Chapter 124: Unlucky Guy
Tom snapped his head up. The trembling in Ginny Weasley's small frame had ceased, replaced by a rigid, unnatural stillness. His eyes—staring out from the girl's pale face—held zero fear. Instead, they burned with the feral, cornered madness of a trapped beast.
It hit him with the force of a physical blow. The teenage girl standing before him, the one who shared an uncanny eighty percent resemblance to his own original features, was a walking death sentence.
She outclassed him in every conceivable metric. Her wandwork was flawless, her combat instincts predatory, and the sheer, unadulterated malice radiating from her very bones suffocated him. She was a monster wearing a porcelain mask.
If he let this drag out for even another breath, she would tear the diary right out of his hands.
And if that little black book fell into the grasp of this terrifying anomaly, his grand resurrection would be the least of his worries. This fragment of his soul—the consciousness he had so painstakingly scraped together from the depths of the ink—would face total, irreversible erasure.
A violent tremor wracked his spectral core. It was a primal terror, an instinctual scream from the deepest recesses of his fragmented soul.
He still had no idea who Tamara Riddle truly was, but his instincts screamed the truth. She would never treat him with the naive, pathetic devotion of that foolish Weasley girl. No. She would strip away his sentience. She would bind his magic. She would crack his soul wide open and devour him whole, cannibalizing his essence to feed her own power.
For Lord Voldemort—for Tom Riddle, a being defined by his supreme arrogance and absolute obsession with control—the mere concept of assimilation was a fate ten thousand times worse than death.
"In your dreams!"
The furious roar tore from Ginny's throat, warping into a guttural, masculine snarl.
He didn't lunge for the discarded wand. Instead, he threw his head back and unleashed a chilling, hoarse hiss into the shadows of the empty corridor. The sound scraped against the damp stone walls, a vile, slithering frequency that made the air itself feel diseased.
Parseltongue.
"Speak to me... Slytherin, greatest of the Hogwarts four."
Almost instantly, the stone beneath Tamara's boots vibrated. A violent, rhythmic tremor echoed from deep within the castle's ancient plumbing. Something massive was tearing through the pipes, its colossal weight grinding against the masonry as it rapidly ascended.
The Basilisk.
Was this fragmented lunatic actually summoning the serpent right here?
Tamara arched a delicate eyebrow. 'My sixteen-year-old self really was a reckless, arrogant little shit,' she mused internally, her mind instantly calculating the sheer, unmitigated disaster it would cause if a fifty-foot snake burst into the open corridor.
She didn't retreat a single step. Her pitch-black eyes narrowed, flashing with cold disdain and deep, offended territoriality. That monster slumbering in the Chamber of Secrets was Salazar's legacy to her. It was her most loyal pet.
"You are courting death," Tamara sneered, her voice dropping to a glacial whisper.
Trying to turn her own familiar against her? The sheer audacity was almost laughable.
She tilted her chin up, her lips parting to issue a far more dominant, crushing Parseltongue command. She fully intended to order her overgrown little treasure to turn its scaly tail around and go straight back to sleep.
But in that split second, as Tamara shifted her magical focus toward the approaching serpent, Tom struck.
Exploiting her momentary distraction, the possessed Ginny sprang from the floor with unnatural, joint-popping agility. Her fingers snatched the fallen wand from the stone tiles. Without a single backward glance, Tom sent the girl's body sprinting madly toward the far end of the corridor.
"Hah. Trying to run?"
Tamara's gaze frosted over. Magic flared around her fingertips as she pivoted to give chase.
Right at that moment, the sharp clatter of hurried footsteps echoed from the intersecting hallway, accompanied by a high-pitched, trembling voice.
"Sir Nicholas... are you absolutely certain it's safe to walk with you? I mean, even from Slytherin's monster..."
It was Justin Finch-Fletchley. The Hufflepuff boy.
Ever since the Dueling Club incident where Harry had spoken Parseltongue, Justin had been a walking bundle of frayed nerves. Right now, he was practically hiding behind Nearly Headless Nick, treating the floating, pearlescent ghost as a spectral meat shield.
"Oh, fret not, my dear boy." Nick's translucent form cast a faint, silvery glow against the damp stone walls. He puffed out his chest, his tone dripping with aristocratic reassurance. "Nothing can harm a person who has already crossed the veil. With me, you are per—"
The ghost never finished that sentence.
Tom, sprinting blindly toward the intersection, spotted the two figures blocking his escape route. A flash of pure, unadulterated malice ignited in Ginny's eyes.
If he needed to lose his pursuer, he might as well leave her a spectacular mess to clean up.
He didn't break his stride. The hissing spilling from his lips spiked into a shrill, frantic frequency.
The rusted iron grate of a nearby ventilation shaft suddenly buckled. Behind the iron bars, two massive, sickly-yellow orbs ignited in the darkness.
It wasn't a direct line of sight, but the lethal, ancient magic projecting from those reptilian eyes instantly slammed into the unfortunate ghost.
"What's th—"
Justin's terrified shriek was violently choked off.
Filtered through Nick's ghostly ectoplasm, the absolute lethality of the Basilisk's gaze was diluted. Yet, the sheer dark magic still hit the spirit like a physical curse, instantly transmuting Nick's pearlescent form into a bizarre, solid mass of scorched black smoke.
Justin, standing directly behind the ghost, caught the secondary blast. His muscles locked. His eyes rolled back. He stiffened like a wooden board and tipped straight backward. His skull cracked against the stone floor with a heavy, sickening thud.
Having orchestrated his perfect distraction, Tom didn't waste a single heartbeat. He drove Ginny's body around the corner and vanished down the pitch-black stairwell.
Tamara skidded to a halt. She stared at the rigid boy sprawled on the floor and the blackened, suspended ghost hovering above him. The shadows clinging to her face deepened, her expression twisting into something terrifyingly dark.
'That damnable, pathetic little fragment.'
Her jaw locked. Not only had he slipped through her fingers, but he had also dumped this colossal, highly suspicious crime scene right at her feet.
If a professor caught her standing over a petrified student, the Virtue System would likely fry her brain with a punishment shock for failing to save a life. Tamara spun on her heel, her robes billowing, and melted into the shadows of the opposite corridor.
She couldn't afford to be seen here.
Less than thirty seconds after Tamara vacated the premises, a new set of footsteps echoed from the far end of the hall, moving with a hurried, aristocratic clip.
It was Draco Malfoy.
The young heir of the Malfoy family gripped a brass magical lantern, his pale brow furrowed in concentration as he swept the beam of light across the damp stonework.
Earlier, during the feast in the Great Hall, he had watched Tamara abruptly excuse herself from the Slytherin table. She had looked pale, almost unwell. The moment she vanished through the oak doors, Draco had found his roasted pheasant suddenly tasteless.
He hadn't even bothered waiting for Crabbe and Goyle to finish shoveling pudding down their throats. He had slipped out alone, wandering the castle in hopes of engineering a coincidental encounter with the girl.
"Strange... I could have sworn she headed up toward the second floor," Draco muttered to himself, his silver-gray eyes scanning the gloom with mounting frustration.
He had faintly heard a heavy, muffled thud echoing from this wing just moments ago. Had Tamara tripped? Had she run into some sort of trouble?
The thought spurred him forward. Draco quickened his pace, his polished shoes clicking sharply as he rounded the dark corner.
"Tamara, are you down he—"
The words died in his throat.
Draco's eyes blew wide open. His fingers went slack, nearly dropping the heavy brass lantern.
The figure lying on the cold stone was not the beautiful, enigmatic Slytherin girl. It was the Hufflepuff mudblood. Justin Finch-Fletchley.
Justin was sprawled flat on his back, his limbs locked in rigid, unnatural angles. His face was contorted into a mask of absolute, paralyzing terror, his eyes wide and unblinking. He looked exactly like a toppled plaster statue.
And hovering just inches above him was the Gryffindor house ghost, Nearly Headless Nick. But Nick was no longer pearlescent. He had been reduced to a bizarre, scorched-black silhouette of frozen smoke, suspended motionless in the drafty air.
"Merlin's beard..." Draco hissed, sucking in a sharp, ragged breath.
A normal second-year student would have screamed bloody murder and bolted for the nearest professor. But Draco was a Malfoy. Raised on a strict diet of pure-blood supremacy and dark arts lore, his initial shock rapidly cooled. The fear in his pale eyes slowly morphed into something else entirely.
A twisted, malicious glee.
"Another mudblood bites the dust," Draco whispered. He stared down at the paralyzed Hufflepuff, the corner of his mouth twitching upward into a cruel, arrogant smirk. "It seems the legend of the Chamber is completely true. Slytherin's true heir really is cleansing the filth from this school."
He hadn't seen the attacker. And not for a single second did his mind connect this brutal scene to Tamara. In Draco's eyes, Tamara Riddle was a regal, untouchable powerhouse. A girl of her caliber wouldn't be skulking around dark, damp corridors petrifying second-rate Hufflepuffs.
To Draco, the scene before him was frightening, yes, but it was also deeply, deeply satisfying.
However, the young Malfoy heir had absolutely no idea just how much trouble his current posture was about to cause him. Standing directly over a fresh victim, failing to summon a teacher, and wearing a look of smug, vindictive amusement was a spectacularly poor life choice.
Before the night was over, the news of the double attack on Justin and Nick swept through the halls of Hogwarts like wildfire.
Up in the Gryffindor Common Room, the atmosphere was thick enough to cut with a knife.
"It has to be Malfoy!" Ron Weasley sat on the edge of a squashy armchair by the roaring fireplace, his face flushed red as he waved a clenched fist. "Ernie Macmillan saw him prowling around that exact corridor right after it happened! He said Malfoy was standing over them, looking downright pleased with himself!"
"I think so too," Harry agreed, his voice grim. He sat on the rug, tightly gripping his holly wand. His right arm gave a dull throb—the lingering aftermath of practicing the Disarming Charm for two solid hours.
Unpleasant memories flashed through his mind: Malfoy's swaggering gait, his sneering face, and the casual, venomous way he spat the word 'mudblood' at Hermione.
"Who else in this entire castle hates Muggle-borns that much?" Harry pressed, his brow furrowed. "Who else struts around acting like he owns the place, practically begging people to think he's Slytherin's heir?"
The more Harry turned the theory over in his head, the more the pieces seemed to fit perfectly together.
"And..." Harry's voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. "Tamara left the feast really early tonight."
Ron leaned in. "You think she knows something? Or... maybe she's trying to avoid the crossfire. Malfoy's been following her around like a lovesick puppy for weeks. What if he bragged about his grand master plan to her? Tamara probably just wants to keep her hands clean. That would explain why she warned us to stay out of the Chamber business!"
"Then we have to expose him."
Hermione Granger snapped the heavy leather-bound book in her lap shut. The loud thwack echoed in the quiet corner of the room. She looked up, her brown eyes burning with absolute resolve.
"The Polyjuice Potion."
"It's the only way forward," she declared, lowering her voice so the older students wouldn't overhear. "We need to brew it, transform into Slytherin students, sneak right into their Common Room, and trick Malfoy into confessing it himself!"
[Akarin's Note:
Enjoying the story? Dropping a quick review, comment, or Power Stone means the world to me and keeps these daily updates flowing!
Want to read 50 chapters ahead or just want to help keep a shameless translator alive? (My livelihood actually depends on this, haha 😭). You can support me directly here:
(P.S. Just remove the brackets and replace the [.] with a regular dot . to use the links!)
✨ Patreon (50 Advanced Chapters): patreon[.]com/AkarinTL
☕ Ko-fi (Support / Sponsor): ko-fi[.]com/AkarinTL
🔗 All My Links: linktr[.]ee/AkarinTL
Thank you so much for reading and keeping this project alive!]