Back to ordinary ground, ordinary temperature, no remaining evidence beyond perhaps some scorched or disturbed earth beneath where the ice had stood.

That was what should have happened.

It didn’t appear to be what had happened.

The mountain was still there. Not just present but apparently significant enough, visible enough, persistent enough that it had acquired a name in the mouths of the people talking about it.

The great white ice mountain. A landmark. Something that people were referencing not as a past event but as a current, observable, physical thing that existed in a specific place and could presumably be visited.

And attached to it, to its continued existence, to the fact that it hadn’t dissolved the way it was supposed to — his name. Mr. White’s name.

Spreading further, reaching more ears, accumulating weight in the public imagination with every day the mountain refused to behave like something that should have disappeared by now.

He hadn’t intended any of this, as he hadn’t constructed it to last.

He wondered if this was due to Limit breaker, which made the ice mountain remain there even after days.

So many thoughts kept going through his mind at the same time, but due to the mask, Taz couldn’t see his expression.

He wasn’t sure yet whether that was a problem or an advantage.

Possibly both.

’That certainly is strange,’ Noah thought, the words settling with a quiet weight behind them. ’I should go back there and see what really happened.’

He brought his attention back to the room.

The principal — Taz, as Noah’s scan had already confirmed — was still standing behind his desk in the particular way of someone who had not fully recovered their footing since the moment the door had opened.

The shiver had subsided from its initial involuntary peak, but it hadn’t disappeared entirely, settling into something lower and more sustained.

Noah looked at him for a moment.

Then he said, evenly and without preamble: "Taz Lance."

The effect was immediate.

The man shivered again — sharper this time, a visible movement that ran through him from the shoulders downward.

Behind the mask, Noah noted the reaction with mild interest and said nothing further about it.

Unbeknownst to the man, he had also scanned him with Eye of truth and knew more about him than just his name.

"What..." Taz began, and to his credit his voice was more composed than it might have been thirty seconds ago.

He was making a visible effort, pulling his professional bearing back around himself piece by piece. "What brings you here, Mr. White?"

A brief pause, the words that followed carrying the careful energy of someone who very much wanted the answer to be a certain thing. "I hope... there’s no problem?"

"Actually," Noah said, "there is one."

He paused just long enough for that to land.

"Involving one of your students."

The color that remained in Taz Lance’s face made a quiet exit.

His eyes went wide — not the widening of surprise exactly, but the particular expansion that happened when a fear that had been formless suddenly acquired a specific shape.

His mouth opened slightly, then closed again, then opened with words that didn’t quite make it out before being reconsidered.

For one brief, unguarded moment, the peak master magus, the most powerful man in the academy, the figure of authority in whose office they were currently standing — looked like a man who was sincerely concerned about the structural integrity of his own trousers.

’Which one of my students offended Mr. White?’ The thought was written clearly enough in his expression that it barely needed inferring.

The internal spiral was almost audible — a rapid, increasingly alarmed cataloguing of every student under his institutional care, trying to identify which one had been foolish enough, reckless enough, unlucky enough to become a problem for a man like this. ’Am I in trouble? Is he going to—’

He didn’t finish the thought. Some conclusions were too uncomfortable to complete even internally.

And the fear driving it wasn’t irrational, which was perhaps the most honest thing about it. Mr. White’s reputation hadn’t been built on rumor alone — it had been built on witnessed events, on outcomes that people had seen with their own eyes and then spent the following days struggling to describe accurately.

A shadow monster, neutralized. An ice mountain, still standing. These weren’t the accomplishments of someone operating at an ordinary level of power.

Everyone with any awareness of how this world’s hierarchy of strength was arranged understood what those things pointed toward.

Mr. White was an arch magus.

Not aspiring toward it, not approximating it, not the kind of person about whom someone might say he has real potential — but standing at that peak, operating from it, the kind of power that most people who dedicated their lives to magic never came close to touching.

An arch magus was not a rank. It was a category, a fundamental separation from the people below it, and there were precious few of them on the entire continent.

One of them was currently standing in Taz Lance’s office, telling him there was a problem involving one of his students.

The man was trying very hard not to show how frightened he was.

He was not entirely succeeding.

Another reason Taz was so afraid was because he still wasn’t sure about Mr White’s true intentions.

All he knew was that he was a random archmagus who came out of nowhere, defeated a shadow monster and lest that towering mountain.

A wild card, in other words.

What Taz didn’t know — what no one in this building knew, or would think to assume — was that the masked figure standing in his office was no longer operating as a free agent with undefined allegiances of his own.

Noah had signed with the guild. He was an adventurer now, S-rank, with a golden card sitting in his storage space and a formal structure behind him that changed the nature of every interaction he had in his Mr. White capacity, whether the other party was aware of it or not.

Taz was speaking to an adventurer. He simply didn’t have that information.

The principal drew a breath that was slightly more controlled than the ones that had preceded it, and squared himself — not fully, not convincingly, but enough to ask the question he needed to ask with something resembling composure.

"Which student is that?"

The question came out carefully. The voice of a man who had remembered that he ran this institution and that remembering it was the least he could do.

"Lloyd," Noah said.

The name landed in the room like something dropped from a height.

Taz’s shivering, which had been on its way toward manageable, reversed course immediately. It moved back through him with renewed energy, and above it his expression did something complicated — several things at once, none of them particularly comfortable.

His eyes moved, briefly, in the way eyes moved when a mind was rapidly processing implications rather than simply receiving information.

’What could Lloyd have done to him...?’

The thought was visible in the tightening around his eyes, the slight forward shift of his weight as the full shape of the problem assembled itself in his mind.

Because Lloyd wasn’t a simple case. In a building full of students from varying backgrounds and varying levels of social weight, Lloyd occupied a category that sat above the rest by a margin.

The son of Count Manos — a man whose authority extended over an entire city, whose name opened gates that stayed closed for everyone else, whose reach from Vale touched even this relatively modest institution in ways that weren’t always formally acknowledged but were always practically felt.

Lloyd was here, at this academy, alongside students who came from far less.

But his presence had never really been equal to theirs. The name he carried didn’t allow for that kind of equality, and everyone in the building — staff and students alike — understood that reality without needing it spelled out.

Which meant that whatever Lloyd had done to land himself in a conversation between his principal and an arch magus was not a simple disciplinary matter.

It was a political situation wearing the clothing of one.

"If I may ask," Taz said, and the careful phrasing was doing considerable work, "what did he do?"

Noah’s hands, hanging at his sides, closed slowly into fists.

"He beat a student close to death," Noah said.

The words were flat and direct and left no interpretive room.

Taz’s eyes narrowed.

It was a small shift, barely perceptible, but it was there — and what it expressed wasn’t the shock or the horror that the statement might reasonably have produced in someone hearing it for the first time. It was something quieter than that.

’That’s all?’

The thought moved through him before he could fully examine whether he wanted it to.

Because this wasn’t new.

That was the uncomfortable truth sitting at the center of Taz’s narrowed eyes.

Lloyd had done this before. Not once, not as an isolated incident that had slipped past the institution’s notice, but repeatedly, with a consistency that had long since moved it out of the category of aberration and into something closer to pattern.

He went for the weak ones — the students without backing, without family names that carried weight, without anyone positioned to make the aftermath of his violence inconvenient for the people above them.

The ones the academy, if it was being honest with itself, hadn’t been particularly motivated to go to bat for.

A student with no talent. A student from a poor family. A student that the institution’s hierarchy had already quietly decided was unlikely to amount to much.