J.A. Criminal Consulting
Chapter 3
Written by Demon Of Zero
Jaune Arc felt a mixture of pride, anxiety, and general exhaustion as he stumbled back into his hotel room. He'd been lucky to find the place, cheap rooms and modest furnishing, in a nice part of the city that was still reasonably close by anywhere he needed to go and thankfully far away from the site of today's incident.
If only he'd woken up hungover here instead of with that crabby angel... demon... girl. The stress that whole event put on his already aching head was just inhumane. Jaune had been fairly certain he was going to hurl at any moment through that whole mess.
But he hadn't. Instead, he managed to keep a bunch of violent gangsters from killing each other. Which probably saved his own life, too, because they didn't look like they were taking prisoners. Only just managing the energy to strip off his armor and throw it to the side somewhere, Jaune slumped forward onto the softness of his hotel bed and just breathed a sigh of relief into the pillows. Safety at last. He could finally stop using his brain and let it try and recover from the abuse he put it through the previous night.
He didn't drink often, there was only one drink he could even stand to begin with after all, so his tolerance was already low. And after being rejected from Beacon, Jaune was pretty sure he'd downed more drinks in that one night than every other time put together. It explained the monstrous headache, the general aches and pains in his body, and so on. Jaune was pretty sure he'd never felt this shitty in his life.
All he really wanted to do right now was just lay here and go to sleep. Tomorrow, he would need to deal with the fallout of his failure; he would head back home in shame, return to his life as the dopey Arc boy who was outshined by his entire family, and try to live out the rest of his life knowing that his dream had been shot down before he'd even had a chance to try.
Maybe he'd wake up back home and find out this was all just some kind of nightmare. He'd wake up, laugh it off, and set out from home to join Beacon Academy and live his dream. He would make friends, get stronger, and become the Huntsmen he had always wanted to be.
"That'd be nice..." He mumbled to himself, tired eyes finally giving out and sliding closed.
Soon enough, he was deep in the embrace of slumber, the entire world blacked out in the pleasant haze of a dreamless sleep.
When he woke back up, Jaune wasn't surprised to see that it was in the hotel room in Vale. But just because he wasn't surprised didn't mean it didn't feel like a punch in the gut. With the pain in his head now dulled to a light throb instead of the piercing migraine it had been, he fumbled for his scroll to check the time. Pulling the little device out, he flicked it open and sighed.
He didn't know exactly what time he'd dragged himself back to his hotel room, but it had been some time early in the afternoon he was pretty sure. Which meant he had been in bed for a good while, then, because it was now well into the evening. For a few minutes, Jaune just sat there on his bed, staring at the screen of his scroll and watching the seconds tick by on the display. What was he going to do now?
He should just go home. There wasn't anything for him here anymore, right? But... he kind of didn't want to. He had come to Vale in the first place to try and leave that behind, try and be something more.
If he went home, the rest of his life would be spent just... living. He'd get some job or another so he wasn't leeching off his family, and he just be stuck with that life until he died. Jaune didn't want that. Going back home, he would just waste his life away, wouldn't he? But it wasn't like Vale had anything for him either, though. Closing the scroll and slipping it into his pocket, Jaune took a deep breath and let it out as a long, exhausted sigh.
"... I need a shower." He grumbled aloud to himself, catching a whiff of the awful scents clinging to him. He could practically smell the vomit from earlier, the sweat from all of the stress he had been put through while running around the building avoiding gunshots, and if he really tried Jaune could smell some of the blood that had probably landed on him in the conflict.
Yeah. He needed a shower, and he needed to change clothes. And wash his for that matter. That was good. He needed to focus on the little things right now, give himself something to do. It would take his mind off of the endless cycle of depression he was just one good push away from right now. For the moment, Jaune just decided to throw his clothes in a pile near his bags. There was a laundromat down the road, he would wash everything there.
Tomorrow, though. With the experience he just had today Jaune Arc was not about to go wandering around Vale in the dark even if this was supposed to be one of the better parts of town. Throwing the last garment into the pile, Jaune stood in the middle of the room for a few moments as he noticed that, yes, there was actually some blood on his clothing. Not too much, but enough that people would probably have questioned him if anyone noticed it.
Thankfully, the hotel hadn't been very busy when he finally slogged his way back through to his room. He didn't think so, anyway, otherwise someone would probably have stopped him. Jaune sighed. "I'll deal with that tomorrow..." For now, that shower was sounding nicer and nicer. Maybe he would do that and then just head back to bed and sleep off the remainder of the headache. "I am never going to drink that much again, that was awful." The blonde promised himself aloud as he made his way into the bathroom, fumbling with the door for a moment before he managed to get the thing open. Hands, man. How do they even work sometimes?
Well, better than they did when he was drunk, that much was true at least since he actually opened the right door this time; honestly, Jaune was just really glad he didn't somehow stumble his way into another den of crooks and thieves planning a heist on his way to this bathroom. The thought did kind of make him chuckle, just at the absurdity of it. Honestly, he wasn't ever going to tell that story for two reasons; one, no one would ever believe him, and two... he was totally an accessory to that robbery he caught wind of on the news tonight as he walked back to his hotel.
"Whoops..." He mumbled to himself, a bit guilty but at the same time more amused by it than anything. Seriously, how was he supposed to know that was going to happen? It was a total fluke, he had been absolutely smashed out of his mind. They even thought he wouldn't remember doing it, but he did, even if it was sort of blurry and he couldn't quite recall faces from the incident.
Reaching into the shower stall, Jaune fiddled with the knob for a moment and turned on the hot water. He took a couple seconds to let it run and heat up, stuck his hand in to check the temperature, and promptly pulled it back out like he'd touched a burning stove. "Ow." He grumbled, shaking his hand around idly. That was way, way, way too hot. Jaune was all of a sudden very glad that he had gotten into the habit of actually checking the temperature instead of just hopping in like he used to.
That would have sucked massively had he been standing in the middle of it. Quickly correcting the temperature and testing once more, he found the waters to be just right. He smiled widely before stepping into the shower stall and letting the water rain down on him, washing away the tension in his body just as surely as the grime covering it. Jaune was not ashamed whatsoever of the blissful sigh that tore from his lips. This was heaven. Four walls and a cleansing rain to soothe his soul. Here, he could just let his body turn on auto-pilot, let his mind wander, and just feel at peace.
The world was still out there, and nothing had changed... but right now, he just didn't care; and it felt so good after the day he had been having.
What was he going to do about his situation at Beacon? It was kind of obvious, if unfortunate; he had to go back home. Even if he didn't want to, there just wasn't any other option. He didn't have a source of income and his funds would eventually run out. Just because he'd been penny pinching allowances and chore money didn't mean he was loaded; it was a fairly modest sum, but not enough to even try to make a living in Vale.
And even if he did want to do that, what would he do here really? No friends, no family, no place to stay, no income, and no connections to find any of that stuff? That would be stupid. So back home it was, and it was obvious. It wasn't a fun realization, but if there was one thing he learned it was never to ignore shower thoughts. Even the stupid ones could be useful somewhere down the line.
The blow didn't really hit quite as hard as it had when he first got the letter, or even when he'd first slumped into a booth at The Club with a drink in hand. It was kind of muted now, especially when he got a first hand glimpse of what people actually did in a fight.
That crabby girl, Mel, she was a real eye opener for him. While they had been running around in the chaos, he'd noticed that she very clearly did not have any kind of bullet proof vest or anything on. But when she had been shot, it just left a hole in her dress and not in her... but, that hadn't been the case for the people she got her hands... er, feet... on. The gore of it was unpleasant, but it told Jaune something about the world that he hadn't really realized before.
He had no idea what the heck he was doing. Like, not even just in a fight like he'd originally thought, Jaune had pieced together from that whole messed up incident that there was something these people had that he just didn't. And he still had zero clue what the heck that was, which was kind of frustrating. If he could just shrug off a bullet wound or two, maybe it wouldn't have been a pipe dream to get to Beacon.
That was shower thought number two; figure out what the heck these people were doing that turned them into freaking super soldiers and get a piece of that pie. It suddenly made sense how a person could go toe to toe with a Grimm if that was what all of the Huntsmen and Huntresses could do, even if it did seem like whatever it was had some kind of limit. If he had that same kind of power, maybe he could even give the Huntsmen thing another shot? Beacon had rejected him, and that sucked, but there were other schools; smaller schools.
It was a bit of a hopeful thought, but it was possible. First he would need to figure out what that special something was that he was lacking, and then he could plan from there. If all these Huntsmen had it, then there was no way it could be a secret. There were just too many people in that line of work to keep something like that hidden from the world. Shower thought two, article b: once he was done in here, start using the vast resources of the CCTnet to research Huntsmen. Nodding lightly to himself, feeling a bit of a smile come to his lips, Jaune set those thoughts aside for the moment and returned to enjoying his shower. But, of course, that would be when the water began to cool.
He grumbled a bit, but quickly got to finishing up before he could get frozen out. "First thing I do, then, is grab my scroll and start trying to figure out what kind of weird mojo I'm missing." Jaune announced to himself, stepping out of the shower and beginning to towel off. "I can work on the rest later, go home and give it another shot another time. If I aim a little lower and prepare myself more, I can maybe still salvage things."
It wouldn't be the same as Beacon, but a license was a license right? It didn't matter if he didn't start out as one of the best, he could still work his way up over time. He could be the guy who graduated from a less known school and matched up to Beacon graduates, the underdog story everyone loved to see. That didn't sound so bad.
So it was with that pleasant thought that a towel-clad Jaune Arc stepped back into his hotel room, prepared for a long night of research into a topic he only had a vague awareness of…
...And then he stopped dead in his tracks as he saw the two people currently standing in his room. The room which he had been very, very sure to lock.
But, well, he supposed that those two wouldn't have any trouble finding a way in anyway, would they?
"Ooh, not too shabby there blondie." The crabby angel-demon-girl announced, eyeing him like a piece of meat. She made no move to explain her presence, simply resting on his bed and kicking her legs idly.
She looked a lot better than she had earlier. Unreasonably better, as a matter of fact. Whatever that weird magic they had was, it looked like it extended to more than just protecting them. He was sure her ribs had to have been bruised pretty badly earlier, but right now she seemed pretty much fine. He wondered how much of it was an act. Jaune hadn't gotten a look at the other girl from that incident, but her name had been Miltia, that much he was sure of. And now, seeing her, Jaune figured out something he hadn't really known; they were twins.
That or clones, but twins seemed much more likely. While Mel was clad in whites and blues, with bladed heels on her boots, Miltia was all reds and blacks, with shorter hair and... oh, those claws were not very nice looking. Jaune was now pretty sure he knew exactly how a few of those corpses he had seen ended up like that.
From what he could tell, she also seemed pretty much unharmed; clothes ruffled and a bit rough around the edges, but standing just fine and not seeming like she was in pain. She stood next to her sister, arms crossed and looking him over much less obviously than her sister. "He's not too bad, yeah." She announced after a minute. "Couldn't really tell under that hoodie, but he's not as much of a noodle as I thought."
He really didn't know what to say to that. A pair of killer girls from a local gang had broken into his hotel room, caught him wearing nothing but a towel, and were now just casually ogling him without even explaining why they were there.
"Yeah..." He finally managed to speak, glancing a bit nervously at their weapons and gripping his towel a bit tighter. "I, uh, don't really know what to say here. Um... how can I help you ladies?" As soon as he asked the question, Jaune felt himself regret it a little bit as the girls put on a pair of identical smiles.
In his experience, when the twins start doing the creepy simultaneous smile thing, it ends up causing him grief. Apparently that wasn't just a thing his sisters did.
"Well, Vomit-Boy, you could make it easy on us and just accept our job offer without any hassle." Mel spoke up, showing that he had been completely right to be worried.
"Job offer?" He repeated, cautious. "Are you... inviting me to join your gang? Seriously?" Jaune was understandably a bit shocked she would even ask, considering how the girl had seen him throwing up into an oversized bear head for most of her time interacting with him.
Miltia chimed in, taking over the explanation. "Not, like, just as dumb muscle like the suit and tie grunts." She started up, tapping her foot on the floor and taking a second to try and figure out how to say what she wanted. "You'd be, like... the guy who gives those grunts a plan to follow, get it?" They didn't really have a name for that position, but... "Junior said to think of it as a consultant or something."
Oh. Ooooh. That... huh. Jaune hadn't expected that he would have impressed anyone that much. Were they really struggling that much on that heist before he'd wandered in and drunkenly fixed it? And, well, he did talk everyone out of that whole mess earlier, but that was as much luck as it was anything else.
That kind of put him in a weird spot, though, because Jaune... didn't necessarily want to be a criminal. He also didn't want to have this conversation wearing just a towel, but he didn't really want to be the one to bring it up if they didn't. If no one else was commenting on it he might as well just act natural. That's how he'd gotten through things so far.
Dad's advice was to be confident, and while it hadn't done him any favors with the ladies as of yet he'd managed to get out of a life threatening situation with it so things were evening out. "So, you guys want me to plan more robberies for you?" Jaune tried to keep the incredulity out of his voice, but it was a little difficult.
"I mean, we'd pay you for it." Mel replied with a shrug, crossing her legs over one another. "It isn't like we'd ask you to do it for free, you know."
Okay, that much was good to know at least. They weren't going to try and lock him up like the Girl in the Tower to do their bidding, it was an actual position in their group they were offering. Jaune still wasn't exactly keen on the idea, but things could have been worse. The fact that they were offering this rather than just grabbing him meant that they valued his cooperation, which meant he had room to negotiate.
But, well, he did still have to check something. "And if I still said no?"
Much like he expected, that didn't seem to be something the twins wanted to hear. They glanced between one another for a moment, seemingly sharing a silent conversation. Miltia seemed conflicted, though Mel's face was more aggravation than anything. After a moment of this riveting discussion, the two of them turned back towards him and, in sync yet again, they shrugged.
"We'd have to, like, convince you then." Mel replied to his question, twirling her foot at the ankle and drawing attention to her bladed heels. At the same time, her sister just nodded silently, but she shifted her crossed arms in a way that displayed the edge of her own claws. "Got any ideas how we could go about that, Vomit-Boy?"
It wasn't exactly a subtle threat, but he could appreciate the elegance of it compared to them just outright breaking something. All the same, though... Jaune knew they were bluffing.
"Threatening me won't work, you know. If you guys were desperate enough to try and get help from someone like me of all people, you're really in a bad spot. I know full well that you two can't hurt me, because you need something from me and you won't get it if I'm bleeding out or missing parts." It wasn't even hard to piece together. Twice now he had gone and floundered his way through situations. The fact that it had worked twice didn't mean it was going to work a third time, and it didn't mean he was anything special. That much was obvious. But despite that, after the situation today, these two had personally come to look for him, to try and recruit him. Him, some random blonde guy who puked in a bear head after getting plastered the night before. The fact that they came to him meant they had already gone through every other better option and come up with nothing.
Just like he figured, the twins both balked at his calling their bluff. They probably figured he would be intimidated because of what they had done to those guys earlier, and they would be completely right.
Jaune was in fact terrified of what these girls could do to him. That was exactly why he was calling their bluff instead of going along with them without a fight. If he just meekly let them bully him into this, they would know they could threaten him. It wouldn't stop them, it would just encourage them to do it more often so they could get him to do what they wanted.
Yeah, no, he'd fallen into that trap with his sisters so that wasn't happening again with a pair of decidedly more violent women. Even if they were both really pretty, he was not about to spend the rest of his life as their plaything.
Miltia, seemingly the calmer of the two, sighed. "Yeah, alright. You've got us there. What is it going to take to get your cooperation? Junior is willing to talk terms himself if we can't convince you." She was clearly not happy to be admitting this, but desperate times called for desperate measures.
Jaune honestly didn't even want to talk about terms with any of them, because he wasn't really all that into the idea in the first place. But, well... they needed help, didn't they? Crap. He had the thought and now it wasn't going to leave him.
These two, and by extension their boss, hadn't actually done anything to him. They had let him sleep off his drunken stupor at their place rather than tossing him to the curb, and when things went down Mel had actually gone out of her way to protect him a few times as they were making their way through the building. If it hadn't been for her he would have just been another casualty of that mess. And they needed help for whatever reason. Maybe he had been underestimating how much losing that building was going to hurt? Was there something else going on that he just didn't know about?
If he helped them, he would feel guilty about helping them commit crimes. If he didn't, he would feel guilty because they needed help and he had refused. This sucked. This seriously sucked.
Jaune didn't like it at all, but he figured that at the very least he could hear them out. "Okay. Say I was interested. Why do you even need to rob these stores anyway?" It seemed kind of stupid for them to be robbing stores when they had, emphasis on had, a legitimate business generating income for them. Now, when they should probably have been laying low, they were instead looking to drag him in to rob more places. It just didn't add up.
They didn't answer him right away, instead having another one of those silent twin conversations. After a moment of that, they turned back to him once again. "So it's like this; we're currently being commissioned by a certain someone to stage these robberies." Miltia started, scoffing out the word commission like it was a curse.
Mel picked up where she left off, explaining further. "And, see, we can't exactly tell this certain someone to shove it, cuz' they are up against a wall in the first place." She shrugged, letting out an annoyed huff.
"And since they're already cornered, they dragged us into it. And now we're obligated to keep this up, because if we can't then it isn't just the certain someone we're gonna have to answer to, but whoever has them acting so out of character in the first place. Get it?"
Well, that was a really long winded way to not tell him a damn thing at all. Okay, so they weren't exactly up for these robberies; that was good, morally speaking. Robbing these stores wasn't what they wanted to do, but they were being coerced into it by someone. If he had to take an educated guess, probably that ginger guy he vaguely remembered from that night he'd taken a leak in their potted plant.
But then that someone was also being forced into it? "What makes you so sure that your certain someone is getting pushed around?"
A rather unladylike snort followed that question, coming from the girl who was less and less angelic as time went on. "Cuz' he's not an idiot." She replied simply, as though that explained everything and he was a moron if he didn't get it.
Her sister picked up and explained, because he was apparently a moron and didn't get it. "We're stealing Dust. Nothing but Dust. No cash, no goods, just Dust." She began, trailing off and seeing if that got any bells ringing in his head.
Coincidentally, it didn't. "And..? It's kind of dumb not to be taking anything but Dust, but I'm not seeing why that means this guy is in a corner?" It's not like he knew this mystery man personally and could piece it together.
The two of them sighed as one, and he was really getting irritated by it to be honest, but then Mel spoke up again to explain. "He usually swipes hard cash or unique valuables he can pawn off to the highest bidder. That doesn't, like... trash the economy. But if he keeps up this pace swiping Dust we're gonna have an economic crisis on our hands, and that's bad for business. What is he supposed to steal if everyone is too broke to buy shit?"
Well, when she put it that way it actually did make a lot of sense. Stealing from rich people would always get you more than stealing from the poor. So why go making everyone poor?Ugh. This was making his head hurt. Jaune never thought he would even consider it again after last time, but he was starting to think he needed a drink.
What a world.
"Okay." He sighed deeply, palm coming up to cover his face even as his other hand held at his towel. "I'm gonna put some clothes on, and you two are gonna take me to your boss." Jaune couldn't believe he was saying this. When did he decide this was a good idea? Oh, that's right, never. This was a very bad idea.
But, and Jaune absolutely hated this about himself, two pretty girls were in trouble and asking him to help. He couldn't just say no, especially because they had pretty clearly implied what was going to happen if they couldn't make this work.
It wasn't pretty, and Jaune didn't like that thought. "I need to know more about this if I'm gonna get anything done, and I wanna know exactly what's in it for me." That last part was more of a bluff really, to hopefully keep them from figuring out how much of a bleeding heart he was for a girl in trouble.
Behind his palm, Jaune wasn't able to tell just which one of them giggled. "Damn, I was kind of hoping he'd forget about the clothes."
"... that wouldn't be too bad, yeah." The other agreed.
He sighed again. "Just... get out of my room so I can change."
"You know you could just change in your bathroom right?" One of them asked him, sarcasm dripping from her tone in a way that suggested it was Mel.
"... I knew that." He had just forgotten with all the chaos.
"We're doomed." The other sister chimed in, almost managing to match the tone of her twin.
"... you want us to do what, kid?" Junior asked his long-shot "consultant" incredulously, suddenly questioning the decision his gut had made.
The kid in question just sighed, rubbing his temples and looking over the various papers strewn across the desk in their safehouse. "Look, Junior, you guys are in way worse shape than I thought. I didn't know you had lost so many guys to that Beacon girl." It just had to be someone from Beacon of all places who trashed their club. Someone was able to run through not only Junior, but both the twins and an entire gang of armed men single handedly and walk away afterwards.
Jaune didn't think he could take on two of the suit clad bruisers Junior had hired, let alone the dozens that girl had apparently ran over. Talk about a reality check. If that was Beacon level, he was so far out of his league it wasn't even funny.
The big man growled a bit, remembering that incident quite clearly. His damn weapon was still being fixed, had to be practically remade more than anything. If he'd been armed when Slim and his boys had come in, that whole incident would have gone down differently.
Junior was perfectly fine with the property damage setting off a rocket barrage in his own house would cause so long as that slinky fucker went down in the collapse. But back to the present, he was faced with a rather absurd proposal from the blonde kid he'd taken a risk on.
Said kid waved around a couple papers, the rough outline of the number of men Junior had available, as if to prove a point. "The numbers here are telling me you're down to under half what you had not even a month ago, Junior. There is no way that this can continue the way you've been doing things, or you're gonna run out of manpower entirely. It's just not gonna work."
"So your big plan is to basically recruit a bunch of small fry gangs for manpower? That isn't gonna work either kid. They already smell blood in the water, we'd have to spend all our time beating them down to keep them in line. No way in hell they'd cooperate long enough to get anything done, and we'd just be wasting more manpower."
Jaune sighed, because while Junior had a point he was also completely missing the point. "I didn't say we were gonna recruit anybody. You think I want to work with people calling themselves the "Night's Vale"? What kind of stupid name is that?" Seriously, he read comic books regularly and that was still one of the dumbest things he'd heard a group of people call themselves, let alone an actual street gang. "No, Junior, the way I see it is that you guys need some breathing room."
That was entirely correct. Right now the whole of Vale was pressing down on the throat of his organization. He had dirt on enough people to maintain the status quo, but too many more big hits and someone was gonna make a move and send everything toppling over. The piranhas in Vale's underbelly were already snapping around at his heels, not to mention the pair of sharks circling him to begin with in the form of Roman and his little psycho.
And then that slimy little fucker Slim had decided his dick had grown three sizes that day, and came busting down the doors of The Club to swing it around. The very fucking moment he had a second, Junior was going to track that little bastard down and make him regret ever even thinking he could take a swing at the organization he'd built from the ground up.
Seeing that the big man hadn't said anything to the contrary, Jaune carried on with what he was saying. "You're on a deadline. You need this much Dust before this day, but no one said you couldn't get it all at once and pay it early. That guy, Roman, you said it yourself that he's not out for your blood. He's just trying to make his deadline too, right? So if you can make sure his ass is out of the fire, he isn't gonna pressure you when you're trying to get things put back together. Right?"
"Yeah." Junior agreed easily enough, after a second to think on it. "Roman ain't what you can call a good person, but he's not lookin' to make waves in the underworld. As long as he can find someone to sell the shit he steals to, he doesn't care what goes on." It made him reliable to deal with, because he existed outside the factions of the criminal underbelly of Vale.
He was a constant; Torchwick steals shit, finds someone to fence it to, and then goes about his merry way until he needs to sell something again or he gets bored enough to send the police a letter declaring his next heist for shits and giggles. Sure, that stirred shit up with the cops and made it harder for some folks to do their thing with the police riled up, but Junior wasn't one of the people it affected so what did he care?
But anyway... "Get back to the point, kid. What do you mean we aren't recruiting? You just said yourself we don't have the manpower to pull off these robberies anyway, and then you said we should just get it all done at once to take a breather. You're not making sense."
"All these gangs here?" Jaune waved his hand over another pile of papers he had set aside, this time one that was listing the competition in the area. "You've got dirt on them. You know where each and every one of their hideouts are." Seeing the big man nod, Jaune grinned because it still didn't seem like it was sinking in. "Junior, you said it yourself. All these guys, they want to make a move, and they all hate each other just as much as they hate you. So what happens if someone hands out detailed plans to rob a Dust shop to every one of these gangs in Vale?"
Junior balked for a second at the thought. "It'd be chaos. The cops would be run ragged doing damage control, even if most of them got caught there would still be plenty that got off and stashed their loot..." He trailed off, shaking his head as the idea finally started to make more sense to him. "Kid, you've gotta be fucking with me. You want us to kickstart anarchy in Vale so we can swipe the loot from whoever doesn't get caught in the process?"
"Yeah." Jaune replied immediately, excited despite himself with the sheer audacity of his own plan. "Just think about it, this way even the guys who get caught are helping you. The less of these guys on the streets the better off you are right now, right? And if you know where all of their hideouts are, it won't be hard to hit them, right?"
"... Right." Junior found himself agreeing, reaching one massive hand up to scratch at his beard. "I've even got a few guys in the force who owe me favors. Some of these gangs are already wanted for plenty of other shit. To get them behind bars, they probably won't mind some of that Dust getting lost in the chaos, so we won't even need to get into any serious fights." The more he thought about it, the better this sounded. He had enough eyes in the city to keep track of these bozos when they started looting, so he could tell who got their shit back home and who got caught in transit. And none of them would ever expect to get robbed right after they got their loot stashed either.
It was clever.
It was also pure fucking anarchy.
But, frankly? Junior was in too deep by this point to even care.
If he didn't take this risk, he was fucked. He did the numbers himself and having the kid confirm it just made it all the more real. So at this point, there was just no reason not to drag everyone else down as deep into the muck as he was. It'd be chaos, but he would be ready for it, unlike everybody else in Vale.
This... it could work. And if it didn't, then hell... nothing really even changed for them in the first damn place. They were fucked if they didn't do it, and they were fucked if it didn't work out.
"Fuck it." He announced after mulling it over, turning around and starting to head off and get things together. "We're gonna give this a shot. Once the twins get back from the station I'll fill them in, then we'll sit down and start getting this worked out." Junior sighed deeply, rolling his neck and setting off a series of loud pops from the motion. "Gotta hand it to you kid, one way or another this is gonna be big. I sure as hell wasn't expecting it when I sent the twins to get you on board."
Jaune let his head fall onto the desk in front of him as the gravity of the events just hit him full force.
"Yeah." He choked out through grit teeth, fighting to keep from slamming his head on the desk. "Neither was I." Gods, what had he just done? This was going to be chaos. How many people were going to be hurt in the fallout of this? How could he have actually just proposed that?
It was because Junior had given him a puzzle, he realized after a second to think it over. Jaune loved puzzles. So when Junior had pitched him this seemingly impossible challenge, he'd tried to find all of the neat and simple solutions for it. There weren't any. And that got him excited. So excited he had completely forgotten that these were real people he was dealing with and not characters in a video game.
This was not going to end well at all. And it was all his fault.
There was only one thing he could thing to say about that.
"Fuck."
L/N: Hey folks, next chapter by the talented Demon of Zero. This was a bit late due to IRL issues, but here it is, and I think it's personally worth the wait. Enjoy, and hopefully we'll get our next volunteer on the WiP Server soon.
