The system really did come through sometimes. Without having to do anything remotely undignified, every reward he would have earned from the tournament had arrived anyway.
Failure is the Mother of Success?
He supposed that made the system his mother now. Wonderful woman.
The new mission suited him fine. Other schools didn't want him in their tournament? That was their problem to sit with. He'd been outmaneuvered once, and only because he hadn't seen it coming. Next time there would be no angle left unexploited.
In good spirits, he burned the intermediate draw immediately. It returned two hundred Achievement Points, neither a loss nor a meaningful gain. He checked his running total, noted he was two hundred points short of summoning the next Century King, and moved on.
The Great Hall was exactly as he expected. Every conversation in the room was about the tournament, and when Tom walked in, the noise dropped by half. Heads turned.
He decided to handle it now rather than repeat himself all evening.
"Don't look at me like that. I'm not entering this one. I've already discussed it with Professor Snape. His full support. Go win the thing and keep the trophy at Hogwarts."
The hall erupted.
Thirty seconds ago the universal assumption had been that the result was a foregone conclusion. Now Tom had just announced he was stepping aside?
"Tom, why are you withdrawing?" Zabini looked somewhere between agitated and genuinely baffled. "It's a guaranteed championship. Why give it away?"
"Exactly," said a sixth-year Slytherin. "Didn't you say before that you were going to enter?"
Tom spread his hands. "What was I supposed to do? If I stay in, the other schools pull their students and there's no tournament. So I step aside and leave it to all of you. I'm confident the trophy comes back to Hogwarts regardless."
Tom had always operated on the principle that failing to take something was the same as losing it. The system had compensated him and given him an extra mother in the bargain, but that was between him and the system. It had nothing to do with the other schools.
He couldn't enter. He could still make them uncomfortable about it.
The sharper students in the room caught the implication immediately, and the looks on their faces curdled. The other schools had been afraid. Tom's withdrawal wasn't generosity, it was the visible evidence of their cowardice.
"Disgraceful," Malfoy said, with feeling. "Worse than Potter and his little entourage."
"Right, so they think without Tom, Hogwarts has no one worth facing?"
The indignation spread quickly through the upper years. The other schools had decided, apparently, that Hogwarts without Tom Riddle was easy pickings. The championship was already as good as theirs.
For one rare moment, all four houses arrived at the same position.
Hit them hard.
By that evening, every head of house had received a flood of sign-up requests from their students. The competitive energy that had gone quiet when the dueling open sessions were cancelled came roaring back all at once.
Down in the Slytherin common room, Tom expanded the space again and cleared out a proper dueling area for practice.
The story hit the papers shortly after. The rules and schedule were secondary. The Daily Prophet's coverage focused primarily on mocking the other schools for their fear of Tom's participation, which was exactly the tone you'd expect from Rita Skeeter. She didn't stop at the tournament, either. The article extended outward into a broader assessment of those wizarding regions, each one receiving her full and unflattering attention. It was something of a British tradition: find someone to look down on, locate a stick to poke them with, and use it regardless of personal cost.
After publication, Skeeter pushed the piece to contacts in other countries. Vinda Rosier quietly added fuel to the fire on her end.
It reached the relevant headmasters soon enough. Several of them were, by all accounts, shaking with anger. They also had no rebuttal available to them. You cannot argue with someone for accurately describing what you did.
Tom handed the whole thing off to the people around him and stopped paying attention to it. Two weeks went by. His Academic Credits burned at a remarkable rate, at least three sessions in Transcendent Mode per day plus one Thought Leap.
Inside the learning space, Ravenclaw's villa pulsed with deep blue light. A wind had appeared from nowhere, pulling at the strange flowers and stranger plants that grew along the edges of the space. Ravenclaw raised one hand and a barrier held the wind off, invisible but solid. She watched the ceiling, reading something in the light and the motion, and eventually lowered her hand with a quiet shake of her head. In the blue glow her face carried an edge it didn't usually have.
The wind died down gradually. The blue light slowed its pulse.
Shortly after the last of it faded, a door creaked open.
Tom walked through it, his expression settled and unreadable.
"Did it work?" Ravenclaw asked. The question came out more tightly than she'd intended.
"It worked."
He nodded, but the voice hadn't come from him. It came from behind the door.
A second Tom stepped out.
(Not a split-soul.)