Adult-FanFiction.org : Inuyasha / Yashahime

A Twist in the Myth
By : Dunkelgelb
Category: InuYasha Crossovers > General
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Disclaimer: See full disclaimer in Chapter 1
Chapter List
- 14
- 15
- 16
A Twist in the Myth
Chapter 15 – Another Day, Another Oni

Chapter summary: Leaving the ruins of the priestess Sayaka’s village behind them, InuYasha and his friends encounter another village with a demon problem and move to help without hesitation. The oni marauding the village turns out to be far more dangerous than any of them anticipated…
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(Soundtrack: Blind Guardian – Bright Eyes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP6qMKW8jHo
            InuYasha and pack, joined by Sesshomaru, Rin, Jaken, and Ah-Un, flew southwest, away from what remained of the miko Sayaka’s coastal village. Naraku had turned the village into one giant trap for them to blunder into, transforming its entire populace into the undead. This forced InuYasha to erase the village and everyone in it from the mortal plane using his Meido Zangetsuha. Because of their perceived failure to prevent Naraku from attacking the village and the fact that they had learned nothing of his motive, the mood of the group was morose and they said little to one another as they flew.
            The group flew in the same configuration they had approached Sayaka’s village in. Kagome, Shiori, and Shizu rode Shippo in his Fire-Fox form, while Sango and Miroku rode Kirara in her Battle-Cat form. Rin and Jaken rode Ah-Un, and Sesshomaru kept InuYasha tethered to him mid-air with his youki so that they flew side-by-side. To Kagome, with her knowledge of her time’s technology, the inu brothers looked rather as if they were riding an invisible, flying motorcycle with sidecar. She might have laughed, but twelve years of seeing equally wondrous sights on an almost daily basis had desensitized her somewhat. And she wasn’t in much mood to laugh to begin with, after the horrors she had seen just a few hours earlier.
            Leaving Sayaka’s village in the mid-morning, the pack’s moderate flight speed put them around a third of the way back to Edo by noon. Then, Sesshomaru spotted plumes of thick black smoke billowing skyward on the forested horizon in the extreme distance, visible only to his superhuman daiyoukai eyesight.
            Filled with regret over his role in the fate of Sayaka’s village, InuYasha paid little attention to the horizon. Since he was essentially a passenger inside an invisible field of Sesshomaru’s youki and could do nothing but let the daiyoukai carry him, he had an opportunity to think to himself, his amber gaze lost in the shadowy green of the endless forest passing briskly below him. The private war that he and his pack had been fighting against Naraku was getting less private by the day, ensnaring innocent people who had absolutely nothing to do with the things that he, his pack, and Naraku were fighting over.
            Worse, in Sayaka’s bath house, InuYasha had seen what kind of sadism Naraku was capable of inflicting on the most attractive young women he encountered. Even that revolting display was likely just ‘practice’ for when the cruel oni lord got his hands or tentacles on Kagome, Rin, or any of the other women of his pack. InuYasha could feel that the situation was getting closer and closer to being completely out of control, if it wasn’t already.
            Sesshomaru got InuYasha’s attention with a nudge. “Look,” the daiyoukai said, gesturing to the horizon with a clawed, yet elegantly manicured hand. “Smoke ahead.”
            InuYasha glanced up to see the smoke Sesshomaru referred to. There was far too much smoke flowing skyward for its source to be bonfire; it looked as if an entire village, one other than Sayaka’s had been set alight. “Whoa,” he awed, snapping out of his private thoughts. At that point, he’d had his hands sheathed inside the sleeves of his red Fire-Rat haori, his version of the ‘Thinker’ pose. He separated his hands, placing his right over his right thigh, closing his left around Tetsuseiga’s scabbard. “What’s going on over there?”
            “What is it?” Kagome asked to InuYasha from her seat on Shippo’s back.
            “Smoke on the horizon!” InuYasha answered, raising his voice a bit so that Kagome could hear him over the sound of the air rushing by them. “There’s a lot of it, but it’s pretty far off, still. Maybe you can’t see it, yet?”
            “Sorry, but no,” Kagome replied, squinting her ethereal blue eyes to try and spot the smoke plume. “Sango, Miroku – do you see it?”
            Sango looked behind her at Miroku; the houshi shook his head. Turning back to Kagome, she said: “No, we can’t! I guess our human eyes aren’t as good as a demon’s, half or full!”
            “I see it,” Shippo said, his Fire-Fox voice coming as a voracious growl. Riding Shippo’s back, her alluring magenta eyes shining with focus as she looked over Kagome’s shoulder, Shiori added: “So do I.”
            Sesshomaru took a sniff of the air. “We’re downwind. It’s a human village of some size. I smell burning wood, human blood, and an oni. A powerful oni.” He then looked to InuYasha. “You remain in charge, InuYasha. What would you have us do?”
            InuYasha smelled the air for himself, detecting the same scents as Sesshomaru. “You’re right. If we can smell human blood and an oni at the same time, then someone over there might need help,” he said. Decisively, he then spoke to the entire pack. "Should we check it out?”
            A series of energetic affirmations resounded from InuYasha’s pack members, a combination of “Yes!”, “Yeah!”, and “Let’s do it!” Everyone knew they had failed to save Sayaka’s village and their thoughts revolved around finding some kind of redemption, no matter its scope. “Okay, Sesshomaru, take us there,” InuYasha ordered to his brother, as politely, yet firmly as he could. “Everyone else, follow us!”
            Sesshomaru changed course to put the smoke directly ahead of him. Shippo, Kirara, and Ah-Un banked to follow. They sped up their flight and in a short time, they came upon the source of the smoke, a human village that appeared to have been raided by a small army of torch-wielding bandits, not a single oni, as Sesshomaru had smelled. Situated at the foot of a fairly short, forested mountain, the village was a large collection of wooden houses built to either side of a well-traveled dirt path, and several of those houses were either on fire or smoking heavily.
            To the relief of InuYasha and everyone else in the pack, there were many survivors running between the village’s burning buildings and a nearby river, working to fight the fires. A large group of them had formed a human chain, passing buckets of water from the river into the village to douse the fires as quickly as they were able. This was a stark contrast to the utter lifelessness that InuYasha and pack had found when they reached Sayaka’s village, earlier. Whoever or whatever had attacked this village didn’t seem to be concerned with killing and/or raping everyone in it down to the last man, woman, and child, as Naraku had been.
            Despite their work, the villagers on the ground were paying enough attention to the sky to see InuYasha and pack flying past them, and their shouts were not ones of jubilation, but fear. Cries of “Demons!” were common, very bad sounds to InuYasha’s sensitive dog ears. He remembered how the guards at Sayaka’s village reacted with hostility the moment Sesshomaru revived them with Tenseiga. In the interest of his pack’s safety, not alarming the villagers below any further, and respecting the authority of the guards posted at the village’s various entries and exits, InuYasha decided that it would be best if he and his pack didn’t simply swoop down and land squarely in the middle of it all.
            InuYasha sighted a place to land well outside of the village outskirts, a grassy field populated by a few trees, and pointed Sesshomaru to it. “There. Land down there,” he instructed to his elder brother.
            Dutifully, Sesshomaru turned and descended to the field InuYasha designated to him. The rest of the pack followed, and once on the ground, Kagome, Shiori, and Shizu dismounted Shippo, while Miroku and Sango hopped off of Kirara. Rin and Jaken stepped down off of Ah-Un and Sesshomaru freed InuYasha from his youki field, setting him onto the ground with enough care that InuYasha didn’t feel his brother was in a hurry to get rid of him. This was a heartening thought for him.
            “InuYasha, what’s the plan?” Sango asked as she and the rest of the pack assembled around their pack leader.
            Sango stood with the smoking, oni-attacked village at her back, and InuYasha glanced around her to see its bow/arrow and polearm-equipped guards taking defensive positions. “Right now, we don’t know very much, so we take it slow,” he said to his taijiya friend and lover. “We walk right up to the guards, but not too fast. We should make it clear that we’re not here to hurt anyone, but at the same time, we shouldn’t look like we’re out for an afternoon stroll. Then, we ask them what happened.”
            “The guards are agitated,” Sesshomaru said to InuYasha, smelling human fear in the air. “Their arrows may fly without provocation. They’re not much threat to us, so perhaps only we two should approach first?”
            “Good idea,” InuYasha agreed. “Let’s go. Everyone else, stay here.”
            “I’m going with you,” Kagome said, stepping up to join InuYasha and Sesshomaru as they prepared to approach the village.
            “No, Kagome, you should stay here,” InuYasha warned firmly. “You might get shot.”
            “I won’t,” Kagome reassured. “They won’t shoot a miko. I’m wearing the robes, aren’t I? And besides, if they tried, Sesshomaru here will use his daiyoukai super-speed to snatch their arrows right out of the air! Won’t you, Sesshomaru?”
            Sesshomaru cocked an elegant eyebrow at Kagome’s bright-eyed optimism. He saw quite a bit of Rin in her, making her even more attractive to him than she was already. “Hn,” he grunted in agreement.
            InuYasha gave Kagome a look of concern and Kagome added: “It’ll be safer if I go with you. I know this sounds bad, but a village that’s just been attacked by a demon probably won’t react very well to two others that just show up out of the blue. Just like before, at Sayaka’s village - if I talk to the guards, I can calm them down a little.”
            “Okay,” InuYasha relented with a sigh. “Just…just stay behind me and Sesshomaru, will you?”
            Kagome nodded and she, InuYasha, and Sesshomaru began to move toward the oni-ravaged village. Kagome walked behind the inu brothers as InuYasha requested, so as to use them as shields in case the village guards started shooting their bows. A few arrows would do little harm to them, as she had seen both of them survive much more serious wounds, some of which they had inflicted on each other. That knowledge made her wonder: the two half-brothers were getting along exceptionally well. At the very least, they weren’t fighting. The ‘talk’ that InuYasha told her he’d had with Sesshomaru the night before must have been a serious one. She decided to ask them about it when they were finished with whatever awaited them in the village before them.
            Once the miko, hanyou, and daiyoukai were within what the guards considered shouting range, the guards did just that. “That’s far enough, youkai! And…Priestess!?” the highest-ranking guard called out, leery of InuYasha and Sesshomaru’s obvious demonic features but given pause by Kagome’s Shinto miko outfit. “Who are you and what do you want?”
            Stepping out from behind InuYasha and Sesshomaru, closing just enough so that she didn’t have to yell for the guards to hear her, Kagome spoke first. “Please, be calm! I’m Higurashi Kagome. I’m a miko from Edo,” she introduced herself. She then looked to InuYasha and Sesshomaru for a moment, trying to find the right words to describe them. She decided that in this case, a lie would be more believable than the truth. “These two are InuYasha and Sesshomaru. Uh, they’re my…bodyguards.”
            The guard leader snorted. “Bodyguards? What are a couple of demons doing protecting a priestess?”
            “I defeated them in battle some years ago,” Kagome replied quickly, to InuYasha and Sesshomaru’s surprise and slight annoyance. “I could have purified them, but I spared their lives and bound them to me. Now, they serve me as my protectors. They won’t hurt you or anyone, as long as you don’t try to hurt me, that is.”
            InuYasha and Sesshomaru looked at Kagome with raised eyebrows, then looked back to the guards before them. They appeared to believe Kagome and the miko from the future continued: “We saw the smoke. What happened here?”
            The guard leader furrowed his thick brows at the thought of a miko binding a couple of demons into her service, but he replied readily, if tersely. “Oni attacked us. Bastard torched some of our houses and kidnapped a few of our women. That was a few hours ago.”
            “Kidnapped? Oh, no…” Kagome hushed. She didn’t know oni to take people for ransom, only food, depraved hunting sport, and perhaps baser needs.
            “Our other friends are waiting in the field over there,” InuYasha pointed, speaking urgently. He knew that if the oni had attacked the village and taken some of its women hours earlier, several terrible things could have happened already. “There’s quite a few of us and one of us is a professional demon hunter. Is there anything we can do to help?”
            The guard leader narrowed an eye. A miko and a taijiya traveling alongside youkai, their natural enemy? Still, he wasn’t so foolish as to turn down an earnest offer to help. “Maybe. Let’s get right to it. Can you kill the oni and get our women back?” the guard leader asked, straight to the point as his men looked on in great interest.
            “Kill the oni? You bet,” InuYasha replied confidently. Between himself and Sesshomaru alone, they had defeated some very powerful foes, ones with appropriately epic-sounding names like ‘Ryukotsusei,’ and ‘So’unga.’ “We can kill the oni if it’s really necessary, but as far as getting your women back unharmed, the sooner we get to work, the better.”
            “Fine. I’ll take you to my lord right away,” the guard leader said. “Follow me.”
            InuYasha turned and waved to the rest of his and Sesshomaru’s combined pack, signaling for them to follow. As they moved to rejoin, Shippo changed back into his humanoid form and Kirara reverted to her housecat form, so that the villagers, likely unused to seeing youkai of any kind, would see them as less obvious a threat. Unable to transform, Ah-Un could do nothing about his size and shape, though. Kagome hoped that his muzzle and saddle would cause the villagers to see him more as a semi-domesticated beast of burden than a fire-breathing dragon out of legend.
            Thankfully, the villagers had not panicked completely, and given that the guards were accompanying them, InuYasha and his motley pack no longer attracted cries of terror so much as strange looks and whispers of gossip. After a short, brisk walk along the village’s debris-strewn main street, they came upon the home of the village’s lord. It was a modest house, hardly more ornate than that of anyone else in the village, but the concentration of armor-clad soldiers waiting outside indicated that someone quite important to the village’s affairs lived inside.
            The soldiers outside the house gave InuYasha and Sesshomaru especially suspicious looks, but since they were preceded by the leader of the village guard force, they did not obstruct their path. The guard leader entered the house, Kagome, InuYasha, and Sesshomaru following behind him while the rest of the pack waited outside. Inside the sparsely-decorated home, three men sat upon thin cushions around a short wooden table, locked in deep conversation as they pored over a hand-drawn map of the village and the surrounding countryside.
            A middle-aged woman, presumably the wife of one of the men, sat alone in a corner of the room, her cheeks streaked with dried tears. Apparently, she had been crying for some time. Back at the room’s center table, each man wore a full suit of 16^th-century Japanese samurai armor, their respective helmets sitting nearby, and each carried a pair of full-length katana. They looked as if they were about to go out and fight something.
            Two of the three men wore black armor with gold trim, while the third’s armor was painted a garish red and equipped with a sashimono, a battle standard of printed linen attached to a rigid, rectangular frame of bamboo, so that he could be easily spotted by his soldiers upon a battlefield – the leader. “Then it is agreed,” the leader said to his lieutenants. “We three shall each lead a group of men into the forest and up the mountain, in the direction of the oni’s den. When one of us finds it, he shall sound a horn to call the others to his side. Then, we attack.”
            The leader of the guards escorting Kagome, InuYasha, and Sesshomaru approached the man in red armor and bowed deeply to him. “My lord, some people to speak with you – a miko and two youkai. They say they can help with the oni.”
            The woman sitting in the corner perked up at the mention of ‘help,’ while the red-armored lord of the village looked up from his map and regarded Kagome, InuYasha, and Sesshomaru with some surprise. He stood from his cushion and his lieutenants stood as well. “Strange. I have not yet sent for help,” the lord contemplated, stepping around his map table to stand before Kagome, InuYasha and Sesshomaru at her side. Dismissing his guard leader with a wave of a hand, he bowed politely, respectful of Kagome’s miko appearance, but wary of InuYasha and Sesshomaru. “Esteemed priestess, I am Hideki Saito, the lord of this village. Who are you?”
            “My name is Higurashi Kagome. I’m a miko from Edo,” Kagome introduced herself for the third time that day, returning Saito’s bow curtly, yet respectfully. She gestured to InuYasha and Sesshomaru as they stood at her side. “I told your guard that these two demons are my bodyguards. That’s only partially true. This is InuYasha, my husband, and this is Sesshomaru, InuYasha’s brother and my brother-in-law.” Privately, Kagome’s embarrassment grew: she was completely happy to introduce InuYasha as her husband, and she was still grappling with the excitement of thinking of Sesshomaru as a brother of any kind, but she always felt more than just a little pretentious whenever she advertised herself as a ‘miko,’ an icon of Japanese religious culture.
            Kagome was from 20^th/21^st century Japan, and like many, if not most people her age around the world at that time, she had seen the American film ‘Star Wars.’ The Star Wars franchise was inspired at least partially by Japanese culture, the plot of the first film loosely based on the Akira Kurosawa film ‘The Hidden Fortress,’ and the series’ ‘Jedi’ named for the American interpretation of the word Jidai, as in Sengoku Jidai.
            Knowing that, Kagome felt a bit like Luke Skywalker. In 1983’s ‘Return of the Jedi,’ Skywalker introduced himself to slug-like gangster lord Jabba the Hutt as a full-fledged Jedi Knight, having undergone much training but without the accomplishment of defeating the evil Emperor Palpatine or his servant, Darth Vader. Likewise, Kagome had learned many things during her travels with InuYasha and the others, but like Skywalker, she hadn’t yet defeated her own ultimate enemy, Naraku. She wished she didn’t have to keep relying on the title of miko, but it, the red-and-white miko outfit she wore, and the occasional display of her reiki were useful in that they caused people such as Saito to take her much more seriously than if she was simply ‘Kagome’ in her absurd and anachronistic sailor schoolgirl uniform.
            “Kagome,” Saito repeated to himself, committing the miko’s name to memory. He then looked at InuYasha and Sesshomaru as they stood at Kagome’s side. “You’re a miko, but your husband and brother-in-law...are youkai?”
            “Yes,” Kagome answered. “I know it may look odd to you…”
            Saito nodded. “Yes, it does, I’m afraid. But we don’t have time to talk about that now. My men and I are about to leave. You say you can help me and my village with the oni that plagues us? If so, then please, speak quickly.”
            “We overheard you talking just now,” Kagome said. “You’re about to go looking for the oni’s den? Your guard says he’s taken some of your village’s women. We want to help.”
            “There’s little room for anything but fighting, now,” Saito warned. “Is that something you are capable of?”
            “Absolutely,” Kagome said without hesitation. Right then, with InuYasha and Sesshomaru, she had two of the heaviest hitters in Japan standing right beside her, to say nothing of what she could do with her reiki.
            Now, the woman sitting in the corner stood and rushed to Saito’s side. “Please, Miko-sama, do something, anything!” she begged of Kagome, throwing herself to the floor to prostrate herself, to everyone’s surprise.
            “We’ll do whatever we have to,” Kagome said, kneeling to the floor and helping the woman to sit up. “Who are you?”
            Saito knelt as well and took the upset woman into his arms. “This is my wife, Keiko. This summer, she and I will have been married twenty years.”
            InuYasha’s golden eyes narrowed as a realization dawned in his mind. “Saito-san,” he addressed respectfully. “Who are these women that have been taken? Who are they exactly?”
            Saito rubbed Keiko’s shoulders to try and comfort her in some small way and he looked into InuYasha’s golden eyes with steely intensity. “They are our daughters. Keiko’s and mine.”
            “Oh, God,” Kagome hushed, looking up at InuYasha. InuYasha’s thoughts were similar to hers. Now, the village’s potential loss had a face: that of a bereaved mother and father.
            “We need to move, right now,” InuYasha concluded, eager to spare Saito and Keiko whatever suffering he could.
            “Agreed,” Saito replied. He looked over a shoulder to his lieutenants as he helped Keiko to her feet. “Ready the men.”
            Gathering their black-and-gold helmets, the lieutenants bowed to Saito and stepped around Sesshomaru to exit the house. Kagome stood along with Keiko and, growing thoughtful, InuYasha approached Saito to speak specifically to him. “Your plan is to try and find this oni’s den, isn’t it?” he asked. “As if you don’t already know where it is?”
            “That’s right,” Saito confirmed. “We’re to split up into three groups and run a search pattern up the mountainside. Why?”
            “I can lead you right to the oni,” InuYasha explained. “Better yet, I can lead you right to your daughters, if they aren’t in the same place as the oni.”
            “What do you mean?” Keiko asked.
            Kagome recognized InuYasha’s train of thought immediately. “InuYasha is inu hanyou, half dog demon,” she said. “Sesshomaru is full dog demon. He and InuYasha can smell things no ordinary person can.”
            “Do you have something that belongs to your daughters?” InuYasha requested of Saito and Keiko together. “Something that they kept close to them a lot? Like a piece of clothing?”
            Eyes widening, Keiko pulled away from Saito and rushed into an adjacent room, returning with two finely-made kimono, one dyed green and blue, the other dyed orange and red. “Here,” she said, handing the two kimono to InuYasha. “Our daughters’ names are Yume and Jun. These kimono are a couple of their favorites.”
            InuYasha accepted the two kimono from Keiko and brought one to his nose, sniffing it and breathing deeply of the scent ingrained into it. His demonic canine sense of smell allowed him to interpret it in much more detail than a human could. “The scent is fresh. Good,” he affirmed. “Assuming the trail is fresh, as well, I can follow it for miles.”
            InuYasha handed the other kimono to Sesshomaru, and the daiyoukai smelled it to learn its scent, as well. “We have the scents, now. We should go,” he suggested.
            Saito turned to Keiko and held her by her shoulders. “This priestess and her demon friends are truly a blessing. With their help, I will bring our girls back, Keiko. Believe that.”
            “I do,” Keiko said. “Bring back our girls and make that oni pay!”
            Saito nodded and turned away from Keiko, inviting Kagome, InuYasha, and Sesshomaru to exit his house. He followed behind them. As the miko from the future, her mate, and her mate’s brother stepped outside, they found the rest of the pack waiting for them. Nearby in the village’s central road, Saito’s soldiers began assembling into groups led by the village lord’s lieutenants, leading Miroku to approach InuYasha.
            “Kagome, InuYasha, what’s going on? What have you learned?” Miroku asked insistently as the rest of the pack listened closely.
            “An oni attacked this village and kidnapped two of its women, the daughters of the village’s lord. We’re going to help him get them back,” InuYasha said. “The lord’s name is Saito. Here he is now.”
            Slipping his red samurai helmet over his head, Saito moved to stand at Kagome’s side, next to InuYasha and Sesshomaru. He regarded Miroku and Sango with the most interest, recognizing Miroku as a houshi and Sango as a taijiya. He was less certain what to make of the others. “Kagome-sama, are these friends of yours also?”
            “Yes, Saito-san. The houshi’s name is Miroku and the taijiya’s is Sango,” Kagome said, next introducing the rest of the pack. “And these are Kirara, Shizu, Shiori, Shippo, Rin, Jaken, and Ah-Un.”
            Saito bowed to the assembled pack, regardless of their demonic nature. “Please forgive me for not greeting you all individually,” he apologized. “But now is not the time. Battle is upon us.”
            InuYasha nodded in agreement. “Shizu, Shiori, Rin,” he began, addressing the three non-combatant women of the pack in turn. “It would be dangerous for you to come along. You should stay here in the village while we go looking for Saito’s daughters.”
            “Right,” the three women agreed, deferring to InuYasha’s judgement in this particular matter.
            “If it is agreeable, feel free to wait inside my home,” Saito offered to Shizu, Shiori, and Rin at once. “You’ll be comfortable and you can keep my wife company during this difficult time.”
            “It is definitely agreeable. Thank you,” Shizu said, on behalf of herself, Shiori and Rin. The three women then separated from the pack and entered Saito’s house as he offered.
            Next, InuYasha spoke to the more battle-oriented remainder of his pack, Miroku, Sango, and Shippo especially. “The rest of you should stay here, too,” the hanyou warrior instructed. “With the help of Saito and his men, Kagome, Sesshomaru, and I can handle the oni. Stay behind to protect the village, in case we miss the oni and it comes back here, or if anyone else decides to show up.”
            In this case, everyone in InuYasha’s pack fully understood that ‘anyone else’ meant Naraku or his incarnation, Byakuya. InuYasha avoided mentioning them by name so as not to give Saito anything other to worry about other than his daughters’ safety. With that in mind, everyone also knew that Kagome, InuYasha, and Sesshomaru alone comprised more than half of the pack’s total fighting strength. Even by leaving the rest of the pack to protect Saito’s village, InuYasha was gambling that Naraku wouldn’t try anything while he was busy rescuing Saito’s daughters from their oni captor.
            At last, InuYasha turned to Saito. “I think that’s everything. Sesshomaru and I will scout ahead, following your daughters’ scents while you follow behind us.”
            “Very well,” Saito replied. He turned around to speak to his lieutenants and the soldiers they led. He drew his katana from its sheath and held it above his head, calling out with a mighty shout. “Ikuzo!”
            Let’s go! Saito’s men responded with a thunderous “Rah!” and they began to march forward out of the village, following close behind Kagome, InuYasha, and Sesshomaru.
~~~~

            High up the side of the forested mountain that Saito’s village sat at the foot of, the cries of two terrified young women echoed out of the dark, yawning mouth of a deep stone cave. Those cries were those of Saito’s daughters and so the cave was the den of the oni that had kidnapped them. At the back of the cave, the two women lay upon crude beds of straw, their arms and legs chained to the cave’s granite floor. As they struggled to escape, their cries began to reach a hoarse crescendo and a gravelly male voice silenced them angrily.
            “Shut the fuck up!” the voice commanded. The creature it belonged to crouched over Yume, the elder of Saito’s daughters, and slammed a hard fist into the stone beside her head, crushing it to leave a fist-shaped indention in it. Abruptly, she and Jun fell silent, trembling uncontrollably by their captor’s violent nature.
            Satisfied by the resulting silence, the oni stood up above Yume to reach his full, seven-foot-plus height, height that would put him on equal standing with Sesshomaru or Naraku. With his height came a weight of more than 300 pounds, most of it raw, vascular muscle covered in scarred, olive green skin. His coal-black hair was long and coarse, rarely washed or brushed, and his lower jaw jut forward from beneath his upper one, his massive lower incisors sticking straight up over his upper lip. His eyes were as obsidian spheres and he wore a loincloth of stitched together animal skins. Two pearly white horns protruded from his forehead and curved backward over his hair, looking like those of a wild ram. His name: Kuno.
            Kuno stepped away from Yume to return to the carcass of the cow he had been eating on. Before he had kidnapped Yume and Jun, he had stolen the cow whole from Saito’s village, moving all thousand-plus pounds of it up to his mountain cave with ease. He had made a fire pit with which to cook it and he ripped a long, sinewy chunk away from its ribs, beginning to heat it up in his fire pit’s crackling flames.
            As he cooked his beef, the thieving, kidnapping oni looked over to Yume and Jun, shooting them a sly grin. He held up the beef for them to see. “Keep on being quiet, and maybe I’ll let you have some.”
            “Please,” Yume gasped, her voice laden with pleading. “Please let us go!”
            “No way,” Kuno declined. “This is my land. Your dipshit father can either pay tribute, or pay the consequences. You two belong to me, now.”
            “Our father will come,” Jun threatened through her tears. “He’ll come, and then he’ll have your head!”
            “Heh,” Kuno chuckled. “I suppose he will come. But it won’t be my head he’ll have. He’ll have his own head…shoved right up his ass.”
            Kuno’s weapons sat near him, leaning up against the cave wall. One was a very large katana befitting his physical size, an odachi. It was the Japanese equivalent of a Scottish claymore, and so an ordinary man would need two hands to use it effectively, whereas Kuno could use it with just one. His other weapon was far larger, a steel-studded kanabo, a giant, reinforced club typically associated with the brutish oni that wandered the Japanese countryside. Whereas Kuno’s odachi was around seven feet long, his kanabo was nearly fifteen, weighing hundreds of pounds and appearing to have been carved directly out of a large tree trunk. Its size relative to its wielder was reminiscent of the human mercenary Bankotsu and his giant halberd, Banryu.
            A series of four amber jewels had been embedded into the handle of Kuno’s kanabo, and one of them began to glow, drawing Kuno’s attention. “Look at that,” Kuno noted to Yume and Jun, reaching out and turning his kanabo to him, so as to study its jewels more directly. “This might be your father now.”
            The jewels in Kuno’s club corresponded to a set of others he had left behind in his forest outside his cave. He had arranged them in concentric, evenly spaced semi-circles, each one directing an invisible beam of light between itself and the adjacent ones in its respective circle. It was a sort of silent alarm system, calibrated to light up one of the jewels in the club if the light beams were interrupted by a solid object, such as a man walking upright. The way the first jewel in his club’s handle blinked on and off repeatedly told Kuno that several men were approaching his cave.
            The first jewel in Kuno’s club ceased flashing and the second one began, much more quickly than Kuno had predicted. “Well,” the oni spoke in surprise. “It seems old Saito knows the way to go, at least.” Setting his beef down and standing up from his fire-pit, he slipped his sling-equipped odachi over his back and balanced his kanabo over a shoulder with a quiet grunt. “Sit tight, girls. I’ll be right back.”
~~~~

            With Kagome, InuYasha, and Sesshomaru leading the way, the inu brothers divining the scents of Yume and Jun, Saito and his soldiers advanced quickly up the forested mountainside. All of them were unaware that Kuno was alerted to their presence. In short order, they sighted the mouth of the oni’s cave and InuYasha signaled for everyone to stop.
            “Look,” InuYasha warned, pointing ahead of him. Specifically, he pointed to the wide clearing in front of the entrance to Kuno’s cave. “Look at how all the trees have been pulled up, here.”
            Indeed, every tree within fifty yards of Kuno’s den had been cut down and their stumps ripped right out of the mossy earth to be thrown elsewhere. “It almost looks like…an arena,” Kagome observed.
            “This is a trap,” Sesshomaru concluded bluntly. “Clearly, the oni expected someone to come looking for the women he took.”
            Saito stepped up beside InuYasha and Kagome, gripping the scabbard of his katana to keep it steady for a quick draw. “What should we do?”
            “You and your men stay here while I move in and check things out,” InuYasha answered. “Kagome, Sesshomaru – you stay, too. If this is a trap, then you won’t get caught in it with me.”
            “Be careful,” Kagome bid to InuYasha. “We’ll be right here if you need help.” For his own part, Sesshomaru said nothing, only turning his head to eye Kuno’s cave suspiciously.
            Carefully, InuYasha moved forward out of the forest and into the clearing in front of Kuno’s den, advancing upon its maw-like entrance. Along with the scent of Saito’s daughters, the scent of the oni that had taken them was strong; it was most likely inside the cave with them. InuYasha could smell some kind of meat cooking, but thankfully, it didn’t smell human. This was a reassuring thought for him, as it led him to think that he, Kagome, Sesshomaru, and Saito hadn’t arrived too late.
            Just as InuYasha began to ascend to the cave’s mouth, Kuno called out from within. “Good morning, friend!” At the same time, a translucent energy barrier of swirling amber came into existence around the clearing in front of the cave, sealing Kagome, Sesshomaru, Saito, and Saito’s men out, and Kuno and InuYasha in.
            “Shit,” InuYasha cursed under his breath, looking around him at the barrier surrounding him. The barrier formed a sphere only fifty yards wide, so for an extremely agile half-demon like him, there wasn’t a whole lot of room to move, especially in the vertical plane. Kuno stepped forward out of his cave’s darkness, leaping down to the ground to stand directly before InuYasha, causing the hanyou warrior to leap back away from him.
            “I guess you’re the oni we’ve been hearing so much about,” InuYasha scowled, sizing Kuno up. Kuno was actually smaller than InuYasha expected, standing at ‘only’ seven feet tall. His idea of a proper oni was something more like fifteen or twenty feet and a couple thousand pounds. Still, Kuno looked big and strong enough that InuYasha could see Saito and his men being unable to fight him off.
            “The name’s Kuno,” Kuno introduced himself proudly. “Who’re you?”
            “I’m InuYasha,” InuYasha answered curtly, warily gripping Tetsuseiga’s scabbard with a hand. Aside from his lack of physical size relative to other oni he had seen, and despite his brutish appearance, this ‘Kuno’ evidently had the presence of mind to speak in complete sentences, rather than animalistic grunts or roars. “You took a couple of women from the village down the mountain. Let them go and we’ll leave.”
            Balancing his kanabo over a shoulder with one hand and holding his odachi in the other, Kuno stepped around InuYasha, utterly dismissive of him. He approached his amber energy barrier and regarded Kagome, Sesshomaru, Saito, and Saito’s men as they stood on the other side. “Hello, Saito-san,” he greeted to the village lord specifically, his voice laden with false, mocking respect. His barrier prevented solid matter from passing through, but allowed the vibrations of air to pass through as sound. The green-skinned oni looked to Kagome and Sesshomaru, then to the small horde of Saito’s soldiers gathered in the forest nearby. “It looks like you’ve made some powerful friends, lately. A hanyou, a miko, and even a daiyoukai! Judging by the hair and the eyes, I’d say your hanyou and daiyoukai are related. It also looks like you’ve brought every single one of your men with you. Were you expecting a fight?”
            “Only if you make that necessary,” Saito warned. “Where are my daughters?”
            “They’re safe,” Kuno replied, honestly enough. “But they’re not your daughters anymore, are they? They belong to me.”
            “So you say,” InuYasha countered venomously. “We’re not leaving without them. Make us fight you for them and you’ll regret it.”
            “Will I, now?” Kuno posed, turning around to face InuYasha directly. “Tell me, ‘I-nu-Ya-sha,’ what’s Saito paying you to come here?”
            “Nothing,” InuYasha answered. “I just like helping people. So I say again: let Saito’s daughters go.”
            Kuno chuckled darkly, facing Kagome, Sesshomaru, and Saito again. He slipped his kanabo off his shoulder, dropping it and letting it fall to the ground with a solid thud of earth being crushed in under its great weight. He unsheathed his odachi slowly, admiring his own reflection in its gleaming, revealed blade, and InuYasha stepped back to draw Tetsuseiga.
            “For an oni who can talk so well,” InuYasha sneered, bracing himself for battle as Tetsuseiga entered its massive fighting form in his hand. “You sure are fucking stupid.”
(Soundtrack: Overkill – Little Bit O’ Murder)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRceK1qq9tw
            Snarling with something approaching pleasure, Kuno turned and leapt across the ground to swing his odachi at InuYasha’s head, a blow which the hanyou warrior blocked easily. Their swords met in a flash of sparks and InuYasha shoved Kuno’s away to make his own attempt to decapitate his opponent. With surprising agility for his size, Kuno ducked and rolled to avoid Tetsuseiga’s blade, leveling his odachi with the ground and closing back in on InuYasha to make a piercing thrust from the side. InuYasha leapt over Kuno’s odachi, his momentum taking him directly over the oni’s head and allowing him to plant both feet into his back in a vicious, full-body kick that sent him tumbling.
            Kuno hit the ground face-first, and InuYasha followed up by leaping as high as he could and bringing Tetsuseiga overhead, aiming to split the oni right down the middle. Kuno rolled onto his back and crossed Tetsuseiga with his odachi again, working a foot up between his body and InuYasha’s to kick the hanyou off him. Returning to his feet, Kuno and InuYasha then began to engage each other in a battle of raw attrition, each one’s thrust or slash met by a parry from the other.
            Watching from the sidelines, Kagome turned to Sesshomaru. “We need to get through this barrier,” she urged to him. “I’m going to try a reiki blast. Please, stand back!”
            Wisely, Sesshomaru backed away as Kagome requested, knowing how formidable her demon purifying powers had become. Saito and his men did the same and Kagome concentrated her reiki into both hands, her energy manifesting as orbs of ghostly-blue light. Closing her eyes and turning her head far to one side so that her face wasn’t directly facing the coming explosion, she shoved her reiki orbs into Kuno’s barrier and they diffused into it with twin, synchronized thunderclaps that shook the surrounding forest. The barrier fluctuated but did not collapse, leading Kagome to try again.
            InuYasha wanted to put an end to his fight with Kuno as quickly as possible, but he knew that within the confines of the oni’s barrier, he couldn’t safely use Tetsuseiga’s most powerful attacks. Such close quarters meant that unleashing the Kaze no Kizu would be almost suicidal, and the Kongosoha would be difficult to aim. However, he felt if the opening presented itself, he could surprise Kuno with his Sankon Tessou, Claws of Steel, and use his youki-charged claws to try and turn the oni into bloody fillets.
            Kuno locked swords with InuYasha to test his own strength against the hanyou’s, finding the two of them fairly well-matched. Their bare feet dug into the earth, slipping back and away from each other slightly as they increased the force they applied to their swords, steel grinding on steel all the while. “You’re tough, hanyou,” Kuno complimented to InuYasha with a grin. “Tougher than anyone I’ve ever fought. Much tougher than any chickenshit daimyo wannabe like Saito.”
            InuYasha managed a grin of his own, exposing his elongated upper incisors. “If you think I’m tough, just wait until my brother gets in on this,” he said to Kuno. Behind him, InuYasha could hear Kagome trying to blast through the oni warrior’s barrier. “My mate will have your barrier down soon. When she does, you’ll have all of us to deal with. Give up now and we’ll let you live!”
            “Never,” Kuno swore. “Bring on your brother and your miko bitch!”
            “Have it your way,” InuYasha replied, abruptly pulling back so that his resistance to Kuno’s sword ceased all at once and causing the oni to stumble forward. “Sankon Tessou!” InuYasha moved his left hand from Tetsuseiga’s grip as his claws began to glow. Dipping his hand low and contorting his fingers rigidly, he brought his claws upward violently as tendrils of his youki began to flow out of them, raking them over Kuno’s flesh to leave five deep slices in him, from hip to opposite shoulder. Kuno roared in pain and InuYasha capitalized upon his break in concentration to level Tetsuseiga with the ground and run him through, right under his ribs.
            Kuno’s strength seemed to leave him as he fell silent with a bloody gurgle and sank to his knees before InuYasha, his arms falling limply to his side and his odachi falling out of his hand. “I fucking told you you’d regret it,” InuYasha cursed to him.
            An evil smile spread across Kuno’s green face, his ink-black eyes widening with borderline psychotic glee. “I don’t have anything to regret,” he boasted defiantly. Coughing up dark red oni blood, he grasped the edges of Tetsuseiga’s wide blade with both hands to turn it ninety degrees inside his abdomen, spreading his wound to grotesque dimensions to maximize the tissue and organ damage. He seemed to relish in the flood of pain it caused. “But you’ve…got…PLENTY!”
            Kuno’s body gave off a tangible pulse of demonic energy, one that seized the full attention of InuYasha, Kagome, and even Sesshomaru. Placing a foot onto one of Kuno’s shoulders, InuYasha yanked his blood-covered Tetsuseiga out of the oni’s stomach and leapt backward as far as he could, given the limited space inside the surrounding barrier. Kuno slumped forward onto the ground, doubling over as his body twisted and contorted in convulsive fashion. His muscles swelled beneath his olive green skin, bulging out as if growing suddenly as his skeleton creaked and popped, changing size and shape to match his musculature.
            “He’s transforming…” Sesshomaru observed. The aura of demonic energy flowing off of Kuno was especially worrying. He looked to Kagome and what he said next was a direct order. “Break through this barrier now!”
            Frantically, Kagome immediately resumed her attempt to penetrate Kuno’s amber energy barrier. By this time, after just a few seconds, Kuno’s body had doubled in physical size and tripled in mass. The rope binding the animal furs he wore around his waist grew taut and broke, unable to encompass its wearer’s girth. The furs fell away to reveal that he wore a thigh length, male-pattern undergarment made of black-dyed animal intestine, one that could stretch out to cope with the stress of such extreme, sudden body growth. Evidently, he had fully anticipated such an event and dressed himself accordingly.
            No longer convulsing, Kuno looked up at InuYasha, then rose from his prostrate position to reach a height of nearly fifteen feet, weighing at least two thousand pounds, a full long ton. The hideous wound left in his stomach by Tetsuseiga healed up for InuYasha to see and he crouched low, clenching his massive fists and puffing out his even more massive chest to roar long and loud, directly at the hanyou warrior just in front of him.
            InuYasha felt his teeth rattling inside their gums by the sonic power of the now-hulking Kuno’s roar. “Kagome, Sesshomaru…” he began, breathing deeply. “Help!”
            Kuno lunged forward at InuYasha with an outstretched fist and the silver-haired hanyou dove out of his way with very little time to spare; the oni hulk was big and fast. Kuno’s fist missed InuYasha’s head and met the energy barrier behind him, very near to where Kagome was working to penetrate it. The shock that transferred into the ground directly beneath threw the miko completely off her feet, leading Sesshomaru to move and catch her.
            “Oh, God,” Kagome whispered to Sesshomaru in horror, watching as Kuno turned ponderously to stoop down to the ground and pick up his kanabo, now possessing the size and strength to use it as intended. “He’s so strong. InuYasha will be killed!”
            Sesshomaru set Kagome onto her feet and forcefully pushed her back away from the barrier. He turned his head to address her, Saito, and the village lord’s men all at once. “Take cover,” he ordered tersely, reaching across his waist to draw Bakusaiga from it sheath.
            Kagome, Saito, and Saito’s men scrambled away at the sight of Sesshomaru about to make use of Bakusaiga, the Explosive Crushing Fang. Satisfied that they had reached a safe distance, the inu daiyoukai raised the super-sword above his head and swiped it downward at Kuno’s barrier, casting forth a searing green wave of the tremendous youki stored within it. He measured the amount carefully: too little, and the barrier would remain standing. Too much, and InuYasha might be killed along with Kuno himself. The wave collided with the barrier with a great flash of light and a blast of heat and wind that shook the surround forest, but once again, the barrier remained.
            Hefting his kanabo with deadly intent, Kuno felt his barrier come especially close to breaking and glanced over a shoulder at Sesshomaru himself, then at the sword he held in hand. “Wait your turn, daiyoukai,” he chided, his voice now deep and bestial by his transformation’s effect on his vocal cords.
            Returning his attention to InuYasha, Kuno raised his kanabo overhead and slammed it down, aiming to crush the hanyou warrior into paste. InuYasha dodged horizontally and the giant club smashed a crater into the earth where he had been standing. Kuno then moved his club in the horizontal plane to match, seeking to plow him over instead. InuYasha hardly let these attempts on his life go unanswered, seizing every opportunity to counterattack.
            InuYasha weaved himself around the movements of Kuno’s club, using Tetsuseiga to slash at the oni’s trunk-like legs and calves. Each cut he made into Kuno’s flesh earned him a roar of pain, but as with the horrible wound he’d made in his stomach just a minute or so earlier, they healed before they could even bleed. ‘Fuck it,’ InuYasha thought to himself, considering his dire situation. ‘I’ve got to do it!’
            Putting his back to the barrier to put as much distance between himself and Kuno as he could, InuYasha raised Tetsuseiga above his head and scythed it downward hard. “Kaze no Kizu!” Four talons of demon-destroying light erupted from Tetsuseiga’s blade, shooting across the ground and raking over Kuno’s hulking body, engulfing it completely. At the same time, InuYasha extracted Tetsuseiga’s black scabbard from underneath the sash holding it to his hip and he held it out in front of him.
            As InuYasha expected, Kuno’s barrier took some of the energy from his Wound of the Wind and threw it back right into his face. He squeezed his golden eyes shut and tucked his head into his chest as it washed over him. His scabbard protected him, forming a teardrop-shaped void around his body that the Wound’s destructive light could not enter. A seeming firestorm raged around him for several long seconds, broken suddenly when a huge green arm reached out of it demonic flames and seized him by his throat.
            The Wound of the Wind dissipated to reveal Kuno standing unharmed, lifting InuYasha high off his feet, tightening his thick green fingers around his neck and threatening to break it like the soft wooden twig it was to him. Rather than kill him right away, Kuno decided to play with him a bit, raising him up and slamming him down into the ground as if he was a child’s toy. Releasing his neck, Kuno took the hanyou warrior by an ankle and flung him overhead into the ground on one side, then to the other, over and over until series of vaguely InuYasha-shaped craters surrounded him. Losing his grip on Tetsuseiga, InuYasha could do nothing but cry out and take the punishment, distantly hearing Kagome screaming to him and catching glimpses of Sesshomaru trying to slash his way through Kuno’s barrier.
            InuYasha’s body grew limp as the pain overwhelmed his consciousness. Finally, Kuno stopped and held him up by his ankle, upside down with his ivory mane dangling from his head to examine his bruised, bloodied face. “Still alive, are you?” Kuno asked, growing thoughtful. “I thought your brains would be scrambled by now, for sure.”
            Kuno dropped his kanabo and turned InuYasha right side up to hold him around the arms with both hands. The hanyou warrior’s head hung to one side and the oni hulk shook him to keep him awake. “You are tough,” he said with twisted praise. “And you’re just a half-demon. I bet your father was something to see. How would you like to be like me?”
            InuYasha shook his head to clear his senses. His brain sure felt scrambled, but still, he could understand what the oni hulk was saying. “Like you?”
            “Sure,” Kuno smiled. “Let me show you how oni…make other oni.”
            Kuno opened his mouth wide and his upper incisors began to extend, becoming as long, snake-like fangs. Each fang began to ooze a thick, creamy green fluid, dripping heavily onto Kuno’s lower lip. InuYasha’s golden eyes widened: Kuno was about to convert him into an oni like himself. Even in his weakened state, he began to struggle in Kuno’s grip, kicking wildly against the oni’s huge midsection, but Kuno merely laughed, hardly feeling the hanyou’s feet connecting with his muscle-filled hide.
            Sesshomaru and Kagome both saw exactly what was happening and Kagome joined in trying to break down Kuno’s barrier. “No!” she cried out to Kuno, begging him to stop. “Please don’t do it!”
            “For an oni, you’re going to be fucking beautiful,” Kuno whispered to InuYasha, squeezing him a little tighter to end his struggling as he lowered his big, fanged mouth to one of InuYasha’s shoulders, right where his shoulder met his neck, and bit down.
            Kuno’s fangs punched clean through red Fire-Rat cloth and the white silk of the kosode underneath to reach deep into InuYasha’s body. The glands at their roots contracted powerfully and their venom exploded out into the hanyou warrior’s bloodstream, quickly travelling to his pounding heart and from there, driven directly up into his brain. InuYasha then gave up a cry that Kagome knew would haunt her for the rest of her life. Even Sesshomaru winced at the sounds coming out of his brother. Inside InuYasha’s body, Kuno’s venom saturated every tissue and organ it could reach, beginning to modify them at the cellular and genetic level.
            InuYasha’s struggling ceased, replaced with soundless, wide-eyed convulsions, and Kuno extracted his fangs from him to carefully lay him onto the ground and let his venom do its work. He picked up his kanabo again and turned to face Kagome and Sesshomaru as they stood outside his barrier. They had stopped trying to break through, fully expecting him to lower it on his own. Placing himself directly between them and InuYasha, he stepped forward menacingly, his massive feet plodding across the ground with a slow, rhythmic crump, crump and the end of his kanabo dragging across the ground. He spoke to Kagome, Sesshomaru, and Saito all together. “Now, it’s your turn!”
            Her beautiful blue eyes narrowing vindictively, Kagome slipped her longbow off of her back and loaded two arrows from her quiver, drawing her bowstring back and turning her bow parallel to the ground, ‘assault’ style. She hunched over slightly, preparing for a sprint. “Sesshomaru, handle Kuno,” she instructed with thinly-suppressed anger. “I’ll go to InuYasha.”
            ‘Hn,’ was Sesshomaru’s reply as he studied Kuno’s body for weak points, giving Bakusaiga an aggressive twirl of his wrist.
            Kuno pressed a thumb into one of the jewels embedded into his club’s handle and his amber energy barrier dissipated suddenly. Now, there was nothing separating him from Kagome or Sesshomaru. He stepped forward aggressively, raising his club high as he began to boast: “Bring it on, you bit-“
            Kagome didn’t let Kuno finish as she stormed into the clearing and released both of her reiki-charged arrows directly into the oni hulk’s face. They shot forward as miniature, lightning-fast comets and deviated from one another by a few degrees, one of them blasting clean through one side of Kuno’s clavicle, the other searing one side of his face to the bone. Howling with rage and pain, he toppled over backward, covering his half-melted face with a hand as if to protect it.
            Sesshomaru made his move now, rushing forward to hop on top of Kuno’s huge chest and drive Bakusaiga down into his throat, nailing his neck into the ground. Kuno gurgled blood for a moment but did not die, his amplified healing factor allowing his pierced throat to heal around Sesshomaru’s sword. Enraged, he swatted Sesshomaru off of him and into the trees, only to be swarmed by Saito and his soldiers as they poured out of the treeline, using their swords and polearms to slash and stab his prone body by the dozen.
            While Kuno was distracted, Kagome rushed to InuYasha’s side, her blood curdling by the hideous puncture marks she found in his shoulder. Even then, they oozed excess oni venom, a gloppy green mess of the oni’s vile fluid and InuYasha’s blood. The hanyou warrior’s body twitched and convulsed involuntarily and Kagome could see the whites of his eyes flashing bright, demonic red. She could only wonder: what was he about to transform into? An oni like Kuno, or his own full demon?
            “Ka…Ka-go-me,” InuYasha rasped, staring wide-eyed at the sky but not really seeing, his voice distorted by pain and by the rise of his inner demon. It rose up to fight the effect of Kuno’s venom, mobilizing his blood’s every antibody in the most forceful manner: demonic transformation. “Away. Get away!”
            Indeed, Kagome thought to move herself away from InuYasha as he ordered. She saw Tetsuseiga sticking out of the ground several yards away, nowhere near enough to restrain her hanyou lover’s inner demon. If InuYasha’s inner demon really was about to break loose, it wouldn’t be for fun, like the night before at Kotobukiya’s inn. Still, Kagome resolved to stay by his side, as he was vulnerable and Kuno was still very much alive.
            Snarling, Kuno sat up and smacked Saito and his men away from him as if ridding himself of a swarm of bothersome insects, taking to his feet again. He removed his hand from his face carefully, webs of steaming, melted flesh connecting his palm to his head. Unlike the other injuries he had sustained so far, this one wasn’t healing, his healing ability thwarted by the shock of Kagome’s reiki. The cosmetic effect of it was permanent and thoroughly unpleasant. “My face,” Kuno whispered in horror as what remained of one whole side of his face stared at him backwards from his palm. “My fucking face! You fucking miko bitch!”
            Kagome turned to face Kuno again and as he stomped toward her, she loaded another arrow into her bow, charging it with especially lethal amount of her reiki. She drew it back against her bowstring and aimed for Kuno’s head. This gave the oni pause and immediately made him rethink his advance. “Keep back, or I’ll even your complexion out,” Kagome warned to him.
            Behind Kagome, InuYasha writhed upon the ground, fast losing himself to his inner demon, ironically as his inner demon sought to protect him from Kuno’s venom. “Say goodbye to your pet puppy,” Kuno mocked, relishing in the pain he knew InuYasha was feeling at that moment. “He’s about to transform.”
            Kagome felt InuYasha’s youki give a harsh pulse, crashing against her own spiritual aura as a massive ocean wave reaching shore. He was teetering right on the brink and she looked Kuno in his remaining eye. “Yes, he is,” she agreed, turning directly away from Kuno and beginning to run.
(Soundtrack: Overkill – F.U.C.T.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJQ2oJBL8g4
            Seeming to suddenly conquer his venom-induced pain, InuYasha rolled onto his stomach and vaulted his lower body up to crouch on all fours like the dog he was. His whole body seemed to shake and vibrate as if on the verge of exploding. His head hung low, his long, ivory bangs obscuring his eyes from Kuno’s view. “Hey, what’s the matter with you?” Kuno asked.
            InuYasha lifted his head to Kuno and allowed him to see his eyes. Their whites had flooded over completely blood-red, their golden irises turned luminescent green. Daggerlike magenta stripes crept across his cheeks and as he raised himself to his feet, his demonic aura erupted in earnest, exploding to drench the clearing in front on Kuno’s cave in bloody red light. InuYasha matched his aura with a roar to the sky, a strangled and primal cry of raw, demonic strength. The portion of his pack waiting in the village down the mountain felt his aura first, then heard him a few seconds later when his terrifying sound reached their ears.
            “What…what the fuck are you?” Kuno cried out. How could a mere half-demon have this kind of power? Swiftly, the hulking oni swung his giant kanabo down up InuYasha, aiming to smash his head in, and the hanyou warrior caught it. Using both clawed hands, he ripped the club clean out of its owner’s grip and effortlessly flipped it end for end to smack him in the chest with it, sending his two-thousand-pound body sailing out of the clearing and into the forest, crashing through tree after tree. Parts of the forest canopy came toppling to the ground as a result, allowing wide shafts of sunlight to reach the mossy mountain forest floor beneath for the first time in years.
            Dropping Kuno’s club, InuYasha took pursuit of Kuno himself, becoming a red-and-white, youki-fueled blur as he leapt through the swath of destruction that the oni hulk’s heavy body left behind. Soon, the transformed hanyou warrior reached his prey, finding him draped halfway over a downed tree some fifty yards away. Leaping atop him, InuYasha grasped one of his big white horns to turn to head and rasp directly into his face. “You…Kuno. You take girls,” he began, his voice more warped and bestial than even Kuno’s. “You attack brother. You attack mate. Me smash. Me KILL!”
            Still grasping Kuno’s horn, InuYasha began to pound the oni hulk’s half-melted face in with his free hand, beating him so hard that his horn snapped out of its root from the strain. Tossing the broken horn aside, InuYasha contented himself with fisting his hand in Kuno’s coarse black hair to reestablish his hold, continuing his beating all the while. After taking several incredibly hard blows directly into his nose, Kuno found the strength to throw InuYasha off him, taking to his feet and charging forward in a crude counterattack, pile-driving the hanyou into a heavy oak.
            Kuno raised a giant green fist to return the favor to InuYasha when what looked like a whip made purely out of bright green, visible light wrapped around the oni’s wrist from behind and snared tight. Sesshomaru reintroduced himself to the battle, having returned from the place in the forest where Kuno had flung him before. The silver-haired daiyoukai pulled hard on his youki whip and yanked Kuno back off of his feet, using his demonic super-speed to streak along the forest floor, then jump up and connect the soles of both boots with the oni’s face in a magnificent, full-body flying kick.
            Sesshomaru’s kick sent Kuno hurtling away from InuYasha and the daiyoukai followed up with a swipe from Bakusaiga, immolating the oni hulk and a half-acre of forest around him with a small, yet devastating demonic nuclear blast. Sesshomaru turned and bent down to pry InuYasha out of the tree trunk Kuno had crushed him into. Setting his brother onto his feet, he asked: “Just so we’re clear, you’re not going to attack me, are you?”
            InuYasha sneered and reacquired Kuno as his target. Like some kind of green stone monolith thrust into the sky by tectonic action, the hulking oni rose from the smoldering ashes of the destroyed forest around him, the wounds that Bakusaiga caused him healing over. “Keh,” InuYasha scoffed. “Brother shut up. Brother and me fight oni!”
            Together, InuYasha and Sesshomaru charged at Kuno, seeking to end him with their combined strength. Kuno was fast in a straight line over a long distance, but his size and weight limited his agility up close, and the inu brothers took full advantage. InuYasha went for his legs, slashing away with his youki-charged claws, while Sesshomaru used his youki whip to snap and crack ruthlessly at the oni’s upper half, the whip lacerating him all the way down to the bone with each blow.
            Little by little, Kuno’s strength whittled away under the inu brothers’ assault, and Sesshomaru seized upon an almost-drunken stumble of his to move behind him and wrap his youki whip around his throat. He manipulated a length of it in each hand and pulled it taut to use it as the ultimate garrote. A vicious death struggle ensued, with Sesshomaru clinging to Kuno’s back, strangling him from behind, and Kuno slamming himself back onto the ground, using his ton-plus weight to try and crush the daiyoukai beneath him.
            Sesshomaru’s youki whip/garrote dug deep into Kuno’s throat, crushing his trachea closed and doing the same to his carotid artery. The oni hulk thrashed wildly upon the ground, his breaths as silent gurgles. He beat Sesshomaru down into the ground to try and escape him, but the inu daiyoukai was far too strong are far too tolerant of pain. Sesshomaru’s eyes flashed red and his face began to deform and elongate as he drew from his ‘true’ form to keep up the pressure. “This is the end for you,” he spoke coolly into one of the oni’s ears. He then looked to InuYasha as his hanyou brother leapt atop Kuno’s chest again. “Finish it.”
            InuYasha plunged his hands into Kuno’s massive, heaving chest, piercing the oni’s diamond-hard muscles to work his hands under his ribs and up into his chest cavity. He reached up between his rapidly inflating, deflating lungs to rip open his pericardium and take hold of his beating heart. Given Kuno’s size, the oni hulk’s heart was the size of InuYasha’s head.
            InuYasha satisfied his intense demonic bloodlust by savoring the sensation of Kuno’s heart beating between his hands. Each heartbeat was incredibly powerful, a harsh, explosive ba-BUMP, ba-BUMP that forcefully pushed InuYasha’s hands away. Gallons of hot, rich oni blood had to be pumping through its chambers at that moment. Kuno’s pure black eyes widened as the oni felt death approach him. He cried out: “No…NO!” These proved to be his last words, and they came a little more than a whisper as InuYasha clapped his hands together, crushing Kuno’s heart with a sickening, gushing pop.
            Grotesque amounts of blood poured out of the hole in Kuno’s chest that InuYasha had shoved his hands through, pouring over his arms and soaking his already red clothing. Sesshomaru added his own touch to the horrifying, yet well-deserved coup de gras by energizing his youki garrote to snip Kuno’s head right off. Soon, the oni hulk’s final death throes passed and his headless body stilled. He was dead.
            Breathing deeply and relaxing beneath Kuno’s dead body, Sesshomaru closed his eyes to bask in the warmth of the sunlight filtering through the forest canopy above. “Heal from that,” he bid to the departed oni.
            Kuno’s body and head began to shrink back down to their normal size, shedding mass as large amounts of dissipating heat. Sesshomaru held the oni’s severed head up in a hand, watching the process with vague interest. For his own part, InuYasha stumbled backward off of Kuno’s heartless, headless corpse, still consumed by his inner demon but keeping it under control by sheer force of will.
            InuYasha summoned the presence of mind to speak again. “S…Seiga,” he uttered to Sesshomaru, sitting on his haunches like an obedient dog. “Give ‘Seiga. Make demon quiet.”
            Keeping a close eye on InuYasha in case he suddenly lost his mind and decided to attack, Sesshomaru extricated himself from between the ground and Kuno’s now ‘normal-sized’ body. Having observed the final moments of InuYasha and Sesshomaru’s battle with Kuno, Kagome came running from her position of safety, stopping to awe at the blood-soaked, Bakusaiga-scarred warzone that had once been peaceful mountain forest.
            “Come no closer,” Sesshomaru warned to Kagome. “InuYasha needs his sword. Retrieve it.”
            Feeling the youki pouring off of InuYasha’s body, Kagome understood immediately and turned to return to the clearing in front of the late Kuno’s den. There, she found Tetsuseiga sticking out of the ground, still in its battle state. As she drew near to it, it shrank to its ordinary katana size automatically, as if sensing her human nature and making accommodation to her to allow her to carry it. Extracting it from the ground and picking up its scabbard as it lay nearby, she rushed back to InuYasha’s side in the forest, wary of his transformed state as she offered him his sword and scabbard.
            Gratefully, InuYasha lay a hand on Tetsuseiga’s hilt and the effect was as if an electric current running through his body suddenly discontinued, his demonic aura immediately calming down. His eyes returned to their ordinary white and golden color and the stripes on his cheeks disappeared. Closing his eyes, he collapsed into Kagome’s arms and in catching him, the miko from the future was utterly unconcerned by all the blood that had soaked his clothes, blood that could potentially soak into her own. Her main concern was his health.
            InuYasha still bore the punctures of Kuno’s fangs, each wound still seeping with the oni’s venom. For her own part, Kagome had no idea what the effect it would have on him now. “Sesshomaru, Kuno’s venom is still in InuYasha’s blood,” she said. “What do we do?”
            At this point, Saito and his men waited in the forest nearby, having observed InuYasha and Sesshomaru’s fight with the hulked-out Kuno at a safe distance. They had made a brave, though foolhardy attempt to kill Kuno with their swords and spears, and after the oni had swatted them away like so many insects, they wisely refrained from rejoining the battle. Seeing that InuYasha and Sesshomaru had won, Saito took a small group of his men and entered Kuno’s cave, finding his daughters terribly frightened by the experience of their kidnapping and Kuno’s brutish behavior, but otherwise unharmed. Freeing the young women from their chains, Saito escorted them out of the cave, then made his way to Kagome and Sesshomaru as they tended to InuYasha.
            “Kagome-sama, Sesshomaru-sama,” Saito addressed with utmost respect, removing his red samurai helmet and kneeling before the miko and the daiyoukai. “My daughters are safe. We could not have rescued them without your help. My wife will be overjoyed – she and I are forever in your debt.” Looking at InuYasha and recognizing his envenomated state, he continued: “I saw what Kuno did to InuYasha-sama. What can I do to help?”
            “We need a healer,” Sesshomaru said, slipping Bakusaiga back into its sheath at his hip. He knelt beside InuYasha and removed him from Kagome’s arms, taking him into his own and standing back up so as to carry him. Between himself and Kagome, only he could carry InuYasha’s roughly six-foot, two-hundred pound frame a significant distance. “Moreover, we need someone well-versed in treating envenomation.”
            “My village has such a healer, the best around,” Saito replied proudly. “His services shall be entirely yours until InuYasha-sama is well again.”
            Then, Kagome, Sesshomaru, and Saito heard Shippo’s voice calling out from somewhere down the forested mountain slope. “InuYasha? Kagome?” the kitsune shouted. “Sesshomaru?” Shippo and the others waiting in Saito’s village had felt and heard the fighting going on up the mountain; they had especially felt InuYasha’s demonic transformation. Therefore, Shippo had volunteered to investigate and report back.
            “Shippo! Over here!” Kagome responded, knowing that as a fox demon, Shippo could hear well enough to zero in on her by a single response alone.
            Shippo moved quickly through the sloped forest to reach Kagome, Sesshomaru, InuYasha, and Saito, stumbling upon the bloody scene of the oni Kuno’s last moments. “Kami,” he whispered, disbelieving the carnage and devastation he saw before him. He then noticed Sesshomaru holding an unconscious InuYasha and rushed to them. “We felt InuYasha go full demon. What happened here?”
            Kagome pointed to Kuno’s lifeless, headless body as it lay near what had been ground zero Sesshomaru’s last Bakusaiga blast. “He happened,” she said to Shippo. “We’ll explain later. Right now, InuYasha needs our help!”
            “I will fly InuYasha down to the village and take him to the healer,” Sesshomaru declared. “Saito, I will need you to direct me to him. You shall fly with me, as well.”
            “Of course, my lord,” Saito agreed, though he was unsure of the means by which he and Sesshomaru would ‘fly.’ However, it was clear to him that if Sesshomaru had the ability to go toe-to-toe with a beast like Kuno and win, then for him to be able to fly in some way was probably well within the realm of possibility. Saito’s daughters, Yume and Jun, stood nearby, leading the village lord to ask: “But what of my daughters? My men can find their way back on foot, but the terrain between here and there is irregular, and Yume and Jun have only their sandals, not a soldier’s boots.”
            “Your daughters and I can fly on Shippo’s back,” Kagome offered to Saito. “We’ll go straight to your house while you show Sesshomaru and InuYasha to the healer.”
            Dutifully, Shippo summoned his kitsune magic and transformed into giant Fire-Fox form, crouching low to the ground in order to allow Kagome, Yume, and Jun to climb atop him more easily. Satisfied with this arrangement, Saito thanked Kagome, then turned to his daughters. “Yume, Jun, your mother will be very happy to see you. I’ll be home as soon as I can. Now, go with Kagome-sama here.”
            “Yes, Father,” Saito’s daughters obeyed, hesitantly climbing onto Shippo’s back – after all, it was only their second encounter with a demon of any kind, the first being with Kuno.
            Kagome climbed onto Shippo to sit behind Jun as she sat behind Yume. “Okay, Shippo, let’s go!” she ordered.
            Shippo manipulated his demonic energy to rise into the air and weave his way through the forest canopy above him, entering fast, level flight to take himself and his passengers back down to Saito’s village. Saito ordered his men to return to the village as well, then looked to Sesshomaru. “I’m ready. How shall we do this?”
            Cradling InuYasha in his arms, Sesshomaru summoned his own demonic energy about him and looked down to Saito. “Take my arm,” he instructed.
            Saito reached out and touched a hand to Sesshomaru’s upper right arm as the daiyoukai said and he gave a shout of surprise as a brilliant white light surrounded him, light that emanated from Sesshomaru himself. By his demonic power, Sesshomaru’s form and the forms of InuYasha and Saito all dissolved into a glowing sphere that shot up through the forest canopy and followed Shippo down to the village at the foot of the mountain, leaving Saito’s men behind standing in a state of complete disbelief at the magic that had just taken place.

-To be continued-
- 14
- 15
- 16
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A Twist in the Myth	By : Dunkelgelb Category: InuYasha Crossovers > General Views: 18090 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: See full disclaimer in Chapter 1

A Twist in the Myth