Chapter 191: The Cursed Club and the Shoes on the Ceiling
The day's final bell had long since tolled. Inside the fourth-floor Charms classroom, pools of soft, warm yellow light spilled across towering stacks of ancient, leather-bound magic tomes.
Following a forced, year-long suspension courtesy of the Chamber of Secrets fiasco, Professor Flitwick's proudest creation—the Charms Club—had finally reopened its doors for the start of their third year.
The room was populated by a hand-picked elite. These were students from across the four houses who possessed an exceptionally high aptitude for Charms work, rigorously vetted by Flitwick himself. Naturally, the majority were upper-year honor students and insufferably clever Ravenclaws.
Then there was Tamara Riddle. As the sole Slytherin granted exceptional admission during her very first year, she naturally commanded the absolute best seat in the room.
A delicate porcelain cup of black tea rested in one hand, while a heavy, borrowed volume titled "Deconstruction of Medieval Advanced Magic Circuits" lay open across her lap. Occasionally, whenever the older students passed her desk, their footsteps would subconsciously lighten. They stole fleeting, awe-struck glances at the beautiful Slytherin prodigy, treating her space as hallowed ground.
This quiet, carefully ordered atmosphere, dripping with unspoken hierarchical suppression, finally offered Tamara a long-awaited sliver of solace. Her mood had been thoroughly soured by endless academic nonsense since the term began, but this was acceptable.
'Quite a nice place...' Tamara sighed contentedly in the dark recesses of her mind.
If it had not been for that sixteen-year-old idiot making an absolute mess of the castle last year—a mess that led to the blanket suspension of all extracurricular clubs—she would have been sitting here enjoying her rightful elite privileges months ago.
Her slender fingers turned a crisp parchment page. Beneath her serene, angelic exterior, Tamara coldly and maliciously cursed her past diary-dwelling self.
'Not only did that fool interrupt my research plans, but he also cost me a full year of peace and quiet. Being personally devoured and assimilated by me was truly the greatest value he could ever offer in his pathetic existence.'
Just as she sank deeper into the harsh critique of her past soul-shard and the mental deduction of highly illegal Black Magic theories, the heavy oak door of the classroom creaked open.
A girl draped in a slightly rumpled Ravenclaw uniform wandered inside. She possessed a head of dirty-blonde hair that looked as though it had never seen a comb, pale silvery-grey eyes, and a bizarre assortment of trinkets dangling from her neck and wrists. Most strikingly, her feet were completely bare against the cold stone floor.
Luna Lovegood. The notorious outlier who had enrolled just last year, swiftly earning the moniker "Loony" thanks to a relentless stream of nonsensical babble and eccentric behavior.
She was quite clearly not a member of the Charms Club. Her unblinking gaze drifted across the room, scanning the shadows as if searching for a ghost.
"Is Professor Flitwick here?" Luna asked. Her voice floated through the quiet room in an airy, dreamlike cadence.
Flitwick, who had been in the middle of demonstrating magical oscillations to the seventh-years, had just popped into the adjacent storage room to fetch some teaching aids. Only the students remained.
The pristine, academic tranquility shattered the moment the uninvited guest spoke. Several third-year Ravenclaws seated in the front row paused their quills. They exchanged a cruel, knowing look before letting out a chorus of unabashed snickers.
"Oh, look who decided to grace us with her presence. Isn't this our very own Miss Lovegood?" a freckled boy announced loudly. His tone dripped with exaggerated disgust, as though a stray dog had tracked mud onto a pristine carpet. "What is it this time? Are you looking for those shoes of yours? Did they grow wings and fly away again today? Or perhaps they were stolen by the Wrackspurts in your head to build a little nest?"
The surrounding Ravenclaws chuckled in agreement. Their eyes gleamed with that specific, cutting malice and superiority unique to clever people when presented with an easy target.
Seated in her shadowed corner, Tamara did not even bother to lift her eyelashes.
Bullying? Petty mockery? Such pedestrian tricks were the daily bread and butter of the Slytherin dungeons. In the eyes of a former Dark Lord, if a creature was too weak to defend itself, it was only natural for it to be trampled and humiliated by the strong. It was the fundamental law of nature. She certainly lacked the spare time or inclination to play savior to a barefoot lunatic.
As long as their pathetic little drama did not interrupt her reading, she would happily pretend she heard nothing at all.
Faced with this concentrated wall of malice, Luna did not flush with embarrassment, nor did her eyes well with tears. She merely tilted her head, her silvery gaze resting calmly on the freckled boy leading the charge. When she spoke, her tone was entirely serious and lukewarm.
"Wrackspurts do not build nests. They only crawl through the ears and into narrow-minded, prejudiced brains, making the thoughts inside as chaotic and fuzzy as the bottom of a moldy cauldron." She paused, her unblinking gaze sweeping across their sneering faces. "Much like... all of you right now."
That airy, utterly emotionless retort hit them like a punch landing on soft cotton. The lack of fear or anger in her voice only served to make the Ravenclaws feel deeply insulted.
"What absolute nonsense are you spouting, you crazy woman?!" The freckled boy shot to his feet, his face flushing an ugly mottled red. Humiliated in front of his peers, he decided to escalate the attack.
He glared at Luna, his eyes brimming with contempt. And then, with spectacular foolishness, he made a decision he would deeply regret for the rest of his short, miserable life.
Raising his voice so it echoed off the stone walls, he sneered, "No wonder your brain is so completely defective! After all, you were lucky enough to attend that little secret tutoring class held by a certain Slytherin great genius last year!"
He deliberately dragged out the syllables, his tone piercing and shrill. "Tell me, did that almighty genius, praised to the high heavens by the entire school, only teach you how to magically vanish your own shoes? Or did she just teach you how to run around the castle barefoot like a complete idiot? If Slytherin's precious tutoring classes only churn out this kind of trash, then I am incredibly glad Ravenclaw didn't bother attending that ridiculous brainwashing session!"
The air in the classroom froze solid.
In her shadowed corner, Tamara's slender fingers, which had been in the middle of casually turning a page, stopped dead in mid-air.
Not a single muscle twitched on her exquisite, pale face. Her expression remained perfectly blank. Yet, the ambient temperature of the room plummeted to a glacial chill at a terrifying, unnatural speed.
With agonizing slowness, Tamara closed the heavy ancient tome. The soft thud of the leather cover snapping shut sounded like a judge's gavel in the dead silence.
The gloating Ravenclaws choked. An invisible, suffocating pressure clamped down on their throats like a giant's hand. Stiffly, their joints popping in the quiet, they turned their heads toward the back of the room. Toward the Slytherin girl sitting in the shadows.
Tamara's pitch-black eyes were fixed on them. There was zero warmth in that gaze. She looked at them the way a mortician might look at a row of corpses that had already begun to rot and fester.
She did not bother to stand. She did not even reach for the polished holly wand resting innocently on the desk beside her tea.
In the midst of this suffocating, lethal silence, Luna—who had seemed entirely detached from the escalating danger—suddenly spoke up.
She looked earnestly at the bullies, whose freckled faces were rapidly draining of all color. Her tone maintained that slow, logically clear melody. "Tamara taught us very well. The magical principles she explained in that lesson were actually far more thorough than what my own father taught me."
Luna tilted her head back, her silvery eyes tracking up to the high wooden rafters. "As for my shoes, they are missing because you took advantage of my inattention and used the Levitation Spell to hide them up on the ceiling beams. Confusing someone else's excellent teaching with your own crude, mean-spirited pranks..." Luna let out a soft sigh, delivering her final, clinical diagnosis. "Your brains must be absolutely infested with Nargles. They are clearly eating away at your remaining sanity."
The freckled boy's pale face flooded with a violent mix of shame and defensive rage. His hand twitched, subconsciously dropping toward his robes to draw his wand.
He never got the chance to shout the rest of his insult.
Tamara still did not lift an eyelash. She merely raised one pale hand and gave a slight, dismissive flick of her fingers. A piece of wandless magic—a spell that had once made the Dark Lord chuckle with cruel amusement—snapped into effect.
The Ravenclaw boy froze mid-draw. The muscles in his face spasmed. The corners of his mouth jerked upward, stretching into a grotesque, uncontrollable arc that bared his teeth.
"Haha... Hahahaha—!"
It was not just him. The three accomplices flanking him simultaneously doubled over, clutching their stomachs as explosive, tearing laughter ripped from their throats.
"Hahahaha! Help... help! Hahahaha—!"
There was not a single ounce of joy in that sound. The overcharged power of the Cheering Charm bypassed their emotional defenses entirely, crudely and violently stimulating the most fragile neural centers of their brains. They shrieked with laughter, their bodies convulsing so violently they could not draw breath. Their faces shifted from red to a dangerous, mottled purple as the early symptoms of severe hypoxia set in.
The surrounding students were paralyzed with horror. They scrambled backward, knocking over inkwells and chairs, looking on as though they were witnessing a gruesome cult sacrifice. Not a single person dared to step forward. Not a single person dared to draw a wand to attempt a counter-curse.
Amidst the hair-raising, agonizing shrieks of laughter echoing off the stone walls, Tamara remained perfectly still in her high-backed chair.
"It seems you are all quite delighted by my curriculum. I am very happy to see such enthusiasm." There was absolutely no fluctuation in Tamara's silken voice. Yet, beneath the polite words lay a crushing arrogance and a raw, bleeding killing intent that made the very souls of the onlookers tremble. "However, if I ever hear another word of nonsense regarding my tutoring class spill from your mouths again, you pathetic pieces of trash..."
She let the silence stretch, punctuated only by the boys' gasping, wheezing laughter.
"I will carve out your tongues and leave them, along with your shriveled little brains, trapped in this room forever."
[Ding! Severe warning! Detected that the host is inflicting inhumane mental torture on classmates, seriously violating the "Friendly and Harmonious" campus guidelines!]
The haunting, perpetually perky voice of the Virtue System exploded inside Tamara's skull right on cue. The blue text was accompanied by the ominous, crackling hum of threatening electrical static, preparing to shock her into submission.
[However...]
The System's tone executed a whiplash-inducing pivot, suddenly sounding deeply moved and immensely gratified.
[Given that although the host's methods were undeniably brutal, she objectively and perfectly stopped an active case of campus bullying! The host bravely stepped forward to protect a weak, pitiful, and barefoot lower-year female student! Please keep up the excellent work, host! Next time, try to spread love and peace in a slightly gentler way~]
'Protect the weak?' Tamara's internal sneer was venomous. She simply could not stomach a few insignificant bugs daring to challenge her absolute authority within her own territory.
Just then, a sound echoed from the depths of the corridor. It was the unique, hurried pitter-patter of Professor Flitwick's tiny footsteps approaching the door.
"Oh my! What is all that commotion? Is someone practicing the Cheering Charm already?" the half-goblin's squeaky voice called out.
Hearing the approaching professor, a sharp flash of annoyance cut through Tamara's dark eyes. She had zero desire to deal with a rambling, overly concerned faculty member right now.
Picking up her wand from the desk, Tamara gave it a lazy, casual flick.
"Finite Incantatem."
The spell snapped. The boys, who had been writhing and shrieking just a fraction of a second prior, collapsed against the desks. They looked like drowning victims suddenly hauled onto dry land, violently gasping for air. Their robes were drenched in cold sweat, and their faces had drained to a sickly, papery white.
Trembling violently, they scrambled to snatch their dropped wands from the floor. They shot one single, utterly terrified look at the beautiful Slytherin girl in the corner, then stumbled frantically back to their seats. They buried their faces deep into their textbooks, terrified to even breathe too loudly.
The pathetic farce was over.
Tamara smoothly reopened her ancient tome, fully prepared to resume her dissection of complex medieval magic circuits.
But Luna, who had been standing quietly in the center of the room the entire time, suddenly turned her head. Not only was she completely unfazed by the terrifying display of dark intent she had just witnessed, but a soft, dreamlike smile actually bloomed across her dirt-smudged face.
"Thank you, Tamara," Luna said. Her voice was incredibly soft, yet in the dead, traumatized silence of the classroom, it rang out with crystal clarity. "You look... not quite as irritable as you did last year."
Luna tilted her head slightly to the side. Her tone carried a near-childlike innocence, paired with a devastating directness. "But... your eyes seem to be hiding far more unsettling things now."
She raised a slender hand, her pale fingers tracing a vague, floating shape in the empty air, as if outlining the silhouette of some invisible, hovering monster.
"Are you afraid of something invisible?" Luna murmured. "The kind of thing that... is clearly very warm and sparkly, yet it wants to forcibly change who you are from the inside out? Making you feel like you are constantly about to suffocate?"
Tamara's fingers, resting on the edge of a parchment page, locked up completely.
'Such detestable, horrifying sharpness.'
A violent spike of danger—the primal threat of having her deepest, most heavily guarded secret peered into—made her magical core flare. Her instincts screamed at her to raise her strongest Occlumency shields and obliterate the threat. But she was, after all, Tamara Riddle. The Slytherin most peerless at the art of emotional disguise.
The microscopic flinch lasted barely a tenth of a second before it was flawlessly buried beneath a veneer of icy arrogance.
"Heh..." Tamara let out a breathy, highly mocking laugh. She slowly raised her chin, looking down her nose at the barefoot Ravenclaw. "Do put away your ridiculous little imaginings, Lovegood."
She did not even dignify the psychoanalysis with a proper refutation. Instead, she casually raised her holly wand and gave a dismissive flick toward the dark wooden beams of the ceiling.
Thump. Thump.
A pair of worn-out canvas sneakers tumbled from the high rafters, dropping perfectly onto the stone floor right at Luna's bare toes.
"Take better care of your shoes," Tamara commanded. Her voice was as cold as permafrost, radiating a definitive boundary designed to keep the entire world a thousand miles away. "My business has absolutely nothing to do with you."
Having delivered her final word, Tamara lowered her head. She forcefully ignored the deeply annoying, terrifyingly intuitive girl, locking her dark eyes back onto the ancient text.
Staring down at the canvas sneakers by her feet, Luna did not look the least bit saddened by Tamara's freezing rejection. She slowly bent over, slipped her feet into the shoes, and straightened up. She took one last, lingering look at the beautiful girl sitting alone in the shadows—a girl who seemed fundamentally at war with the entire world.
"As I thought... there are still so many Wrackspurts buzzing about," Luna murmured softly to herself. Then, turning on her heel, she drifted out of the Charms classroom like a weightless, wandering cloud.
"Goodbye, Tamara," her airy voice floated back from the corridor. "We can go look for traces of the Crumple-Horned Snorkack together another day, if you'd like."
Tamara did not move a muscle. She waited in the shadows, listening until those light, skipping footsteps completely faded away at the far end of the corridor.
Only then did she slowly, mechanically, turn the parchment page in her hand.
But her dark eyes remained rigidly fixed on the exact same line of obscure, ancient Latin for a full ten minutes. She did not absorb a single syllable.
'Damn Lovegood...'
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