Chapter 32: Raw Strength
During the first week of term, Professor Flitwick and Professor McGonagall had temporarily swapped their teaching slots, replacing the scheduled Charms block with Transfiguration. While it seemed like a simple, single-class exchange on paper, the cascading effect of juggling different years and rival houses threw the entire Hogwarts timetable into a minor state of chaos. It took until the middle of the semester for the Tuesday afternoon Charms class, shared between Slytherin and Ravenclaw, to finally settle back into its proper rhythm.
Right now, the spacious, tiered Charms classroom was a theater of absolute uproar.
Dozens of pristine white feathers fluttered erratically through the air, propelled by the desperate, rising and falling chants of first-year students.
"Wingardium Leviosa!"
"Oh, damn it, it fell down again!"
Because Tamara had already executed a flawless Levitation Charm during a previous private assessment, Professor Flitwick had granted her a rare privilege. She was exempt from the agonizingly basic exercises of the day, permitted instead to read independently at her desk.
This arrangement painted a rather bizarre picture in the sunlit corner by the window.
All around her, eleven-year-olds were practically having aneurysms, furiously jabbing their wands and butchering the incantation with appalling pronunciation. Yet, sitting dead center in the eye of this pathetic storm, Tamara remained a picture of serene grace. She held a brick-thick tome titled The Origins of Medieval Charms, her posture impeccably straight.
'Idiots. The lot of them. A simple swish and flick, and they act as if they are trying to move a mountain with a toothpick.'
Her expression was a mask of focused, gentle studiousness, entirely detached from the auditory torture happening around her. Whenever an out-of-control feather drifted too close to her face, propelled by some Ravenclaw's misfired magic, she merely tilted her head a fraction of an inch. She did not even bother to draw her wand to swat them away. It was beneath her.
Naturally, this blatant display of academic privilege did not go unnoticed by the eagles across the aisle.
"Hey, look at that Slytherin." Terry Boot, a Ravenclaw boy with a smattering of freckles and an inflated sense of self-importance, nudged Padma Patil with his elbow. "Why isn't she practicing? Doesn't Professor Flitwick care that she's just sitting there?"
Padma cast a sidelong, dismissive glance at Tamara's quiet corner and offered a contemptuous shrug. "Maybe she gave up. Everyone keeps whispering about how amazing Riddle is, but honestly? I think she is completely average. The Levitation Charm requires extreme focus and delicate magical control. Slytherins usually lack the patience for anything that doesn't involve hexing someone in the back."
"Exactly." Michael Corner leaned across his desk to join the gossip. He had just managed to make his feather hover a pathetic two inches off the wood, and his adolescent confidence was currently peaking at insufferable levels. "They only know how to throw around crude jinxes. When it comes to actual, delicate spellwork, you have to look to us Ravenclaws."
Eager to prove his own intellectual superiority, Terry Boot puffed out his chest. He intentionally raised his voice, ensuring the sound carried over the classroom din, and aggressively swished his wand.
"Wingardium Leviosa!"
By some miracle of statistical probability, his feather actually caught the magical current. It wobbled unsteadily, drifting upward until it hovered right at head height.
"Look! I did it!" Terry shouted, his voice cracking with triumph.
The surrounding Ravenclaws immediately broke into a smattering of applause and enthusiastic cheers, celebrating this monumental achievement of lifting a literal feather.
The praise acted like a swelling solution on Terry's ego. Puffed up and emboldened, he turned his body completely around, aiming a deliberate, mocking sneer at the quiet girl in the corner.
"Hey, Riddle!"
Tamara's slender finger, which had been in the middle of turning a brittle parchment page, paused. A microscopic halt. She did not raise her eyes.
"What is it? Did you realize you couldn't learn it, so you decided to pretend to read just to hide your embarrassment?" Terry jeered, his voice dripping with eleven-year-old condescension. "If you need help, we Ravenclaws really do not mind teaching you how to wave a wand correctly. After all, academic exchange knows no house boundaries, right?"
A chorus of snickers and outright laughter erupted from the blue-trimmed robes around him.
Across the aisle, several Slytherin students darkened with anger. A few gripped their wands, half-rising from their seats to defend their house's pride, but a single, elegant raise of Tamara's hand froze them in place. They sat back down instantly.
Slowly, deliberately, Tamara closed the heavy ancient tome.
Clap.
The sound of the leather cover meeting the parchment was soft. Yet, somehow, it cut through the chaotic noise of the classroom with chilling clarity.
"Academic exchange?" Tamara repeated the words. Her voice was a soft, melodic murmur, but the corners of her mouth curled into an arc of pure, unadulterated irony.
'I have slaughtered wizards whose magical knowledge could drown your entire pathetic bloodline, you freckled little insect.'
[Ding! Academic authority detected to be under provocation!]
The perky, aggressively cheerful voice of the Virtue System chimed directly into her cerebral cortex, entirely ruining her murderous mood.
[Mission: The Weight of Knowledge.]
[Mission Description: There is always a higher mountain and a taller building! One must always maintain a humble, helpful heart when dealing with peers.]
[Mission Requirement: Demonstrate your strength and patiently guide your classmates toward the light of knowledge!]
[Reward: Wisdom +2, Special Reputation unlocked.]
'Patiently guide them? I will guide them straight into the Black Lake.'
Suppressing a sigh that would have cost her precious system points, Tamara stood up. She smoothed her hands down the front of her Slytherin robes, brushing away non-existent wrinkles to buy herself a second of composure.
"Since you want to see it so badly..."
She reached into her robes and nonchalantly drew her holly wood wand. The polished wood spun once, a deadly blur of motion between her pale, slender fingers, before coming to a perfect rest in her grip.
"Then I will give you a lesson." She looked up, her dark eyes locking onto Terry Boot with the intensity of a predator observing a particularly slow mouse. "Watch closely. This is what you call 'delicate work.'"
The moment the last syllable left her lips, the atmosphere in the room shifted.
Tamara did not utter a single incantation. Her lips remained perfectly still.
She simply gave her wand a light, almost dismissive flick.
In the very next second, a scene unfolded that every single Ravenclaw present would burn into their memories for the rest of their natural lives.
It was not just the single white feather resting on Tamara's desk.
It was not just Terry Boot's feather, which was still bobbing pathetically in mid-air like a bloated flobberworm.
Across the entire expanse of the classroom, dozens upon dozens of feathers—those resting on desks, those discarded on the stone floor, and even the ones still tightly gripped in the sweaty hands of stunned students—all lost their gravitational anchors at the exact same instant.
It was as if an invisible, all-powerful hand had swept through the room. The feathers violently broke free from their owners' weak magical constraints, shooting upward in a synchronized, blinding white storm.
"Hey! My feather!"
"My god! What is happening?"
Cries of alarm and pure shock echoed off the stone walls. But amidst the panic, the students quickly realized the feathers were not flying randomly.
They were rapidly converging. Rotating. Arranging themselves with terrifying, mathematical precision in the empty space above the desks.
Tamara gave her wand another light, upward flick.
The chaotic storm of white instantly snapped into the shape of a massive, serpentine dragon. The feather-dragon surged forward, circling the high ceiling of the classroom in a flawless, undulating loop. The synchronized whoosh of a hundred quills slicing through the air sounded like a localized hurricane.
Then, Tamara's wrist snapped. The tip of her holly wand pressed down sharply.
Whoosh!
The majestic dragon shattered, and dozens of feathers plummeted like arrows, stopping dead exactly one inch above Terry Boot's head. They hovered there, a dense, vibrating cloud of white quills, locked in absolute stasis.
The entire room fell into a suffocating, dead silence.
Terry Boot's jaw hung entirely slack. He stared blankly upward, his eyes crossing slightly as he tried to focus on the massive, suspended weight of feathers threatening to bury him alive. A single drop of cold sweat broke out at his hairline and trickled slowly down his freckled forehead.
If Tamara's magical grip slipped by even a fraction of a percent, the sheer mass of the compacted quills would crash down and bury him.
The surrounding Ravenclaws swallowed hard, their previous arrogance evaporating into pure awe. What level of monstrous control was this? This was not the standard first-year Levitation Charm. This was taking the fundamental theory of the spell, tearing it apart, and grinding it into the dirt beneath her polished black shoes.
At the front of the room, Professor Flitwick, who was perched atop his usual stack of heavy spellbooks, was physically trembling with excitement.
"This... this..." The tiny Charms master gasped, his eyes widening to the size of saucers behind his spectacles. "A perfect Mass Levitation Charm! And executed non-verbally! With multi-threaded precision control! Sweet Merlin!"
Having made her point, Tamara gave her wand a final, dismissive wave.
The dense cloud of feathers instantly lost its rigid magical support. The tension broke, and they fluttered down gently, drifting like soft winter snowflakes. With eerie, calculated accuracy, every single feather landed perfectly back on the exact desk it had originated from.
Every feather, that is, except for Terry Boot's. His original feather drifted down and stuck straight upright into his messy hair, making him look like a particularly ridiculous, oversized quail.
Tamara sat back down in her chair, the picture of elegant composure, and calmly reopened her ancient tome.
"This is the academic exchange you wanted," she said. She did not bother to look up at him, her tone as flat and undisturbed as a still lake. "Now, can we practice quietly?"
The classroom remained deathly silent.
The Ravenclaws, who had been practically glowing with superior pride just a minute prior, now collectively bowed their heads. Their faces burned a uniform, bright red.
This was the impossible gap in raw strength. While they were still patting themselves on the back for making a single, weightless object wobble in the air, this Slytherin girl was already commanding the entire room's materials to dance a synchronized ballet.
The sharp ringing of the bell finally shattered the tension, signaling the end of class.
While the students were still numbly packing their parchment and quills into their bags, Professor Flitwick practically sprinted down the aisle toward Tamara's desk.
"Miss Riddle! Miss Riddle!"
The diminutive professor, whose goblin heritage gave him a surprisingly quick stride, was beaming from ear to ear. He looked up at Tamara, his eyes burning with the fervent intensity of a master jeweler who had just stumbled upon a flawless, unpolished diamond.
"Incredible! That display just now... the sheer intuition of your magical flow... it is simply genius!"
"Tha... Thank you, Professor," Tamara responded, perfectly modulating her voice to sound polite, humble, and just a touch shy.
"I have a humble request!" Professor Flitwick rubbed his hands together, practically bouncing on his heels as he asked expectantly, "I wonder if you would be interested in joining my Charms Club?"
The students lingering near the doorway gasped audibly.
The Charms Club! That was widely known as one of Hogwarts' most elite academic circles. Professor Flitwick usually only extended invitations to students in their third year or above who demonstrated exceptional, once-in-a-generation talent.
To be invited in her first year? In her first few months? It was an unmatched honor.
"Although we usually only recruit upper-year students..." Professor Flitwick added, looking somewhat sheepish but entirely resolute, "clearly, age and year limits are entirely meaningless to someone of your caliber. If you are willing, we meet every Friday night to discuss some... much more deep charms."
[Ding! Mission Completed: The Weight of Knowledge.]
[Reward: Wisdom +2.]
[Current Wisdom: 22.]
Tamara smiled slightly. It was a smile of perfect elegance, masking the dark, calculating triumph beneath.
"It would be my honor, Professor."
[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!]