Chapter 2: The Court of the Void
The transition from the world of the living to whatever lay beyond was not a tunnel of incandescent light, nor was it accompanied by the ethereal chorus of angels. For Hiromi Higuruma, the end of life was heralded by the absolute cessation of sound—a silence so dense, so terrifyingly heavy, that it felt like a physical pressure against his eardrums, more suffocating than the water of the Sumida River had been.
One agonizing moment, his lungs were a theater of fire, filled with the freezing, silt-heavy water as it claimed his final breath. He had felt the grit of the riverbed, the cold metal of his wedding ring slipping on a numb finger, and the sudden, sharp silence of the city above. The next moment, he was standing on a surface of pure, reflective white that stretched into an infinite, featureless horizon.
He was no longer wet. The chilling, sodden weight of his clothing had vanished. His charcoal-grey suit was pristine, the fine wool fibers restored to their original luster; the jagged, blackened bullet holes in his shoulder and chest were gone, replaced by smooth, unblemished fabric. His body felt oddly light, stripped of the chronic aches of his thirty-two years and the tension of a thousand sleepless nights, yet his mind remained as sharp and structured as a final closing argument.
The Psychology of the Departed
Higuruma stood still, his breath hitching. He wasn't breathing because he needed oxygen, he realized, but because the habit of living was hard to break. He looked down at his hands. They were steady. No tremors from the adrenaline of the bridge, no blood under the nails from clawing at the river's surface.
"Is this the finality of the Law?" he wondered. As a lawyer, he had always viewed death as the ultimate "Statute of Limitations"—the point where all litigation ceased and the record was permanently sealed. Yet, here he was, an active consciousness in a vacuum. He felt a strange, cold analytical detachment. He wasn't mourning his life; he was assessing the situation. He thought of the fourteen workers whose files were now rotting at the bottom of the river. He felt a pang of professional failure that outweighed his personal extinction. To Higuruma, a life ended was a tragedy, but an unfinished trial was a sin against the universe.
"Is this the verdict?" Higuruma spoke aloud. His voice didn't echo. It didn't carry across the vastness. It simply existed in the space and then stopped, absorbed by the boundless, hungry white.
"You are a curious one," a voice replied. It was a sound that didn't originate from a throat or a mouth; it resonated from the very molecules of the air, vibrating in the marrow of his bones.
The Appearance of the Arbiter
Before him, the white void rippled like a disturbed pond. A figure began to coalesce out of the nothingness. It was not a deity in any traditional, mythological sense. It was a shifting, kaleidoscopic mass of geometric shadows, draped in a cloak that shimmered with the flickering black-and-white static of a dead television screen. This entity sat upon a throne that appeared to be constructed from infinite, stacked ledgers—billions of pages of human history, legal transcripts, and forgotten testimonies piled into a seat of cosmic authority.
"Hiromi Higuruma," the entity said, its form flickering between a dozen different shapes—a judge, a scale, a blinding light. "A man who lived by the book and died by the bullet. You spent your final moments mourning the loss of a legal file rather than the loss of your own pulse. You watched your life's work drown before you watched the light fade. Tell me... why?"
Higuruma reached up and adjusted his glasses. They were back on his face, perfectly balanced. It was a habitual gesture of a man preparing for a cross-examination.
"The life was mine to lose; I had already accepted the risks of my vocation the moment I passed the bar," he said, his voice regaining that calm, rhythmic courtroom cadence. "The brief belonged to fourteen people who had no other voice in a system designed to ignore their existence. I was their counsel. To fail them is a greater death than the stopping of a heart. A heart is just a pump; the Truth is a foundation. Without it, the house of humanity falls."
The Proposal of Rebirth
The entity shifted, its shadow-limbs folding over one another with a sound like dry parchment rubbing together. "The world you left is a chaotic mess of entropy. You were an honest man in an industry built on beautiful, expensive lies. Most who arrive here plead for mercy, scream for vengeance, or weep for things left unsaid. You... you look as though you're preparing to challenge my jurisdiction."
"I would simply like to know the rules of this space," Higuruma said, his eyes narrowing as he scanned the infinite white for a boundary. "And if there is a right to appeal the current state of affairs. I was not finished with my closing statement. If reincarnation is the protocol, I find the timing highly inconvenient."
The shadow-figure let out a sound like the shutting of a heavy vault door—a laugh that carried no humor, only the weight of eons. "Honesty is a heavy burden, Higuruma. It burns with a brightness that is a rarity in the stream of souls I process. I have a proposal for you, Counselor. There is a world where the 'Law' is being suffocated by 'Power.' A world of 'Heroes' and 'Villains' where the lines of morality are blurred by spectacle, commercialism, and the toxic cult of personality."
"A world without order?" Higuruma asked, his brow furrowing as he processed the sociological implications.
"A world where order is enforced by the fist and the flame, not the gavel and the pen," the entity replied. "A world that desperately needs a Judge who cannot be bought. I shall place you there. I will give you the tools to bring the trial you never finished to a much larger stage. I want to see what a truly honest man does when he is given the power to legally strip the 'gods' of their lightning."
Higuruma looked at his hands again. He thought about the concept of a "Quirk"—a biological anomaly that granted power. To him, it sounded like a legal nightmare. A world where everyone was their own private militia.
"And the cost?" Higuruma asked. "What is the consideration for this contract?"
"There is no cost, Counselor. Only the burden of your own conviction. You will find that in a world of superhumans, the heaviest thing one can carry is the truth. Go. The court is now in session."
The Descent into Being
The white void suddenly shattered like a pane of glass struck by a gavel. Higuruma felt himself falling—not into the suffocating, icy depths of a river this time, but into a kaleidoscope of blinding colors and muffled screams.
The concept of reincarnation hit him with the force of a physical blow. He wasn't just moving; he was being compressed. His thirty-two years of memories, his knowledge of the penal code, his memories of the smell of old law books and the taste of bitter coffee—it was all being stuffed into a vessel that couldn't yet hold it.
He felt the terrifying loss of agency. He went from a man of stature to a spark of consciousness. The geometric entity faded into a flickering memory, and in its place, the first cry of a newborn broke the clinical silence of a high-end Tokyo maternity ward. The air was cold, the lights were too bright, and the giants in white masks were shouting things he didn't yet understand.
He was no longer a lawyer drowning in a failing system. He was a spark of ancient, unyielding integrity reborn into a world of Quirks, capes, and compromised justice. He was Hiromi Higuruma, and as he felt the first touch of a nurse's hand, he made a silent vow:
He would put this entire world on trial.
.........
Author's Note: Hello everyone! I have officially rewritten and updated this chapter, expanding significantly on Hiromi's internal monologue and his perspective on the transition between worlds. I wanted to capture his "lawyer's brain" even in the face of the supernatural. If you're enjoying this deeper look into his character, please show your support—it really helps keep the momentum going! Stay tuned for Chapter 3!