- wait, what?

She's not dead!

But she doesn't have the jewel!

Even if she did have the jewel, he doesn't need to save her to get it! Saving her from something else makes him less likely to get it!

" - Inuyasha?"

"So, girl, how's that 'keeping the jewel safe' thing working out for you?"

"Uh, it - could be going better - "

"So, here's the plan: You sit tight, I deal with this decaying corpse here, I run off with the Shikon Jewel, and we never see each other again. Sounds good?"

How is she supposed to make a decision about something that important in one second like this!!

It definitely seems better if the person who just saved her life for no reason has the powerful mystical artifact than if the powerful mystical artifact stays in the hands of the person who is trying to kill her for equally little reason, but - 

Kaede thought he was even worse than Mistress Centipede, but he doesn't seem worse - 

She can't actually protect it from anything anyway -

It isn't really hers to give away like that, though, is it -

Say something -

"It's a corpse?"

"Humans really have no sense of smell, do they?"

He'll toss a glance over at the ?bandit?. "Hey! Enjoying your snack?"

The bandit responds by attempting to attack him!

So he rips its chest open.

There's a bird, inside, a monstrous three-eyed carrion crow.

... Very monstrous.

"YOU ALREADY LET IT TAKE THE JEWEL?"

"Well - I was tied up, so - "

"By bandits? And you couldn't even get loose? Do you even do things?"

"I did get loose! But by then it was killing people!" This is such a pointless, stupid - "It's getting away!"

And, indeed, the bird - mutating as it does - is making a run for it! Well, a fly for it.

"Come on, then! Grab a weapon and let's get going!" He'll jerk a claw at one of the bandits' bows, discarded next to a quiver as they fled.

" - right!"

She doesn't actually know how to use a bow, at all, even a little bit, but apparently following combat instructions is much easier than deciding whether to agree to anything about the jewel. She arms herself with the bow and starts running after the bird. It's pretty obvious she's not going to be able to keep up, though.

Then he'll scoop her onto his back and start leaping after it. He's fast. It's faster. "Get it with an arrow!"

"I've never used one of these things before!"

But she pulls an arrow out, and tries very hard to aim it. She hadn't realized how hard it was just to draw one of these things. When she thinks she has it lined up - assuming she's at all right about how shooting a bow actually works, mechanically - she fires.

The arrow does travel a ways in approximately the correct direction. That's about all that can be said for it. It doesn't so much miss as fall well short, too underpowered to reach the crow even if her accuracy were dead on (which it, uh, wasn't).

"Gah!"

Kikyo could have (he suppresses this sentence for the wrong reasons rather than the right ones.)

"What do you know how to do?"

The distance is increasing!

She could think of a stupid comeback to that, but instead she's going to take a deep breath and draw another arrow, ignoring the voice in her head telling her that this is stupid and doomed, doomed and stupid, and pull back with all the strength she can muster -

This one falls even further short.

Inuyasha moves fast, and Kagome does so too with him carrying her. It doesn't take long for them to pass a bandit on horseback, nor for them to make it most of the way to the village - 

- Where the mutated, monstrous crow has swooped down on, and seized, a boy, whose weight (a significant fraction of its) is slowing its flight speed. 

"Pretty dumb bird," he says, claws ready - 

Is he going to be able to just tear it out of the sky, if it's slowed down?

She's worried about what happens to the kid, when that happens, but surely he's thinking about that, right, he didn't want anything to happen to her, so saying anything would just be annoying, right -

Nnnnope. Nope he is not. "DEMON BEGONE!"

The bird is now a couple dozen plummeting pieces! The kid is also plummeting!

"Catch him!"

She absolutely believes he'll do it on his own, she's crying out mostly reflexively, but she's also looking ahead to figure out where the child will land if he doesn't -