Gung Ho Grave Robbers

Mission Info:

Three days ago....

It was in the dead of night. A young boy not much older than Goro Chinoike was visiting the grave of his beloved grandfather. He had come alone, and he had brought with him a bouquet made up of Hemlock, Conqueror's Thristle, and Siren's Rose. The exotic collection of flowers that he had laid before the tombstone was gathered by the young Genin himself. It was his ritual to make this offering to his late ancestor on the second Wednesday of every month when the hour hand of the clock struck twelve at midnight. He had finished with his ceremony, and was about to leave the graveyard on his way back to his rural home in the outskirts of the village. That was when it happened.

He watched in horror at the sight of a green ghastly corpse, floating in the air with its limbs hanging from its sides, and its back faced down towards its own empty, desecrated grave. It wobbled back and forth, before its pale rotten face turned its head towards the youth. The worms crawling out of its rotten eyes were exposed when they were basked in the light of the moon in waxing gibbous. The corpse then zipped past him with a blurred acceleration, disappearing into the shadows in the forest beyond the confinements of the barren graveyard. A bloodcurdling scream escaped the lips of the horrified Genin as he caught a hint of its foul stench as it zipped past, breaking the silence of the night.

---

Saturn Sentobi stood in the middle of two vandalized graves with a shovel over his shoulder. The Sun had long set in the Kumon skies to give way to the full moon. "We're in this together.." He had told his partner Yōkye Ushitora before desecrating the graves of the two prominent Jounin. They were a couple who had died together while on a mission to retrieve a prisoner who had managed to escape from his cell. They were buried next to each other after succumbing to mercury poisoning. Now, they were the only two deceased jounin left at the graveyard in question after the others had gone missing.

Saturn had tried to catch the grave robbers in the act for two consecutive nights, hiding in the shadows while using his sensory jutsu and borrowing the eyes of rats, owls and even hawks with his hiden techniques, to no avail. The culprits were elusive and bodies still went missing. The shinobi theorized that they used Hiding with Camouflage along with certain other techniques to conceal their presence and carry out their robbery without being detected. They were being even more careful after a young boy reported what he saw when he was visiting his grandfather's grave. After collecting the records of those who were buried at the site, he established a pattern - that prominent shinobi were specifically targeted by the culprits - and he devised a desperate plan. He, and hopefully his partner, would lie in wait for the perpetrators inside the graves, sharing coffins with rotting corpses.

Yōkye was an interesting young man. He had already left a notable first impression on Saturn. The shinobi had a knack for reading the likes and dislikes of characters that he would encounter in his journey, but he was unable to read the dark haired shinobi who seemed to have neither. This inability to read him sparked in Saturn a slight irritation with himself, like an itch that he could not hope to scratch. It also sparked somewhat of a keen interest. It was also a breath of fresh air for the fortuneteller. His face lit up when he addressed his compatriot as he handed the shovel to him, to bury Saturn with it once he would get inside one of the coffins later,

"So, what do you say? I like our odds."

"Empty. They must have taken them just now, right from under our noses." Saturn gazed up from inside the coffin to see the visage of a demon looking down at him. It would have sent chills down the spines of most shinobi, but Saturn was built different. His expression was a mirror image of the bland one on the Ushitora's face. He liked the view - a part of him regretted that he was still not dead - and hoped that the image that scarred his mind would meet him again upon his real death. It seemed like the beginning of a dark and sinister adventure.   He waited to reflect on his emotions on the matter before forming the seal of confrontation to use Mind's Eye of the Kagura. He had tried using the technique earlier, and the night before that to try and catch the culprits but to no avail. This time would prove to be different. They had been too bold and brazen with their act.

"I see them. Shit, they're underground. Two males with two corpses, rapidly moving towards my nine o' clock, now ten." His heart was racing, he could not afford to lose sight of the culprits. Overhead, an owl hooted, flying over Saturn's grave with impeccable timing. He formed handseals in quick succession, placing the image of the bird between his fingers that formed a heart shaped hand seal. His eyes rolled into the back of his skull, and so did the bird's. While his body stayed rigid and lifeless within the open coffin that he himself had dug up, the owl would land on the handle of the shovel on the ground with its back towards Yōkye. Its head then spun a full one hundred and eighty degrees backwards to face him before hooting. Saturn could sense the movement underground with the borrowed senses of the owl. Its uneven ears one placed higher than the other on its skull helped him determine the direction and distance from which he could now sense the burrowing culprits. He initially struggled with understanding the extrasensory capabilities of animals that weren't human, but after possessing ostriches, vultures, cats, bears, sharks, and now an owl, he was much too familiar. He could not only sense the culprits from his newly acquired senses, he could also see them from his active Mind's Eye of the Kagura. However, they were rapidly moving away from the effective range of his technique. He had one more trick up his sleeve.

This way, I'm certain.

The owl would speak telepathically with Yōkye, before taking flight in pursuit of the grave robbers, leaving Saturn's body behind.

WC: 442

TWC: 1581

Saturn commented telepathically on the boy's running form as he flew overhead, guiding the Genin towards the right location. Behind them, Saturn's body awoke from its early grave, shadowing them from a safe distance with his active Mind's Eye of the Kagura. At that time, his mind was in two bodies at once. He was getting better at piloting multiple hosts simultaneously, but he narrowly evaded the debris when Yōkye swatted the massive tombstones that came flying in. He could have been crushed to a pulp had it not been for the warning before the reckless swat.

He cursed, performing some aerial acrobatics to navigate the flying debris. When he caught sight of the pale boy he had just taken a direct hit. Shit, is he dead? He winced at what looked like a brutal hit, but was relieved when he saw that his partner was still standing, unfazed, dealing a crushing blow to the egos of the culprits.

As they made their way through the smoke, they were brought to a barren corner of the same graveyard. Two corpses were laid side by side in front of a crouching old man in a red mask with a shovel. His partner behind him was a towering man wearing an identical mask, no less than seven feet tall and buff with bulging muscles, the one responsible for heaving the tombstones earlier, it would appear. Saturn in his owl body landed on a branch of a fir tree, about ten meters to the right of Yōkye.

The tall man spoke in a gruff voice, pointing towards the Ushitora clansman as he walked towards him fearlessly. Neither he nor his partner noticed the three strange eyes that grew on the barks of trees placed no more than five meters apart, behind the corpses.

WC: 328

TWC: 1909