Miroku shouts at Inuyasha to come back before his body melts, worry mirrored by Kagome and Kaede beside him, but Inuyasha isn't listening. He pushes through the miasma with a groan, trying to protect his face with a sleeve of the fire-rat. Naraku stands at the center of the cloud of grossness, hair whipping across his mug wildly and only leaving an eye exposed while he calls Inuyasha a moron for thinking he could escape the miasma once he was inside. He's holding a sleeve up to his nose once more when that one exposed eye widens in surprise, shifted to his left.
Naraku starts to retreat back into his bubbling wave of miasma with a noise of frustration, but Inuyasha yells at him to stop. He swings Tessaiga again to cut the miasma, questioning if he cut Naraku in the process hopefully.
Kagome rushes forward calling Inuyasha's name, with a Shippou on her shoulder who's in awe that Inuyasha is alive. Inuyasha is still preoccupied by the spider he saw on Naraku's back just before he got away, so he tells the others about it, describing it as much like a burn. Kaede looks contemplative, which Miroku notices and asks her to confirm that the bandit Onigumo indeed had burns all over his body. Kaede says this is correct and speculates that the spider mark are what remains of Onigumo. Inuyasha thinks the spider is Naraku's identification, which sure is inconvenient, considering it'll be covered most of the time.
A strange gasp is heard by the group and they all turn to see what's making it.
Rouyakan brings his jaws together, snapping and crumbling the tree in his mouth, while Miroku names him and Shippou cowers because he's still alive. Yes, Shippou, EVERYONE is still alive. What's next? Turning around and being shocked that Kaede's still kicking too? Sheesh... As Rouyakan continues to recline, looking distant and out of it, a rumble comes from his head. He suddenly becomes VERY aware that the grinding sound is his head splitting, stuttering this out in fear. Kagome and Miroku stare, the former picking out the light of a Shikon fragment beneath the leaves sprouting from the panicking Rouyakan's head. He thrashes around, shouting in pain that he's dying and clutching both sides of his skull.
Kagome approaches Rouyakan quickly, against an unfinished warning from the nervous Miroku. Inuyasha scoffs and jumps in front of Kagome, asking her if she WANTS to die. He turns to the still panting and groaning Rouyakan, hand on sword, and Kagome leans around Inuyasha to address Rouyakan. She asks if she can take the fragment, and Rouyakan tells her it's futile because only Naraku can remove it. She reaches for it anyway, shocking Rouyakan.
Predictably, Inuyasha starts to yell at Rouyakan that he shouldn't think he can just get off with an apology, but Miroku steps in front of him with his staff held out. Miroku tells Inuyasha to let it go, because Rouyakan was only being controlled by Naraku anyway and any more fighting would just be pointless slaughter. Inuyasha scoffs, but doesn't give chase.
Later, Inuyasha is sitting in his favorite thinking tree, silently cursing Naraku as he promises to track the bastard down to avenge Kikyou's death. He considers it the only thing he can do for poor Kikyou now, anyway.
Kagome watches him wordlessly, hanging out next to a nearby fence. Shippou jumps onto her and starts complain about how Inuyasha's shut himself up in his own head just when she's come back. But Kagome knows he's hurt because of what happened to Kikyou, and wonders if it would have been better had she not come back at all. Shippou sits on the fence now, as Kagome walks away. He asks if she's going somewhere, and she assures him it's just for a bit, though in a distinctly gloomy way. Inuyasha hears this, but doesn't move to stop her or say anything.
She goes back to the well and mutters about Inuyasha smashing it up so badly. Kagome climbs over the lip, intending to go back at least once because she didn't tell anyone she was leaving. Before she can slide in, someone calls out to her. It's Inuyasha, who comments on her leaving again already. Kagome says his name hesitantly.
Inuyasha makes more headway in the communication department when he starts to explain that he thought it would be okay no matter how far away she was, but it wasn't until he saw her face that for whatever reason his strength returned. Technically, it was when you caught her scent. Splitting hairs, I know, especially when Inuyasha is spilling his guts. He's uncomfortable and looking away, but Kagome stares, expression blank.
And if you're wondering what Kikyou has to do with anything here, well, just follow the manga to the next page, where we get to visit a different village where someone is asking about and evil aura the villagers have been feeling lately. Someone else answers that it's been swirling around the area for a bit. The one asking the questions about auras and strange happenings is a man dressed in similar robes to Miroku accompanied by his apprentice, and he's asking them of a man balanced on a seat on a rope looped around a tree, bracing his feet against the trunk to keep himself steady. This device is ingenious, because the man with the sickle can sit semi-comfortably while he's harvesting the branches from the tree. The man himself? Not so ingenious.
He asks the priest if he's kidding, and the others assisting him say that there's no strange happenings around such a peaceful village as theirs, and especially not since the priestess came to them. The priest seems suspicious at the mention of a priestess, who is in a field picking herbs with a couple of children who ask her which ones are good. They call her Kikyou.
So, what did I think of this chapter overall? Don't worry, I'm not a COMPLETE idiot. I realize that Naraku being in the middle of a transformation is probably the reason he's hiding his face. This might even indicate a somewhat vain streak, because his shape is in transition and it doesn't look quite the way he wants yet. That reason would add a little bit of depth to Naraku's somewhat flat existence in the beginning. Also, there's certainly no other reason I can think of why he would be obscuring his face so much here, while not bothering to throughout most of the rest of the story.
Moving on to Inuyasha's confession in this installment: it's BIG. Maybe bigger than some Western readers may realize. Sure, it's quite big enough that Inuyasha is expressing himself in an intimate way to Kagome, which we've seen can be really difficult for him. He's still not saying out loud half the things that are going on in his head to Kagome, which is his tendency toward a lack of clarity when communicating, but he's definitely getting better in that respect. Inuyasha has learned that Kagome wants to be around him as much as he wants to be around her, and it's probably making his confession a bit easier here. I'm sure it also helps that there aren't any nosy eavesdroppers hanging out around the corner this time around.
But more than all that, there are cultural subtleties at work here as well. Asian cultures have a slightly different definition of masculinity that's quieter and less emotional than the Western version - men aren't likely to EVER out-and-out say how they feel, and will come up with more round-about ways of expression. For example, where an American man might get down on one knee in public and hold out a ring while asking a woman to marry him, a Japanese man might be more inclined to ask his lover to just take care of him for the rest of his life in private. Keeping this in mind, Inuyasha isn't just telling Kagome he wants her around for unspecified reasons, he is actually expressing in the only way he knows how that he REALLY likes her.
Which makes them officially a couple by the end of this chapter. Keep that in mind as we go forward into the next arc, if you will, because Kikyou still being "alive" definitely complicates things. At this point, Inuyasha isn't aware that Kikyou is still around. I'm guessing his mental note about Kikyou when he told Kagome he wants her by his side is supposed to be more of an indication that he's aware of how Kagome may feel about his pursuit of revenge for his ex-girlfriend, as well as a reminder that he can't let his new relationship with Kagome let him slacken this pursuit.
But it also acts as a strangely loud transition into the scene where Kikyou is seen to be hanging around. It's not quite as clumsy as the transition between Kikyou's resurrection and the introduction of a character who seemed to know much more about her killer than anyone else did, but it's up there.
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