[Info] Racing with the Sun

[Drak]

An archer had appeared on the outskirts of Dragon Country, proclaiming that he would shoot down the sun. The man struck anyone who saw him as eccentric at best: his mannerisms were strange, his clothes threadbare, and he seemed near unaware of any of the events of the previous fifteen years. He roamed from town to town, described sometimes as a sort of bandit, others as almost a folk hero. Still others heard him speak of an inner journey, of ambition and mastery and took him to be a wandering mystic. Beyond his unkempt appearance and odd mannerisms, beyond his skill with a bow, even beyond his self-proclaimed mission to shoot the sun out of the sky, one thing left a huge impression on the civilians he encountered: his white, featureless eyes.

When word of his eyes made their way to ANBU’s ears, they jumped into action. There was little in the way of a pattern to his appearances, which made tracking him difficult to say the least. He would sometimes appear in neighboring towns again and again, then suddenly disappear into the wilderness, only surfacing in a far-flung village days or even weeks later. In an attempt to suss out a pattern, or even some information on which of the handful of Hyuuga missing nin that might be, the order went out to bring in one of ANBU’s most prominent “special consultants.”

The request came through the University, ostensibly. One of the hundreds of mailboxes in the university’s mailroom marked with the name of an invented administrator was visited by a non-descript man who dropped a letter into it. Seeing a misdelivered letter, a mailroom clerk moved it into Akito’s mailbox. Upon delivery, a series of symbols marked the letter as a secret message. To anyone else, the letter was a bland note about a colleague visiting, but to Akito, it contained instructions about where to meet the ANBU agent who would brief him.

Once in the briefing room, a masked man detailed the situation. A single person, thought to be the long missing Hokuto Hyuuga had surfaced in Dragon Country. A projector flicked to life and illuminated a screen with a map of his most recent sightings. The professor leaned forward in his chair, narrowing his eyes as he studied the map.

“Do you know anything- remember anything about the target?” The agent asked.

Akito remembered the murder well. The Awai had reacted more strongly originally: it was one of their own who had been killed after all. When it was discovered that Hyuuga Hokuto had gone missing that same night, the pieces fell into place immediately. There had been a manhunt. Akito – still fresh from the academy – was too young to be involved. Many Hyuuga and Awai went out looking for the boy, along with expert trackers of the Inuzuka, but no sign of the rogue chuunin ever showed up.

“He simply disappeared after that,” Aikto concluded. “You probably know as well as I do beyond that. Better, even.” He nodded in the direction of the stacks of files piled around the room. Akito lazily opened the single file in his hands and idly flipped through it, his white eyes scanning the scant information held within.

“Every time he surfaces, he talks about shooting the sun out of the sky?” He mused. The ANBU agent stood there for a moment, unsure if the professor was asking the question of him. Akito's head darted back up to the map, his eyes narrowing.

“Do you have a topographical map of the area we can overlay?”

The agent dove into the stacks of documents, searching for such a resource. When none presented itself, Akito waited as the man radioed to some unseen helper. Moments later, a door opened and another agent pushed a cart through, laden with boxes of maps.

“Dragon Country, Quadrants G-Nineteen and G-Twenty,” the first agent muttered to the second as they plunged into the crates. Emerging with two sheets of transparent plastic crisscrossed with hundreds of fine, irregular lines, the agents adjusted them on the screen.

Akito stood up from his chair and got closer to the map, casting his silhouette large across the modelled landscape.

“If he wants to shoot down the sun, what would he need?” Akito asked, his tenor sounding like he was coaching an especially slow student.

“A bow?” The second agent offered.

Akito sighed.

“Yes, I suppose so. But what else? I do not think it possible to actually shoot down the sun. If it is, and this man possesses such a jutsu, then I think ANBU needs to send its entire force. Regardless, I would think he needs high ground,” Akito pointed to a series of sightings. “He seems to frequent higher elevations. Even here, where he seems to ‘bounce’ between villages, look what we see in between them: a high point.”

He walked across the screen to focus on another group of sightings.

“And here, he spent nearly a week in this region. What do we see there?” he paused for a single beat, letting his rhetorical question sink in. “A basin. Flat land in the East. An unobstructed view of the sunrise. His movement is still somewhat random, but he is clearly working up the courage to move deeper into Dragon Country. I cannot say if this behavior is building up to something, or if he is simply choosing these locations and shooting at the sun to draw attention to himself for some other, as yet unknowable end.”

Akito fell silent for a moment, ambling back to his seat.

“I posit that the target prefers high elevations without major geographical obstacles to the East. If we are to catch him, we should focus our search on places such as those. We can proceed to find locations to place scouts, but before I help with that, I have one request. Like me, this missing-nin is a Hyuuga, and as such the clan has a vested interest in seeing him brought in. This is all to say: I want in on this hunt.”