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
- 18
- 19
- 20
A Twist in the Myth
Chapter 19: Relapse – pt. 2

Chapter summary: Naraku uses Sayaka to heal himself of his Shikon illness’ relapse. Kagura bears witness to the horrifying act, learning of her master’s dire condition and the threat it poses to her own life and Byakuya’s. Naraku then gives Kagura and Byakuya their orders: to capture Kikyo and bring her to him, so that he may use her as he does Sayaka…
~~~~~

(Continued from pt. 1)
            The skeletons pulled back as Byakuya ordered, forming themselves into two neat ranks, one to either side of the castle’s entrance. They stood as a path for him, Kagura, and Sayaka to follow. Their deference was an illusion though, an illusion that he was fully aware of. He and Kagura could escort Sayaka back inside in a polite, orderly fashion, or the skeletons could drag her. His thoughts echoing Kagura’s, he knew there could be no true freedom for any of them as long as they were still bound to Naraku.
(Soundtrack: Demons & Wizards – Dorian)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMOXaSOBPR4
            Byakuya turned and looked down at Sayaka, gesturing his head toward the castle. “Come on. Let’s at least get our clothes back on.”
            Sayaka agreed. She, Byakuya and Kagura were all stark naked and the salty ocean air outside the castle was uncomfortably cold. Staying close to the two wind demons in case one of the skeleton soldiers made a grab at her, she followed them inside the partially-collapsed castle, eyeing the ceiling carefully to look out for any sections that appeared on the verge of falling. Together, they retread the path they had fled the castle by, soon encountering a section of shoji hallway that had collapsed during Naraku’s ‘relapse.’
            By Naraku’s dark magic, the debris blocking the hallway lifted and reassembled into its previous, undamaged structure with eerie precision. Their path cleared, Byakuya, Kagura and Sayaka first came upon the bedroom Sayaka had been sleeping in. Byakuya ducked inside and retrieved the red hakama and white haori he used the castle’s enchanted loom to make for Sayaka earlier. The miko prostitute accepted them from him and slipped into them gladly. Next, Byakuya came upon Kagura’s clothes and his own where he had dropped them a few minutes earlier. Fortunately, they had escaped damage from the castle ceiling’s collapse and he handed Kagura hers first, then took up his own.
            Fully dressed again, Byakuya, Kagura, and Sayaka arrived at Naraku’s den and entered with caution. Most of the wooden floor had given way to a yawning sinkhole of dust-filtered blackness. Holding onto the frame of the den’s shoji doorway for support, Byakuya peered into the pit and leapt back when a tendril of ink-black demon flesh, dripping with some vile fluid, shot out from the darkness and reached high to wrap around one of the ceiling’s rafters. Several more tendrils followed, pulling taut as they began to lift something out of the darkness.
            Kagura felt her stomach churn as Naraku used his hideous tentacles to pull himself out of the pit and into her sight. He had divested himself of most of his body; now, he was just a sable-maned head grafted onto a sickly-looking collection of gushing, pumping internal organs and assorted other demonic body parts. She had seen him in such a state only once before, the time when his hanyou ‘day of weakness’ came. Back then, the evil oni lord seemed to have temporarily lost the ability to maintain his body in a humanoid form, letting it regress into its ‘true’ state - that of hundreds of lesser youkai conflated into one, awful whole, devouring and spawning one another over and over without end.
            Kagura had to ask herself: was today simply another one of Naraku’s days of weakness, or was it something else, something worse? She felt she would soon find out.
            Stabilizing himself in his web of tentacles, Naraku looked at Kagura, noting the revulsion upon her face. He had wanted to conceal his condition from her, but he knew it would have been difficult in the long run; through the spiritual link they shared, she would eventually be able to feel something was wrong. He then looked to Sayaka, his red eyes sullen and bloodshot with pain. “Miko. Come to me,” he ordered.
            Broken wooden planking rose from the darkness of the pit beneath Naraku to assemble into a narrow path that bridged the pit’s ragged edge with Naraku’s central position. Sayaka looked at the path, then into Naraku’s eyes, regarding him with bristling hostility. This was her first encounter with him since he had Byakuya abduct her from her shrine. He had personally raped her and her junior priestesses, then murdered her junior priestesses right in front of her. He didn’t just force her to watch, he forced her to really experience it in visual, aural, and mental terms. Right then, the dying screams of those young, beautiful women, ripping directly into her mind, were still loud and clear to her.
            Sayaka wanted very badly to kill Naraku, to fucking kill him! She wanted revenge for herself, her women, and anyone else he had hurt during his abomination of a life. ‘Naraku’ was an old name among miko – the tale of how he had set the miko Kikyo and her hanyou lover, InuYasha, against each other had spread far and wide throughout Japan in the decades since. His name was synonymous with evil and sin, making him the natural enemy of all miko, even if she herself indulged in sexual sin to support her shrine, as well as to simply please herself. But Sayaka knew that her most effective weapon against Naraku, her purifying power, was exactly what he needed to survive. Consequently, she knew that to try and attack him while she stood in the symbolic center of his power would be suicidal at best.
            Swallowing her anger, Sayaka turned and looked at Byakuya and Kagura, searching their eyes for some kind of guidance. Nominally, the two wind demons were Naraku’s servants, but they didn’t seem to be happy servants of their master’s dark will. They were willing to protect her however they could, and they were incredibly beautiful, to boot. Byakuya was already a great fuck and she imagined that Kagura could be persuaded to fool around with her, another woman. Moreover, she fully intended to hold Byakuya to his responsibility of helping her raise their baby, if she lived long enough to have it. If Naraku died, so would he and Kagura, and if she somehow escaped with her life in the end, she would be left alone with her child. And in that event, she would have nowhere to go: she suspected that not only did Naraku desecrate her shrine, he had destroyed her whole village, as well.
            Byakuya gave Sayaka an affirmative nod and the miko resolved to give Naraku what he wanted for the moment and bide her time. She returned her attention to him and began to approach him, stepping along the narrow path of magically-bonded planks with care. Then, she began to grow thoughtful. “You know, I’m a miko,” she said to Naraku with a bitter, cynical laugh, stating her occupation aloud to build a frame of reference. “I fight demons, exorcise haunted houses, and other miko shit. You are just about the greatest, most evil enemy a miko could ever hope to fight, so if you came to me directly and said: ‘Sayaka-sama, I’m dying. Please purify me,’ then I would have said: ‘Fuck you, go fucking die.’”
            Even in his malformed state, Naraku managed a smile. “Naturally,” he said to Sayaka. Behind Sayaka, Kagura listened closely. She paid special attention at the miko’s mention of the word ‘dying.’ She then began to grasp the nature of Naraku’s condition – he was seriously ill, and not just in the mental sense.
            “But I’m also a prostitute, a whore,” Sayaka continued, drawing closer to Naraku. “Men pay me to suck and jack them off. If they pay enough, I let them fuck me, or my other women, which you fucking killed. I don’t just do it for the money, which I need for my shrine, but because I like it. Imagine if you had come to me and said something like: ‘Sayaka-sama, I’m dying. Please purify me. By the way, I have a really sexy, big-dicked servant that I could let you fuck. He can make copies of himself and gangbang you and all your girls into next week.’ If you’d said that, then I might have actually helped you out, willingly.”
            By Sayaka’s coarse, sexualized choice of language, Kagura wondered to herself: ‘This woman is a miko?’ Sayaka stood directly before Naraku now. She looked at the thick, black tendrils of demonic flesh suspending him from the ceiling and she reached out to close a hand around one, squeezing gently. She held it as she might one of her male customer’s cocks, with care and relish, beginning to stroke the evil thing back and forth. She recalled the sensation of Naraku using several like it to suspend her from the ceiling of her bath house in a web-like apparatus, teasing her mercilessly and bringing her to the peak of female arousal as he made ready to fill her with his cock.
            It didn’t take much imagination on Sayaka’s part for her to picture the tentacles alone doing the penetrating, a dozen or more of them becoming as one perfect, mouth/pussy/ass raping machine. Naraku had used just one on her mouth and it was bigger, harder, and ejaculated much more powerfully than any man she had ever serviced at her shrine. Her pulse quickened at the thought: not that Byakuya was any slouch, Naraku’s tentacles could be a perfect, inexhaustible lover, as long, thick, and hard as she could stand and with the stamina to take her where she wanted to go, without fail.
            “You stupid bastard,” Sayaka shook her head at Naraku, releasing his tentacle to gesture at it and the others like it. “You could have even convinced me to give these things a try.”
            “A wasted opportunity to please a woman…consensually,” Naraku mused almost wistfully. “I’d apologize, if I felt any remorse at all.” He then concentrated his evil power and manipulated his heart within him, moving it to the oozing, undulating surface of his corrupted body, in the place where his chest should have been.
            Bumb, bumb. Bumb, bumb. The sound of Naraku’s evil heartbeat began to resound within the den, filling Sayaka’s ears as well as Kagura’s and Byakuya’s, oppressing their very souls. It was hard and rapid, and Kagura and Byakuya could feel their own hearts speeding up to match. Their very life forces were bound to Naraku’s and it was quivering. Reflexively, Kagura placed a hand over her heart as if to calm it while Byakuya lowered his head and grit his teeth, holding the den’s doorframe more tightly to keep himself upright.
            Willingly, Sayaka began her life-saving work, giving it a venomous qualification: “I do this not for you, Naraku, but for Byakuya, Kagura, and the baby growing in my belly.” Naraku’s heart glowed by the malevolent power of the Shikon no Tama, beating hypnotically and casting Sayaka’s face dramatically in rich, bloody magenta light. The miko prostitute knelt before the oni lord on the narrow wooden path he made for her and cupped her hands toward one another, extending them forward to cover his heart and begin channeling her reiki into it. Her body began to glow softly with soft blue light, that light beginning to flow visibly through her arms, into her hands, then into Naraku.
            Naraku hissed in relief as Sayaka’s reiki entered his body. He soaked it up eagerly, feeling himself responding well to it. He felt as if the pressure of her reiki was pushing his pain completely out of him. He began to take control of the flow as he had done at her bath house and bravely, she chastised him for it. “Not so fast!” she warned. “Don’t suck it out of me, let me feed it to you. It’ll work better that way.”
            Remarkably, Naraku cooperated, returning control of the reiki transfer to Sayaka. In return, she increased the flow to the fastest rate she could comfortably sustain. Gradually, Naraku’s body began to change size and shape as the miko prostitute purged the corruption from it. His grotesque exterior transmutated and his tissues reconfigured themselves at the cellular level, condensing from gelatinous demon flesh to ordinary bone and muscle. He regained his tall, muscular humanoid form in a matter of seconds, entering it nude and on his knees upon the wooden path he made for Sayaka.
            Sayaka discontinued her reiki flow and slumped back away from Naraku weakly, collapsing onto the wooden path behind her. She panted hard to catch her breath from the spiritual exertion and Byakuya rushed forward to kneel and take her into his arms, pulling her into his lap to prevent her from falling into the bottomless void to either side of her. His body repaired, Naraku stood up and used his dark magic to summon his robes and armor about him. He then mended the rest of the den’s flooring, sealing the sinkhole completely. Finally, he materialized an appropriately evil-looking throne, one made of human bones, along the den’s back wall and sank back into it, sighing with relief.
            “Very good, Sayaka-sama,” Naraku praised mockingly, closing his red eyes in pleasure as he settled his forearms on his throne’s armrests. “I feel much better, now.”
            With her back against Byakuya’s chest, Sayaka forced herself up into a sitting position, still weak from the reiki transfer. She trembled in her wind demon lover’s arms, holding onto him tightly. “I gave you less than before,” she said to Naraku, her heart racing and breath coming in shallow pants. “It won’t last you long. You’ll need more…soon.”
            “How very right you are,” Naraku confirmed. “Kagura, I now charge you with the first mission of your new life.”
            With the floor repaired, Kagura left her place near the den’s doorway and moved to stand next to Byakuya as he held Sayaka. Naraku explained: “We are currently far out to sea, east of our homeland. You and Byakuya will fly there and find Kikyo, then bring her to me here.”
            As a miko (and not as a prostitute!), Kikyo’s name resounded in Sayaka’s mind. In Christian analogy, Kikyo was basically her patron saint, the patron of all miko. Sayaka wondered: ‘the’ Kikyo and ‘the’ Naraku under the same roof –she could only speculate as to the devastation that could result from two such powerful entities coming into close contact with each other. She supposed it was a good thing that Naraku’s built his castle out to sea: on the water, there would be few bystanders.
            Kagura scoffed. “Our homeland is a big place, in case you forgot,” she noted to Naraku with snark. “How do we find her? Start looking for her ‘soul collectors?’”
            Naraku smiled faintly. “To locate Kikyo, you may use this,” he said. Raising a hand from his throne’s armrest and turning it to face his palm upward, he summoned an object into it, a certain, finely-polished mirror framed in pure, floral-patterned silver.
            Kagura stilled, her ruby eyes widening, then narrowing in great suspicion as she studied the mirror. “That’s Kanna’s,” she hushed, beginning to shake from the terrible realization pouring over her. “Where is she?”
            Naraku said nothing, his smile becoming markedly more perverse. Kagura looked down at Byakuya as he held Sayaka, grabbing one of his shoulders. Breathing harder now, she asked: “Byakuya, where’s Kanna?”
            The mention of Kanna’s name summoned unpleasant memories into Byakuya’s mind. He thought back to that terrible night years before, when Naraku expended Kanna in battle against InuYasha. Back then, Kanna fought the hanyou warrior by proxy using her twenty-foot mirror golem, one equipped with a phantom copy of his own Tetsuseiga. Her body and the golem’s were magically linked, so that every blow he or his friends landed on it affected her, as well.
            Byakuya distinctly remembered watching Kanna’s child-like body cracking and crumbling as if it was made out of glass, not flesh. The process was technically bloodless, but uniquely horrifying all the same. At last, when Kanna could fight no more, InuYasha spared her life, citing his fear of the nightmares that would ensue if he killed her. Naraku had no such reservations and crushed the sapphire orb that served as her heart, turning her into a walking, talking suicide bomb with which to try and kill InuYasha and Kagome.
            Of course, InuYasha and Kagome survived, but besides the physical wounds, Kanna’s high-explosive fragmentation of a death left an indelible mark on the psyches of them, their friends, and Byakuya all at once. Clearing his head of such ugly thoughts, the male wind demon jolted a bit as Kagura grabbed his shoulder. He looked first at her hand, then up into her gorgeous red eyes. His expression became laden with visible regret and he looked away, leading Kagura to remove her hand from him and glare pure death at Naraku. “You fuck,” she spat. “You piece of shit. You fucking killed her!”
            Naraku studied Kagura’s enraged expression with sociopathic fascination. “And?”
            Her glossy red lips curling into a terrible, yet beautiful sneer, Kagura stormed forward to try and tear Naraku’s throat out. She did not run or leap at him, but blundered forward with uncharacteristic clumsiness, nearly stumbling over the kneeling Byakuya out of sheer, inconsolable rage. Raising a hand to strike, she came within just a few feet of him when he transformed the fingers of his free hand into five long, thin tendrils of prehensile demon flesh. They shot out all at once and seized Kagura by her wrists, ankles, and neck, lifting her off her feet and holding her immobile.
            Holding Kanna’s mirror in one hand and Kagura’s entire body in the other, Naraku stood from his throne, bringing Kagura face to face with him. “I’m afraid you only get one try at me today, my dear,” he said to her, leading her to thrash in his tendrils’ hold, trying to break free. Using a flesh tendril to give her neck a reminding squeeze, he added: “Think carefully, Kagura. I admit it – I killed Kanna. But I also killed you, yet here you are again.”
            Recognizing what Naraku was suggesting, Kagura forced herself to calm down, swallowing heavily and getting her breathing under control. “Bring her back,” she demanded. “God damn you, bring Kanna back!”
            Satisfied that Kagura would not attack him again, Naraku released the wind witch from his finger tentacles, dropping her carelessly to the wooden floor next to Byakuya and Sayaka. “I will,” he agreed. “In fact, I was considering it even before I revived you. Byakuya was quite lonely, until he met Sayaka. Besides, reviving Kanna will be enjoyable for me. I’ve come to think of creating my incarnations as something of an art form. When you return with Kikyo, Kanna will be here to greet you.”
            Then, Sayaka felt her stomach growl, a sound that did not go unnoticed by Naraku. “My, you sound hungry,” he said to her. “You must not have had anything to eat for several hours. Excluding semen, that is. You’ve been under such stress, lately.”
            Sayaka separated herself from Byakuya, sitting upright by her own strength. She clasped a hand to her abdomen, contemplating the emptiness of her stomach. Between two rounds of reiki transfer to Naraku and a round of hard, feverish sex with him and Byakuya, followed by another with Byakuya alone, her metabolism was completely out of whack, strained to the limit. And she could only guess what the half-demon child growing inside her would do to her going forward. “I could eat,” she admitted.
            “Good. Byakuya, show Sayaka to the galley and feed her,” Naraku ordered, speaking of Sayaka as a house pet as he sat upon his throne again. Using his telekinesis, he floated Kanna’s mirror over to Kagura, and the wind sorceress took it into her hands gingerly, knowing that it was not merely a mirror, but a potential weapon of mass destruction. “Kagura, you may join them, if you’re so inclined. Once you are fed, go find Kikyo.”
            Sayaka was still weak from the reiki draining, so Byakuya and Kagura helped her to her feet, escorting her out of Naraku’s den. Once they left, the den’s shoji door slid closed by Naraku’s telekinetic command, sealing the oni lord into the darkness of his own thoughts.
~~~~

(Soundtrack: Dark Tranquillity – Through Ebony Archways)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oo50aDFNRg
            After a few minutes of navigating the gloomy halls of Naraku’s castle, Byakuya, Sayaka, and Kagura reached the galley. Back when the castle was inhabited by the retinue and servants of the human lord Kagewaki Hitomi, the galley was one of the places where the servants gathered for their meals. However, of the nine incarnations Naraku had made during his sixty or so years of existence, only four were developed or civilized enough to take their food while sitting at a dinner table – Byakuya, Kagura, Kanna, and Hakudoshi. The Infant was just that, and had to be fed as one, while the others, Goshinki, Kageromaru, Juromaru, and Musou, were bloodthirsty monsters that preferred their food still living.
            By the time Naraku created Byakuya, his list of living incarnations had been whittled down to just Kanna. Even though Kanna wasn’t very talkative by nature, Byakuya still enjoyed eating with her whenever the opportunity arose. After her death, he had to eat alone, feeling profoundly lonely in the grim emptiness of Naraku’s castle. This led him to seek out Naraku’s enemies more and more often, happy for their brief company, even if they tried to kill him in the end. In that respect, Sesshomaru was probably the worst out of all of them, talking the least and going for his sword the soonest.
            Therefore, Byakuya was thrilled to share the galley with another soul again, especially a pair of true beauties like Kagura and Sayaka. The galley was dark upon their arrival, so Byakuya entered ahead of them and used a flash of youki from his fingers to light the lanterns that sat in the galley’s four corners. The flickering orange light they gave off revealed a long, rectangular dining table that sat at the center of the galley’s wooden floor, rising to a height appropriate for around ten people to sit upon cushions around it.
            “Please, sit down,” Byakuya said to Kagura and Sayaka, gesturing to the table. “I’ll start getting things ready.”
            Kagura and Sayaka sat at the table, watching as Byakuya went to work. The galley was divided into two halves, one in which food was prepared and one in which food was consumed, the half with the dining table. In accordance with Japanese architecture of the time, the kitchen half of the galley was recessed about six inches lower than the dining half, its center marked by a stone-lined fire pit and an iron cooking pot mounted over it by an iron frame.
            Byakuya moved to a wooden chest along one of the kitchen’s shoji walls and opened it. The chest was made watertight with meticulously-cleaned animal intestine and filled with ice. Atop the ice lay several large fish, an assortment of salmon, tuna, and bass. Where Naraku’s dark power heated the water of the castle’s various baths, it could also cool water to well beyond the point of freezing. Byakuya personally sourced the water for the ice and the fish from the surrounding ocean. He collected and transported the saltwater in buckets or leather pouches for freezing or purification into freshwater. To gather the fish, he skimmed the surface of the sea near the castle in one of his origami cranes, dragging a fishnet behind it to use his crane as an airborne fishing trawler.
            Selecting three fish from the ice chest at random, Byakuya turned and held them up by their tails for Kagura and Sayaka to see. “I hope you like fish!” he said to them with a cheerful smile, knocking the chest closed with a foot.
            “Duh. I’m from a fishing village,” Sayaka said. “I live on fish.”
            Byakuya’s pleasant expression sobered at Sayaka’s mention of her village. As he moved to the kitchen’s fire pit and ignited it with his youki, then skewered the fish he had selected over the rising flames, he told the miko prostitute the terrible truth. “About your village,” he began, summoning the courage to finish his sentence. “Naraku destroyed it.”
            “I know. I sensed it,” Sayaka replied, to Byakuya’s surprise. She tapped one of her temples for him to see. “Miko powers, you know?”
            “Right,” Byakuya replied. “I’m sorry.”
            “What’s wrong with Naraku?” Kagura asked to Sayaka and Byakuya at once. “I mean, other than the usual shit.”
            “The Shikon jewel is what’s wrong,” Byakuya said, turning the three fish upon their skewers to cook them evenly. “It’s killing him. You saw what he looked like, just now. It’s caused his body to start disintegrating and a miko’s reiki reverses the process, though only temporarily. To stay alive, he’s been looking for powerful miko to take it from. Sayaka, here, is the latest and soon, he’ll have Kikyo.”
            Ignoring the implications Naraku’s illness held for her own mortality, Kagura looked to Sayaka, looking her right in her lovely golden eyes. “Sayaka-san, you have my most profound apologies that you got dragged into all this.”
            Sayaka smiled at Kagura with great appreciation. “Thank you,” she said. Studying Kagura, then Byakuya with some fascination, she asked: “The two of you seem pretty agreeable, for a couple of youkai. What are you doing working for a dickhead like Naraku?”
            Kagura laughed bitterly. “Work? ‘Work’ implies payment. Naraku doesn’t pay us, except maybe with continued life in exchange for following his orders.”
            Byakuya left the three fish to cook for a moment as he reached for a large ceramic vase sitting on a nearby wooden countertop and uncorked it. It contained purified water and he poured it into the iron pot beneath the fish. “He also didn’t hire us, or even just capture and enslave us,” he said as he worked, adding onto Kagura’s statement. “He made us. He engineered our bodies, imbued them with spirit, and gave birth to us in a chamber beneath the castle. We are his incarnations, detachments of his body and projections of his mind.”
            “So that’s what you meant,” Sayaka realized, thinking back to her earlier conversation with Byakuya in the castle’s bath and evaluating it in light of Naraku’s recent boast of his ‘art.’ “When you said you are ‘effectively’ Naraku’s son.”
            “Yes,” Byakuya confirmed. As the water he poured into his cooking pot began to boil, he moved to a wicker basket next to the ice chest. It contained several pounds of dry, clean rice, which he transferred to the cooking pot by a large wooden bowl. “Kagura and I are his children, his twins, and his shades all at once. As his ‘twins,’ we seemed to have come out significantly less psychotic, but in any event, our lives are bound to his.”
            “I guess I have another reason to help Naraku stay alive, then,” Sayaka said to Byakuya and Kagura at once. “If I keep Naraku alive, I keep you alive, too.”
            “There’s that miko compassion,” Kagura said with a wry smile. “I didn’t know what to think about you, at first, with the way you talk. You say you’re a prostitute, too?”
            “Uh…” Sayaka faltered, suddenly embarrassed about discussing with Kagura the lewd things she did for money, embarrassed in a way she had not been with Naraku. “Part time, yes. But not anymore. My girls are dead, killed by Naraku, and if he’s destroyed my village, then most of my usual clients are probably dead, too.”
            Kagura’s ruby eyes narrowed and she inhaled deeply through her nose, detecting a particularly unsettling scent woven into Sayaka’s clean, natural feminine one. She smelled semen, both Byakuya’s, as she expected given her pregnancy by him, and Naraku’s. “I smell Naraku on you,” the wind witch said the miko prostitute. “Did he do what I think he did?”
            Sayaka nodded, leading Kagura to add: “Well, if it makes you feel any better, he did the same thing to me…and Byakuya, too.”
            As he used a sharp knife to slice up a few turnips and cucumbers he’d drawn from a second ice chest next to the one that held the fish, Byakuya looked over to Sayaka, seeing utter sympathy in her eyes, then looked back down to his vegetables. Sayaka couldn’t help but smile at him, looking between him and Kagura. “And so marks the first convening of the Anally and/or Vaginally Raped by Naraku Club,” she remarked.
            With the fish cooked thoroughly, the rice made soft and fluffy through boiling, and the turnips and cucumbers sliced up into three even servings, Byakuya transferred all the food he had prepared to three rectangular wooden plates and placed them neatly upon the dining table. He set one in front of Kagura, one in front of Sayaka, and one in a place directly across from the two women, where he would sit. For drink, he poured water from the water vase into three wooden cups, setting one next to each plate. Finally, he provided soy sauce in a short ceramic bottle and wooden hashi as eating utensils. Politely, Kagura and Sayaka waited to begin eating until Byakuya sat down with them.
            Sayaka raised her cup of water as if to propose a toast. “To Naraku,” she said, to Kagura and Byakuya’s intrigue. “May he choke on many dicks.”
            “I’ll drink to that,” Kagura replied, tapping her cup to Sayaka’s and sipping from it as she began to eat. Sayaka and Byakuya followed, dining with her in comfortable silence.
~~~~~

            After eating and cleaning up, Byakuya, Kagura, and Sayaka left the galley, moving toward the castle’s front entrance. The time had come for Byakuya and Kagura to leave for their mission to find and capture Kikyo. Sayaka followed them not to join them in their mission, as Naraku would not permit her to leave the castle, but simply to remain in their company for as long as possible.
            Sayaka became fearful at the thought of being left alone in the castle. As she followed Naraku’s wind demon incarnations through the castle’s halls, they passed more than a few of the castle’s shambling skeleton servants, their once fine silken robes rotting right off their bones. Naraku was obviously controlling them, directing a few of them to turn their bare skulls and ‘look’ at Sayaka with empty eye sockets, then give a threatening chatter with bare, gumless teeth.
            Just as Kagura and Byakuya reached the castle’s entrance, Sayaka reached out to grab Byakuya by a sleeve. “Wait,” she protested to him and Kagura at once. “Do both of you have to go? I…I don’t want to be here alone.”
            Kagura looked at Byakuya, then at Sayaka. “Naraku ordered both me and Byakuya to capture Kikyo. Knowing him, that’s probably not negotiable.”
            “But I can be in two places at once,” Byakuya noted, to Kagura’s great interest. Stepping back away from Kagura and Sayaka, he focused his demonic magic and turned perpendicular to the two women, then walked forward slowly, his body separating into two identical halves: the original, and a copy.
            Byakuya’s copy moved to stand at Sayaka’s side, her protector. She reached out and touched one of his arms, reassured to find that he was indeed made of solid matter. She knew Byakuya was capable of duplicating himself, having witnessed that power in ‘action’ at her bath house, but she wanted to make sure his copy was real.
            “Byakuya, stay with Sayaka and don’t let any of the skeletons touch her,” Byakuya ordered to his copy, effectively talking to himself. “Don’t leave her side for any reason.”
            Byakuya’s copy nodded. “Yes, Byakuya,” he replied, smiling from the strange feeling of addressing himself in the third-person.
            With Sayaka’s concerns addressed as well as possible, Kagura and the original Byakuya exited the castle, stepping out into the brisk, salty seaside air. There, they were met by a single skeleton servant, once a human woman, judging by the cut of its kimono. The undead servant bowed and extended its bony hands toward Kagura, holding some very special objects out to her: a number of pure white bird feathers, and her enchanted paper fan.
            “Heh,” Kagura snorted. “Looks like Naraku’s smart enough not to give me any weapons while he and I are in the same room.” She took the fan and the feathers from the skeleton and it turned to shuffle back into the castle. Byakuya looked on as she carefully inserted the feathers into her glossy black hair for easy access, then snapped her fan open to inspect it. She gave it an experimental fling to her front, producing a gust of wind that kicked up large amounts of dirt and pebbles from the rocky ground.
            Byakuya drew one of his origami cranes from inside his haori and transformed it into its giant ‘flight’ form. Kagura did the same with one of her feathers and the two wind demons mounted their unusual aircraft, lifting off from Naraku’s castle island and turning to head due west, toward Honshu.
            They had a miko to capture!

-To be continued-
- 18
- 19
- 20
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A Twist in the Myth	By : Dunkelgelb Category: InuYasha Crossovers > General Views: 18090 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
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A Twist in the Myth