Chapter Text
For a lawyer, Hiromi Higuruma could be pretty undignified when he wanted to be. Take, for instance, right now.
He’s perched on one fuzzy red velveteen stool of many in the Tokyo Metropolitan Theater’s lobby, croissant in one hand and a latte from a barista’s coffee machine he operated primarily through guesswork in the other. He's dropping croissant flakes everywhere, and there’s a few angry blisters on his right hand from where he scalded himself once or twice. Some burn cream he liberated from a pharmacy seems to have done the trick for now, though.
Blisters or no, in Higuruma’s professional opinion, the coffee was worth it. Any old convenience store had a coffee machine that would work equally just as well, but when did he ever have the opportunity to use a proper machine? Especially given that trying new things has been his motto recently.
It was a bit too cold to people watch in the plaza outside (as if there were people around to watch), so the crisp crunches of the just-passable croissant, ten times louder than normal thanks to the lobby’s high ceiling, became the backdrop to his thoughts.
What would he do with himself today?
Since his establishment in the area, things have quieted down from their initial hectic pace. Higuruma was almost starting to miss the daily fights to the death the Culling Games ostensibly had as the Culling Games, even if the actual pleasure he took in taking a life was close to zero. Instead, things settled into an oddly mundane rhythm, or mundane as it could be for Tokyo, a city of ten million people, being almost completely emptied out save a few people with powers. Wake up, look outside, take some food, twiddle his thumbs, summon his shikigami, dismiss his shikigami, take more food from a convenience store, so on and so forth. If people weren’t gunning for him anymore, then were they choosing to give him a berth? Or was this merely a lull, and tomorrow he’d wake up surrounded or dead?
On that note, Higuruma stood up, giving his Yofuku-no-Aoyama suit a final brush down before he decided to start his daily excursion to nowhere in particular.
The sun outside shone with the harsh glare that only comes around with the colder months—the type of sunlight that casts blue-tinted shadows instead of black. If that didn’t serve adequate enough a reminder of the temperature outside, the breeze sure did, nipping at Higuruma’s ears as it whistled down the empty streets.
He picked a direction at random and walked.
It was just too quiet. Higuruma’s steps echoed through all-too-empty streets past all-too-empty office buildings to what would probably be somewhere slightly less empty, but the only signs of life whatsoever were faint booms in the distance. Obviously, the friendly, nice sort that he should definitely investigate the source of.
And there was the other matter of the minor issue with Higuruma just encountered with his method of picking a direction and walking, as without realizing he almost stepped into a very large crevice in the middle of the road from one of his bouts. It would be a bit silly of him to pick this direction knowing he couldn’t pass this way. This was his, right? Higuruma looked to the left and noted sections of rubble in the walls of buildings matching to where he had been launched through, and if he looked down…
Okay. A pair of legs, a torso and an overwhelming stench of iron that he may have been responsible for. Decomposition hadn’t set in yet, even though he had encountered her just over a week ago. Interesting.
She spoke in a pompous manner, claiming to be reincarnated from the Heian Era and giving a haughty sniff at the piddly little mallet he summoned. Up until the moment Judgeman appeared over his shoulder that fateful day, Higuruma would dismiss her as a crackpot; a crackpot not viable for insanity plea given she knew exactly the nature of her actions by trapping him in a domain and attempting to beat him within an inch of his life, but a crackpot, nonetheless. The Culling Games, in that matter, have done an excellent job of testing his suspension of disbelief.
And, what happened then? Well, in Ikebukuro, they say— the lawyer’s small gavel grew three sizes that day. The lower half of the body was the only half still recognizable as once belonging to a person, and he refused to let his eyes drift any further upwards.
With how much of a rift had been left in the road, it would be a bit of a hassle to try and negotiate it through climbing down and back up. Higuruma was still not quite sure why he forgot about it.
Look at her torso. Look at it.
Thinking of her dredged up something that she said. It nagged at him at the time, but he set it aside on accounts of fighting for his life. If he recalled correctly, it was something along the lines of,
“Be that as it may my need to unravel my cursed craft is next to nought, it has a manner of elegance and polish to which you, modern sorcerer, shall appreciate my toil in refining it!”
Be that as it may… Be that as it may…
The wording. There are circumstances in which it is necessary to reveal one’s technique to an opponent, most likely because it would confer an effect upon oneself. Higuruma himself, for instance, is compelled to explain the rules of his domain once he opens it. Is this effect a benefit or disadvantage? “Be that as it may I don’t have a need to weaken myself,” versus, “Be that as it may I don’t have a need to strengthen myself.”
He toyed with the wording in his head. The faraway booms continued.
Be that as it may… Be that as it may… Be that as it may…
To reveal the technique is to remove the surprise, thereby weakening it, but his technique, his version of the rule of law, like any good rule of law functions on transparency. He can’t not reveal how his domain functions. He tried to hold back once, but it just spilled out. Either those Lon Fuller readings he did must have really dug their little claws into his head, or something else is happening here.
Boom. Boom.
Be that as it may.
Ah, there we go, I think. The more rules-based the technique is, the more clarifying the rules confers power upon the technique. It should provide marginal benefit for techniques that do not have strict rules, but for techniques and domains that are rules-based, the reveal is indispensable. It’s like a game. It’s easy for someone to pick up Tag learning rules on the fly, but it’s perhaps slightly harder to do the same with, say, shogi.
Oh, so that’s why the Culling Games does that.
Boom. Boom. Boom. Just turn around and look at—
Jujutsu has been around for thousands of years. Someone must have come up with means by which ‘clarifying’ a technique with little rules can still grant it an significant boost. If so, then what could ‘clarifying’ actually entail?
Higuruma began to distance himself from the damaged patch of road and the body, checking for a side street to make a detour onto.
There’s a barrier. It covers a very large distance—I think Yoyogi to somewhere in Itabashi. I highly doubt that’s normal. Its power could be enforced by its very existence in the rules, but, if it were the work of an individual, there may be a physical place ‘clarified,’ made clear, made… duh, obvious enough to where if an anchor or technique originated from there, it would augment the strength of it beyond what would be possible normally.
And on obvious big buildings, maybe the nearby massive complex, Sunshine City, with a sixty-floor skyscraper (creatively named Sunshine 60) would do the trick. Higuruma now had a hypothesis, and with that an objective for the day. Don’t think about the body.
His pace picking up, another street sign channeled him northbound towards an elevated freeway that as he approached slowly but surely dwarfed him; by the time he reached where the road he was initially following ended, he stood in the expressway's shadow, having to crane his neck to barely catch the top of it. The booms were quieter than before, too. Higuruma hazarded a guess that they came from the south—Zoshigaya, maybe, where the tram line was.
The judge—not right now.
How surreal is it, then, that in any other circumstance that expressway would be bumper-to-bumper, and the streets would be filled with people going places. He could stop right now and sit on the ground, and nobody would tell him to get out of the way— just sit and feel the roughness of the tiling that comprised the sidewalk. He could see if there was some Aston Martin or Bentley up there, and if the fob was still in the car, just take it— not like he'd ever get one otherwise on a public defender's salary. He could break into the municipal office and see everyone’s records—make a hit list to prove some points. The only true rules were survival through self defence, survival through point acquisition and whatever Kogane may add.
It's November now. His oxfords resumed their rhythmic clacking against the ground as he walked past a display for some Mont Blanc-flavoured latte in the window of an Excelsior Coffee. Next month back home, it’ll probably be an orange-flavoured mocha, or something Christmassy like peppermint instead, but the Culling Game insists upon itself.
Orange, yuzu, strawberry, cherry blossom, plum, mint chocolate. I’d prefer not to die.
That—move on. The scraping of his shoes against pavement faded out.
Fuck it, let’s steal that Bentley to do it once.
Stealing a Bentley is harder than it sounds, even with no police around to catch you. For one, you have to find a Bentley.
From the top of the building he’d broken into, Higuruma looked back down at street level. The cold breeze now a harsh wind whipping past his face, the first thing that set in was vertigo, and the second was the sudden instinct to throw something over the edge to watch it shatter, which ended up being a still-running air conditioning unit. A gavel in his hand through pure will alone, he slammed it into the bolts keeping it attached to the roof before hoisting the unit over the building’s edge with a solid heft; it landed with a solid bang! as mechanical parts and coolant exploded onto the concrete. The splatter of coolant kind of—no.
Between that and the crater in the door where the doorknob was, there would no doubt be evidence that he was about, which presented a potential opportunity for development of his abilities or, if nothing else, a timer reset. He himself was on a timer now. Higuruma sighed, his body loosening in a brief respite.
Bringing his attention back to the main matter at hand, while from his current angle he could now very much spot which building was Sunshine 60, that same view did not include any luxury cars whatsoever, of which Higuruma knew quite a few makes and models. Ex-classmates here and there who’d enter Big Law, get snapped up by global firms, those were the cars they’d end up driving when they were made head partner. Take Suzuno Ryouhei-san from two months ago—he’d just helped on an IPO advisory worth billions of yen. Has a lovely wife, lived in a very swanky apartment in Hiro-o, and his two girls went to some absurdly expensive private school with an English immersion program. Their holidays are spent skiing in the Swiss Alps.
Higuruma had caught up with him over drinks at an upscale hostess bar in Roppongi. He’s at work sixty hours a week and the wife won’t sleep with him. A dead bedroom after marriage is pretty normal anyway, but given long hours is a part of the job, that bedroom was on life support to begin with.
The Rémy Martin and the women couldn’t mask how tired Suzuno-san’s eyes were.
Immature as it was, and maybe fueled by a little of the aforementioned Rémy, Higuruma felt a smug satisfaction creep up upon him. He’s doing the thing lawyers ought to be doing, upholding the law—Tokyo was just an in-and-out for work, he’d be back on the bullet train by tomorrow— and Suzuno-san’s been bent over for a little extra money helping companies avoid taxes and paying their workers. No, Higuruma’s not a little bitter and twisted by the fact that he’s 36 and being paid peanuts to do the right thing while his parents’ questions of when the grandchildren are coming are starting to sound more like pushes, why do you ask?
Suzuno-san knows his eyes are closed, and it’s just not fair. It makes sense, but God, it’s not fair, just nor reasonable.
“And, how’s your job otherwise,” Suzuno-san asks, having shooed away a 25 year old with beauty marks and bleached hair, her name's Mio if Higuruma remembered correctly, for a brief minute of one-on-one talk.
“Oh, the same old. I’m in town gathering testimony for the embezzlement case we’re wrapping up, and there’s the Oe one I told you about. I think I can pull it off.”
Suzuno-san takes a sneaky drag of a vape, exhaling strawberry-kiwi smoke between his teeth, before sighing.
“You graduated top of the class. I still remember you sitting at the front of the lecture hall, answering all of the questions we kind of didn’t want to… no, no, not like that. You’d always ask these really smart questions, you know. We were all kind of glad you were there.”
“Okay. What about it?”
“Are you- Why? Why do that? Why do what you’re doing now? You could have picked anywhere. Anything.”
Higuruma put a glass of cognac to his lips, ice clinking as he raised his hand. A pregnant pause held briefly before he set down the glass and finally spoke.
“Because I wanted to.”
Praise, exasperation, shock—in the dim lighting, a something flashed across Suzuno-san’s face. He gawped, mouth opening, closing, expressions changing as he tried to formulate an answer, before finally,
“I really admire you, you know.”
Anyway, Suzuno-san drove an Audi RS7, and Higuruma got carried away with reminiscing.
But still, what a bummer. Higuruma spun on his heel and stepped back into the fluorescent lighting of the fire escape; the air inside just slightly more stagnant, and the sun shining through the windows slightly brighter, than it was on the way up. Reaching the bottom of the flight of stairs, he took in the mangled remnants of the air conditioner and a good whiff of the metaphorical bomb of coolant that just went off.
An underlying note, sickly sweet, brought to mind… Anyway, how odd that he could just do whatever he wanted, and nobody would stop him.
Bentleys can wait, Higuruma mused before carrying on, a trail of wet footsteps behind him.