InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Once Upon a Time ❯ ...And What Alice Found There ( Chapter 4 )

Disclaimer: All I own here are the youkai, and I don’t really want to own them….

  4. …And What Alice Found There  

At the campsite, two pairs of eyes flew open simultaneously. “What was that?”

The hanyou shook his head. “I don’t know. I think we were being attacked in our dreams.”

Kagome, apparently now free of the malevolent influence of the region, didn’t have much of an opinion. Despite all that she had seen and done over the past several months, this event was well outside her experience. She got to her feet, looking at the sleeping forms of Shippou, Miroku, and Sango. “They’re all still asleep. Why do you suppose we woke up?”

He took a good look at the sleeping figures. Inuyasha thought that they looked distinctly restless. “Kagome--”

As the girl turned she could see what looked like tiny glowing sparks crawling on the ground. Looking more closely, she saw that each of the sparks was actually a tiny ball of light held aloft by small creatures moving along the ground. The creatures were barely two inches long with shiny, pulsating skins in a vivid, poisonous green. They had no legs, but were instead equipped with a single pair of serrated claws at the front end which held the lights. The creatures seemed to possess nothing resembling eyes or mouths, but that didn’t mean that such features didn’t exist where she couldn’t see them.

The creatures continued to move away from the restless sleepers, all in the same general direction, carrying their lights. Kagome shuddered at the thick slime trails they left. “What are those things--and what are they doing?”

“I don’t know,” he snarled. “They’re not the source of the trouble--just little messenger boys.” His features turned grim. “I’ll follow them back to whatever’s behind it.”

Kagome picked up her bow and quiver from where she had let them fall before going to sleep. “Right,” she said. “I’m ready.”

“Where the hell do you think you’re going? You have to stay here and keep an eye on them!”

“Inuyasha,” she said, “There’s no sign of anything moving in this forest--everything here seems to be affected just like we were.” She thought about it briefly, then continued, “This is a big area--whatever is doing this has to be pretty strong. You might need my help.”

Actually, the hanyou was glad to have her along. Although he had once sent her back to her own world because he said he couldn’t fight the way he wanted with her around, he had also noticed that even the faintest hint of her presence enhanced his abilities--with Kagome around, his speed, strength, and reaction time all improved. Besides, she seemed to have an instinctive knowledge of the right way to approach an unfamiliar situation. “Let’s go, then.”

Despite the impenetrable darkness of the forest, following the creatures was simple--the lights they carried provided the hunters with a clear trail. If there had been any doubt that the little creatures were in fact all being guided by the same will, it would have been eliminated by the perfect unison of their movements.

The two had been following the trail for about twenty minutes when it suddenly disappeared. Looking closely, they noticed that the creatures were carrying the lights into a small crevice between large rocks at the base of a huge, vine-covered tree.

Kagome looked up from where she was watching the creatures’ progress. “Now what?”

The hanyou flexed his claws. “Leave this part to me.” Almost effortlessly, Inuyasha tore two of the boulders free, exposing an opening large enough for them to enter. He sniffed the air. “This is it--the whole place stinks of youkai.”

Although Kagome didn’t expect that her bow would be of much use below ground, she wasn’t about to leave it behind. Even if she couldn’t see well enough to fire the weapon, she could always use it to swat the nasty little beasts. She followed Inuyasha into the hole without hesitation.

Surprisingly, there was more than enough light to maneuver easily. She followed the hanyou, looking around with interest. Even though the floor was relatively smooth, it sloped steadily downwards. The air was damp and chilly, and the floor of the tunnel was slick with nearly liquid mud. The light, she noticed, was coming from masses of glowing fungus dotting the walls.

Suddenly, Kagome realized that he had stopped moving. “Damn!”

Peering around his shoulder, she saw that they were in the entrance to a large chamber. The sluglike creatures continued to arrive, circling around an enormous…something in the middle of the cavity. “What is that thing?”

“That’s the youkai we’ve been looking for.” He gestured at the orange grublike youkai lying motionless while the smaller creatures brought the lights near enough for them to be absorbed into the massive creature. “Those little bastards are feeding it--don’t you feel the hunger coming from that thing?”

She nodded. She had originally thought that the feelings of hunger were her own, as she hadn’t eaten. She had never before seen a youkai that inspired such revulsion: the soft-looking body dotted with coarse black bristles seemed to pulse slightly, although the half-dozen or so tiny legs clustered near what she thought of as the “head” end were nowhere near powerful enough to move the massive form. “It’s pretty disgusting, but how dangerous is it?”

“Feh! If it falls on you, maybe.” Drawing his Tetsusaiga, he sprang forward. “This won’t take long.” It was really not a fight at all. The hanyou leaped at the creature, slicing it down the middle, splattering the cavern with foul-smelling fluids. At that moment, the little green slug-things all dissolved, releasing the lights they had been carrying. While most of the lights drifted back up the tunnel, a few of them returned to Kagome and Inuyasha. As the lights returned to their places of origin, they each experienced waves of the emotions that had been generated in their dreams.

Blinking back tears brought on by the sudden intense emotions, Kagome shook her head. “We should be getting back to the others--if this is any indication, they’re probably awake and wondering what’s going on.”

As they emerged from the tunnel, they noticed that the surrounding forest was subtly changed. Not only was the strange, dead feeling of the place gone, but it was also littered with the bodies of people and animals in various stages of decomposition. Somehow the youkai in the chamber below had kept them from realizing that they had been traveling through an immense graveyard.

The hanyou gestured at the complete undisturbed skeleton of a wild pig. “We got lucky, Kagome.”

She nodded, not entirely sure she understood. “That thing killed everything here, didn’t it?”

Inuyasha shook his head. “From what happened when it was destroyed, I’d say that it fed on strong emotions. Somebody would wander into the area and be put to sleep by that filthy thing. It caused them to experience powerful events in their lives in dreams. Then those little bastards harvested the emotions it stirred up and brought them back so it could feed.”

She shuddered. “The lights.” At his nod, she continued, “So why do you suppose it didn’t get to us?”

They were still debating the issue when they arrived back at the campsite. The rest of the party had apparently recovered, although they were all pale and shaken from the experience.

Shippou raced forward to satisfy himself that the girl he had come to think of as almost a second mother was in fact all right. Sango turned haunted eyes in their direction. “Youkai?”

Kagome gave them a brief but essentially accurate account of their activities from the time she and Inuyasha awoke to the time they had both arrived back at the camp. Shaking her head, she continued, “We still haven’t figured out exactly why we woke up and nobody else did--for a really long time, from the look of things.”

Shippou nodded vigorously. “Yeah. I don’t think anybody’s ever escaped from here before--there are bones all over!”

Miroku nodded. “But that’s another part of the puzzle. The skeletons don’t look like they died violently--we’ve all seen enough battlefields to recognize the difference.”

Sango took another look. “He’s right. These people all look like they just went to sleep and never woke up again.” Her eyes widened as she realized that this same thing had very nearly happened to them all. “It’s a good thing that you two woke up when you did.”

Miroku had been considering that very matter. “Kagome-sama, what was the last thing you remember dreaming about before you woke up?”

She thought about it for a few seconds. “I dreamed that I was back home, by the sacred tree in the middle of the shrine. I could almost see Inuyasha sitting against the tree, right where he was when Kikyou forced me into the well. I was wondering if he was all right, because he was really hurt.”

Miroku nodded, then turned to the hanyou. “What about you?”

He hadn’t expected the question: he was still trying to get his head around what Kagome had said about Kikyou. Inuyasha looked up almost guiltily. “It was the same. I was pretty cut up, but figured I’d be okay once we got rid of that Chinese moth youkai. The strange thing was that Kagome wasn’t around--she never leaves somebody alone when they’re hurt. I remember calling for her.”

The monk nodded: his assumptions seem to have been correct. “So you were both dreaming about the same thing--a time when you were trying to reach each other across a great distance. I think,” he said, shaking his head, “That you called out to each other in your dreams. I don’t know how, but I don’t think that anybody else could have done it.”

Even though it was very late, they realized that there was absolutely no point in trying to sleep. Kagome built up the fire while Sango broke out some of their stock of bottled water--it would have been all too easy to fall and break a leg while searching for water in the dark.

They spent a pleasant couple of hours drinking tea and talking. Between the search for the Shikon fragments and the hunt for Naraku, they usually had little or no time to spend on purely social interaction. In the manner of people in every time and every place, the conversation soon worked its way around to what they would do once their immediate tasks were accomplished.

Shippou had long ago decided to wait until he was closer to full maturity to start looking for any other kitsune that might still live in his home region. Maybe in time he could help his people carve out a new territory for themselves in the mountains that had once been his home.

Sango had pretty much decided that living on without her brother Kohaku was infinitely preferable to joining him in death, even if it was not possible to restore him to the brother she remembered. It might indeed turn out that the only way to finally remove Kohaku beyond Naraku’s reach would be to free him from this life completely. Although she knew that any of her new friends would choose to spare her the task, Kohaku was her brother--if it became necessary, it was better done by one who knew and loved him.

She would really have liked to revive her home village’s work of exterminating dangerous youkai with Kohaku at her side. In any case, she had sworn on the memory of her murdered people that she would carry on, alone if necessary.

Miroku was starting to tire of wandering. Once Naraku was gone and his curse lifted, the monk would happily settle down in a village somewhere to tend a shrine for his neighbors. If he could, he would also like to find someone with whom he could raise a family. It was, he decided, something to think about.

Kagome had always said that her goal was to complete the mission and return to the life she had left behind. She had, however, said nothing about it in quite a long time. What would actually happen remained a source of intense speculation for the others--in truth, none of them could imagine life without her.

The hanyou had long since stopped talking about what he would do when it was all over. Although he had long coveted the nearly unlimited power of the true youkai, he had come to realize that that was not the path for him. Those few occasions when he had transformed to something very like a fully youkai state had frightened him badly: when transformed, all that mattered was the thirst for destruction--he didn’t even recognize the people he had come to think of as his friends. If these transformations were to continue, it was only a matter of time before he destroyed Sango or Shippou…or even Kagome.

He sat silently, wrapped in his grim thoughts, listening to the others speak of their plans for the future as though Naraku had already been beaten. Inuyasha was particularly aware of the silence from Kagome.

“Inuyasha?” He looked up suddenly, surprised that he hadn’t seen her arrive. Some protector he was--a person could just come up and sit next to him, and he didn’t even notice. He breathed deeply, savoring the scent he no longer bothered to claim was offensive.

“Nani?”

Kagome gave him that compassionate look that usually meant that she’d caught him at something he’d prefer not to admit. “Are you all right? You’re so quiet.”

He gestured at Sango and Miroku, who were comparing notes on their respective ideal futures. “Look at them--you’d think that the fight was already over.”

She shook her head, smiling at him. “Don’t worry about it--it’s just their way of not thinking about it for a little while. When the time comes, they’ll be ready.” She took a deep breath, then forged ahead. “What are you going to do when it’s all over?”

He looked down at the dusty ground. “I don’t know. Everything depends on the course of the battle--I might not even survive it.”

Kagome was distinctly unsettled. He almost never allowed himself to admit any weakness or uncertainty. Still, she couldn’t quite bring her self to believe that he was this concerned about his safety. “Maybe we should try to gather a few more allies--Naraku can’t be the most powerful force in the entire world!”

He shook his head, the true reason for his worry coming to the surface. “I can’t guarantee that any one of us will survive this kind of battle.” He paused briefly before continuing, “Go home, Kagome. I don’t want you in this fight.”

She shook her head, a stubborn set to her features. “Not a chance. I’ve talked to Kaede-baachan and Miroku-sama--I know you fight better when I’m around. Besides,” she added, her voice growing cold, “I owe Naraku for all the misery he’s caused the people I care about.”

It suddenly occurred to him that he had been misjudging her since they first met. She was not the incredibly helpless human girl he’s first assumed her to be. The hanyou thought at that moment that she might be the single most dangerous individual he knew, as much for her strength of will as for the fact that she was consistently underestimated by enemies. Eyes wide at the quick surge of power he could almost see flowing through her, he nodded. “You may be right after all.” Looking up at the lightening sky visible through the sickly-looking forest canopy, he added, “It’ll be light enough to travel soon. I think we’d all like to get away from this place.”

She nodded and began packing up their gear. Inuyasha still couldn’t quite get over the odd sense of finality surrounding this trip. It seemed as though an overwhelming need to finish the job was affecting them all in one way or another.

Either way, he decided, this would be the last campaign in the war against Naraku.