Unless the chapter title is talking about Naraku's scheme to have Sango attack and kill Inuyasha with false information.
Ahem. Forget you read that first paragraph.
She leans forward, presumably to give him a piece of her mind, and Inuyasha asks her casually if she's awake now. Sango demands he put her down and to know what he's going to do to her, when the better question is probably where he's taking her instead. Inuyasha looks a cross between confused and annoyed as he glares at Sango out of his periphery. Kagome, whom Sango looks at in shock as she realizes she's been riding Inuyasha's back right beside her this whole time, lets Sango know that they're headed to confront Naraku, who took their Shikon shard from them.
Inuyasha asks for confirmation on Sango's name, but doesn't wait for it, assuring her that if she tries anything funny, he'll drop her. Sango is indignant, and Kagome whines at Inuyasha that if he's overly hostile, Sango will misunderstand. She then turns to Sango, a hand on Inuyasha's miffed head, telling her that Inuyasha may act brash but he's also got a nice side. Inuyasha trails off in a perturbed protest, while Myouga hops on Sango's shoulder and explains that Inuyasha and company COULD have left her behind in her injured state, but didn't. Sango appears to recognize Myouga, which rules out the idea that he was secretly skulking around the village trying to find out information through spying, which is what I had thought before.
Having no more patience for all this talk about how generous and kind he is, Inuyasha barks out a suggestion that they fly, thinking that he won't let Naraku escape. Yeah, you WISH this series were that short, Inuyasha.
Cut to Miroku, whom Naraku is hovering over, many intestine-tentacles whipping around with malice while Miroku and Kirara stand their ground tenuously. Naraku asks Miroku why he's surprised, chuckling. Miroku gapes, realizing half aloud, that Naraku's body is a fake. Seems real enough to throw you off your game, Miroku. Naraku has a similar sarcastic retort, telling Miroku that whether or not it's fake won't make much of a difference in Miroku's experience of it. The tentacles lunge at Miroku, eager to impale Miroku. Guess they weren't satisfied with just feeling him up like before.
Miroku grunts, shredding the tentacles with a thrust of his staff. The pieces fall to the ground but come slithering back together again like they were never torn in the first place. Miroku complains internally about the futility of his strikes, and dives out of the way when a particularly large tentacle tries to smash him, carving a hole in the ground where he once stood instead. One of the tentacles forms a clawed hand again, latching onto Miroku's ankle to keep him from escaping. Then...
He doesn't have long to worry about if the tentacle is going to probe any further, though!
Deposited behind a tree by Inuyasha only seconds before, Kagome, Sango and Shippou peer over a mound of earth beside it at the scene. While helping keep the weak Sango steady beside her, Kagome gapes at the amalgam of tentacles that Naraku is, baffled by it. Sango is just speechless and wide-eyed.
Inuyasha turns to mock Miroku for sleeping on the job, crouching where his forceful attack landed him. When he sees that Miroku is still laying prone on the ground, severed tentacle standing were it struck his chest, Inuyasha recoils in horror as Myouga haltingly says Miroku's been struck through. Kagome and Shippou wail Miroku's name, as does Inuyasha, rushing to get to his side and asses the damage. On his way, Naraku's tentacles move to strike him too, and he's only just able to grab Miroku and dodge them. He yells at Miroku not to die, but he's pessimistic, already lamenting that he didn't get to Miroku a bit sooner.
Suddenly, Miroku starts hacking up a lung, managing to croak that he thought he had died himself. Inuyasha gapes, completely taken aback by Miroku's unexpected return to consciousness. I am a little bit too, because I'm not sure how the tentacle just knocked him out by nearly running him through. That's... not how impaling works...
Miroku grabs the tentacle supposedly sticking out of his stomach and throws it, Kagome and Shippou looking on in awe. Inuyasha examines the place where the tentacle was, noting that there's not even a hole, while Miroku milks how close of a call that was. Inuyasha knocks him upside the head for looking as dead as he looked, and Miroku grumbles that Inuyasha was the one who jumped to conclusions and overreacted. Nah, Miroku, I'm with Inuyasha on this one. You could have been less dramatic about the whole thing; you didn't even get a SCRATCH, you dick.
But Naraku wasn't talking about HIS attacks - he observes that Sango failed to bring Inuyasha down. Inuyasha calls Naraku a bastard for sending a swarm of youkai to the exterminators' village to kill them, but Naraku scoffs at this. He admits that all he did was call the best exterminators to the castle and send a little message to the youkai that the village was vulnerable. The bystanders at the tree, Sango in particular, gape at the confession.
Inuyasha spits that Naraku is a bastard again, and Miroku asks if Naraku was after the Shikon fragment in the village. Naraku says that Miroku is awfully well-informed, apparently not realizing that he's just transparent as glass. Naraku claims that taking the shard was easy in the chaos of the fighting between youkai and villager. Inuyasha cannot stop labeling Naraku a bastard, seemingly in mild disbelief, but greater anger.
Naraku's attention is drawn to Sango shouting his name, and he acknowledges her with a smirk under his mask. Sango asks for confirmation that the extermination job at the castle was also just a trap, though she already knows the answer to that judging by her rage-face. He nonchalantly says it was an excuse to lure the exterminators out so he could deal with them before they became a nuisance to him.
Naraku taunts her by saying that if she had continued to believe that Inuyasha was her enemy, she would have died peacefully thinking she had completed her revenge. That's only if she managed to kill Inuyasha in her ignorance, and I think it's safe to assume that her blood loss alone would have worn her down before that happened, dude. No matter how good she is, she's not hanyou tough.
Naraku is taken aback by Inuyasha lunging at him, which has me scratching my head. You should expect to get some retaliation when you're talking smack like he is. Inuyasha starts ranting about how Naraku ALWAYS pulls this crap, taking peoples' hearts and... he doesn't finish before Naraku starts talking even MORE crap about how this whole situation must remind him of what happened with Kikyou. Oooooh, Naraku done it now...
Holding the pain-wracked Sango, Kagome lets out a shocked noise while Shippou gapes, muttering that Inuyasha got Naraku. Naraku's head falls to the ground, Inuyasha and Miroku watching it speechlessly as it starts chuckling.
Even that terrible pun wasn't enough to murder Naraku...
So, what did I think of this chapter overall? I'm torn on the exposition of Naraku's plot against Sango and the exterminators. On the one hand, this wasn't a blatant bad-guy monologue where he's just really excited to talk about his evil plan even though no one asked him in the first place. Naraku didn't say anything until Inuyasha and company invited him to, and he only gave enough detail to imply that he couldn't DIRECTLY be held responsible for what the youkai did with the information about the exterminators being away he gave them. In fact, in true manipulative style, he pulls the familiar excuse of all violent instigators that words are only words and he can't be responsible for what others do when he says things.
At first, anyway. Then when he starts blatantly taunting Sango for not CONTINUING to believe his lies to her so she could die peacefully, he gives her his entire motivation for killing everyone she knows. It was implied, didn't need to be said, and was simply clunky within the flow of the rest of the chapter. Besides, it's a little weird that Naraku would admit so brazenly that the exterminators were, or would become, a threat to him. His style strikes me as an insecure trickster type, trying to convince everyone he fucks with them for shits and giggles.
Taunting Inuyasha about the similarity between this incident and the one with Kikyou was a kind of relief for me, because it's much more fun to hate Naraku when he's just being a shitlord, as opposed to being your stereotypical mustache-twirler.
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