Chapter 24: Soul Collision
If Transfiguration class had been an exercise in precision and art, the subsequent Defense Against the Dark Arts class was a dual assault on Tamara Riddle's senses and soul.
A suffocating stench hit her the moment she reached the end of the third-floor corridor.
It wasn't merely a bad odor. It was the pungent, eye-watering reek of hundreds of crushed garlic cloves, left to ferment in a confined space with something distinctly rotten for an entire summer.
"Ugh—" Goyle gagged, clapping a thick hand over his nose.
Draco Malfoy whipped out a pristine silk handkerchief, pressing it hard against his lower face. His pale features twisted in revulsion. "What kind of hellhole is this? Is this a classroom or a kitchen? I feel like I've stepped into a giant pickle jar."
Tamara halted at the threshold. Her expression darkened into something terrifyingly cold.
In her past life, even during the most frenzied, blood-soaked Death Eater rallies, she had maintained absolute elegance. Her robes had always been immaculate, the air around her forever carrying the metallic tang of blood mixed with a cold, aristocratic fragrance.
And now.
She stared at the heavy wooden door leaking toxic fumes, feeling her very dignity being dragged through the mud.
That main soul possessing Quirrell—the version of herself without a nose. Had he truly sunk this low? To mask the scent of his own rotting, parasitic existence, he had pickled himself?
'Simply... a disgrace to Slytherin,' she thought, her jaw locking tight.
She stepped into the classroom with heavy, measured steps, looking less like a student attending a lecture and more like an executioner approaching the block. The room was dim, draped in shadows and endless, obnoxious strings of garlic hanging from the ceiling and walls.
Behind the heavy wooden lectern stood the greatest joke in all of Hogwarts: Quirinus Quirrell.
He wore that absurd, oversized purple turban wrapped tightly around his head, looking like a deranged snake charmer. He rubbed his hands together frantically, his eyes darting from desk to desk, entirely lacking the courage to meet the gaze of the first-year students filtering into the room.
"G-good... morning, c-class," Quirrell stammered. His voice trembled, every syllable catching in his throat as if he were choking on his own tongue. "W-welcome to D-defense... Against the D-dark... Arts."
A wave of suppressed snickers rippled through the rows of desks.
Slytherins prided themselves on respecting tradition and authority, but maintaining a straight face before this stuttering clown proved impossible. Draco leaned back in his chair, tilting his head.
"G-g-good morning," he whispered to the surrounding desks, mimicking the professor's frantic eye movements perfectly. "I'm a... s-stutterer."
Pansy Parkinson slapped a hand over her mouth, her shoulders shaking with silent laughter. Crabbe and Goyle didn't even bother to hide their sneers, letting out thick, guttural chuckles.
The unbridled mockery sounded exceptionally harsh in the otherwise quiet, garlic-choked room. Quirrell's face flushed a patchy, blotchy red. He opened his mouth, seemingly trying to scold them, but no sound came out. Defeated, he awkwardly tugged at the edge of his purple turban, his eyes swimming with helpless panic.
Tamara sat dead center in the first row. Her face remained a mask of absolute indifference.
She didn't laugh.
Instead, a wave of shame and white-hot fury churned in her chest, threatening to boil over.
That was her main soul. That was the Dark Lord who had once held the entire wizarding world by the throat, the immortal terror whose very name made grown men weep. Now, he stood cowering behind a lectern like a frightened quail, being openly mocked by a gaggle of eleven-year-old brats!
"Enough."
Tamara brought the base of her expensive holly wand down against the wooden desk.
The crisp clack wasn't loud, but it carried a biting, glacial authority that instantly sliced through the snickering. Draco froze mid-mimicry. Pansy's laughter cut off with a sharp squeak, like a duck getting its neck wrung.
Every eye in the room snapped to the front row. Tamara turned her head by slow degrees, her obsidian eyes sweeping over the students behind her. The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees.
"Is this Slytherin etiquette?" she asked, her voice dangerously soft. "Mocking your Professor like a pack of ill-bred baboons?"
"But he—" Draco started to protest, lowering his handkerchief.
"Mocking such a pathetic figure," Tamara interrupted, her tone carrying the absolute finality of a judge passing a sentence, "only makes you look low-class."
The Slytherins stared at her, utterly bewildered. They couldn't decipher if she was defending Quirrell or delivering a far more devastating insult.
[Ding! Detected that the host maintained classroom discipline, demonstrating the beautiful virtue of respecting teachers.]
[Although your tone was heavily sarcastic, the end result is full of positive energy!]
[Reward: Wisdom +1.]
Tamara sneered inwardly.
Respecting teachers? No. She simply refused to watch 'herself' be played for a fool by a bunch of half-wit children. It was physically painful to witness.
"Th-thank you, M-miss Riddle," Quirrell stammered, a complicated flicker of emotion passing through his watery eyes. "T-today's lesson, w-we are going to talk about... v-Vampires."
Quirrell launched into his pathetic performance. He rambled about a vampire he had supposedly encountered in Romania, detailing how he had used garlic to drive the creature away. His narrative was a disjointed, illogical mess, and he even managed to mispronounce the incantations for three basic defensive charms.
Listening to this fabricated drivel, the dark fury in Tamara's chest did not cool. It burned hotter.
During the previous Transfiguration class, she had been forced to burn a precious system item just to save face. She was currently brimming with a volatile, murderous frustration and nowhere to direct it.
This garlic-reeking, play-acting fool standing before her was the perfect target.
When Quirrell reiterated that garlic was the ultimate bane of vampires, Tamara elegantly raised her hand.
Quirrell paused. Seeing it was the polite, helpful student from earlier, his face split into a fawning, eager smile. "M-miss Riddle? D-do you have... a question?"
Tamara stood up.
She stared directly at Quirrell, her dark eyes filled with a heavy, calculating scrutiny. A slow, dangerous smile curled the corners of her lips.
"Professor, you mentioned earlier that this garlic is meant to ward off the vampire you met in Romania. To prevent it from tracking you down for revenge, correct?"
"Y-yes," Quirrell squeaked, his fingers nervously plucking at his turban again.
"That is truly a touching story." Tamara drew out the words, her voice light, airy, and gentle. Yet every syllable felt like a poisoned needle. "But I am curious, Professor."
She took a single, deliberate step forward, closing the distance to the lectern.
"Garlic can indeed ward off low-level dark creatures like vampires. However..." Tamara narrowed her eyes, her gaze sliding past Quirrell's face to lock dead onto the back of his head, right where the thickest folds of the purple turban rested. "What if the thing possessing a person isn't a vampire at all?"
The classroom went dead silent.
"What if it is a... more ancient, weaker, disembodied remnant soul? A pathetic fragment that can only cling to life by acting as a parasite?"
The words struck like a silent thunderclap.
The fawning smile on Quirrell's face shattered. His body jerked, locking into absolute rigidity. The nervous hunch in his spine vanished, snapping straight with an unnatural, terrifying swiftness.
In that split second, the man behind the lectern changed.
The cowardly, evasive, stuttering fool evaporated. In his place, a fleeting, blood-chilling crimson light flared within Quirrell's eyes.
It was the gaze of Lord Voldemort.
It was the lethal, unblinking stare of a venomous viper whose tail had just been crushed under a boot heel. He stared through Quirrell's eyes, locking onto the eleven-year-old girl standing before him.
The air in the classroom turned to lead. Draco, Pansy, and the others had no idea what Tamara's words truly meant, but they felt the sudden, crushing shift in the atmosphere. The pressure in the room grew so heavy it squeezed the breath from their lungs.
Tamara met that crimson stare without blinking.
At this exact moment, two Voldemorts faced each other.
One possessed a young, healthy body, shackled by a ridiculous Virtue System.
One possessed a powerful main soul, reduced to living as a parasite on a useless, garlic-soaked host.
Their gazes clashed in the dead air.
Buzz—
A spike of blinding, agonizing pain drove straight into the core of Tamara's brain.
This was no ordinary headache. It was the violent resonance of souls—the catastrophic repulsion and magnetic attraction generated when two fragments of the exact same origin were forced into close proximity.
[Warning! High-risk malicious intent source intrusion detected!]
[Detected that the host possesses no defensive skills.]
[Triggering highest-level security protocol: Soul Firewall activated.]
Buzz—!
This was not a clash of magic. It was a brutal, tearing repulsion on the spiritual plane. It was the terrifying friction produced when two soul fragments, born from the same source but bound by entirely different cosmic laws, ground against one another. It was like forcing the identical poles of two massive magnets together.
Hiss—!
Tamara swayed, her face draining of all color as it felt like a red-hot iron poker was violently stirring her gray matter.
But the man across from her suffered far worse.
"Ah!" Quirrell suddenly shrieked. He clutched the back of his head with both hands, stumbling backward so fast he nearly sent the heavy wooden lectern crashing to the stone floor.
The sensation tearing through his skull felt as though he had plunged his bare hands into a cauldron of boiling lava. The Virtue System had instantly wrapped Tamara's soul in an impenetrable, unanalyzable layer of garbled code, violently burning away Voldemort's dark, probing curiosity.
Quirrell—Voldemort—stared at her, chest heaving.
He had likely never imagined he would sense an aura that even he found daunting radiating from a first-year student. It was the distinct, unmistakable aura of his own kind.
But what enraged him more than the pain was the sheer humiliation of the encounter.
"Sit down!" Quirrell roared.
The extreme emotional and physical shock stripped away his disguise entirely. His voice was sharp, high, and piercing, completely devoid of any stutter. He spun around, presenting his back to Tamara, his hands gripping the edges of the lectern so tightly his knuckles turned a bloodless white.
He stood there, gasping for breath, desperately trying to claw back his clumsy persona.
"T-that is a meaningless hypothesis!" he choked out, his voice pitching back into its frantic tremble. "G-garlic is very effective! Very effective! Now... o-open your textbooks to page ten!"
Tamara stared at the trembling back of the man who had just fled from her gaze. A cold, contemptuous sneer touched her lips.
Coward.
To be provoked so easily by a mere student, only to turn tail and hide? It seemed that slicing one's soul into pieces truly did inflict irreparable damage upon one's intellect and breadth of mind.
She elegantly lowered herself back into her chair.
The brief, agonizing confrontation hadn't instilled a drop of fear in her. Instead, it sent a rush of twisted, intoxicating pleasure through her veins. The lingering frustration from Transfiguration class evaporated entirely.
Tamara opened her textbook, her eyes resting on an illustration of a shambling zombie, but her focus was miles away, staring into the void.
'Since you have fallen so far as to parasite the body of such a pathetic idiot...'she thought, her fingers lightly trailing over the polished wood of her wand, feeling the faint, thrumming warmth of the phoenix feather core within.'Then I will gladly take this Philosopher's Stone on your behalf.''After all...' Her dark eyes gleamed.'Only a complete, powerful version of myself is worthy of eternal life. Isn't that right?'
The remainder of the lesson was agonizingly dull.
Quirrell seemed genuinely terrified. Perhaps he feared being stung again by another of Tamara's razor-sharp questions, because he spent the rest of the hour reading strictly from the textbook, his eyes glued to the parchment. He didn't dare glance in the direction of the front row.
When the bell finally rang, signaling the end of the period, Quirrell shouted, "Class dismissed!" before the final chime even faded. He snatched up his books and bolted into the private office behind the lectern, slamming the door shut as if a pack of hellhounds were snapping at his heels.
"What is wrong with him?" Draco asked, his brow furrowed in confusion as he packed his parchment and quills into his bag. "It's like he's seen a ghost."
"Perhaps," Tamara said softly. She stood up, her hands smoothing down the invisible wrinkles in her pristine robes. "Perhaps he really did see a ghost."
She paused, casting a long, sidelong glance at the heavy oak door of the professor's office. A cruel, knowing smile curled her lips.
"Or... perhaps he saw something far more terrifying than a ghost."
She turned away, her robes billowing slightly. "Let's go, Draco."
Tamara was the first to stride out of the garlic-infested classroom. As she stepped into the corridor, she breathed in the drafty castle air. It was cold, but it was fresh, and it made her feel as though she had just come back to life.
"Let's go to lunch," she said, her mood vastly improved. "I suddenly feel that even that dreadful pumpkin juice might not taste so bad today."
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