Everyone was dumbstruck with fear!
They had lingered here too long and actually alerted Professor McGonagall.
"Very well! Roaming around at midnight and making such a racket—you're awfully bold!"
Professor McGonagall took one look. Four from her own House, three from Slytherin. Very well, a group offense.
"Twenty points from each of you! One month of detention!"
The next day, the students discovered at the entrance to the Great Hall that Gryffindor had lost eighty points and Slytherin had lost sixty from their House point hourglasses. The school erupted at once.
Ted had spent over half a year, with Professor Snape's full cooperation, deducting a few points every class before finally reaching a hundred. Yet they had lost eighty points in one night? Impressive! The students of both Houses looked at the point-losers very differently now.
Ted thought, Could the House Cup finally be within reach? Impossible, absolutely impossible. Dumbledore is still there to bail them out! What concerned Ted more was that none of the professors seemed to have anything for the students to do, so Professor McGonagall handed the detention duty over to Filch.
And the only things Filch could think of were cleaning toilets and polishing trophies.
But Harriett and Malfoy's group were practically repeat offenders when it came to detention. Filch was especially malicious toward them and directly assigned them to help patrol the Forbidden Forest.
Well then... they hadn't managed to avoid it after all! That was the Forbidden Forest!
It was already dangerous enough normally. There were man-eating Eight-Eyed Spiders, thoroughly unfriendly centaurs, all sorts of dangerous dark creatures and magical beasts. Just wandering through the woods at night was terrifying enough.
When Malfoy learned that he would have to spend two hours in the Forbidden Forest every night for the next half month