Disclaimer: I do not own Inuyasha or Naruto. The only thing I own is the plot.

Beta: Michelle T.

Chapter 9: Jailbreak 2


Will he now?

Came the thought in Kagome's head the instant those words came out the little girl's mouth. She meant well, Kagome knew, but this was not the first nor would it be the last time when Kagome felt doubt in her guardian, the chief of the Sand people village, Rasa.

When they talked for the first time after meeting Gaara, her first instinct was a niggling question. What sort of a father would let something like that happen to his own child? What adult would let a child suffer so? That boy whose soul was so grotesquely mutilated was without a doubt of Rasa's blood. They had the same hair, the same face, the same lean and wiry build, and the same eyes that when agitated, would lit up like the eyes of some great cat. The features on the son were only separated from the father's by a magnitude of years and experience. Kagome had seen both the boy and the mother, for a split second, in the memories of his father.

But as soon as the thought occurred to her, she would remind herself that she didn't know the whole story. She could barely speak the Sand people's language at it was, and knew but a handful of facts about their culture. She had no right to judge anything or anyone in this land.

The boy's chimeric soul was obviously an artificial construction, but she didn't know how or why it had come to be. She had never seen anything like it before. Not even Naraku's soul was as viscerally divided; more tainted yes, but the parts when merged together was still united under a single will. It could be a curse, or the aftermath of a magical accident, or the result of some malicious soul disease whose cure the father was working on… if there was one.

The point was: she didn't know the full story and the world and people both were complicated things that should never be judged on first looks alone… even when Kagome could literally gaze into the true self of all living things if she really wanted to.

It was the same as when she was journeying across the Sengoku Jidai. The history book mentioned it, but not until Kagome happened across a village after the raid of a wandering army in the beginning of her journey... did she realize the brutality and horror of the era. It was the bloodiest age of Japanese history. For a hundred and thirty-six years, war and chaos raged across a land whose throne lay empty. As the lords, daimyos, and samurai measured the depth of their ambition and ruthlessness in blood and death, the little people suffered.

Life in the Segoku Jidai was nothing at all like the life as Kagome knew of until then.

Of that first village she happened upon, only three people survived. A woman and her two nephews, all three of them near naked and sitting by the embers of their ruined house. As she patched them up with the supplies from her first aid kit, Kagome chattered on to draw them from the trauma of the experience. It didn't take until she shared her lunch with them for the woman to start talking, in a quiet, muted voice, of what she wanted to do.

She wanted to send her boys to the neighboring lord's army, she said. Where they would be fed and taught how to hold a spear and maybe allowed to become the servants of some soldiers of meager rank.

Kagome had been horrified then. Those boys didn't look a day older than nine. They had endured such tragedy and now their aunt wanted to send the both of them into the neighboring lord's army? Where they didn't have a qualm about throwing children into the fray? Wouldn't they be better off staying together?

She never understood why the woman would even consider the option until Kaede, once Kagome returned to her village, explained to her the rationale behind the aunt's decision. Left alone and with nothing to their name, those three wouldn't have lasted the winter. If they didn't die from starvation, disease, bandits, slavers, or the wild beasts and flesh eating demons that roamed the land, then the cold of the coming winter would still have picked them off with absolute certainty.

Few villages would open their doors to them, not with the taint of death and disaster clinging to their skin and hair. Even if they were lucky enough to find those few that would, life would still be difficult. In those times, a household with no man in it opened itself up to all sorts of abuses. The bruises and marks on the aunt's near naked body when Kagome discovered them were a testament to that.

In contrast, a life in a lord's army, while hard, would still give them the certainty of food on the table and clothes on their back and while that might seem trivial to Kagome—said Kaede softly, patiently, in the voice she used when speaking to young children—that would already have been many times more than what the young aunt could give her nephews herself. As for the prospect of death, well, everybody died eventually. Death, in the time of war and strife, was a close and old friend.

In this land, said Kaede, people lived and died like the wild grass that grew by the side of the road, quickly and thoughtlessly, making the most of what was given them. Life was not ideal, but it went on. And if their choices appeared ill thought-out to Kagome—who by that time had had the luck of a privileged life devoid of heartbreak and tragedy in a land as good as heaven to these people—then really it was through no fault of theirs. It was merely how the world was in those days, and if she was to judge them based on the standards of her privileged life and idealistic world, then it would have been judgement made without thought and consideration for the world she now inhabited.

To be quick to judge was the mark of the young, said Kaede, and while Kagome had all rights to the fallacy of youth at only fifteen years old, it probably would do her a world of good to be mindful of the differences of her world and their world and the limitations of her own youth.

In the blink of an eye, she had been filled with shame then for not having realized that simple truth sooner. There was no sense in judging the people of another world by the standard of her own, no sense in holding the same expectations on a land not her own. It was a lesson that served to keep her grounded throughout her year-long journey through the fantastical land of Japan five hundred years before her time, where demons hid in the skin of unfortunate princesses and madmen cannibalized their way to demi-godhood.

It was the same story here, with Rasa and his son… or was it?

Kagome sat down on the bench by the long table and looked at all the children surrounding her, and with care and deliberate slowness, fielded her question.

"How... will Lord Kazekage... save us?" The adults and the warrioresses would not give straight answers to her stumbling questions regarding the boy Gaara. Perhaps in these children she would get her answers at last.

"He's strong! The strongest warrior of the village!" a young boy with wire rim glasses on the bridge of his nose jumped to the answer. "He'll beat the Shukaku to a pulp!"

"Shukaku?" Kagome repeated the strange name.

"Shukaku is the big demon," a girl in blue shorts provided.

Demon? Did they mean the tanuki spirit grafted to the boy's soul?

"Beat Shukaku? How?" If Rasa possessed a power that could combat a bodiless spirit, then Kagome had never sensed nor seen it in action.

"Yeah! With his gold tsunami! I know somebody who has seen it once. He does it like this!" The wire-rim glass boy demonstrated excitedly with his hands. "And the sand dust goes like swoosh and make a big wave, and then he pulls his hands and the big wave goes on top of the demon, who goes squished under all that gold." The boy nudged the bridge of his glass with one hand, primly stating. "Gold is very heavy you know. And Lord Kazekage can command all the gold in the earth."

"That…" Kagome started, "But… that would hurt Gaara…" Surely that was not the way he would go about it? The boy was attached to the spirit and to harm the body of one was to harm the body of the other. She wasn't sure how such a messy stitching of the souls could be unravelled but it most certainly could not be done the way the wire-rim glasses boy was talking about. She looked at the older children, expecting one of them to come forward with a more sensible explanation, but to her surprise, no such thing happened. Instead, the older kids nodded as if what the wire-rim glass boy said made perfect sense to them.

"Who cares about Gaara?" said one boy with a bow cut, with undisguised callousness in his voice. "Nobody would care if he gets hurt… or dies." To Kagome's horror, the boy's carelessly cruel comment was met with nods of approval from the other children. From their tiny little mouths came a string of chirruping susurrus.

"Yeah, I don't like Gaara either." "I just want him to go away." "He'd be better off dead. We wouldn't have to deal with his fits then." "Why'd he have to live in the same village as ours?" "Even mama matron thought he was too dangerous to let loose. Why can't they just put him in a prison same as they did the old monk?" "It's cause he's the Kazekage's son. If he weren't…"

"Stop it!" snapped Kagome, at once shocked and horrified at the outpouring of malice from a group of children no older than twelve. "That is not nice. You.. you all should not say that!"

They hushed at the sound of her raised voice, turning confused and chagrined eyes at her.

"But… Onee-san, you don't understand," one of them protested, "Gaara is... bad... all the adults said so. He hurt people, killed them. Did you know the first person he killed was when he was five? We are not being mean. He is. He's the monster!"

The scene before her eyes was becoming eerily familiar. Kagome had seen them before, in a different place, a different time, the same play enacted with different actors. The Hanyou Jinenji and the angry villagers who were convinced that he was the demon preying on their members. Shiori whose bat demon parentage got her to be forcibly exiled from her own village and birth mother. It was the same…no, it was worse. Jinenji had his mother. Shiori had hers and the ghost of her father.

The chimeric child Gaara… if she was hearing it right… had no one. Not his father, not his sister, not his fellow villagers, not even the children of his age. And the unnatural state of his grafted soul must give him a lot more trouble than Jinenji's misshapen body ever did. The Sand warriors were a lot like the taijiya of old, but they had neither holy monks nor mikos with purifying power. It occurred to her then, with the complete lack of true youkai and individuals with strong spiritual power in this world, that the people would not know how to deal with a child like Gaara, would be unprepared to live with someone like him. And that… was a sad thing to think about.

"He's not," she said to the orphans, voice quiet but unyielding. "He's a boy, a child, like you." She was upset, and somewhat angry, but they weren't the ones at fault. They were children who knew no better than what was taught to them by the adults around them.

"He killed people!" said the boy with the wire-rim glass.

As if to prove his statement, Kagome sensed two souls blinked out at once, the light of their spirit flared at the moment of death, crushed beneath the nebulous presence of the tanuki, before fading away to some other world. The tanuki was going on a rampage in the market square where a lot of people were still stuck. The child part of the soul was completely crushed to the bottom, trapped in the madness of his much more powerful counterpart. If he was left as he was, a lot more innocent people would die.

"Then he needs… to be stopped. But it doesn't change… the fact that he needs help," said Kagome, standing up. "I need… I need to go to where he is." The Shadow of the Wind would not be happy with her, but at the moment, what he wanted her to do was quite irrelevant.

"You won't go anywhere," came the quiet statement from her back. Kagome turned and there Yuhi stood. Only by the account of her young age was Kagome able to read the expressions on her face. She was conflicted, but in the end committed to carrying out her mission to the letter. Ever since day one, Kagome had never been under any delusions as to the nature of her 'maidens'. They never wore the garbs of the warrioress but there was no hiding the sharp tones of their bodies to Kagome who had lived and slept and bathed with Sango for the better part of a year. They were good people, and genuinely wanted to be her friends, this she knew without a doubt. But on the other side, they were also soldiers with a mission. She didn't know the details of what order they were under, but she could guess well enough. To protect her, and watch over her as per the Shadow of the Wind's instructions.

And if she knew Rasa, which she thought she she had a fair grasp of, having been in the man's close acquaintance for over eight months, then he must have already made known to these girls the fact that he wanted her nowhere near the chimeric boy.

"It's dangerous outside, Kagome-sama," Yuhi continued. She was standing with her hands by her side and out in the open, the pose coupled with the floral babydoll dress she wore making her look like a harmless teenager girl rather than the trained warrioress she really was. "You've always been kind. I know you want to help, but Kazekage-sama… no… we… all of us would be heart-broken if anything were to happen to you. You cannot help Gaara. For now, it is best that you remain here."

Yuhi sounded sincere. The light of her spirit was untainted with deceit. Which made it more difficult than if she were only a soldier following the directive of her superior. Smiling sadly at her, Kagome said.

"Yuhi… I'm sorry…"

The thing about being able to see souls and spirits was that eventually, gradually, even the way Kagome interacted with the world became different. After sight, others thing followed. She used to not be able to do much other than just see the world in a different way than other people, but with time, she began discovering other things. If she touched the spirit just right… like this… not with her hands of course, but with the reach of her own spirit.

Yuhi had a split second to realize something was going on before she stiffened and then collapsed on the spot, unconscious. Kagome caught her on her way down, then gently lowered her to the ground. The children gasped in shock at the sudden turns of event behind and around her.

"She sleeps," said Kagome in an attempt to calm them. "Don't worry. It's not bad. She wakes up soon." Then she turned around to the orphans who Yuhi had been patching up until just now. "Can you… watch her for me? Make sure she's... okay… when she wakes." They nodded dazedly, looking in bemusement between the supposedly harmless priestess and the seasoned but now quite clearly unconscious kunoichi.

She turned to look at the door then. She needed to leave before Mei came back from investigating whatever was making that racket. Looking at the dazed and lost children around her, she said softly.

"I need to... go out. I need to go to where Gaara is."

"You… she…" the wire-rim glasses boy stuttered, then, as if having regained his bearings, he straightened up. "There's the barrier. No one can get out."

Yes, there was Oren's barrier enveloping the entirety of the building. But even when she was only fifteen and starting to learn the intricacies of Miko craft, barriers had never been able to trouble her. Not all of them anyhow. Oren's barrier might not be like anything she had felt before, but it didn't seem to have the overwhelming strength of Naraku or Shiori's barriers.

"I can," she said simply in response to the boy's statement. "But... I don't know the way to where Gaara is." She had an idea of the direction, but the streets of Sunagakure was a honeycomb maze that required a lot of time and exploration neither of which she really had, having always been escorted through specific cleared paths off the peak traffic area to wherever the destination of the day was.

There was suddenly a hush as the orphans eyed each other in trepidation.

"It's a stampede outside," said glasses boy. "The streets will be blocked."

"You won't be able to make it to the central market square," agreed another girl standing a head taller than him.

"She will if she takes the rat's way," interjected a boy with a headful of messy brown hair and a scar across one cheek. He looked fairly bit older than the average age of the orphans, around Souta's age, thirteen or so.

"Rat's way?" Kagome repeated.

"It's like… this back alley system that runs through the village. Real small," the boy held two of his fingers a hair's width apart. "So the only one who can use it are kids…"

"He means street rats, like us," The girl from earlier cut in, shooting her counterpart a look. "Most ninjas don't fit the rat's way, and the ones that do hate it cause there's no space for them to maneuver their fancy ninja moves. A runty street rat can shank them with luck and preparation and there ain't no death as embarrassing as being shanked by an untrained street kid. Onee-san is just about small enough to fit through but… Fuyu… you're really going to help Gaara? He... " she hesitated here, frowning, then pushed forward. "Because of him… your father is…"

"Shut up! What the hell do you know?" The boy named Fuyu, who had brought up the rat's way in the first place shouted, face red. Then he looked over at Kagome with eyes that were beginning to wet. "I ain't helping Gaara!" He said loudly, as if making a statement. "I'm helping Miko Onee-san. There's a difference."

He took her hand then, and in a voice that seemed to say he had made up his mind and wouldn't change it, said. "We should get going soon… before that other Kunoichi nee-san comes back and you have to... uh… do your weird Miko thing again. You don't … don't uh… shine… so if we keep out of the way, the ninjas with good senses won't be able to sense you."

The crowd of orphans twittered as Fuyu led her to the door, a couple of the older kids looking like they wanted to follow them. But Kagome stopped them.

"Stay," she said in her heavily accented Sand tongue. "It's dangerous." And when a couple of them looked at her worriedly, smiled reassuringly. "I'll be back... soon."

Fuyu led her through the same hallway, but at the crossroads where they passed to get to the inner mess-hall, he took a left and pulled her onto a different path. Three right turns and five left turns and a dizzying number of hallways and doors after, they arrived at a small, run down door with a rainbow of crayon scratches and a rusted bronze handle on it. Pushing the door open, the boy shouted over his shoulder at her.

"I hope ya right about the barrier."

Kagome stepped through the door after the boy and walked out into the street by the side of the new orphanage building. The differences were immediately apparent. The street was barren, but there were all sorts of stuff strewn about here and there. A broken cart, upended ports and bags left behind by fleeing villagers. The ground, which was usually covered with a thin layer of sand and dirt, was immaculate. A cat ran frantically through the street as it made its way home. The sound of a man calling in panic for his missing son. Then Kagome saw it. Towering above the streets, the buildings, and the electric poles, a tanuki made entirely out of sand was rampaging in the heart of the village. The fact that she could see it over the distance and the various buildings in between the market square and the orphanage was testament to its sheer size. It was large, larger than Sesshomaru's true form, as large as Ryokotsuke and perhaps Inu no Taisho when he was alive, and it was screaming bloody murder.

At the Tanuki's roar, a veil of sand bullets appeared over the skyline and started carpet bombing the village down below. Before the bullets made impact however, they were stopped by pockets of glittering gold dust that rose from the ground. As each sand bullet and gold dust cloud collided, thundering booms reverberated through the village.

"That's Lord Kazekage!" said Fuyu as he pulled her towards an alley branching off the street. Between them and the alley was a shimmering, translucent barrier that crackled threateningly as the boy approached it.

"Stay close to me," said Kagome as she pulled Fuyu closed. This close to Oren's barrier, she could see clear as day the threads that held it together. There were knots along its thin membrane, possibly visible to only her eyes. If she touched them…

… Ah. There it was. One hand held forward, Kagome stepped close to the barrier, touched it, and then passed through it as if it were never there in the first place. Fuyu followed closely behind her, eyes wide and slightly dazed for a second before he shook himself out of his stupor and led her by the hand again.

They made their way into the alley, which was barely large enough for her to come through, then through what Kagome could only describe as a labyrinth of tiny alleys forking and branching through the various larger streets of the village. After what felt like an eternity to her, Fuyu stopped abruptly.

"We're here," he gestured at the opening of the alley they were in where light and the sound of battle flooded through. Kagome walked past him without hesitation. Putting a hand on his shoulder, she said.

"Stay." As she withdrew her hand, a tiny bubble sprung up around the boy, enclosing him in and protecting him from harm of any kind. "I'll be back." Then she stepped through the alley mouth and into the market square.


The central market square was once known under a different name, Taiyou no Niwa, the Sun Yard. It was the single largest manmade structure of Sunagakure with the exception of the walls around the village and in the surrounding desert. After having served as the site of the biggest market of not only local Sand people but also foreign travelling merchants for over fifty years, it became known as the Central Market or simply the Central Square. There was a lengthy story behind the name change she was sure, but Rasa's succinct nature and manner of speaking had shortened it to a necessity to accommodate visiting merchants who couldn't quite mimic the thick local accent and produce the correct name.

The square was four hundred yards wide and six hundred yards long, a plot of flat land nearly fifty acres in surface area situated perfectly in the center of the village. It had four main gates through which large caravans of visiting merchants would come through all year round and its grounds were plated with a type of heat retardant slate quarried from deep dessert pits. Statues of various guardian ninja animals and past heroes dotted its rims. At its center stood the village symbol, a sculpture made from sandstone and red-dyed steel, and before this sculpture, a gleaming, great board forged from pure titanium bearing the names of all the warriors who died for the village.

The market housed over three hundred local shops and had bore witness to countless celebrations and historical moments of the village. On its off day, Taiyou no Niwa, the Central Market saw roughly seven thousand visitors and was the village's undisputed center of commerce.

As Kagome stepped foot into it for the first time, all around her was chaos… and sand… lots and lots of sand. An ocean of it, churning furiously as if disturbed by some great wind. There were people lying on the ground in pain, people running, people shouting. Right in front of her, a row of shops had been flattened underneath a mountain of swirling sand. She saw crowds of people across the square, congregating at the gates which had collapsed under piles of stones and broken marble columns. Around these crowds and over the collapsed gates were throngs of sand warriors who, by the look of it, were trying to clear away the rubbles and evacuate the thousands of people still stuck inside the square.

Above them, a battle between titans raged. Under a burning red and purple desert sun, the Shadow of the Wind was single handedly battling the tanuki spirit. An ocean of sand against streams of pure glittering gold. Rasa was zipping about in the air, held aloft on a cloud of flying gold dust. The gold streams danced to his will, countering the tanuki's sand and keeping its attention away from the crowds of civilians. Some of that gold was attached to the tanuki's back and hind legs, pulling it down like the wire-rim glasses boy said. But the tanuki moved in a way that suggested that this was an old dance between the two of them, and that it had learned a thing or two from having been beaten to the ground at Rasa's hand one too many times. It jumped and leaped and used its massive frame to its advantages, crushing the rows of shops within the square into rubbles. And whenever the gold attempted to creep up further and push it down, fired off volleys of sand bullets in the direction of the fleeing crowd, forcing Rasa into pulling back his gold to cover the defenseless people.

It noticed Kagome the moment she entered the square proper and swivelled on its mammoth hindlegs to face her.

"YOU!" It screamed, the force of its booming voice sending shockwaves into the air. "WITCH!"

Rasa and the warriors in the square turned at once, drawn by the tanuki's sudden rage. Kagome saw the exact moment Rasa realized who was standing at the other end of the square, out in the open and absolutely without supervision. She had never before seen such naked emotions on his face. Shock, terror. His mouth opened in a scream she couldn't hear. His hands moved, willing gold and warriors to her, but the tanuki was the quicker one this time. It spread its mouth into a yawning chasm and within a single heartbeat, before either Rasa's gold or the sand warriors could make it to where Kagome stood, fired off a ball of blazing black fire in her direction.

.

.

.

To Kagome's senses, time slowed down. The world around her, which was usually vibrant and noisy with a thousand things going on all at once, muted out. The light dimmed and the people in the background faded away. Her attention was on the tanuki and the flying ball of burning death racing its way across the square towards her. The ground beneath the ball cracked and burned and melted into black goo as it made its way across. And the tanuki…

… now that Kagome had seen it with her own eyes, Shukaku seemed both bigger and smaller at once. Its physical body, made of sand and held together by roiling dark energy not quite youki, was massive. It was as big as the daiyoukai of her old world. But on the other hand, its spirit felt… small, maimed. if she were to detract the murderous rage that painted its spirit black at the moment, its presence felt like it was half of what it should be. It seemed Gaara was not the only wounded party in this ill-formed union between a fleshly mortal and a spirit of nature.

But now was not really the time to contemplate the intricacies of their chimeric state. The burning black ball was very close to its destination now and if Kagome didn't do anything, she would die along with probably all the villagers living in houses behind her.

She closed her eyes for a second, and for the first time in nearly a year, called upon her Miko ki. It came to her as though she had never sealed it away, shining and warm and filling her cold shell to the brim. Distantly, she was aware of sand warriors, those who could see with more than their eyes, those whose spirit gleamed a different shade from their comrades, leaping back as their senses suddenly detected the presence of power where there was once nothing. Her Miko's barrier sprung up a second after, gleaming pink against the advancing tanuki's ball.

The two forces collided in a nova of flashing lights, the tanuki's tainted energy against her Miko powered barrier. For a brief moment, the burning black ball pushed, seemingly gaining on her barrier, the place where black and pink met sparking violently. Then, with a loud, cracking boom like the sound of thunders, the ball shattered into a million pieces, the shards bounding from the wall of her barrier, growing weak and faint as her holy spirit cleansed their taint.

As the dust settled around a perfectly unharmed and unarmed Kagome, the square was suddenly dead quiet but for the tanuki's screams of rage.

"ABOMINATION!" It roared as it tore free of Rasa's golden restraints, buoyant on black fury and fear. "I'LL KILL YOU! I'LL CRUSH YOU WHERE YOU STAND."

Then all the sand in the square rushed upward into the skies where they formed a million spinning bullets. The air was suddenly fraught with the tanuki's murderous intention and the shouts of people, villagers and warriors both, in dismay. Kagome saw Rasa's gold shifting, rushing to counter what could only be another hail of bullet. She could feel his fear for her sake, all the way from across the yard, stark as day, as well as the panic of a dozen other sand warriors in the square all directing at her.

Despite their worry however, Kagome felt oddly calm. This scene, this rush, this battle. They all felt familiar. She had done this before, many many times, and the electrifying sense of danger filled her not with terror but with nostalgia.

Ah… this dance…

The tanuki's bullets darkened the skies as they shot towards her, spinning, hissing in the air. Without a thought, four more barriers sprung up in in the square, around the crowds of civilians, the warriors and the Shadow of the Wind. Her barriers held strong, burning and sizzling away the bullets that pounded against their walls.

Kagome moved then, galvanized by the memories of a hundred battles against foes much more dangerous and cunning than this mad spirit. She could feel a spike of phantom pain from the boy still trapped within the mad spirit. He was coming apart as the tanuki raged on.

She needed to end this battle.

In the rubble of the collapsed shops were strewn weapons of all kinds. Knives, swords, fans, throwing stars, scrolls of paper. Most of them were broken and burned, but the among them the shurikens were small and tough enough to avoid most of the damage in the collapse. Picking up the leaf shape shurikens, she drew a single apple seed from her pocket, one of the few left after having grown a small garden for the orphanage kids.

It was not the seed's wish to grow into a shape it did not know, but it conformed easily to the pull of her power. It sprouted in her hands, growing long leafy vines and thick wood and shaped itself to her will until Kagome held in her hand an applewood bow with the string made of thin yet resilient vine. In her other hand, the wood grasped onto the leaf shape shuriken, forming the tail to its makeshift arrowhead.

Just in time too, because the tanuki, apparently having smartened up to the fact that its bullets were ineffective against her barriers, had changed its approach. With an ear splitting roar, it summoned forth a tsunami of sand and sent it crashing down upon all who stood within the square.

In response, Kagome shifted into stance, nocked her arrow, drew the bowstring taut in one fluid motion, breathed in, filled the applewood shaft and the cast iron head with Miko's ki, aimed, breathed out, and released. Her arrow was a shining pinprick against the cascading sand tsunami and as it impacted, blew clean through the tainted sand.

The tanuki screamed in frustration. But Kagome was not about to let it call forth another wave. In her hand, the second arrow formed with the speed of a thought. She nocked it without words, aimed, fired.

Her arrow struck the tanuki's front leg this time, blowing the appendage clean off and melting the tainted sand flesh. Shukaku screamed again, this time not in rage but in fear and pain. It had a body made of sand and chakra. It had never before felt this kind of pain, worse than being captured, worse than being sealed away, worse than decades of being imprisoned against its will. It had a body of sand and chakra. It could regenerate endlessly and outlast any foes not its fellow bijuu and not versed in the art of sealing. It never once thought anything could harm its physical shell. But at that very moment, as it instinctively pulled the sand back into the shape of its front leg. It found it could not. Its leg was melting off, rotting away, and it could not stop the advance of the rot.

Something was mixed in with its sand, with its chakra. A blazing, burning light that was eating up its essence.

For the very first time in its life, it felt fear, true fear, as it realized what this strange power could do to it, what this abominable witch could do to it. She could kill it, truly and completely. She could end its thousand years old existence. She was, perhaps, the only one in this world who could.

"ARGHHHhhhh! It HUrtss! It hUrts! StAy away! Stay aWAy!"

It summoned up another volley of sand bullets, this one smaller and weaker, then turned tail and ran for the desert. Before it could take more than three limping steps however, a wall of gleaming pink light shot up in front of it, barring the way. The wall was made of the same blazing light that hurt it more than the sealing. Then another on its right and another on its left, boxing it in. It snapped its head around then and saw at its back the abominable witch leisurely following with her flimsy looking bow drawn and aimed at its heart.

"nO! NO! StaY Back! sTAY bACK, you WITCH! Papa! pAPA! Save ME! I DON'T WANT TO DIE! nOOOOO! NOOOO!" It wailed and thrashed and yanked violently at the sand and the desert but the walls could do more than just bar its way to escape. They were suppressing its power, prepping it for the killing blow that would soon follow.

Down below, Kagome drew her bow, filled her arrow with holy ki until it shone like it was made of light, aimed, fired.

A terrible scream rent the air as her arrow struck true. It was quickly followed by the dying keen of the mad spirit. Kagome's last and strongest arrow hung in the air where its purification power ate away at the tainted spirits within seconds. The sand melted away, lost shape, fell, until finally she could see the human boy buried at the core of the tanuki monster. For a moment, the boy was held aloft by a thin cloud of sand. The mother, weak but alive, held her son while smiling in gratitude at Kagome.

You saved my son, she spoke, her words heard by none but the Miko standing below. Thank you. I won't forget this. Thank you.

Then, with great care and tenderness, she lowered the boy into Kagome's waiting arms and then faded away.

As the last of the tanuki's sand body disintegrated into dust, Kagome held a sleeping Gaara tight in her arms, his chin on her shoulder and head against the column of her neck, and enveloped him in a glow of purifying light. Across the Sun Yard, she could see the face of the father amidst a blur of other faces and people, pale and bloodless, staring back at her.


End Chapter 9


1. I changed the story rating to M. From now on, we are on route to arc 2 of the story, where the tone will gradually become more mature (the opening of this half chapter is already a testament to that) and touch upon topics not suitable for those too young. To be fair, From the Garden of Gods has never been the fluffy, easy kind of story, but before then, the subject matter was still relatively tame. From here on out, that will change (though not drastically; this ain't Tis Femina after all).

2. I was going to include the interrogation of Kagome by the Go-Ikenban after the showdown between her and Shukaku but thought the chapter was getting a bit too long, so I stopped. Next chapter: "Who are you, Miko? What are you?"

3. From here on out, we are going to see more interaction between Kagome and the main cast of the story (Gaara, Temari, etc…) in contrast with the general background crowd of arc 1 (which covered Kagome's entry into Sunagakure and the premise of her encountering Gaara who later on became her drive to change the ninja world. Without him, she wouldn't have felt attached enough to want to actively change the trajectory of Rasa's world). We will gradually learn more about Kagome's power and get some hints as what happened to her prior to her arriving in Narutoverse.

4. Gaara is eleven years old in this chapter for those of you who are wondering, roughly six years younger than Kagome.

5. And no, Kagome did not just kill Shukaku… at least not entirely. She is well aware that Shukaku is linked to Gaara and is not sure if killing the spirit outright would cause permanent harm to him. Besides, Kagome is a little curious about Shukaku, seeing him not as a true demon but more a spirit gone mad from his imprisonment and forced merge with a human.

6. I'm feeling surprisingly motivated. Next chapter will probably come out soon, in a week or two… provided my boss does not heckle me too badly.

See you next time!

Sythe