@scurriilous | plotted starter
The endless pulse of blood in his ears, the throb behind his eyes, matched the endless forest that spanned before him, after him, all around him. The trees closed around him, claustrophobic, the atmosphere of unease that lingered within the air weighing him down with a pressure that he could feel upon his back. Each step took more effort than it should, as if the forest itself fought to keep him from reaching his destination.
He could sense the eyes that watched him from the shadows, eyes that had no doubt called attention to his presence, eyes that had summoned the two fools who had fallen at his hands. Fools they were, too, if they thought they could stop him. He was not the weak, broken thing the Copycat had dragged back to Konoha to be poked and prodded at, tortured for intel, then thrown into a cell to rot. How little anyone knew of him. Those clever little threads of his had done their work, though it had taken time.
It was a lucky thing for him, of course, that those Nara shinobi had come to cleanse their forest. He wasn’t sure how much farther he might have made it into the forest without the extra beat of two fresh hearts in his body. It would probably only be a matter of time before more Nara came, but that didn’t bother him. No - he was here on a personal mission, and nothing was going to get in his way. Plus, he still had two more hearts to replace.
There were no paths to follow here - none that he could discern, at any rate - and he had been stumbling blind for an undeterminable amount of time, but something... something was guiding him, some peculiar instinct he’d rather not dwell too closely upon. He somehow knew, somewhere deep inside, that he’d eventually find what he was looking for.
And then, past a break in the trees, there it was. Tumbled earth, grown over with thick clumps of grass and weed, the remains of rusted wire still hanging from singed branches that had never fully recorded. He staggered to the edge of the filled pit and dropped to his knees, the pressure of the forest weighing more heavily upon him, as if determined to stop him from unearthing the fiend below.
He seized the first chunk of earth with both hands and began to haul it from its nest. The stitching upon his forearms split as threads spilled forth, stabbing into the ground to loosen the compacted dirt. “You better be alive in here, shithead.” He uttered through gritted teeth. “You know I hate wasting time.”
