You know who's NOT standing right now, though?
The sick-ass face spots the corked bottle of Shikon shards on Kagome's desk next to her and is stoked that the jewel still exists in this time period. It pushes open the window and snakes in, on an elongated neck that appears to stretch all the way into the street. The woman it possesses is probably trying desperately to scream in agony right now.
In said street, a man and woman are riding around in a sports car, and the woman is asking if this is around where that ghost is said to appear. The man says it really DOES appear, and it was once a woman who was a victim of a hit-and-run accident. The woman presses her palms to her cheeks like Kevin McCallister and says this is scary before the man tells her that he was teasing her and made the whole thing up. She beats playfully on his shoulders while she calls him silly. It's all very lighthearted and about to become super real, super fast.
Then, in front of them, they see the woman possessed by the mask, face skin stretching up and out of sight and they're perplexed. The face in Kagome's window is ripped out of sight as the car rams straight into the rest of the body and sends it flying and slamming into the pavement, bloody and broken. Well, I take it back; I DON'T feel those feels, and I hope I never will. Kagome hears the squeal of tires and groggily comes to.
The mask loops around, still snaking out from the rest of the body, which attempts to lift itself with an arm that is so broken a bone is poking out through the skin. It cracks and crackles as it comes back to its standing position and the face shrinks back down to its rightful place on the skull and I'm really grossed out right now.
Back in her room, Kagome wonders what made the noise and blinks out the window, postulating that it might have been an accident of some sort. Spot on, Kagome, well done! Back on the street, the possessed woman is limping off, and the man and woman in the car wonder from behind their deployed airbags just what the hell that was. It was you guys making your silly joke ghost story real, that's what.
Sleepy-eyed, Kagome looks at her clock and suddenly gets real awake, grabbing the clock to exclaim that it's two in the morning. She resumes her position at the desk, in a panic because she hasn't studied for her test at all.
Meanwhile, back in time...
But Inuyasha's lack-of-Kagome-teasing-induced depression is only our focus for these two panels. We're back to Kagome in an instant, walking out of the school building after her last day of tests, stretching and repeating the happy mantra that she is officially done. Short-Hair-Girl is slumped, however, claiming that she's envious of Kagome. Headband-Girl asks Kagome if she's not always in the top 30 scores, and Kagome laughs nervously, saying she doesn't know about that math test while scratching the back of her head.
Kagome hears her name called behind her, and turns to see that it's Houjou again, on his bike and asking how she's feeling. Short-Hair-Girl whispers that it's Houjou, just in case
Same thing happened to me when I was Kagome's age, because there was an exchange student who kept giving me gifts and confessed that he liked me, but I had ZERO interest in him. It was awkward sauce every time he came up to me and gave me something, because I wouldn't want to refuse the gift, and didn't want to insult him. I just kind of shyly mumbled about nothing until he went away.
Anyway, story-time is over, and Houjou is asking Kagome if she likes movies. Kagome gives him a look like she's one of those 0.0 emoticons. Houjou goes on to ask her if she might like to go to a movie just the two of them sometime, and Kagome is pulling this even weirder expression where her chin is tucked in but she's looking up at him while also hiding her mouth with the bamboo thing he just gave her. She wonders if he could be asking her for a date, because she's a girl, and questions whether anyone could seriously want to date her.
I guess Houjou goes away again, because in the next panel, her friends are all up on her and asking what she's going to do and whether or not she's going at all. Never mind, Houjou is in the next panel, but way in the background, nervously watching them deliberate. Short-Hair-Girl whispers to Kagome that she should go, because she's never been on a date before. Kagome tries to deny that she hasn't ever dated, but she has to at least admit to herself with a queasy look that she hasn't. She goes back over to Houjou and awkwardly rubs the back of her head as she accepts his offer. This is such cute teenage girl stuff, I can't even.
Houjou is STOKED, and gets back on his bike proclaiming that they'll go out on Saturday. At the mention of Saturday, Kagome looks a little like a deer in headlights because she has to go back to the Sengoku period after her tests, and a date would be completely out of the question. Later, as Kagome and Short-Hair-Girl are walking around a corner, a teacher calls for Kagome's attention to see her a moment.
Suddenly, a chill runs through her and she looks up, wondering if it's a youkai. Twisting around to look behind her...
Kagome is super excited, because she wanted to see Inuyasha. Inuyasha's eyes widen, but he takes on an unconcerned expression paired with a sweatdrop when he lies that he didn't really want to see her. When they get back to the shrine and well, Inuyasha is furious again, though. He demands to know what she wants three more days over in the modern era for, and Kagome is in a begging stance when she confesses that she can't study over in the Feudal era and she's not too terribly good at math to begin with. She tells Inuyasha that if she fails the make-up exam too, it's all over for her.
Inuyasha says no immediately, disregarding her raised hands with the laced fingers. Kagome asks him to let her stay just this once, but he's having none of it. He says there's no chance she'll get to stay, and Kagome hangs her head, all of her begging for nought. Inuyasha looks back at her to see that her eyes are hidden by her bangs and she's sighing.
On a playground out in the city at night, a man in glasses is getting kicked as he sits hunched and begging his aggressor to stop. It looks like a whole group of kids stand around and watch as one of them continues to kick at this guy, who is lying in a pretty big stain of blood on the concrete. The kid kicking him makes fun of him for telling them to stop, and another calls him funny-looking. Another says he's stupid. I'm flashing back to Yu-Gi-Oh's The Cruel Gang chapters, but at least these kids aren't beating on a man in broad daylight in the middle of a mall. They're the SMART thugs.
One of the kids pull him up by the collar and another grabs the guy's wallet, remarking on how much money the man has on him. He's not going to get a penalty game for this crap though. Instead...
The kids all turn toward the limping woman with the completely turned-around limbs and are in WTF mode right now. The mask says that it's grateful for how many evil souls there are in this world.
The mask proceeds to snake forward and take one of these kids' heads right off, much to the shock of his buddies. The kid's body falls, and as it chews on all the hair, bone and flesh, it exposits that it needs a stronger body to take the Shikon no Tama, with lots of evil souls as food. Yum.
The rest of those kids scream bloody murder, but their screams turn to crunching and chewing sounds soon enough.
Again, we pay a brief visit to Inuyasha back in the Sengoku Jidai. What's he up to, I wonder?
So, what did I think of this chapter overall? The beginning and the end are so much badassery. The way the sound effects and pictures combine to give the reader the sense of how unnatural the movement is for the possessed body was pretty great in the last chapter, but it's even better in this chapter. Because the body is so destroyed, it becomes that much more a horrific sight, and at the end when it starts consuming the gang it's so grotesque that it always leaves me flinching. No matter how evil those brats were, it was PAINFUL to watch that thing swipe off one of their heads.
That said, it was clumsy as hell for the mask to start telling these kids why it's going to eat them. The only reason it would have been talking like that in the scene was if it was talking to an audience that needs to know, and whenever that happens, it takes me RIGHT out of the story.
The filling of the chapter was more a whole bunch of teenage drama, of course. When your characters are teenagers, that tends to happen, but I don't mind it so much. I thought the pressure around Kagome promising to go on a date with Houjou AND having to take a make-up exam AND having to go back to hunt for the Shikon no Tama was an understandable corner to be in as a fifteen-year-old, and I feel for her.
I also feel for Inuyasha, believe it or not. He's in this inexpressible position of having low energy when Kagome isn't around to keep him entertained. Inuyasha doesn't understand a lot of things about Kagome, and she seems so strange to him that he pokes at her just to get a reaction. He gets a little depressed when she's not around being interesting, and life seems a little boring to him. At the same time, though, he never intends to truly upset her, because he's only teasing. It's not fun anymore if she's really hurt by it, because he feels bad when she cries too. I think we've all been having a lighthearted poke at someone, not meaning to hit any nerves, and they get really angry and sad. That's essentially what happened with Inuyasha and Kagome there.
And because Inuyasha really DOESN'T get why Kagome is so invested in her tests and exams, he's just perplexed as to why she's really upset about not getting to stay. He probably didn't understand 3/4s of what the hell she was talking about, because he's never gone to school or had to take tests. That's so far outside of his scope she may as well have been reciting Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity to him.
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