InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ A Tale of Ever After ❯ Chapter 329

[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]

I do not own InuYasha or any of the characters created by Rumiko Takahashi

Chapter 329

InuYasha, Eiji and Susumu walked for about a quarter of of an hour down the trail, until it met up with the main path to Morimura.  Here, the entrance to the trail had been marked with a white length of fabric, not as well made as the one they originally followed.  It had frayed more under the effects of the weather.

“You were right, Eiji,” Susumu said, fingering the scrap of fabric.

“It made sense.  This trail is closer from the Morimura side, while the other one was closer to our village.  It’s still just a loop.”  He shrugged.  “We’re just about at the midway point between the two places, anyway.”  He turned to InuYasha.  “You still scent them coming this way?”

The hanyou nodded.

“You see that hill up there?” Eiji asked pointing to a rocky rise ahead of them.

The other men nodded their heads.

“That’s the halfway point between Morimura and our village.”

“The trail’s still strong,” the hanyou said.  “Do we need to walk all the way to Morimura to be sure?”

“Let’s go to the top of the rise, and if it’s still strong, I think we can be pretty sure that’s where he went,” Susumu said.

They reached it a few minutes later.  “They definitely passed this way,” InuYasha said.

“Well, I guess the talk was true. I’ll show Chichi-ue the axe, and tell him what you said, and let Haruo off the hook, and we can call this done,” Susumu said.  “Even if Yoshimi wanted to come back and dispute Sukeo’s inheritance, it’ll be a done deal.  Nobody will give him an ear.  And I believe the woman he went off with is an heiress.  He’ll have her land.  A sure thing, and a fresh start.  He might be stupid enough to try something later, but we’ll be ready for him.”

“And maybe she’ll keep him busy enough he won’t have any time to mess with others,”  InuYasha said.  “Good riddance.”

“With no big brother to back him up any more, he’s going to have to learn a whole new way of living.  Lucky for us we won’t have to watch,” Susumu said.  “Time to head back.”



Fresh from his little jaunt to the August Fields with Kazuo, Yoshio-no-kami was feeling relaxed and maybe a little hopeful that the situation with his ko, and especially with that stubborn and irritating descendant of his, Michio and his wife Chiya could be resolved.

“My thanks,” Kazuo said as they hovered above the village.  “That onsen...ah, what a bit of divine glory it was.”

“I thought you’d enjoy it,” Yoshio replied.  “That Tennyo Hikari...such skillful hands she has.  Every kink, tension, ache...she can cure them all.  And these last few days have tied me up in knots.”

“Something about good sake, hot blissful water and beautiful bath attendants.” Kazuo’s face had a relaxed, even dreamy look to it.  He shook his head, clearing his thoughts. “Now if our great grandchildren haven’t done anything stupid while we were gone...”

“Right now I can believe everything will all work out,” Yoshio said.  They were making wide, easy sweeps over the village, looking at the farmers with hoes and adzes and seed bags and carts as they finished with the bean fields and moved on to prepare other dryland fields.  Kinjiro was pruning his fruit trees.  Akimori, Fujime’s husband, was showing his grandson a special technique he used in his soybean beds.  Masu was putting the final touches on his beloved eggplant beds.  Takeshi was chasing a deer away from the plants he had just weeded.  All seemed as it should be for a simple farming village.

That is, until a strong and bitter scent hit Yoshio like a heavy iron mallet. “What is that horrid smell?” he asked.

“Smell?  I don’t smell anything out of the ordinary,” Kazuo said.  “Compost, manure, Nanami cooking her special stew,  someone at Tameo’s using too much vinegar….”

The two of them drifted over the village as Yoshio tried to pinpoint the odor.  “So you can’t smell it?” he asked Kazuo.  “To me it smells like a mountain of cow dung.”

It wasn’t anything coming from Fumio’s forge, which lay quiet at the moment with the smith being busy organizing Sukeo’s needs for the moment, or anything that came out of the dye house that the smith’s wife used.

There were no bandits, no wildfires, no animals ravaging.  No unaccounted for youkai.  Shippou was at his uncle’s place, studying kitsune magic.  The longer they flew, the worse it smelled to Yoshio, and the more Kazuo was convinced there was nothing unusual going on.   

The two kami stopped for a moment by the shrine at Toshiro’s compound.

“I don’t understand it,” Yoshio said, leaning against the building.  “Sayo and the baby are doing fine. Nanami is finally getting enough rest.  Yasuo has Daiki firmly in tow and they’re playing ball with Hiroyo’s boy.  Asami’s doing her chores like she’s floating on a cloud.”

“Maybe the stench is a warning,” Kazuo said.

“From whom? And why stench?”  Yoshio said, rubbing both hands across his face.  “And why me?”

“Sometimes  destiny is hard and fixed; sometimes we are given a fork in the road,” Kazuo said.  “Me, I’m no expert.  Dipping into what’s ahead more than a little bit gives me a horrid headache, but perhaps  Myouken who tracks all these things as he sits on the north pole sees the fork ahead.”  He shrugged.  “When my poor great-great-great granddaughter Kikyou was born, I was given a vision of what would happen to her if they trained her as a miko.  Once the family put her on that path, there was nothing I could do but watch.”

“Once, I had a voice tell me to check on someone,” Yoshio said, “And I went, and found out someone was trying to set the barley on fire, right before harvest.”

“I remember that,” Kazuo said.  He leaned on his hoe.  “We had to get all the kami working together to stop it.  Stupid brothers fighting.  Stupid man didn’t realize how likely it was to take out all the barley and maybe all the village.” He shook his head.

“So now I get a big stink.  Maybe we need to see if it comes from one particular place, or if the entire village is getting a warning,” Yoshio said.  “Maybe if we can find where it’s coming from, we can get it to stop.  I don’t want to go much longer smelling this.”

They drifted across the landscape, checking Chiya’s place as a likely troublespot, but there was calm.  Hana was sitting outside working on a braid while Hiroki was telling her a story.  Inside, Chiya was asleep.  They went north and checked out Michio as another likely trouble source, but even Michio was relatively calm, playing with his children in front of his house.   

“You still smell it?” Kazuo said, watching Michio.

“I do,” Yoshio said.  “Surprisingly, it’s not as bad here as it was over the center of the village.”

Michio picked up his daughter.  “Let’s go see Obaasan.  I know she’s making you your favorite fish tonight.”

His daughter shook her head and squinched up her nose.  “Not as good as Haha-ue’s.  When can I see Haha?”
The man frowned, and made a rude gesture at the sky. “We’ll have to see, baby.”

“Is he calming down?” Kazuo asked.

“A little.  Maybe,” Yoshio said. “I hope.”

“So you say the odor is weaker here, but it was stronger towards the center of the village?  I guess that means the trouble has to be something new.  It’s not directly Chiya or Michio, it’s not by Toshiro’s place either.  Let’s go see if we can get a better idea.  Who would want to make trouble for someone in Toshiro’s ko?  Are they mad at Toshiro or Michio or someone else?”

They hovered over the village, criss-crossing it back and forth.   After doing this a number of times, Yoshio came to land in a cluster of smaller, poorer households between Tameo’s compound and Toshiro’s.  “It really stinks around here,” the kami said.

“Let’s see – who lives around here?” Kazuo asked.  “There’s Choujiro’s place,” he said, pointing to a neat, small house.  Choujiro’s wife Yurime was working in the vegetable garden near it, while keeping an eye on her young son Dachi.  

Yoshio popped over and popped back.  “Not there.  The smell almost disappears by their place.”

The two kami turned around.  “Let’s see...Aito lives over there.”  He pointed to another small, neat home.  There was laundry flapping in the front yard. “His woman Kou’s pretty close to Chiya.  And across the way from her is Niko and Benika’s place.”

“Benika...I remember how much trouble she caused the last time Michio and Chiya did this.  She almost got half the women in the village ready to run Michio out of town…”

“I think,” Kazuo said, rubbing his hat across his head, That maybe we should go check that place out.”

It wasn’t the smallest house in the village, although it wasn’t very large.  It wasn’t the most run-down house, although the roof ridge sagged a little.  The yard was scattered with the evidence of day to day life – an upturned basket.  A barrel on its side.  A handcart.  A wood pile and the wood chips that go with it.  A garden patch, not as neatly weeded as some in the village.  A bucket, half filled with water.  A rooster hopped up on the basket, and looked around as if it could sense the presence of the two kami, or perhaps it was keeping a careful eye on the cat sleeping next to the front door.

“This is the place,” Yoshio said.  “If circling around it smelled like a mountain of manure, now it smells like I’m inside that mountain.”  His eyes were watering even as he spoke.

From inside, the two kami could hear voices.  They peeked inside.

Benika  poured tea into cups.  Her husband Niko was out with their two sons on their small plot of dry field.  But she was not alone.  There were three mats set out.  All three were occupied.

“I’m so glad you were able to come over, Sora-chan.  I know how hard it is with your little ones,” she said, handing Sora a cup of tea.

“I was lucky that Denjiro was too tired from last night to go back out to his beanfields after lunch.  He really doesn’t mind watching the little ones, but he doesn’t get much time to spend with them,” Sora said.

“Well, you should be proud of him.  He was quite the hero last night,” Benika said.  “I heard he was one of the men who helped Masu take that awful Seiji down.”

“He was.  And has the bruises to show for it,” Sora said, nodding.  “He called them badges of honor.  But that’s why he was too tired to work today.  I’m glad Tsuneo didn’t want him for anything today.”

“Be glad,” said Kou, another part of Chiya’s circle. “My Aito would have run off rather than take care of the kids when they were younger.  At least Jiro’s old enough to work on his own, and his sister is taking care of the youngest.”

The two kami slipped into the house and drifted up to the rafter.

“The smell…” “Yoshio said, his eyes wide.  “It’s gone away.  Totally.”

“Means we’ve found the spot.” Kazuo rubbed his hat back and forth across his head, peering at the women. “Let’s see what these three are up to.”



While the kami were running down trouble, on the other side of the village, Miroku and Sango were enjoying their new-found peace.

Miroku sat at his place near the fire pit, smiling at his wife, enjoying the calm as his daughters murmured together as they played with their stick dolls. There was no crisis, no horribly wounded woman requiring care and healing, no sad sons, no threat to his family's safety.  He found he rather enjoyed it. But then, a thought crossed his mind and he sighed.

Sango looked up at him.  "What's that for?"

"I ought to be making my rounds through the village," Miroku said. "I didn't really do much of it yesterday, and today as been...well, you know what today has been like."

"It sounds like you'd really rather stay home, if you ask me," Sango said as she fed Naoya.

"You know me too well, my dearest wife," the monk said with another sigh. "After yesterday and today, all I really rather do is stay here, with you and my girls and my son and tell the world to go away. That doesn't make me a very good monk."

"No, but it does make you a good man," Sango said. "A good husband. A good father. She leaned against Miroku's shoulder while she finished nursing her son. "The last two days were rather...overwhelming. Even the twins are ready for some quiet time.  Plus, it's getting late."

"And what about my lovely wife? What is she ready for?" He let his arm wrap around her.

"To fix dinner. To eat with my children and my husband. A hot bath. To have someone to tell a story to the children, and for them to go to sleep. And then..."

He raised an eyebrow, and the corners of his lips turned up.  "And then?"

"And then, my husband, maybe we can sit by the fire and have our own time, in quiet." She looked up at him. "If you can be quiet?"

"As quiet as snow," the monk said, a twinkle in his eye. "It wasn't me who woke up the twins the last time, remember?"

She gave him a little shove, then proceeded to burp the baby.