My Bugged System Made Me Too OP!

Chapter 106: Losing control

The academy couldn’t afford to lose the Count’s support.

Count Manos was not a passive donor or a distant name on a funding record — he was an active presence in the financial architecture of this place.

His continued goodwill and donations were the kind of thing that the academy’s leadership had collectively decided was worth more than the comfort and safety of students who didn’t come with comparable backing.

So the calculus had been made, quietly and without ceremony, and then made again each time Lloyd provided occasion for it.

The weak students, the untalented ones, the ones from families that couldn’t push back — they absorbed what they absorbed, and the institution found reasons to look in a different direction.

It had worked, in the narrow sense that nothing had exploded.

Lloyd remained enrolled. The Count remained satisfied. The incidents remained contained. And the students on the receiving end of Lloyd’s particular version of aristocratic entitlement remained without help, because the structure that was supposed to provide help had opted out of that function where they were concerned.

Taz had lived inside this arrangement long enough that its edges had gone soft. It didn’t feel like a decision anymore. It felt like the shape of things.

Which was precisely why the figure standing across from him didn’t fit.

He turned the situation over carefully, conscious of the mask watching him, trying to locate the angle he was missing.

An arch magus. A man whose name was currently attached to a standing ice mountain and the neutralization of a shadow monster.

Someone who operated at a level so far above the ordinary politics of this academy that the academy’s politics shouldn’t even register on his scale of concerns.

Why would someone like that walk into this office over a beaten student?

It was the wrong size problem for the wrong size person. An arch magus had no business caring about disciplinary matters in a provincial academy, no natural reason to be standing here with clenched fists over something that, in the grand architecture of things that actually affected people at that level of power, amounted to almost nothing.

Unless.

Taz felt the thought arrive before he had finished constructing it, the conclusion pulling ahead of the reasoning.

Unless the student in question wasn’t random to Mr. White.

Unless there was a connection — personal, professional, something — that transformed what would otherwise be beneath notice into something that had brought a man of this caliber through his door with his hands closed and his voice flat.

The color that had been slowly returning to Taz’s face made a second, more decisive exit.

’Lloyd,’ he thought, and the name in his own mind carried a weight it hadn’t carried five minutes ago. ’Just what have you done?’

Because the calculation that had always made the situation manageable, but now an arch magus has been involved... over complicating everything.

The Count’s reach was quite considerable. His influence was real and it moved through the relevant channels with the practiced efficiency of old money and established connections.

But influence and an arch magus were not the same category of thing, and Taz was experienced enough to understand that clearly.

You could navigate influence. You could apply counter-pressure, call in favors, arrange meetings, appeal to shared interests.

An arch magus who had decided to be your problem was a different situation entirely.

No one in their right mind wanted that. Not the Count. Not his son. Not Taz himself. Not anyone with a functioning understanding of how power actually distributed itself at the upper end of this world’s hierarchy.

He steadied himself as best he could and asked the question that the whole conversation had been building toward.

"This student," he said, keeping his voice as level as the circumstances permitted, "who is he to you... Sir White?"

The title came out with more deference than he had used at the start of the conversation. He noticed it himself and didn’t try to correct it.

Noah looked at him for a moment.

Then he chuckled.

It was a short sound, quiet and without warmth, the kind of laugh that came not from amusement exactly but from the particular feeling of watching a thought complete itself in someone else’s face exactly as you had anticipated it would.

"You didn’t care," Noah said, "that a student was beaten almost to death."

He let that sit for exactly one beat.

"Only that he might have a connection to me."

Taz shivered.

The color that had already been draining from his face completed its exit, leaving behind something closer to gray than anything that belonged on a living person.

"No," he said quickly, and the quickness itself was its own kind of confession. "It’s not like that, Sir White."

He straightened as he said it, the movement carrying the energy of a man reaching for something — dignity, authority, the shape of the person he normally was in this room.

"We care about all the students in this academy. We treat them equally."

The words came out whole and coherent and in the correct order.

And even as they left his mouth, something behind his eyes acknowledged, without being invited to, that they were completely untrue.

Not partially untrue, not true in spirit if not in practice, not the kind of thing that could survive even casual scrutiny if someone decided to apply it.

Simply, flatly, demonstrably untrue, and the man saying them knew it with the same certainty that he knew his own name.

But fear had its own logic, and the logic it was applying here was simple: say something, say it with conviction, and hope that the words created enough of a surface to stand on.

Noah looked at him.

"Really?" he said.

The word came back out of his mouth with a different texture than it had gone in — quieter, and somehow heavier for it.

"Is that why you never cared about the ones suffering in silence?"

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. The words moved at the same measured pace they always did, but there was something underneath them now, something that hadn’t been present in the earlier part of the conversation.

"Ignoring reports about bullying," he continued, "just because they don’t have any backing."

The words were coming from somewhere real, shaped by something genuine — the accumulated weight of knowing exactly what it felt like to be on the other side of that institutional indifference. To be the student without backing. To be the name on the report that nobody followed up on, the person the system had quietly decided wasn’t worth the inconvenience of protecting.

He knew that experience from the inside.

And somewhere in the space between knowing it and saying it, something in him had loosened without his permission.

He didn’t notice it at first, but he was already starting to release his mana pressure subconsciously.

It filled the space between them and then kept going, quiet and enormous, the way truly significant things were often quiet.

Taz felt it before he understood what it was.

His body responded before his mind caught up, the shivering that had been working through him escalating abruptly into something uncontrolled — a full, sustained trembling that he had no mechanism to stop because it wasn’t coming from fear alone anymore.

His lips parted slightly.

A thin line of blood traced itself from the corner of his mouth downward, slow and precise, and he didn’t appear to notice it happening.

His eyes had gone wide and fixed, locked somewhere slightly past Noah rather than on him, the expression of someone whose full processing capacity had been redirected toward simply remaining upright.

The chair beneath him groaned.

Noah heard the chair.

His eyes dropped to it for a fraction of a second, and in that fraction the awareness of what was happening arrived with cold clarity.

He pulled the mana back.

It retracted the way a held breath released — not slowly, but fully, all at once, the pressure collapsing back toward him and disappearing into the same interior space it had come from.

The room lost the weight it had been carrying almost instantly, the air returning to something that could be breathed without effort.

Noah exhaled. Low and quiet, barely audible.

’I let myself lose control,’ he thought.

He had always tried his best to keep up his aloof Mr White persona, however, reason he had lost control was simple enough, when he was honest about it.

’I already know the academy doesn’t care about untalented magi,’ he thought, the words carrying no heat now that the mana had been pulled back — just a flat, settled recognition of something he had understood for a long time. ’And I was simply the most untalented of them all.’

By the academy’s measure. By the metrics it had decided were the only ones worth applying.

He had been the furthest thing from what this institution valued, which meant he had also been the furthest thing from what it protected.

What Taz had said — the lie about equal treatment — wasn’t surprising. It wasn’t even particularly remarkable.

It was simply the official language that institutions used to describe a reality they had no intention of changing.