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The Good Life: Old Habits (ch. 17)
🕑 Added 2023-09-01 15:06:54 +0000 UTCThe affairs of the living world are for the humans living in it, and despite having a body of flesh and blood, Yoruichi still very much considered herself a spirit.
"This is a terrible idea," Yoruichi informed Law as wind buffeted her face, making her whiskers flap around while the boat they were on crashed through the waves in a spray of water. Law was all smiles as he continued straight for their destination -- Riker’s Island. Home to one of the country’s most depraved prisons according to a human invention called Google. Humans really did come up with the most incredible things. She was a big fan of the internet.
"I know," Law replied, his face covered by his mask, but the fact that he was wearing a wide smile was clear as day to her. Yoruichi simply shook her head, finding herself most amused with this human. It had been nothing more than dumb luck and chance that brought them together. Yoruichi's hobby was people watching. A habit she had picked up in the last hundred years of her time in the human world -- she would pick hundreds of humans to watch and visit, marveling at the changes that would take place in as little as a decade. How they would age. How snot nosed brats became mature adults.
It was a pretty big change in comparison to the Seireitei. There, nothing changed. You ate the same meals, met the same people, and did the same damn thing over and over and over for centuries on end. It made humans fascinating. And Law was a gem among them.
"Do you even have an exit strategy?" She asked, truly marveling at Law as he just laughed as his answer. He caught her attention in passing with a display of power. These so-called Supes were a thing of fleeting interest, but the ones she had been following quickly proved to be idle entertainment at best while Law and everything around him was prime time television.
To be human was to embrace change. Day by day, year by year, a person changed in ways that were only obvious when you stop to look back a decade. Law was an agent of change. A chaotic force that demanded it. He would not rest nor settle until everything had been flipped on its head. There was no doubt in her mind that if this had been the Seireitei, she would have been tasked with his assassination. He was a creature blind to risk vs reward, cost vs gain. He was completely based on emotion and beholden only to his own internal logic, a logic that was clearly twisted into pretzels.
The affairs of the living world are for the humans living in it. That didn't mean that she didn't want a front-row seat to this unmitigated shit show. What changes would Law bring? What changes would he experience? Already, there had been a change in him as the vaunted heroes of this world proved to be no better than any other mortal. There was a focus in his actions that hadn't been there before. More than that…
Law was beginning to plan. Every action was building to something -- even this trip to Riker’s Island. All of it building to an explosive finish that Yoruichi almost couldn't wait to witness.
“Room,” Law intoned, and an invisible force stretched out. It was completely undetectable as far as Yoruichi could tell. She couldn’t sense it, and if it wasn’t for Law describing his power to her, she would have never known that they were inside of his Room. An area that, in theory, he could control utterly, as if he were the Soul King himself. A fascinating power that he was just starting to get the hang of. Saying Room was the only tell that it had, and it was something he was actively working on.
It served as her only warning before they were suddenly on the rocky sand beach of the island, some three thousand feet from the boat that was still speeding in their direction. Already, the alarm was blaring, their approach having not gone unnoticed, but Law hadn’t exactly been trying to hide. Uttering Room a second time, recentering the Room around them, Yoruichi then found herself standing on a cafeteria table in the heart of New York’s most dangerous prison. Dozens of men in orange jumpsuits sat at the table, looking at them in shock.
The area was run down and neglected. The people inside…
It reminded her of home. The Maggots Nest - the secret prison run by the Onmitsukidō that made all but the lowest levels of the Central Great Underground Prison look like a vacation spot- a place where minor criminals and those who hadn't committed any crime at all were turned into hardened criminals just to survive. Those whose crimes didn’t warrant assassination or execution, ended up getting tossed into that hole and left to rot. It might as well be a grave, because… well… once you were down there, you never got to leave. No parole, no service time, no appeals.
All except for Mayuri Kurotsuchi. And if you needed a reason to think that the Soul Society was rotten to the core, you just needed to ask him to empty his pockets. You’d find plenty of reasons.
“Hello everyone! My name is Heartless! How would all of you like to become domestic terrorists?” Law began, raising his voice to speak to everyone in the cafeteria. Instantly, the shock at their abrupt arrival changed into interest. Yoruichi didn’t know what crimes they had committed to get put in prison, but she suspected that they had committed worse to survive inside. Freedom was a distant prospect and, based on the hunger in their eyes, one that a lot of them had given up on entirely.
None dared speak for a moment. A heavy silence fell on the cafeteria that was only broken by the doors sliding open to reveal a number of men in riot gear, throwing in tear gas. Without so much as a twitch, those security guards found themselves in locked cells along with the tear gas. That display of power did the trick. The hesitation left them. The stray thoughts of 'is this a trap' faded away and were replaced by desperation.
"You get me out of here and I'll do whatever the fuck you want!" The man directly in front of them, whose lunch was currently sitting on the beach, announced and that caused the rest to follow suit. They announced their allegiance with little thought of the cost that their freedom might have.
"That's the spirit! Who says America doesn't love a little terrorism?!" Law announced, clapping his hands together. "However, there is a small issue. If you want to join my gang-" he began but he was immediately interrupted by one of the inmates taking out a shank and stabbing another in the throat. The man gargled in his own blood, collapsing to a knee as his jumpsuit was dyed red. As soon as he hit the ground the entire cafeteria descended into absolute chaos with Law looking around in wonderment. "Totally not what I was going for, but this works too."
He seemed absolutely delighted in the massacre. The prisoners barely noticed when their surroundings changed, taking them all outside. Law briefly disappeared to gather up the other prisoners, leaving Yoruichi to watch the butchery. Men killed with weapons, with their hands, and even their teeth if they had to.
It reminded her once again of home, Yoruichi recalled, the smell of blood permeating the air as it was spilled on the lush green grass. The head of her family had been the commander-in-chief of the Onmitsukidō for about as long as it had been around. An organization of spies and assassins that kept the peace by eliminating problems before they could become problems, that had all but subsumed the Second Division of the Gotei Thirteen. By the time she became Captain of the Second Division, the already blurry lines between the two organizations vanished entirely.
As Captain, she trained her men to die. She took the average -- the ones who excelled at nothing, who possessed no innate talent. To those, she instilled financial devotion and a disregard for their own lives. Taught them, when a comrade was dying and in need of help, that it was better to strike at the enemies back as their friend was killed. To accomplish the mission at any cost, and their own life was the least that her assassin's were willing to sacrifice. There was nothing more costly in this world than peace and prosperity, and it could only be purchased in blood and lives.
And, for centuries, for better or worse, she paid that cost. All in the name of the greater good. A grand cause that Yoruichi wasn't sure she ever actually believed in. She'd like to think that there was more guilty blood on her hands than innocent, but she knew damn well that would be a lie. She killed whoever she was told to kill, and eventually became the doing the telling -- all to keep the peace.
Men and women that were left to rot in the Rukongai, who raged at the Soul Society. They might not need food or water, but there were many things that they could suffer because of the Seireitei's neglect.
Noble families that bucked at the long established powers. Those that tried to bring change to the Seireitei…. Honestly, if Yoruichi had been murdering for the sake of a better tomorrow, she should have been killing the power hungry wretches that pointed her at their enemies.
So, the savage sight didn't phase her. Not as men were bludgeoned to death, stabbed, or beaten until bones snapped. Cries of pain, fear, and primal rage echoed out. Death came quickly for humans. They were inherently fragile creatures without the use of Reiryoku. Law appeared nearby, watching on as the numbers were whittled down. As near fifteen thousand prisoners slowly became ten thousand, then eight thousand, then five thousand, Yoruichi spoke up. "I would stop it here," she recommended.
"Five thousand is still a lot, you know?" Law replied. The plan was to take a couple hundred at most. The rest would be released into the city to cause chaos.
"You have an army now," Yoruichi remarked, calling upon centuries of turning normal men and women into some of the deadliest murderers in the Soul Society. Her students might not have been the strongest fighters, but they absolutely were the best killers. "Take them back to the city and give them a reward. Reunite them with their families. Give them mountains of drugs. Let them see how great it can be working for you so they won't think to say no when you ask something of them."
Law considered it for a moment before he shrugged his shoulders, "I don't think I should be taking advice from my cat about raising armies, but that sounds hilarious. I'm in," Law decided, and such a danger was he that his own amusement was enough to commit to a radical change in his plans. With that, he clapped his hands and the sound echoed far louder than it should, the sound making the senseless violence pause. "Congratulations! You've passed the test! Freedom and justice for all of you," he said, and he really did know where to poke to get a reaction.
"You are all now members of my gang and I do think a celebration is in order. So, follow me -- you're getting out of here," Law said and despite the blood and the injuries, Yoruichi saw the hunger in their eyes. Hardship turned lumps of coal into diamonds. With the right touches, they could become a powerful force amongst the humans. The right training, the right motivation… Law gained an army of killers to keep in his back pocket. It might not make up for the numbers that they lost in the raids, but quality over quantity.
With the price for their admission all around them, they followed Heartless towards the gate. It opened for them, allowing them to leave the prison with ease. His control over his power was getting a lot finer, she noticed. The gestures to push buttons or move things were getting smaller or being eliminated entirely. She purred in approval -- it wouldn't do to waste one's talents, after all.
The island was connected to New York by a long bridge, and while the entire ordeal hadn't taken more than thirty minutes, that was enough time to garner a reaction. The US military had sent in a half dozen helicopters and Yoruichi marveled at them. Humans were creative, she would give them that much. Without Reiryoku, they were so limited in what they could accomplish, so they were endlessly creative with what they could manage. The helicopters flew in a V formation with the lead one making a downward tilt, blaring a demand for their surrender.
Law answered by flipping them off and the attack helicopters wasted no time launching their attacks. Missiles streaked towards them and Yoruichi leapt into action.
Right and wrong. There was a point in time she might have concerned herself with such a thing, but you can only ponder something like morality for so long before it got depressing. When your job was literally murdering people for the sake of the state, and when you started to find yourself agreeing with the people that you were murdering more often than not… eventually, you came to a breaking point. A point where you had to confront the fact that you were doing wrong, even if it was for the right reasons. And Yoruichi didn't even have the luxury of saying it was for the right reasons.
Old Man Yamamoto tried. He really did. He did his best to build a system of government that wasn't solely based on might makes right when he was hands down the strongest. He tried to make a democratic state without understanding what democracy was or how easily it could be turned against itself. But he failed. There were a lot of damn good reasons why everyone wanted the Soul Society destroyed, and Yoruichi was more privy to those reasons than most. If only the destruction of the Soul Society didn't come with the price tag of completely destabilizing the afterlife and the deaths of all her friends.
Because that was the answer she arrived at when it came to the question of right or wrong. Good and evil. Justice and injustice.
Was it good for her friends, or was it bad for her friends?
Yoruichi lightly landed on the missile that shot straight for Law and lightly pushed it with enough force to flip it around. With a gentle nudge, she sent it flying at one of the helicopters, who immediately panicked. An explosion of heat warmed her face as she was already pouncing onto the next missile, the first helicopter crashing down upon the bridge in a flaming wreck.
This was not her world, Yoruichi reminded herself as she effortlessly flipped through the air, another helicopter exploding as she landed on top of the spinning thing that kept the helicopter afloat. That bag of dicks Aizen was nowhere to be found. Kisuke wasn't here either. More than that, in half a year of being here, Yoruichi hadn't seen a single Hollow and enough time had passed that she was increasingly certain that the borders between this human realm and the Soul Society, Hell, and Hueco Mundo were a lot more locked down compared to the one she knew.
Meaning all of her old friends were gone. All of her old enemies were gone too. No Hollows. No Aizen.
A complete fresh start that she never asked for.
Yoruichi felt the air pulling her down and she kicked the spinning thing with enough force that the helicopter shot to the ground and flattened like a pancake upon hitting the water. Using that momentum, she turned her attention to the last two helicopters, who were panicking at being cut down like flies.
Law was a friend. She liked him. And she really didn't need a reason to offer a helping hand beyond that. Yoruichi would fight on the side of her friends -- good, evil, right, wrong… none of that played a factor into anything.
If her friends wanted to save the world, then she would fight to save it. If her friends wanted to destroy the world, then she would destroy it.
With the last of the helicopters destroyed and the path forward cleared, Yoruichi landed and lightly kicked one of her paws, basking at the stupefied expression that Law was hiding behind his mask. "What?" She questioned, a smile in her voice. "Did you think talking was all I could do?"
Law didn't miss a beat as the odd five thousand men behind him were absolutely dumbfounded. "Uh, yeah. Kinda."
"... and you brought me along on this mission because…?" Yoruichi tilted her head. He really was clueless, then? She thought he might have wizened up about her human form.
"I thought you'd be bored at the apartment," he admitted with a shrug and Yoruichi simply chuckled at the consideration. Law could be surprisingly thoughtful. When he felt like being thoughtful, of course. "What else can you do?"
"I suppose you'll have to wait and see."
…
Yoruichi liked Robin. About as much as she liked Law. She reminded Yoruichi of Soifon, even if they couldn't be more different physically. Namely, where Soifon was… svelte, Robin had a massive pair of tits. So big that it was honestly kind of shocking. Their similarities revolved around the fact that they were dependable -- didn't matter what was going on, Yoruichi could always turn to Soifon to take care of things. Naturally, that behavior was rewarded with plenty of orgasms, but she wasn’t entirely sure what Robin was getting out of it beyond the self satisfaction of creating an international criminal organization.
"So, Robin, what's the damage?" Law asked as he kicked his feet up in his penthouse apartment. He seemed completely unaware that across the street, Robin was in her own living room. A nice apartment that was absolutely covered in information relevant to managing a criminal conspiracy. She was good at it too. Really good. Good enough to tell Yoruichi that this was far from her first rodeo.
"Severe on all fronts, but recoverable with proper action," Robin stated, her tone aloof while Yoruichi was lazily sprawled out on Law's lap, enjoying some chin scratches. "Revenue has been seized and disrupted, a number of those loyal to us have been killed or arrested, and a good half of those that used to work for us have broken all contact or are actively working against us."
Dire straits, honestly. Calling the situation severe was a genuine understatement. And she could see the disinterest in Law's eyes as he heard about how his criminal organization was falling around his ears. "Looks like a win for the good guys," he remarked, a sly smile tugging at his lips. As far as the news was concerned, Heartless was done for. He may have managed to escape capture, but they were tightening the noose around his neck. No mentions of Riker's Island or the targeting of Supes.
That was some quality information control. Yoruichi might be out of the game, but game still recognized game, as the humans said.
"I expect you intend to let them bask in it?" Robin questioned and Law's smile just grew.
"Of course. A win is a win. Stan is more fun than I thought he'd be," Law mused, scratching behind her ears and Yoruichi just about melted underneath his touch. As if she needed another reason to stick around. He had magic fingers. "Any word on their next move?" He asked and Robin paused for a moment.
"Solidifying their victory over you by parading the members of the Eight that they captured. Homelander will likely receive a parade as they push the agenda of Supes in the military and the police," Robin answered and Law simply hummed to himself. She could see his mind working, turning over the factors as he plotted out a course of action that would only make sense to him.
"I can deal with the wayward members of the Eight. They'll try to stop me from usurping their spotlight, but I know how to get around that," he muttered to himself.
"I'm more curious on how you intend to use the Supes you have… acquired," Robin prompted.
"And ruin the surprise?" He shot back, entirely too pleased with himself and whatever he was cooking up in that head of his. Yoruichi heard Robin swallow a sigh over the phone, but she didn't seem surprised by the decision in the slightest.
"Can you at least tell me where you will be striking as to not disrupt my own plans?" Robin requested. She really was the guiding hand to the organization. Law was just the figurehead, but it was an interesting give and take. Law gave Robin near complete control over the Eight, but Robin still pulled the reins in the direction that Law pointed. For what reason? Yoruichi found herself curious, especially now that Robin's hard work was blowing up in her face because of Law.
"Their image," Law answered with a smile. That… didn't really narrow things down, if Yoruichi was being perfectly honest. Law had been attacking the heroes' image since the start -- touching the untouchable, dragging their reputation through the mud by exposing every little secret. Something that Yoruichi thoroughly approved of. It was something she had imagined herself doing way back in the day when the virtuous facade of the Seireitei started to make her sick to her stomach. Law was a real piece of work, but he didn't pretend to be anything other than what he was. He didn't pretend to be anything other than a self-indulgent monster that sought only his own self-gratification.
He didn't hide behind words like 'the greater good' or 'necessary sacrifices'.
"... Can I expect a further partnership with Miss Sato, then?" Robin prompted. Yoruichi perked up -- she liked Asami. She reminded her of Kisuke, only more uptight. And not as lazy. And more of a functioning person... It was mostly the brilliant inventor thing, honestly. Maybe she was just looking to make connections where none existed, but all the same, Asami was adorable. Especially when she was throwing down with an international conglomerate.
"Probably," Law agreed. "Do we still have enough money to pay her?"
"Not in such volume," Robin confessed and wow, they really had been punched in the wallet, huh?
"Then send her my kick up," Law spent hundreds of millions of dollars with a dismissive wave of his hand. "Her company is going to be important for the next stage of the plan." What plan would that be? "We'll need to take care of those insider trading charges, though."
"Already being taken care of," Robin informed. "I suspected that you intended more for her."
"You're the best, Robin," Law told her. He really did place a great deal of faith in someone who he had never even spoken to face to face. Law settled in as he watched the news detailing his defeat, how his organization has been crushed, and how he was on the run. A number of heroes stood front and center to take the credit -- Black Noir, Queen Maeve, and a handful of other notables. Starlight was one of them. That girl was an odd one.
Yoruichi could feel it in her bones -- the next step of this so-called plan was going to be a messy one. The first true confrontation between the Seven and the Eight. Until now, they just threw punches, and the other side countered. They prodded and poked. A warm up for the real fight that was coming up next.
Mirko was on the screen, looking displeased with the attention that was being dumped on her. She had potential. Yoruichi had her eye on Mirko since the very start, and she only got more promising as time went by. That woman would break before she bent. Yoruichi couldn't wait.
Interrupting her train of thought, Yoruichi felt Law's phone ring in his pocket and he shifted her around to take it out. Curious, she shifted to see the screen and her eyebrows shot upwards when she saw a photo of Cinder. The woman was almost as dangerous as she was attractive -- especially when she was completely naked and sitting on a 7 shaped table, her perky breasts covered with an arm and her expression smoldering. There was little doubt in her mind that Starlight had taken the photo.
Underneath the photo was a message.
'Come claim your reward.'
"I truly hope that I don't need to state how foolish it would be to go to Vought headquarters to sleep with a dangerous narcissist that is now among our greatest adversaries?" Robin sighed as Law was already standing up, setting her aside.
Law was all smiles, "Nope. You really don't," he said, heading for the door to his apartment.
That kid really was his own worst enemy. But, the thing is, Yoruichi didn't think Law would have it be any other way.
