𝐘𝐈𝐊𝐄𝐒 ❖ KIMETSU NO YAIBA

7. TSUZUMI MANSION

The next morning, Mieko was gently woken up by her crow. 

Usually, her crow likes to wake her up like there was no tomorrow, but this morning was different. Why, you may ask? An easy question to answer; you see, the crows were scared of Inosuke.
So many times did he try to eat them, cook them, pull them apart. There was another crow lingering behind Mieko's, and so the white haired girl guessed it was Inosuke's. Poor thing looked petrified to be so close.

However, after telling their message and Mieko giving them a thumbs up, they went up into the sky and flew off.
Sighing, Mieko glanced at Inosuke, who was still sleeping.

"Inosuke...!" Mieko yelled whispered, patting the ground to try and make noise to wake him up. "...Inosuke...Ino...Inosuke!"

Nothing, he was dead to the world.

Mieko rolled her eyes and clicked her tongue before - SMACK!

Jumping to a start, Inosuke pulled himself from his sleep, both hands on his swords and looked around wildly, only to see Mieko trying to look innocent.
"Did you just slap me?!"

"No, what are you talking about? That's so mean." Mieko shook her head. "Maybe something fell on you -don't think about it much, we have to go anyways."

Inosuke watched as Mieko pushed herself up onto her feet and picked up her sword -which was next to her. She placed it on her hip before looking back to Inosuke. "We have to go check out a house, some woman went missing after something took her, it might be a demon."

"How the hell do you know that?" Inosuke asked, snatching his two swords off the ground.

"The crows told me, now let's go sleepy head! No time to loose! Onward!" For some reason, Mieko was feeling rather good this morning. Maybe it was the full belly from the meal last night.

Making herself get a head-start, Inosuke raced himself to catch up, and started off on a tangent of very random things he asked Mieko. The first lot of them were about the crows, but then it went from asking about blades of grass and then towards how colours were made. 
But either way, Mieko answered them -AND! Bonus! She could breath while answering them, since Inosuke didn't smell terrible anymore!

Happy days!

But...happiness is short lived...especially when traveling with a half naked, boar head wearing teenage boy.
Not halfway through the journey and he already is trying to pick a fight. Mieko ignored him the best she could but lord could this boy pick at a nerve.

"You only got one sword, and I've got two!" He sneered, as she showed them off. "I bet I could beat you."

"Maybe." Mieko nodded her head, she didn't want to start a fight, but she wasn't going to be so overly modest.

"I bet I can run faster than you too!" And without so much as a warning, Inosuke ran off, sprinting as fast as he could to get away. And instead of doing the smart thing and staying where she was so Inosuke would lose interest, she yelled after him and chased after him.

This set Inosuke off on a giggling tangent, which was kinda weird since he had such a low voice and the giggles sounded almost painful.
However, a while after the run, when Inosuke had gotten off his high horse and finally calmed down a lot, he sounded like he started to sniff the air a lot.

"What's that smell?" He asked, doing one big and looonnngg sniff.

Confused, Mieko also sniffed the air, but she couldn't smell a thing other than the plantation around. "I don't smell anything."

But, glancing back to Inosuke, Mieko clocked it in her mind that Inosuke was smelling things through his boar head, meaning the thing he would smell most, would be his boar head. Biting her lip comically, Mieko wondered how bad it must've been to smell the boar mask if he had gotten used to the smell of the stink.