Chapter 2

Kagome heaved her oversized backpack over the sill of the bone eater's well from within, and the heavy rucksack, filled with goodies for her friends as well as her textbooks, fell to hit the earth of Feudal Era Japan. Next over the sill was Kagome herself, with some assistance supplied by a still somewhat dazed half dog-demon in a red kimono. As her head was coming up above the ledge, her eyes became level with a pair of keen blue eyes that shone with joy and excitement.

"Kagome! I'm so glad you're back!" Shippo's voice mirrored his eyes, and he let go of the well, dropping to land on his feet at the well's base.

"Hello, Shippo. It's good to see you too," spoke a smiling Kagome. She noted that Sango and Miroku were standing nearby, both smiling at their friend's return. Shippo continued to speak as she extricated herself from the well.

"It was really boring here without you, 'cause nothing interesting happens when you're gone, and Miroku was busy doin' monk stuff and Sango was gone, and Kaede was busy, and Inuyasha was moping about because you wer- OW! What did you do that for, Inuyasha?" Inuyasha had leapt up from the well during Shippo's speech, and was well prepared to smack Shippo down, an action he executed with his own style of anger, embarrassment, and denial.

"Because you don't seem to know when to shut up, pip-squeak." As the fox demon and the half demon squabbled in the background, Kagome walked up to Miroku and Sango.

"It is good to see you again, Kagome," said Sango.

"Indeed it is. You have been missed. Has Inuyasha told you of what happened in the North while you were away?" Miroku inquired.

Inuyasha had already told his tale to the others before he had left, and he had told Kagome whist still in the modern era, so the group started to make their way north, towards the village that would house any surviving witnesses, and anyone who could possibly answer the party's questions. Kaede would be staying in the village during this expedition, however.

They reached the village two days later. The villagers themselves could only repeat what they had told the merchant: that over a week ago, on a clear day, they had heard lots of what sounded like peals of thunder. They knew that the local lord was out riding with his vassals, and that maybe he was fighting something. He had ridden out from that very village that morning, and had stated his intention to return by nightfall. When dusk was falling, six wounded and exhausted men, whom the villagers recognized as some of the lord's vassals, stumbled in through the village gate. All that they would say was that a battle had taken place three miles to the east, and that they had run into some sort of demons who cut down their comrades with reckless abandon. Two of the survivors soon died from strange wounds that looked like very deep punctures, and the remaining four collapsed into fatigue-induced comas. Ever prudent, the villagers had no intention of finding out what had happened until they were sure it was safe. It was not until the next day that they worked up the courage to go searching for the field of battle. What they found astonished them. The entirety of the local lords retinue had been slaughtered. This in and of itself was not exceptional, especially not in a world where terrible demons lurked in the deep shadows of the world, but how the bodies were found. They had been buried, and with some care. This puzzled the villagers, who would not go near the graves for fear that they might incur the wrath of the spirits interred there.

Kagome tried talking to one of the four surviving witnesses, who had recently regained consciousness, but the experience had apparently driven him mad. All he would say was "Thunder and smoke, smoke and thunder," and, "Death is in the wind." They could not interview the remaining three men, unfortunately, because they were still unconscious. As they were walking towards the battlefield, they tried to make sense of the madman's words.

"Rather cryptic fellow, wasn't he?" Miroku asked.

"The poor man. Seeing your lord and your comrades exterminated like that, it really took a toll on him, didn't it," pondered Kagome.

"Don't worry," Inuyasha said, "It's probably just some demon who's overcome with the power of a jewel shard and thinks he's invincible. We'll just have to cut 'im down to size and take that shard from him. No problem."

"I am not so sure," said Sango, "I sense something strange about this, but I can't pinpoint just what. Lets just keep moving." Shippo was not privy to this discussion, but this was because he and Kirara had both fallen asleep inside Kagome's backpack, and the unconscious do not get to participate in conversation, or at least not usually.

The battleground appeared just as the villagers had described. From the addled accounts of the six survivors, the battle had taken place both on a large pasture off to one side of the road, and on the road itself. In the middle of the meadow there were four long rows of neat little mounds with spears and other pole arms stuck into the ground at one end to serve as headstones. There were approximately six hundred graves in all, one of which still bore a fine suit of armor and a pair of swords, a katana and a wakizashi. These blades were indeed of fine craftsmanship, and it puzzled Kagome why thieves and looters had not already dug up the graves and stripped the dead of all of their worldly possessions.

"The local thieves are afraid." Miroku said, answering Kagome's unasked question, "They fear that to open these graves is to set the demons that put the corpses there on their track, and the thieves that either don't believe in that or are brave enough to risk angering unknown demons eitherhaven't heard about it or just haven't got here yet."

"Strange," Inuyasha said, "I can't smell any demons here. I smell humans, and blood. Lots of blood. And something else...very faint. It's like…like a cross between smoke and brimstone, but different. Very faint though."

Kagome looked about the battleground. A glint of light on the ground caught her eye, and she knelt down upon the ground to examine what the light was reflecting off of. It proved to a metallic, hollow cylinder made of brass that was a little bit more than half an inch in diameter at one end, which was closed and had several concentric circular grooves in it, but towards the other end it was necked down to a little bit less than half an inch, which was open. As she looked closely at the ground, she spotted another one, then another, then another. Now that she knew what she was looking for, she saw that the ground was littered with these metal containers. She sniffed the open end, and a hypothesis formed in her mind. However, like any experiment, she needed to conduct a test, of sorts.

"Inuyasha?" Kagome called.

"Yeah?"

"Could you come here, please?"

"Sure. Why?" He sprinted his way over to Kagome.

"Smell this, would you?" She proffered the brass cylinder. He looked at her warily for a moment, but when she glared at him, he took the cylinder and sniffed the open end as well.

"Ugh! That's that brimstone and smoke smell again, only much stronger. What is that thing, Kagome?"

"I have an idea on what this is, but I'm not totally sure. I am sure, however, that I know someone who does. Unfortunately, Inuyasha, it means I need to go back to my era for a day."

"AGAIN!" came his displeased cry, "You just got back!"

"And now I need to go back. We need to know what we're up against. Even you can't argue against that." Inuyasha was still glaring his displeasure at her, but grudgingly nodded.

"Fine. But you'd better not waste time there! The sooner you get back, the sooner we can kill these things, whatever they are, and get the Jewel Shards back." He stood there a moment; his arms stillcrossed over his chest in defiance, and then motioned for Kagome to get on his back. "The faster you get back to your time, the faster you can get back," he explained. Kagome paused to take Shippo and Kirara out of her pack, then climbed up onto to the half demon's back. Once she was secure, he started leaping south. "You guys wait here for a day and try and find anything you can from those survivors! After that, head back to the well. We'll meet you there." Kagome could not hear their replies, between the wind of their rapid movement in her ears and the rapidly growing distance between the pair and the rest of the group. Inuyasha's keen dog-ears, however caught the affirmative reply, and he increased his speed.

As she rode on Inuyasha's back, she thought of the metal object, which she had placed in her pack. She was sure that she recognized that smell. She had smelt it once before, during Professor MacDunwald's class, the class where he fired off a Baker rifle after class, to be precise. The scent that Inuyasha could not identify smelled a lot like black powder, which she knew was the propellant of all early firearms. She was proud of herself for remembering that little snippet of information from history class. She was certain MacDunwald could offer some answers concerning what she believed to be a spent cartridge casing. After a day's worth of constant running, leaping, and sprinting, Inuyasha came to a halt at the bone eater's well. Kagome got off of his back, and made towards the well. She turned, and spoke to him.

"Thank you, Inuyasha, for carrying me here."

"Um, yeah. Was nothing, really. Just get to your era and back as soon as possible, okay?"

"You got it. See you soon!" With that, Kagome jumped into the well.

The next day, after class was finished, she went to Professor MacDunwald's office, and gave him the cylinder. He examined closely for a while, then spoke.

"Well, Kagome, that's an interesting find you have there," MacDunwald said, examining the shell. "You are correct in your deduction that this is the spent remains of a self-contained gun cartridge. You are even correct in your believe that it had been filled with black powder. I suppose you want to know the actual details, don't you?"

"Why, yes, sir."

"Very well. This is the brass shell for a Sir Henry Boxer point five seven seven dash point four five caliber cartridge, or in other words, a shell that is fifty-seven point seven percent of an inch in diameter at the base, and necked down to forty-five percent of an inch in diameter at the top. The only gun in the world that was chambered for this round was the British Martini-Henry, which was a single-shot drop-block rifle. Very reliable, served the British army for thirty years, from the late eighteen-sixties to the mid eighteen-nineties. Where did you say you picked this up?"

"A, uh, friend gave it to me. I told him that I knew someone who could identify it for him. Obviously, I was right. Thank you sir, and I'm already working on a topic for my paper," she called out as she made her way out of MacDunwald's office.

"A most charming lass," MacDunwald said to himself, shaking his head, "but most certainly daft out of her little skull. Of course, so am I, after a fashion. Now then, I'd better get back to being a productive member of society, and all that rot, before they start yelling at me. Ha ha." With that, the teacher went back to work in his office.

As she made her way back home, Kagome wracked her brain trying to figure things out. Shehad answered one question, but it had in turn raised a host of more questions. At the front of this horde of questions was a rather simple one, which would promise a most complex answer: "What in the world are nineteenth-century British riflemen doing in Feudal Era Japan?"