"Wind User Kagura, did Naraku send you here?"
Li Xia, who had kept his Barrier up all along, got straight to the point.
"I was only following orders to monitor your movements here. I had no intention of fighting you."
Kagura forced herself to offer an explanation, her expression rather strained.
As it happened, she had been unlucky too.
Originally, the battle between the venomous Saimyosho and the giant bear over a Shikon Shard had only been a ruse. The aim was to make the man before her lower his guard, letting him think he had lucked into a jewel shard for nothing.
This man, who possessed more than half the Shikon Jewel, would very likely be tempted into acting for that shard.
As long as he reached out and touched that counterfeit Shikon Shard formed from tainted Demon Power and lethally poisonous miasma, he would either die or suffer injuries.
Then, if the trap severely injured him, she could use her exceptional mobility to move in and finish him off, as Naraku had ordered. Besides eliminating this dangerous human, she could seize his Shikon Shards.
Two birds with one stone.
And she had been a hundred meters or so from the battlefield, free to attack or retreat. That should already have been a fairly safe distance.
But she had never expected that, after just a month apart, his strength would have soared again, leaving his former self far behind: in just a few breaths, he had actually constructed a wide-area defensive Barrier covering a radius of five or six hundred meters.
As for his purpose? It had merely been to prevent any Saimyosho from escaping.
And so she, originally positioned at a safe distance, had naturally been caught in it too.
Trapped inside the Barrier.
To avoid alerting him,