Spoiler:

This one. This one had him... both annoyed, and confused. How did an animal, even a pet, lose all ability to defend itself. Sure, a baby could be overwhelmed, and if a natural predator of the beast found it first... but from what the mission request [emergency, at that!] said, this 'pet' was completely tame, and useless on it's own. He wasn't sure how he felt about that. Sure, the average human couldn't handle a truly wild beast as a pet; it took special skill and iron will to bond with a beast that wasn't even a little bit trained or bred to work with humans; but this was taking it too far.

Maybe that's why Dad has such a healthy respect for felines. No matter how domesticated they seem, they never really lose that ability to be wild. Same thing for their clan dogs. They're lovable, murderous, psychopathic killers that loved nothing more than to lick a kids face until they got their ears scratched; but they where never anything resembling helpless once their eyes and ears opened up and they got their first set of milk teeth.

That he could understand. An infant, he could understand. The helpless part, not being lost. Losing an infant was unforgivable. He was pretty sure he felt the same about losing an adult 'pet' as well; but he was willing to give an ear to mitigating factors. Maybe not change his judgement on why the owners of the pet where terrible people; unless he was told that say, the house was broken into and the pet escaped while running to safety or some such. That he could understand, and he'd be less judgmental overall in an instance like that. Marginally. About the only saving grace is the speed that they requested help. If the mission request is to be believed, the family was at the local MP office [which to be fair, is a valid spot to put in a ninja job request] within 15 minutes of realizing the pet was missing, and that was almost all travel time once the local civilian police had released them with a 'Nothin' we ken do, gais' bullshit platitude.

Well, time was on his side, anyway. There might be a limit on the mission itself [dusk, go figure], but he was anything but slow. His father's genes reigned strong in some aspects, Hiroyuki was as speedy as Kenta was at roughly the same age, although he tended not to reveal that fact. Too many questions to be asked of a genin; why was he as fast, if not faster, than the fastest jounin? Same could be said of his mental skills; he outclassed his jounin cousins by leaps and bounds, but that didn't stop him from refusing to allow outsiders to know that. He didn't want to be spot promoted or some shit. He hadn't felt worthy up to the idea of being a Chunnin, let alone a Jounin, for a loooong time; a problem he was only just sort of starting to come out of. Time heals all wounds; the biggest load of crock he'd ever heard. More like, suck it up, buttercup. He needed to get more of that attitude into his mindset, according to his fathers. Maybe he'd ask Hisaki what he thought, if he could ever find the Hyuuga.

Through this entire mental tirade of his, he'd been racing around rooftops letting his senses do what they did best; sense. He could let his conscious mind drift while his unconscious mind and muscle memory did all the work for him. Add in his whole, telepathic mental map of every living creature around, and it made it super easy to find stuff. Not that he was entirely sure what to look for; the mission had been... oddly vague about that. Just that, the pet was to tame to function outside, and it would stand out when it was found. Something about a very flashy collar, and just not making sense in the context of the village? Stupid, stupid idiotic lack of information was liable to get the poor beast killed. How these 'terrified, worried' owners could be completely without a picture of some sort of the pet was... appalling to him.

Ooooh....shiny.

....

Was that a red elk?

Suddenly, a lot of things made a whole hell of a lot of sense. They had a red elk as a pet. No wonder they'd trained it to never go outside. Red elk where so endangered that even the Nara clan had to dance through hoops to be allowed to harvest their own herd's antlers for medicines; and they'd had their personal herd for a metric fuckton longer than the species had been endangered. Bureaucratic nonsense. Literal nonsense, that was.

Oh well.

The boy came to a halt beside the poor beast; it was so scared of being outside as it was that it didn't even react to the dog smelling ninja literally appearing out of thin air beside it. A bit of rope threaded through the hoop that allowed a leash to be attached to the collar was all it took to 'capture' the elk-pet, and a flash on the radio for pick up meant that he wouldn't have to walk the spooked beast anymore than he had to in order to get it loaded into a transport cage where it could rest and relax a bit.

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