The mist was just perfect for this little tiny ‘training’ session that Moku had planned out. For most of the day he had tracked a trader that started at the country lines and headed his way towards Kirigakure. Usually, Moku doesn’t really interfere with anything that goes and comes from the village since his run in with Inoshi. That is something he didn’t want to mess up, but he thought he might as well start to get a good grip on being slient. What use is a missing-nin if they pretty much go into a place yelling and giving off signals that they are in the area? In his mindset; he didn’t care about others. It was more about him getting stronger and better with his abilities. “We’ll see if he is worth keeping after the test I’m about to pull.” With a swift cock of his head, Moku slowly rolled around the tree to look at the path that the trader started to move down cautiously. The secret to stealth, or at least in his mind set, was to think about the decisions that the person you’re following could make over a course of time. Seeing as the fog was slightly thinner than usual, a lot of open space could be seen to a degree in front of the trader. Moku was going to use this to his advantage. Since it was an involuntary movement that the elderly man look behind him every few minutes, Moku leaned slightly to the right from behind a tree; just getting his right eye locked on the man’s movements.

“Every time he looks back he repeats it in three minutes and twelve seconds. That gives me enough time to get over by at least 5 trees. Nah, kidding, at least 20.” Moku was a little over confident in his abilities at the moment. The forest was spread out in front of him and it was just like a personal playground. You have the literal jungle gym if you wanted to think of it in that term. Taking in a deep breath through his mouth, he held his breath while he took his step and ran to the nearby tree, planting his heel on the base of the plant and pushing his body upwards, running up the length of the tree to the branch. Crouching, he watched the elderly man walk a few more steps; it was his moment to move to another tree. With that he placed both of his hands on the branch and pushed off towards the opposite tree just on the diagonal right of the older man. His black eyes squinted together while he fixed the beanie that laid rest on his head tightly. Clenching his jaw just underneath the fabric, Moku sat on the branch while he waited on the man to turn around when cued; which actually happened a few seconds off from what Moku had counted. “God damn it. Off by 4 seconds.”

Moku wasn’t one to get ‘too’ frustrated with being wrong. Even being wrong in his mind was being right. It was his thought process so this whole ordeal only made him look over the current plan that he had set. Tugging the mask from his face down from his nose and mouth, he simply dropped from the branch and quickly rolled behind another trunk. It wasn’t a big move, but it would allow him to get a better view of the way the old man was moving. The wagon helped with the tracking of the old man, but that wasn’t the main object here. The main objective in his mind was to see how close he could get to the man without behind spotted or heard. Considering how far the man has traveled over a course of the day, Moku was debating on whether to take his life with a kunai or take the goods that he could suffice with his own bag. Once the old man turned back around to continue walking through the mist, Moku got up quickly on the balls of his feet and fixed his mask back into place; bending at his waist he sprinted for the wagon before taking a sharp turn to the left. Pressing his back against the tree, his lips snarled with an outline in the fabric covering them. “That was too close. If I didn’t turn he would have heard my footsteps. I don’t need to keep dragging my heels like I do.”

The whole training point was starting to reduce its meaning to learning just stealth and quickly turning about a potential murder and theft action. With every step the old geezer took towards the village, the more Moku’s blood boiled. This was HIS hunt, not any one elses or the villages concern. He wanted what was in the wagon, he wanted to see the man cringe and squirm underneath his grip. If he was going to change the ninja world, why not take out the ones that are just clogging up the population and are closer to dying than the young ones? Fixing his gloves slowly, Moku’s black orbs pierced the man’s skull. The thought of seeing blood drop from his pearly white hair made a smirk play at his lips. Climbing the tree again, he went up to the tip of the tree so he could see straight down and at an angle to the elderly man.

“I wonder what your skin is going to do once I pierce it. Will it just rip like paper, or will you have the rough kind that will make me push down harder? Ohohohoho.” He held his stomach while he let out of a soft chuckle. It was quiet enough so only he could be hear the small laugh. Pulling down his beanie tighter around the skull of his head, he leaped to the tree just above the trader. There it was; the opening it calculated once he first saw the man a few moments ago. Dropped down, he held out his kunai so that when he landed on the ground behind the man, it’ll just take one full motion to the jugular and the man wouldn’t be able to scream while he bled out on the ground. It all happened pretty quickly once the man did turn around. The kunai cut through his neck with much ease, causing the older man to grip his neck while he fell back. Turning his head to look over his shoulder into the wagon, Moku looked over the fruit and nuts that the man was carrying. “Well there’s dinner.”

After gazing through the nuts and fruits from the gains of his training session, Moku pulled off his bandanas slowly, revealing his face and placing the fabric in the back of his pocket. Wiping the edge of the kunai he just used and looking over the body of the elderly man; he had to get rid of the body so kirigakure doesn’t suspect his movements along their lines and start to send elite ninja out to hunt for him. Given he wasn’t really afraid of the higher ups, it was more on the lines of ‘this could really fuck up my plans for kirigakure’ thing.  He –had- to get rid of the body just for security reasons and actually cleaning up his mess. Mokuzai is not really known to take care of bodies in this manner, but with him being so close to a main village, it wouldn’t hurt to actually try to take care of the body in a semi-messy nature. He wasn’t a clean ninja by all means when it came to killing or doing his operations that he was commanded to do or decided to do on his own. He did whatever it takes to get stuff done, even if it meant some people had to get put down and out of the way. The elderly man before hand was only a matter of his training and benefited that and that only.

Letting out a large sigh, Mokuzai kneeled down and grabbed the ankles of the elderly man, making sure to not make a trail of blood with small tugs here and there until he got the body straightened up. “Well.” He rubbed the back of his neck while he chuckled softly. “The blood is just making this a little too funny to look at. It looks like tomatoes were thrown at him over a course of time and just happened to be really red. Such a bad way to look at death when he was so close to it in age; I’m sure he would have died within the next year anyway. I don’t see how I made it much worse than he already was experiencing.” He smiled softly, looking over the body and pulling the etched headband from his mouth. Looking down at the symbol of Taigakure, he clenched the headband with the Line through the symbol in the metal.

“Idiots, they doubted me.” Mokuzai shook his head slightly, slowly tying the headband back over his mouth and placing the bandanas back in his pockets. Looking over the ground and the trees, the only way he could think to hide the body was to either put it in a tree and hope to whatever there is in the afterlife and make sure it hid well, or pull the body into the ground with the roots of trees.
“Which one would be a little cooler than the others? A lynching or just a burial of wood? Hmm.” Mokuzai needed to use a lot more wood for this one. Normally on his Mokuton jutsu, he would limit on how much wood he would use so he didn’t tire his self out quickly; this was another case.  Looking over the body again, he kneeled right beside the body, doing a few hand signs before pressing his hands on the ground. His arms slowly turned into wood. He needed to be quiet as well as work quickly with how he did this. Mokuzai still had no idea on which way to bury this man! How hard was it to choose a hanging or a ground burial? Either way, elite ninja wouldn’t be able to pinpoint who he was since it would just mix with the forest. It was just the size he would have to adjust to carry the body weight and adjust to the shape of the man.

Mokuzai had decent Shape manipulation of his wood, not the best but not the worst at the same time.  He would have to really concentrate with this one. “If I can just get the wood to wrap around his waist first, then everything else should meld together and make this a lot easier. Now to just make it work.” He silted his eyes slightly, looking at the shape of the elderly man’s body and slowly curled his wooden arms around the man while the body and wood slowly pushed up into the air. Usually this is where it peaked out for him at a tree around 6 feet tall. The basic shape of a tree; while the illusion forest was much, much larger in the form of trees knitted closely together.  He needed to make it larger, wider, and just overall push his abilities of wood manipulation. Leaning into the touch he had on the ground, he pressed his hands deeper into the ground, running the wood through the ground and pushing, the already formed tree, further up and studying up the base before the wood cracks slightly. Pulling his hands off the ground, he clenched his jaw tightly. “Shit!” Mokuzai coughed softly, holding his hand in front of his mouth before looking up at the tree. It wasn’t high enough so the body was hidden in the mist. Standing up and pacing around for a bit, Mokuzai snapped his finger softly once he realized what to do. “If I just add more branches.. and increase the size of the trunk, then maybe I can make it so that the fog covers the body.

Cocking his neck and popping a few bones in its place, Moku placed his hands on the trunk of the tree. Closing his eyes, he focused his chakra to increase the size of the cells in the tree. Slowly, the bark started to thicken and he tree expanded slowly. Creeks and branches snapping could be heard throughout the whole transformation of the tree. It was only due to the tree rubbing up against the others and breaking the smaller branches up near the top.  Once the tree stopped turning, Moku looked up to see half of the tree covered in fog while he smiled bright. “Good. Good. I need to do that from now on. Makes lynching so much better.”