Lily
I had never even considered teaching others how to form binding vows. It might’ve seemed strange from the outside but the Grimoire made these abilities innate to me and, much like how I couldn’t really replicate Taylor’s magic because I lacked her innate ability to be so aware of each and every part of every body she controlled despite me knowing how to cast the spell she used to assume control as well as the one she used to send her orders, I had simply believed that no one could use those abilities because they lacked my innate ability to use them.
And yet, the moment Missy had suggested it and I’d given it some thought, my mind – granted a mastery of teaching that few others could claim to possess – formed a curriculum for teaching others how to create binding vows.
It’d take longer than any other singular thing I had to teach before but not as long as teaching an entire field of magic. Or, at least, not as long as gravity sorcery.
To compare the two, I expected fully teaching gravity sorcery to an acceptable level of mastery would take me about 120 hours. In other words, it’d take five full days of lecturing just to get someone to a level of mastery still quite a bit below mine. Other factors such as also teaching mana control, talent on the part of the student or simply teaching one-on-one rather than as part of a lecture to hundreds of people could decrease that number but that’s the baseline.
That was a lot, of course, but it was an entire field of magic. They’d inevitably be less efficient than me but teaching others to match the level of mana efficiency I’d achieved in gravity sorcery would take me over a thousand hours and it’d stop being worth the time investment hundreds of hours before then.
Meanwhile teaching someone how to create binding vows at will would take me about thirty hours and require me to apply Naturalized Foreigner to them. That was a lot for a singular ability but teaching Lisa and her assistants how to use it would save me a lot more than that in the long run.
And merely having the knowledge that it was possible meant that I went through all my abilities to see which ones I could teach. Ignoring the skills some of them gave me – which were usually at a level where teaching them in full would take problematic amounts of time – it wasn’t hard to figure out a pattern.
Passives such as Never Felt the Need to Drink Blood, Skilled Development or Identify Talents weren’t something I could teach. Or rather, each and every one of them took so long it wasn’t worth the effort. What few active abilities I had, however, I could teach to varying degrees. For example, I could teach High Probability but I couldn’t easily teach the part that let me handle receiving all the information it gave me so teaching a less detailed version of it was as far as I could safely go with beings that couldn’t handle receiving stupid amounts of information.
It didn’t matter how nonsensical it was, as long as it was something I used rather than just possessed, I could teach it in a reasonable amount of time.
In hindsight, I probably should’ve guessed as much. I could literally teach someone to possess a supernatural energy they didn’t have just because it was a required part of teaching them how to use what I actually wanted to teach them.
But there was a difference between what the Grimoire gave me and everything else in my mind. That difference was real, too. Otherwise teaching Grimoire abilities wouldn’t take several times longer than teaching most other things. It just wasn’t so overwhelming of a difference that it meant I couldn’t teach them to others, it just made it time-consuming.
Had it not almost been time for my first Hoho lesson, I would have rushed off to teach Lisa and her assistants already. Well, they were also asleep, which was a problem, but it was one I’d have been happy to ignore in order to make it so I’d no longer have to be present for all the contracts we made.
‘I should have Lisa get started on recruiting people on Remnant already so I can teach them, too.’ At this point, I’d happily take anything that’d let me spend some more time on things I wanted to do.
Yoruichi
As a shinigami, I was aware of my soul. I had fought and lived without a physical body for over a hundred years. I was more familiar with my soul than any human being could ever hope to be.
The moment my aura awakened, I felt foolish for possessing such beliefs. It was an expansion of my senses that perfectly carried my reiryoku, a change so immense that I felt as though all the progress I’d made in the last century was nothing compared to what I could achieve within the next month.
For a living being like the girl who’d given me this power, maybe aura was not nearly as impactful. For me, who I’d never been more than a soul as far as I knew since I’d been born in Soul Society, it was an improvement so massive that I couldn’t properly describe it.
Gigai were no longer a weakness, of that I was sure. I’d just have to envelop them in my aura and I’d be able to use all my abilities as though I weren’t temporarily in a physical body. Maybe my more physically demanding abilities would shred the Gigai but I could still use them.
And the biggest change was in how my reiryoku flowed. I had long since reached the level at which it was trivial for me to manipulate even large amounts of my reiryoku quickly. Now, I did so with even greater ease and could use more at once.
Fully perfecting Shunko even beyond what I’d originally envisioned felt like a possibility now instead of just being a pipe dream.
“Alright,” I clapped my hands, grinning at the girl who’d given such a boost to both myself and Kisuke for nothing more than me teaching her Hoho. Admittedly, many shinigami – back before I’d followed Kisuke into exile – would have done just about anything for me to teach them Hoho or Hakuda but, were they to know of aura, those same shinigami would’ve offered anything short of their zanpakuto to gain it. “I need to get a handle on my aura and you need to figure out Shunpo so we’ll make it simple. I run and you try to catch me.”
I’d already given her a simple explanation of the steps so this was the best way for her to get anywhere. Shunpo, ultimately, wasn’t even that complicated. It was just a well-timed burst of reiatsu mixed with proper footwork.
It was still one of the shinigami techniques that was among the most important while also being the one many shinigami took the longest to master.
Ultimately, there were three steps to it.
Joritsu, which was just a proper stance for taking the step without falling flat on your face after moving and could be adjusted in any way one liked as long as one could keep their balance afterwards, was the easiest to practice but difficult to master because one couldn’t always take the right stance in combat.
Then there’s Bakkyaku, the part in which one moved the leg for the step. That, too, could be optimized and it was another thing that could take someone a while to truly master to the point where they would always be able to optimally perform it even in combat situations. Not to mention the fact that one had to perform it as quickly as possible.
The third step that the technique was named after, Shunpo, was then just the timing of the reiatsu burst which would have to be in-sync with the moment in which one’s foot began to push off the ground. Well, it technically also included the part where one would put their other foot onto the floor after the burst and was the point at which one could transition back into Joritsu but a beginner was usually just happy to get one cycle without either failing miserably or ending up with their face on the ground.
If one mastered Shunpo properly, outspeeding others became trivial. The issue was that reaching that point in the first place required lots and lots of practice.
“I suppose I’ll catch you soon, then.” Lilian replied despite almost certainly being aware of the fact that I was one of, if not the greatest master of Hoho in Soul Society, a grin on her lips.
‘She’s confident she’ll get it quickly, then.’ I concluded and, feeling mischievous, snatched that ridiculous top hat of hers within a single step before placing another to put some distance between us. “Guess you won’t mind the extra incentive to catch me, then!” I called out to her while waving the hat around.
Despite my attitude, however, I observed her carefully as she took a step that was far too measured. It worked somewhat, letting her cross a distance maybe half as large as it should have.
Most importantly, there were traces of my footwork in there. Not my Hoho footwork but my Hakuda footwork. Almost indistinguishable since I usually fought with both but I was entirely capable of fighting with just Hakuda, too.
Kisuke and I had both noticed the same thing when Lilian had trained Ichigo. It was less obvious in Zanjutsu than in Hakuda but she had occasionally shown off by backhanding the flat of Ichigo’s blade and she’d done so in the exact same way I would have had I been in her position. She’d adjusted for her height, of course, but the movements were umistakably a match for a Hakuda master.
Somehow, this girl from another world was better at Hakuda than almost all shinigami. Either she had previously visited a world with an identical fighting style or there was something fishy going on here.
Booping her on the nose while she was busy stabilizing herself after her first attempt at Shunpo served the purpose of amusing me while also showing me how she instinctively reacted. The answer was that her arm moved in the precise way in which I’d have moved mine in an attempt to touch me to win our little game were I in her position.
Oh, there was one difference that became abundantly clear as I watched her attempt Shunpo over and over again, barely even needing to take one step for her first dozen. Lilian restrained herself. Each and every one of her movements was made to look effortless but that sacrificed a lot of force she could get out of it.
That same flaw had also been present in her Zanjutsu. Even the way she’d walked had carried traces of it.
Lightly brushing my thumb over the elaborate headwear I’d nabbed for this first training session, I got the suspicion that her outfit and the weirdness of her movements were related.
After all, why go to the effort of having an incredibly durable suit created when there had to have been better options for combat outfits in at least one of the worlds she’d visited?
And, unlike how it’d been when she’d trained Ichigo, Lilian began to lose her restraint after a little while as amusement and frustration began to take root in her. It did wonders for her progress, at least, so I continued taunting her even as I continued to wonder just why she was so obsessed with looking elegant that she was holding herself back.
Elegance was a thing for people who didn’t look good enough that even I struggled not to stare from time to time. There was not a single flaw I could see on her, even as her long hair flew through the air from the ponytail she’d had it in coming undone after she fell again, it did so in a matter that looked beautiful. Her outfit was an eyesore and yet it looked beautiful by association. Without her excessive self-restraint, she progressed at least ten times faster than before and no longer fell on her face quite so often and it didn’t detract from her looks in the slightest.
It didn’t matter that she’d gotten dirty from her failed attempts and me occasionally tripping her up to show her where the flaws in her footwork laid. It didn’t matter that she was grinning in a mildly concerning manner.
Lilian Biron had no need to add to her beauty through mannerisms. She was beautiful beyond words no matter what she did. That was simply a matter of fact.
It was a mystery to me why she even bothered with controlling her movements to her own detriment despite that.
I’d been raised as a noble. Elegance was taught to me and enforced by my clan for quite some time. Despite that, I was taught to move freely in combat because anything else ran the risk of me dying for an incredibly stupid reason.
Some part of Lilian must’ve known that already, too. No one who moved with such skill could have been blind to the disadvantages of moving differently just because they felt it was more elegant.
There was elegance in immense skill, too. A different type of elegance, maybe, but elegance nonetheless. And that elegance really was effortless once one had had it for long enough. The last time I’d had to think on how to move was an eternity ago.
I wouldn’t point it out yet. Not just because I was unsure whether or not the outsider who, according to Kisuke, was just as likely to side with no one as she was to side with any of the sides available to her, would be an enemy but because making her aware of it now after she’d already stopped inhibiting herself might make her regress.
I’d been paid to teach her and my payment was good enough that I at least wanted her to get what she’d paid for out of this. Even if I’d hold back some things, I’d make a Hoho master out of her.
Within six hours, she had gone from barely being able to take a single step without falling to taking five steps in less seconds and almost catching up to me due to how out-of-shape I was.
I’d gotten rusty hiding out in the world of the living. Not enough to let a newbie catch me but enough that I, near the end, had to move constantly to continue to evade her.
But the training was over now. She was breathing heavily and I had no doubt her leg muscles were in a miserable state at this point.
Throwing her the hat, I recognized the confusion in her eyes as soon as it entered them and, deciding to let her continue to catch her breath, I spoke up, “The exercise is over for today. You’re too exhausted to improve much more. Come back once your legs have recovered.”
For a moment, she seemed ready to argue before, slowly, carefully nodding. Her forced ‘elegance’ had returned the moment she’d swallowed down her desire to continue. “I’ll be back tomorrow. I recover quickly.”
“You’d know best about that.” I commented off-handedly, storing the information in an ever-growing mental file for my temporary and perhaps most talented student.
It was good, too. It gave Kisuke and I some time to figure out how to politely ask how she’s a master of Hakuda.
Lily
Sometimes, I could understand the desire to sleep. If yesterday had done anything it had proven to me that I was tired. Tired of running from one task to the next with the only breaks being moments in which I improved my mastery over my powers while learning some new things or reading a book or generally doing some relaxing activity.
I enjoyed one of these two things but there’s a reason I shoved just about all the administrative tasks onto Lisa in the first place. I cared about the money the guild brought in and occasionally enjoyed fighting monsters. Everything else was just bothersome things I had to deal with to increase the amount of money I got out of it.
Of course, all of this was entirely on me. I didn’t have to make a guild. I could’ve just gone to another world, set up a business empire with Lisa at the head and sat back as I made money. This was simply more entertaining for me and, once everything was properly set up, would be more entertaining as well as earn more money. I just had to get to that point.
It also had the advantage of letting me empower some people so they could maybe do something once the Monarchs would inevitably get to this world. With it currently being my primary source of income, letting it get invaded and ruined would be problematic.
The Gates would probably stop once the Monarchs were dealt with and that was a problem, too, but I could use the money the Gates earnt me now to set things up in other worlds.
“Once I’ve taught Lisa and the people she picked how to make binding vows, I’m not going to deal with any of the administrative stuff anymore. One meeting a week at most.” I decided, sick and tired of it all now that I’d had the time to notice the problem.
Teaching and leading the occasional raid, I’d still do because I liked doing those things but, if anyone tried to set up a meeting with me after I was no longer the only source of binding vows, they’d better hope no one else was in the queue before them or be willing to wait at least a week.
Faultline should’ve counted herself lucky that I was interested in potentially having her be in charge of a secondary branch of the Travelers Guild or else I wouldn’t have agreed to meet with her immediately. Especially because I couldn’t make Lisa deal with her instead since Lisa couldn’t potentially help Labyrinth and the Case 53s.
‘After this, I should ask Amelia if she wants to hang out again.’ I decided as I entered the nightclub Melanie and her subordinates used as their base, ready to deal with what would hopefully be one of the last recruitment meetings I’d ever have to deal with myself.
Before anyone points out the height thing, I looked up Yoruichi’s official height. According to the wiki, she’s officially 18cm shorter than Ichigo at his shortest official height. According to literally the first image I found after looking up ‘Yoruichi next to Ichigo’ she’s less than a head shorter than him. These two facts as well as Yoruichi’s body proportions are not compatible with her being 156cm tall so I’m electing to ignore it and increasing her height. She’s still shorter than Ichigo but by an amount that’d explain the ‘half a head shorter’ thing rather than an amount that gives me a headache to think about
Anyways, ignoring me being frustrated by official heights that make no sense with the body proportions given, I hope you enjoyed and let me know if you have any feedback