Chapter 156: He Still Has to Say Thank You
Sesshomaru pivoted on his heel, his silver hair trailing like a banner of frost.
The instant his golden eyes recognized the true nature of the object resting in his palm, he acted with ruthless precision. He closed his fingers around the black pearl. As his immense Yao Qi surged into the tiny sphere, the pitch-black gemstone flared to life, bleeding a brilliant, indigo-blue light.
The radiance sliced through the very fabric of space, tearing a jagged fissure in the air. Beyond that tear lay a void of endless, suffocating darkness.
The boundary between the living and the dead. The gap between the worlds.
The final resting place of their father, Toga.
Sesshomaru did not spare a single backward glance. He offered no parting words, completely dismissing the bleeding half-demon on the ground. His pristine white silhouette glided into the abyssal fissure as casually as one might step through a courtyard gate.
Panic seized Jaken. The diminutive green demon scrambled forward, desperately hugging the Staff of Two Heads to his chest.
"Lord Sesshomaru! Please, wait for me!"
He threw himself at the portal.
Unfortunately for the loyal retainer, the barrier had other ideas.
A violent pulse of energy erupted from the tear. Jaken was violently repelled, launched backward through the air with a pathetic shriek. The Black Pearl, carefully crafted by the Great Yokai Hosenki, possessed a strict entry toll—and it certainly did not welcome the likes of him.
Jaken hit the dirt hard, tumbling head over heels in a cloud of dust. He came to a halt in a crumpled heap, his bulbous eyes spinning dizzily in their sockets, entirely incapable of standing up.
High above, a luminous full moon bathed the desolate landscape in a pale, silver glow.
Inuyasha sat slumped on the cold earth. A jagged tear marred his red haori—the exact spot where Tenseiga had impaled him before being ruthlessly yanked free. The young man pressed a hand over his right eye, his features twisted in a mask of sheer bewilderment. For a long, agonizing moment, his mind struggled to process the violation.
Then, the realization clicked.
He erupted.
"Sesshomaru, you absolute bastard!" Inuyasha roared, his voice tearing through the quiet night. "That was mine! That bastard father—the one Mom was always going on about—left that for me! Give it back!"
He understood now. He finally grasped the origin of the foreign object that had been buried deep within his right eye since birth. Fueled by raw indignation, he tried to scramble to his feet to give chase.
But his body betrayed him.
Having been dead for over two months, his muscles were horribly atrophied. The phantom lethargy of the grave crashed over him. His knees buckled instantly, sending him crashing back into the dirt. He gasped, his chest heaving, as a far more terrifying revelation washed over him.
His Yao Qi.
It was gone.
The scalding, volatile demonic power that had simmered in his blood since childhood—the feral strength that defined his very existence—had completely vanished. He reached up, his fingers brushing the top of his head. No soft, twitching dog ears. He looked at his hands. No lethal, razor-sharp claws. He ran his tongue over his teeth. Flat. No fangs. Even the rich, layered mix of scents that usually painted his world had collapsed into a dull, muted blur, restricted to the pathetic olfactory limits of an ordinary mortal.
He had become human.
Completely, unequivocally human.
It felt exactly like the suffocating vulnerability of a new moon night. Yet, when he tilted his head back, a perfectly round, brilliant full moon mocked him from the heavens.
Inuyasha froze, paralyzed by the impossibility of his own flesh.
Only then did his dulled senses register the figure standing quietly a few paces away.
Kobe Hikaru observed the unfolding drama in absolute silence. The fearsome Crimson Oni Mask concealed his features, framed by a cascade of pale hair. His gray robes, now restored to their pristine state, fluttered gently in the night breeze. Behind the demonic visage, a pair of calm, crimson eyes locked onto the bewildered boy.
Inuyasha's reaction was immediate and explosive.
"You! You're one of Sesshomaru's underlings, aren't you?!"
He jabbed a trembling finger at Hikaru. It was entirely unclear whether the shaking stemmed from lingering physical weakness or boiling rage. "That arrogant bastard stole my eye and ran off! You damn lackeys—"
What followed was a breathtakingly fluent, highly creative string of profanities. Inuyasha viciously cursed Sesshomaru's ancestors dating back eight generations, completely oblivious to the glaring irony that Sesshomaru's ancestors were, in fact, his own. The tirade was a masterclass in vulgarity, rich in colorful vocabulary and deeply personal insults. While his physical vigor was a mere shadow of its former glory, his lung capacity and sheer duration more than compensated for it.
Hikaru remained rooted in place, his arms casually crossed over his chest. He listened to the entire, blistering monologue without interrupting.
When Inuyasha finally paused to draw breath, the Oni Samurai nodded in solemn agreement.
"You're right to curse," Hikaru said.
Inuyasha blinked, the remaining insults dying on his tongue. "...Huh?"
"That guy really is a piece of work," Hikaru continued, his tone entirely sincere and deadpan. "Snatching the legacy his own father deliberately left for his younger brother, right out in the open. If word of this got around, people would certainly have a few choice words for his character."
Inuyasha's mouth fell open. He closed it. He opened it again.
He was completely derailed. This was not the reaction he had anticipated. In his admittedly limited life experience, anyone associated with his older brother—like that pathetic toad Jaken—were sycophantic bootlickers who practically wagged their tails for the great Lord Sesshomaru.
Yet this imposing stranger, wearing a terrifying oni mask, was actively trash-talking the guy right alongside him?
The sheer absurdity of it shocked the anger right out of him.
"You... you're not on his side?" Inuyasha asked, his guard dropping a fraction.
"Then who the hell are you?"
"Just the 'oni' who dragged you out of a pile of rotting corpses," Hikaru replied smoothly.
Inuyasha stiffened. A pile of corpses?
He furrowed his brow, desperately digging through his hazy, fragmented memories. Flashes of violence assaulted his mind. A blood-soaked battlefield. Chaotic, warring armies. The suffocating pressure of being hunted and besieged by both humans and demons simultaneously. He remembered the moonlight dimming, the terrifying sensation of his demonic power draining away into nothingness... and then, a cold, absolute blank.
But one singular, chilling fact pierced through the fog.
"I... I died?"
"You've been dead for over two months," Hikaru stated, offering no sugarcoating. "I managed to summon your soul back to the living, but I could only anchor the human half of it."
"Over two months..." Inuyasha muttered, his dark eyes widening. "Wait, only the human part?!"
The pieces slammed into place.
He stared down at his own hands. The skin was pale, the knuckles ordinary, the fingertips completely devoid of the lethal talons he had relied on for survival. They were, undeniably, the fragile hands of a mortal boy.
A storm of complex emotions warred across his face. There was deep shock, naturally. A bitter sting of resentment at the loss of his strength.
But buried beneath the fear and the anger, hidden in the deepest recesses of his heart, lay something else entirely.
Something incredibly subtle.
Relief.
For his entire life, his half-demon blood had been a curse. He was an anomaly, a creature despised by both halves of his heritage. Humans recoiled from him in terror, while full demons sneered at his tainted blood. He had desperately wanted to become a true demon, yet no one had ever guided him. Conversely, there were times he just wanted to be a normal person, to live without constant bloodshed—but those cursed, twitching dog ears had always betrayed his identity.
That very dichotomy was the reason he had died in the first place.
His half-demon physiology had betrayed him on the night of the new moon, stripping him of his power right when he needed it most. Humans refused to shelter him; demons actively hunted him. When volleys of arrows rained down from both the human armies and the demonic hordes simultaneously, he hadn't even known which direction to defend against first.
That hesitation had cost him his life.
If it had solely been a demonic ambush, Inuyasha could have relied on his instincts to escape. If it had merely been the organized military momentum of human soldiers surrounding him, his innate durability would have seen him through unscathed. If only one faction had targeted him, the outcome would have been entirely different.
But now, the dog ears were gone. The claws were gone. The suffocating aura of his Yao Qi had evaporated into the night air.
He was just a boy. Black hair framing his face, soft brown eyes reflecting the moonlight. If he walked into a village right now, he would look no different from any peasant's son on the street.
"I... I've really become human?" Inuyasha whispered, his voice trembling slightly. "Completely? It's not just the new moon? It won't come back tomorrow?"
"That should be the case," Hikaru replied simply, opting not to overwhelm the boy with the complex, arcane details of the soul-binding process.
Inuyasha fell into a heavy silence.
Hikaru watched him carefully. It came as no surprise to the pragmatic Oni Samurai that this notoriously irritable, impulsive, and fiercely stubborn half-demon did not fly into a violent rage at the confirmation of his lost power.
Instead, Inuyasha simply bowed his head. He stared at his fragile, human palms, lost in a long, unbroken quiet.
When he finally lifted his gaze, a strange, quiet light flickered within his deep brown eyes.
"...I guess it's not the worst thing in the world," Inuyasha murmured. His tone was incredibly soft, laced with a lingering uncertainty, as if he were trying to convince himself.
But Hikaru caught the micro-expression that flashed across the boy's face. It was unmistakable. It was the deep, soul-deep exhaustion of a wanderer who had spent his entire life trapped in the agonizing purgatory between two worlds, finally finding solid ground to stand on.
True, Inuyasha had once ruthlessly pursued the Shikon Jewel to become a full-fledged yokai. But that desire had stemmed from a desperate need to belong somewhere. If that 'somewhere' ended up being the human world... he could live with that.
After all, the mother he had loved so dearly was human.
As long as he was finally whole, as long as he wasn't a fractured, despised half-breed anymore, it was enough.
The quiet stretched on for a few more moments.
Suddenly, Inuyasha snapped out of his reverie. He reached up to roughly scratch the back of his head—a nervous habit. His fingers brushed against strands of hair that used to be as silvery-white as Sesshomaru's, but were now a stark, raven black. The texture felt entirely alien against his skin.
He dropped his hand, clearing his throat awkwardly.
"So... you saved me, then?" Inuyasha muttered, refusing to meet Hikaru's eyes. "...Then, thanks."
The words were forced out with agonizing stiffness, as if he were trying to speak around a mouthful of gravel. It was muffled, gruff, and entirely lacking in grace.
But he did say it.
Despite his abrasive exterior, Inuyasha was not devoid of gratitude; he simply possessed zero experience in actually expressing it., while the imposing stranger in the oni mask looked like a nightmare made flesh, he had just spent a solid minute dragging Sesshomaru's name through the mud. According to Inuyasha's incredibly rudimentary standard of judgment, the enemy of his bastard brother was a friend. That automatically put the masked man on his side.
Hikaru gave a faint, acknowledging nod, a subtle smirk playing on his lips beneath the terrifying crimson mask.
Off to the side, the forgotten heap of green misery finally stirred.
Jaken groaned, painfully peeling himself off the dirt. The diminutive demon scrambled atop a nearby boulder, squatting defensively with the Staff of Two Heads clutched tightly against his knees. His sharp, monkey-like features were pulled taut in a grimace as he cast nervous, sidelong glances at Hikaru.
His demonic senses were tingling. He could clearly gauge the Yao Qi radiating from this mysterious Oni Samurai.
It was undeniably vastly inferior to the overwhelming majesty of Lord Sesshomaru. However, it was also significantly denser and more lethal than his own.
A lot more lethal.
Even armed with the magical staff graciously bestowed upon him by his master, Jaken knew exactly how a fight would play out. He would be strung up by his ankles and beaten to a pulp. The Staff of Two Heads was a fantastic tool for bullying lesser imps and incinerating ordinary mortals, but against a genuine, battle-hardened yokai, it was practically a toy.
Jaken opened his beak-like mouth to hurl a threat, thought better of it, and promptly snapped it shut.
There was no haughty arrogance. No shrill, demanding shouts.
Without the protective shadow of Sesshomaru looming behind him, Jaken's legendary bravado vanished like a receding tide, instantly plummeting far below sea level.
After all, a demon who understood the reality of his situation was a demon who lived to see tomorrow.
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