[Mayonaka Homare]

Homare is uncomfortable, so say the least. As it is, she doesn't much like having to stay off the road, which is nearly done being built, but work is halted again and again as something comes in the middle of the night, tearing away whole sections of road by uprooting the carefully laid stones meant to provide stability and support for the more smoothly-laid layers that would help facilitate travel by carriage or wagon. She needs to find out what it is and put a stop to this errant destruction before it costs Kirigakure or the archipelago any more money; it was likely in danger of going over the budgetary constraints at this point. While Homare holds her axe and the sheathe of her katana in each of her lower hands, her middle and upper pair of arms are being used to gradually spin out more and more webbing from her pores. Now that she was producing silk, it would just make sense to use some of it for just this kind of situation.

She certainly hopes that whatever is causing this difficulty won't be uprooting her, or worse, catch sight of her lurking in the marshy area. While her kimono was a bright color, the dark of night should be enough to keep her from being seen.

[Mayonaka Homare]

The Mayonaka worries for a moment that she might end up seeing something really dangerous, and ghost stories about the kemuri no inoshishi makes her hair stand on end. Her hands shake a little, all six of them, but she gradually calms her nerves. If it's really that deadly boar, she'll hear it before she sees it, and she should be able to use all six of her arms to climb up into a tree. From there, it should be easy to at least tie the hog up if it makes an appearance. But she doesn't think it's likely. As aggressive as such a boar might be, there's no way it would choose to continue living this close to civilization, especially since it was apparently so difficult to track down normally. A wild pig like that would want to avoid humans at all cost otherwise.

Homare stops her silk-spinning for a moment when she hears grass rustling, going totally still as her eyes try to peer out into the darkness of the road to see what might be disturbing the area. For a moment, she spots something white flash by, and she considers chasing it, but with how quick it is, she's not sure she'd be able to keep up. Besides, it darted across the cobbled stone and then kept going. She was sure it left behind a momentary trail of light, though.

[Mayonaka Homare]

Homare's six arms start reaching for her weapons as the night grows darker, clouds moving across the sky and taking away all but the moonlight and diffusing what light there is to see, the moon changing from a bright spotlight to see the nightly world into a mere candle that gives some fuzzy understanding of the world around her. Now it's a bit more dangerous, and she wouldn't want to be caught unawares by whoever or whatever has been undoing all the hard work of these workers that were building a road through the nearly untamed wilderness of Mizu no Kuni. She starts by pulling free her shinobi axe, a very helpful weapon for her; she knows she can pull the katana out even faster if she needs to, and she even knows a few quickdraw techniques that require the sword to be in its sheathe first in any case.

There's some more grass rustling, but she doesn't make a move just yet. If it's only a wild animal, she'll only end up spooking both the animal and anyone else nearby, including whoever has been undoing the work of the road. The last thing she needs is to alert others to her presence, but thankfully the rustling of the grass stops for a moment.

[Mayonaka Homare]

She freezes with her lower right arm halfway to pulling out her shinobi axe from the corset at her waist when a voice yells out into the darkness of the cloudy night, seemingly only a couple hundred meters away from her, and a voice of what is definitely a human.

"We know you're out there! Get lost or face the consequences! We're armed, and we'll really put a good hurtin' on you if you don't leave now!"

There's a long moment of silence afterwards, where Homare doesn't move even a little bit. She barely even breathes as she waits to see what happens now. She grips the katana's handle and sheathe with her middle arms, right hand on the handle and her left gripping the sheathe tightly, and it takes a few careful breaths through her nose and a calming moment where she empties her mind of all but the present moment to keep her hands from shaking from the intensity of her excitement. However, when nothing happens after a few minutes, she starts to wonder if they hadn't seen her after all.

Indeed, several minutes later, a group of dark figures comes out from the underbrush where she'd heard the voice calling out, and they seemed to be rather relaxed in their movements, having apparently been bluffing just to make sure nobody was nearby.

[Mayonaka Homare]

Homare still isn't sure how many there are, so she ends up waiting even longer, although the men had claimed that they were armed and made some threats of violence. She figured that was a bluff, although she could certainly see that most of these men were holding some kinds of implements. She wasn't quite sure what to make of that just yet, but she didn't think they meant to do harm with them. Gradually, the clouds continue their travel across the night sky, revealing a bit more through a break in their formation that let the moonlight through a small window and lit up the situation before her. Many of the men were simply milling about for now, making some small talk and none of them apparently all that eager to start with their work. She could see, however, that they were all holding pickaxes and hammers. It only made the Mayonaka more curious.

After a while, one of them nudges some of the other men, pointing at the road that had been constructed only yesterday and was still starting to set, so that the road was in a rather mucky configuration as it cures, causing it to have a consistency like wet mud beset with gravel.

[Mayonaka Homare]

As she watches, the men begin to bring out there pickaxes and begin laying into the setting concrete wherever they could find it, breaking the stony pieces apart and shattering them quite easily, as they were brittle, due to the fact that they had not fully set just yet. She frowns, since she's not entirely sure why they would be doing this, as she recognizes that some of them were the same workers that had laid the road only just recently, as she'd asked them about the strange happenings in order to get more information about what was going on. She'd thought they were a bit standoffish and somewhat disinterested in the investigation, and simply wanted to return to work or to their beds. Some of them had claimed that they rarely got enough sleep for all the work they did, and she was starting to see why they had complained of this exhaustion.

The one that had started getting them to do the work was now sitting back, somewhat close to her and discussing their activities with another colleague nearby, apparently uncomfortable not with the fact that they were undoing the work, but that Kirigakure had apparently started to feel suspicious about all of this.

[Mayonaka Homare]

Homare listens more intently to their conversation as one man says to the other that there's nothing to worry about. It takes a bit of self control to avoid herself moving any closer as they explain their plan in more detail, as apparently this worker with the nervous demeanor was new to the job, and had not been let it on the full details of their work. Apparently, the idea was to do a lot of the work during the day, and then to come back and undo much of the previous day's work in order to have Kirigakure pay them once more to simply perform their job again. The longer the job took and the more material Kirigakure needed to invest in the job would mean more money for the construction company, and more wages for the workers, so it only made sense to them that this was the best method of extracting as much money as possible.

This doesn't sound quite so smart to Homare; couldn't Kirigakure simply hire another business, one that could get the work done faster and more cheaply? It seems the new worker had the same questions, and the foreman waved off his concerns with more explanation.

[Mayonaka Homare]

Homare listens once more as the foreman continues his explanation for their scam, describing the fact that it was partially a sunk cost fallacy, that the village wouldn't simply give up on the venture due to the fact that they'd already put in so much money and effort into getting the job done, and that they were under contract, to be paid by Kirigakure until the work was done, while they would work as efficiently as possible in order to finish the job. So long as Kirigakure assumed that they were an innocent party, the village wouldn't renege on the contract, and they would appear to be working as efficiently as possible, only they would be continuously delayed by the work being undone again in the morning.

The Mayonaka ninja had to smirk at that, since she was physical proof that Kirigakure no longer assumed they were an innocent party. But at this point, she'd heard enough of the scam, and deftly draws the shinobi axe from the side of her corset, extending it to its greatest length, then wondering if she should kill them after all; they were construction workers, and likely some fear would be better served to ensure their compliance in the future, instead.

[Mayonaka Homare]

Homare makes her decision to simply beat them silly and chase them away, and then report on the success of this mission by identifying which of the workers had been undoing all the hard work of the day before by the bruises she planned to leave behind on each of them. With a sudden movement she springs from the hiding place like a trapdoor spider leaping from its hidden burrow to take on its prey, and instead of actually drawing her katana from its sheathe, she simply uses the sheathe like a wooden blade, smacking the leader across the face and the newest cohort on his forearm with the backside of her shinobi axe, ensuring that some quite obvious purple markings would be left behind by next morning. With the first two mostly too pained to do much against her, she moves on to the other workers.

It's a twirl of limbs and two fairly simple weapons that smack up against faces when one of the workers tries to fight back against her, or forearms or shins for those that simply try to run away. While it's hard to tell in the low light of the moon if she hits all of them, she can be sure she managed to land a few hard blows on several of them.

[Mayonaka Homare]

Homare sighs as the few workers that hadn't been beaten down looked to be ready to surround her and attack, but a bit of focusing of her chakra allows the Genin to seem to drop down into nothing as she uses a puddle that had been left in the wake of all the trampling feet in the mud in order to escape through the Hiding in Water Technique. In their confusion, a few of the workers ended up smacking each other in their haste to try and take down the interloper in the low moonlight that they had to use to see by, up until one of the more clever leaders of the work turns on an actual lantern, only to find that whoever had attacked them seemed to have disappeared. In the bright light, the red mark across his face was already beginning to bruise, and she almost felt bad for his broken nose, but she was already making her escape.

With such bright purple and red marks on the workers, it would certainly be an easy job to point out the men that had been undoing the work the night before, and she'd easily be able to explain their clever ruse. Homare would be more than happy to report the success of this mission to her Mizukage.

[EXIT THREAD]