Chapter 188: No Coercion
After the start-of-term feast, the Slytherin students filed down the dark, damp stone stairs, retreating into the depths of the castle. The Common Room, situated at the very bottom of the Black Lake, bathed them in a familiar, eerie greenish glow as they stepped through the hidden entrance.
At the beginning of every new school year, tradition dictated that the prefects establish their authority over the fresh meat and reiterate the house rules. Gemma Farley stood tall before the roaring fireplace, her voice echoing off the carved stone walls as she delivered her formal speech. Yet, the moment she finished her rehearsed lines, her gaze drifted subtly toward the figure lounging in the high-backed leather armchair in the corner.
Tamara Riddle.
Gemma knew the truth of the dungeons perfectly well. She might wear the silver prefect badge on her chest, but everyone in the room knew exactly who sat upon the true throne of Slytherin.
Sensing the prefect's lingering gaze, Tamara offered a faint, almost imperceptible nod—a silent acknowledgment of Gemma's sensible behavior. This handover of power was quiet and seamless, entirely devoid of the usual pure-blood power struggles. It contained only tacit understanding and absolute submission.
"Alright."
The soft clink of porcelain against a saucer cut through the room as Tamara set down her teacup. Her cool, measured voice washed over the Common Room, instantly suffocating the lingering whispers and shuffling feet.
"A new year has begun, and I have absolutely no desire to repeat those tired clichés." Tamara's dark eyes slowly swept across the sea of faces, her gaze sharp enough to draw blood. "I only ask one thing: do not bring shame to the name of Slytherin."
She let the silence stretch, allowing the weight of her words to settle over the room.
"In this school full of shifting variables, strength and brains are the only things you can rely on." She paused, her eyes locking onto a cluster of shivering first and second-year students huddled near the back. A flash of undisguised annoyance flickered across her features. "If there is nothing else tonight, return to your dormitories immediately. I require quiet."
The crowd dispersed with frantic speed, moving as if they had just been granted a general amnesty from the executioner's block. The lower years and a good portion of the upper-year students drained from the Common Room like a receding tide, their footsteps hurried and hushed.
A few moments later, only a few dozen third-year students remained in the cavernous space.
Clearly, after committing to the ultra-high-difficulty elective courses, these third-years could hardly claim they had "nothing else" to do. Aside from the resident simpletons like Crabbe and Goyle—who possessed just enough self-awareness to scramble back to their beds and fall into a drooling sleep—those left behind were the Slytherins who had gritted their teeth and registered for Ancient Runes and Arithmancy.
Right now, this group of self-proclaimed elite little snakes were painfully huddled around several long oak tables. Thick, dust-covered textbooks were piled high in front of them, looking heavy enough to crush a man's skull.
"This isn't meant for human eyes to read at all!" Draco Malfoy stared frantically at the twisted, tadpole-like Ancient Runes characters crawling across his parchment. He dug his fingers into his pale blonde hair, looking as though his brain might spontaneously combust. "Why does this 'Ehwaz'have to be interpreted as'betrayal'in an inverted sentence? Doesn't it represent'horse'and'trust'?! There is zero logic to this!"
"Because it's inverted, Malfoy." Pansy Parkinson lay completely flat against the table, staring blankly at the stone ceiling like a corpse drained of all will to live. Her fingers unconsciously twirled a black feather quill. "And those formulas in Arithmancy... I would honestly rather drink an entire cauldron of Professor Snape's undercooked Swelling Solution than calculate one more soul number."
"If you cannot even sort out that basic thread of logic, perhaps you should march up to Divination with the Hufflepuffs and listen to that lunatic predict you'll choke to death on your morning pumpkin juice."
The consistently taciturn Theodore Nott delivered the stinging remark without even looking up. His thin, aristocratic face bore deep signs of exhaustion, though the runic diagrams on his parchment were significantly more organized than Draco's chaotic scribbles.
"Oh, as if you actually understand the magic framework of Chapter Three," Draco shot back, letting out a heavy, rattling sigh. He felt he had exhausted a lifetime's worth of sighs in a single evening.
"Stop arguing, both of you. My grammatical derivation has been stuck on the same line for half an hour." Daphne Greengrass rubbed her temples, her beautiful blonde hair falling in disarray as her voice cracked with sheer frustration.
Had Tamara not been sitting quietly by the fireplace, this pampered collection of young lords and ladies would have undoubtedly hurled these cursed textbooks straight into the depths of the Black Lake hours ago.
From her high-backed chair, Tamara casually flipped through a heavy tome on Dark Arts theory she had quietly liberated from the Restricted Section, absorbing every pathetic wail and petty argument drifting from the tables.
'Fools.'
How could these pathetic creatures, who couldn't even untangle the most basic foundational rune structures, dare to call themselves pure-blood elites?
Yet, Tamara made no move to offer them any cheap assistance.
Relying on past experience, she simply closed her eyes and silently counted down in her head. Three. Two. One.
According to the twisted, sickening logic of her Virtue System, the glowing interface should pop up right about now, chiming merrily to issue some nauseating task about 'caring for her classmates'and'developing mutual assistance.'
Tamara shifted into a more comfortable position, her pale fingertips tapping a slow, rhythmic beat against the aged parchment of her book. She was in absolutely no hurry to answer these idiots' questions. Since she would inevitably have to speak and guide them anyway, she might as well wait for the System to drop the mandatory quest so she could snag a few free attribute points in the process.
However, a full minute passed.
Then two minutes.
Aside from the grating sound of Draco irritably scratching his quill against the table, her mind remained deathly silent.
Tamara's brow twitched. Her tapping fingers stilled.
'Are you dead?' she questioned coldly in her mind.
[Oh my, since you haven't died, Host, how could this System possibly bear to pass on?~]
The System's undulating, sickeningly perky voice finally rang out, dripping with sluggish sarcasm.
[This System just detected that the Host is deeply immersed in the dark, edgy ocean of Black Magic theory and seems to be in a rather foul mood!]
[This System is very humane now! Since you clearly do not want to help those dim-witted classmates from the bottom of your cold, dark heart, this System will absolutely not force you.]
[After all, forced fruit isn't sweet! How could it possibly be good to force the noble, terrifying Dark Lord to do good deeds? What if you get sick from all that suppressed anger? We wouldn't want that!]
Tamara's finger, which had been resting on the edge of a page, suddenly locked. The fragile, centuries-old parchment gave a dangerous tearing sound under her tightening grip.
This damn thing... was actually playing hard to get with her?!
But the most agonizingly ironic part of the situation was that, this time, Tamara actually intended to help these useless idiots.
Her reasoning was entirely pragmatic. In her past life, Lord Voldemort ruled the Death Eaters through absolute, paralyzing fear and the liberal application of the Cruciatus Curse.
But now, trapped in this shell and shackled by this infuriating System, she couldn't use those methods. Without the threat of agonizing death and endless pain to keep her followers in line, Tamara needed to establish a different kind of absolute worship. She needed to engrave a "might makes right" mentality so deeply into their bones that they would never dare question her.
She needed these future heads of the Sacred Twenty-Eight to clearly, painfully realize one obvious fact: without the supreme guidance of Tamara Riddle, they were nothing more than a collection of mediocre, inbred trash.
She wasn't tutoring her classmates. She was domesticating her dogs.
Her jaw set. Tamara snapped her book shut, stood up, and closed the distance to the long oak tables with slow, elegant, predatory strides.
Draco, who had been mid-complaint, instantly snapped his mouth shut. The color drained from his face. Daphne and Pansy immediately sat up straight, their spines rigid.
"Bring those parchments filled with absolute nonsense over here."
Tamara took a seat at the head of the table. Her voice was ice-cold, yet the sheer authority in her tone made everyone present feel as though they had just been granted a desperate reprieve.
She reached out and snatched the crumpled parchment directly from in front of Draco.
"'Ehwaz' in the context of Ancient Runes does indeed represent trust," she began, her tone clipped and precise.
Tamara drew her holly wand from her robes. With a casual, fluid flick of her wrist, she traced the rune directly into the empty air. A brilliant emerald light bled from her wand tip, leaving a perfect, glowing runic trail suspended in the damp atmosphere of the dungeon.
"But when it is placed in an inverted sentence structure and bound to 'Laguz,'which represents'water,' its entire magic circuit reverses flow." She tapped the floating green light, watching it twist and invert. "The reversal of trust is betrayal. Water erodes the foundation."
Draco stared at the glowing symbol, stunned. A second later, his gray eyes widened in sudden comprehension, and he nodded frantically, scrambling to copy the floating diagram.
Tamara didn't wait for him to finish. She turned her sharp gaze to Theodore Nott, mercilessly dissecting the fatal flaw in his careful notes.
"Nott. Your direction of derivation is technically correct, but within the framework of Chapter Three, you completely overlooked the spatial extensibility of runes as the foundation of ancient magic circles." She tapped her wand against his parchment, leaving a faint scorch mark. "You are dismantling planar, two-dimensional runes as if they were three-dimensional spell models. That is exactly why your calculations collapse before you reach the final result."
Theodore stared down at his notes, his jaw tight. A moment later, a rare flash of genuine surprise broke through his exhausted facade. The structural problem he had agonized over for the past six hours had been effortlessly unraveled by Tamara in exactly two sentences.
"As for the Arithmancy the two of you are butchering..."
She shifted her dark eyes toward Pansy and Daphne, who both flinched slightly under the weight of her attention. "Forget the superficiality of the numbers clogging your heads. Look for the magic resonance frequency hiding behind them."
She leaned forward slightly, her presence dominating the space. "In divination, prime numbers always represent shifting variables. They are never the final results."
For the next hour, Tamara ruthlessly suppressed the burning urge to turn every single one of these heirs into garden slugs. Instead, she used sharp, concise, and utterly unforgiving language to precisely analyze the academic roadblocks that had been driving them to the brink of madness.
The entire process was laced with her merciless, condescending humiliation, but the results were absolute. Tamara's explanations cut straight through the bloated, complex academic facade of their textbooks, exposing the raw, beating essence of the magic beneath.
"Do you understand?"
Tamara asked the question softly, her cold eyes sweeping over the group of Slytherins who were now frantically scribbling notes, looking as though they had just been handed the secrets of the universe.
In the heavy, suffocating atmosphere she had cultivated, absolutely no one dared to let a single syllable of dissent escape their lips. Unless, of course, they wished to be served as breakfast to the Giant Squid residing just outside the glass windows tomorrow morning.
More, they truly did understand.
Watching their submissive, awe-struck postures, Tamara slowly withdrew her gaze, a deep sense of satisfaction settling in her chest. The dogs were learning to heel.
"Very well."
She stood up, smoothing the front of her robes. "Since you all understand so perfectly now, then for the remainder of this semester, I expect to see your grades for these two courses consistently maintained at a highly 'pleasing' level."
Tamara leaned down slightly, planting both hands flat against the oak table. She lowered her voice into a hair-raisingly soft, silken whisper.
"If, by the end of the term, I find that anyone's grades are dragging our house down... I will not mind sacrificing a bit of my personal rest time to provide highly personal, individual guidance down here in the dungeons."
Her dark eyes locked onto Draco, then Theodore, promising untold horrors.
"Until you have those magic circuits permanently engraved into your brains."
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