The Law Bends, Then Breaks.
Chapter 17: The Law Bends, Then Breaks
Rukia sat in the dim glow of her office lamp, flipping through a stack of documents with practiced precision.
The law wasn't about morality. It never had been. It was a game of pressure, of influence, of knowing which levers to pull and which to cut.
And she was a master of the game.
She had taken down men twice Aqua's size. She had crushed industries with a well-placed clause. She had rewritten corporate landscapes with a single paragraph hidden in the fine print.
Aqua was no different.
At least, that's what she had told herself.
Yet, as she stared at the case files before her, a realization clawed at the edges of her mind.
He wasn't playing by the same rules.
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The first move was simple: tax audits.
She flagged discrepancies in his financial statements.
She found inconsistencies in his offshore accounts.
She ensured every property linked to his name was re-evaluated for compliance.
Then came business permits.
She pulled strings to delay construction projects under environmental regulations.
She filed motions to revoke land licenses.
She created legal bottlenecks, ones that should have forced Aqua to react.
Nothing happened.
No lawyers showed up in court. No appeals were filed. No resistance emerged.
At first, she thought it was arrogance. Maybe Aqua thought himself untouchable.
But then she checked the system.
The filings were gone.
Not rejected. Not delayed.
Erased.
Rukia's grip tightened on her pen.
Someone had wiped them from existence.
Not one. Not two.
Every single case.
That wasn't just corruption. That was something deeper. Something darker.
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She spent days running diagnostics, tracking every document that had vanished.
Her connections ran deep-judges, clerks, legal analysts.
She knew people in the system.
But no one had answers.
"I never saw that case."
"That motion? It was never filed."
"Are you sure you submitted it, Amanika-san?"
She wasn't insane. She wasn't sloppy.
She tried again.
She sent a single test case under a dummy corporation. A fabricated claim, designed to flag minor tax fraud in a property linked to Aqua.
It was processed. It was logged.
And the next day?
Gone.
Not dismissed. Not delayed.
Deleted.
Rukia leaned back in her chair, exhaling sharply.
This wasn't just influence.
This was control.
Someone—or something—was rewriting data itself.
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Fine. If her standard methods weren't working, she'd escalate.
She moved quickly:
Property seizures. Aqua had assets, but they couldn't all be hidden.
Freezing accounts. Even offshore money needed pathways.
Bureaucratic warfare. If she couldn't touch Aqua directly, she'd cripple the people around him.
Yet, every time she expected pushback, nothing came.
The silence wasn't victory. It was unnerving.
Her legal network-usually buzzing with activity-remained dead still.
She called an old friend in the judiciary.
The response was short. Cold.
"Drop it, Rukia."
"This isn't something you want to touch."
And then the line went dead.
Rukia lowered the phone, fingers trembling slightly.
She wasn't afraid.
But for the first time in years, she felt outmatched.
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Three days later, an envelope arrived at her office.
No name. No return address.
Inside was a single sheet of paper.
Her stomach twisted as she unfolded it.
It was a court ruling.
Stamped. Signed. Legitimate.
But the words on it?
They were impossible.
Aqua didn't exist.
Not missing. Not dead.
Legally erased.
His name had been stripped from every registry, every database. As if he had never been born.
Rukia's breath caught.
Even with all her power, she couldn't do this.
This wasn't just forgery. This wasn't just corruption.
This was something beyond human.
She clenched the document, eyes dark.
Justice was a lie.
But whatever Aqua was he had the power to make it truth.
Rukia stared at the document in her hands. It was impossible. No, worse than that-it was unnatural.
A forged identity was one thing. Criminals, spies, and even ordinary conmen did it all the time. But this wasn't just a false name. This was an erasure.
Aqua had never been born. He had never paid taxes, never signed a lease, never existed in any legal capacity. There was no birth certificate, no medical records, no employment history. Not even an alias to chase down.
And yet he walked among them. Lived, breathed, built power.
Her fingers curled around the edge of the paper, knuckles turning white. How?
She had spent her life navigating the law, bending it, exploiting it, understanding it in ways most people never would. There was always a trail. Even the most carefully constructed falsehoods left footprints if you knew where to look.
But this?
This was like trying to find shadows in the dark.
A sharp knock on her office door dragged her out of her thoughts.
"Enter," she said, voice measured.
A young clerk stepped inside, nervous. "Ma'am, we've run another cross-check through every national database. There's nothing."
"Not surprising," Rukia murmured. "And international?"
The clerk hesitated.
Rukia's gaze sharpened. "What?"
"There was something, but..." He swallowed. "It disappeared."
She stood, papers forgotten. "Explain."
"We flagged the anomaly for further review. But when we tried to access the data again, it was gone. Not erased-just... gone. Like it was never there."
Rukia's lips pressed into a thin line.
She had seen cover-ups before. Data could be destroyed, logs tampered with. But this wasn't deletion. It was a rewriting of data itself.
It was as if the moment Aqua's name was noticed, the system had instinctively erased it.
No traces. No errors.
Nothing.
Rukia exhaled slowly. This wasn't a battle of legalities anymore. This was war against something that refused to be bound by the laws of the world.
Fine.
If Aqua could erase his past, then she would carve his downfall into the present.
Rukia exhaled slowly. This wasn't a battle of legalities anymore. This was war against something that refused to be bound by the laws of the world.
She sat back down, eyes gleaming with something colder than determination.
"Prepare a new case file," she said, voice even. "This time, we don't search for his past. We trap him in the now."
The law bent.
Now, she would make it break.
The lights flickered. Her computer screen glitched, lines of corrupted text flashing for half a second before stabilizing.
And in the reflection of her darkened monitor-for the briefest, impossible moment-she saw a second shadow standing behind her.