Quirrell began his performance.
He talked about the Vampires he encountered in Romania and how he used garlic to ward them off.
But his speech was incoherent and illogical, and he even mispronounced several basic defensive spells.
Listening to these fabricated stories, the anger in Tamara's heart didn't subside from the earlier interlude; instead, it burned even hotter.
In the previous Transfiguration Class, she had been forced to waste a precious item to avoid losing face.
Now, she was full of pent-up rage with nowhere to vent.
And this garlic-reeking, play-acting Quirrell in front of her was the perfect punching bag.
When Quirrell mentioned that garlic was the bane of Vampires.
Tamara elegantly raised her hand.
Quirrell stopped, and seeing it was the student who had just helped him, he immediately gave a fawning smile: "M-miss Riddle? D-do you have... a question?"
Tamara stood up.
She looked at Quirrell, her eyes filled with a meaningful scrutiny, a dangerous smile playing at the corners of her mouth.
"Professor, you mentioned earlier that this garlic is to ward off the Vampire you met in Romania, to prevent it from coming back for revenge, right?"
"Y-yes," Quirrell nervously tugged at his turban.
"That's truly a touching story."
Tamara spoke slowly, her voice soft, but every word was like a poisoned dagger.
"But I'm curious, Professor."
She took a small step forward, closing the distance to the lectern.
"Garlic can indeed ward off low-level dark creatures like Vampires."
"However..."
Tamara narrowed her eyes slightly, her gaze locking onto the back of Quirrell's head, wrapped in the thick turban.
"What if what's possessing a person isn't a Vampire..."
"But a... more ancient, weaker, disembodied remnant soul that can only linger like a parasite?"
These words were like a silent thunderclap exploding in Quirrell's ears.
The smile on Quirrell's face froze instantly.
His body jerked rigid, and his spine, which had been somewhat hunched from nervousness, straightened in an instant.
In that moment, his gaze changed.
That cowardly, evasive, and stupid look vanished without a trace.
In its place was a fleeting, hair-raising red light.
That was the gaze belonging to Lord Voldemort.
That was the gaze of a venomous snake whose tail had been stepped on.
He was staring intently at the eleven-year-old girl in front of him through Quirrell's eyes.
The air in the classroom seemed to solidify.
Draco and the others didn't understand the deep meaning behind Tamara's words; they only felt the atmosphere suddenly become very oppressive, so heavy it was hard to breathe.
Tamara met that gaze without flinching.
At this very moment.
Two Voldemorts.
One possessed a young, healthy body but was bound by a system.
One possessed a powerful main soul but had to live as a parasite on a useless person, smelling of garlic.
Their gazes met in mid-air.
"Buzz—"
Tamara felt a sharp, intense pain in the depths of her brain.
It wasn't an ordinary headache.
It was a resonance of souls, the repulsion and attraction generated when two fragments of the same source came into close contact.
[Warning! High-risk malicious intent source intrusion detected!]
[Detected that the host has no defensive skills.]
[Triggering highest-level security protocol: Soul Firewall activated.]
Buzz—!
It wasn't a clash of magic, but a violent repulsion on the soul level.
It was the terrifying resonance produced when two soul fragments, originating from the same source but wrapped in different laws, were forced into contact.
It was like the same poles of two magnets being forced together.
"Hiss—!"
Tamara felt like her brain was being stirred by a red-hot iron poker, and her face turned deathly pale.
And Quirrell, opposite her, had an even bigger reaction.
"Ah!"
Quirrell suddenly let out a short scream, clutching the back of his head, and stumbled back two steps, nearly knocking over the lectern behind him.
That feeling was as if he had plunged his hand into boiling lava.
The system had forcibly wrapped an unanalyzable layer of garbled code around the outer layer of Tamara's soul, severely burning Voldemort's dark curiosity.
Quirrell—or rather, Voldemort—stared at her fixedly.
He had likely never imagined he would sense an aura that even he found daunting from a first-year student.
It was the aura of one of his own kind.
But what angered him more was this humiliation.
"Sit down!"
Quirrell suddenly shouted, his voice becoming sharp and piercing due to extreme emotional turmoil, even forgetting to stutter.
He spun around abruptly, his back to Tamara, his hands gripping the edge of the lectern so hard his knuckles turned white.
"That is a meaningless hypothesis!"
He gasped for air, reclaiming his clumsy disguise: "G-garlic is very effective! Very effective! Now... o-open your textbooks to page ten!"
Tamara watched the back of the figure who had turned away in disarray and gave a contemptuous snort.
Coward.
To be provoked to such an extent by a student and only dare to turn away and flee?
It seemed that slicing one's soul really did affect one's wisdom and breadth of mind.
She elegantly sat back down.
That moment of confrontation hadn't made her feel fear; instead, it gave her a sense of twisted pleasure.
The frustration from the previous class was swept away.
Tamara opened her textbook, looking at the illustration of a zombie, but her gaze looked past the pages into the void.
"Since you've fallen so far as to parasite even such an idiot's body..."
"Then I'll take this Philosopher's Stone on your behalf."
"After all..."
Tamara's fingers lightly stroked the handle of her wand, feeling the warmth of the phoenix feather within.
"Only a complete and powerful me is worthy of eternal life, isn't that right?"
The rest of the lesson became dull.
Quirrell seemed frightened, or perhaps he feared being stung again by Tamara's sharp questions; his subsequent lecture was entirely by the book, and he didn't even dare glance in Tamara's direction.
The bell for the end of class finally rang.
Quirrell shouted "Class dismissed" almost at the very second the bell rang, then clutched his books and rushed into his office behind the lectern as if fleeing for his life.
"What's wrong with him?"
Draco asked in confusion while packing his bag, "It's like he's seen a ghost."
"Perhaps."
Tamara stood up and smoothed her unwrinkled robes.
"Perhaps he really did see a ghost."
"Or..."
She glanced back at the closed office door, a cruel smile curling her lips.
"...saw something far more terrifying than a ghost."
"Let's go, Draco."
Tamara was the first to walk out of the garlic-scented classroom, breathing in the corridor air that, while cold, was fresh; she felt as though she had come back to life.
"Let's go to lunch. I suddenly feel that even that pumpkin juice might not taste so bad."