Chapter 52: For Want of a Nail
After completing the barrier, and reassuring the few hanyō and yōkai that lived with the exterminators Dekuyume and Kagome had offered healing assistance to the exterminators master healer. The tiny medicine woman, Kiki, turned out to be Sango and Kohaku's mother. She thanked them, but asked that they keep their strength. It was more important to have fighters available than fully healed, but still exhausted exterminators.
The woman's eyes crinkle as she smiles, "My husband has told us of the ink-spell you have given us, and now you have given us a barrier to ease our burden even further. It seems that we will be in dept to your house for quite some time. Unfortunately with everyone recovering, only my children are in any condition to keep taking requests, I…" Dekuyume spares her the trouble. "You need us to help them since two exterminators are not enough to form a full hunting party. To make matters worse, you can't even guarantee any income for the village even if you do keep taking requests for aid, because you only ask the villages you aid for what they can afford to spare."
Kiki nods, worried for her children, and Dekuyume glances over at her sister, who grins chirping. "Does that mean I can wear armor like Sango-chan instead of the faraday stuff?" Dekuyume laughs, shaking her head. "Come now, surely it wasn't that bad."
Kiki clears her throat as Kagome pouts. "Well, if you don't mind a used set, and it doesn't reject you as a miko… I still have mine from when I was Sango's age. I retired from field medicine when I was pregnant with her, and I never went back so that if anything ever happened to Kei, my people would still have a leader, and my children would still have a parent." She considers mentioning how inappropriate the young miko's garb was, but did not want to insult her. The exterminator armor may have been formfitting, but at least all of their skin was covered.
Kagome gasps in surprise, she had mostly been joking… but that armor looked so much easier to move around in… though, what did she mean by reject? "Are you sure?" Kiki nods, "Yes, I had meant to give it to Sango, but… It is a secret kept in our clan, I am sharing it with you because of the dept we owe you. Every set of armor and every weapon is made from the yōkai we have defeated. While we are able to purge them of the malice the yōkai had in life, their gentled spirits remain attached. When I tried to give my old armor to Sango, the yōkai inside rejected her, I suppose that they would rather work with a healer. You are welcome to try, provided you are comfortable knowing what you do now."
Kagome glances at Dekuyume, biting her lip. Dekuyume smiles gently, "You won't hurt them if you don't want to, you have a fair amount of control over your magic, and most automatic defenses are triggered by hostile intentions." Kagome grins jumping for joy.
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Naraku had finished preparing his spell, having spent a ridiculous amount of time arguing with himself about the best way to go about trapping a yōkai that could transform into lighting. He had set up his trap around the brothers base, and waited a week for them to come back home. The waiting had been murder on his patience, in order to silence the endless complaining of Onigumo he had decided to check on the news in the town nearest Raimei valley. From his position at the inn's bar counter, disguised as the 5th son of a lord, traveling the world in search of purpose, he hears drunken men gossiping about the beautiful women who had just joined their village.
Naraku grits his teeth, grateful that his use of the Hitomi's form ensured his face did not randomly sprout appendages due to his emotional state. The women had joined the village before he had even finished preparing the spell. He had wasted so much time preparing a trap for men who were already dead, and even more time waiting for them to come home. Disappointingly, when he had cornered and adsorbed one of the women that had been rescued, he only gained knowledge of her ridiculous fear of heights and the knowledge that an exterminator had been part of the group.
He left the village shortly after that. There was no reason to stay. He considered destroying it to ease his anger, but he did not want to give away the fact that he was on their trail. He would need some way of keeping an eye on his opponents if he did not want this to happen again. But there was no other yōkai, hanyō or human that he would trust to do this for him, if only Ito-chan had lived… That was it!
The problem in Ito's creation had been space. His soul was roughly 7-8 orders of magnitude larger than it should be, and when Ito's soul had been released from the collective into her new body, her fragments had remained that far apart without any support structures to sustain them. It had caused the flesh he built around her to deform and deteriorate before her soul could anchor to it. She had been both a volunteer, and well liked among many of the souls that made up their collective. None of them had been happy to see her die and enter the reincarnation cycle.
Even the third of the jewel that he held now, had enough power to compress his soul fragments together removing some of the void space; increasing their density would do him no harm. Then, once the fragments were much closer together, he could oust some of the more annoying souls as incarnations. He grins maliciously, the hardest part of the whole thing would be trying to decide what precautions to take to prevent treachery.
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After making sure that the armor did not reject Kagome, they set off again. On the way to a village next to a large lake, the exterminator siblings explained the request. They would not explain how it was that a village hidden in the mountains received these requests, but Dekuyume already knew how. She would not speak of it, there was no reason to give Naraku more reason to attack the village. Without the mirror of seeking, Kanna would be much simpler to defeat this time.
The village they were heading to had recently been besieged by the kami in the lake. Claiming insult the kami was demanding the villagers first born sons, promising to stop flooding their village once his anger was abated. Disturbingly, he was eating them, whole. Kagome shouted when she heard that. "There is no way that's a real kami!"
Calming her sister, she agrees, and so do the exterminators. "Yes, we thought that was strange as well. The village headman contacted us the moment that the kami demanded a second boy, and is worried that the kami's anger will continue until every first born boy in the village is dead. He can't do anything overtly, for fear of angering the one causing the floods, so we will be on our own. They are moderately well off, and should be able to spare some food, pottery and cloth for us to carry back home."
It was a simple matter in the end. Using the stealth and evasion skills they hand trained so long for, the exterminators were able to gather information from the village, and scout out the position the yōkai was hiding in. At the very center of the lake on a small island ,was a shrine that they had seen him moving around on. In doing so they discovered something interesting. In addition to the shrine, there was also a sacred rock and a very suspicious sutra stuck to it. The true kami had been sealed inside, and had heard them talking to one another.
The two exterminators had freed her and gazed in wonder at the tiny form she had taken to conserve her power. Carefully, they had returned to the rest of the group with the kami riding on Kirara's back while she was in her kitten form. The kami then explained what had really happened. One of her vassals with delusions of grandeur had stolen the trident that served as her Regalia. Without her only weapon, she had been powerless to stop him. As it was, she was probably going to have to fire the spirit, and revoke his name. There was just no excuse for allowing the serpent to use him.
They rested for the remainder of the day, and in the darkest part of the night, Kirara transported them all across, two at a time. The two guards never even noticed them, but then, they were merely ensorcelled fish and shellfish. Feeling a powerful magic in the area, Dekuyume waived for them to follow her quietly. His lessons with Kohaku must have been paying off, because Inuyasha seemed to have gained some manner of discipline, and remained quiet through the whole process, even though he had been the one to wait the longest.
They crept down the hallway until they came upon the room that the serpent was lounging in. Dekuyume rolls her eyes as she hears him wondering if the headman's son would taste better than his last meal to yet another ensorcelled lake creature. And then, their good luck streak breaks as Kagome sneezes. The serpent demands that they enter, threatening to unleash a flood if they don't. He spots the true lake kami the moment she enters the room and begins bragging about how easy his victory had been. Unwilling to let a dumb snake yak at him, Inuyasha darts forward drawing Murasame. Sango and Kohaku follow close behind.
The serpent raises the trident and points it at the silly humans rushing at him, preparing to call on the waters to wash them all away. He grins maliciously as he contemplates eating them all one by one as they drown. The water trips the trio up, pushing them back. Carefully, while he is distracted, Dekuyume palms her yin-yang tantō, and with a deft flick of the wrist, throws it through past her falling companions. It strikes true, cutting off his thumb, and forcing him to release the spear. He hisses in pain, forced to watch as the trident is swept away in the very waters it had created, and as the water drains out, it stops right at the feet of the true lake kami.
There wasn't really much for them to do after that. The kami undid most of the damage her vassal had caused, and reassured the villagers that she did not, nor had she ever, demanded the life of a human. Grateful that they had stopped this from continuing before he was forced to decide if he was going to actually sacrifice his own son the way he had asked everyone else to, the headman had given them more goods than they could carry. He had even given them a horse and cart to pull it with!
Taking the opportunity offered by the cart, Dekuyume gives lessons to Kagome, Shippō, and Sōten while they travel. Kagome had a lot of material to cover before her next test, and the two children needed to work on their handwriting. Kōryū proved to be quite the little scholar, he could read very well, but without opposable thumbs, he could not learn to write. With a mischievous grin, Dekuyume gently hit the little dragon on the head three times, triggering his transformation. Promptly handing him his utensils and paper, she continued the lesson.
