Inuyasha Manga: 029 The Thunder Beast Brothers

I finally got to start cooking for myself a couple of days ago, and since I'm in a brand new place with a brand new grocery store I have to get acquainted with, I figured I could make a new recipe I hadn't tried before. It's this sweet potato/peanut stew that was PHENOMENAL. Seriously, guys, if you get the chance to make it, it's on that Yummly app and it is to die for.

A much better use of a cauldron than a shoddy sounding hair-growth serum, I assure you.

Hey man, some would kill to get a nice septum piercing for free. Don't complain.

As Shippou scrambles forward, Manten lunges toward him, still demanding the Shikon fragments in his tiny fist and calling him scum. Shippou is not interested in giving them up, and jumps away from him. Kagome notes the Shikon shards Manten already has embedded in his forehead and takes aim at them with her arrow. Unfortunately, when she releases, the arrow only grazes the top of Manten's head, missing the target. Kagome reaches for another arrow, disheartened by how she missed.

While she's nocking it, Manten's sweating face is shadowed but gleaming with sweat and two of the three hairs on his head flutter off his head. Kagome stares at him in confusion, because he's looking a little panicked when he pats his head, searching for those hairs. Tears streaming, he throws back his head and wails at their confirmed loss, causing Kagome and Shippou to look at him like he's out of his mind.

Manten levels his head again to charge up his mouth fire and Shippou urges Kagome to run and get out of the way because that was the move that took out his dad. Still crying, Manten asks Kagome how she could dare to give him that shave.

Kagome flops down in the grass and Manten pants in the wake of his emotional outburst. He wonders if he got them, and starts looking as Shippou tells the knocked-out Kagome to hang in there. He hears the shifting of the foliage and Manten's nearly bald head bobbing toward them.

Manten pushes aside the grass only to find Kagome. Upon taking a closer look at her, he notices that she's SUPER cute, and hovers his twitching fingers over her creepily. Elsewhere in the grass, Shippou struggles to calm his hammering heart when he hears a noise above him. It's Manten, flying away on his cloud, and to Shippou's horror, he has a passenger.

Shippou gazes up at her with concern and is at least self-aware enough to realize that he deserted her when she tried to help him. He makes a little fist and curses in his head.

Back with Inuyasha, Myouga is trying to pry off the paper charm Shippou slapped on the statue holding Inuyasha's hands down, but he's too small to get the job done. He gives up, apologizing to Inuyasha, and Inuyasha strains to pull his hands from under the statue while cursing the little fox runt.

Speak of the devil, Shippou reappears with a declaration that he MIGHT help Inuyasha. Inuyasha gives him a wide-eyed stare as Shippou tells him that Inuyasha has to promise not to hit him if he removes the charm. Inuyasha wonders what happened to Kagome, because Shippou is alone. Shippou is conspicuous in his refusal to answer, asking Inuyasha whether he promises or not. Inuyasha calls Shippou an idiot, but does agree not to hit him.

Shippou rips off the charm in one swift motion, which also reduces the statue to a fraction of its size. Shippou tosses the mini statue up and down as he tells Inuyasha to settle down so he can say something. Inuyasha cuts him off by punching him several times on top of the head, leaving lumps upon lumps. Shippou whines that Inuyasha promised not to hit him, but Inuyasha isn't listening because he just remembered something else. He grabs Shippou by a leg and shakes him out, looking among the many toys and items falling to the ground for those Shikon shards Shippou stole. He catches the bottle and holds Shippou by his tail while he examines them, confirming that they look like they're okay and all there.

Tears in his eyes, Shippou shouts at Inuyasha to knock it off and listen, because Kagome was kidnapped by a Thunder Beast. Inuyasha glares at him, asking if those are the enemies of Shippou's father mentioned before and if they met. He peers down at a guilty Shippou as he's trying to look away, saying that it doesn't really look like Shippou managed to get that revenge he was after. Shippou's face is pouring sweat and his gaze shifted away when Inuyasha asks him if he just sat back and watched Kagome being taken away. Shippou yells that Inuyasha should shut up and just go rescue his woman already, the latter part of this statement making Inuyasha cringing at. He then slams Shippou down into the ground, insisting that it's not like that with him and Kagome.

Methinks he doth protest too much.

The tears have come back to Shippou's eyes as he warbles out the beginning of a protest at Inuyasha who has turned away and crossed his arms. Inuyasha says that he's not opposed to saving Kagome (where have we heard this before?), but Shippou has to prostrate himself before Inuyasha to motivate him. If Shippou begs, Inuyasha claims he will forgive him for all his transgressions, all through a fake superior glare that's betrayed by the sweatdrop at his temple.

Shippou is indignant, but Myouga hops on his shoulder to advise him to do what he's told and ask for Inuyasha's favor. Myouga says that if HE'S able to act mature in this situation, it'll be better. Shippou raises a shaking fist, angrily wondering out loud why he has to do this, but the image of Kagome being carried off on the cloud by Manten flashes across his mind. He admits, silently, that he can't save Kagome by himself.

So, he slaps his hands on the ground in front of his knees, cursing, and grovels to Inuyasha, pleading with him to help.

You told him to, don't you remember? Kagome's memory problems must be rubbing off...

One the craggy side of a rocky mountain, the audience is shown a gate, behind which Kagome groans as she wakes up and props herself on her elbows to groggily look at her surroundings.

It's not Sparta, I can tell you that much.

Kagome recoils, asking if Manten is going to eat her, but Manten says he's not. Instead, he plans to boil her down and rub her on his head, because he's heard that a cute girl's flesh is good for hair growth. She's dumbfounded by this statement, and then indignant when she shouts that she would rather be eaten. Manten shushes her, because if she's too loud, his brother really WILL eat her.

Too late.

Hiten just busted that door right down. Rude.

Hiten catches sight of Kagome and asks what the deal is with her being around, and since he looks more human, Kagome ponders the possibility of communicating with him a bit better than Manten. Manten puts himself in a guarding stance between Hiten and Kagome, saying that she's HIS spoils. Hiten assures Manten that he's not going to take Kagome, because he's already got a better-looking woman. Said woman scoffs, clearly in agreement.

Comparing womenz aside, Hiten wants to know if Manten found any more Shikon fragments. Manten puts one of his hands to his mouth, possibly to block his worried mumble. He starts sweating, shifting his gaze away as he says he remembers now. Hiten hums and Manten stutters that he did find some, but...

Hiten is all kinds of smiley when he asks what Manten means by that, asking if he was more dazzled by Kagome than the Shikon fragments.

Yup, he's got quite the temper on him, doesn't he?

So, what did I think of this chapter overall? I love all these assumptions and biases being turned on their heads. First we have Shippou, who came back from his botched revenge not only a failure, but someone who had gotten help and had abandoned the person who had given him that help. This forces him to accept that he couldn't have gotten his revenge on his own, and by extension, can't save his savior by himself either. Add to that the fact that Kagome is a human, and he's likely feeling a high amount of foolishness along with guilt right about now. He has to go to the person he knows has to have a bit more power than Kagome in order to get help with the rescue now, and accept the fact that Inuyasha will probably be able to get the job done a lot better than he could.

Then we have Kagome making the assumption that she might be able to reason with the more human of the Thunder Brothers, and being shut down in that assumption fairly fast. I don't know why she thought Hiten would be more reasonable, given she's met Sesshoumaru already, but this was a classic lesson in the adage that looks can be deceiving. It doesn't matter how human someone looks, they can still be a horrible piece of shit on the inside.

That goes for scents too, in this case. Shippou smelled the human scent mixed with the youkai scent on Inuyasha and presumed he couldn't be as powerful as a full youkai. But Shippou is about to find out that parentage is no indicator of a person's abilities.