"Madame Maxime!" said Fleur at once, striding over to her headmistress. "Zey are saying zat zis little boy is to compete also!"
Somewhere under Harry's numb disbelief he felt a ripple of anger. "Little boy?"
He'd not realized that he'd said that out loud, but Fleur turned to glare at him. "You cannot see zat four girls are interested in you and spend all your time running from zem! You are still a little boy!"
"Four? FOUR!? There are twenty-six, last I checked. The four obvious ones just keep chasing the others away."
The older girl blinked, even as Diggory nodded, but she quickly recovered. "Twenty-six?"
"He has made a good showing of himself," Professor Dumbledore chimed in. "Three years ago today he led the charge to save a classmate from a mountain troll. Later that year he seemed to have helped smuggle a dragon out of the castle and he defeated a professor out to kill him in what should have been single combat not in his favor at the end of the year. The professor wasn't ready for how...effective his bare-handed fighting was. The following year he survived encounters with the whomping willow on the grounds, the acromantula nest in the forest, and finished things off by killing a thousand-year-old basilisk with a sword. Last year he survived multiple incidents with dementors, had a close call with a werewolf, and demonstrated a patronus strong enough to drive off an entire dementor swarm."
"As distasteful as it is to admit," Snape added, "his entry was almost certainly an attempt to get him killed, likely by an older student annoyed by how much female attention he's been getting this year."
Most of the rest of the room had turned to stare at the two while they'd been speaking, before turning to look at Harry. Karkaroff then scowled. "The tournament is not for...professional heroes!"
"I'm not a professional hero," Harry immediately retorted. "That would imply that I get paid. As I'm unpaid for my heroics, by definition I'm an amateur." He paused as they considered that. "Also, I'm not sure that escaping attempts to kill me counts as 'heroics'. I believe every single thing the Professor just listed was directly tied to or caused by the actions of individuals involved in attempts on my life."
"As...problematic as his entry seems to be," Bagman said, "unfortunately, there are no provisions for excluding a chosen champion and no way to relight the goblet for a second attempt."
Great. If he couldn't get out of this then he was going to have to see if he could redirect the girls chasing him into helping him figure out a way to survive this fiasco.
