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
- 23
- 24
- 25
A Twist in the Myth
Chapter 24: Abduction

Chapter summary: Kagura and Byakuya intercept Kikyo and Kohaku over Honshu, unaware of the full scope of Naraku’s newest, twisted plan – to use a child, possibly one of theirs, as his new host body. As the two wind demons overpower and capture their marks, they sense InuYasha’s full-demon transformation as he and Sesshomaru battle the oni Kuno, and Byakuya sends a copy of himself to investigate.
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(Soundtrack: Kamelot – Torn)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8KPmbDCc0I
            Riding his giant origami crane and her giant swan feather, Byakuya and Kagura flew at top speed at high altitude over deciduous Honshu forest, as high as they could manage while remaining close enough to the ground to see Kikyo and Kohaku, once they got close enough. Flying at a low altitude, they would have contrasted sharply with the surrounding forest and have been easily visible, since both of their aircraft were white in overall color, and Kagura’s outer kimono had a lot of white in it, as well. Flying at an altitude level with Kikyo and Kohaku, they would have potentially silhouetted themselves against the sky and then been easily visible again. Therefore, high altitude was the best choice left for them, and the color of their craft would contrast less with that of the open sky.
            Having fucked her for the third time in twelve hours, Byakuya had given his female reflection another brief respite from her heat and they needed to accomplish their mission before it seized her again. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be able to focus, leaving them much more vulnerable if their upcoming encounter with Kikyo and Kohaku turned into a fight. They flew at such a high altitude to avoid detection as they made their approach, closing in on Kikyo and Kohaku from behind and above as they rode atop a group of linked-together Shinidamachu. This way, the miko and taijiya wouldn’t spot them until the last possible moment. Their altitude hardly limited their pursuit; after all, with Kanna’s mirror, they didn’t need to establish visual contact until the very last moment.
            Byakuya eyed Kikyo and Kohaku far below his crane’s forward port quarter, spotting the light, bluish-green of their Shinidamachu craft moving over the much darker green of the forest below them. He turned to Kagura, shouting over the sound of the oncoming wind. “Kagura! Stay up here for now. I’ll try talking to Kikyo and Kohaku alone first. Maybe we can avoid a fight altogether. When I call you, drop down behind them so we can move on them from opposite directions.”
            “What the hell for?” Kagura asked impatiently, her impatience stemming from her body’s desires and her emotional need to see Kohaku and speak to him in-person as soon as possible.
            “It’ll be more dramatic that way,” Byakuya replied. “They haven’t seen you since Naraku brought you back. Your sudden appearance will take them completely by surprise, and we might be able to use that to our advantage.”
            “Okay, fine,” Kagura agreed with some irritation. She banked in her giant feather to veer away from Byakuya in the horizontal plane. Putting the sun to her back, she matched speed and heading with the miko and taijiya, ready to pounce at Byakuya’s word.
            Kikyo and Kohaku were totally oblivious to Byakuya and Kagura’s presence as they prepared to spring their ambush, still thinking of the brief, yet illuminating joy they’d known in the forest hot spring they visited before. Sitting side-by-side with Kikyo atop her flying pallet of linked-together Shinidamachu, Kohaku squeezed one of the miko’s hands in his and she squeezed back. Tactile sensation had mostly faded for her, except for the lingering sensation of warmth from her new lover’s hand, and she relished in it to its fullest.
            The two of them were travelling to find InuYasha and his pack so that Kikyo could speak with Kagome about what she had seen in the spirits of the dead at Sayaka’s shrine. Naraku was ill in some way, requiring him to seek out miko in order to steal their reiki from them. This made herself and Kagome his next likely targets. Kikyo felt that if she could let Kagome and the others know about Naraku’s condition, then they could all work together and seize their latest, greatest chance to kill him once and for all. Still, even with such an urgent subject on her mind, she couldn’t help but wonder how InuYasha would react to the idea of her and Kohaku as lovers. Undoubtedly, the hanyou warrior would be able to smell Kohaku on her.
            Byakuya’s arrival disturbed Kikyo from her thoughts. Kohaku pointed and shouted, and she looked to see Byakuya approaching, riding his giant origami crane at an altitude above them and descending rapidly. Once level with them, the male wind demon braked hard and stopped directly in their path. Kikyo guided the Shinidamachu carrying herself and Kohaku to decelerate as quickly as possible without throwing them off, the pale serpent demons arching backward and giving their passengers a semi-solid surface to brace against.
            “Kikyo, Kohaku. Hello,” Byakuya greeted, respectfully yet distantly as Kikyo and Kohaku came to a stop a dozen yards or so from him. He didn’t have to shout loudly now, as he, Kikyo, and Kohaku were all stationary relative to the ground and each other, and the sound of the wind was nothing but a breeze.
            Kikyo regarded Byakuya coolly, while Kohaku placed a hand on his kusarigama, contemplating its use in an air-to-air engagement. “Mugen no Byakuya,” Kikyo addressed with a formal, icy tone, her smoky-grey eyes locking onto Byakuya’s as if to penetrate them. From her commune with the spirits at Sayaka’s shrine, she knew Byakuya had been there along with Naraku. Then, he had been Naraku’s herald, his presence preceding Naraku’s. Having seen the last moments of one of Sayaka’s deceased junior priestesses, she knew that Byakuya had participated directly in the hellish orgy that followed. “What have you done with the miko Sayaka?”
            Byakuya’s mouth fell slightly agape, his cobalt eyes narrowing. Though he expected Kikyo and Kohaku to be hostile to him, he had also expected to start out with more control of the conversation than this. “How do you know about that?”
            “Kohaku and I just visited her village and her shrine,” Kikyo said, her icy tone becoming one of accusation. “What’s left of them, anyway.”
            “Naraku ordered me to take Sayaka to his castle,” Byakuya answered. He swallowed thickly: if Kikyo knew he had been at Sayaka’s shrine, then she probably also knew of the things he had done to Sayaka and her younger women while there, however directed by Naraku they may have been. “She’s safe, for the moment. At this point, I think you know why he keeps her.”
            “Yes,” Kikyo confirmed. “Though Naraku had clearly taken certain steps to ensure no one lived or lived long enough to tell the tale by spoken word, he couldn’t do anything about the spirits of the dead left behind afterward. I communed with them, and now I know everything.”
            Byakuya winced at the repulsed expression in Kikyo’s eyes. That wince actually caused Kikyo’s expression to soften. “You regret what happened, don’t you?” she noted with some surprise.
            “Of course I regret it!” Byakuya snapped. “Whether I wanted to or not, or whether Naraku was forcing me to do it or not, I raped. I killed…I helped Naraku kill innocent people, right in front of me. Sayaka herself has forgiven me, but the guilt remains.”
            “So Naraku has Sayaka, and now you’re here to take me,” Kikyo concluded, the icy tone in her voice returning as she prepared to defend herself. Beside her, Kohaku had been listening intently the entire while, looking around the surrounding sky and forest for any of Naraku’s demon horde that Byakuya may have brought with him. He saw nothing, since Kagura was concealed by the light of the sun. He recognized Kikyo’s tone for himself and his hand gripped tighter around his kusarigama’s handle.
            “That’s right,” Byakuya said. “And I’m here to take you alive.” He considered the meaning of the word as if applied to Kikyo and blinked blank-facedly as he realized his gaffe. “So to speak. We’re still pretty high up in the air here. In the interest of your safety, why don’t we take this down to the ground?”
            Kohaku glanced at Kikyo, then at Byakuya. A country road lay below them, running southeast to northwest, between a small patch of forest to the southwest and a much larger swatch of it to the northeast. Descending to it served Byakuya’s purpose by ensuring that neither he nor Kikyo would fall off the Shinidamachu and meet either death or serious harm if the relatively civil conversation she held with the wind demon turned to violence, but it also served him: he could fight much more effectively with solid ground beneath his feet. Nodding, Kikyo replied to Byakuya: “Very well.”
            Sensing her telepathic command, Kikyo’s aircraft of joined-together Shinidamachu descended vertically until it hovered just a few feet above the well-worn, wheel-gouged dirt road far below. Byakuya descended with them and he and Kohaku dismounted first, clearly sizing each other up for the fight to come. Kikyo stepped off her Shinidamachu and the serpent demons unlinked from each other, dispersing into the air to leave her, Kohaku, and Byakuya facing off alone. She unslung her bow, but did not yet reach for an arrow.
            “Now,” Byakuya began. “No one’s in any danger of falling and getting hurt. As I said before, I’m here to take you to Naraku, Kikyo, but I’m also here to take you, Kohaku.” Kohaku still searched the surrounding area for danger, not putting Byakuya out of his sight for more than a moment at a time. When Byakuya spoke his name, he turned his head forward to focus squarely on the wind demon before him. “Kikyo - what does Kohaku know about all this?”
            Here, Kikyo allowed Kohaku to speak for himself. “For better or worse, not much,” the taijiya warrior said. “I only know what I could gather from the state you and Naraku left Sayaka’s shrine in, and from what Kikyo has told me so far, which is nothing. I suspect she hasn’t told me anything to spare me from the heartache of knowing.”
            “It’s more than that,” Byakuya said. “If Kikyo told you everything I think she knows, Naraku would have another reason to kill you. He has enough of those already.”
            “Like that matters,” Kohaku scowled to Byakuya. “Undoubtedly, Naraku wants my jewel shard. Taking it out will kill me.”
            Byakuya shook his head, recalling Naraku’s twisted, sexual ‘promise’ to Kagura. “Naraku said…that he was going to take your shard in such a way that you survive.”
            “Are we supposed to believe that?” Kikyo hissed. “Naraku would say anything, if he thought it would serve his goals. I can see a conflict in you. Following the worst of Naraku’s orders clearly hurts you, so he probably told you that to get you to cooperate with him more readily.”
            “Actually,” Byakuya half-smiled, seeing his opportunity to bring Kagura into the situation. “Naraku didn’t say that to me.” He glanced up to the sun, squinting against its light. “Kagura!”
            High above, Kagura heard her cue and dove hard from her holding pattern in the sky, riding her feather down to the country road that Kikyo, Kohaku, and Byakuya stood in. She leapt off her feather from a height of about 50 feet and landed in a neat, kimono-clad crouch in the road, directly behind Kikyo and Kohaku opposite Byakuya. Kohaku turned to face her and immediately froze, his rich brown eyes widening as he laid them on her for the first time in seven years.
            Kagura stood from her crouch slowly, roving her lovely ruby eyes up and down Kohaku’s now-grown body, which filled out his taijiya bodysuit in a delicious way. He was definitely a man now - the image of him she’d seen in Kanna’s mirror as he made love to Kikyo hadn’t been an illusion. The last time she had seen him, he had been barely more than a boy. Then, she had sent him flying away on one of her giant feathers, to get him away from Hakudoshi safely. Despite the intensity of the emotions coursing through her by her sudden reunion with him, she couldn’t manage to say anything more eloquent than: “Kohaku…uh, hi.”
            Like Kagura, Kohaku underwent an emotional upheaval. A series of expressions crossed his face in just a few seconds as he looked upon her and heard her sultry voice: recognition, hope, disbelief, anger, then rage. “Fuck you, Byakuya,” he cursed at Byakuya over a shoulder, then cursed up to the sky. “And fuck you, Naraku! Do you hear me? Fuck you!”
            Byakuya and Kagura both recoiled at Kohaku’s outburst; neither knew him to curse under any circumstances and he’d been through some shit in his time. Kikyo, too, was taken aback, not knowing him to curse even during the throes of passion. Composing himself, Byakuya spoke: “I get the ‘fuck Naraku’ part, but what have I done to you?”
            “Don’t be coy, Naraku-spawn,” Kohaku spat to Byakuya with thinly-restrained venom. “For the ‘Master of Illusions,’ you sure are being rather obvious. And you got her dimensions wrong, too.” On his last point, Kohaku eyed Kagura’s ample chest suspiciously, seemingly disgusted with its attention-getting size.
            “Oh…oh!” Byakuya exclaimed as he realized Kohaku’s meaning. “Kagura isn’t one of my illusions. She’s quite real – Naraku brought her back last night. As for her dimensions, Naraku made some changes to make her more appealing to the male eye.”
            “Kohaku, it’s me,” Kagura protested. “I’m not an illusion, and I’m not anything else in disguise.”
            “Shut up,” Kohaku growled to Kagura, or in his mind, ‘Not Kagura.’ “Your very existence is soil on Kagura’s memory. Though I do appreciate that even Naraku had decency enough to wait seven years before he pulled – or ordered someone to pull - a stunt like this.”
            Kagura grew still – seven years. She knew she’d been gone for a long time, and such a length of time certainly explained how Kohaku had grown into a man, but the thought was still dizzying. Seven years had passed and she remembered Naraku skewering her with his miasma-laden tentacles like it was yesterday. For her, it was yesterday. She realized that she had absolutely no memory of the intervening time: she didn’t even dream. Putting those thoughts aside, she recognized that Kohaku didn’t accept her and wasn’t about to, so she appealed to Kikyo and her miko senses. “Kikyo, what do you think? You can feel that I’m real, can’t you?”
            Kikyo glanced at Kagura over a shoulder, looking the tall, well-built female youkai over with visible suspicion. She thought back to the moment when Naraku, disguised as InuYasha, eviscerated her with his claws, more than 60 years earlier. Then, Naraku had felt like InuYasha, so much so that she hadn’t suspected a thing until she was well on her way to bleeding to death. Her lips curling downward as that terrible moment played over and over in her mind, her reply was soft and whisper-like. “I…have been deceived before.”
            “Well, fuck,” Kagura cursed. She reached under her kimono’s left breast with her right hand and withdrew her enchanted paper fan, flicking it open with a skillful snap of her wrist, her ‘kaze’ magic blowing a dusty gust of air up from the road. “I guess we do this the hard way, huh?”
            Byakuya watched with mounting apprehension as Kikyo and Kohaku moved to put their backs together, each covering the other from behind. Holding his kusarigama in his right hand, Kohaku wrapped his left in a length of its chain, to use it as an anchor when the time came to throw the demon-slicing scythe. Kikyo drew an arrow from her quiver and nocked it up in her bow, drawing it back against the bow’s taut string to give it a little bit of tension. The arrow’s head began to glow as she fed her reiki into it, and the sight of it gave Byakuya serious misgivings about his chances of living through the day. From his first encounter with Sayaka, he knew full well how much damage it could do to him. “Kagura, wait!” he called, raising a hand and gesturing it downward to get his female reflection to lower her weapon. Meanwhile, the unpretentious way Byakuya referred to Kagura and the way she responded to the name so readily sewed some doubt in the disbelieving Kohaku’s heart. “Kikyo, there’s no need for this.”
            “No, there isn’t,” Kikyo agreed with Byakuya. “You can leave us be and we can be on our way.”
            “I want to, but I can’t,” Byakuya lamented. “Kagura can’t either. Naraku made us, and he owns us. We follow his orders or we die. I had hoped…that seeing Kagura again would at least make Kohaku come quietly, but whether the two of you believe it’s really her or not, believe this: Naraku made her every bit as powerful as she was before, and then some. Do you think that the two of you can take on the two of us?”
            Kikyo raised an elegant female eyebrow at Byakuya’s challenge. “Let’s find out.”
(Soundtrack: Nightwish – Wish I Had an Angel)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X9NTz1iGv4
            At the same time, Kohaku crouched and cast his chain-scythe at Kagura’s neck, while Kikyo raised her bow, drawing her arrow back and charging it fully with her reiki to aim it in Byakuya’s general direction for a quick offhand shot, all in one motion. Their speed surprised the wind demons and they dodged to their sides in the road to prevent themselves from being abruptly decapitated or purified. As Kohaku yanked on his kusarigama’s chain to recall its blade to his hand, Kagura lunged further in the horizontal plane so that she wasn’t aiming directly at Byakuya behind the taijiya warrior and his miko lover, and swung her enchanted fan at him.
            “Fuujin no Mai!” Kagura snarled, unleashing her magic fan’s Dance of Blades. Ordinarily, the spinning, semi-circular blades of highly-compressed air rolling off the edge of her fan would have flayed Kohaku alive, lacerating him to the bone. Instead, she deliberately weakened them to avoid causing serious injury to him, but he couldn’t judge their power visually and vaulted out of their way regardless. She anticipated his movement, having observed him evade the Dances of Blades in the past. In effect, she had seen him do it just yesterday and she exploited that knowledge to the fullest. Predicting the speed and direction he would evade, she dashed forward with a flick of a foot to intercept him mid-flight, raising a knee under her kimono and driving it up into his stomach. Fortunately for him, his stomach was partially covered by the groin pad of his taijiya bodysuit. Kagura underestimated her new body’s enhanced strength and ended up knocking Kohaku off his feet, bowling him clean over and sending him crashing through the rickety wooden fence lining the side of the road.
            Meanwhile, Byakuya deployed at least a dozen copies of himself, the original disguising himself into the crowd of copies as a demented ‘shell game’ to confuse Kikyo’s aim. Sayaka had thwarted this technique easily at her bath house, seeking out the original Byakuya among the copies by his unique youki signature and blasting him down with her reiki arrows, so this time, Byakuya made sure to duplicate his aura among his copies and let the process of elimination be his shield. Faced with so many targets at once, Kikyo only get off a few more arrows before the Byakuyas reached her, with one yanking her bow out of her hand and another tearing her arrow quiver from her back. This hardly deterred her from defending herself as she transitioned to reiki-powered hand to hand combat. Her slender, feminine hands, charged with her reiki and glowing as white-hot, yet somehow heatless blades, sliced through the face of the Byakuya that had taken her bow, plunging into the throat of the one holding her quiver.
            Both copies of Byakuya evaporated into mist as Kikyo dispatched them and a third copy grabbed her from behind, crouching and wrapping his arms around her waist to lunge upward and suplex her overhead, slamming her body-head-ground into the dirt road behind him. Byakuya did not hesitate to get physically violent with Kikyo because after Sayaka, he had first-hand experience with how dangerous a miko like her could be in battle. He knew from Naraku’s encounters with her that the magic animating her clay/grave soil body made her surprisingly durable, so he did not overly worry about breaking her neck. Even if he had, she didn’t have a real nervous system to damage and would have been only cosmetically affected.
            Kikyo righted herself on the ground and scrambled to her feet just in time for Byakuya to plant a sandaled foot to her chest and kick her through the same fence Kagura had driven Kohaku through. While Kohaku lay stunned in the grassy field beyond the fence, Kagura closed in on him to relieve him of his kusarigama, blade, chain, and all. Feeling her standing over him, Kohaku vaulted into a crouch and drew his katana, swiping at her and missing her narrowly enough to cut though her outer kimono over her thighs, without drawing blood. Angrily, the wind witch retaliated by leaping back and giving him a shotgun-like Fuujin no Mai to the face and chest, bowling him over again.
            “This is getting fucking retarded,” Kagura snapped at Kohaku as he pried himself out of the small crater her wind blades had pounded him into. “Stay down!”
            At the same time, Kikyo stood back up, having been driven to generally the same place as Kohaku in the field beside the road. The Byakuya holding her bow snapped it in half at its canvas-wrapped midpoint, while the one holding her quiver removed the arrows from it and snapped them all in half, as well, tossing them all into the tall grass on the opposite side of the road. “You can’t beat us, even with your best weapons,” one Byakuya said to Kikyo and Kohaku at once, trying to appeal to their reason. “Give up now.”
            “And then what?” Kikyo asked indignantly, her fists clenching as she took a defiant stance. “You take us to Naraku and he uses us for his evil plans, whatever they may be? Will he hurt us, even more than you have already, or even kill us?”
            “We are incarnations of Naraku,” Kagura replied impassively, coiling up the chain of Kohaku’s kusarigama. She clipped the coiled chain and the scythe blade connected to it to the sash around her waist, next to Kanna’s mirror outside her kimono. “We are tools to be used and disposed of. Other than what he tells us to our faces, we don’t get the luxury of insight into his thinking. And we sure as hell don’t get to tell him ‘No.’”
            Sitting up in the grass, Kohaku slinked a hand to a pouch hanging from his taijiya bodysuit’s green sash. He moved his hand slowly and concealed it behind a hip to avoid getting Kagura’s or Byakuya’s attention as they and Byakuya’s small army of his copies advanced on Kikyo and himself. Opening the pouch, he withdrew two small glass spheres, each filled with a thin, dark red liquid. Just as Kagura spoke the ‘uh’ sound in ‘Get up’ to him, he cast the spheres to the grassy ground between her feet and Byakuya’s, and they broke open on contact, their contents reacting violently with air to become a dense, billowing cloud of red smoke.
            The smoke that Kohaku’s smoke bombs produced was specially-formulated to be highly-irritating to virtually any youkai, and Kagura and Byakuya both cried out as the it engulfed them, searing at their eyes and filling their lungs with millions of tiny, stabbing chemical daggers. Unaffected by the smoke himself, other than being unable to see through it very far, Kohaku sheathed his katana for safety and dashed to Kikyo’s side, sweeping her up into his arms. Then, he sprinted through the smoke for the forest bordering the field beside the road, a hundred yards or so away. This left Byakuya and Kagura standing alone, choking for breath and stumbling around blindly as their targets made their escape.
            “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Kagura cursed wildly, screwing her ruby eyes shut to try and seal out Kohaku’s anti-youkai smoke. For his own part, Byakuya couldn’t find the breath to say even that much, the only sounds coming out of him being one strangled cough after another. Kagura’s eyes burned beneath their lids and she called on her winds to blast the smoke away. Once it was gone, she and Byakuya regained their breath and eyesight only gradually, and Kagura squinted against the smoke’s lingering bite just in time to see Kohaku and Kikyo disappearing past the outermost trees of the nearby forest.
            “They’re getting away!” Kagura warned to Byakuya, grabbing one of his upper arms to turn him in Kohaku and Kikyo’s general direction and urge him forward with her. Still nearly blind from Kohaku’s smoke, he could do nothing but let his female reflection guide him. The loss of concentration he experienced in the meantime caused most of his copies to dissolve and return their essences to him, but he regained control in time to prevent the copy of himself keeping Sayaka company back at Naraku’s castle from dissolving, as well.
            Carrying Kikyo in his arms, Kohaku moved through the forest as quickly as InuYasha might have, dodging the oncoming trees with precise movements and swift reflexes. Once he had gone a few hundred yards, he stopped at the base of a large, tall oak tree and set Kikyo down onto her feet, turning around to scan the direction they’d come for any sign of pursuit by Kagura or Byakuya.
            “Did we lose them?” Kohaku asked to Kikyo, placing a hand on his katana’s scabbard for a quick draw.
            “It doesn’t matter,” Kikyo dismissed. “They’ll track us down regardless. We are now on foot and they can fly.”
            “How did they find us?” Kohaku asked further.
            “Did you see that mirror hanging from Kagura’s waist?” Kikyo posed to Kohaku. He nodded. “That was Kanna’s. It isn’t just a mirror – it is as a window, too, a window through which they can see whatever or whoever they want.”
            Kohaku blanched at the implications of a mirror that could allow Kagura or Byakuya to not only find Kikyo and himself wherever they went, but also to spy on them at any time. “Do you think they were watching when we…when we, uh…”
            “Undoubtedly,” Kikyo speculated with a raise of her eyebrows and a roll of her eyes. “Kagura seemed quite taken with you, not just physically, but emotionally, too. Perhaps Naraku really did bring her back. I don’t think a copy that didn’t have her personality in it would have reacted to you that way.”
            Kohaku felt his heart skip a beat at the prospect of Kagura actually living again. He didn’t completely believe it yet, but he wanted to, and that was more than he was feeling a few minutes before. “We have to keep moving,” he said. “If we can’t reach my sister, and Kagome, InuYasha and the others with her, we might be able to reach a village with enough people in it to make this ‘Kagura’ and Byakuya keep their distance.”
            “No,” Kikyo disagreed. “Leading Kagura and Byakuya to a human village would only give them – and Naraku – leverage to use against us. They might take hostages. We make our stand here, in this forest. We either kill them, or they take us to Naraku. Kohaku…can you kill Kagura, aware of the possibility that she may actually be who she says she is?”
            Kohaku was silent for a moment. “I have to,” he answered quietly.
            While Kikyo and Kohaku decided on their next course of action, Kagura and Byakuya reached the edge of the forest the miko and taijiya had taken refuge in. By this point, they had shrugged off the aftereffects of Kohaku’s smoke, able to see and breathe comfortably again. Kagura raised her enchanted fan to the sky and swirled it around to summon her winds, then pointed the fan at the forest before her, causing the wind to blow into it and filter through the trees, shaking untold thousands of leaves on their branches.
            “Kikyo! Kohaku!” Kagura called out deftly, her wind carrying her voice to the miko and taijiya, wherever they were hiding in the forest. “You have nowhere to run! There’s nowhere you can go that we can’t follow, and wherever you try to go, you won’t get there before we catch you! Come out and give yourselves up!”
            Under Kagura’s control, the wind was a two-way communication medium and she listened intently for a reply. Unsurprisingly, she received none. She turned to Byakuya and detached Kanna’s mirror from the sash around her waist, handing it to him for safe-keeping. “Get in the sky and cover the forest from above in case they try to run,” she ordered to him. “Use the mirror to keep track of them. I’m going in on the ground.”
            Byakuya nodded and recalled his magic origami crane from where he had dismounted it in the road he had landed it in earlier. It lifted off from the road’s dirt and turned in place, then flew over to him and Kagura. He leapt atop it and rode it into the air, able to see out over the forest once again. Standing alone now, Kagura ran into the forest at ground level, entering it in roughly the same place that Kohaku and Kikyo had. She had given Kanna’s mirror to Byakuya to allow him to use it to zero in on Kikyo and Kohaku from the air, as before. She also gave it to him to prevent it from being broken, since the engagement with Kikyo and Kohaku in the forest was likely to be a high-speed foot chase between the trees, punctuated with bouts of violent hand-to-hand combat, even some wrestling.
(Soundtrack: Nightwish – Bare Grace Misery)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZmIMDyQrTE
            Kagura’s wind carried her ultimatum to Kikyo and Kohaku. They bristled at the sound of it brushing past their ears, along with the eerie sight of every leaf in the forest canopy above them shuddering under the sudden wind, then growing still again. “We should split up,” Kikyo suggested to Kohaku. “Kanna’s mirror works by tapping into this world’s ambient spiritual energy. I can block it with a reiki spell, but I have to be stationary while I do.” She looked to the tall oak tree behind her, noting a hollow at its base, one large enough for her to fit through. “I’ll hide here and begin my spell. While I’m casting it, we will both be invisible to Kanna’s mirror. Use that to your advantage and try to take Kagura or Byakuya – or both – by surprise.”
            Kikyo crouched and slipped through the opening to the oak tree’s hollow, while Kohaku leapt into the dense tree canopy overhead. He jumped from tree to tree with stealthy taijiya silence, moving about 50 yards back in the direction he and Kikyo had come, then concealed himself among one tree’s leaf-covered branches. He kept the big oak that Kikyo sheltered inside within sight, so that he could watch it for Kagura’s or Byakuya’s approach.
            Kagura arrived after just a minute or so. She dashed through the forest with even greater speed than Kohaku had, ignoring the squish of mossy forest detritus beneath her bare feet. So much flying, fucking, fighting, and running around made her yearn for a goddamn bath, and her perspiration in the shaded summer heat matted her silky black bangs to her forehead. Without Kanna’s mirror, she navigated by her heightened youkai sense of smell. Her breeding heat had sharpened it even further than normal, allowing her to really lock on to the scent of a clean, healthy, sexually mature male – Kohaku.
            Kohaku’s scent led Kagura almost directly to the oak that Kikyo hid inside. The beautiful wind witch could feel her heat coming back gradually and her heart thumped insistently in her tapered ears, her blood burning in her veins. Thoughts of sex, of getting well and truly fucked and knocked up by any of the beautiful, powerful males she’d encountered in her life, especially by Kohaku, tugged at her mind, but she scrounged up the willpower to resist them. She glanced around her, seeing no sign of Kikyo or Kohaku, then focused her attention on the large oak before her, looking it up and down then peering suspiciously into the hollow at the oak’s base. It was such an obvious place to hide, but then again, Kikyo and Kohaku probably couldn’t have found anything better in the short time that had passed since they escaped.
            Kagura closed her ruby eyes to focus her thoughts and reached out to Byakuya telepathically. “Byakuya, do you see anything from up there?”
            Above the forest, Byakuya flew his origami crane in a grid-like search pattern, looking downward through the forest canopy for any signs of red-and-white color. Between Kikyo and Kohaku, Kikyo’s miko outfit would be the easiest to see. “Nothing, yet. This forest doesn’t go on forever, so if they run, they’ll have to cross open country at some point.”
            “What about Kanna’s mirror?” Kagura asked further, opening her eyes again to search the forest canopy above her, keeping the oak tree’s hollow at the front of her mind.
            Byakuya consulted Kanna’s mirror, gazing into his own reflection and thinking intently of Kikyo and Kohaku. This time, the image of himself blurred and flickered, but did not change to a view of the miko and taijiya he and Kagura were seeking. “The mirror…isn’t working!”
            Inside the darkness of the oak tree hollow, Kikyo sat on her knees in a meditative position, her eyes closed and her hands clasped together over her chest as she used her reiki to subtly manipulate the energy field that Kanna’s mirror depended on to function. Kagome would have likened the act to that of ‘jamming’ a radio or radar signal in her time. “What? Try again!” Kagura urged to Byakuya.
            Byakuya concentrated on his reflection more intently, putting Kikyo and Kohaku at the forefront of his thoughts, and it still did not resolve to an image of either one of them. “No, still nothing!”
            “Fuck!” Kagura cursed telepathically. “Are you using it right?”
            “Yes, I am,” Byakuya intoned, mildly offended that Kagura would question his competence. After all, they were basically male/female versions of the same person and possessed the same skill set and range of experiences, to include knowledge of Kanna’s mirror. “I’ve used it before, haven’t I?”
            Aggravated, Kagura eyed the hollow in the oak tree again and began to move toward it, passing under the tree Kohaku hid in. She moved almost directly beneath him, completely unaware of his presence. Kikyo’s spell concealed him from Kanna’s mirror, so Byakuya could not warn Kagura that he was near. Kohaku saw his opportunity to strike and unsheathed his katana as quietly as he could, then leapt from his vantage point in the trees, holding his sword above his head to try and slice Kagura in half in a quick, downward swing. Fortunately for her, her senses were elevated to the point that she could feel the air moving around her as Kohaku dropped through it, and threw herself out of the way of his sword.
            With her youkai agility, Kagura dove into a fetal position mid-air and rolled on one of her shoulders on the forest floor to spring back up on her feet, facing her would-be assassin. “Well, I found Kohaku,” she signaled to Byakuya by telepathy. She tightened her fingers on her magic fan as Kohaku hunkered down and held his sword parallel to the ground, aiming it right at her for a running thrust. “I’ll keep him busy. Try looking in the hollow in this big oak tree near me. Kikyo’s probably there!”
            Silently, Kohaku lunged at Kagura and the beautiful wind witch dodged his first thrust, engaging in a deadly dance with him. And to dance was one of her greatest skills, allowing her to evade the slash and thrust of his katana will all the grace her name implied. Kagura – God Entertainment. Nevertheless, his speed and strength put hers to the test. Given superhuman power by the shard of the Shikon jewel in his neck, his body was also that of a man who had spent his entire adult life and most of his childhood training to fight and kill the most dangerous youkai stalking around feudal Japan, a land ridden with lawlessness and almost constant civil war. Kagura knew that if she had been lesser in any way, Kohaku would have turned her to bloody ribbons.
            Kagura fed her youki into her magic fan and it crystallized into a shimmering red blade, turning her fan into a very short, broad sword and allowing her to begin blocking Kohaku’s attacks head-on. As he slashed at her from one side, she drove her fan sword into his katana and the two blades met in a burst of hot, streaking sparks, much to his surprise as his katana did not slice through her fan, but bounced off it. She seized on his surprise to force him off balance, grabbing him by the collar of his taijiya bodysuit and effortlessly throwing him overhead in a direction that led away from the hollow Kikyo sheltered inside. She aimed Kohaku’s body carefully to ensure that she didn’t inadvertently throw him into a tree and break him.
            Kohaku tumbled across the forest floor and before he could regain his bearings, Kagura was upon him again, using her toned-down Fuujin no Mai to blast him further and further away from Kikyo’s hiding spot. He cried out in agony, covering his face with his hands as the wind blades pelted against his taijiya bodysuit, and Kagura winced at the sound. The last thing she wanted to do to her friend, possible lover, and prospective father of her children was hurt him and sour their reunion further.
            Meanwhile, Byakuya hung Kanna’s mirror from the sling of his sword scabbard and jumped off his giant origami crane, using his youki for deceleration and directional thrust to guide himself safely through the dense forest canopy below him. He landed near the tree that Kagura suspected Kikyo of hiding in and immediately detached nine copies of himself, the ten Byakuyas converging on the oak tree’s hollow. “Kikyo!” one of them called out. “We know you’re in there. Come on out, then let’s go see Naraku.”
            Inside the hollow, Kikyo opened her eyes and discontinued her mirror-jamming spell. Kohaku had failed to kill Kagura outright, though not out of a lack of skill, and Byakuya had found her, so there was no reason to keep the spell in place any longer. She stood up into a hunched position, as the hollow’s low ceiling prevented her from standing at her full height, then exited the hollow to be met by ten Byakuyas – nine copies and one original.
            “It appears you have me surrounded,” Kikyo noted with feigned helplessness, looking among Byakuya’s copies and using her miko senses to try and identify the ‘real’ one. Doing so was difficult: he concealed his aura well and even made sure that each of his duplicates wore a phantom of Kanna’s mirror at his hip, so that the mirror itself was not a giveaway. Kikyo channeled her reiki into her hands and they became as glowing, fingered blades again. With a silent gesture of ‘welcome,’ she brandished her weaponized hands to the wind demons surrounding her, knowing exactly how well they could move through their demonic flesh. “Come at me, if you dare.”
            Having observed her movements while fighting hand-to-hand with her back at the road, Byakuya sent all nine of his copies against Kikyo at once. She destroyed three of them almost instantly, her glowing hands leaving horizontal, lightning-like trails through the air as she ripped through wind demon faces, throats, and abdomens. As those first three Byakuyas died and dissolved to ash, two others managed to get behind Kikyo, between her and the tree she had just climbed out of. They seized her arms by her wrists and held her arms outstretched to either side, making sure to keep themselves clear of her hands. Dragging her down from the oak tree’s raised, uneven roots to more level ground, they forced the struggling undead miko down onto her knees, then planted a sandaled foot to her back and shoved her face-down on the forest floor.
            The original Byakuya moved to stand in front of Kikyo and she lifted her head to glare daggers up at him. “I’ve always admired you, Kikyo,” he confessed with a sigh. “I am so sorry for this.”
            Together, the two Byakuyas restraining Kikyo pushed on her back with their feet and pulled on her wrists with their hands until her arms were taut. They built the tension gradually until her arms were shuddering under the strain. Then, the strain broke abruptly as her arms separated from her body at her shoulders, the old bones inside popping free from their sockets with a sickening crumble of clay and grave soil. The two Byakuyas pulled Kikyo’s severed arms out of her haori’s sleeves, then removed their feet from her back.
            The original Byakuya unslung his sword, then slipped out of his navy vestment and used it as wrapping for Kikyo’s arms as his copies handed them to him. While his respect for Kikyo was genuine and he wanted to preserve her arms so that they could soon be reattached for her use, his purpose was also practical: she wouldn’t be able to give her reiki to Naraku in the same way Sayaka had been if she didn’t have her arms and hands. “I hope that didn’t hurt,” he said to her as he wrapped her arms securely in his vestment and handed the bundle to one of his copies, slinging his sword afterward. “I know you and Kohaku were having sex earlier. You looked like you were enjoying it, so you must have been feeling pleasure, then. Just now, I could only assume that whatever you’d done to give yourself feeling again had subsided.”
            Minus her arms now, Kikyo lifted her head to separate her face from the earth and turned it so that her head lay on an ear. With cold venom, emphatic alliteration, and unusual profanity, she ordered: “Pick me up…off this fucking forest floor.”
(Soundtrack: Nightwish – Live to Tell the Tale)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_a2YTZCT7c
            Right then, Kagura forced Kohaku further and further through the forest. After being hit by her wind blades a few dozen times, he was in a great deal of pain and his movements were clumsy and uncoordinated, making him easy prey for her. Barely conscious and unsteady on his feet now, he gripped his katana and held it high, then made a wild, last-ditch charge at her. With her left hand, she caught his right wrist, that of his main sword-hand easily and discarded her magic fan-sword to free up her right hand, using it to grasp his throat and slam him up against a nearby tree.
            “Stop,” Kagura ordered harshly to Kohaku, speaking directly to his face. She forced his right hand downward with her left and squeezed hard on his wrist to get him to drop his sword. Involuntarily, his hold on it loosened and it fell from his hand, clattering to the roots at the base of the tree that Kagura had him pinned against. Unarmed now, he hardly stopped fighting her, clenching his unrestrained left hand into a hard fist and using it to pound down on her head from above. Sneering in mild annoyance from the pain, she let him get a few blows in before she released her right hand from his throat used it to grab his left wrist, pinning his hand it to the tree above his head. “Fucking stop! Please!”
            With both of his hands under Kagura’s control, Kohaku tried to follow up with his legs, driving a knee up into the wind witch’s stomach. However, the hard, lean female demonic muscle there was as living steel and his knee bounced off her stomach without effect. She responded by pressing herself closer to him, wedging him between her body and the tree, then used her legs to block his and hold him still. “God damn it, Kohaku, it’s me!”
            “You’re not her,” Kohaku rasped to Kagura’s face, still fighting to break free from her. “You can’t be. Kagura’s dead.”
            Kagura couldn’t help but give up a bitter laugh. “And so were you, until Naraku stuck a jewel shard in your neck,” she retorted. “As for me, it was Naraku from whom I came, Naraku to whom I returned, and Naraku from whom I came again. He fucking murdered me, and even death didn’t free me from him. I guess that’s our lot in life, to be manipulated by him.”
            Kohaku relaxed a little, recognizing that it was futile to struggle against Kagura any longer. He was exhausted, and she was taller, heavier, and vastly more powerful. He then realized that if Naraku was only after his jewel shard, then Kagura had more than enough strength to simply take it. She smiled softly in approval as he calmed down. “You’re so handsome now,” she complimented to him, her expression sobering quickly. “I wish I’d been there, to see you grow up. Maybe…maybe I could have been your first, instead of Kikyo. Not that she doesn’t deserve to be happy, too, especially after all this time. It’s just…I’m so happy to see you again.”
            Kohaku trembled as Kagura held him in her iron grip. At such an intimate distance, her body’s heat was overwhelming, and there was something in her scent that had his heart speeding up in his chest. He opened his mouth to speak again and he suddenly found himself without voice, without breath. The beautiful wind witch recognized the effect she had on him, having seen it on Naraku and Byakuya before. She pressed herself closer to him, molding her body to his, and her superior height made it necessary for him to tip his head back to keep eye contact with her. Her large breasts flattened against his chest through their clothes as she nuzzled her nose past his and kissed him.
            Back at the big oak tree, the original/main Byakuya stepped forward and stooped down over Kikyo to grasp her now-armless shoulders and pick her up off the ground. Despite having her arms torn off, she didn’t have any blood to lose, so her ‘life’ wasn’t in danger and her haori’s empty sleeves remained unstained. Carefully, he set her back onto her feet, and once she was steady upon them, he turned her in place to face him. Just as he opened his mouth to render a further apology, her smoky-grey eyes gave a mysterious, reiki-fueled flash.
            Byakuya felt Kikyo’s reiki enter his body through her steely gaze and every muscle in his body froze at once. Every muscle, to include the ones that moved his diaphragm and the ones in his heart. He couldn’t breathe! His heart defied Kikyo’s spell bravely, but gradually began to weaken and slow down. He felt his strength flowing out of him with every heartbeat he lost and every breath he missed.
            The effect Kikyo had on Byakuya spread throughout all his copies, so none could retaliate against her from their positions behind her and to her sides. “I’ve taken control of your body, inside and out,” she explained to him. “You can’t breathe now, and I just stopped your heart. You have one or two minutes left, at most.”
            True to Kikyo’s word, Byakuya felt heart his grow completely still between his lungs. He sank to his knees before her, unable to speak. His copies dissolved again, causing Kikyo’s severed arms, wrapped in his vestment, to fall to the ground from the empty air left behind. This time, he could not maintain the copy he’d left with Sayaka. His legs folded behind him and he fell onto his back on the ground, staring up and the sunlit forest canopy and writhing in silent, asphyxiating agony. He could do nothing about it, not even claw at his chest or throat. The color drained from his vision and the entire world began to darken before him. Kikyo moved to stand over him and keep eye contact with him, kneeling beside him as if to send him off to the next world.
            “I’d hold you in these last moments of yours, but as you can see, I haven’t the hands for it,” Kikyo jabbed to Byakuya as he died slowly. She then began to eulogize him. “I know you respect me, and to be perfectly honest, I never hated you. You were always so different from Naraku. Gentle where he would be brutal, accommodating where he would be unyielding. But you are dangerous to me and Kohaku. I can’t allow you or Kagura to take us to Naraku, and I know that you won’t just let us go, so I have to kill you. Die now, and find some measure of peace in the next world, if one awaits you.”
            “Kagura, help me!” Byakuya screamed into the telepathic link he shared with his female reflection. “HELP ME!”
            Meanwhile, Kohaku moaned into Kagura’s kiss and all of his resistance to her collapsed. Eagerly, she drank his moan from him and felt him relax against her. Sensing that we would not attack her further, she moved his left hand from the tree bark above his head and guided it down to her right hip, then back over her ample rear, encouraging him to take hold and grope as he pleased. She moved her left hand from his right wrist to align their hands, twining her fingers with his and squeezing gently, adding a depth of emotional intimacy to the kiss she shared with him. She took it deeper, slipping her tongue into his mouth and working it against his, then pulled away with a soft gasp.
            Kagura licked her glossy red lips to consider Kohaku’s taste and smiled down at him as he quivered against her. “God…I’ve wanted to do that for a while,” she whispered to him, grasping his chin between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and admiring his youthful male beauty. “But you were just…too young for it before. In some twisted way, maybe I should thank Naraku for keeping me on ice this long.”
            “It’s you,” Kohaku hushed in amazement and unexpectedly affirmed hope. The moment Kagura’s lips touched his, her youkai essence flowed into his body and mind, creating a telepathic connection and allowing him to ‘see’ her memories. He could see her interactions with Naraku, Byakuya, and Sayaka, including the sexual ones, then going just a little further back, he saw her last moments from her perspective. Sesshomaru stood over her in a field of wildflowers, then her gaze wandered over to him as he stood among InuYasha, Sango, and their friends. Her vision faded to black as she died, then returned to her as she came awake in Naraku’s arms. Watching her beat the living shit out of Naraku in first-person immediately afterward was all the more proof he needed. “It’s really you!”
            “Yes,” Kagura confirmed with a beaming smile and gave Kohaku another kiss, one more tender than the last. She wrapped her arms around him to hold him tight and he did the same to her as their second kiss ended, allowing them to bury their faces into their shoulders and nuzzle their heads together. She felt him weeping into her kimono and she felt tears come to her own eyes. That someone would be so happy to see her gave her a psychological boost she needed desperately.
            “I guess you missed me, then,” Kagura quipped, pulling away to brush Kohaku’s bangs away from his face and look upon his reddened eyes. “I missed you, too, though maybe for not the same amount of time. When I sent you away from me, to get you away from Hakudoshi, I didn’t think I would ever see you again. Then Naraku kills me, brings me back, and here I am with you.”
            “I missed you more than you can know,” Kohaku said. “But it looks like Naraku made some changes to your body. I’ve grown a foot or so over the past few years, and you’re still taller than me now. And then there are these…uh, curves of yours…”
            Kagura gave Kohaku a sexy, leering smile. “I’m glad you noticed. You can probably guess why Naraku made me like this.” Then, her smile faded as Byakuya’s telepathic cry for help reached her mind and she looked in his direction through the forest.
            “What is it?” Kohaku asked in concern.
            Kagura’s lips curled downward as she perceived the sheer terror Byakuya was feeling. He was basically drowning, above water. “Kikyo is killing Byakuya,” she answered. “I probably shouldn’t let that happen. If I turn my back on you, will you attack me?”
            Kohaku swallowed thickly, weighing his loyalty and romantic relationship with Kikyo against his friendship, history and possible romantic relationship with Kagura. Kagura saw the sudden conflict in his eyes and pre-empted his reply. “Actually, don’t answer that.” She was gone in a flash after that, using her incredible wind demon speed to collect her magic fan from the ground and vanish almost instantly, leaving Kohaku dumbstruck and still pressed up against the tree behind him. Any delay at all would give her a critical head-start, so he picked his katana up, as she had with her fan, and took off after her through the forest.
            Byakuya was seconds away from losing consciousness and entering the realm of brain death when Kagura reached him and Kikyo as the undead miko strangled him…with her mind. Once within range, Kagura launched herself into a flying kick and planted both feet to Kikyo’s head from one side, deftly knocking her away from Byakuya, allowing him to breathe again. He sucked in a desperate breath, as if having been held underwater for too long, and his heart began beating again, entering a state of intense tachycardia that would have been lethal for an ordinary human.
            Kikyo tumbled away from Byakuya by the force of Kagura’s kick and landed on her back several feet away. Missing her arms, she could still sit up, so she sat, then stood as Kagura advanced on her. “Don’t look in her eyes! Don’t look in her eyes!” Byakuya cried out from behind Kagura to warn his female reflection as he caught his breath, and she averted her gaze from Kikyo’s before the miko could paralyze her, too.
            Using her peripheral vision to aim, Kagura blasted Kikyo with a Fuujin no Mai from her fan and knocked her back down, then ran over to her and knelt at her side to rip off one of her haori’s empty sleeves, all before she could recover. Quickly identifying the ‘grain’ of the sleeve’s fabric, she tore a long, rectangular section from it and wrapped it around Kikyo’s head as a blindfold. Now, unless she had any other incredible, lethal abilities up her remaining sleeve, she was no longer a threat.
            Kohaku arrived just a few seconds later, katana in hand. Between him and Kagura/Kikyo, Byakuya picked himself up off the ground and faced the taijiya warrior, contemplating drawing his own sword to fend him off. Kagura stayed his hand: “Byakuya, no. Kohaku knows I’m ‘me’ now.” Byakuya blinked in understanding, still wary of Kohaku, but his sword-hand remained at his side. Kagura spoke to Kohaku next. “Kohaku, Byakuya is a friend of mine. At least, we’re friendly enough to be on fucking terms, so don’t fight him, please.”
            Kohaku did not immediately sheathe his sword, causing Byakuya’s sword hand to creep upward to the hilt of his own as it sat in the scabbard across his back. Unable to see through the blindfold over her eyes, but still able to perceive the surrounding world by spiritual energy, Kikyo observed Kohaku about to engage Byakuya, and let out a defeated sigh. “It’s all right, Kohaku,” she called out, raising her voice so that Kohaku could hear her by his distance from her. Beside her, Kagura helped her into a sitting position. “I am figuratively and quite literally disarmed, and you are no match for Byakuya and Kagura together. Don’t fight them, now.”
            Byakuya relaxed as Kohaku sheathed his katana and stood to one side, giving him a clear path to walk to Kikyo and Kagura behind him. As he passed, the male wind demon took the liberty of relieving the taijiya warrior of his katana and any other taijiya ‘surprises’ he might have carried on the sash around his waist, then allowed him to continue. Kohaku joined Kagura at Kikyo’s side, his stomach twisting at the sight of the damage he’d allowed Byakuya to do to her. “I’m sorry,” he apologized to her, touching the sleeve that Kagura hadn’t removed from her haori, noting its conspicuous emptiness. “I couldn’t kill Kagura after all, even when I had my chance.”
            Kikyo laughed softly, dismissive of Kohaku’s guilt. “I expected as much,” she revealed to him, to his relief. “I felt the change in you the moment you saw her. There is a part of the human soul that cannot be tricked, one way or another. I know you love her.”
            Kagura felt a painful tightness in her chest. “Shit…” she hushed. “I know how close you two are now. Byakuya and I came to take the two of you to Naraku, but we didn’t come to fuck up your relationship. I’m sorry, too…for everything.”
            “Be consoled that my relationship with Kohaku is unaffected, as yet,” Kikyo assured to Kagura, to Kohaku’s surprise. “InuYasha has more than one woman, so we shall see if Kohaku can handle both of us, if we all live long enough to see such a thing happen.”
            Kohaku blushed at the thought of being with Kikyo and Kagura at once. He’d only given Kikyo his virginity an hour or two earlier and already, he was well on his way to getting into a second woman’s bed, a woman who also happened to be a force of nature. Still blindfolded, Kikyo looked to Kagura. “We are soundly beaten, unable or unwilling to resist you further. Will you take us to Naraku, now?”
            “Yes. We’d better get going,” Kagura replied. Byakuya had been listening in the meantime and called his giant origami crane down through the forest canopy, summoning it to his side and floating it over to Kikyo’s feet. Kagura scooped Kikyo up into her arms and laid her in the crane, then plucked a white feather from her hair and used her kaze magic to transform into its scaled-up flight size. She gestured for Kohaku to board it and as he climbed into it, she, Byakuya, and Kikyo, the three of them being more spiritually-sensitive than the taijiya warrior, each felt a tremendous explosion of raw youki emanating from their southwest.
            Kagura was about to climb into her feather behind Kohaku and she stopped mid-step, turning to face the direction she felt the youki coming from. “Holy shit,” she awed, visualizing the intensity of the youki against the earth’s natural spiritual background. “What is that?”
            “An oni,” Kikyo determined, blindfolded by able to see dozens, if not hundreds of miles on the spiritual plane. “A very powerful one. Its youki has just appeared, so the oni must have transformed from some lesser state.” After a few moments of reading the spiritual signatures in that direction, she added: “InuYasha and Sesshomaru are there with it, as are all the others.”
            The oni that Kikyo, Kagura, and Byakuya sensed was Kuno, having transformed into a hulking, green-skinned brute after InuYasha ran him through with Tetsuseiga. Sealed inside an arena-like barrier with Kuno, InuYasha put up a brave fight until the oni hulk got hold of him and bit him, infecting him with his venom. Moments afterward, they felt InuYasha’s youki match, then eclipse Kuno’s, with Sesshomaru’s youki following close behind as the inu brothers engaged him in a bloody battle to the death. InuYasha tore Kuno’s heart out and Sesshomaru decapitated him, killing him hard and completely erasing his youki from the mortal plane. A minute or so afterward, Sesshomaru’s aura calmed, followed by InuYasha’s as Kagome reunited him with Tetsuseiga.
            Kagura and Byakuya felt Naraku’s sinister voice speak into their minds, shuddering by the indecent tone of it. “Kagura, Byakuya. I’m sure both of you felt that, just now,” he said, able to monitor the spiritual plane from his dark castle as they did standing on Honshu.
            The two wind demons glanced at each other, silently deciding which one of them would have the unenviable task of communicating with their dark master. To be in his presence was to risk being physically raped, while to converse with him by telepathy was to risk being mentally raped. Being the ‘elder’ and braver of the two, Kagura answered. “We did,” she said aloud, thinking and speaking her reply at once so that Kikyo and Kohaku could hear her end of what she and Naraku were discussing. “We have Kikyo and Kohaku, now. What do you want us to do?”
            “Bring them to me,” Naraku ordered. “As for InuYasha, investigate what has happened. Spy on him and his friends, then report back. Byakuya, that task shall fall to you. You can be in two places at once, so make a copy of yourself and send it InuYasha’s way.”
            “As you wish,” Byakuya acquiesced, making a single copy of himself, who created a giant origami crane of his own on which to ride. He handed Kanna’s mirror back to Kagura, since he could find InuYasha and Sesshomaru by their youki alone. Despite being reluctant to follow Naraku’s orders, he was eager to return to Sayaka: he could feel that the copy of himself he’d left with her had dissolved during Kikyo’s psychic attack on him and such a thing was likely to upset her. Making a copy of himself to fulfill Naraku’s will while the ‘main’ part of himself returned to the castle with Kikyo allowed him to do that.
            Kagura climbed into her feather, sitting behind Kohaku, while Byakuya retrieved Kikyo’s severed arms as they lay where they had fallen on the forest floor, still wrapped in his navy vestment. He lay them next to Kikyo in his crane and dared not try to reattach them, lest she try and kill him mid-flight. Taking his seat behind her, he and Kagura lifted off through the forest canopy and turned east once clear of it, heading to Naraku’s castle while his copy ascended with them, turning southwest for InuYasha and his friends.
            Together, Kagura and Byakuya were powerless to do anything but obey Naraku’s will, for the moment. They could only pray that the oni lord didn’t have anything too depraved planned for Kikyo and Kohaku. It was an empty prayer, at best.

-To be continued-
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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