Chapter 221: Realism
The entire following week, Tamara Riddle's life could only be described as exhaustingly busy.
Not that third-year academics posed any actual difficulty for a Dark Lord who had once graduated with straight O's. Whether it was in Professor McGonagall's Transfiguration class, where she flawlessly coaxed an ordinary porcelain teapot into a perfectly formed tortoise without a single wasted wand movement; or in Professor Flitwick's Charms class, casually executing non-verbal spells that far eclipsed the standard third-year curriculum; or even down in the damp dungeons for Potions, where she brewed with such fluid, careful grace that even Severus Snape's hyper-critical eyes could not spot a single flaw to deduct points over.
This former Slytherin prefect crushed her peers with absolute, suffocating dominance. She swept the top marks in every subject without a sliver of suspense. As Hogwarts' most dazzling genius, Tamara glided through the castle corridors with effortless poise, naturally basking in the undisguised wonder, praise, and blatant favoritism of the entire faculty.
Honestly, the hypocritical school life was not the torturous part.
The true torture was having to personally tutor a monumental idiot every single day after classes ended.
After being ruthlessly tormented by Tamara for several consecutive days, Harry's mind had finally stopped resembling a drafty, broken cupboard. He could barely scrape together a paper-thin barrier in his consciousness—just enough so that one could not read his deepest secrets at a mere passing glance.
It was another grueling half-hour session after class.
"Begin."
Tamara sat perched in a high-backed chair, her hands elegantly folded across her chest. Her deep, cold eyes locked onto Harry with an emotionless, predatory focus.
Standing opposite her, Harry took a deep, shuddering breath. His body instinctively coiled tight, muscles bracing for the inevitable spike of pain.
"Legilimency."
She did not even bother raising her wand. A cold, pervasive will violently stabbed into Harry's brain like an ice pick.
Harry gasped, painfully meeting Tamara's dark eyes. He fought desperately to shove down the flashing images of Sirius Black and the Marauder's Map, scrambling to use the crude methods Tamara had drilled into him to construct that fragile line of defense.
But over these past few days, the sheer humiliation of it all had been festering. The helplessness of unilaterally enduring this mental butchery finally triggered a fierce, reckless spark of rebellion within his mind.
'Why is it always Tamara invading me?''Why does she get to sit up there on her high horse, effortlessly tearing my thoughts inside out, while I do not have the faintest clue what is going on in her head?'
Backed into a corner by Tamara's suffocating consciousness, with absolutely nowhere left to retreat, Harry's eyes suddenly snapped wide.
A desperate, burning resolve ignited in the depths of his emerald irises. Facing Tamara's freezing gaze, he made a wildly foolish choice: he abandoned his defenses entirely and condensed his own scattered mental strength into a single, blunt spear.
Even if he had never formally learned how to do it, he had certainly been on the receiving end enough times. Relying purely on raw intuition and desperate imitation, Harry launched a crude, reverse Legilimency strike directly at Tamara's mind!
Tamara's eyelashes flickered. Just a fraction of a millimeter.
She keenly sensed the boy's aggressive, clumsy mental energy attempting to scrape against her consciousness.
'Overestimating yourself, you pathetic little worm.'
An arrogant, freezing sneer echoed in the dark abyss of her heart. Without a single outward shift in her expression, her Occlumency activated. The barrier was a flawless fortress of diamond and steel, effortlessly shattering Harry's pathetic little probe into microscopic dust upon impact.
But she was not finished.
The sheer audacity of this idiot attempting to peer into her thoughts thoroughly enraged the great Dark Lord.
"It seems your trivial bit of progress has given you the ridiculous delusion that you can stand on equal footing with me," Tamara said, her voice dropping to a deadly whisper.
She stood up abruptly. The magic output she had been carefully restraining doubled in a fraction of a second.
Unleashing a far more destructive wave of Legilimency, she mercilessly crushed the thin, pitiful layer of defense Harry had just managed to establish.
Harry let out a raw cry of agony.
The intense, splitting pain made it impossible for him to remain standing. His knees buckled, and he crashed heavily onto the hard stone floor. He clutched his head, curling inward, desperately trying to look down to avoid Tamara's eyes—eyes that currently felt as terrifying as a bottomless abyss.
However, Tamara had no intention of giving him an avenue of escape.
She stepped forward, her shadow falling over his trembling form. Reaching out with a pale, freezing hand, Tamara grabbed a fistful of Harry's messy black hair and wrenched his head back, forcing him to look directly up at her.
"Who gave you the nerve to dare peer into my thoughts?"
Her voice was terrifyingly low, dripping with a crimson, swirling murderous intent that bled into her gaze. The suffocating, absolute pressure of the Dark Lord, mixed bizarrely with the crisp scent of cedar radiating from her robes, crashed over Harry like a tidal wave.
Yet, in this moment of extreme, suffocating tension...
That incredibly close physical contact, laden with such pure, concentrated malice, finally triggered the long-dormant lightning-bolt scar on Harry's forehead.
As the final Horcrux that Voldemort had unintentionally created, a jagged fragment of the Dark Lord's soul remained wedged deep within Harry's own.
When Tamara exerted such violent, murderous, close-range physical and mental pressure, the dark link between the two soul fragments was instantly ignited.
A blinding, burning agony suddenly exploded from the scar!
But before Harry could even open his mouth to scream from the searing pain...
That damned System once again triggered its unyielding protection mechanism.
[Ding! System background running: Detected that the host is performing unilateral mental and physical abuse on the target character, Harry Potter!]
[Detected intense Horcrux feedback pain signals within the target character's soul...]
[To maintain the host's precarious 'friendly' image and avoid causing irreversible physical or mental trauma during the teaching process—]
[Forced signal transcoding in progress... Pain blocking enabled... Replacing with—High-frequency dopamine simulation signal!]
The very instant the System's forced transcoding completed, the tearing agony in Harry's forehead felt as if some absurd, reality-bending magic had been cast over it.
Not only did the sensation of pain vanish into thin air, but in its place rushed something entirely different.
It was a pure, almost hallucinatory... ultimate joy. An overwhelming, staggering pleasure.
This euphoria, forcibly converted and injected by the System, was like a bursting dam, instantly washing through every single nerve ending in Harry's body.
Harry's eyes, which had been squeezed tightly shut in agony, snapped wide open.
He stared blankly up at the breathtakingly beautiful, furious face hovering mere inches away from his own.
His heart began to accelerate wildly, hammering against his ribs completely out of control. Blood thundered through his veins like liquid fire. A scalp-tingling rush of sheer excitement made even his ragged breathing turn scorching hot.
Time seemed to stretch infinitely in the quiet room.
Tamara looked down at the Savior, who by all rights should have been rolling on the floor in a puddle of his own tears.
Not only was he not screaming, but he was staring fixedly up at her with a dazed, flushed expression. In those emerald-green eyes, there was not a single microscopic hint of fear. Instead, there was a flashing, feverish fanaticism that made Tamara's skin violently crawl.
"You..."
The corner of Tamara's mouth twitched violently. A very, very bad premonition suddenly seized her.
Harry stammered. Under the catastrophic impact of the pleasure forcibly pumped into his brain by the System, his cognitive functions had completely stalled. It took a long, agonizing moment before he managed to squeeze a sentence from his dry throat—a sentence completely and utterly irrelevant to the deadly situation at hand:
"Too... too close..."
Tamara's face instantly blacked over like a thundercloud.
As if she had just grabbed a live Blast-Ended Skrewt, she abruptly released Harry's hair and took a massive step back, her face twisting in absolute disgust.
While frantically cursing this completely mentally ill Savior in the darkest corners of her mind, Tamara whipped out her wand and cast three consecutive, aggressive Scourgify charms directly onto her own hand.
"Harry Potter—" Tamara's voice actually cracked slightly, vibrating with sheer, unadulterated rage. "I am teaching you these things so you can defend yourself, not so you can peer into me!"
She forcefully swallowed the overwhelming urge to just end his miserable existence with a quick Avada Kedavra, instead issuing her dismissal in a cold, heartless tone.
"Since you have barely managed to master basic Occlumency, as long as the professors are not so morally bankrupt as to use deep Legilimency on you directly, general probes will not be able to pry into the secrets in your head anymore."
"You do not need to come back. Get out."
She refused to look at his incredibly stupid, flushed face for a single second longer.
Harry slowly scrambled up from the cold floor.
He gasped for air, clutching the lightning-shaped scar on his forehead. His heart was still thumping like a frantic war drum against his ribs. Even though Tamara had let go of him, the phantom echoes of that mind-melting pleasure still reverberated through his skull.
"...I understand."
After a hurried, breathless farewell, Harry stumbled out the heavy doors of the Room of Requirement and collapsed into the empty, shadowed corridor.
The cool night wind drafted through the stone halls, blowing against his face and slightly cooling his burning cheeks. Harry stopped, leaning heavily against the freezing stone wall, savoring that absurd yet terrifyingly addictive sensation.
But deep down, he clearly realized that what made his hands tremble was not just that sudden, inexplicable burst of pleasure.
What truly made his heart race out of control was the look Tamara had given him.
In the past, Tamara's gaze had always carried a high-and-mighty coldness. A pristine, untouchable disgust. Even when she smiled her perfect smiles, they were entirely devoid of temperature, distant, lacking even a trace of genuine humanity.
But just now...
A scorching, unmistakable fire had burned in Tamara's eyes.
That was a real human emotion. A vivid, intense, and visceral anger.
In that fleeting moment, an absurd illusion had taken root in his mind—it was as if she had finally stepped down from that untouchable, flawless pedestal. She had become a real, breathing human being who could be genuinely angered by him, someone who had focused the entirety of her intense attention solely on him.
Harry felt like he might truly be losing his mind.
That scorching, furious disgust actually made him feel grounded. Real.
Suddenly, a wild thought flashed through his racing mind.
Professor Lupin had said that the Patronus Charm required summoning the absolute purest, strongest happy memories from within.
And the feeling he had just experienced... that was undeniably the strongest, most extreme surge of euphoria he had ever felt in his entire life.
If, when casting the Patronus Charm...
He did not think about his first time riding a broomstick. He did not think about winning at Quidditch.
But instead, he thought back to everything that had just happened in that room.
Harry stared out the arched window at the rapidly darkening sky, his breath fogging the glass as he murmured to himself.
"...What would happen?"
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