Sesshomaru turned quickly.
In the instant he saw through the origin of the thing in his hand, he moved to answer it.
The black pearl was clenched in his palm. The moment yokai power flowed into it, the pitch-dark gem burst into a ghostly blue radiance, and that light tore a rift open in the air.
On the far side of the rift lay endless darkness.
The border-crevice of the underworld.
Where Toga's grave lay.
Sesshomaru did not look back. He spared Inuyasha not even a glance. The white figure stepped into that rift as if walking through an ordinary door.
Jaken scrambled after him in a panic, the Staff of Two Heads hugged to his chest.
"Lord Sesshomaru! Wait for me!"
But a pity—
The next second, Jaken was flung right back out.
Clearly, the black-pearl agate crafted by the great yokai Hosenki did not welcome him.
So Jaken went rolling across the ground several times, thoroughly battered, and lay there a good long while before he could get up.
Overhead, the full moon hung high.
With Tenseiga pinning his hem and then being pulled away, it left a hole behind—and a boy sat on the ground clutching his right eye, his face utterly blank. Inuyasha, too, sat stunned for a moment.
Then—he erupted.
"Sesshomaru, you bastard! That's the thing our deadbeat old man left me, the one Mom never stopped going on about—you give it back!"
He had clearly realized something.
Realized the origin of the thing hidden inside his eye.
He tried to stand and give chase, but his body—dead only a little over two months—seemed to catch up with reality just then, so weak he couldn't even hold himself upright. His knees buckled and he collapsed back down.
And worse—he noticed it.
His yokai power.
Gone.
That scalding force that had been with him all his life, flowing through his blood, had vanished.
No dog ears, no claws, no fangs. Even his sense of smell had dulled to the level of an ordinary human's.
He had become human.
Completely human.
The way he did on every night of the new moon—except this time, the moon was hanging right there in the sky.
Inuyasha froze where he sat.
Then he finally noticed Kobe Hikaru, who had been standing beside him the whole time.
A scarlet oni mask, pale long hair, and a set of gray robes restored to their normal state.
Those crimson Demon pupils were watching him calmly.
Inuyasha's reaction—
"You! You're one of Sesshomaru's lackeys, aren't you?!"
He pointed at Kobe Hikaru, his finger trembling—whether from rage or weakness, no one could say. "That bastard grabbed my stuff and bolted! You pack of bootlicking dogs—!"
What followed was an extremely fluent stream of profanity, spanning eight generations of Sesshomaru's ancestors, with no regard whatsoever for the fact that Sesshomaru's ancestors were, in all likelihood, his own ancestors too. The cursing was varied in style and rich in vocabulary; his breath was weaker than before, but it made up for it in sheer duration.
Kobe Hikaru stood there, arms folded, and heard the whole thing out.
Then he nodded.
"You're right to curse him."
Inuyasha: "…Huh?"
"That fellow really is no good."
Kobe Hikaru's tone was sincere. "Robbing his own little brother of the keepsake their father left him, in broad daylight—word gets around, and people are going to have a few things to say about it."
Inuyasha's mouth fell open, then shut again.
He seemed not to have expected this reaction.
In his limited experience of life, the people around Sesshomaru—Jaken and his ilk—were all the sort who wagged their tails at that bastard.
This masked fellow in front of him was actually cursing Sesshomaru right alongside him?
He was floored.
"You… you're not on his side?"
"No."
"Then who are you?"
"The Demon who dragged you back out of a pile of corpses."
Inuyasha blanked again.
A pile of corpses?
He knit his brow and thought it over.
The memory was blurry.
He remembered the battlefield, remembered the chaos of the troops, remembered being surrounded by humans and yokai at once, remembered the moonlight dimming and his yokai power draining away—and then he remembered nothing at all.
But one thing came back to him.
"I… died?"
"Dead a little over two months. I summoned your soul back. Only—I called back just the human part."
"Two months… and what do you mean, the human part?!"
In other words, he had become human—?
Inuyasha lowered his head and looked at his own hands.
Fair, clawless fingers—unmistakably the hands of a human.
In that instant, his expression grew complicated.
There was shock, and there was resentment.
But beneath that, somewhere deeper, there seemed to be something else.
Something extremely faint—a flicker of delight.
All his life, because he was a half-yokai, he had pleased neither side—caught between humans and yokai. Humans feared him; yokai looked down on him.
He wanted to become a full yokai, but no one would teach him; he wanted to be an ordinary human, but there were these troublesome dog ears in the way.
His earlier death had come from exactly this.
A half-yokai's body waned around the new moon. The humans would not accept him, and the yokai wanted him dead.
When arrows came flying from both sides at once, he hadn't even known which to block first…
So he had died.
If it had been only the yokai's attack, Inuyasha could have gotten away.
If it had been only the human military might beating him down, he would have come through unscathed.
Had even one side held its fire, had even one side eased its encirclement, the outcome would have been different.
And now—no dog ears, no claws.
Even his yokai power was gone.
He had become an ordinary human boy.
Black hair, brown eyes.
He looked no different from any random youngster off the street.
"I… turned into a human?"
"Mm."
"For good? Not the new-moon kind that comes back after a single night?"
"Should be."
Kobe Hikaru did not explain many of the details.
Inuyasha fell silent.
As Kobe Hikaru had expected, this half-yokai—so hot-tempered and reckless in the original story, forever refusing to admit defeat—did not fly into a rage upon hearing those words.
He only lowered his head, staring at his human hands, and stayed quiet for a long time.
Then he lifted his head.
In those deep brown eyes, something brightened for a moment.
"…Guess it's not so bad."
His voice was very soft—so soft that even he sounded unsure.
But that flicker of expression, Kobe Hikaru saw clear as day.
It was, for the first time, the relief of someone released from that place of neither-here-nor-there, once he had confirmed that he had finally come down on one side.
True, when he'd chased after the Shikon Jewel before, it had mostly been to become a full yokai… but if it was the human side, that too was something he could accept.
After all, his mother had been human to begin with.
As long as it was whole, complete, either would do.
Inuyasha stayed silent a while longer.
Then he suddenly looked up and, careless as ever, scratched at his hair—once silver-white like Sesshomaru's, now black—and found the feel of it completely unlike before.
"Hey."
"Mm?"
"You're the one who brought me back?"
"That's right."
"…Then. Thanks."
He said it awkwardly.
Like he had a stone in his mouth, the words coming out muffled.
But he did say it.
It wasn't that Inuyasha didn't understand gratitude—he just wasn't used to voicing it.
What's more, this masked fellow in front of him looked frightening, yet a moment ago he had cursed Sesshomaru right along with him. By Inuyasha's rough standard of judgment, that made him one of his own.
"Mm."
Kobe Hikaru answered once more, the expression beneath the oni mask hard to read.
Off to the side, Jaken had finally come to his senses and picked himself up.
The little green-skinned yokai crouched on the rock, the Staff of Two Heads laid flat across his knees, his sharp-mouthed, hollow-cheeked face drawn tight as he squinted sidelong at Kobe Hikaru.
He could feel the yokai aura on this oni warrior.
Far weaker than Lord Sesshomaru's, yet stronger than his own.
Much stronger.
Even with the Staff of Two Heads that Lord Sesshomaru had given him, he would most likely just get strung up and beaten. That thing worked fine against little yokai or ordinary ones, but against anything even slightly powerful it was a joke.
Jaken's mouth opened, then closed again.
No swagger, no shouting.
With Sesshomaru gone, his arrogance was like the tide going out—instantly ebbing down below his ankles.
He who knows the times is a wise man indeed!
____
________________________________________
If you want more chapters, please consider supporting my page on (P). with 50 advanced chapters available on (P)
👻 Join the crew by searching Leanzin on (P). You know the spot! 😉