Chapter Sixteen: The Third Mission, Osaka Factory Part Four
Obito was surprised by a blow coming from the left side.
It was a simple, scuttling lunge he hadn't fully tracked. His panoramic vision, granted by the Sharingan, had been fixed on the three curses directly in front of him, the five to his right, and the two trying to flank from behind. The left side, momentarily 'clear,' had been a blind spot in his attention, not his sight.
It was from a curse resembling an insect.
A low, chittering thing made of fused, clicking carapaces and too many jointed legs. It moved with a jerky, unpredictable skitter-skitter that was hard to anticipate even with enhanced vision.
Its cursed energy was low, so he hadn't focused on it.
A rookie mistake. In the blinding, chaotic storm of high-grade malice from the boss and the seething mass at the door, the faint, sputtering signal of a low-grade pest had been filtered out by his own panic. He'd prioritized the 'loud' threats and ignored the quiet, stabby one.
It was his lack of experience that made him weak, even with possessing the Sharingan.
The eye was a supercomputer, but he was an untrained operator trying to use it to play a deadly video game on the hardest setting with no tutorial. He had the hardware, but the software—the instincts, the battlefield awareness—was full of bugs.
His experience was low.
Two missions. Some harsh training sessions. That was it. A pathetically thin resume for a life-or-death struggle in a cursed factory basement.
He didn't possess any inherited experience or skills except for the things he trained on with Kyoshi.
No muscle memory from a lifetime of combat. No secret family techniques unlocked by trauma. Just the sore muscles, bruises, and half-remembered drills from a teacher who believed in 'motivational' beatings.
Even the pain he was exposed to during training—he couldn't withstand it, he wasn't talented enough to get everything.
Kyoshi's 'lessons' had left him aching and humiliated more often than enlightened. He'd absorbed the basics of stance, grip, and evasion through sheer, painful repetition, not through any flash of genius.
Even after discovering the Sharingan and being able to activate it, this eye worked to make him able to see movements close to the future, in addition to exploring movements very quickly and giving him enhanced reactions.
It was a cheat code, yes. But cheat codes don't teach you how to play the game. They just make your character overpowered while you still run into walls.
But it didn't help or lead him without any use.
The information was a firehose. He was drowning in data—trajectories, energy flows, weak points—but lacked the processor to use it all effectively. It was like being given the blueprint to a castle while standing in the moat, with archers shooting at you.
All of that required from him a great deal of experience to be able to use it.
And experience, in the Jujutsu world, was often bought in blood. His was about to make a down payment.
—
"Dammit! Just die already!"
His scream was a raw, frustrated thing, torn from his throat more by panic than rage. He swung the Butcher Knife in a wide, desperate arc.
He screamed while hitting one of the curses.
The insectoid curse, having landed its initial scratch on his arm, chittered in anticipation of another strike. Obito's wild swing, telegraphed and clumsy, somehow connected—guided at the last millisecond by a faint predictive trail from his Sharingan.
Blood flew after he cut off its head, which resembled an insect.
SCHLICK-CRUNCH!
The sound was wet and brittle, like snapping a crab shell filled with gelatin. A spray of cold, blackish fluid splattered across his face and uniform. He gagged at the smell—ozone and rotting meat.
But ten were coming behind it.
As the headless curse dissolved into smoke, the gap it left was immediately filled. Ten more shapes pressed forward from the gloom of the corridor, their forms a nightmare menagerie of twisted metal and tortured flesh. Their energy signatures were low, flickering candles compared to the boss's bonfire, but there were ten of them.
Their energies were low; nonetheless, that matter didn't make Obito feel better, it made him more serious.
Quantity had a quality all its own. Ten weak curses could overwhelm him just as dead as one strong one. The Sharingan helpfully highlighted all ten at once, painting his vision with ten overlapping sets of attack vectors. It was visually overwhelming, a psychedelic nightmare of red lines and pulsing dots.
He used the body of the curse whose head he had cut off as cover.
As the dissolving corpse began to fade, he gave it a savage kick with his foot, sending the semi-corporeal mass tumbling into the path of the two foremost curses. They stumbled over it with angry hisses and screeches, their advance momentarily disrupted.
And rose around it.
He used the half-second of confusion to move, not away, but into the disorganized pack. A suicidal move for anyone without precognitive sight.
He struck one with the Butcher Knife in his hand.
A downward chop, aimed not at the center mass but at a glowing 'joint' in its leg-like appendage. Crack! The limb gave way, and the curse toppled with a shriek.
And grabbed a second with his fist and used it as a projectile towards another curse.
His left hand, moving on autopilot guided by a red after-image, shot out and grabbed a smaller, skittering curse by what passed for its neck. He didn't think; he just heaved, spinning and using its own momentum to launch it like a fleshy bowling ball into a cluster of three others. Thud! Screech! They went down in a tangle of limbs.
Then launched towards them both.
He was moving now, a red-eyed dervish in the narrow space. The fear was still there, a cold knot in his stomach, but it was being overridden by a frantic, survivalist rhythm his body was falling into.
All of that within a matter of seconds.
Five seconds. Maybe six. In that time, he'd assessed, reacted, killed one, disabled two, and created momentary chaos. It wasn't elegant, but it was effective. A strange, savage efficiency born of pure desperation.
His body was being enveloped in cursed energy automatically.
A thin, shimmering aura of his own cursed energy—a pale, defensive layer he wasn't consciously controlling—had sprung up around him. It was the body's instinctive response to a hostile environment, like sweating in heat or shivering in cold.
His control over cursed energy was increasing with every moment passing in this place.
The pressure-cooker environment was forcing a crash course in energy manipulation. Every dodge, every strike, every panicked surge of adrenaline was being converted, filtered, and utilized. He was learning by literal fire.
Fear, anger, guilt—all these emotions were working and transforming into cursed energy he was now using to make his survival continue.
The cocktail was potent. Fear of death (very immediate). Anger at the situation, at his past self, at the universe (plentiful). Guilt over luring them here (fresh and acidic). It all boiled in his core, a toxic reactor fueling his desperate moves.
So that his team, which was now undertaking the task of eliminating the Grade Two curse, could succeed.
That thought was a distant, secondary motivator. Primarily, he wanted them to succeed so the giant eye-tentacle monster would stop existing, thereby increasing his own chances of not being turned into paste. Altruism and self-interest were beautifully aligned.
—
But was this enough? Certainly not.
A grim, internal voice answered his own rhetorical question. No, you idiot. It's not enough. They're endless. You're one guy with a kitchen knife and a migraine.*
Obito's situation was incredibly tense.
The word 'tense' didn't do it justice. It was a high-wire act over a pit of spinning blades, while being pelted with rocks, and the wire was on fire. Every muscle fiber was pulled taut, every nerve ending screaming.
His body was much weaker than the place believed.
The factory, a monument to industrial strength and enduring decay, seemed to mock his human frailty. His arms were already burning with lactic acid. His lungs heaved, drawing in the foul air. He was a perishable item in a realm of eternal rust.
He was feeling tired even with the enhancement he obtained from cursed energy.
The energy surge was like a potent, jittery caffeine injection. It made him faster, sharper, but it didn't remove the fundamental exhaustion. It just let him ignore it for a little longer, at a cost that would come due later.
There were limits to how the body worked.
Biology was a harsh mistress. She didn't care about cursed techniques or reincarnated souls. Muscles tore. Bones broke. Stamina ran out. He was painfully aware of those limits with every gasping breath.
During the fight, the thing that made him able to keep up with this number of curses coming at him from every direction was the dynamic vision granted to him by the Sharingan.
It was the only thing keeping him alive. The predictive trails were like ghostly footprints showing him where to step, where to swing, where to duck. Without them, he'd have been overwhelmed ten seconds ago.
But this couldn't last. This is what Obito realized.
The realization was a cold drip of dread down his spine, even as he sidestepped a lunge and buried his knife in a curse's 'spine.' The eye was a battery, and it was draining fast. He could feel the strain behind his eyes, a building pressure that promised a spectacular headache—if he lived long enough to have one.
—
The Sharingan worked to increase the speed of his reactions, but that took a lot of cursed energy in line with the amount of danger.
The more threats it had to track and predict, the more power it siphoned. It was a vicious feedback loop: more danger → more Sharingan use → more energy drained → greater danger from being slower.
At this moment, where danger was in every corner, his mind was secreting cursed energy without stopping to increase the work of his cursed technique ability.
His brain was in overdrive, a command center under siege, burning through its fuel reserves at an alarming rate to keep the precious, life-saving data stream flowing.
Continuing for a long period meant more consumption of cursed energy.
He wasn't built for a marathon of slaughter. He was built for short sprints, maybe a brisk jog. This was a marathon through hell, uphill, carrying weights.
He could calculate the amount of time his cursed technique could continue working, which was 10 minutes at most with accuracy.
The number appeared in his mind's eye, not as a thought, but as a gut-deep knowing, an instinctive readout from the Sharingan itself. Like a fuel gauge blinking into the red. ESTIMATED REMAINING OPERATION: 00:09:47... 00:09:46...
How he arrived at this time, he didn't know, but he felt that his eye was telling him now the amount of time it could continue, and that was only if he didn't sustain an injury.
The condition was a terrifying caveat. Any significant hit, any drain from poison or a major defensive expenditure, and that timer would plummet. It was a countdown to either victory or a very messy death.
—
SCRAAAAAPE! CLANG!
The floor emitted a metallic sound from under Obito.
A curse that was in the shape of an insect had almost grabbed his foot and thrown him backward.
It had burrowed? No—it had flattened itself, a chitinous pancake sliding silently along the grimy floor, waiting for his weight to shift. A trapdoor spider strategy from a thing with too many eyes.
But before that happened, he had jumped a distance of one meter off the ground.
The Sharingan's predictive lines had flared a millisecond before the floor moved. He didn't have time to think; he just jumped, pushing off with everything he had. The curse's grasping claws missed his ankle by centimeters, closing on empty air with a nasty snap!
But this jump was at the cost of another curse.
A hunched, misshapen thing that resembled a bundle of bloody wires had been waiting for just this moment—when he was airborne, committed, unable to change direction.
It was deformed and resembled a bundle of wires full of blood, and it punched him with a punch that made him retreat and fly one meter backward.
It didn't swing a fist; a cluster of its wire-like appendages gathered into a single, whip-fast point and thrust into his midsection as he descended. THUMP! The air left his lungs in a pained oof! The force was immense, sending him sprawling backwards.
But that was directly at the moment he was trying to concentrate on keeping his cursed technique active.
The impact was more than physical. It was a psychic interruption. The shock, the sudden, blinding pain in his solar plexus, shattered his intense focus like a hammer through glass.
That caused the complete deactivation of his Sharingan technique.
The world snapped back to normal. The red hue vanished. The predictive trails, the energy flows, the hyper-detailed slow-motion analysis—all gone. The world became loud, blurry, and terrifyingly fast again. The curses, which he had been seeing move in slow motion, now moved with horrifying, jagged speed.
—
"Dammit all to hell!"
Obito released a scream as he cursed the curse, the floor, the factory, and his entire existence. The words were a guttural roar of pain and fury.
His body moved.
Instinct, trained by Kyoshi's brutal lessons, took over. He hit the ground in a roll, the motion clumsy but effective, putting some distance between him and the wire-bundle curse.
He tried to secrete cursed energy to activate his technique again.
He focused inward, desperately trying to reignite the cold engine behind his eyes. He could feel the potential there, the dormant power, but lighting it under this kind of pressure was like trying to strike a match in a hurricane.
Unfortunately, the time around him was much more than what it was when he was using his special technique.
Without the Sharingan's predictive grace, everything was chaos. Attacks came from everywhere at once. He was reacting to what had already happened, not what was about to happen. It was a death sentence on delay.
Because at this moment, the curses that he saw moving very slowly were now moving at several times their speed.
The insectoid curse he'd beheaded earlier? Its friends were now a buzzing, chittering blur. The wire-bundle thing was a nest of striking vipers. Everything was faster, meaner, and much, much closer.
One of the curses struck his hand with high precision by sending thorns that were in most of that curse's bodies.
The curse, a bulbous mass covered in rusted, jagged spikes, vibrated violently. With a sound like ZZZT! FWIP-FWIP-FWIP!, it launched a volley of its own spines, sharp as needles and glowing with a sickly purple energy.
The thorns flew and hit Obito's shoulder.
THWACK! THWACK!
Two spines embedded themselves deep in the meat of his left shoulder. The pain was immediate and searing—not just the puncture, but a cold, burning sensation that spread outwards like ice-fire.
He released a scream of pain and tried to escape quickly from that next attack.
The scream was short, choked off as he forced himself to move. He scrambled backwards on his heels and one good hand, the Butcher Knife held out in a feeble, shaking guard.
Unfortunately, there was another curse that had targeted his head with precision.
A lean, almost humanoid curse with elongated arms ending in scythe-like blades of bone had been hanging back. It saw his stumble, his injury, and chose its moment. It lunged, its bladed arm whistling through the air in a horizontal arc aimed at his neck.
He could see the sharp teeth that could cut off his head in a matter of seconds.
The 'teeth' were serrations along the inner edge of the bone-blade. They gleamed wetly in the dim light. They were about three feet from his carotid artery and closing fast.
"Why don't you just die already, you—"
He didn't have a clever insult. Just a raw, desperate plea to the universe for a basic courtesy.
Before he could finish his words, he felt dizzy in one moment, and his head began to spin.
The world tilted. The screeches of the curses became a distorted, echoing cacophony. The concrete floor seemed to undulate beneath him. Nausea rose in his throat.
—
Obito didn't realize that the wound that hit his shoulder, thanks to the curse's thorns, had been poisoned by the cursed energy specific to that curse.
The purple glow on the spines wasn't for show. It was a venom, a concentrated toxin of pure malice designed to disrupt the nervous system and flood the victim with paralyzing pain and confusion.
And his shoulder began in a matter of seconds to send pain directly to his nerve signals.
It wasn't just the wound hurting. It was as if someone had injected liquid fire into his veins and was now sending jolts of electricity along every nerve pathway from his shoulder to his fingertips and up into his skull. His left arm went numb, then screamed with pins and needles.
What made him feel the desire to scream, but unfortunately, there was no moment for him to delay.
The scream was trapped in his constricted throat. The pain was a white-noise static in his mind, threatening to drown out everything else. But stopping to acknowledge it meant death.
Three curses at the same time rushed directly towards them.
The insect swarm. The wire bundle. The scythe-armed executioner. They converged, a perfect, unholy trident of death aimed at a dizzy, poisoned, and technique-less boy.
—Damn it. I feel like I'm going to die if this continues.
The thought was crystalline, pure, and utterly undeniable. It wasn't fear anymore; it was a final report from his survival instincts. TERMINATION IMMINENT.
—
It was a simple moment, all he needed to know that he would die if he stopped due to the pain.
The clarity was brutal. Pain or death. Choose. There was no third option. No miracle rescue. Kasumi and Mai were locked in their own life-or-death dance with the boss. He was on his own.
Therefore, he focused with all his might and activated his technique again.
He didn't try to 'calm' his mind. That was impossible. Instead, he harnessed the chaos. He focused the white-hot panic, the searing pain, the dizzying nausea, and the crushing guilt—all of it—and shoved it into his eyes.
The activation of the technique was not complete at first.
For a horrifying second, nothing happened. The world remained blurry and fast. The scythe-blade was a foot away. He could smell the decay on it.
Where his body was moving non-stop to confront a curse that almost grabbed his arm.
His body, operating on the last dregs of Kyoshi's training, twisted sideways. The scythe-blade whistled past his ear, close enough to sever a few strands of hair. Swish!
He used the Butcher Knife to cut the curse's arm.
His right hand, still functional, lashed out in a blind, reactive strike. The knife connected with the scythe-arm's 'wrist.' CRACK! It wasn't a clean cut, but it was enough to deflect the blow and make the curse shriek.
And his other hand to grab the head of another curse and slam it into the wall, causing a short-range shockwave.
His left hand, numb and trembling, somehow found purchase on the writhing, wire-bundle curse that was coiling around his legs. He didn't have the strength to throw it, so he simply rammed its 'head'—a knot of wires—into the solid concrete wall beside him with all his remaining strength. THUD-SPLAT! A satisfying, wet crunch.
And his eyes turned into the Sharingan in the next moment.
And then… ignition.
SNAP.
A sound only he heard, inside his skull. Like a circuit closing under immense voltage.
His speed suddenly increased.
The world drowned in crimson once more. But this was different. The red was deeper, richer. The tomoe in his eyes spun so fast they became a continuous, hypnotic circle.
He suddenly felt his body become lighter.
The searing pain in his shoulder didn't disappear, but it was… compartmentalized. Pushed into a box labeled 'LATER.' The dizziness cleared, replaced by a hyper-alert, laser-focused calm. The fatigue in his muscles was still there, but it was data now, not a limitation.
—The effect of the Sharingan, or something he didn't know, had made his body lighter and reduced the effect of the poison that was affecting his shoulder.
*Was the Sharingan filtering the poison? Burning it out with cursed energy? Or was this simply his brain, under ultimate threat, dumping every possible chemical into his system to keep him alive, overriding the toxin's effects? He didn't know, and he didn't care. He could move**.
And in one moment, he shattered the head and destroyed several heads of the curses with a short strike using the Butcher Knife, which he used this time in a curved, cutting posture.
He didn't 'swing.' He flowed. The Butcher Knife became an extension of his will. He stepped into the space between the three attacking curses, and his body executed a single, seamless, spinning motion. The blade traced a perfect, crimson arc through the air.
The parts of the curses that were destroyed turned into pieces in the next moment.
SHLICK-SHINK-CRUNCH!
Three distinct, wet, fracturing sounds, almost simultaneous. The insectoid curse lost its front half. The wire-bundle was severed at its core knot. The scythe-armed curse's head (a bulbous growth) separated from its shoulders. All three dissolved into clouds of evaporating malice before their pieces even hit the floor.
—
And after that, Obito's slaughter of the curses continued.
It was no longer a desperate defense. It was a harvest.
Where he cut dozens of those creatures using the Butcher Knife.
He moved through the remaining curses in the corridor like a reaper through wheat. They were still Grade Three, still dangerous, but to his enhanced perception, they were moving in slow, predictable patterns. Their weak points glowed like neon signs.
Little by little, his movement, which was lacking in style, began to imitate the trainer's sharp style without stopping.
The frantic, wild swings were gone. Replaced by the crisp, efficient, and devastatingly direct movements Kyoshi had drilled into him—and into his predecessor's body—through relentless, painful repetition.
The goal was to kill with one strike instead of continuing.
No wasted motion. No flashy techniques. Just economy of force. A step, a pivot, a precise strike to a vital energy cluster. Thwack. Puff of smoke. Step, pivot, strike. Crack. Dissolution. It was mechanical. It was brutal. It was working.
Every movement became sharper, and with time, his body began to adapt to those strikes so he could repeat every strike he had learned during his opposition to blows in the third training field.
Muscle memory, buried deep and inaccessible, was being unlocked and accelerated by the Sharingan's mimicry function. His body was remembering things his mind had forgotten—the exact angle of a wrist for a downward slash, the torque needed for a reverse-grip stab, the footwork to pivot out of a counterattack.
In the beginning, he felt his mind entering a stage of simulation where he imagined the image of Kyoshi fighting him.
A strange, out-of-body experience. He saw himself from the outside, but the 'him' moving was a perfect copy of Kyoshi's relentless, oppressive style. It was as if his teacher's ghost had possessed his limbs.
Before the matter turned into a different form. His body began to imitate every move Kyoshi had made.
It wasn't conscious imitation anymore. It was absorption. The Sharingan wasn't just showing him the future; it was recording the past—the countless moves Kyoshi had used against him—and playing them back through his muscles with perfect, lethal fidelity.
—
Obito didn't realize while doing this that his body, in addition to the Sharingan technique, had entered a higher level.
The evolution was silent, internal, and profound. He was too busy not dying to notice the software update installing.
In the beginning, the Sharingan allowed him to see with more accuracy.
Stage One: Enhanced Perception. Seeing the world in slow-motion, reading energy flows.
Then it allowed him to see clips of the future and know the angle of attacks.
Stage Two: Predictive Sight. The ghostly after-images, the trajectories. The short-term precognition.
And now it allowed him to replicate physical skills.
Stage Three: Mimicry. The ability to observe, comprehend, and perfectly reproduce any physical movement, any martial technique, as long as his own body was capable of performing it. He wasn't just fighting; he was downloading Kyoshi's entire close-combat skill set in real-time.
In reality, he couldn't focus on knowing that because he was in a state of survival that increased the flow of cursed energy in his body much more.
The floodgates were open. The fear, the pain, the adrenaline—all of it was pure fuel, and the Sharingan was a supercharger gulping it down. His reserves, which should have been nearly empty, were being artificially, dangerously inflated by his own escalating emotions and the life-or-death pressure.
If Kyoshi had witnessed his fighting skills accelerating to this extent, he would have been shocked.
The old trainer, who had written Obito off as a hopeless case with poor fundamentals and weaker will, would have dropped his ever-present cup of tea.
Not to the degree of astonishment, but to the degree of amazement at this rapid development of skill.
It wouldn't be pride. It would be clinical, professional awe—the kind a mechanic feels when a rusted-out junker suddenly starts outperforming a race car. He'd be wondering what the hell is powering this engine? And then he'd probably try to hit him even harder to test the limits.*
Obito, standing amidst the dissolving remnants of a dozen curses, took a shuddering, deep breath.
The corridor before him was, for the moment, clear. The endless tide from deeper in the factory had been stemmed, the vanguard utterly destroyed. Black smoke and the smell of ozone hung thick in the air.
He looked down at the Butcher Knife in his hand. It was slick with ectoplasm, but unbroken.
His shoulder still throbbed with a deep, poisonous ache, but it was a distant thing, managed. His Sharingan hummed in his skull, the three tomoe spinning lazily, steadily. The timer in his mind now read: ESTIMATED REMAINING OPERATION: 00:03:12.
From behind him, the sounds of the main battle continued—the shriek of energy slashes, the BOOM of explosions, the BANG of Mai's pistol.
He turned, his movements fluid and sure, a stark contrast to the trembling boy who had entered this room.
The doorway was secure. For now.
His job was done.
Now, he just had to hope the professionals finished theirs before his borrowed time, his borrowed skills, and his borrowed luck ran out.
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End of Chapter.
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