Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Ten-Minute Limit & The Popping Corn
Maki didn't delay from her spot.
The moment Obito finished speaking, the tenuous truce of words shattered. She moved. It wasn't a dash; it was an eruption of pent-up violence, a seismic event given human form. The ground beneath her feet, already scarred, cratered further with a muffled WHUMP.
Obito's body reacted before his mind could fully process the threat. Cursed energy surged through his circuits, a desperate, hot flood. He poured it into reinforcement, into speed, into anything that could put distance between him and the green-haired hurricane. An explosive burst of cursed energy detonated at his soles, tearing up a meter-wide chunk of earth and propelling him backwards and up.
BOOM-SWOOOSH!
He flew, a clumsy projectile, scrambling for purchase on the trunk of a tall pine. Bark scraped under his nails. Scritch-scratch. He managed to hook an arm over a lower branch, leaves and pine needles raining down around him in a chaotic green shower. Swish-swish-swish.
But she didn't let them. She didn't even let the foliage obscure her vision.
While he was still pulling himself up, she was already there. Not climbing. She'd simply jumped, a vertical leap that defied gravity and good sense, closing the distance in a blink. Her hand, moving faster than a striking snake, shot out and clamped around his forearm—the one hooked over the branch.
Her grip was inhuman. It wasn't just strength; it was focused, crushing pressure that generated its own localized field of air compression. Obito felt the bones in his forearm groan in immediate, terrifying protest. The muscles swelled against the skin, threatening to burst. The sound was a sickening, wet CRUNCH of stressed tissue and grinding bone.
—Damn it, my arm is going to shatter. It's going to pop like a grape!—
Panic, cold and sharp, lanced through him. He couldn't pry her fingers off. He couldn't overpower her. His only option was a desperate, brute-force expulsion. He focused all the cursed energy he could muster into the arm she held, not for reinforcement, but for a violent, outward push.
A shockwave of red-tinged energy erupted from his skin, not enough to break her grip, but enough to force her hand open a crucial millimeter. In that sliver of space and time, he twisted, using the branch as a pivot, and lashed out with his other leg in a spinning kick aimed directly at the side of her head.
THWOCK!
The impact was solid, the sound a dense, meaty thud. Her head snapped to the side. But she didn't stagger. She didn't even blink. Her eyes, locked on his, didn't waver from their murderous focus. It was like kicking a stone statue.
She used his momentary imbalance against him. Her grip tightened again, and with a contemptuous, effortless motion, she yanked. She didn't just pull him off the branch; she used his own momentum, plus her monstrous strength, to whip him through the air like a ragdoll.
He lost all orientation. The world became a spinning blur of green, brown, and blue. She released him at the peak of the swing, launching him on a trajectory towards a dense cluster of ancient, thick-boled trees.
His body became a human cannonball. He hit the first tree back-first with a sound that was part wood-splinter (CRACK!), part bodily impact (THUD!). The air exploded from his lungs in a pained WHOOF! Momentum wasn't done. He caromed off, spinning, and smashed sideways into a second trunk (SMACK!), then scraped along a third, tearing his uniform and skin on rough bark before finally slumping to the forest floor in a heap of agony.
THUMP-thump-thud… silence.
Blood, warm and coppery, trickled from a fresh cut on his forehead, mingling with the dirt and pine resin on his face. He felt dizzy, the world tilting on its axis. Every breath was a knife in his ribs. The arm she'd grabbed felt numb, then flooded with a firestorm of pain—definitely not shattered, but deeply, impressively bruised. The bone felt… cracked. A hairline fracture singing a song of misery.
Her strikes were economical. They weren't wild; they were precise applications of force designed to cause maximum damage with minimum effort. He was used to pain by now—his life was a catalog of aches—but this was a new chapter. A chapter titled "Systematic Dismantling."
He forced himself to roll, then push up onto his knees. Blood dripped from his brow, splattering on the dark earth. Plink. Plink. He leaped backward, a stumbling, graceless hop, trying to put more ruined trees between them.
She didn't stop. She was a relentless engine of anger. Her hair, freed from its tie, flew around her like a dark corona with each violent movement. Her eyes tracked him with an intensity that felt physical, a weight pinning him in place.
—I knew this was a bad idea. Talking was a bad idea. Existing near her was a bad idea.—
He took a sudden, jerky step to the side, ducking behind the splintered remains of the tree he'd just introduced himself to. He just had time to see Playful Cloud, a blur of polished wood, slice through the space where his head had been and continue, unhindered, into the trunk of his makeshift shield.
The tree—what was left of it—didn't stand a chance. It was cut clean through with a sound like a giant snapping a toothpick. SNAP-THWOOM!
The upper half teetered for a heart-stopping second before crashing down, a ton of deadwood and needles. It hit the ground with an earth-shaking CRASH, sending up a rolling tsunami of dust, dirt, and shredded foliage. The wind of its fall whipped at Obito, stinging his eyes.
But the Sharingan saw through the particulate storm. It saw more than that. It saw the opening.
As the dust bloomed, Maki was momentarily obscured, her form a shadow within the cloud. Obito didn't delay. He switched his cursed energy placement with a frantic, mental flicker. He forced the flow away from his screaming arm and battered ribs, channeling it all into his legs and his free hand.
He moved, not away, but through the chaos. He used the falling debris as cover, leaping over a tumbling log, his movements an awkward, simian scramble. He emerged from the dust cloud not in front of her, but slightly to her left and behind, using the sound and visual cover to mask his approach.
He compressed his cursed energy into his right fist, a dense, glowing ball of potential force. This was no simple reinforcement. He was trying to execute one of the techniques he'd been grinding in secret—a brutal, close-range strike that borrowed the concept of cursed energy "detonation" from the Acceleration technique, but focused it into a single, penetrating point.
The punch was precise, aiming for the cluster of nerves and muscles at the base of her spine. It was a dirty, fight-ending move. He was done playing defense.
But Maki's instincts were sharper than any technique. She couldn't see him clearly through the dust, but she felt the shift in air pressure, the subtle displacement of sound. Reacting wasn't a solution; it was too late for that. So she didn't try to dodge.
Instead, she planted her foot and, with a grunt of effort, used the spear shaft (now in its single form) to strike not at him, but at the air beside her. It was a bizarre, almost wasteful movement.
Until the result manifested.
The spear-tip, moving at transonic speed, didn't hit anything solid. It simply cut through the atmosphere with such force that it created a momentary, violent vacuum and a following shockwave. The air itself became a weapon. A concussive blast of wind, sharp as a blade, erupted from the point of impact, blowing the remaining dust away in a perfect circle and hitting Obito's charging form like a invisible wall.
WHOOSH-BOOM!
It wasn't enough to stop him, but it was enough to throw his balance, to ruin his perfect alignment. His precise, killing punch became a wild, off-target swing. He stumbled past her, his attack whistling through empty air.
He caught himself, skidding on the loose soil, and spun to face her, breathing ragged. She was already looking at him, having turned smoothly with the motion of her missed strike. A mocking, vicious smile touched her lips.
"You bastard," she spat, her voice thick with disdain. "Are you trying to use what you stole? These sneaky, copied methods?"
Obito didn't say anything. Talking wasted breath, and he had precious little to spare. He adjusted his stance. His feet settled, his shoulders dropped. The posture was suddenly, unmistakably familiar—wide-based, solid, hands coming up in loose fists. It was Panda's boxing stance. A fraction of a second of mental focus, a surge of cursed energy that reshaped itself to mimic the flow he'd observed in the cursed corpse, and his own energy took on a faint, bestial shimmer around his knuckles.
Then he moved.
[Cursed Acceleration]
Not for travel, but for rapid, close-quarters flurries. He didn't appear in two places at once; he moved so fast in a tight space that he created afterimages. Two shimmering, red-eyed shapes seemed to come at Maki from left and right simultaneously, each throwing a heavy, reinforced punch.
Maki's eyes narrowed. She recognized the style, and the recognition fueled her rage. She spun Playful Cloud, her hands a blur. With a sharp click-clack, the staff separated into its three sections, connected by short chains. She didn't try to block both afterimages. Instead, she whipped the sections into a spinning, defensive cyclone around her body—a moving, metallic fan.
The movement released a torrent of cutting wind, a miniature tornado of force that shredded the afterimages and forced Obito's real body to abort his attack and leap back, his clothes flapping violently. Swoosh. Whoosh.
—I needed a way to keep fighting even when the copy timer ran out. But after all the thinking, the books, the theory… there's no cheat code for sudden, permanent strength. So, there was only one path.—
Obito's mind raced even as his body moved. He broke off, using a half-fallen tree as a springboard. He landed beside another, larger pine. Adopting Panda's stance again, he poured cursed energy into his fist, not for a piercing strike, but for sheer, concussive force. He drove his fist into the tree's trunk.
BOOM-CRACK!
The sound was deafening. The tree, a century old, shuddered violently. A web of fractures raced up its bark before the entire thing, with a groaning CREEEAK, gave up and began to topple directly towards where Maki stood, having just dissipated her defensive whirlwind.
She didn't even look up. As the massive shadow fell over her, she simply braced, grabbed one section of her spear, and with a two-handed upward swing, met the falling trunk head-on.
SPLINTER-CRUNCH!
She didn't cut it; she shattered it. The trunk exploded into a storm of kindling and sawdust, the two halves crashing harmlessly to either side of her. She stood untouched in a clearing of her own making, dust settling on her shoulders like snow.
Without pause, she reassembled the spear with a flick of her wrists (click-click) and lunged. But she didn't aim for Obito directly. Instead, she planted the butt of the spear into the ground and used it as a vaulting pole, launching herself into a spinning, aerial kick. The air pressure from the kick alone was enough to bend saplings.
Obito didn't stop to receive it. His speed suddenly spiked again—another burst of Acceleration—and he vanished from the kick's arc, reappearing not beside her, but directly in her blind spot as she landed.
Her eyes widened in genuine shock. She felt this. The footwork, the angle of approach, the way the cursed energy flared at the last second… it was horribly, insultingly familiar. "Impossible. How can you—"
She didn't finish. Obito's fist, now not mimicking Panda's blunt force but something sharper, more refined—Kiyoshi's precise, surgical strikes—drove into her ribs with pinpoint accuracy. There was a sickening CRUNCH of cartilage.
Ugh! The air left her lungs in a pained gasp. She was thrown backward, skidding on her feet.
But Maki Zenin didn't stay down. Even in mid-skid, her weapon was moving. She didn't try to reorient; she simply lashed out with a backhanded swing of one spear section, the chain extending to its limit. It was a wild, unpredictable strike.
Obito, relying on prediction, dodged the main impact. But he didn't account for the wind shear. The spear-tip missed him by inches, but the displaced air it created was like a whip. It caught the side of his cheek, opening a thin, stinging line. Blood welled and flew in a fine mist. Swish. Splat.
—That's right. The ten-minute limit for continuous copying… The solution isn't to extend it. It's to fragment it.—
The revelation had come during a sleepless night, poring over notes on cursed energy stamina and technique burnout. His Sharingan's copy ability had a hard cap: ten minutes of sustained mimicry before a mandatory, debilitating cooldown. In a life-or-death fight, thirty seconds without his eyes was a death sentence.
But what if he didn't use it continuously? What if he treated it like a toolbox, not a single tool? Activate the copy for one perfect punch—Panda's knockout blow. Deactivate. Switch to pure perception and prediction to evade. Then, a micro-second later, activate copy again for a different style—Kiyoshi's precise jab to a nerve cluster. Deactivate. Rinse, repeat.
He wasn't copying a person; he was copying moments. He was building a combat style out of stolen seconds.
---
The essence of the combat shifted. It became a chaotic, unpredictable exchange. Obito's movements lost all coherence to an outside observer. One moment he was a brawler, planting his feet and trading heavy blows (Panda). The next, he was a fencer, darting in with lightning-fast, debilitating jabs (Kiyoshi). Then he'd flow into something else entirely—a gliding, efficient footwork that was undeniably, infuriatingly hers (Maki's own style, thrown back at her). Finally, he'd punctuate it with a burst of speed and a crushing strike that carried the arrogant, overwhelming weight of the Clan Head himself (Naobito).
He was imitating Naobito's attack style to breach her defenses, but only for the duration of a single strike. Then it was gone.
—Why? Why can this bastard use these techniques in pieces? Why doesn't he commit? He defends, he feints, he never follows through!—
She blocked a punch that carried the weight of a bear, her arms ringing. But she felt the pain—real damage was accumulating. She couldn't see cursed energy flows without her glasses, but she could read the language of force. She could feel the quality of the strikes changing. She adapted, trying to lure him into a pattern, to launch a probing attack with the three-section spear, testing if his reactions were scripted or fluid.
He avoided them all, a red-eyed ghost in the shattered woodland. She barely managed to land a glancing blow with the shaft, but he didn't stop. He was predicting her movements more accurately now, learning her tells even as she learned his stolen repertoire.
—The eye. That damned, stealing eye. How dare he? How did he integrate it to this degree?—
Maki, in her fury, was missing the fundamental horror of the Sharingan in combat. It wasn't just a fancy trick. The deceleration turned her blistering speed into a manageable flow. The prediction mapped out the probable futures of her spear strikes, turning deadly arcs into dodgeable paths. And the copy… the copy let him weaponize the skills of everyone he'd ever fought, using them as surgical strikes before discarding them, all while his base perception kept him alive.
This piecemeal, opportunistic style was slowly, maddeningly, paralyzing Maki's overwhelming assault. She was a torrent; he was a needle, darting in to puncture, then retreating. Yet, amidst the storm of his borrowed skills, she noticed one constant, one thing he couldn't copy.
—He's breathing like a spastic bellows. This bastard. He's gassed.—
A cunning, cold smile touched her lips. The fog of pure rage began to part, replaced by the cold, clear light of tactical analysis. She understood now.
—He can copy the how, but not the hardware. He can mimic Panda's punch, but not Panda's cursed corpse endurance. He can steal Kiyoshi's precision, but not his years of refined control. He's forcing a weak body to execute advanced techniques. It's unsustainable.—
---
Obito, panting, sweat and blood mingling on his face, saw the change in her. She stopped pressing the all-out attack. She settled into a more defensive, observant stance. Her gaze was no longer just fiery; it was calculating, sharp as the spear in her hand. His mind, trained by paranoia, connected the dots instantly.
—She knows. She's figured out the stamina problem. She's waiting. Waiting for the engine to seize.—
Thanks to his fragmented use, he could stretch the effective "copy time" across the whole battle. But the energy cost—the sheer mental and physical tax of constantly switching styles, micro-managing cursed energy flows, and maintaining the Sharingan's enhanced perception—was immense. His body, even reinforced, was a cheap knock-off trying to run premium software. It was overheating.
More than fifteen minutes had passed since the first spear swing. Obito's world had become a cycle of explosive motion: leap, block, twist, strike, evade. Tree bark under his hands, the whistle of the spear, the crunch of impact, the burn of lactic acid in every muscle. All at a speed that would liquefy a normal human.
He couldn't stop. Stopping meant presenting a stationary target for a strike that would end things. Not just because she was stronger, but because the fury in her eyes promised she wouldn't stop at a simple knockout. She wanted to break something. Permanently.
The anger that fueled her seemed to have its own energy source. Her breathing was hard, but controlled. It wasn't cutting off in ragged gasps like his.
"What?" she taunted, her voice a cold dagger. She feinted forward, making him flinch back, then casually kicked a football-sized rock from the rubble. It shot towards his face like a cannonball. He jerked his head aside, but the wind of its passage opened another shallow scratch on his cheek. He ignored it. "Is this your maximum limit? I'm just warming up."
He heard her, but he was focused on the spear in her hand. The three sections, connected by chains, gave her a terrifying range of motion. She could attack from angles that defied physics, strike from the left while the right section coiled for a follow-up. Its versatility made the task of defeating her exponentially harder than facing her unarmed.
—A weapon in her hands isn't a tool; it's a force multiplier.—
Maki's physical strength was nightmare enough. Combined with her preternatural skill and instinct with armaments, she was a comprehensive, walking war crime. And with every passing minute, she was adapting. She was learning the rhythm of his stolen styles, predicting the switches, her own combat IQ rising to meet the challenge.
Her Heavenly Restriction granted her innate physical advantages Obito could never replicate, no matter how many styles he copied. If his baseline body were stronger, if he had Yuta's cursed energy reserves, he might have a chance. But he didn't. So he had to be smarter, more desperate.
He pushed more cursed energy towards his brain, trying to increase the deceleration factor further. The world slowed another notch. Maki's movements, even as they evolved and adapted, became a series of connected, analyzable frames. The Sharingan's prediction module worked overtime, highlighting weaknesses in her stance, moments of over-extension after a powerful swing.
He took an offensive stance, not copying one person, but synthesizing. In his mind's eye, he replayed moments: Naobito's crushing, authoritative fist descending; Panda's wide, telegraphic haymaker; Kiyoshi's needle-thrust to a pressure point. The Sharingan allowed him to hold these blueprints simultaneously. His cursed energy flickered and shifted, trying to wear three masks at once.
So, when he moved, it was a grotesque, effective chimera. A lunge with Naobito's arrogant speed, a body-weight shift into Panda's power-generating rotation, all focused into a strike with Kiyoshi's surgical precision, aimed at the cluster of nerves on Maki's shoulder.
THWACK-POP!
Her body, supremely conditioned, still suffered. A grunt escaped her. Blood, dark and real, began to well from the point of impact, staining her torn shirt. This pattern continued for another agonizing stretch of time—clashes measured in seconds, injuries accumulating in small, painful increments. Obito used his cursed energy as a crutch to bridge the physical gap. Maki weathered the damage, but she was learning, analyzing, her own predictions starting to counter his.
---
On the other side of the devastation, the three spectators—Yuta, Panda, and Inumaki—stood at the edge of the ruined forest, drawn by the continuous symphony of destruction. They had arrived a minute prior, and the scale of the damage stole their words. It looked less like a spar and more like a small meteor impact site.
Beside them, Satoru Gojo was… not helping. He was leaning against a miraculously untouched tree, his head tilted as if listening to a fascinating symphony. With his Six Eyes, he wasn't just watching; he was perceiving the intricate dance of cursed energy, the strain vectors, the micro-adaptations. A low chuckle escaped him, soon growing into a full, delighted laugh.
"Wonderful!" he exclaimed, clapping his hands together once with a sharp clap! "This is extremely amazing! Their growth curves are spiking! Obito, that kid… he really is something else. He's reverse-engineering combat in real-time! And Maki! The feedback loop! She's evolving her style to counter a style that's evolving to counter hers! It's beautiful!"
The three students heard him. Yuta's face was a mask of horror and disbelief. He pointed a trembling finger towards the continuing cataclysm. "Sensei! What is wrong with you? This has gone beyond dangerous! Look at that!"
Another tree, this one a good fifty meters away, suddenly exploded into splinters, felled by a shockwave or a stray strike. The whistle of accelerated metal cut through the air. "This isn't training! It's mutual attempted murder! You have to stop them, or… or I'll do it!"
He had no idea how, but the thought of Obito—his first friend here—being dismantled piece by piece was unbearable.
Gojo turned his blindfolded gaze towards Yuta, his smile not fading, but taking on a didactic edge. "Do you know the primary catalyst for a jujutsu sorcerer's development, Yuta-kun?"
The three looked at each other, confused by the non-sequitur. Yuta just shook his head, frantic.
Panda, ever the good student even in a crisis, answered, his voice rumbling with concern. "Through combat. Real, high-stakes combat against curses."
Inumaki, beside him, gave a firm nod and a muffled, "Salmon." (Agreed.)
Gojo made a cheerful ding! sound, like a game show buzzer. "Correct! Combat against curses forces adaptation, innovation, a breaking of limits. But!" He held up a single, dramatic finger. "There's one thing even more potent than facing a curse."
This time, the trio was stumped. They looked at him blankly.
Gojo's head swiveled back towards the epicenter of the destruction, his smile knowing. "Anger. Pure, personal, psychologically charged anger. A motive that comes from here." He tapped his own chest. "Suppressed anger is a chain. It makes you hesitate, makes you brittle. A chain like that can snap at the worst moment on a mission. Get someone killed." His voice lost its playful edge for a millisecond. "Isn't it better for that explosion to happen here? In a controlled environment?"
He gestured grandly to himself. "Where the strongest is present to ensure the building doesn't completely collapse?" Then he waved a hand airily. "And Shoko is on standby. A few broken bones, some internal bleeding… it's all in a day's work for her. No need for such long faces!"
Then, in a blur of motion, he disappeared and reappeared holding a massive, freshly-popped bag of buttery popcorn and three cans of juice. Pop! Fizz.
"Here!" he said, shoving the snacks into their stunned hands. "Eat. Watch. Learn. This… this is the kind of crucible that forges real Grade 1 material. You might need to find your own 'Maki' one day if you want to reach the top."
The three stood holding the popcorn and juice, utterly bewildered. Before they could process the absurdity, Gojo had already turned back to the fight. He raised his fists like a cheerleader at a sports match, bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet.
"Go, go, Maki! Smash his copied nonsense! Go, go, Obito! Don't let her figure out your tell! WOO!" He jammed a handful of popcorn into his own mouth.
Crunch. Munch.
"Oh! Almost a kidney shot! Nice pivot, Obito! Maki, watch the over-extension on the backswing! You're leaving your center open for, like, 0.2 seconds!"
The three students could only stare, their snacks forgotten, as the forest continued to convulse. The sounds were a relentless orchestra of shattering wood, clanging metal, pained grunts, and the manic, running commentary of the world's most powerful sorcerer, who was treating a grudge-match beatdown as the most entertaining reality show ever made.
Crunch. "Ooh, that's gonna leave a mark!"
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End of Chapter.
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Hello everyone, the author is speaking to you here.
My friends, thank you for your reviews and comments about my novel. You are truly the best people and I love you.
Some of you have wondered how the protagonist awakened his cursed technique, while other characters, despite controlling cursed energy, don't possess a cursed technique, like Kusakabe.
I will tell you the answer now.
When the hero transferred into Obito's body, they altered Obito's Zenin spirit, which awakened Obito's Zenin technique, the Sharingan.
How did that happen? Well, in the world of Jujutsu, the soul and body are one. If the soul changes, the body changes with it. You can compare that to Mahito's cursed ability. It's similar to when Obito Zenin's soul changed after merging with the soul of...The hero was thus able to awaken Obito Zenin's cursed technique.
Some of you might wonder if that's illogical. It's much more logical than you imagine; it's simply the law of this spiritual work: the body and the soul. That's what I based my thinking on.
Finally, the reason Gojo Satoru can't tell that Obito isn't the original Obito is simply because he's never known the original Obito before and has never seen him. The Six Eyes allow one to see the true form of the soul and recognize the technique.The cursed one
But if Goku wanted to know the difference, he needed to know the original body and technique first. He knew Saguru because he was his friend, but he didn't know his soul, Obito Zenin. So when he saw him...
He saw that Obito's spirit was only older than his age, but that was normal because shamans face a lot of danger, which causes this development, especially since he had heard that he had awakened his cursed technique at a late age, so he thought that was the reason.
Finally, what I'm saying isn't meant to belittle Gojo Satoru's intelligence, but rather to highlight his natural inclination to think about such matters. The important thing is that he witnessed Obito's cursed technique using the Six Eyes
So these were the main reasons. If you have any further questions, I'd always be happy to answer them.