My Bugged System Made Me Too OP!

Chapter 107: Kael’s thinking

’So the principal’s words aren’t surprising at all.’

He turned his attention back to Taz.

The man was staring at him.

Not with the calculating assessment of before, not with the carefully managed unease of someone trying to maintain a professional surface over genuine fear.

It was the look of someone who had just watched something happen in a room and had updated their understanding of what they were sharing that room with.

He was staring at Noah the way a person stared at something that had briefly reminded them it could kill them without deciding to.

Noah held his gaze for a moment, steady and unhurried, and then he spoke.

"Don’t think the person in question is some random student," he said.

His voice was even. The brief loss of that control had been noted, internally addressed, and set aside — it didn’t belong in what came next.

"The student Lloyd beat almost to death," he continued, "is none other than my personal disciple."

The word landed in the room and changed it.

Personal disciple.

The two words together, attached to a name like Mr. White, didn’t just raise the stakes of the conversation — they restructured it from the foundation upward.

A random student was a matter of institutional policy and uncomfortable questions about selective enforcement.

A personal disciple was something else entirely.

It was a direct line from the injured party to the man standing here, a connection that made everything Lloyd had done not just a disciplinary incident but something that had reached up the chain and touched someone whose position in the world’s hierarchy of power put him in a category that very few people occupied.

Taz gasped.

It was a genuine sound, unfiltered, the kind that bypassed whatever mechanism he had been using to keep his reactions measured.

For a fraction of a second he was simply a man who had received information his body didn’t know how to absorb quietly.

And then he moved.

His knees found the ground, and his upper body followed, folding downward with the full committed energy of someone who had made a very rapid calculation and arrived at the conclusion that upright was the wrong position to be in.

He prostrated.

Fully, without reservation, his forehead angled toward the floor, both hands flat against the ground in front of him.

"T-the personal disciple of S-Sir White—"

His voice was fractured, the words coming apart slightly at the joints from the combination of shock and the lingering physical aftermath of the mana pressure that had moved through him minutes ago.

"I’m sorry." The words came out pressed and urgent. "I had no idea — forgive me — forgive me for my stupidity in running this academy."

The blood from his mouth and nose kept dripping down even as he prostrated, slowly dropping to the ground, until they formed a small pool beneath him.

He was aware of it, but it didn’t factor into anything he was doing in this moment.

The bleeding was not the problem.

The problem was that the personal disciple of an arch magus had been beaten almost to death under his academy, by a student he had protected through deliberate inaction, and the arch magus in question was standing in his office having already demonstrated, without apparent effort or intention, the kind of power that made the Count’s name feel like a very small shield.

Noah looked down at him.​​​​​​​​​​​​​, and his frown deepened.

His fists closed at his sides, slow and deliberate, the knuckles pulling taut as he looked down at the man prostrating on the floor in front of him.

Something dark and cold moved through him, and for a moment he let it sit there without pushing it away.

A part of him genuinely wanted to crush the man’s head under a mountain of ice.

Not as a passing thought — as an actual consideration, real and specific, the kind that came with a clear mental image attached to it.

He could feel the mana responding even as the idea formed, ready and willing, requiring only the decision to become something that couldn’t be undone.

He could do it.

That was simply the truth of it. The capability was there, the cause wasn’t difficult to justify, and the man bleeding quietly on his own office floor had spent years earning something in that neighborhood through deliberate institutional cowardice.

But the consequence would be too troublesome.

The Magus Order would intervene. That was inevitable — a dead academy principal wasn’t the kind of event that passed without drawing their attention, and their attention was something Noah could not afford right now.

They would arrive with authority and momentum and the full weight of an organization that existed partly to ensure that people with significant power didn’t use it in ways that disturbed the established structure.

The investigation that followed would pull threads he needed to remain unpulled. Everything he was building, every careful separation between his identities, every piece of groundwork laid for what came next — all of it would disappear under the noise.

It would get too complicated.

He was still working through it when Kael’s voice arrived in the back of his mind, bright and entirely unbothered by the gravity of the moment.

’The Magus Order, the guild — they all don’t matter anyway, master,’ the dragon said, his tone carrying that particular warmth that showed up when he was confident about something. ’You’re going to surpass them in no time. Heheh.’

Noah exhaled slowly.

’That’s true,’ he thought. ’A few more weeks and I’ll reach supreme magus rank in no time.’

But then, even to him, that sounded almost funny.

Not because they were wrong. They weren’t wrong — that was the honest and slightly surreal part of it.

Supreme magus rank was not a casual destination.

It was something no one had done in two hundred years.

The few who did were etched in the history of magic forever.

A few weeks ago, Noah had not thought of it as a distant goal or a difficult challenge.

He had thought of it as an impossibility, and now he was putting a timeline on it.

A timeline measured in weeks.

Kael knew all of this without being told of course.

That was the nature of the connection between them — it wasn’t a simple line of communication that carried only what Noah chose to send through it.

It ran deeper than that, picking up the things that surfaced close enough to the top of his mind, the emotions and thoughts that had enough weight to transmit without intention.

The dragon had been present for enough of Noah’s internal processing to understand the system not as something he had been briefed on but as something he had experienced through the link, in real time, alongside its owner.

He knew about the levels. He knew about the stats, and how Noah progressed in his magus rank.

Which was why even his most outrageous declarations of confidence were never entirely empty.

However, even though Kael didn’t say anything else, Noah could still feel his thoughts through their connection.

It ran continuously in the background, a low and steady current that carried more than words when words weren’t being used. Emotions came through it. The texture of thoughts that hadn’t fully formed into language yet. The general orientation of a mind that was pointed in a particular direction even when it wasn’t speaking.

And right now, what was coming through from Kael was a feeling that Noah could only describe as impatience on his behalf.

Not frustration exactly. More like the quiet, settled conviction of someone watching another person take a careful path around an obstacle when, from where they were standing, the obstacle didn’t actually require that much respect.

Noah could feel it clearly — the dragon’s perspective on the whole situation, laid out not in words but in the emotional texture of what was transmitting through the link.

Kael thought he was being too careful.

He hadn’t said it directly. He wouldn’t, necessarily — not in so many words, not as a formal declaration.

But the feeling was there, carrying itself through the connection with the kind of low-level persistence that thoughts had when they were settled and certain rather than fleeting. It wasn’t agitation. It was closer to bemusement.

The mild, almost fond bemusement of someone watching a person they respected perform an unnecessary amount of caution around a problem that didn’t warrant it.

Because to Kael, the reasoning was simple.

Noah was going to become a supreme magus in a matter of weeks.

That was not a hope or a projection — it was a trajectory already in motion, visible and measurable, with nothing currently positioned to interrupt it.

And a supreme magus didn’t need to calculate the Magus Order’s reaction to his choices. He didn’t need to weigh the adventurer guild’s goodwill against his own impulses or manage his behavior around the potential complications that various institutions might generate if sufficiently provoked.

A supreme magus was the ultimate peak of magic, of which everything else would revolve around.

Trying to maintain careful relationships with the guild and the Order — building those connections thoughtfully, preserving goodwill, operating within the margins of what those organizations could accommodate — all of that, from Kael’s perspective, was starting to look like something that consumed effort without returning proportionate value.

The guild was useful now. The Order was a factor now. But now was a temporary condition, and the thing coming after now made both of them largely irrelevant as forces that needed to be managed.

They were humans.

That was the foundation of Kael’s thinking, and it was worth being honest about where that foundation came from.

To the dragon, the word carried a specific meaning that wasn’t contemptuous exactly, but wasn’t equal either.

Humans were quite capable, but capable wasn’t the same as significant at the level Kael operated from instinctively.

Human organizations, human hierarchies, human political structures — these were things that mattered within a certain scale of the world.

At the scale Kael was oriented toward, they were more like pieces of furniture.