a dense, writhing mass of pitch-black smoke was violently blasted out of Quirrell's back.
It was Voldemort's main soul.
Ripped from its host, the black mist tumbled chaotically through the air, expanding and contracting as it unleashed a furious, unwilling roar.
"I will remember you... I will return..." the shadowy visage cursed viciously, the voice fading into a hollow echo as the mist quickly spiraled upward, fleeing desperately toward the narrow ventilation grates near the ceiling.
As the trailing edge of the dark smoke whipped past Tamara's face, she did not step back to dodge it.
Instead, she closed her eyes and took a long, deep breath.
In that fleeting instant, a concentrated surge of pure, unadulterated dark energy from her original body flowed through her nasal cavity and sank directly into her own soul. The sensation of cannibalizing a fragment of her own essence... it was intoxicating. It was so deeply pleasurable that it made her very soul tremble with ecstasy.
"Tastes good," she murmured.
When she opened her eyes, a faint, predatory red light flashed within her dark pupils. An extremely dangerous, satisfied smile curled her bloodstained lips. She could feel the stolen magic settling into her core, making her tangibly more powerful than she had been just moments prior.
Stripped of the main soul that had been animating him, Quirrell collapsed onto the marble floor like a boneless pile of wet mud. His chest barely rose and fell, his breaths shallow and rattling. He was not entirely dead yet, but he was hovering dangerously close to the edge.
Tamara cast a disdainful glance down at the unconscious professor. 'This pathetic tool still has its uses,'she mused coldly.'I need a disposable pawn to run errands for me outside the castle walls.'
"Lucky you," she muttered.
She gave her wand a lazy flick. Quirrell's limp body instantly levitated off the floor, hovering a few feet in the air.
Tamara walked briskly toward the tall, arched window at the edge of the chamber and pushed the heavy glass panes open. The cold night wind howled in, carrying the scent of the pitch-black waters of the Black Lake far below.
"Go take a bath, Professor."
With a heartless, dismissive wave of her wand, she tossed Quirrell's body out of the fourth-floor window, discarding him as casually as one would toss out a bag of rotting trash.
Naturally, to ensure the man survived long enough to be useful later, she lazily tacked on a highly insincere Hover Charm to his falling form at the very last second, slowing his descent just enough to prevent his bones from shattering on impact with the water. As for whether he would end up as a midnight snack for the Giant Squid lurking in the depths... well, that was entirely up to his own miserable luck.
The chamber fell deathly silent. The threat was dealt with.
Only Tamara and Harry remained in the ruined room.
Harry was still sitting frozen on the floor amidst the glittering sea of shattered glass. He was clutching the blood-red stone tightly to his chest, staring up at Tamara in absolute, unblinking shock. His mind was struggling to process what he had just witnessed. He had seen Tamara step in front of a lethal curse for him. He had seen her take a wound to the face to shield him. He had watched her single-handedly drive away that terrifying monster, and then casually toss the treacherous professor out the window to secure their safety.
"Tamara..." Harry breathed, his voice trembling with a mixture of awe and lingering adrenaline.
Tamara slowly turned away from the window. She walked toward the boy, her footsteps echoing sharply against the stone. The blood was still streaming freely down her pale cheek, staining her collar crimson. There was not a single trace of warmth or emotion in her pitch-black eyes. The sheer, suffocating coldness radiating from her made Harry's survival instincts flare, a primal spike of fear piercing through his gratitude.
She stopped right in front of him.
"Give it here."
Tamara held out her hand, her pale palm facing upward.
"What?" Harry blinked, staring up at her blankly.
"Do not play dumb, Potter."
Tamara dropped into a half-squat, bringing her dark, empty eyes perfectly level with Harry's bright green ones. Her gaze carried a heavy, unquestionable pressure that seemed to crush the air out of his lungs.
"The Philosopher's Stone." Her voice dropped to a dangerous whisper. "Give it to me."
"But... Professor Dumbledore said..." Harry stammered, his grip tightening instinctively on the gem.
"Dumbledore is not here!" Tamara snapped, her patience instantly evaporating. She reached out, her cold fingers wrapping like a vice around Harry's wrist. "That object is far too dangerous! Keeping it on your person will only guarantee your death!"
She pulled his arm slightly toward her. "Give it to me to keep safe. It is for your own good!"
Her pale fingertips brushed against the warm, faceted surface of the legendary stone.
But Harry did not let go.
Instead, the boy did something entirely unexpected. He suddenly shifted his grip, reaching out with his free hand to firmly grasp Tamara's wrist.
The boy's palm was burning hot, flushed with the heat of a racing pulse. His fingers wrapped securely around Tamara's freezing, porcelain skin.
Tamara's brow twitched. A sharp, violent flash of genuine murderous intent flared in the depths of her eyes. She was absolutely not accustomed to being touched with such casual, unearned familiarity.
Harry looked directly into Tamara's terrifying eyes, his own expression shifting from fear to a deep, unwavering seriousness.
"I trust you," he said softly.
Slowly, deliberately, he uncurled his fingers. He placed the heavy, crimson Philosopher's Stone directly into the center of Tamara's palm. And then, while she stared at him with an expression of genuine, unmasked surprise, he gently but firmly folded her pale fingers closed over the gem.
"You were injured because you stepped in to save me." Harry's gaze shifted to the jagged, bleeding cut on Tamara's cheek. His green eyes were swimming with a heavy mixture of guilt and absolute determination. "If this can help you... then take it."
Tamara gripped the stone. She could feel the ancient, surging magical power humming beneath its crystalline surface, vibrating against her skin. She looked down at the boy kneeling before her—this foolish, painfully sincere little savior.
The sensation twisting in her chest was incredibly strange. It felt exactly like walking up to a mark with the clear, premeditated intention of committing a violent robbery, only for the victim to smile warmly, hand over their wallet, and earnestly ask if she needed any spare change for the bus.
"...Absolute fool," Tamara muttered under her breath.
She quickly withdrew her hand, stuffing the priceless Philosopher's Stone deep into the concealed inner pocket of her robes before the idiot could change his mind.
She cast one last glance down at Harry, whose eyes were still shining with that sickening, misplaced trust.
A dark, mocking sneer curled through her mind.
'You handed this over voluntarily, Potter.'She turned on her heel, her bloodstained robes billowing behind her.'Even if you realize what you have done and regret it later... do not come crying to me.'
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