- Okay FINE since he's landing ANYWAY he'll grab the kid by the scruff of his neck and drop him on his mother. But only because it was on his way.

"Done. Now where's the jewel, girl?"

(Answer: Under the left wing of a crow that is now largely reassembled and flying off, thanks to the regenerative powers of the Shikon Jewel.)

She scans the sky -

"There! Under the left wing!"

- but augh, it's so far away now, and it's faster than he is when it's not weighed down by anything, they've lost their chance to catch it -

He'll drop her unceremoniously on the ground, leap after it, claws extended - 

- and do no more than clip its tail. 

The crow is climbing as fast as it can! It DOES NOT WANT to stick around here!

"Damn it! It's getting away with the jewel!" He needs that!

Oh, great. He's not going to catch it like that, and then he'll be angry with her for mucking things up. (And apparently she's more worried about than about what actually happens to the jewel, right now. It's just very hard to intuitively feel that the jewel is super important, okay, while it's easy to remember how embarrassed she'll be the next time she messes up.)

The kid cries out, and she looks over to see the crow's foot, claws still embedded in the boy's clothing, rising up in an attempt to join the rest of the crow and finish regenerating. The boy is too heavy to lift with it, but if it had something lighter -

She still has her bow and arrows. She grabs the foot, bites the strap off her quiver, and uses it to tie the foot to one of her arrows. The foot should carry it to the bird - all she needs to do is provide enough power that the arrow stabs through flesh when it reaches it. Even if this works, it'll probably just embed the arrow in the bird, which seems unlikely to kill it. It might at least slow it down again, though, and then maybe Inuyasha can finish it off. 

"Inuyasha! Duck!"

- and then, in another moment, she lets her arrow fly.

"That is the dumbest -" he says.

(And ducks.)

And as the crow flies higher, higher, higher, so high up it is only a speck - 

- The arrow, drawn upwards by the regeneration, flies true, and strikes the heart of it.

Where there is - the Shikon Jewel.

Struck by an arrow, the jewel explodes into a thousand pieces. The crow, no longer possessing rapid regeneration powers and with an arrow through its torso, abruptly stops holding together and collapses.

You can see the light from Kyoto, and the falling shards tumbling like snow across more a thousand miles of Japan.

"Oh."

"Sorry?"

A small fragment of the jewel makes a tinkling sound as it hits a rock near their feet.

Kagome bends down and picks it up.

"...I'm gonna go talk to Kaede."

"Sounds good!" says Inuyasha. "Why not!"

So Kagome trudges back to the shrine.

Does Kaede appear to be aware of anything that's happened since she set off for the well? Either from the bandit who may or may not have decided to be helpful, or from watching the sky just now, or from anything else?

Yeah. She knows.

And looks - completely crushed, as much as Kagome or Inuyasha.

"The Shikon Jewel is shattered," she says.

Great. Stellar. Awesome. They could have buried the thing in the ground and done better than giving it to her.

"Yeah."

"Yeah, old hag, I know that! Got anything useful to say?"

"Only this: That you will need to work together to recover the pieces and restore it."

"Are you out of your mind? Kagome broke the damn thing, and I'm the demon you were trying to keep it safe from!"

"Yeah, I don't think there's really anything I can... do? About this?"

Also she's kind of unclear on what the effects of a shattered Shikon jewel even are, or for that matter what the effects of a regular shikon jewel are, and at this point she's kind of scared to ask. About anything, really.