100 Ghost Stories Counting Down To Halloween 2020 #21

 The thief who harassed our neighborhood rode a stolen bicycle up and down the street, casing which house would be more comfortable to rob as opposed to those that were not.

He was successful with the Japanese couple down the road and the other family at the end of the block. Our neighborhood drew the straw when the thief robbed the old-man next door while he was still home. He walked into the house with a mask on, claiming to be the plumber. You don't do that; you don't rob an old defenseless man.

~

I'd been tooling around with a wooden samurai sword, which I purchased online. I was practicing drawing the sword from the sheath techniques that I watched from a YouTube channel. It was very compelling.  I was in my garage practicing, not realizing that the neighborhood thief had slipped in through the back door of my house and was robbing the coffers as they say. Meanwhile, I repeated the method where you bring to the sheathed sword partway out of the uwa-obi. You hold on to the hilt while you twist your hip in the opposite direction. The sheath then draws itself away from the sword, and then you make your cut. I went through the motions slowly before I was confident enough to execute it full force. The thief was not aware that I was in the garage because he was armed with items he'd just stolen from my house when he burst out of the garage door. I was in real-time, the sheath came away from the sword in a flash, and I cut the air horizontally to my right. The wooden sword blade met the bridge of the thief's nose, obliterating the bone. The momentum of the blow lifted him off his feet, and the back of his head hit the cement floor with a sickening thud. The items he'd intended to steal went flying everywhere. I hadn't seen his accomplice across the street, hiding in the neighbor's garage. He was on a moped, keeping it warm. I must have been hyper-focused because I didn't hear the noise. That is until I struck the thief and his friend came tearing out of the neighbor's garage, heading straight toward me.  There was no fancy YouTube technique here; I sidestepped him at the last second and stuck the wooden sword into the wheel spokes. The moped caught, and the occupant went sailing over the bars and hit my storage closet head and body first. 

~

I haven't told the authorities about the incident. Instead, I made use of them by burying the two at the front and back corners of my yard.  Now they're guardians, forced to prevent thieves like themselves from robbing me or anyone else.