Yuko winced as the van she was in rolled over a rather large pothole, bracing a hand on the seat to steady herself. Who in the world designed a van with no seatbelts?
Around her, the men who were accompanying her gave no indication of being bothered, their guns staying still on their laps as they moved with the van itself like a sailor on a ship. One of them looked at her, and she got the distinct impression the man was amused though his face didn't show it. She looked away, trying not to pout.
It had been a few weeks since her father had fully inducted her into the gang, and those weeks had been spent primarily going over the internals of how the ABB as an organization functioned. The types of drugs they sold and the types they didn't, how they acquired their munitions and where they kept them, all of this and more was crammed into her head at a dizzying pace.
Where before she didn't pay much attention to gang affairs apart from what her father did, as a part of it, Yuko was forced to take a more hands on approach thanks to her new responsibilities, which had led her to learn much more about the ABB's inner workings.
For example, the ABB as a gang itself was split into several tiers, each having more authority than the last. Yuko had known this, but over the past weeks she had gained a much more in depth look at their internal hierarchy apart from the just fact that her father sat at the top.
From most authority to least, it went like so: Lung, Yuko, Lee and any other cape enforcers her father may choose to employ, the Faces, Officers, Captains, and finally Grunts.
The first three were pretty self explanatory, her father was in charge and she was right behind him - his right hand as he had explicitly stated - and Lee was behind her. If her father cose to recruit more capes to his side, they would fall behind her as well, after they had proven their loyalty of course.
After that it got more complicated, though still relatively straightforward. From top to bottom, the ABB's hierarchy was basically a pyramid of authority, and the number of members followed suit.
Below the Enforcers were the Faces, the people who managed the day-to-day aspects of the gang. Their brothels, drugs, recruitment, guns, and money were all managed by these few individuals. Their numbers fluctuated based on who took on more responsibility and who took on less, but they always remained about the same, evening out at around six, give or take a member or two.
Below them were the Officers, who were the go-between for the Faces and their subordinates. Each Face had only one or two officers, and it was a very coveted position in the gang, and the one that most new recruits were told about to get them to join, using tales of money and women to get in their head. In actuality, being an Officer was probably the most grueling position in the gang, as you were always jerked about from place to place as you did your best to keep things running in spite of idiots trying to undo your work. Not fun.
Below Officers were the Captains. These people were most often seen out and about, herding the lowly grunts so they don't get out of hand. Coincidentally, this was also the title with the most amount of betrayals. Apparently getting put in charge of a relatively large group of men made one think they were bigger than they actually were. They were always dissuaded from that notion rather quickly.
And finally, Grunts were the lowest on the ABB's totem pole, and where the most bodies were sourced from. From new recruits to veterans, the largest chunk of the gang's manpower was located here. Last Yuko had checked,they had a little over four hundred members, a respectable number even in Brocton Bay, Massachusetts.
Of course, among the Grunts they tended to give each other titles and responsibilities, but those titles were mostly kept to their individual cells and had little-to-no bearing on the gang as a whole.
Now, given Yuko's inexperience with the ABB itself, it was only expected that she would shadow someone who would show her the proverbial ropes. It would be a disaster if she was just suddenly thrown into the deep end in regards to her responsibilities, and it seemed Lung had agreed.
The man her father had chosen, Hiashi Nogi, was one of the Faces of the gang, specifically, the one in charge of maintaining their drug trade. Despite his unusually young age, a mere thirty-six as opposed to the fifties and sixties of his peers, Hiashi was extremely adept at his job. Since he had been promoted, the number of 'missing' drug shipments had all but disappeared, and the money from sales had nearly doubled. Her father was extremely pleased with his performance.
Even with his duties having increased with Kaito Nanaki's death, Hiashi had taken the changes in stride and had quickly gotten ahold of his duties once more, adjusting things for the influx of responsibility.
He was a relatively quiet man, introspective if Yuko had to guess, and when he did speak, it was usually best to listen. Yuko was happy that she had been assigned to shadow him instead of one of the much more shady Faces, Takao especially. The pervert. He seemed to be a man of principle which was odd for the gang and she would love to hear his story.
Unfortunately for her, Hiashi also had a habit of staring at her like she was going to tear his spine out through his throat at any given moment which kind of put a damper on their conversations. Hiashi had deliberately kept their interactions brief, not staying any longer than was absolutely necessary.
Yuko had a feeling she knew why this was, she recalled seeing the man during her display in the war room, and she distinctly remembered the look of absolute horror he gave her as Kaito Nanaki died under her watchful gaze. He was afraid of her. Terrified even.
Still, showing his professionalism, Hiashi didn't let his fear of her get in the way of teaching her everything she needed to know about her responsibilities as her father's second-in-command. She would often shadow his Officers on their outings to their various caches and holdings as they made sure things stayed operational, always keeping a careful distance from the proceedings as she was shown how they were done.
It was pretty dull all things considered, and though Yuko knew how important the various visits were, she often had found herself spacing out during the proceedings. Through sheer willpower though, she managed to rein her straying thoughts in, and absorbed as much knowledge about her duties as she possibly could. She was her father's right-hand now, she would not disappoint him by bumbling around in things she should be proficient in.
Which brought her to what she was doing now. Apparently she had shown a sufficient amount of knowledge in their operations as Hiashi had allowed her to attend to one of the holdings by herself. Well, almost.
The men riding in the van with her were ostensibly her guards. While Yuko was more than confident in her abilities thanks to her power, Hiashi had insisted they follow her on this outing just in case. And really that just spoke even more to the man's character than despite his fear of her, he would say something that could so easily be misconstrued as an insult.
She had reluctantly agreed, on the caveat that this would be a one-time thing. She was not a child in need of a babysitter. Under the right conditions, she could easily be the most powerful cape in Brockton Bay.
And besides, she was pretty sure her father had Lee shadowing her from the rooftops anyways. So there was that too.
The van pulled up outside the warehouse in short order. Already somewhat used to procedures but now, Yuko waited for her guards to secure the general area before stepping out of the vehicle.
It was late, the setting sun just barely peeking over the roof of the warehouse and Yuko winced behind her mask as the light got into her eyes. She gave the man who had opened the door for her a nod, noting that he was the same one who had stared at her in amusement, and made her way up to the warehouse.
Flanked by armed men at her front and back, Yuko stopped just before the door, gesturing to one of the men to open it for her. He did so, and Yuko gave him a nod of thanks as she walked inside. As she entered the warehouse, Yuko stopped dead in her tracks, and her eyes widened behind her mask at what she was seeing.
It was a mess to put it lightly, piles of wrapped white bricks lay strewn about and ripped to pieces, cocaine spilling from plastic packaging and ruining itself upon the floor. Yuko could just barely see small craters in some of the moor intact packages, someone having taken small chunks out of the bricks for their own use.
And not only that, but it seemed that simply consuming the drugs hadn't been enough, several bricks had been stomped flat, like a child had had a tantrum atop them, crushing them into the concrete and utterly ruining them.
Beer bottles and cans, enough to supply a particularly loud frat party, were discarded around the warehouse, and in a similar vein, piles of cash were also piled up near the coke. Stacks of paper towering higher than the drugs themselves though oddly enough, they had been neatly organized into several rows.
The people who were responsible were still there, clearly enjoying their continued indulgence as they hadn't even noticed Yuko and her contingent enter. There were around twenty of them, wearing ABB colors and stumbling around drunkenly or fidgeting with energy from the drugs they had no doubt consumed.
Possible hundreds of thousands worth of drugs had been utterly ruined by a group of twenty or so idiots. Father would be furious.
Yuko shook out of her shock, eyes narrowing in outrage as she took in the chaos. She turned to her guards who looked just as dumbfounded as she had, staring at the scene with wide eyes.
"Round them up." She ordered coldly, "Do not let a single one of them slip away. They will answer for this betrayal."
"Yes, Yosei-sama!" Came the chorus from her men, before they sprung into action.
The inebriated men shouted out in surprise and fear as they were rounded up. Rifle stocks slammed into stomachs and faces as her men carried out her orders expeditiously, forcing men to their knees and tying their hands behind their backs with whatever could be found.
One of the men, a smaller individual wearing shorts and a stained T-shirt, cottoned on to what was going on and attempted to dart past her and out the door. Instead of calling out to her guards, Yuko simply flexed her power, willing the Mist into her eyes and changing them into something else.
She gave him a hard glance as he got near her, and he immediately froze as if he had been struck. She looked away, releasing her power, and the man yelped as he fell to the ground, clutching his legs in pain. Yuko spared him another glance, observing the changes her power had wrought on him or more specifically, his legs.
The gorgon was a Greek mythological creature whose gaze had the ability to turn people to stone, and for just a moment thanks to her power, so had Yuko's.
From the man's foot up to his thigh, the skin and muscle had been turned to dark grey stone, immovable, extremely heavy, and irreversible without the use of a parahuman power. He would likely never walk again. A pity.
Yuko turned her gaze away from him and back to the room proper as her men finished the fools up, tying their hands behind their backs and forcing them to kneel in a line. As she took in the terrified faces, Yuko realized something was off.
"Where is the overseer of this warehouse?" She demanded the most sober looking man.
It seemed that the reality of his situation was beginning to set in, as he quickly complied with her as opposed to arguing or just screaming in terror.
"W-we left him in the office! Up the stairs!" He started out, body jerking as he tried to point with his tied up hands, "H-he's behind the desk I think!"
Yuko kept her eyes on the man, the dark shadows created by her mask making him sweat, before she nodded in satisfaction.
She turned to her nearest guard, "Make sure they don't try anything stupid. I will be right back."
The man nodded firmly at her, before returning his attention to the inebriated individuals on their knees.
The door to the office was up a set of stairs and clearly labeled as such. As she reached it, Yuko prayed that the person inside was at least semi-lucid. She would like to get at least some answers as to what was going on and how it had reached this point.
The moment she entered the room, she could immediately hear the muffled screams coming from behind the desk. Thankful that the man below wasn't lying and even more thankful that the Overseer was conscious, Yuko made her way around the desk.
The Overseer was a heavy set man with noticeably thinning hair. He was lying on his side on the floor, hands and legs tied together in a hogtie that would look comical in any other situation. His eyes widened in surprise as he caught sight of her, relief stark in the dark orbs as Yuko leaned down towards him with a hand.
He took a deep breath as Yuko pulled the gag from his mouth, casting a thankful gaze up at her, "Thank you so much Yosei-sama! God knows what they would have done to me when they were done down there."
Yuko stepped back, folding her arms in front of her and looking down at him as he slowly stood, taking in deep breaths of relief. She looked around the office with a frown, taking in the scattered papers and open cabinets who's content's had been scattered all over the floor, deliberately opened and rifled through. Clearly the ones responsible had been looking for something in particular. How interesting. Especially so given that the majority of the men down below didn't look to have more than one brain-cell between them.
"How did things progress to this point?" Yosei asked sternly, "Surely they have been planning this for some time? How could those under you revolt so openly?"
The man scoffed as he got to his feet, before blanching as he realized what he had just done. He gave her a hasty bow, "I mean no disrespect ma'am, but the men who you call 'under me' barely tolerate me. They were conscripts."
Yuko blinked, "Ah. I see."
Conscripts were exactly what they sounded like, people (Usually young men) who were forced into the ABB for one reason or another. Given that most were plucked out of the prime of their life, early high-school usually, they had a tendency to be loose cannons at the best of times. It wasn't unheard of for them to attempt to revolt if a large enough group of them got together.
Still, what were they doing rummaging through the files in the office? They would absolutely know there was no money to be found in there. Something was off.
She followed the man back to the main floor, mind whirling with confusion and wariness. Was this truly just a revolt from conscripts? All the signs pointed to it, but something deep inside of Yuko's gut made her think it wasn't so simple.
"What should we do with them, Yosei-sama?" The same man who helped her out of the van asked.
She hummed lightly as she thought. It would be simple to just give them the 'concrete-shoes' treatment, but Yuko's gut still wouldn't shut up and she had a feeling that any answers would die with them if she did so. She bit her lip lightly, trying to decide what to do.
"We will take them to Nana." Yuko finally decided, "They were looking for something in the office upstairs. I would like to know whether or not this was a planned operation, or just a spur of the moment bout of foolishness." Better to err on the side of caution in this case. If she was wrong, nothing would come of it except for Nana's lost time.
The men on the floor immediately started to struggle in their binds, and Yuko couldn't exactly blame them, being sent to Nana was probably the worst that could happen to them.
Nana Akagi was the ABB's go-to interrogator. The woman was a bit of an oddity in the gang given that she was a woman who held a relatively high standing in the gang's hierarchy, akin to an Officer with none of the responsibilities of one. It was practically unheard of, but Nana was just that good at what she did. That primarily being torture.
She was also extremely sadistic and enjoyed her job immensely, often looking for new ways to inflict the most pain on her subjects as possible while trying to get information out of them. Though she rarely killed any of her victims, those that came out of one of her little sessions alive were never the same afterwards and often unfit for duty besides that.
If that's what it took to find out exactly what had spurred this betrayal, then Yuko was fine with that.
"Call Teruo." Yuko ordered the man nearest to her, "Tell him to send a couple vehicles out here, preferably vans. I don't want to wait here longer than we have t-"
Just then with little warning, the wall to Yuko's right exploded inward, stone and debris flying into the building as the tied up men screamed in surprise. She brought a hand in front of her face, shielding her eyes from the offending detritus as she tried to make out the cause of the sudden eruption.
Though given the lack of gunpowder in her nostrils, as well as the lack of police telling them all to get on the floor, she had a feeling it wasn't a swat team. She grimaced as she felt her power begin to churn inside of her, more mist accessible to her than she had had in a long while.
Much like Lung, Yuko's power worked off of the threat she was facing at any given time.
Though instead of simply transforming to suit the threat like her father, Yuko simply got access to more Mist with which to use her power, and more forms to choose from.
The biggest caveat of her power was that she could only transform into mythical creatures, and only those she was relatively knowledgeable about, though it wasn't limited to just eastern ones. Harpies, Gorgon, even Gnomes (though she had no idea why she would ever want to turn into one of those) all were things she could become.
The other biggest caveat was that every transformation used a certain amount of her power, or Mist, as she called it due to how it presented itself. The amount varies depending on the creature she wished to become, with each requiring different amounts.
Her Kistune form for example, varied in the amount of Mist it used by the number of tails she wished to possess. One tail would cost practically nothing, while nine would cost magnitudes more.
If she wished to, she could simply take on aspects of the forms she could choose from, say a Siren's voice or a Unicorn's affinity for sussing out negative emotion. Doing this used much less Mist than simply transforming, though the more aspects she took on, the more difficult it was to not simply undergo the change.
She wasn't sure exactly what decided how much most each form used, but she speculated it had something to do with the public consensus on their general power. Everybody knew that a dragon was stronger than a big dog after all, so of course it should cost more. It was simple playground logic.
Depending on the threat she was facing, she would gain access to more Mist and by extension, more forms. If she was facing off against a group of unarmed thugs for example, she wouldn't get nearly as much as she would fighting, say, Armsmaster or Purity, actual threats in other words.
She had felt what she was relatively sure was the upper limits of her power exactly once in her life. When she had triggered. She would rather die than be put in that situation ever again. The idea of feeling that helpless, despite having so much terrible power at her disposal once more… It made her sick to her stomach.
Luckily, while the swelling of her power within her was more than she had felt in a long time, it was nowhere near as potent as That day. No, this was much more mild, and if she had to guess, she'd say she could achieve maybe three or four tails in Kitsune form before her Mist ran dry. That meant there was definitely a cape present. A rather strong one too.
And as the smoke cleared, and Yuko got her first sight of the person responsible for the destruction, she narrowed her eyes at who she saw.
"Wrap it up boys! I'm taking this little operation of yours down and you to jail!"
Lustrous blond hair fluttered in the breeze created by her extremely dramatic entrance. Her white and gold dress seemed to be unaffected by the dust in the air, remaining just as pristine as the cape flowing behind her back.
The picture of perfection was capped up by a golden tiara, twinkling merrily on top of her head, also unaffected by her entrance. All in all, she looked the part she was so clearly trying to play, the resplendent hero, come to save the day, and Yuko felt a hint of awe that wasn't her own creep up her spine as the blonde's power went to work on her mind.
Victoria Dallon aka Glory Girl, was a known entity in Brockton Bay and had been for some time now. Yuko had seen many PHO posts talking about the blonde's reckless nature and general hotheaded demeanor, while just as many praised her for her admittedly impressive heroics when it came to the gangs.
She didn't come into contact with the ABB nearly as much as the Empire or the Merchants, but that was likely due to the fact that the ABB didn't operate nearly as overtly as either of the other gangs. Glory Girl thrived on finding out-and-about criminals during her patrols given how often she patrolled on her lonesome.
While the Nazi's liked to grandstand with their racism and the Merchants were, well, Mechants, the ABB focused more on its internal operations such as drug trade or gambling rings. Apart from the kidnapping of women for brothels (Which Yuko was still trying to make her father see reason on) the ABB didn't really do anything to catch the public's eye.
In fact, Yuko could count on one hand the number of times her father or Lee had gotten into an altercation with the heroes in the past few months, least of all New Wave. It seemed she had just broken that streak.
Glory girl's gaze roved around the room, somewhat smug as she took in the terrified forms of the cowering ABB members before her expression shifted as she spotted the ones who were already tied up. That confusion grew even more when she took notice of Yuko, clearly not recognizing her costume.
"Uhh, what's going on here?"