Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Games of Body and Soul

Cold Region Horror Show

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...