Mission name: Academy Gang
Mission rank: C
Objective: Catch and stop a gang of academy brats that are committing petty crimes around Iwagakure.
Location: Iwagakure
Reward: 140
Mission description: Some academy students formed a gang and are involved in criminal light actions. They paint graffiti, steal from citizens and they have even been found beating up other kids for not joining them. Your mission is to catch and stop the gang by any means, force not recommended.
Mission details: The gang consists of five academy students, of which none is over ten years old. They have basic knowledge of the clone jutsu and each one of them has one kunai. The rest is entirely up to you. 1000 Wordcount.

Now this was his type of mission, Ranmaru thought.

For too long, he had been asked to do menial D-ranked chores, or C-ranked missions that were in their essence just boring D-ranks which were bumped up because they either took place outside the village, or because he was helping some noble out. Those were boring with little to no action, and whatever action they did have was strongly overshadowed by the fact that an Academy student could probably have completed them without wasting too much effort. Times of peace like this had really softened the village if it was bumping up D-ranks to C-ranks not due to practicality but simply because clients might not want to have to deal with greenhorns.

Even so, it was not his position to judge. He finally got a C-rank that he had been dying for. It had been far too long since he had experienced real action, with most of his missions either concerning the cleanup of places or painting fences. Now, it was time for a fight. Five Academy students had formed a small local gang that was currently involved in small-time criminal actions. It wasn’t a big deal, but their parents wanted these kids off the roads as soon as they could so they didn’t pick up any overly and excessively bad habits. Ini Ranmaru’s head, though, such habits were already heavily ingrained within their heads if they were willing to commit truancy and vandalism despite the efforts that the Tsuchikage had already put in place.

Of course, policies instated at the higher levels, Ranmaru had learned, didn’t often translate to the lower ones.

He reached the streets where this small gang called their home and realised it looked similar to one of the streets that he had cleaned up in the past.

Pity, he thought, that kids made such a place their home in hopes of gaining some sort of leverage against other people. What did they hope to gain?

The entire street was deserted, though you wouldn’t be able to tell if something was wrong from that and that alone. Iwagakure was a big village, and it was almost guaranteed that at least five percent of the village was rundown and not in use at any one time, even if he had to admit that the Tsuchikage had done a splendid job of cleaning up the place. There was just something about society and the dynamic nature it evolved in that left a little something to be desired in multiple parts across the village, giving rise to slums and deserted back alleys even despite the politicians’ best efforts to keep such places off the road.

“Hey you!” he heard someone call out to him.

He looked down and saw a boy almost half his size pointing a finger up at his face.

“Yeah, I’m talking to you!” he said. “What do you think you’re doing on our turf?!”

Ranmaru looked around, seeing nothing that indicated he had stepped past some boundaries into their turf. He just assumed that it was something that they took for in their minds, and he decided to humour them a bit.

“Was this your turf?” he asked nonchalantly.

“Yeah!” the one boy replied.

Ranmaru tried to scan the area for the other four boys. The mission details included that there were a total of five boys, but so far, he had only seen one. He still needed to flush the rest of the boys out before he could tell them the true reason he was here. Before that, though, he had also been advised to keep an eye out for local gang members, since it was entirely too possible that they had been lured into becoming a gang themselves by a local gang, and if it was a local gang behind the works, he would have to keep an eye out, since being a Genin he couldn’t really hold off as many members as those of notorious gangs in the area, however small-time they were.

“You better get out now or my friends and I will pummel you!” he said.

Ranmaru grinned. “Oh, your friends, huh? And where are they? Cause all I see is a little squirt!”

“That’s it!” the boy threatened. He gave a whistle (with a whistle on his neck, not really with his hands) and Ranmaru saw four figures come bounding out of two abandoned buildings, two from each. They were all holding a kunai, standard Academy issue, and the boy himself drew one. “Now you’re going to apologise or things will get ugly!”

With a quick maneuver, though, Ranmaru had the boy pinned against himself, with one hand holding onto the boy’s wrist, immobilising the hand that held his kunai, while the other was wrapped around his neck. The other four students paused in their steps, before slowly inching closer and closer. Ranmaru brought the boy’s hand down, until the kunai was resting against his neck.

“You know, you should probably stop playing ninja with real ninja,” Ranmaru suggested. “You four, come here.”

The four children quickly walked over, now scared since one of their lives was actually in danger.

“Do you know how much worry your parents are in?” Ranmaru asked. All four shook their heads. “Look, the village is willing to let all this go if you don’t do it again. Do we have a deal?”

All four nodded, and scrammed the moment Ranmaru gave them a nod. He then let go of the small kid he had taken ‘hostage’, who then tried to run, only to be stopped when Ranmaru grabbed onto his collar.

“What do you want now?!” he screamed.

“Can it, kid,” Ranmaru said. “You’re obviously the leader of that small troupe, so I’m going to give you a harsher sentence. I’ll only let you go if you promise to do three things for me.”

“Three?!”

“Yes, three,” Ranmaru replied. “One, you never do anything like this again. Two, you make sure your friends stay out of trouble. And three, you tell me who made you do this, because there’s no way five Academy kids would run off on their own.”

“It was Suezo! Suezo Kawagishi!” the boy answered.

Suezo Kawagishi. Now there was a name he had been hearing more and more recently, especially from his other friends on the streets.

“Very well, then, leave,” Ranmaru replied.

As he watched the boy scramble off, he couldn’t help but think how boring this mission had been, compared to how he had imagined it.