It was just a bunch of chess pieces, but it felt like a million horses running.
Hermione's horses and rooks attacked with great fluidity, heading straight for Tom's central formation.
By this time, Tom had withdrawn his rooks, lost his knights on both flanks, and worse, had not dug his trenches. The 900 pawns were attacked by 50 rooks and 200 horses.
Some of the horses fought back, but they were easily defeated. Tom watched as the captain who had complained earlier went against the tide, and then was blown to pieces by a Hermione rook, and his men scattered.
Tom: "..."
I'm going to transform to the bishop! Next time you try to hide in the hills, I'll magically bombard you!
Tom's side was completely defeated. He watched his king leap onto a rook with great agility and then quickly fled the scene. Tom's 900 pawns were finished.
When Tom retreated to his hill, there were almost none of his 900 pawns left. And it was impossible for Tom to replicate Hermione's style of play. All Hermione had to do was throw her pawns around Tom's mobile troops, and then let her rooks and knights charge the line, and she would win easily.
"You've won" Watching his king get knocked down, Tom gave up the fight. Hermione tapped the table with satisfaction, "Remember to buy me chocolates."
At this point, several owls flew in, some requesting to be teaching assistants, but a few were fan letters. The week Tom first arrived, there were countless little witches coming to the door asking for autographs and hundreds of letters a day. But after Tom responded to his fans by telling them he had to concentrate on teaching, the number of letters dwindled to a few a day. The demand for autographs from young witches is limited, and after Tom signed a bunch of them, the number of young witches coming to the door dropped considerably.
As for teaching, come on, if Lockhart could teach Defense Against the Dark Arts, so could Tom. For young wizards below fifth year, Tom would naturally give them the basics. After all, Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers hadn't been very reliable in recent years, and they needed a good foundation.
As for fifth through seventh years, it's all about review and exam preparation. Fifth year students will take the Indispensable Title in Ordinary Magic (T.I.M.O.) exam tomorrow, in June, and seventh year students will take the Terrible Examination in High Wisdom and Secret Invocations (ÉXTASIS).
The T.I.M.O. exam is a subtest administered by the Magic Examination Board for fifth-year students, and the score a student obtains in a particular T.I.M.O. subject determines whether he or she may continue with the course for the remainder of the year. Young wizards up to fifth year, similar to university students, were tutored by Hogwarts professors, gifted or not, and Snape, who hated Neville, tutored him for five years.
Sixth and seventh years were a bit like graduate school. The professors were selective, and required a certain grade on the T.I.M.O. in order to attend their classes. Snape, for example, stipulated that if he wanted to continue in his Potions class, he had to have a good Potions score. Professor McGonagall had asked Tom at the beginning of the term what grade he wanted to get.
If Tom had wanted to save time, he could have put the grade in Distinction, which would have resulted in fewer students enrolling in the course. But the employment of many students would be affected. The Defense Against the Dark Arts course is not an unpopular subject, and if you want to be an Auror, you have to be very good at it. To be a healer you need at least an "E" in Defense Against the Dark Arts.
In the wizarding world there are six grades: E, S, A, I, D and T. The first three are passes, the last three are fails.
So, in the end, Tom, like other teachers, put his grade at "A (acceptable)." There were not many students who signed up for the class, and there were only a dozen students in each grade.
The function of the EXTASIS was to serve as certification for Hogwarts graduates when applying for a job after graduation, the equivalent of the various professional certificates listed on a Muggle's CV. However, the years of teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts were so poor that the poor kids had to learn on their own; the real Lockhart could only forget spells and brag about his books. Lockhart could only give the students all the support they needed, except help. Tom was similar; he wasn't good enough to teach the seventh years, but he was certainly better than Lockhart, at least he could do one thing: help them prepare for their exams.
Using his Lockhart identity and connections, Tom sent out some letters requesting the original exam questions from previous years from an admirer of his who worked at the Magical Testing Authority. Tom then read the questions overnight. He found that the content of the written test over the years is actually similar: for example, last year's T.I.M.O. Defense Against the Dark Arts written test was about the five characteristics of a werewolf; this is simply a question to give marks.
In her experience, the best way to tackle the Defense Against the Dark Arts written exam was to work through the questions. It was about their knowledge of dark magic and dark creatures, their characteristics, distribution, habits, and ways of dealing with them.
You have to know their characteristics, distribution, habits and answers. It's much easier than the Muggle world: at least the magical world doesn't ask you to summarize the historical significance of the invention of werewolf potions, it just asks you what they are for and, at the highest level, how to make a potion. The answers to these questions are more like o questions.
This is why there has been such a stir at Hogwarts over the Defense Against the Dark Arts post, but the students have not failed in large numbers.
It was a simple way to teach the written T.I.M.O. and EXTASIS exams, as Tom only had to summarize the points of the questions and produce a review booklet or Lockhart's secret paper. The other part of the exam, the practical exam, will test his mastery of defensive spells and the various interpretations of them.
This will require some outside help. To be more precise, it was Tom who had to go for help.
Tom dismissed the owls and then played a few games of modified magic chess with Hermione. This time it was a back and forth affair, with some new tricks. It wasn't until the first class of the afternoon that Hermione left. Before leaving, she urged Tom to make time to transform the Bishop.
After seeing Hermione off, Tom took out his parchment and wrote a letter to both Professor McGonagall and Professor Flitwick, hoping to be able to make an appointment with them to discuss preparation for the T.I.M.O. and EXTASIS practical exams.