Chapter Seventeen: The Third Mission, Osaka Factory Part Five
Mai felt her head spinning.
The sensory overload was immense. The psychic scream of the Grade Two curse, the concussive BOOM of its energy attacks, the deafening BANG of her own pistol, the sharp clang of Kasumi's katana deflecting metal—it all blended into a dizzying, painful symphony.
She was in the back, while Kasumi was holding her sword and launching herself towards the curse.
Her role was support. The sniper. The backline. She was supposed to have a clear line of sight, a stable position. But in the cramped, chaotic room, with debris flying and tentacles whipping everywhere, 'stable' was a distant memory.
She could also hear the sound of the fight coming from outside.
From the corridor, a different kind of chaos echoed—the wet schlicks, the sharp cracks, the guttural shrieks of dying curses. It was a relentless, brutal percussion underlying their own desperate melody.
Obito was continuing the fight, and that was a shock to her.
Each gunshot she fired was punctuated by the sounds of his struggle. It was a constant, unsettling reminder that the weakling, the bully, the boy she despised, was holding the line against a tide of monsters. The cognitive dissonance was giving her a headache worse than the cursed energy pressure.
But this didn't mean her movements had slowed down; they became faster.
*If anything, the shock acted as a perverse catalyst. Her hands moved with mechanical precision, her focus narrowing to the simple calculus of aim, create, fire, repeat**. The alternative—pondering the impossible—was a luxury that led to death.
The shock that the person who was merely a scumbag who bullied her and her sister was now capable of fighting dozens of curses and giving them these minutes was something she hadn't expected to be possible.
The thought flickered at the edge of her consciousness, a bizarre, unwelcome footnote. He's… buying time. For us. Why? She didn't have an answer, and the question was infuriating.
But she nevertheless continued firing her shots accurately towards the body of the Grade Two curse.
Her pistol barked again—BANG!* A cursed-energy bullet, crafted for penetration, tore through a regenerating chunk of the curse's flank, making it flinch and roar.*
The curse was huge to her, among the harshest curses they had faced in cruelty so far in her career, which hadn't extended for a long time.
She'd seen ugly things. Fought nasty things. But this amalgamation of industrial suffering and intelligent malice was on another level. Its very presence felt like a violation.
Nevertheless, she felt fear while firing, but her hands didn't shake.
The fear was a cold stone in her gut. But her hands, trained through repetition and a deep-seated need to prove herself, were steady. They had to be. Wasted shots were wasted energy, and wasted energy was a death sentence.
She realized that if she lost even one bullet, this meant she would lose an amount of her cursed energy in vain, and this meant she would be closer to death.
Every pull of the trigger was a strategic expenditure. Her reserves weren't bottomless. Each bullet was a piece of her lifespan, carved out and shot at the monstrosity. The pressure to make every shot count was its own kind of terror.
"And she wasn't the only one fighting now. Kasumi."
Her eyes, sharp and assessing, tracked the other girl's movements even as she lined up her own shots.
She watched the girl who was holding the sword, who seemed more experienced than her, launching herself using graceful movements and avoiding the attacks that were in the form of iron projectiles the curse launched from time to time.
Kasumi was a blue-and-white blur, a study in lethal elegance. She didn't just dodge the hurled chunks of machinery; she used them, deflecting them with precise sword taps to send them crashing harmlessly into walls or even back towards the curse. Clang! Ting! Thud!
But the blue-haired girl was never weak and never hesitated.
There was a terrifying certainty to her. No second-guessing, no panic. Just action and reaction, flowing like water. It was the confidence of someone who had faced the abyss many times and learned to dance on its edge.
Her breathing was regular while her private sword moved like a snake, parrying every blow close to or in a vital place in her body.
Inhale during a spin. Exhale on the cut. The sword was an extension of her will, its blade humming with pale blue energy. It weaved a protective web around her, a whirlwind of sharp angles and sudden stops. Shink! Shink! Parry!
Mai, who was watching this fight while also participating in it, felt helpless.
It was a bitter, familiar feeling. The feeling of being less than. Of watching someone operate on a plane of skill she could only aspire to, while she stood at the back, a tool-user, limited by her very genetics.
"I am not at this skill level."
The thought was not self-pity, but a cold, factual assessment. It was the core truth of her existence in the Jujutsu world.
She never felt like she wanted to become stronger.
It wasn't a lack of ambition. It was the crushing weight of a predetermined ceiling. Why rage against a wall you know you can't climb?
She knew she could never be stronger.
It was written in her blood, in the twisted fate of her birth. A sentence passed down by a cruel, archaic system.
She had been part of a dirty system, part of a fate that made her incomplete.
The Zenin clan. A pit of vipers where value was measured in cursed energy and inherited techniques. Where twins were considered an aberration, a dilution of power.
She had a twin sister in the Jujutsu world. Being a twin meant that the person between them would never possess their full potential.
A cursed birth. One would be strong, the other weak. One would shine, the other would be cast aside. It was an unspoken law, a self-fulfilling prophecy of the clan elders.
Her sister possessed high physical strength but didn't possess cursed energy, while she possessed this energy but in a small amount.
Maki: the physically gifted, cursed-energy-less outcast. Mai: the one with just enough cursed energy to be noticed, but not enough to be valued. Two halves of a whole that the clan saw as worthless.
That made her cursed ability for creation unremarkable.
Her technique, Construction, was versatile in theory. She could create weapons, tools, objects from cursed energy. But the fuel tank was tiny. She could craft a precise bullet, but not a barrage. A single barrier, but not a wall.
True, her ability enabled her to create weapons or materials using cursed energy, but that became less due to her cursed energy reserves, which were already low.
It was a cruel joke. A power defined by its limitations. Every creation was a careful rationing of her life force. She was an artist with only a thimbleful of paint.
—
At the same time, the curse near Mai had noticed the method by which the short-haired girl was firing.
The giant, central eye had been tracking not just Kasumi's flashy swordplay, but also the precise, stinging shots from the back. It learned. It adapted.
Therefore, it rushed quickly using one of its limbs and launched an attack of iron spikes in the same direction.
A thick, piston-like tentacle, studded with rusty rivets, suddenly retracted and then shot forward like a piston. From its tip, a cluster of sharpened, foot-long metal rods—scrap rebar—erupted in a deadly spray aimed directly at Mai's position. FWOOSH-FWIP-FWIP-FWIP!
The attack was so close to Mai that she felt the cold and that she was close to death.
The air grew chill as the projectiles tore towards her. Time seemed to stretch. She could see the individual rust flakes on the spinning metal. She was mid-reload, her pistol dematerialized, her hands empty. This was it.
But a cutting strike came from above, surprising the curse, as it destroyed the spikes that were launched.
SHING-SHATTER!
*A crescent of blue light sliced down from Kasumi's leap, intercepting the cluster of rebar mid-air. The metal rods were severed, falling to the ground in harmless clatters. Clang-clang-clang.
At the same time, a whistling sound came from the left side, in addition to a scream that was directed towards Mai.
While Kasumi dealt with the spikes, another, thinner tentacle—a whip-like appendage tipped with a barbed hook—had snaked around from the left, aiming to snag Mai and pull her into the curse's central mass. It moved with a sinister whiiip sound.
"Be attentive, Zenin! This is not playtime!"
Kasumi's voice was a sharp, commanding lash, even as she landed from her defensive strike. There was no warmth in it, only the urgency of a commander seeing a subordinate about to make a fatal error.
She didn't say anything after that.
Words were done. Actions were all that mattered.
Kasumi launched herself with a precise sword movement and unleashed a slash wrapped in cursed energy.
She pivoted on her heel, her body a coiled spring releasing. The katana became a blur of blue light tracing a horizontal arc through the air towards the whip-tentacle.
The range of her strike was short, but it affected the Grade Two curse greatly.
The slash didn't reach the curse's main body. It simply severed the whip-tentacle at its base, cleanly, about two meters from Mai. The severed limb thrashed on the ground like a dying eel before dissolving.
Because of the strength of the strike, the curse retreated and let out a painful scream.
SKREEEEEEE—!
The sound was a physical force, a wave of distorted hatred that made the air vibrate and dust fall from the ceiling. The curse recoiled, its giant eye blinking rapidly in pain and fury.
That moment pulled Mai out of the shock and from the proximity of death that was about to take her life.
The near-death experience had frozen her for a second. Kasumi's strike and the curse's scream acted like a bucket of ice water to the face. Move. Now.*
And she directed her cursed energy towards the pistol she had summoned.
Her hands came together, blue energy crackling between her palms. She didn't just summon the pistol; she forged it anew, pouring more focus, more intent, more anger into its creation this time.
"I will kill you for this."
She didn't say this out loud, but the thought was a white-hot brand in her mind, giving shape and purpose to the energy coalescing in her hands.
But her bullet, which had gathered cursed energy, pierced the curse's body from the middle.
BANG—CRACK!
This shot was different. Louder. Sharper. The bullet wasn't just a point of energy; it was a dense, spiraling drill of cursed force. It tore through the air with a screech and punched a clean, sizzling hole straight through the curse's central mass, just below the giant eye.
That strike was quick and even surprised Kasumi.
Kasumi, already moving in for a follow-up, had to check her stride slightly as the bullet whizzed past her peripheral vision. That was… stronger.*
However, the blue-haired girl exploited the scream that came from the curse and advanced forward, activating her cursed technique.
She didn't waste the opening. While the curse was shuddering from the penetrating shot, Kasumi's form seemed to flicker.
"Cursed Technique: New Shadow Style—Simple Domain."
The incantation was swift, almost silent. It wasn't a request; it was a declaration of a controlled space.
At the same moment she formed this style, a circle of cursed energy appeared.
A perfect, shimmering disc of pale blue light, about two meters in diameter, materialized on the floor around Kasumi's feet. It hummed with a low, steady bzzzt.
It directly enhanced Kasumi's cursed energy.
The Simple Domain wasn't an offensive move. It was a purification field, a territory where her will was law. Inside it, the confusing, oppressive pressure of the curse's own domain was nullified. Her senses sharpened further; her movements gained an extra fraction of speed and certainty.
The creation of this simple domain was enough to raise her physical statistics to a good level.
It was like shedding a heavy, wet cloak. Her body felt lighter, her mind clearer. The edge of her sword glowed brighter.
It made her disappear and appear directly in a blind spot behind the curse's back.
Using the domain's enhancement, she executed a movement so fast it was almost teleportation—a shunshin-like dash that carried her from the front of the curse, around its flank, to a point directly behind its massive, pulsating back. She moved in the blind spot of its singular, forward-facing eye.
The curse didn't feel the flow of cursed energy due to its concentration in one point.
All its attention was on the painful hole in its front and the lingering sting of the severed tentacle. The subtle shift of energy as Kasumi activated her Simple Domain was masked by its own rage and Mai's powerful gunshot.
Therefore, the sword moved with surgical sharpness and cut its back in half.
SHLIIIIICK!
The sound was long, wet, and definitive. Kasumi's katana, powered by the Simple Domain and her own focused will, sliced vertically through the curse's back from the top of its humped form down towards its base. Ichor and fragments of rusted metal sprayed out.
"Well done, Senpai!"
For the first time, Mai almost screamed these words, but she stopped.
Where she noticed something Kasumi, who had executed this attack, hadn't noticed.
Her sharpshooter's eye, always scanning, caught a detail in the chaos. The wall behind the curse's blind spot—the wall Kasumi had just appeared in front of—wasn't just a wall.
The curse had extracted from the wall that was behind Kasumi's blind spot several metal parts that rushed in the direction she was in.
The curse's body wasn't just contained within its central mass. It was integrated with the factory. As Kasumi struck, a section of the rusted metal wall behind her seemed to liquify. Sharpened girders, pipes, and sheets of corrugated iron shot out like deadly petals from a metallic flower, aimed directly at Kasumi's unprotected back. SCREEE—CRUNCH! The wall itself was attacking.
Mai realized the danger.
Her heart leapt into her throat. Kasumi was committed to her finishing strike, her back completely exposed to the wall of spearing metal.
The pressure of her cursed energy increased.
*There was no time for a precise shot. No time for a careful creation. She had to act now**, with everything she had.
She couldn't allow Kasumi to be defeated at this moment.
Kasumi was their anchor, their best chance. If she fell, the fight was over. Mai would be next. Obito, wherever he was, would be overrun. They all died.
Therefore, she released her cursed energy in a rapid succession.
She didn't aim. She didn't craft a single bullet. She opened the floodgates. A torrent of blue energy erupted from her hands, a raw, desperate surge of power.
That cursed energy went directly towards the weapon that was her pistol, and it changed to become a pistol with six barrels.
The energy didn't form a new gun; it remade the one in her hand. The sleek pistol warped, expanded, its barrel splitting and multiplying into a brutal, hexagonal cluster. A mini-gun of cursed energy. It glowed with an unstable, violent light.
Each barrel had a bullet in it that was fired at once.
She didn't pull a trigger six times. She willed all six to fire simultaneously, a single act of catastrophic expenditure.
BRRRRRT!
The sound wasn't six distinct bangs, but a single, deafening, concussive ROAR that shook the entire room. Six spiraling projectiles of concentrated malice tore from the barrels, leaving trails of blue-white energy.
The bullets pierced the air with terrible speed, faster than anything else.
They were unguided, wild, but they didn't need to be guided. They were a wall of force, a shotgun blast of cursed energy on a colossal scale.
They rushed directly towards Kasumi but also avoided hitting her and went directly towards the wall.
Mai's intent was clear in the energy: Protect. Destroy the threat behind her. The bullets, almost sentient in their creation, curved around Kasumi's form—a hair's breadth from her blue hair—and slammed into the erupting wall of metal.
They hit every target and released explosion sounds from the other side.
KABOOM! KRA-KOOM! BOOM!
The makeshift metal spears were vaporized on impact. The wall itself cratered inward in a shower of shattered concrete, twisted rebar, and black smoke. The curse, connected to the wall, let out a new, shattering scream of agony.
Mai released a scream of pain.
"AAAGH!"
The backlash was immediate and vicious. Using her technique at that magnitude was like trying to channel a lightning bolt through a copper wire. Her head exploded in pain, a white-hot migraine stabbing behind her eyes. Her nose began to bleed. Her cursed energy reserves plummeted, leaving a hollow, aching void in her chest.
Her head hurt because of using her technique to this degree of power.
It felt like her brain was trying to squeeze out of her ears. The world swam, colors bleeding at the edges.
Nevertheless, she didn't retreat and released all her strength to cover Kasumi.
She swayed on her feet, vision blurring, but she didn't fall. She forced her eyes to stay open, to track Kasumi. Her job wasn't done.
—
Kasumi didn't look back.
She didn't need to. She felt the heat of the passing bullets, heard the cataclysmic ROAR and subsequent BOOM behind her. She understood in a flash: Mai had just burned a significant portion of her soul to save her.
She knew from the sound that came from behind her that there was an attack coming, but the bullets Mai fired had covered her at the right moment.
A debt, paid in pain and power. There was no time for gratitude, only for exploitation.
Therefore, she exploited this moment and boosted her cursed energy to the maximum.
With the immediate rear threat obliterated, she poured every ounce of her focus, every spark of her remaining energy, into her sword arm. The blade glowed so brightly it was painful to look at, a miniature sun of cutting intent.
She was aiming for one thing: "I must destroy the core of this curse!"
She'd seen it. During her slash, her enhanced senses within the Simple Domain had pinpointed it—a dense, pulsing orb of concentrated hatred and machinery buried deep within the curse's central mass, just behind the giant eye. The nucleus.
She realized that only this way could they defeat the curse in the least time possible.
No more whittling. No more tentacle-severing. Go for the heart. A single, all-or-nothing strike.
Her style was costly, as one of the curse's claws hit the lower part of her body.
In her all-out commitment, her defense dropped. A claw-like appendage, swift and jagged, raked across her thigh. RIIIP! Fabric and flesh tore. The pain was sharp, hot, and immediate.
And that almost made her lose her balance and at the same time be hit by several other strikes.
She stumbled, her perfect form breaking. Two more tentacles saw the opening and lunged for her throat and sword arm.
But she gritted her teeth in anger.
"GRRR—!"
The sound was feral, a denial of pain, of defeat.
"I can't stop now! I won't allow death to take me until I kill this curse!"
She told herself this, a silent mantra of pure will. The words had no sound, but they burned in her mind, fueling the next surge.
And at the same time, her anger increased, which made her cursed energy rise by the same amount.
The pain transformed. It wasn't a hindrance; it was kindling. The anger at being wounded, the frustration at the curse's resilience, the sheer unfairness of it all—she funneled it directly into her cursed energy core.
Her cursed energy rose with her anger, with negative emotions. She used that to increase the pressure of her cursed energy.
A dangerous, exhilarating feedback loop. The more she hurt, the angrier she got. The angrier she got, the more power she drew. It was a sorcerer's gambit—risking a curse born of their own emotions for a burst of strength.
And without a doubt, that had effects, as Kasumi's energy rose several times for a period less than one second.
Her aura flared violently, a brief, supernova burst of blue light that pushed back the encroaching tentacles for a crucial half-second.
But it was enough for her to use the curse's body as a platform and rise while delivering several cutting blades in the form of slashes, cutting the curse's body from bottom to top.
She planted her foot on the still-regenerating wound on the curse's flank and launched herself upwards. As she rose, her sword became a whirlwind. Not one slash, but a rapid-fire series—Shink! Shink! Shink! Shink!—each one carving a deeper gouge along the same vertical line, following the path of her initial cut, aiming straight for the core.
Every strike was more precise than the previous one while her hand moved fluidly.
It was a display of transcendent skill. Her body was a single, coordinated weapon, each muscle contributing to the devastating, upward-cutting spiral.
Blood droplets were coming from her hands due to the tight grip she had on the sword hilt, which was bending and increasing the strength of its blade with every strike that passed.
The grip was so tight her knuckles were bone-white, her palms bleeding from the friction. The katana itself groaned under the strain, its metal singing a high-pitched whine of protest and power.
—
Mai's head was spinning.
The aftermath of her overclocked technique was a world of pain and disorientation. The metallic taste of blood was in her mouth from where she'd bitten her tongue.
She was about to fall to the ground after using her technique to this degree, but she couldn't close her eyes because she realized she was in the middle of a battle and still was until now.
She blinked rapidly, forcing the world back into focus. The room tilted, but she locked her knees. Not yet. Not yet.*
She heard the sounds of the curse's screams while also seeing the sounds of cutting and the shapes of slashes Kasumi was unleashing.
It was a sensory jumble. The SKREEE of the curse, the shink-shink-shink of the katana, the blurred blue light of Kasumi's ascent. It was beautiful and horrifying.
Nevertheless, she felt that wasn't enough.
A cold, creeping certainty wormed its way through her pain-fogged mind. A feeling in her gut that something was wrong.
There was a feeling inside her that there was a mistake.
It was the curse's energy. It didn't feel… desperate. It felt focused. Concentrating.
The curse's energy seemed to be more than this, yet it wasn't using all it had. There was something wrong.
The massive, chaotic output was lessening, but not from injury. It was being gathered, pulled inward. The air pressure of cursed energy was shifting, condensing around the main body like a storm contracting before the final lightning strike.
—And that was correct.
Her instincts, honed by a life of observing threats from the periphery, were right.
Where, in the next moment, Kasumi, who was about to attack the curse's core, received a direct injury with such speed that the girl couldn't even blink before being thrown towards Mai.
The curse didn't defend. It counter-attacked in a way none of them predicted.
The surprise was so great that she couldn't put herself in a defensive position.
Kasumi was at the peak of her upward strike, blade poised for the final plunge into the core. Then, the entire central mass of the curse imploded violently inward for a nanosecond, and then exploded outward.
Therefore, her body was thrown non-stop while her arm was penetrated and shattered to a degree that made her feel unbelievable pain.
A thick, spear-like formation of condensed metal and cursed flesh—like a colossal, brutal fist—punched out from the curse's body directly into Kasumi's path. It hit her crossed arms and chest with the force of a freight train. CRUNCH-BOOM! The sound of breaking bone was sickeningly clear. Her sword flew from her grasp, clattering across the floor. She was hurled backwards like a ragdoll.
That severe rush in the air was quick, but Mai had seen the attack before it happened in a short period and anticipated the direction of Kasumi's flying body, which was near her side.
Mai's blurred vision had caught the tell—the sudden, unnatural contraction of the curse's energy a fraction of a second before the blow. She didn't know what was coming, but she knew where the result would land.
Therefore, she moved quickly and caught the body in the air and protected herself quickly by spinning swiftly and holding Kasumi's body tightly.
*She lunged forward, ignoring the screaming protest of her own body. Her arms, trembling and weak, wrapped around Kasumi's torso mid-flight. The impact spun them both, but Mai used the momentum, turning it into a controlled, stumbling roll that took them behind a half-crushed metal press. Thud-roll-thud.
"Dammit! The situation is getting worse!"
Kasumi's voice was pained but clear to Mai, and she felt that the senpai was ready to return to the fight.
Kasumi's voice was in pain, but it was clear to Mai, and she felt the senpai was ready to return to the fight, but she didn't dare allow the senpai to move at this moment, especially since the curse's attacks and its cursed energy had risen strangely.
Kasumi was already trying to push herself up, her face a mask of pain and determination, her left arm hanging at a wrong angle. But the air around them had changed. The cursed energy wasn't just high; it was coalescing, becoming denser, heavier. The factory lights (what few were functional) flickered violently.
—
The truth that Mai didn't know was that outside, Obito was finishing off the curses while his time was decreasing, his head was about to explode.
In the corridor, Obito's world was a red-tinged slaughterhouse. The timer in his mind's eye blinked: 00:00:47. The strain of maintaining the Sharingan at this level was a white-hot spike driven directly into his frontal lobe. Every movement sent fresh waves of agony through his skull.
Using the Sharingan to this degree was enough to give Obito a severe headache due to the amount of information entering his head.
It was like having a supercomputer with a cracked cooling system running a full-system diagnostic while being used to play a 4K video game. Error messages flickered at the edge of his consciousness. SENSORY OVERLOAD. ENERGY DEPLETION. NEURAL STRESS CRITICAL.
But he didn't stop and didn't waste time. He continued eliminating the curses one after another with speed and increasing efficiency.
He was a machine. A broken, pain-wracked, but brutally efficient machine. The Butcher Knife was a red blur. Curses fell around him, their dissolution adding to the swirling black mist in the corridor. He was clearing the path, buying seconds. 00:00:23.
But at one moment, while striking one of those curses, that curse disappeared before he could cut it completely.
He swung at a scuttling, spider-like curse. His blade was a millisecond from connecting with its energy core when the curse simply… popped. It didn't dissolve from his strike. It vanished in a puff of black smoke that was instantly sucked away, drawn back down the corridor towards the main room.
His eyes widened, and information reached him from the Sharingan at the same moment.
The data stream from his eye delivered the analysis instantly, bypassing his pain-fogged brain: ENERGY SIGNATURE DISPERSAL. NOT TERMINATION. ENERGY TRANSFER DETECTED. VECTOR: PRIMARY CONFLICT ZONE.
"The cursed energy… it's disappearing and transferring to another place."
He mumbled the words, his voice hoarse. He understood. The curse wasn't just summoning minions; it was reclaiming them.
He looked in the direction of the place where Mai and Kasumi's private battle was happening and quickly predicted what would happen there.
His Sharingan, even in its dying moments, extrapolated. It showed him a horrifying probability: the boss curse, wounded, was now absorbing the remnants of its slain and summoned underlings to fuel a final, powerful transformation or attack.
"Dammit! It was weak! It was giving its cursed energy to gather these curses, but at this moment, it's absorbing them now!"
The realization was a cold slap. They hadn't been fighting a curse and its minions. They'd been fighting a distributed network, and the central node was now recalling all its resources for one last, devastating push.
His realization of that made Obito feel danger, and his head, which was about to explode from the severity of the pain, told him to escape quickly.
Every survival instinct screamed at him to run. The doorway behind him was clear. He could bolt, right now, leave the factory, survive. The timer in his head hit 00:00:05. The Sharingan flickered.
But at the same moment, he thought of something important.
The thought was a cold, logical counterpoint to the screaming instinct. It wasn't about heroism. It was about a different, more protracted kind of survival.
"Escaping now might keep him safe, but that might be temporary."
Running away only solved today's problem. It created a much bigger one for tomorrow.
The reason for that was that he knew what would happen if Mai died at this moment.
A memory, sharp and terrifying, from the story he knew: Mai Zenin dies. Her twin sister, Maki, achieves enlightenment through grief and rage, becoming a physical god who annihilates the entire Zenin clan.*
Her sister Maki would become as strong as Toji, and in the original story, the moment Mai died, Maki quickly obtained the energy and strength that made her capable of annihilating the clan alone.
The image was clear: Maki Zenin, drenched in blood and fury, a one-woman apocalypse for her family. A catalyst for that apocalypse? The death of her sister.
Then if she found out that I was with her sister and I was the sole survivor of all this—
The math was horrifyingly simple. He, Obito, the former bully, the weakling, walks out of a death trap where the mighty Mai Zenin died. What would a grief-maddened, supremely powerful Maki conclude? She wouldn't need evidence. She'd need a target for her rage. And he'd be the most convenient one standing.
Obito stopped thinking.
The conclusion was inescapable. It wasn't a choice anymore. It was a strategic necessity.
It was impossible for him to get out of here without this girl.
Not because he was a hero, but because if he came out now in this way, he might die by the executioner's sword that might come from her sister, who would certainly seek revenge.
Not because he was a hero, but if he left now in this way, he might die by the executioner's sword that would come from her sister who would certainly seek revenge.
His survival was now paradoxically tied to the survival of the girl who hated him. The irony was so thick he could choke on it.
He remembered that the reason that made Maki kill all the clan members wasn't for her sake, but because her sister was the one who only asked Maki to kill all the clan members.
The detail was crucial. Maki's rampage wasn't for her own ambition. It was a final, twisted gift to her sister. A fulfillment of Mai's last wish. Mai's death wouldn't just empower Maki; it would direct her. And the direction would be towards anyone Mai might have considered an enemy.
Therefore, based on this information, he knew she would always seek revenge on the person she believed was the cause.
And who would she believe was the cause if he, Obito, stumbled out alone, babbling about a giant eye-monster? She'd believe he ran. She'd believe he let her die. She'd believe he was the cause.
His Sharingan timer hit 00:00:00.
The red world vanished. The predictive lines, the energy flows, the hyper-clarity—all gone. A wave of crushing exhaustion, nausea, and skull-splitting pain washed over him. He stumbled, catching himself on the wall, the Butcher Knife slipping from his numb fingers with a clatter.
The corridor was empty of curses. The doorway to the main room was ahead. From within, he felt the cursed energy spiking to a terrifying, concentrated peak.
He heard Kasumi's pained gasp, Mai's ragged breathing.
He looked at his trembling, empty hands. Then at the Butcher Knife on the floor.
With a groan that was pure agony, he bent down, picked it up, and took a staggering step forward.
He wasn't running away.
He was walking towards the epicenter of the disaster, armed with a kitchen knife, a splitting headache, and the bleak, comic certainty that saving the girl who wanted him dead was the only way to avoid being killed by her even-more-terrifying sister.
It was, he thought, the worst plan he'd ever had.
And it was the only one he had.
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End of Chapter.
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