How Not to Build a Family

Kidnapping? Yeah, No wrote:
Mission Type:  Rescue
Mission Rank: B
Mission Goal:  Rescue the Kidnapped Children
Description: A group of notorious kidnappers has made their way to Konoha and are trying to ‘one up’ the shinobi by kidnapping civilian children from out from under their noses and getting away with it. Find the three children they’ve kidnapped, and rescue them.
Payment: 25,000
Requirements: C-Class or 2 D-Class

Serial in the Morning wrote:Mission Type: Investigation and Assault
Mission Rank: B
Mission Goal:  Track the Serial Killer and kill him.
Description: A group of murders has the police baffled, track down the serial killer and either bring him into custody or eliminate him.

THE KILLER:
Payment: 25,000
Requirements: C-Class or 2 D-Class

Kill the Assassin wrote:Mission Type: Elimination
Mission Rank: B
Mission Goal: Kill The Assassin
Description: An assassin has been rumoured to be in the darkest parts of the forest. She’s a tall woman, who wears a rabbit mask and utilizes throwing axes with deadly efficiency. When she’s near you can hear a haunting lullaby being sung throughout the trees without a point of reference. Survive the assassin, and eliminate her.
Payment: 25,000
Requirements: C-Class or 2 D-Class.

It was a nigh inevitable tragedy of life that there were those who took advantage of the preoccupation of protective forces with major calamities such as the War to attack the unfortunates who were left unprotected thanks to the call of duty. Worse among those were the ones who preyed on the loneliness and insecurities of the survivors left behind in order to further pursue their own sick pleasures. In this particular string of cases, the crimes committed were so grotesque in nature that the young shinobi who answered the village police forces' calls for help was not even allowed to see the bodies.

There's so much blood... Ashitaka thought as he looked around at the scene of a family household that was newly bereft of a family. It's just everywhere...

There were some things that he was told and others he was able to see as he looked around the place that painted a very odd picture. For one thing, the front door of the house had been found unlocked. But the window in one of the children's rooms had been broken into in what had to be the most unnecessarily difficult manner ever. Rather than breaking the glass, as anyone even half sane would, this intruder seemed content to hack the entire sill right out of the wall with... hatchets, Ashitaka guessed by the length of the blade strikes. Granted, it was a relatively flimsy wall being as it was made out of ordinary wood for poor people, but that was still much more difficult to get through than the thin glass of the window.

In addition to the starkly contrasting modes of apparent entry, there were other signs of multiple assailants being responsible for the horrific crimes that took place in this house. Such as for example the fact that there were footprints of three adults in the blood on the floor: one larger than the other two, although its impressions were shallower than one of the smaller ones. Somebody big was light on their feet in here. As a general rule, a fairly safe sign that this person made a habit of sneaking around. That was, of course, discounting the footprints of the investigators who had obviously shown up long enough after the fact for the blood to have coagulated and dried. Not to mention those of Ashitaka himself, since he had arrived so much later that his own were instead faintly marked in the dust that had collected on the scene. The stench was almost as nauseating as the disorientatoin from being summoned by that Otsutsuki lady who helped with the Commonwealth evacuation.

"I just don't get it..." the local detective said as he ran a hand through hair nearly as shaggy as the Chuunin's, although black instead of brown. "I can see some pervert coming after the missus while her husband is away at war, but why take the kids? I'd think they'd be nothin' but trouble for the sort of man that would do something like this. And why's the back window hacked apart when he clearly came in through the front door? Wouldn't he have helped his buddies if this was some kind of gang deal?"

"The real question you should be asking..." Ashitaka said as he looked out the window and at the bloody pair of footprint trails disappearing into the tree line. It was clear by their depth that the owners of both had departed with a burden that was a sizeable fraction of their weight, and given that there was nothing of value taken from the house, it didn't take an ace detective to figure out what they were carrying. "...is why two people with shinobi training would not only attack a civilian house, but also make it abundantly clear that they had done so. This is the fifth time this has happened in less than a month, and every time it did has resulted in disappearances among the search parties. I suspect they might be intending to bait others into coming to look for them."

He made some hand signs, then went around the house, soaking the ground surrounding it with water. Then he did the same for the ones nearest it on either side. The detective rushed outside and looked at him in surprise and confusion.

"Just w-w-what d-do you think you're doing, young man?" he demanded, marching over to Ashitaka as though he intended to give the boy a stern talking to. "Are you trying to give this family's poor neighbors a weed problem?"

"The killers here wanted to make a display of their actions. I'm taking that away from them. Prepare the remains of Mrs. Kamazuki for a proper funeral. Then burn this house to the ground. It's been cursed by the horrendous actions that have taken place here."

"But the evidence! How will we prove these crimes if we destroy the scene?" he demanded, mostly taking offense that he was being ordered around by a child.

"You've already proven them to me, and I will act accordingly. Rest assured I will not allow such monstrous acts to go unpunished." he said as he closed the door to the condemned home.

"But you're just a child! What can you even do against these people?"

"More than you can possibly imagine. These weapons I'm wearing aren't just for show. Now do as I've instructed. I don't want to have to pull rank," Ashitaka replied as he started walking in the direction of the footprints. Obviously, it wasn't long until they ran out of blood to trail and disappeared into the long grasses. But these criminals wanted to be followed so there were other signs that could be found with minimal effort.

The Senju Forest was a vast place, and deep. Its iron-hard trees reached for dozens, if not hundreds of meters overhead and claimed so much of the sun's light on the way down that it was often hard to tell what time of day it was. Additionally, shrubs and grasses were rare and stubborn, but the various mushrooms that thrived in dark places were strong and prominent. The animal life was no gentler nor softer, as the stationary life forms had set the bar which all others must clear in order to survive. Everything that lived here was by necessity strong, fierce, and vibrant. It was in this place that the boy who would one day be named Ashitaka spent the first years of his life.

It was into this place that he pursued those humans who would prey on their own.

He was in no particular hurry, even knowing that the criminals had murdered helpless innocents and abducted children in whose age range he resided. Ashi had seen how his friends had suffered from rushing headlong into danger and being struck ruthlessly from behind. So instead he moved at a more sedate pace: quickly enough to suit the demands of purpose, but still slowly enough that waiting for him to pass required considerable patience. His Sensing Field scanned the area surrounding him in a sphere with a roughly 250m diameter, making it nigh impossible for anyone with chakra to sneak up on him. More than that, he was also listening to the local wildlife. As usual, they had nothing of value to say, only screeching vagaries about food and the desire to find a partner. However, it was only a matter of time before he crossed an imperceptible threshold and the wilderness around him fell silent. This is what he was really listening for.

The attack was a near-total surprise, given the lack of a source of chakra in the vicinity of its point of origin. In fact, if Ashitaka had been relying exclusive on his Sensing Field and not also on his ears, it probably would have struck him. As it was, he leaned back slightly and caught the projectile as it passed in front of him, identifying it as a crossbow bolt roughly as thick as his thumb and four times as long before it exploded in a puff of black smoke that engulfed his head and shoulders. His hand and primary sensory organs stung as he accidentally inhaled some of it, and he stepped back and crouched down to pull his head out of the miniature cloud and wave his good hand in front of his face to clear it. But his assailants were already on the offensive. Several figures dropped out of the trees and surrounded him, one casting a net at him while the others rushed in with sticks to beat him into submission. Meanwhile, the sniper fired another specialized shot, this one loaded with a sedative for livestock.

Unfortunately for the assault team, they were grossly outclassed. The Senju boy sidestepped the net and allowed it to ensnare two of the stick-bearers and pin them to the tree they'd leapt from. Then he backhanded the bolt in the direction of the net-thrower, thankfully barely grazing the kid who like the others was roughly the age of their quarry and nowhere near as talented in combat. The small amount of the drug that got into his bloodstream through the scratch in his arm was still enough to make him dizzy, and Ashitaka knocked him the rest of the way unconscious with a knife kite to the back of his neck. His mission was to take these children back alive, after all. And he wasn't inclined to kill anyone if he could avoid it, in any case.

That just left the sniper and two more beaters. Now that she was out of trick shots, she resorted to firing ordinary bolts, but stuck to firing while her target was preoccupied now that she was aware of his agility. For being ordinary kids, the group had surprisingly good tactics. The strikers charged at him from his sides, one swinging high and the other low, while the shooter launched her attack from behind. At that point, Ashitaka understood why most people had serious difficulty taking children seriously. For all of their ferocity, the members of this little gang were pitifully ineffectual. He caught the high strike with his right hand and trapped the low one by stepping on it with his left foot. The crossbow bolt struck him in the back, but it splintered off one of his kunai mounted their and only penetrated his flack jacket enough to be really annoying.

He disarmed both of the kids on the ground with one motion, and when they realized the situation they were in, they started to run. The beaters were taken down with their own weapons, but the shooter had a better lead and dashed away along the branches, crossing from one tree to the next where they intersected. Ashitaka tied up the kids he'd already dealt with using a length of wire and left their weapons in a pile before sending up a flare and taking off in the direction of the last child. In spite of her advantage, she lacked the training required to make any real headway and it wasn't long before he caught up to her. It was long enough that before he caught hold of her, he was stopped by the sound of singing echoing through the forest.

"Come little children...
I'll take thee away...
into a land of enchantment.

Come little children...
The time's come to play...
here in my garden of shadows."

The song coalesced into a single point as Ashitaka's Sensing Field and Genjutsu: Kai banished the auditory illusion just in time for a handaxe to graze his cheek as he narrowly evaded it. It cut deeply enough that the wound started to bleed before his regenerative ability could close it. The weapon continued on to embed its head in the tree whose branch he'd been standing on. Looking towards the source of the sound and attack, he spotted a figure that was black against the general darkness of the area, which stretched out vertically and with a flourish revealed itself to be a cloaked man with a leather-clad woman clinging to him. Her song continued as the boy dropped to the ground next to a sapling that was struggling to find its place among its overwhelming elders, but was cut short when he uprooted the small tree and hurled it at the two of them.

The deadly duo leapt out of the path of the dangerous and frankly rude interruption to their dramatic entrance, noting with some concern that they barely evaded it in spite of it being a tree thrown at them by what appeared to be a child. The sapling's branches entangled on the one they'd been standing on as gravity and momentum righted the smaller tree and brought it back to the ground. The assassin in the bunny mask took the initiative, performing an acrobatic aerial maneuver as she sprang off the trunk of another large tree to accelerate her approach to Ashitaka. She performed several similar moves as she approached, intending to surprise him by landing behind him and strike his collar muscles with the edge of her hatchet before taking off again to retrieve her other weapon.

Instead, she found her axe crossing hafts with a much larger and better-crafted one over his head. But it wasn't a deadlock, he simply slung her weapon out of her grip and off some distance away and forced her to jump back and actively scamper in the direction of her first axe. Fortunately, her partner wasn't idle and approached Ashitaka from the front, running on the air as he bore down on him with his greatsword drawn and brandished. The blade of his weapon sang with the power of Wind that it had been imbued with. The killer noticed just slightly too late that the boy was neither intimidated by his actions nor confused by the assassin's. A single half hand seal was formed in the kid's unoccupied hand and the accompanying bracer unraveled and flowed into it, reforming into a wooden sword comparable in size to the killer's before it was coated in nearly-transparent chakra that seemed to flow from hilt to tip. With this weapon, he met the attack and swatted the grown man away like an insect.

Is this boy... dual-wielding two-handed weapons? the man wondered as he re-oriented himself in mid-air and landed on the face of a tree trunk a good dozen or so meters away from his target and heard, with some concern, that he had cracked the iron-hard bark on impact. He felt pain racing through his body as the kinetic energy that had been forced into it sought outlets. It was almost enough to make him lose focus on the flow of chakra through his feet.

As he returned his attention to Ashitaka, he noticed that the boy wasn't even looking at him. Instead, the young shinobi was watching the woman struggle to pull the head of her handaxe out of the tree trunk it had been buried in. With a sigh and a shake of his head, he walked over and pried it free for her with his foot. He had the air of someone who had stopped taking his opponents seriously and was treating their deadly duel like it was some tedious chore. This incensed the serial killer so he charged at his quarry using airborne steps to nullify the possibility of making a sound with his approach from behind. Taking advantage of his greater mass and the reach adjustment of his blade, he went for a thrust instead of a conventional strike. At the same time, the assassin lunged at him with a desperate overhead strike with both hands on the haft of her axe. This was a stupid move but fear was severely hampering her ability to think in any capacity, let alone tactically.

Their shared target seemed to blur slightly, and then suddenly he was not in the path of their pincer attack. Instead, the killer's blade plunged into the half-exposed bosom of the assassin, whose own axe fell haphazardly as her approach was forcibly stopped. He would have been able to avoid it had Ashitaka not revealed that his relocation was a simple jump by turning in midair and kicking the hatchet's chipped head into the side of the man's neck. He more or less landed on the haft of the small weapon and further drove it down into the serial killer's chest until it caught on the part of his strange armor that made something resembling an attempt at serving armor's intended purpose. Why the two of them decided to dress like this eluded the young ninja even more than their decision to attack helpless innocents. Both killer and assassin watched each other die at the feet of an opponent who they'd grossly underestimated.

His mission completed, he banished his weapons and fired another flare into the sky as the sniper he'd been pursuing, noticing that her tormentors weren't going to be haunting her waking hours any longer, came out of hiding lest this new greater monster hunt her down. When the enforcers showed up to collect the kids and the bodies, she turned herself over to them and gave them the locations of the children not involved in the ill-fated patrol. She also told them about how she and the other survivors were forced to eat the flesh of any who fell during their training. Of course, some might think that these two psychoes got off easy for what they'd done, but in Ashitaka's mind, all that mattered was that they were stopped with no possibility of escaping to resume their monstrous crimes.

He returned to Konoha to report on the successful completion of his missions, wondering what it meant that the first time he killed people barely fazed him emotionally.