Chapter Thirty-Six: The Debt, The Betrayal, & The Spear
"Maki, what the hell do you think you're doing?!"
Panda's voice was a rumbling roar of disbelief. Beside him, Inumaki Toge, driven by a rare burst of urgency, actually used his cursed speech, the words ripping from his throat with tangible force: "STOP!"
The air around them crackled with the command's power.
The girl didn't look at them at all. Her entire world had tunnel-visioned down to a single point: Obito. He was looking at her, his face pale as parchment under the smears of dirt from his earlier tumble. Then, as she watched, his expression darkened, his jaw tightening. She didn't know why he did that, didn't care. She was only focusing on him, on the space between his eyes where her spear would feel most at home.
But at the same moment, a blur of white shirt and black pants crossed the distance. Yuta Okkotsu planted himself squarely between them, one hand raised towards Maki in a gesture that was part plea, part pathetic shield.
"Maki-san, why… why were you going to hurt Obito-senpai?"
He looked at her as if she'd made a simple, correctable mistake. This idiot. This clueless, wide-eyed idiot. He doesn't know anything. He doesn't know the smiling boy he's befriending. That boy with the innocent expression is just a coward in a new skin, a person who possesses no pride, no honor, nothing but a desperate, scrambling desire to be something he's not.—
Maki didn't say anything to Yuta. She didn't have words for his naivete. Her gaze, burning with enough heat to melt steel, slid past him to lock onto the two behind him—Panda and Inumaki. Her friends. Her traitorous friends.
"Dare to intervene before me?" Her voice was low, guttural, the sound of rocks grinding in a deep pit. "I'll really kill you."
It wasn't a threat. It was a statement of fact. Her eyes were red-rimmed, not from tears, but from the sheer pressure of her fury. Her chest rose and fell in sharp, ragged motions as she dragged air into lungs that felt too small. Her mind was filled with one singular, crystalline desire: to hit Obito. To hit him until he stopped moving, until he stopped breathing, or at least until he came so close to that edge that he would understand the taste of the betrayal he'd served her. She couldn't resist this desire any longer. She'd tried for a week, staying away, stewing. Now she had exploded, and she didn't want to stop. Couldn't stop. Not unless she did the thing her screaming mind was demanding.
"I won't allow it," Yuta said again, his voice trembling but firm.
—Won't allow me? And how will he do that? With his sad eyes and his cursed ghost girlfriend?—
Maki shifted her weight, her feet sliding into an offensive stance on the churned earth. Scritch. She wouldn't even care about the apocalyptic curse the boy had chained to his soul. Anger was blinding her, narrowing her world to a monochrome of rage. She had no problem hitting that boy, too, if he was just an obstacle in her path. She'd swat him aside like a fly.
"Fine then," she hissed, the words dripping venom. "I'll hit you too until you disappear."
Inumaki rushed forward, placing himself beside Yuta. His face was a mask of desperate concern. He raised his hands, the high collar of his uniform pulled down. "Maki, halt!" he commanded, the words leaving his throat raw.
But of course, she had understood the first command. This one just washed over her, a ripple against a steel hull. She screamed towards the silent boy, spittle flying from her lips, "You don't understand anything, so just stay away! This is between me and him! Don't interfere!"
Panda also moved, his large form a wall of fur and muscle. He looked down at Maki, his usually gentle face etched with worry. "Maki, you need to stop. This isn't good. This isn't you."
He wanted to say more, to reason, to remind her of their friendship, of the person he knew was buried under this rage. But the girl's face turned a mottled, dangerous red. The veins in her temple stood out like cables.
—Idiot. Idiot. Idiot.—
The word was a drumbeat in her mind, synchronizing with her pounding heart. They were unaware. Blissfully, stupidly unaware of what Obito truly was. If they knew this coward was just a hypocrite wearing a human suit, a person who would smile at you while sharpening the knife for your back, who would betray you the moment he found a better deal… they would understand. They would get why the very air in his presence was poison to her. This bastard doesn't deserve to be here, breathing the same air as people who actually work for their strength. He doesn't deserve a cursed technique handed to him like a party favor. He doesn't deserve friends, trust, smiles. He deserves to be thrown away. To die alone in a ditch, forgotten, like the trash he is.
"You all stop."
The voice that cut through the tension was calm. Too calm. It came from behind Yuta and Inumaki. Obito.
The three turned to look at him. He was standing straight now, brushing dirt from his uniform sleeve with a detached air. His Sharingan eyes were active, the crimson tomoe spinning slowly, eerily vivid against his pale skin. He looked at each of them, then his gaze settled back on Maki.
"This matter," he said, his voice devoid of its earlier forced cheer, "is really between me and her. So don't interfere from now on."
After that, he took a more relaxed, open stance, one hand coming up in a loose guard. He looked directly at Maki, and his eyes didn't leave her furious, burning gaze.
"I'll admit it," Obito continued, the words measured. "The person I was… the one you knew… was despicable in dealing with you. He was trash. Less than trash. A stain."
He paused. The forest seemed to hold its breath. Even the distant crow had gone silent.
"But—" Obito's stance shifted subtly, his weight settling, his cursed energy beginning to coil visibly around him like a faint, red-tinged mist. "—that doesn't mean I will apologize. The person who did those things to you… he's definitely dead. Has been for a while. The one standing here now… doesn't owe you an apology."
Maki clicked her teeth together with a sound like a gun being cocked. Click. A short, harsh laugh escaped her. Hah.
"Dead? Is that so?" Her voice was dripping with mocking disbelief. "Then why do I see him now standing before me, looking at me with those stolen eyes as if he possesses some strength now? As if he's something new?"
Did he think he could deceive her with word games? Did he think that with this new coat of paint, after becoming a little stronger, he could just act as if the past was a different person? Rewrite history? After he was her only friend—hers and Mai's. The one person in that vipers' nest who seemed to see them as human. And then he betrayed them. Because of him. Because he led her to that place. Because of him, she had to face months of humiliation, of darkness, of fear, while Naoya laughed and he smiled from the shadows.
"I'll tell you just one thing."
There was no calm left in her voice at all. It was a raw scream that tore across the training field, a sound so dark and black it seemed to leach the color from the afternoon light.
"I don't care about your philosophical crap. I don't care if you think you're reborn or possessed or whatever pathetic story you've cooked up. I only care about one thing: shattering your bones. I don't care about killing you—death for the likes of you is a mercy, a gift. And I am not in a giving mood."
After that, as if the words themselves were a catalyst, Maki disappeared.
It wasn't the flashy shwip of cursed energy. It was the pure, terrifying physics of a body pushed beyond human limits. Her knee bent at a dangerous, torque-heavy angle. The spear, Playful Cloud, became a blur in her hand, cutting through the air with a sound that started as a low whistle and rose to a piercing shriek.
SWIIISH—THWOOM!
This strike wasn't aimed to disable. It was aimed to obliterate. It launched towards Obito's head at a vicious, diagonal angle, fast enough to leave afterimages.
"I want to see if these fancy eyes are enough to give you the courage to talk back to me. So show me! Show me if you can stay standing after I'm done with you!"
She told him she wouldn't kill, but the promise in her words was worse: she would make him wish, with every fiber of his being, that she had.
---
Obito saw the trajectory. In the hyper-detailed, slowed-down world of his Sharingan, the spear's path was a glowing line of inevitable impact. He didn't hesitate. He pushed the technique to its limit, his cursed energy compressing to a dense shell around his body. He calculated not just the first strike, but the three follow-up angles her stance allowed. He reinforced his forearms, his neck, his core.
[Cursed Acceleration Technique]
He didn't retreat. He bent backward, his spine arching like a bow, letting the spear-tip pass so close to his throat he felt the wind of its passage like a razor kiss. Then he pushed off with his feet, the cursed energy detonating in a controlled burst that sent him into a sideways, spinning flip.
He landed, already turning to face her. But she was gone.
She appeared beside him like a vengeful ghost, having used the recoil of her own missed swing to pivot instantly. She didn't give him a moment. She unleashed a barrage. Not wild swings, but precise, devastating spear strikes—thrusts, sweeps, overhead slams. Each one was meant to break a limb, crush a joint, cave in his ribcage.
Obito couldn't attack. He had no opening. He could only defend, a frantic, desperate dance of parries, ducks, and micro-dodges. His arms rang with the impacts, even through his reinforcement. CLANG! THWACK! BAM!
Her physical strength was terrifying in every sense of the word. She wasn't using cursed energy reinforcement; she was the reinforcement. Every strike released shockwaves in the air, compressing it with such force that the space around them seemed to thicken, to groan. The ground cratered under her footfalls. The air itself cracked like a whip.
BOOM. WHUMP. CRACK!
"This is good," she taunted, her voice a sinister purr amidst the violence. Her movements were a brutal, efficient ballet. "You're giving me a lot of fun by making it this hard to hit you. Aren't you?"
Then, he felt it—a line of white-hot pain across the side of his back. He hadn't seen the shift. In a fraction of a second, too fast even for his prediction, the three-section staff had separated. One section had been a feint; another had snaked around his guard. The Sharingan had seen the possibility, a branching path in the future, but his body, already straining at its limits, couldn't react to both.
The impact wasn't a punch. It was like being hit by a speeding car made of solid oak.
BOOOOM.
The sound was deep, final. Obito was launched off his feet. He became a projectile, skimming across the training field, tearing a furrow in the dirt before his trajectory sent him crashing into the tree line at the edge of the forest.
His body collided with a thick pine trunk with a sickening CRUNCH of breaking wood and a simultaneous, wetter THUD of flesh meeting immovable object. The tree shuddered, a rain of needles and splinters pattering down. He didn't stop there. Momentum carried him, and he rolled, a limp bundle of limbs, across the rocky, root-tangled ground for several more meters before finally coming to a stop in a heap.
THUMP-THUMP-THUMP… silence.
The scene was horrific. A cloud of dust and pine needles hung in the air where he'd vanished.
The three spectators were frozen in a paralysis of shock. They hadn't known the fight would escalate to this. They hadn't understood the depth of the hatred, the history that fueled it. Panda and Inumaki looked at each other, a silent, frantic communication passing between them.
—We have to get Gojo-sensei. Now. This is beyond us.—
But before either could move a muscle, they each felt a light, casual tap on their shoulder.
They turned.
There, standing behind them as if he'd materialized from the dust, was Satoru Gojo. His white hair was perfectly in place, his black blindfold covering eyes that were undoubtedly watching everything. He was holding a large bag of popcorn. He shoved a handful into his mouth.
Crunch. Munch.
"This looks very entertaining," he announced, his voice cheerful. He pointed a buttery finger towards the forest edge. "Look at her moving at that speed. She's developing quickly. The anger is a wonderful motivator, isn't it?"
Gojo was clearly praising Maki.
The three students were struck dumb, their brains short-circuiting. Yuta Okkotsu turned to his teacher, his face a picture of pure, uncomprehending horror. "Aren't you going to do something? Sensei, she's going to kill him!"
Gojo tilted his head, as if considering the weather. "No, no, no need to worry. She won't kill him. She's very precise. But she'll definitely put him in a… let's say, 'reflective' state." He waved the popcorn bag vaguely. "Anyway, Shoko is already on standby in the infirmary. It's good for her to do some work instead of just reading those medical journals, right? Gets the blood pumping!"
The trio was reeling. Their teacher's indifference was a psychological blow almost as violent as Maki's spear.
"It doesn't matter," Yuta said, his jaw setting with a determination that surprised even him. "I'll go stop her."
He took a step forward.
A hand landed on his shoulder. Not a tap this time. A firm, inescapable grip. It was Gojo's hand. The teacher was no longer smiling. Or rather, his smile was still there, but it had hardened at the edges, grown cold.
"There's no reason to stop that, Yuta."
His voice was still light, but it carried an undeniable weight now, the gravity of a mountain wrapped in silk.
"It seems there are… debts between the two. Old, rotten debts. Isn't it better to let them settle it in their own way? A nice, logical, physical dialogue."
Yuta's mind stuttered. A logical dialogue? This was a attempted murder in broad daylight! Since entering this world, he'd accepted a lot of crazy—curses, talking pandas, his own haunting. But this? Allowing a student to beat another into a pulp to settle a 'debt'? This was a new tier of insanity.
"Sensei," Yuta's voice was small, strained. "Are you… are you in your right mind? She's going to kill him. I can feel it."
Panda and Inumaki nodded vigorously, their own fear confirming Yuta's. They knew Maki. They knew her control, but they also knew this white-hot rage was something else. It was blind. It was consuming. She might not mean to kill him, but in this state, the line between 'maim' and 'mortally wound' was tissue-thin.
"Alright, alright," Gojo sighed, as if humoring a child. He released Yuta's shoulder and sauntered over to a nearby bench that had somehow survived the earlier shockwaves. He sat down, crossed one leg over the other, and got comfortable. "He'll be fine. I'm here. If his head pops off, I'll stick it back on. Probably."
He resumed eating his popcorn. Crunch. Crunch.
These utterly ridiculous, horrifying actions left the three students in a state of profound moral and emotional whiplash. They stood rooted, caught between their instinct to intervene and the absolute, unnerving command in their teacher's casual demeanor.
"Don't interfere in other people's personal problems," Gojo said, his voice carrying clearly across the field. He wasn't looking at them; he was watching the treeline. "Children should release their anger. It's cathartic. Good for the soul. Makes for healthier sorcerers. Less repression, more expression!"
He didn't say anything else. His attention was fixed on the scene where Obito was finally moving.
A groan echoed from the wreckage. Obito pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. He was moving shakily, like a newborn deer made of broken glass. He coughed, a wet, ragged sound, and a spatter of blood darkened the pine needles beneath him. Cough. Splatter.
Slowly, painfully, he got to his feet. His uniform was torn in a dozen places. A long, bleeding gash ran down his temple, painting the left side of his face in a macabre half-mask. He swayed, but he didn't fall.
Meanwhile, Maki's figure appeared. She hadn't charged. She was standing on the thick branch of a tree he'd nearly sheared in half, looking down at him like a predator assessing wounded prey. She was breathing heavily too, but her gaze was cold, calculating.
"What now?" she called down, her voice echoing in the sudden quiet. "Is that all? Was that your big speech?"
She wanted to see him afraid. She wanted to see the coward re-emerge. She was waiting for it, hungry for it.
Obito lifted his head. Blood dripped from his chin, plinking onto a leaf below. Plink. And then, he smiled. A bloody, twisted thing that didn't reach his crimson eyes.
"Yes," he said, his voice hoarse but clear. "This isn't everything. Don't worry."
He took a combat stance again, one foot sliding back through the debris. Scrape. He raised his hands, but then he said something that made the air itself seem to freeze.
"Do you remember," he began, his tone shifting, adopting a strange, wistful cadence that was utterly at odds with the scene, "that time when I told you I would be your closest friend? Your only real friend in that whole cursed place?"
Maki stopped breathing. She stood perfectly still on the branch. Her anger, which had been a roaring inferno, condensed into a single, diamond-hard point of ice.
"Stop it," she whispered, the sound carrying with unnatural clarity. "Stop it, you bastard. Stop mentioning that. I'll make you pay. I'll make you scream."
But Obito didn't remain silent. He raised his voice, not in a shout, but in a carrying, almost tender tone, as if reminiscing about a beautiful, shared childhood.
"I used to play with you and Mai. In the eastern garden, where the koi pond was. They were beautiful times, weren't they? I always told you… I always said you would become stronger than all of them. That you would become a person the whole clan would have to respect."
She froze. Her expression was hidden behind the curtain of her disheveled hair, but her entire body began to tremble. Not with fear. With a rage so pure it was vibrating her very bones. Obito could see it, even through the Sharingan. He was poking a sleeping dragon with a red-hot iron, and he didn't seem to care.
He laughed then, a short, disgusted sound that ripped the faux tenderness to shreds. He was remembering the thoughts of the original Obito, the ghost in this machine. He could only say with clear, unveiled contempt:
"I feel nothing but disgust for that Obito. Really. You know he was a bad friend, right? The worst kind."
He was saying this to Maki, who had become a statue on the branch. Her face was still hidden, but the trembling had intensified. He felt the murderous intent radiating from her like heat from a furnace. She was waiting, coiled, letting him talk himself into a deeper grave.
He was happy to oblige.
"Very good," Obito continued, his voice dropping, becoming conspiratorial, intimate. "Do you remember that day? The one I told you about? We could play a special game. A secret. In that little storage room on the west wing. The one that smelled of old tatami and damp. A place that belonged to just me and you?"
Obito was physically nauseated by the memories he was conjuring, by the saccharine tone his vocal cords were producing against his will. But he pushed on, a performance for an audience of one vengeful angel.
"We went there. It was dark. But at that moment, after you stepped inside, looking back at me with that trusting smile… I closed the door. Do you remember the sound of the bolt sliding home? Click."
Maki's body went utterly rigid. The trembling stopped. A single drop of blood welled from where she'd bitten her own lip and traced a path down her chin. She wasn't suppressing a scream anymore. She was holding in a silent detonation.
"I closed that door," Obito narrated, his voice a haunting whisper now. "And after that, you heard my voice, didn't you? I was telling you this game would be the best. You just had to stay in this nice, dark room, and I would come to save you later. It was a game of hide-and-seek. A test of courage. I told you it would be fun."
The memories weren't just coming; they were assaulting Obito's mind. The sight of a young Maki's confused face through the crack in the door. The sound of her small fists pounding on the thick wood. Thump. Thump. Thump. Then her voice, small and scared: "Obito? This isn't funny anymore. Let me out."
Obito felt bile rise in his throat, but he swallowed it. He had to finish this.
"You screamed. You told me to stop playing. Then… you heard something else, didn't you? Another voice. A voice you've come to hate even more than mine. Do you remember, Maki? Right?"
Obito remembered it with crystal clarity now. Naoya, a teenager already steeped in cruelty, stepping out from behind a pillar. His hand clapping the young Obito on the shoulder. A condescending laugh. That memory made Obito's stomach churn, but he weaponized it.
"You were hearing him, right? Hearing him praise me. 'Good job, Obito. You're useful trash. You have your uses.' And he told me he'd take care of me. That I, the useful piece of trash, would be okay. While you… you were the useless one. The one to be discarded. Isn't that wonderful, Maki? The poetry of it?"
Finally, he stopped. The only sound was the wind sighing through the shattered trees.
He heard a soft thud. Maki had dropped from the branch. She landed silently on the forest floor and began walking towards him. Not charging. Not running. Walking. Each step was deliberate, heavy, as if she were walking through deep water. The distance between them closed with terrifying slowness.
She stopped when she was about five meters away. The air between them felt charged, ionized by hatred.
"Yes," she said. Her voice was flat, dead, all emotion burned out of it, leaving only ash. "That's right. I remember the two months. Two months in a room that wasn't a room. A pit. Full of crawling things and the smell of rot. With food shoved through a slot that was more mold than meal. And finally, your laughter. Your voice telling me that if I tried to escape, if I made a sound, Mai would be next. That she'd get a turn in my 'special playroom.' Right?"
Her face, now fully visible as she lifted her head, was a nightmare. Pale, streaked with dirt and that single track of blood from her lip. Her eyes were dry, wide, and utterly hollow. All the fury had been refined down into this: a bleak, absolute void of intent.
Obito's Sharingan took it all in. He felt no sympathy for the original Obito—that sniveling, pathetic creature who had been ordered to befriend and then betray. That coward who had imprisoned a little girl to curry favor with a monster. Even Naoya Zenin, for all his narcissistic evil, was straightforward in his malice. The original Obito was a subtler poison, a betrayal that cut deeper because it came wrapped in friendship.
And even that wasn't enough for the wretch. After she was found, half-starved and traumatized, he had the audacity to act as if nothing happened. To treat her worse, to mock her, to solidify his place by stepping on her. It was no wonder her only desire was to hit him until nothing remained.
And even now, Obito knew she was right about him, the current occupant. He was also a user. A liar. He wanted things from Yuta, from Panda, from Inumaki. He was building connections as assets. He was despicable in his own, more pragmatic way.
So there were no righteous words he could offer. No defense. Only a bleak acknowledgment.
"I won't apologize for anything he did," Obito said, his own voice stripped of pretense. "I hope you can… accept my condolences. That person is gone. Erased."
For the first time since Obito had arrived in this world, Maki Zenin smiled at him. It wasn't a smile of warmth or relief. It was a smile of dark, giddy anticipation. A happy smile.
"Really?" she breathed, the word a puff of frost in the air. "I also want his face to disappear. Every trace of him. Will you allow me?"
Obito's expression didn't change. The blood from his temple wound had started to coagulate into a gruesome crust. He replied, his tone almost conversational, "I wish I could oblige. But I have a personal aversion to plastic surgery. Bad experiences."
She took another step forward. The air around her seemed to warp, pressurized by the sheer density of her killing intent. The fallen leaves around her feet stirred, then were pressed flat.
"Don't worry," she said, her voice a soft, deadly promise. "I'll pay for the best plastic surgeon in Tokyo. The procedure will be… extensive. Very painful. But I promise, you'll be a completely different person when it's over."
Obito retreated one foot, settling into the most solid stance he could manage. Every muscle screamed in protest. He took a deep, shuddering breath, steeling himself for the hurricane about to make landfall.
"I think I'll have to refuse that generous offer, Maki," he said. "I don't like being in debt. Especially not one that involves facial reconstruction."
The air between them crackled with unseen energy. The scent of copper blood, ozone from cursed energy, and the sharp, clean smell of crushed pine needles was overwhelming.
Somewhere behind them, on his comfortable bench, Satoru Gojo selected another piece of popcorn with fastidious care and brought it to his mouth.
Crunch.
The sound was obscenely loud in the silent standoff.
The debt was called. The betrayal laid bare. All that was left was the spear, and the settling.
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End of Chapter.
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