With a creak the old front door opened for the first time in years. Dust coated every surface of the house from the floors to the walls to the furniture. The place hadn’t been touched in years; or so Kaia~Mai figured. The door she was going through was the front door. She had recently remembered where she had lived and who her parents were and had gone exploring. She wanted to remember them and so far she had only got glimpses of those memories back which was why she had hoped that exploring her old home would help.

She stepped inside, the smell of dust assaulting her nose and causing it to wrinkle. She looked around while walking slowly, not bothering to attempt to turn the lights on because she knew the electricity would have long ago been shut off. As she walked she left behind small footprints in the dust, the footprints marking the path she took as she headed towards the living-room.

She peered in through the doorway to see the furniture exactly as it had been on the day her parents died: big plush furniture that was once an elegant green color but now gray due to the dust coating it. One entire wall of the living room was taken up by a bookcase that went the whole way to the ceiling and which was filled with all sorts of books. Her parents had always encouraged her to read; to get as smart as she could be. Kaia~Mai walked inside of the living-room and over to one of the side tables. She reached a hand out and picked up one of the frames that filled the table: a picture of her when she was a baby and her mother and father. She smiled down at it, using her hand to wipe the dust from the glass before she turned it over and unhooked the back. She removed the picture and then placed the frame back down. The picture went into her pocket and she moved on from there to the kitchen.

The dust continued to mark her path as she walked back into the hallway and then down it to the kitchen at the end. When she reached it she walked in and paused staring at a peculiar sight: the back door was wide open and the dust around it was freshly disturbed. It was at that point that Kaia~Mai felt as if she were being watched and a huge figure emerged from the shadows by the door: a man who was built like a brick house with huge muscles that marked the guy as a physical fighter. The man stood easily six feet, six inches tall and looked to weigh at least two hundred and fifty pounds. He was dressed in a black silk top with matching slacks and polished shoes but that didn’t hide the bruises that lined his knuckles as if he had recently beaten someone. The man’s hair was black and slicked back with the end behind held in in a ponytail. The man’s appearance caused a pang of pain to hit Kaia~Mai’s brain while memories flooded back to her: a little girl in chains, her, tortured into compliance: a girl who got beaten when she even set a toe out of place, forced to serve the man standing in her parents old kitchen.

“Master…”

“So you do remember…”, the man responded with a wicked grin as he took a step towards her.

“NO!”, Kaia~Mai turned quickly and took off down the hallway while the man chased her down. She was fast but his longer legs meant he reached her before she could even get to the living-room let alone the front door. He yanked her by her ponytail backwards which caused her feet to go out from underneath of her. She hit the ground hard and was dragged backwards by her hair. She lifted her hands, scratching and clawing at the hand that held her ponytail in hopes of making the man release her but to no avail. After several seconds of her failed attempt she balled her right hand into a fist and sent an upper-cut of a punch straight into the man’s groin.

She was released as the man doubled over, holding himself and groaning in pain. Kaia~Mai scrambled to her feet and took off back down the hallway, hoping to get out the front door before he could catch her again.

The man recovered quickly, his feet thundering against the ground as he chased her down. Before she could get to the door she felt him gaining on her and darted off at the last second into the living room hoping his large frame would keep him from moving so swiftly and turning as quickly as her smaller form allowed her. She ran towards the living room window and had it open, preparing to dive out of it when her ankle was grabbed and she was dragged back in with a short scream that was cut off by her chin slamming against the window seal; tongue bitten and blood beginning to drip down from the corner of her mouth.

The man continued to drag her backwards by her ankle and Kaia~Mai began to kick at the man, aiming for anywhere she could reach in an attempt to get him to let go of her. As she was dragged by a table she grabbed on to one of the silver candle sticks. She threw it over her head and straight through one of the front living-room windows, causing it to shatter. As she started to be dragged from the living-room she grabbed hold of the doorway, holding on with all of her might… Surely someone would have heard the commotion by now... she could only pray: this man was far too big for her to fight by herself.

Word Count: 978

The Lord Commander of Konohagakure no Kato sat at his desk with his head resting between his hands, long raven black hair falling through his fingers and glasses set down on his desk. He had sent out a couple of his personal ANBU agents to look after his young daughter, Kaia-Mai, whom he and Strafe who had recently adopted. She was a sweet and kind young girl with a past that Mitsuo was still unsure of, though he knew that she was a member of his own clan. He had recognized her but had decided that he wouldnt' tell her such, as it may be more harmful than good, and when she figured it out he spoke with her about it. He was happy that he and Strafe had taken her in and he had grown very fond of her, but with that came a lot of worry. That was the reason for his agents tailing her on this night.

As he glanced over his notes for the past several weeks, he sighed a deep sigh, double and triple checking papers that he had written and rewritten several times before standing up and throwing his head back. He was wondering why he hadn't heard from any of his agents yet telling him everything was fine and he was getting more worried by the second. As he tired of waiting he looked towards the two armour racks in his office, the first bearing the cloak of the Aoi Bara, still stained with the blood of hundreds of fallen enemies from the War of the Seven Bells Clan. It was a simple black hooded cloak with a blue rose in the center of it and a wolf mask with a red leaf. He smiled as he looked towards the cloak, remembering his time with the Blue Rose before moving onto the slightly more impressive stand in the room. On the second stand was his modified ANBU armour, the armour itself having been painted black as the night with a nearly unnoticable kanji on it that read "Kage" or "Shadow". The head of the rack was covered by his newly commissioned ANBU Mask, which was bone white with silver lines and a red pattern over the right eye and the chin. Mitsuo stripped the armour from the rack and meticilously placed each piece on himself before retrieving the most impressive part of his gear; The Shroud of Shadows.

The Shroud of Shadows was an item that essentially made him invisible, making it so no sight based dojutsu or sensory would be able to detect him. As he put it over his shoulders and grabbed his two newly commissioned longswords, Justice and Retribution, and strapped them to his back, one of his agents entered the room. He was wearing a fox mask and looked as though he was tired. Mitsuo nodded to him and in a commanding tone, augmented by his vocal transmiter from his mask, said "Speak Kitsune, tell me what you have learned." The agent named Kitsune bowed to Mitsuo before standing and looking him in the eye.

"Lord Commander, we followed your daughter as you asked us to do, and kept a safe distance so she would not be able to track us. At some point she ended up going into her old house and she hasn't come out in a while. Hepa stayed behind to make sure that nothing would happen and that he could step in if needed, and I made my way here as quickly as I could to inform you..." Mitsuo put his hand on Kitsune's shoulder and nodded his aknowledgement. "Thank you Kitsune, you have done well... I will go to her..." And with that Kitsune bowed once more, and the Sword Saint was gone...

He moved like lightning across the rooftops of Konohagakure no Kato, determined to get to his daughter before anything was able to happen to her. As he ran he was preparing himself to figure out what he was going to do if she was in trouble. He couldn't help but worry and wonder why she hadn't come outside in a while. When he passed Hepa, the ANBU agent didn't even knotice that his leader had arrived on the scene as he was literally a shadow in the night, impossible to see to the naked eye. He blasted through the door and made his way towards where he could feel his daughters chakra, which he had become used to feeling by now. There was someone else in the room with her and he could sense that her chakra was disturbed. She was afraid.

Mitsuo burst through the door and saw a massive man who was somewhat well dressed with raven black hair standing in the kitchen, Kaia-Mai on the ground at his feet with the beginnings of a bruise on her chin. Mitsuo started seeing red as soon as he noticed that she was hurt and he tackled the man through the wall, destroying the plywood easily as they tumbled into the next room. The man wouldn't be able to see the Sword Saint until he was literally on top of him, and even then his vision would be dim at best. Mitsuo took advantage of this and smashed his masked face into his opponent's, breaking his nose and probably a few teeth before backing off and pressing his hands to the ground, focusing his KAton alligned chakra into a set of bars that would wrap around the large muscular man. This was Mitsuo's Hell's Gates jutsu. one that had been considered to be a Kinjutsu, as it was largly considered to be a brutal torture jutsu. He watched as the air was sapped from inside the dome of bars, the man trapped inside wasting most of his precious oxygen panicing as Mitsuo killed him slowly.

Within several seconds large blisters had began appearing all over the man's body and he was falling to the ground, his legs giving out as there was no longer enough oxygen in his blood to support his emmense weight. His hands would attempt to pass through the bars, only suffering instant third degree burns in a grid pattern to appear all over where they had touched them. The man attempted to scream but there was not enough oxygen left in his lungs to do so, and he inevitably collapsed onto the ground, all of the oxygen sapped from inside of the dome. Mitsuo then pulled his hands up from the ground and released the jutsu, pulling out Justice and Retribution instead, placing them crossed over one another on either side of the man's neck.

"You don't fucking touch my daughter you sick piece of shit..." He brough the blades to the neck of the unconscious man, the immensly sharp blades nicking both sides of his neck and drawing blood from the man who was already on the verge of death. "Nobody fucks with my family and lives to tell the tale..." He then swiftly flicked both of his wrists and the large man's head rolled away from his shoulders, moving along the ground of the room before Mitsuo finally stopped seeing red and cleaned his blades before resheating them and moving back into the kitchen, where he saw Kaia-Mai laying on the ground. He walked in and took her into his arms, holding her close to him and asking "Are you alright sweetie? Did he hurt you? Who was that man?" The Sword Saint had never felt such fear in his life, and he clung onto his daughter as though his life depended on it...

(1286)

Kaia~Mai didn’t know what she was going to do. This man, this horrible man whose appearance was causing more and more memories to flood into her mind, was trying to drag her out of the house and she was too tiny, too weak, to stop it: it was like her worst fear come to life, the very thing she wanted to grow up and be able to stop from happening to anyone else.

Her mouth was filling slowly with blood from where her tongue had been bitten when her chin had smashed into the window seal when she had been jerked back inside and the coppery taste was almost sickening. Her tongue was throbbing with pain and she could hear her blood rushing through her ears as her adrenaline caused her heart to pump faster than usual.

She was going to try screaming for help when suddenly the man was no longer standing over her and was, in fact, being tackled through a wall as if the wall was made out of foam or some other material with an easy give instead of the wood and plaster that it was. Her head jerked in that direction; and she lowered her head to spit out the blood before she could accidentally swallow it and end up making herself sick. She could hear the sound of a fight and see the evil man’s face; it looked as if his nose was broken and blood was pouring out of his mouth.

However, before the man had a chance to try and get up he was caught inside of a jutsu made out of katon; a very painful and brutal looking one. The man tried to escape it but was only burned in the process: forced to suffer – at least, that was, until his head was removed by who she realized was Mitsuo as his words registered over the memories still flooding into her mind: he was pissed off that this man had dared to harm his daughter, his family.

When he came over to her and picked her up she clung to him; head resting against him. All of the memories flooding through her head were horrifying to witness, let alone to know that they were her own – she truly would have been better off not remembering half the things she had had to suffer through. She shook slightly; but shook her head no in response to the question asked of her. “No, daddy… he just made me bite my tongue when I was going out the window and he dragged me back inside.” Already her tongue had stopped bleeding: it would hurt for a little while but like all things it would heal – that is if it wasn’t fixed beforehand, but it wasn’t the worse pain she had ever felt and so she could deal with it.

“That… man.” She stopped, trying to collect her thoughts while continuing to cling to her father. “He was the man who took me from this house when my parents died. He’s… the man who made me call him Master. I remember it all… My parents had been dead for a few days, but I was so little I thought they were sleeping. Before anyone showed up though that man did and he took me away. He locked me in a dark windowless room at first and left me there; I remember being so hungry for a long time. I don’t know how long I was in there, I just remember that I passed out and woke up later in some strange room. I had that mark on my hand and he told me it was so he could control me, so no matter where I went he would find me.” She closed her eyes as she spoke because it was easier to remember that way. “He made me clean and cook for him mmostly; and kept me chained up when I wasn’t working. If I did something wrong, or if he was bored, he would beat me. He always watched me, but eventually he stopped – I dunno why. He didn’t watch me when I cooked for him towards the end and one day I put some cleaner in his food. He got really sick and that was how I escaped.” She opened her eyes, snapping back to the present and forcing the images of her ordeal out of her mind.

“I came here to get a picture of my old parents and when I went into the kitchen I found the door open and the dust around it looked like it had been freshly disturbed. That’s when I noticed that man standing in the shadows and I realized who he was. I went to run down the hallway and he grabbed me by my ponytail and started to drag me back down the hallway…”, the more she spoke of what happened before Mitsuo arrived the easier it became. “.. I tried scratching him and when that didn’t work I punched him in his groin. He let me go but started following me again so I darted into the living room to try and go out the window. He grabbed me before I could and that’s when I slammed my chin off the bottom of the window.

“He wanted to take me back with him again…I didn’t want to go, I don’t want to leave you guys.” She fell silent thing, thinking of how glad she was that the man was dead: more so that she had got to see him die – it meant she would be spared, hopefully, from nightmares of the man returning to take her away.

Word Count: 943 + 978 = 1,921
Strength D – D1: 1,921 / 325
Remaining: 1,596
Strength D1 – D2: 1,596 / 400
Remaining: 1,196
Strength D2 – D3: 450 / 1,196
Remaining: 746
Endurance D – D1: 746 / 325
Remaining: 410
Endurance D1 – D2: 410 / 400
Remaining: 10
Endurance D2 – D3: 10 / 450