After dinner, Kate made the rare decision to turn down Hermione's invitation to the library, citing a mildly upset stomach, and headed back to the Common Room instead.
She walked in to find Pansy and Malfoy hunched over a game of Wizard Chess.
But judging by the long face Malfoy was pulling and the carnage scattered across the board, it was abundantly clear that her mind wasn't on the game at all.
"I win, Draco." Pansy declared checkmate with effortless ease, then moved to clear the board — and looked up to find Kate standing nearby, watching the two of them.
She read the room immediately. Setting her pieces down, she rose to her feet. "Oh, I just remembered I have homework to finish. Find someone else to play with."
"What homework? Didn't you finish it already?" Malfoy frowned and reached out to pull her back — but a shadow fell over the chessboard in front of her.
She looked up, irritated — and the moment she saw Kate's curious expression, whatever remained of her good mood plummeted straight to the floor.
"Don't be in such a hurry to leave," Kate said quickly, catching Malfoy's sleeve. "Surely you don't think you'd actually lose at Wizard Chess to someone like me — someone who didn't grow up in the wizarding world?"
Malfoy's face flushed scarlet. She slammed the chessboard down on the table with a resounding crack. "Who said I'd lose!"
"Then let's find out." Kate curved her lips into a smile, and shot Pansy a pointed look: go, now.
The two of them sat back down. Malfoy arranged her pieces — and then noticed Kate was carefully copying her setup, mimicking her piece placement.
"Oi. You've never actually learned Wizard Chess, have you?" she said, dripping scorn.
Kate smiled with complete candor. "Grandpa Rand taught me a few times when I was little. But since I was usually home alone, I never had anyone to practice with, so I got pretty rusty."
The old butler wasn't her constant companion, after all — besides looking after her, he had the Shafiq family's business affairs and the manor to manage.
Most of the time, the house was quiet enough to be a haunted mansion, save for when Hermione came to visit.
Something shifted in Malfoy's expression — whatever she'd just remembered, it softened the mockery on her face, and her voice lost some of its sharp edge.
"Fine. I'll play you a teaching game. Pay attention."
She moved a knight piece and paused, glancing over at Kate. "Your turn. Fair warning — the rules for Wizard Chess are complicated. Don't go moving the wrong piece right out of the gate."
Understood. It's basically the same as Muggle chess.
As a transmigrator, she was no great shakes at Wizard Chess specifically — but she understood the rules of chess itself perfectly well.
And so the two of them began trading moves.
Say what you would — Kate hadn't made any truly embarrassing blunders, but with so little practice behind her, it was no surprise that fifteen minutes later she lost to Malfoy without much fuss.
"Oh, you can move there like that?" Rather than looking defeated, Kate was already bent over the board studying the sequence Malfoy had used to checkmate her, eyes alight with genuine interest.
That expression — all excitement and not a trace of frustration — left Malfoy, who should have been crowing in triumph, oddly wrong-footed.
"Tch. Again!" The golden-haired young miss immediately reset the board and launched into the second match.
To her surprise, though she won again, the game stretched past the thirty-minute mark. The mental effort she'd had to put in was considerably more than the first round.
"Brilliant move!" Kate praised her opponent with the same cheerful sincerity as before, then immediately launched into an enthusiastic post-game analysis.
Malfoy felt her face contort.
She stared at Kate — not a trace of dejection or irritation anywhere on her face — and finally couldn't hold the question back any longer.
"Shafiq. You lost. How are you still this happy?"
As the loser, she should have been tearfully conceding that she was outclassed, or at minimum fuming with wounded pride.
Kate's gaze shifted from the chessboard to Malfoy's face — puffed up slightly from the effort of containing her indignation. Frankly, a little adorable.
When I thought she was a boy, I didn't think anything of it. Knowing she's a girl makes this version of Malfoy kind of cute.
Ugh. I really am a world-renowned hypocrite.
Not that any of these thoughts made it to her face. Kate's mouth launched into its next lecture without missing a beat.
"In a competitive game like this, winning and losing do matter. But does that mean I should be disappointed and demoralized just because I can't beat you right now?"
"Sure, I lost. But win or lose, both players take something away from the game. You got the satisfaction of victory — and I, even in defeat, absorbed and learned from your technique."
"As long as I keep working hard, someday I'll be stronger than I was before. That's the most valuable thing I've gained. Isn't it?"
Freshly brewed Kate-brand inspirational wisdom, served piping hot.
Draco Malfoy, consumer of said wisdom, drained the bowl of rich, nourishing broth — and felt her entire soul transcend to a higher plane of existence.
Like hell it did.
"Is that your way of covering up the fact that you lost?" she bit back, her lip curling. "I'm the winner. In a competition, there's only ever one winner. Everything else is just varying degrees of irrelevant loser."
That was exactly what her father had told her, on the very first day she'd ever played Wizard Chess.
"Fair enough," Kate said, spreading her hands in cheerful capitulation. "Honestly? I'm absolutely gutted on the inside. But I didn't want you to see it, so I said all that to cover it up."
That's what Malfoy had wanted to hear.
She let a smug little smile creep onto her face, and her chin tilted up with it. "Hmph. I've been studying this game for years, after all. Of course you can't keep up with me!"
She packed up the chess pieces, visibly in a much better mood now. "Come on, I'll teach you another round!"
Kate blinked. "Much appreciated."
The third game lasted forty minutes. In the final, grinding deadlock, Malfoy at last found the gap in Kate's position she'd been hunting for — she surged through it and ended the match.
"I don't think I'm going to be able to beat you at Wizard Chess." Kate leaned back against her chair, eyes dropping with something that looked almost like genuine disappointment.
Malfoy, who had been gearing up to gloat, let her smile fade a little. She kept her head down as she packed the pieces away.
After a long pause, Kate heard her mutter, "Sleep it off. You'll be fine in the morning."
That... counted as comfort, probably.
Kate raised an eyebrow slightly, stood up, and stretched. "Right. You get a good night's sleep too, then."
"Tch. I'm the winner. I don't need your comfort!" Malfoy snapped back to her usual arms-length manner, shot Kate a distinctly disgruntled glare, and disappeared into the boys' dormitory.
Oh. So she does know she was comforting me.
Kate couldn't help a quiet, private laugh.
That last match — she'd had to work very hard to engineer one specific gap for Malfoy to find.
Glad it hadn't been noticed. Throwing a game gracefully was an art.
She yawned, glanced at the clock on the wall, and noted that it was time for her evening workout.
·····
The days that followed seemed to return to normal.
Classes, library study sessions, grinding through spells, physical training — these four things filled Kate's schedule to capacity.
The only notable exception was Defence Against the Dark Arts: every lesson, Katherine treated her with a warmth so conspicuous that Kate had started to wonder if she'd accidentally left some kind of buff active — and whether Katherine was secretly a magical creature wearing a human suit.
Other than that, things were fine.
Oh — and Dark Cloud.
As agreed, Newt had taken the little dragon away once she reached two weeks old. In that time, he had been racing from one office to another, applying for a private dragon-keeping permit.
Keeping a dragon was, needless to say, against the rules. But the wizarding world ran on personal connections just as much as any other society.
With a few decades' worth of contacts to draw on, Newt had little trouble securing permission to privately care for a hatchling described as "an orphan, in poor health, barely clinging to life" — at least for a year or two.
After that, the little dragon would eventually have to be transferred to a proper dragon-keeping reserve. But that was a problem for one or two years from now.
In the meantime, Kate — buoyed by Katherine's consistent favoritism — had single-handedly accumulated nearly a hundred points in class, putting Slytherin almost two hundred points ahead of every other House.
This gave Kate no small amount of anxiety.
Anxiety specifically about Dumbledore. She had absolutely no idea what excuse Old Man Dumbledore was going to conjure overnight to hand Gryffindor two hundred points and close that gap.
Not that it was her problem.
Either way, Katherine's favoritism had done wonders for Kate's social standing among Slytherin's little snakes during this period.
The most obvious change was Amber Wilson — the girl who had crossed Kate not so long ago.
For reasons Kate couldn't quite determine, the girl had taken to knocking on her dormitory door every evening after curfew, asking for help with her schoolwork.
Turning her away repeatedly wasn't a good look, so after a few rejections, Kate relented and explained things to her whenever she showed up.
Every time the lesson ended, Amber would leave the dormitory with bright red cheeks and a little bounce in her step.
Had Kate's tutoring style already become so clear and accessible that it was genuinely uplifting to experience?
Curious, Kate took the same problem and explained it the exact same way to Harry and Ron the next day.
Predictably, both of them sat through it with matching expressions of pained suffering.
Right. It's a people problem, not a teaching problem.
Having reached that conclusion, she decided she'd add a little extra material the next time she tutored Amber.
Who didn't enjoy a student who gave positive feedback?
Beyond all of that, the thing that excited her most was finally completing the System's second monthly exercise challenge and collecting five Attribute Points.
After dumping all five points into Strength and Agility to bring them both up to thirty, Kate felt as though her entire being had ascended to a higher plane.
[Charisma: 40]
[Strength: 30]
[Agility: 30]
[Spirit: 30]
[Vitality: 71]
[Luck: 27+5]
[Mana: 54]
Those were her current attributes. Every single one was above thirty — which meant that, at least in raw foundational stats, she had caught up to the level of a strong Hogwarts graduate.
What still needed work was her proficiency with spells and her practical combat experience.
Kate wasn't in any rush. Second year brought Lockhart as the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, and that buffoon was going to host a Dueling Club — she could pick up some combat experience there.
A little experience, probably.
She didn't have high expectations for that walking disaster of an instructor — but as a source of experience grinding, Lockhart was still more manageable than the inscrutable Katherine.
As it stood, the only things left undone were the story quest to guard the Philosopher's Stone and the Family Mission to find the alchemical item.
Both required patience. Neither could be rushed.
"So until then, all I can do is grind spells and study?" Kate lay alone on her bed, fresh from the bath, legs still pleasantly sore, talking to herself.
[Six weeks remain until the end of term. Semester Quest triggered: Achieve a top-three ranking in your year on final exams.]
Noted. Dismissed.
Kate stared at the System's freshly issued quest with a perfectly blank expression, feeling, not for the first time, that the System slightly underestimated her.
For the entire school year, when she wasn't working through story events, she was either in the library or on her way to the library.
Even before sleep every night, she ran Occlumency drills. Her Occlumency was already nearly at Level 5.
With that kind of grinding schedule, she'd outwork Hermione — who was already a top student in their year — without breaking a sweat. Never mind ranking in the top three for the whole year.
If she couldn't manage that after all this effort, she might as well give up entirely.
"I'd rather think about how to grind more spells."
Briskly dismissing the System's quest, Kate glanced at the clock. Half an hour to midnight — just enough time for one Occlumency session.
At this rate, practicing once or twice a day, she should be able to get Occlumency to Level 5 before the end of term.
She had never intended to master Occlumency to any extreme degree. Snape, considered an Occlumency grandmaster, was at roughly Level 8 — and that was the level required to resist Voldemort's Legilimency outright.
Level 8 was Kate's target. Higher than that required a far deeper theoretical understanding of the magic itself.
For Kate, a simple spell like the Levitation Charm was something she could tinker with and analyze to her heart's content. But Occlumency — a precision art that worked directly on the human mind — was a different matter entirely. She was genuinely worried that if she pushed too far into the theory, she'd end up conditioning herself into a kind of permanent mental lockdown. That would be counterproductive in the extreme.
"System — begin Occlumency training."
She closed her eyes, cleared her mind completely, and began to construct false emotions and false memories.
As always, the System's simulated Legilimency was ruthlessly precise — no preamble, no warning. It simply entered her mind.
False memories…
Sweat broke out on Kate's forehead almost immediately. She worked desperately to layer fabrication over fabrication in her mind.
And then she saw it.
Herself — sitting in a pram, looking up at a woman with a gentle, warm smile. Beside the woman stood a young girl who looked seven or eight points like Kate herself, her smile pretty in a way that bordered on bewitching.
This person was—
She strained to reach out and touch that familiar face — her hand had barely extended halfway when everything went pitch black.
[Simulation exercise failed.]
The System's cold electronic chime yanked her out of the memory and back to reality.
Kate's eyes flew open. She was gasping, gulping air — and only then realized that her hand was still suspended in midair, reaching for something that wasn't there.
The System said the exercise had failed.
Which meant that memory hadn't been fabricated at all.
She clenched her fist hard, forcing herself to think back — to chase the image of the woman she had just seen in that fragment of memory.
The hairstyle was different. The face was younger by years, less settled in its features. But the bone structure, the line of the jaw — it was unmistakable.
The woman in the memory was Katherine Wynyard.
They had actually met before. The two of them — in her past, before she could even form proper memories — had genuinely crossed paths.
____
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