The Demon King... Claude [Modded Mission]

[Michi]

It was 1235, the middle of the night in a quiet residential neighborhood. It was the kind of place where you could forget to lock the door and still safety sleep through the night. Akin to the suburbs some men and women endure with their perfectly manicured lawns and their cars still under warranty. A perpetual state of debt to keep up with the Jones's hidden behind an appealing facade. This home, not unlike the other dozen homes that had already been passed would soon be the site of a murder. Home of four and half if you were to count the family pet -- a mother, father and pair of children, one boy and one girl. The 'perfect picture' this family attempted to exude had shattered several days earlier, their daughter the elder of the children had started to see or rather experience visions. Premonitions that something terrible was about to happen. Her nights filled with dread as she ran from a phantom in her dreams, a trail of blood left by her feet. Her days, wrought with paranoia. In the shadows she could almost see something... something watching her. Golden eyes that pierced through the shadow and gloom of a cluttered closet that could fir no more, behind a curtain, beneath a bed. But she would blink her eyes and then whatever it was would be gone. It did not stop the fear or the near certainty that something was there but she started to do this on purpose, blink hard and for a long time and then when she opened her eyes there would be nothing there. But it got worse over the next few days, tangible proof that there was something there. A note reminding her to look behind her. A knife being left on her bed-stand that she did not bring with her.

Her lack of sleep and her constant paranoia made her physically ill. Combative and violent. She struck out at her brother earlier today, with the knife left for her. She ripped open doors and filled her room with light, concluding as many do that without the shadow and the gloom there would be no eyes peering back at her. She would be correct of course, that did keep this fiend at bay. However, it would be insane to believe that such a preposterous creature did in fact exist. Confined to her room, the door was bolted shut. The home on the second story, a pittance for a deviant to find entry but a near impossibility for a young girl lacking the skill set or ability to manipulate her chakra. The room was dark, the girl's light was forcibly taken from her. A cruel act by her concerned parents surely. They did what they always did - prove to the girl that nothing has changed, that there was nothing in the night but her fear and imagination. The girl screamed and cried. How she begged and pounded on her door. Even in her madness, finally ripe she knew that they had sealed her fate. She struggled until exhaustion overtook her. She had quieted to a whimper and a sniffle an hour earlier and now there was simply silence.</B>

<B>

It came like a rolling fog, under the locked door barricaded on both sides. The inky black gloom blew into the room like a ghost. It stalked the young woman, knotted in the sheets of her bed. Her pillow soaked from tears. A chill emanated from the black being, but it was not the frigid aura of an Ancient it was something else entirely. The scent of sulfur filled the room as the darkness crept around the bed. A long talon-like finger ran along the underside of the girl's jaw that brushed a lock of her golden hair away. So beautiful... So delicious... She would make a lovely corpse. It lifted that same finger and then descended downward, directed at the young woman's heart.

 

[Mikaboshi]

[col]The light in the room had not been taken by her parents but by another who had taken an interest in the curious case of the mysterious shadow monster named Claude. Originally thought to simply be a superstitious legend which suicides and particularly grisly murders were being attributed unduly, eventually a single case of documented evidence managed to pull together enough of a thread for "Claude" to be listed as an S-Rank wanted person in conjunction with a cold case list of murders a mile long. After a cursory examination it was easy to see why such cases had gone unconnected for so long -- the number of victims often varied from a single person to an entire family and in many cases the deaths could just as easily have been ruled animal attacks given the nature of the dangerous fauna that sometimes wandered into the city limits from the darkness of the underground cavern that Sunagakure was situated in. Even still, there were common threads between them. In each case, no matter the volume of deceased, there were always young women among them and in each case there were associated reports of erratic behavior from friends and family of at least one person in each group. The reports were often isolated domestic things such as furious mood swings, night terrors and such other things but they were remarkable in the one notion that ultimately they represented a singular pattern. When viewed in aggregate, each group contained at least one young woman who seemed plagued with a mental illness... or at least it seemed that way.

So when such reports began to filter in once more about one particular young woman, they'd caught the attention of something much more than local mental health authorities.

Like a gargantuan spider lurking beneath a carefully designed trap door of shadows, Mikaboshi waited in the gloom of the girl's room poised to strike. The young girl was no shinobi and her senses were not developed nearly enough to know that she was in the presence of such a hunter nor could she possibly know that she had been used to bait a trap to catch her tormentor. He'd disabled her light to give himself the advantage, between the element of surprise and his own adeptness at utilizing the shadows to hide himself the ANBU Sennin was confident enough that he would be able to catch this "shadow monster" in the act sooner or later. It had been that motif which had caught Mikaboshi's eye to begin with as it reeked of similarity to his own legend. A beast in the night that hunted those weaker than him and left no trace of his passing.

The problem was that this "Claude" was sloppy. He killed indiscriminately and made enough messes that people had taken notice of his attacks... enough so that one of his victims, a completely normal young woman who was scared to the brink, had actually outwitted him enough to take his picture and document his existence for others.

Sloppy.

If it weren't bad enough that Claude was mimicking his legend... he was doing so poorly and perhaps that rankled Mikaboshi most of all.

He watched from the corner of the room wrapped in a veil of his chakra and shades as Claude filtered into the room as a mass of smoke and shadow and coalesced near to his mark's sleeping bed. The woman had finally gone to sleep after hours of piteous weeping and crying and finally Mikaboshi's prey was making his move. A number of possibilities ran through Mikaboshi's mind as he observed, concluding at some kind of half demon being the most likely given his sulfurous scent but it was too early to draw any actual conclusions. Observing as the man? Demon? The creature moved to tower over the young woman, Mikaboshi stayed his hand until he was sure that the creature was going to attack... and then made his own move. With a gesture of his hands, the floor itself would split apart and from it would come a buzzing and hissing mass of grasping claws made from pure shadowstuff which would claw and grab at Claude's form intending to restrain the creature long enough for Mikaboshi to have a good look at him.|[legend="[[b][u]OOC Notes[/u][/b]] - [[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-MY9rIltwU]SCENE BGM[/url]]"]

Mikaboshi - Sand ANBU Sennin

Actions

• Targeting Claude with Gate of Enma (Rank 1) to bind him.

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