While the brief pause that was almost a necessity to process what had just transpired before their eyes did not do Kouta and Erumo any favors, the pair managed to snap out of it in a timely fashion and dash at the same direction where the furry nightmare had gone to. The monstrous invader of bodily cavities appeared humanoid but moved like anything but.
The bestial humanoid with the affinity for invading foreign bodies had a head-start, the alleyways were long and confusing, made more so because of the same way that every building was designed and built, not to forget the natural darkness. At that point both of the pursuers missed the light pollution of Konoha at night, nobody could have lost a person there. Rushing through this settlement at night felt like running with poked out eyes. Cold, scary and occasionally you bumped into something and yet duty forced you to keep on moving forward instead of anywhere but.
"Did what we just saw happen happened?" Kouta mumbled, still struggling with believing it. "This escalated way off the scale in no time at all."
"Don't lose it." Erumo tried to keep her ally on track. "He might be a link to the tribe we're looking for or it might just be a random freakazoid. Either way, we're definitely finding out what it knows and what exactly is this thing it's doing."
"It's blocks ahead of us already. For the record though, that was a furry midget bursting from somebody's body, right?" Kouta desperately looked around for any telltale signs of the little beast's presence like a snippet of its tail slipping through a corner. As he had assessed, the body-invader was far too off ahead for something as clear-cut as that.
"I don't think it was a midget. It was a child." Erumo declared. She dragged her finger across the dirt and examined the leftover splatters of wet dirt, snow, and blood. Far too fresh to be anything but something splattered from what had just ran down that way, it helped the pair gain a little bit on the fleeing beast, while its movements were inhuman and creepy, its speed was actually quite lacking compared to the two Konoha ninja and both felt confident they could have caught up if they only came at it in a straight line instead of having to play hide, seek and chase with it.
"Nice catch." Kouta complimented his teammate.
"Partly thanks to you bringing it up how it just burst from somebody's body after spending who knows how long inside of it. Still want to figure out what that's all about." Erumo said in return.
"Really think it's a child? Seems like a pretty messed up thing for a child to do… For anyone to do, honestly, but for a child - especially so." Kouta expressed his doubts in amazement at the bizarre and macabre scene they just witnessed.
"Not only it is a child but it is also human." Erumo expressed with about as much worry as before, even though internally she was beginning to piece the puzzle together. "Anyone that spends so much time inside a human corpse would have no problem dressing in other animals' dead bodies too."
The freaky figure dashed, jumped and vaulted about on all fours, using the hooked, bronze claws at the end of its impressive yet primal costume to cling to walls and vault about easier, swinging off of pieces of architecture with natural grace only available to small monkeys that spent their entire lives moving this way. A bright blast of pure chakra missed the fleeing kid by just a narrow margin, the resulting explosion sent the child rolling and tumbling but because of its affinity of moving on all fours, it continued on its hectic path.
Several more times Kouta tried tagging the child attempting to dress as a legion of dead critters that it wore on its body, all of those times the young man missed, sending the fleeing target tumbling the other direction. The young man maintained a steady pace, he may have tried picking up his speed and catching up to the little one but he might have had more under his sleeves, everything needed to go smooth rather than the way Kouta was beginning to get used to while working with his father. This experience was a worthy reminder…
The boy maintained a steady pace, even with pursuers after it, even when projectiles of chakra that may have easily killed him exploded all around him, the freaky kid continued to run with the same unnatural motions to his style, his gender and age only made available to an onlooker through the subhuman grunts and growls that the child let out. Grunts and growls that turned to squeaking the moment that steel wire loops closed on to his neck and every single one of his limbs right at the joint. With a masterful flick of her wrist, the intermediate trap weaver sent some more strings looping around more and more areas of the boy's body, completely disabling him.
It was only then that the boy was completely subdued and at the complete mercy of the two Konoha ninja that they had a better look at what they were chasing around. A mixture of the impressive way that humans could have gotten one with the nature that birthed them and dismissed both the benefits and the drawbacks of modern civilization of the ninja world and the brutality of the primal conditioning. A combination of unprocessed skinned furs that still had snippets of flesh while they were being worn and smelled of rotten carcasses of the critters they once belonged to, bones and body parts, all integrated into the boy's style. Topped off by the bronze claws – the only sub-civilized aspect of the boy's appearance.
"Rat tails for hair? That's… Disgusting." Kouta picked up on a detail of accessorizing that he found particularly revolting – a line of rat tails that was ringed around in a straight line and hanging down like wet noodles, simulating what would have been the protective layer of mane or hair around one's head.
"Yes, perhaps it would be better to work with something less attention-hogging." Erumo nodded, approaching the young man with a kunai in hand.
A splat of blood blinded Erumo temporarily, the top side of the trapped body fell head-first onto the dirt, now a hand short while his second hung only to a narrow strip of flesh. Somehow the unnatural appearance of the imitated beast distracted both ninja to where they did not notice that the mask of the impressive costume was hanging hollow and that the little human inside was working some macabre magic with its sharp teeth through its trapped limbs.
"Don't let him free the legs!" Erumo yelled out in despair but Kouta was already engaged with pulling his blinded friend out of harm's way as if he had moved a millisecond later – her throat would have had a rich bunch of sharpened chompers digging into it to worry about. In her scared and blinded state, the trapster may not have worried excessively about chakra augmentation of her body, which, in actuality, was the main thing she should have worried about when caught by surprise like that.
Despite missing out on catching the little, resourceful boy, Kouta pinned its fur outfit with a kunai, forcing the young one to abandon it regardless of his preference, revealing nothing more but a half-naked, bald little boy with dried out chunks of gore and black blood all over, now sinking in surges of his own blood that he's been quickly losing.
Erumo tried casting a loop of steel wire to catch onto something but missed the young boy entirely. Without its impressive coat, he was even smaller and harder to catch than before. Kouta dashed after him but found the use of force unnecessary as the little one collapsed from blood loss, fading away not ten meters from where he had chewed his own arm off. A behavior he may have learned from observing the rodents he had skinned for his identity.
"He chewed his fucking arm off?" Erumo still wheezed from the stress and disbelief how much trouble someone so much slower and weaker than either of them caused to the two of them just because of how morbid their tactics were and the necessity to catch the fleeing boy alive.
Kouta leaned down and moved the boy's weak and pale lips only to reveal blood-soaked lines of sharpened teeth, with his impressive line of sharpened teeth, the young one reminded of a little shark from an outside look, without his not any less impressive costume of vermin corpses worn over his frail shoulders and hunched back that had sharp protrusions of spine pressing against the skin, likely a result from how much time the young boy spent on all-fours, hunched over.
"Can you fix up something to tie him up with? Something foolproof this time." Kouta suggested. The young man bent to his knees and started working on the wound that would have ended up killing his captive in mere upcoming moments.
Sweat burst forth from the forehead of the medical ninja, the emerald glow from his hands intensified, he moved one of his hands away from the pale and dying boy to scan his pouch for any Sanguine food pills but he could not find any. There were plenty of blades though, burning with frustration, Kouta pulled out a wristband meant for wiping the sweat off his face after a tough training session. The emerald light died out, with a furious smack, the medical ninja slammed the wristband to the dirt. The wet slapping sound made Erumo get startled and turn around with worry in her eyes.
"Don't bother…" Kouta mumbled out.
"And?" Yushijin asked for the inappropriately frustrated teammate of his to finish his report. So far it sounded like something from a trashy horror picture or one of the creepier sections from a biology textbook.
"Seeing how we don't have an armless ten-year-old with us, I failed to save him, didn't I?" Kouta flipped his hands up in the air.
"How strong was the kid, how fast?" Yushijin wondered after a brief moment of silence.
"Stronger and faster than an adult man, for sure, probably physical chakra augmentations…" Kouta shrugged.
"He seemed pretty mindless, no forethought, only sheer instinct. No fear of pain or self-preservation though. Don't think any of the physical augmentations were conscious." Erumo added.
"There you go…" Yushijin sighed. "It's not your fault, the kid had lost an arm by chewing it off himself, hardly the optimal way to go around with that. Despite the massive blood loss, he kept on moving around and fighting, there was nothing you could have done."
"Maybe if I paid more attention to my kit and bothered taking some more food pills…" Kouta grumbled.
"All in all, it might be for the better that the kid died." Erumo declared with boldness in her voice that made Mana turn at the trapster with a brew of emotions in her eyes, unlike anything she's felt in a while. Had the magician not been beaten off her feet, she'd have lashed out and tried some self-righteous lecture, even when she knew that such vain effort would have been self-righteous, she'd have still been unable to resist herself.
After the rest of Team Fir turned at the young lady with a similarly focused distaste for the trapster's timing, the young woman shook her head. "I can't believe none of you get it yet. The kid was dressed as a legion of rats. He chewed his own arm off to escape a trap, just like a rodent would have."
The rest of Team Fir continued to stare at the trap specialist with blank and confused faces, at least after being informed that there was a sensible reason for Erumo's declaration they lost the flames of judgment in Mana's case and vapid confusion in the case of the boys.
"The boy was a scout. Vermin send scouts that are supposed to scour the area for potential loot, find out how secure it is. I'm not sure what exactly the boy was doing inside a dead body but… I'm sure that was his ultimate goal. The fact that the boy won't be returning will tip the enemy off, they'll turn elsewhere for an easy raid." Erumo explained. "I guess in the end this guy really was related to the tribe we're looking for…"
"How is the enemy going away from the settlement we're waiting around in a good thing?" Yushijin asked.
"No more civilians will get hurt. If the tribe did try and raid this settlement, they'd have left only bodies, even if we were here to defend it. The only way to avoid civilian casualties would be to engage them on their own turf." Mana finally put Erumo's point together.
"Too bad we don't know where their turf is because someone lost the only living target for interrogation." Kouta let his pessimistic turn linger in the room's atmosphere and soak the entire area with its gloom.
Team Fir ended up spending the rest of the day in the little settlement, all four of them slept with one of their eyes open. Each one hoped that their better judgment and hopes for peace would be proven wrong and that the enemy would attack. While Mana was too absorbed by the decimation of Iwagakure to stay too long and process the issue of the tribesman scout, she saw her teammates bitterly switching the positions of their tongues inside their mouths, counting something imaginary but something they found threatening regardless.
None of the four ended up having much quality sleep that night. After Mana rose to get a cup of cocoa like last night, she had to walk past Kouta who was just staring at a patch of wall with his table light on. The magician kept stepping on the foot of hers that stayed on the ground at the time, hesitating if she should try to talk to her boyfriend.
"Hey, you need something? I'm going down for something warm to drink." Mana asked the young man with a whisper, as if Yushijin was asleep, which, obviously, he wasn't. Erumo was not even in the room. Still, at this time of early morning, whispering just felt kind of right.
Kouta stonewalled the question. He didn't give Mana any angry glares, so he did not outright reject her but neither did he do anything welcoming. The young man squirmed in his plaid, moving a little bit farther from where Mana whispered from. The magician got the clue. Her own head twitched a little, surprised by the noise that, if heard at any other time, should not have startled her nearly as much.
Even the squeaks of the wooden stairs got Mana on edge. A gentle sound that she may not have even heard or told apart from the general harmony of noises normally now irritated her. The young woman moved slowly, in a way she felt like one of those characters from the movies, played by one of those fancy actresses who got up in the middle of the night to check if the sound of her dog's throat being slit was anything to be suspicious about.
Hell, given her current sense of self-worth, she felt about as ditzy and shallow…
"Could you stop that girl?" the receptionist spoke up at Mana as if she was an angel guardian descending to answer his prayer. Even if it came with the display of general paleness of skin and wide open, shifty eyes, something that would have been dismissed by anyone without a penchant for paranoia, when seen on a Land of Snow settler, it looked about as out of place as seeing someone from anywhere else suffering a heart attack.
"I'll see what I can do." Mana nodded. "Can you make some cocoa in the meantime?"
"Quid pro quo…" the receptionist replied.
"You eloquent hillbilly…" Mana grinned before entering the doorway that led to the warehouse, apparently. The magician had never gone there before but it did not take an expert of warehouses to identify this one. The purpose and the direction of the staircase could have been pieced together from cobwebs as thick as dreadlocks hanging from every surface leading down.
Using the walls for support, after carefully measuring the length of the first few steps with her foot, Mana descended down and tried heading for the singular beam of light in the room. The magician's arm shot to her side, her clutch locked around a wrist trying to grab her from behind. There was no fear or worry in Mana's voice, her clutch neither trembled nor pressed hard on the misinformed soul that tried to press her hand against Mana's mouth. Yet, given that the magician put together that it was exactly what Erumo tried to do, she stayed silent.
A single, cat-sized rat wandered around the beam of light, flashing through it once in a while. The vermin was startled by Mana's appearance but quickly became emboldened again. It did not come to grow this large for its kind because it was afraid, it grew this large because it took chances and nabbed the food that others feared to even try reaching out for. A gentle ticking sound reached the magician's excellent senses from one of the darker corners. A strong gust of wind, following a mechanical voice of active rotator blades, made both young women lean forward and do their best to maintain balance.
The light came on, it was only when it did that the rat trapped in what appeared like a massive glass jar began trying to escape its entrapment but the sizzling noise of a burning explosive tag signaled the demise for both the prey and its short-term prison. The magician covered her face so that none of the shrapnel of glass hit her face. The last thing she needed right now was to spend needless chakra on augmentation so that she did not get cut by rogue glass.
"Now I see why the receptionist asked me to get you out of here…" Mana sighed like a tired mother who returned after a double shift to find her children having drawn obscenities with a coloring pen all over the apartment walls.
"Can you not? I need this… It's how I… Relax." Erumo rubbed her elbow. "I still can't get used to the fact you can just sense people's chakra like that…" her mood picked up after she recalled her failure of sneaking up on Mana.
"You're scaring the owner, who is also the receptionist, who is also the room service, probably also the janitor. At least give me a shot at it." Mana moved a nearby wooden stand with her foot. It took a gentle flick of her lower leg to push one to Erumo as well, just hard enough to barely touch her shins and make a complete stop. After training with the ninja rabbits, nobody could have accused Mana at being sloppy with working her legs.