Mission name: Whac-A-Mole
Mission rank: C
Objective: Help an elderly couple with their mole infestation.
Location: Konoha
Reward: 160 Ryo
Mission description:An elderly couple that makes their living off the family farm has recently come under attack by an infestation of moles. The moles are constantly digging up crops and ruining entire fields of crops. It's up to those who take the mission to remove the infestation without damaging the fields too much. If there is damage to the field, those who take the mission will be requested to help repair whatever the damages were.
Mission details: The intelligence of the Moles is irregular and their cunning is unmatched. They've created complex networks of tunnels underneath the fields that they are able to navigate efficiently and quickly. There are six moles in total that are damaging the fields.

‘A mole infestation?’ Kidou thought.

He was holding the scroll in his hands, spread horizontally out in front of him with the base of the scroll in his left hand as his eyes scanned the contents. Written in sloppy kanji, from up to down and right to left in that order, were the mission details. What really confused him was what he had read in the mission description. Kidou had accepted this mission from the mission desk not so much out of his own choice, but out of the administrative section’s suggestion that he do so. He had thought that it would be okay to accept a C-ranked mission, though internally he was debating whether the amount of excitement normally associated with a C-rank mission, at least more excitement than he would normally have with the D-ranked missions that he was used to, would actually be worth it, before ridding such thoughts from his head and taking it anyway. It was a C-ranked mission that Konoha needed done, and he would do it for the village regardless of how difficult it was. Besides, the higher amount of pay would be enough to reimburse him for the troubles that he was not used to going after.

However, reading the mission description several times had proved that there was indeed nothing wrong with his eyesight, and it was actually a mole infestation problem that he was meant to get rid of. That was… truly really odd. Kidou wasn’t used to C-ranked missions taking on such… well, he wasn’t used to C-ranked missions having little to no danger associated with them. Unless these were rabid moles or scientific mutations that had crawled into the gardens of someone unfortunate enough to have been their target, he really could not understand why it was labelled a C-ranked mission instead of a simple D-ranked mission. It did mention that the intelligence of the moles was unmatched and their cunning was nothing to laugh at but… really? Was that really all it took to bump up a mission to the next rank? A group of animals that showed slightly higher IQ than the rest of their species? Kidou would have thought that something like that was ordinary in a world where chakra governed the very law of nature; surely some of these moles would have been exposed to some sort of chemical or mutation to have given them this brilliance, but it was definitely nothing to be so alarmed of that they had to bump it up a notch, right?

Well, apparently it was, and Kidou didn’t understand that. Personally, he didn’t have a problem with the mission itself. He already had an idea of how to get rid of the moles based off what information he knew of them, as well as what information he could glean - that of their intelligence - from the mission scroll itself. In all fairness, he was actually quite excited, or as excited as one Kidou Nara ever could be given his near chronic laziness, to do the mission. Rather, what got him slightly peeved was how this mission had been bumped up to a C-rank. He really did not understand the nature of such an act of increasing the mission by one rank. The only closest explanation Kidou could go off of as to why it was a C-rank and not your usual D-rank was that it was located outside of Konoha. Normally, for such missions that took place outside the safety of the village’s walls, missions being bumped up to the next rank were fairly normal. It was mostly because Genin were just not safe outside the village’s walls, since there was always a threat of bandits or wildlife attacking them when they were not expecting it. Of course, wildlife or bandits, it would take a seriously ill-fitted Genin to actually fall to them without a fight, during which he could likely escape without much harm, so the increase in rank was almost simply protocol and for show, and nothing significant to be worried about.

Kidou chalked it up to that as he continued his trek outside the village to the family farm that was located to the south of the village. The journey to the family farm took an hour and was fairly uneventful, though in Kidou’s defense, he did walk there. The normal ninja may have been tree-hopping to get to their destination as fast as possible, but Kidou wasn’t actually in a hurry to complete this mission. The family was worried that they wouldn’t be able to grow their crops if the moles were not removed from their new home, and from the way the mission had been phrased, hurrying would not save them much in the short-term or long-term. As such, instead of tree-hopping to make the most of his time, Kidou instead chose to make the most of his time by doing something entirely different - admiring the scenery and the avid life that he saw springing up all over the place. Birds were chirping in the trees and he saw the occasional snake dangling from a branch. None took his entry into their jungle as a hostile, and so he was allowed to walk past it without any incident. He had always been good with the family deer, and it seemed that his aptitude with animals expanded beyond the tame deer that his family reared.

He arrived promptly at the old couple’s farm and, as he thought, it was truly nothing special. The only thing that had bumped this up to a C-rank was the distance between the farm and the village. He could have been attacked on his way there, but he didn’t pay it any mind as he spoke to the couple about accepting their mission before he was introduced to the family farm, which by now was already infested with holes. He could see many popping up all over the place, and several moles were even jumping out of the grounds. It was clear why they were a pest to the family. Wasting no time, Kidou used his Shadow Bending Technique on one of the holes, extending his shadow within it and filling the holes, breaking off to encompass entire networks of tunnels. It took all his concentration, but he eventually got it covered, and the moles were sent running out of the only other hole he had yet to cover, straight into the farmer’s traps. Satisfied with a good mission completed, he bid them farewell and returned to Konoha.