"Don't you dare -" as her blade whips across the battlefield -

Kagome pushes to her feet and runs for the skull, drawing the robe tight around herself. 

It deflects off her as she reaches the skull!

Yura tries hair again -

- But Inuyasha's standing over her, slashing away the strands with less aim than general fury -

The world consists of Kagome and this one creepy skull, and she's not letting the creepy skull get away. She drops to her knees beside it, pulls out an arrow with one bleeding hand, and slams the arrowhead down on the top of the skull with all of the force she can muster. If it doesn't work the first time, she's prepared to keep pummeling it until it does.

It cracks, but does not - quite - shatter!

"You're dead, girl!"

This time the blade will aim for her throat!

She ignores the sword. A crack means this thing is about to break. She brings the arrowhead down on the crack in the skull as hard as she can.

And it shatters, revealing - a comb.

A comb?

Without thinking very hard about it - there's no time to think about it - she picks it up, pulling it out of the few strands of hair that are wrapped around it.

Yura's body falls limp. Yura's sword clatters to the ground. Yura's hair ceases to attack.

Huh. Well. This comb must be the puppet master, then.

She looks it over for a second, considering, and then snaps it in half in her hands.

And Yura's body fades away, leaving nothing but her sword and the old clothes she was wearing.

"No wonder I couldn't kill her."

(He looks exhausted. He's covered in blood, both from direct obvious stabbing wounds and the individual welts left by razor hair, and also bruises, and also probably half his muscles have been wrenched.)

(He's not dead, though.)

"Yeah. It was a comb the whole time." Now the rest of the world is coming back into focus, her tiredness and her own injuries and the memory that she has to go find out if the villagers are still alive. But first - "You're hurt."

Unsurprisingly, the suggestion that he might possibly possess some weakness inspires him to annoyance!

"Never mind about me, where's the jewel shard?"

"Uhh..."

There it is, glinting over by Yura's clothes and sword. She walks over and picks it up.

"All right." He'll hold out his hand for it. "Let's go, Kagome."

She spends a second staring at his outstretched hand. She has half a mind to keep the shard anyway. She meant to, when she picked it up. She doesn't think she should have given it away so easily, before; the thing was a part of her, that's a lot of the reason why she thinks she has a responsibility to find it again. Anyway, he's the one who lost it, and she barely knows him, and he doesn't doesn't exactly come with stellar character references, and he tried to kill her for it not three days ago.

He's also absolutely covered in blood, largely from injuries that he sustained protecting her...

"Oh!" she says, remembering the robe and momentarily forgetting about the question of what to do with the jewel shard. She takes the robe off and hands it back to him. "Thank you. For letting me use it."

" - Hmph." He'll grab it and pull it on.

She should really be thanking him for... more things than that... but listing all of them out would sound absurd.

"All right. You don't need - bandages, or anything? I have some in my pack." Which she really should have dropped, at some point, it's kind of been killing her to carry it, but there wasn't ever really a spare moment when it was safe to think about that.

"I'll manage," he says, pulling his robe back on and wrapping it around himself. "Let's go."

" - 'kay," she says, and falls into step behind him. 

"Do you know where the villagers are?"

"Well, the old hag's in a shallow grave outside of town."