Chapter Thirty-Eight: The Black Flash & The Endless Grudge
This battle, which she had entered assuming it would be a swift, brutal, and deeply satisfying one-sided beatdown, had overstayed its welcome. It had become a grueling, drawn-out war of attrition.
He was a cockroach. A slippery, red-eyed cockroach that refused to be squashed. He kept dancing away at the last moment, lashing out with a stolen technique—a ghost of Panda's haymaker here, a phantom of Kiyoshi's jab there—before scrambling back to a safe distance, only to dart in again a second later from a different angle. It was infuriating.
But his body was clearly failing him. The signs were there, written in the language of exhaustion: his breathing was a ragged, desperate sawing sound (haa… wheeze… haa…). The crimson glow of his eyes, while still active, seemed strained, flickering at the edges. He was even struggling to maintain a steady stance between bursts, his legs trembling visibly.
She wanted to scream her mockery, to pour salt into the wounds of his obvious fatigue. But she couldn't find the breath, the moment. She was too busy blocking another flurry of rapid, disjointed attacks, her forearms ringing from the impacts. Clang! Thwack!
—The eye… It's giving him an unfair advantage in processing speed. He's reacting faster than I can initiate.—
His cursed technique seemed built for this: to warp perception, to stretch milliseconds into manageable moments, to turn her overwhelming speed into a predictable sequence. But this didn't make her slower. If anything, it forged her fury into a sharper, more focused weapon. Her body, her fighting style, was adapting to this frantic pace in real-time, evolving under the pressure.
She felt exhaustion, a deep, bone-weary ache that was new. She felt the strain of pushing past her known limits again and again. But these sensations only stoked the furnace of her anger. She was breaking her own barriers, and she hated him for it.
—How dare he be the catalyst for this? How dare this piece of trash be the anvil on which she's being reforged?—
She would accept nothing from him. Not a lesson, not a revelation, not even the grim satisfaction of her own escalating power. This perfect, irritatingly durable punching bag—one that improved, that threw her own skills back at her, that forced her to evolve—inspired not an ounce of gratitude. It only fueled a deeper, colder desire: to end him. Now.
Maki planted her feet, the ground cracking beneath her. The spear, Playful Cloud, was in her hand. It had shifted between its one and three-section forms a dozen times in the last minute. Now, it was a solid staff again. She ran a lightning-fast internal calculation, mapping the patterns of Obito's evasive scrambles over the last several minutes.
"This time," she growled, the words grating out from between clenched teeth, "I want to see how you wiggle out of this."
She screamed it, hoping to see a flicker of terror in those stolen red eyes. But there was none. Just that unnerving, hyper-focused calm. A calm that, for the first time, felt less like fear and more like… anticipation.
Maki felt a primal warning itch at the back of her neck. Something was off.
—Does he think I'll hesitate because he might have a trap? That I'm afraid of a coward's trick?—
Rationality was a distant memory, burned away by rage. She attacked. But rage didn't make her stupid; it made her brutally efficient. She poured more strength into the strike, even as her senses expanded, taking in the battlefield: the ring of shattered trees, the carpet of wooden debris, the swirling leaves. The sheer devastation they'd wrought was a testament to the stalemate, and it screamed that something was about to break.
Her spear tore through the air, not aimed directly at Obito, but at the space he would need to occupy to dodge her previous feint. It generated a visible shockwave, a storm-front of compressed air that rippled outwards, shredding leaves and snapping smaller branches. SWOOM-BOOM!
But the strange thing was, Obito smiled. A thin, blood-streaked crack in his mask of concentration.
"I couldn't learn weapons," he said, his voice surprisingly clear amidst the din, "not because I didn't want to, but because I always knew you were leagues beyond me. There's no point confronting a master with a stolen beginner's form."
—What is this bastard babbling about? Is he complimenting me? Now?—
The words, sounding like praise, felt like acid in her ears. Disgust, pure and hot, flooded her. It amplified her strength, her singular need to erase him from her sight.
But then he moved.
It wasn't a dodge. It was a blur of frantic, impossible activity. He seemed to dissolve into motion. If Maki could perceive cursed energy, she would have seen Obito overclocking the [Cursed Acceleration] technique to a dangerous extreme, pushing it past Naobito's efficient bursts into something frantic, wasteful, and blindingly fast. It wasn't Grade 1 level; it was a desperate, unsustainable spike.
He became three afterimages in the space of a heartbeat. Each afterimage grabbed something—a chunk of shattered trunk, a handful of fist-sized rocks, a clump of dirt and leaves. And then, in a simultaneous release, all three launched their projectiles at her.
The storm of debris met her air-pressure wave head-on. CRUNCH-POP-THUD! Wood splintered, rocks powdered, leaves vaporized into green mist. The collision created a momentary screen of chaos.
And through that screen, moving faster than sight or sound, Obito emerged.
He didn't cry out in anger. He let out a sound that was pure, raw effort—a guttural roar of pain, conviction, and utter desperation that vibrated in Maki's chest. It wasn't a taunt; it was a declaration of war from the deepest, most exhausted part of his being. And it made her want to hit him so much harder.
But she couldn't track the movement. Her eyes, her instincts, failed her for a critical half-second.
His fist wasn't in front of her. It was behind her, having somehow navigated the debris screen and her blind spot with impossible geometry.
—I want to see if your superior body can withstand several of these.—
He didn't say it, but the intent was telegraphed in the vicious, concentrated power of the strike. In less than the blink of an eye, he landed three blows. Not random punches. Three precisely targeted, cursed-energy-saturated impacts on nerve clusters at her kidney, her diaphragm, and the base of her neck.
THUMP-CRACK-THUD!
Pain, bright and electric, detonated along her nervous system. Her vision whited out. Her body went rigid, then was hurled into the air like a discarded toy.
But Maki Zenin's grip was a vice. Her fingers, bleeding and raw, held onto Playful Cloud. As she flew backwards, she had a single, crystalline sensory memory: a flash of darkness. Not the darkness of unconsciousness, but a flash of nothingness, a spatial rip that seemed to consume the light and sound around the point of impact on her body, just before the force launched her.
Even the kinetic force felt wrong—it was denser, heavier, as if the punch had carried twice the mass it should have.
She couldn't form words. All that escaped her as she smashed through one tree trunk (CRASH), then another (SMACK), before skidding to a stop in a heap of splinters, was a raw, furious scream that had no language, only rage.
---
Obito knelt on the churned earth, one hand pressed into the mud for support. He was trembling violently. He couldn't believe it.
He had felt it. A resonance so perfect, so improbable, it felt like the universe had momentarily aligned its gears. In that split-second of absolute focus, with his body screaming in protest and his mind a bare wire of intent, his cursed energy had connected with Maki's physical mass at a precise, 1/1,000,000th of a second delay.
[Black Flash.]
The technique he'd only read about in theory, the phenomenon that magnified the power of a cursed energy strike to the power of 2.5. It wasn't something you could do; it was something that happened to you when everything lined up perfectly.
And it had happened. To him. While he was at the absolute brink, with no thought of escape, only the pure, undiluted desire to fight, to stand his ground against this force of nature.
The Sharingan had been pushed to its absolute limit: deceleration stretching time to a crawl, prediction mapping a thousand branching futures, copy holding the blueprints of three different combat styles simultaneously. His mind was a supercomputer on the verge of meltdown.
Even his cursed energy, which had been guttering like a dying candle, had surged back after the Black Flash, a supernova of replenishment. He felt… lifted. Sharper. His cursed energy moved with a new, instinctive fluidity, its recovery rate absurdly accelerated.
But the high was momentary. The bill came due immediately.
He didn't stop. He couldn't. He vanished from his spot, using the last dregs of that transcendent energy to become a ghost again. He weaved through the shattered tree stumps, a phantom of pain and determination, and reached her as she was pushing herself up from the wreckage, leaning heavily against a snapped tree. Her posture was pure, unadulterated fury. Playful Cloud, back in its three-section form, was already spinning in her hand, building momentum for a strike that would take his head off.
He didn't let it happen. He wrapped the last of his cursed energy around his body in a final, suicidal shell, forcing another burst of speed. The cost was immediate and visceral. He screamed—a short, sharp sound of pure agony—as his battered bones protested, his torn muscles shrieked, and every wound on his body wept fresh blood.
But it was enough. He slipped inside the arc of her whirling spear, bypassing her defenses completely, and drove another punch, fueled by the fading echo of the Black Flash, into her sternum.
BOOM.
The sound was hollow, final. Maki was launched backward again, her feet digging twin trenches in the soil for several meters before she somehow, impossibly, remained upright. She didn't fall. She looked at him, blood streaming from her nose and a cut on her brow, her eyes the eyes of a predator who would die standing before she admitted defeat.
He looked back, his own vision swimming. The careful facade, the spy's detachment, the calculated friendliness—it was all gone, burned away in the crucible of this fight. What was left was a raw, exhausted teenager who just wanted it to stop.
"Ah, ah," he gasped, the words coming out in pained bursts between heaving breaths. "Just fall down already, you crazy woman!"
His mind was a chorus of warnings: Stop. Your body is breaking. You will die. But his eyes were locked on hers, and he screamed, the sound torn from a place of utter desperation, "I just want this to be over!"
He launched himself forward one last time, his body moving on autopilot, falling into Panda's boxing stance by pure muscle memory.
But as he did, he felt it. A sudden, terrifying emptiness behind his eyes. The constant, humming pressure of the Sharingan—the anchor of his perception for the entire fight—vanished. The world, which had been a slow-motion ballet of trajectories and energy flows, snapped back to normal speed with a dizzying, nauseating jolt.
His eyes returned to their normal, dark color. Fresh blood, hot and insistent, streamed from the gash on his forehead, blurring his vision.
On the other side, Maki, her body a testament to catastrophic damage—bruised organs, cracked ribs, strained tendons—saw the change. She saw the crimson light die in his eyes. She saw him falter, his charge becoming a stumbling, blind rush.
—He's reached his limit. The eye is gone. This is it. This is the end.—
Obito knew it too. A cold terror, deeper than any he'd felt facing curses, washed over him. He was about to win. He was inches from ending it. And now, he was naked, slow, and helpless.
He saw Maki, despite her own ruined state, gather the very last dregs of her superhuman strength. She dropped into a low stance, coiling like a spring, her one good eye fixed on his throat.
But as he braced for the final, killing blow, as he committed to a hopeless, off-target punch, something else happened.
Maki's body betrayed her. The accumulated damage—the Black Flash to her core, the dozens of copied strikes mimicking Naobito's punishing style, the sheer physical toll of pushing past her limits for nearly an hour—reached a critical point. Her knees, which had held her up through sheer will, simply buckled.
Thump.
She didn't fall gracefully. She crashed to her knees, her body seizing in a violent, full-body tremor. Her muscles, pushed beyond endurance, were locking up.
And she wasn't alone. The moment her knees hit the dirt, Obito's own legs gave out. He didn't crash; he folded, collapsing onto his hands and knees a meter away from her, his head hanging low, blood dripping steadily into the mud between his fingers. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Both of them, frozen in a tableau of mutual ruin, had the same single, furious thought screaming in their skulls:
—Impossible. My body… it won't move. It's done. Damn it. DAMN IT! I need to hit her/him just one more time!—
They were locked in place, a meter of churned, bloody earth between them. He was a broken marionette, head bowed. She was a shuddering statue, convulsing with pain and thwarted fury. Neither could raise a fist. Neither could take a step. The endless grudge had finally met a limit their bodies could not transcend.
---
From his VIP seating at the edge of the devastation, the strongest sorcerer of the modern era let out a long, appreciative sigh. He had watched the entire spectacle through the god-like lens of the Six Eyes, perceiving not just the actions, but the swirling torrents of cursed energy, the strain on souls, the miraculous alignment of the Black Flash.
When that darkness had flashed, even Satoru Gojo had been genuinely, pleasantly surprised. The Black Flash wasn't a technique; it was a lottery ticket punched by fate for those dancing on the edge of oblivion. The kid had bought a winning ticket.
"Let's go," Gojo announced, clapping his hands together once. The sound was absurdly cheerful in the post-apocalyptic silence. "Show's over. Ding dong!" He imitated a game show buzzer. Bzzt!
In the next instant, his cursed energy, vast and effortless, enveloped the two broken combatants. There was a soft whoosh of displaced air, and then they were gone from the forest floor.
He reappeared in the sterile, clean-smelling infirmary, an unconscious, bleeding Obito under one arm and a shuddering, semi-conscious Maki under the other. He deposited them unceremoniously onto two adjacent medical beds with a series of twin thumps.
Ieiri Shoko, who had been engrossed in a medical journal under the cool blue light of her desk lamp, looked up. She didn't startle. She took in the two bloody, broken students, then fixed a flat, unimpressed stare on Gojo, who was beaming with pride.
"Look, Shoko!" Gojo said, gesturing grandly like a presenter on a talent show. "Look at my students! Both have leveled up tremendously! I'm so proud. So much talent! Of course, my peerless mentorship is the secret sauce."
He let out one of his characteristic, unhinged laughs. Ha-ha-ha!
Shoko's expression didn't change. She closed her journal with a soft snap, stood up, and pulled on a pair of medical gloves with a sharp snick-snick.
"Put them on the treatment beds," she said, her voice devoid of warmth. "I'll treat them. It's going to take a while. And it seems they've both decided to check out for the moment."
She was right. Obito, the moment the adrenaline of the fight and the terror of his technique failing left him, had plunged into unconsciousness the second Gojo's energy touched him. His body had simply shut down.
Maki, powered by a stubbornness that bordered on the pathological, had clung to awareness. She didn't trust Obito not to launch a final, cheap shot. But the moment she felt Gojo's presence—the moment the external threat of the fight was formally removed—her body's veto overruled her will. The pain gates opened fully, and the world dissolved into blackness. It wasn't trust; it was systems failure.
Shoko positioned herself between the two beds, her hands already beginning to glow with the soft, blue light of the Reversed Cursed Technique. The hum filled the quiet room.
"Why are you like this?" she asked Gojo, not looking at him, her focus on assessing the internal damage. "You could have stopped it at any point. Why let it go that far?"
There was no guilt on his face. Not a shred. If anything, he looked revitalized, like a man who'd just watched a particularly thrilling sports match. Shoko noted this, and a flicker of quiet anger stirred beneath her professional calm.
Gojo understood the subtext. For him, the entire brutal ballet in the forest had been pure, unadulterated edutainment. He'd witnessed growth in its rawest, most painful form.
He took a deep, happy breath, as if smelling a fine wine. "Isn't it obvious? Look at them. Broken, bleeding, half-dead. But do you know the beautiful part?"
She probably knew exactly what he was going to say. She'd heard this tune before. She waited, her hands continuing their work, the blue light tracing the contours of Obito's cracked ribs.
"They're not dead," Gojo said, his voice dropping to a tone of genuine, almost reverent appreciation. "They've been forged. They're stronger."
He pointed a finger at Obito's unconscious form. "He triggered a Black Flash. A Black Flash, Shoko. I've never even done that, you know? Too predictable, I guess." He shrugged. "His control, his integration of that technique… it jumped a whole tier. He's brushing against Grade 1 territory."
His gaze shifted to Maki, her face swollen and bloody. "And her. She didn't just vent anger. She weaponized it. Her combat adaptability, her physical toughness, her strategic parsing of an unpredictable opponent… all evolved. She was solving him in real-time."
Gojo replayed the fight in his mind's eye. Obito's fragmented, intelligent abuse of his copying ability, his strategic use of the environment, his desperate stamina management. Maki's relentless pressure, her adaptive learning, her sheer, unkillable tenacity. They had been perfect foils, each the other's worst nightmare and best possible trainer.
In the end, he could only conclude, looking at Shoko with a smile that was both childish and deeply knowing, "This fight was a necessity. An investment. Now, it's up to our wonderful school doctor to do her magic and patch up the assets, so they can go out and use these shiny new skills on some curses, right? ROI, Shoko. Return on investment."
She was silent for a long moment. The only sound was the soft hum of her cursed energy and the ragged, syncopated breathing of the two patients. She sighed, a sound of profound weariness that had nothing to do with physical fatigue.
"Is a little peace and quiet too much to ask for?" she murmured, mostly to herself. Then, focusing the blue glow more intently, she added, "But fine."
The healing light intensified, washing over the two broken bodies. It promised to mend bones, seal wounds, and soothe torn muscles. It promised no such relief for the endless, simmering grudge that lay between them, now etched even deeper into their very beings. That was a wound no Reversed Cursed Technique could ever touch.
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End of Chapter.
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Hey guys, I'm doing my best to always live up to your expectations.
I wrote this chapter to be good for you, enjoyable and wonderful, with development, movement, and action.
Obito developed greatly in this battle, and Maki wasn't just a spectator; she participated in this development and also evolved.
I didn't allow Obito to unleash the Black Flash just because you wanted it, friends, but because it was also part of the plan for him to develop and become capable. He did everything he could at that moment and didn't stop or back down.
That's also why other characters who mastered the Black Flash were able to use this technique; they were fearless and wouldn't back down. He wanted to win and did everything he could.
I hope you enjoy this chapter, which I worked hard on. I hope you will write your reviews and comments about this story. Finally, regarding the power stones, I want this novel to be good for fans of Jujutsu Kaisen.
In conclusion, I want to say that I love you all. I hope you will add your reviews to the existing ones and always be honest and unbiased. Also, please leave your kind comments so I can read them; I always do. Finally, the Power Stones to support the story