Chapter forty-fifth: the War, Part I
[2017 Tokyo, Sixth Month, Tokyo Jujutsu High]
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Time had slipped through their fingers like cursed energy dissipating into cold morning air, and the sixth month had arrived with the subtle menace of a blade sliding silently from its sheath.
Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
The jujutsu world had become a frantic organism, its many limbs scrambling, scratching, clawing at shadows that refused to yield anything but more shadows. Fingertips drummed against wooden desks. Sandals squeaked against polished floors. Scrolls rustled with violent urgency as historians and sorcerers alike tore through centuries of records, searching for any mention, any whisper, any godforsaken hint of where Suguru Geto had buried himself for the past decade.
They searched for Satoru—no, for Suguru Geto, because Satoru was still here, still wearing that infuriating smile, still pretending his oldest friend hadn't become something that needed to be put down like a rabid dog. The jujutsu world searched with desperate, sweating palms for any trace of the man who had once been the brightest among them, and they found nothing.
Nothing.
Even Obito, with his Sharingan that could pierce through dimensions and his knowledge of futures that should never exist, even he could only clench his jaw until his teeth ached and admit that Geto had become very good at hiding.
Very, very good.
And the certainty sat in Obito's chest like a swallowed stone, heavy and indigestible: the attack would come soon. Not could come. Would. The air itself tasted different now—metallic, anticipatory, the flavor of a held breath that could no longer sustain itself. Every shadow seemed to lean inward. Every creak of floorboards made sorcerers' hands twitch toward their weapons.
"Bemāta fikur?"
Yuta's voice cut through the fog of Obito's thoughts like a blade through cheap parchment.
Obito blinked. Once. Twice. The world swam back into focus—the gentle rocking of the bus, the muffled thrum-thrum-thrum of tires against asphalt, the muted light of late afternoon filtering through tinted windows. He was here. They were all here. Maki sharpening her weapon with methodical shiiick-shiiick-shiiick strokes. Panda's massive form taking up an entire row of seats, his breathing slow and deliberate. Inumaki scrolling through his phone, occasionally grunting single syllables that made Toge nod in solemn agreement.
They had just completed a mission—the third in forty-eight hours, not that anyone was counting (Obito was counting; thirty-seven cursed spirits exorcised, fourteen windows evacuated, one near-death experience that had left his left arm aching with phantom pain)—and they were hurtling back toward Tokyo Jujutsu High with the desperate momentum of moths drawn to a flame that might very well burn them all to ash.
The call had come twenty-three minutes ago. Obito remembered the exact second because he had been watching the digital clock on the bus's dashboard when the phone vibrated against his thigh, and the numbers had flickered from 4:17 to 4:18, and Yaga's voice had crackled through the speaker with that particular tightness that meant things were about to become very, very bad.
"Things are about to become very bad. Get back here. Now."
Obito's stomach had performed a slow, unpleasant roll.
He had known this was coming. Had spent six months preparing for this exact moment, running scenarios through his mind like prayer beads slipping between anxious fingers. And yet, somehow, knowing and knowing were two very different things.
The bus groaned—a long, weary creeeeeeak—as it pulled through the academy gates.
Gojo was waiting for them.
Of course he was.
He stood in the center of the courtyard with his hands shoved deep into his pockets, that ridiculous black blindfold hiding eyes that Obito knew were currently the coldest things in all of Japan. The afternoon light caught the disheveled mess of his white hair, casting it in silver-white relief, and his posture was so deliberately casual it circled back around to aggressively hostile.
"Get ready," Gojo said, and his voice didn't sound playful at all. Not even a little. The smile on his lips was a paper-thin thing, stretched taut over something sharp and bleeding. "A catastrophe is going to happen if we don't eliminate them fast enough."
Them. Not him.
Still. Always. Even now.
The team divided like water finding cracks in stone. Names were called. Assignments given. Sorcerers scattered across Japan like seeds cast into poisoned soil, each taking their designated position in the sprawling, desperate net they hoped would catch a monster.
But Obito—
Obito was different.
The moment his feet touched the ground at his assigned post—a rusted water tower overlooking a suburban district that was, according to intelligence, a potential entry point for Geto's forces—he made a decision.
Screeeeeech.
His sandals pivoted against the metal grating. The sound echoed across the empty rooftops, sharp and discordant.
He left.
He didn't run—running implied urgency, and Obito moved with the deliberate, unhurried certainty of a man who had already made peace with his choices. He simply turned his back on his post and walked, then jogged, then moved, his form flickering between shadows and fire escapes and the narrow alleyways that Tokyo excreted between its grander structures.
Tokyo Jujutsu High rose before him like a tomb.
The air here was deceptively still. No cursed spirits. No explosions. No screaming. Just the gentle whisper of wind through cherry trees that had long since shed their blossoms, and the distant coo-coo-coo of pigeons roosting in the eaves.
Peaceful.
Which meant the beginning would happen either very soon or not at all, and Obito's money was on very soon.
Yuta stood alone in the courtyard.
He was positioned at the exact center of the academy's defensive perimeter, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword, his posture so rigid with anticipation that he might as well have been carved from marble. His eyes swept the horizon in slow, methodical arcs. His jaw was set. His breathing was controlled.
He looked, Obito thought, exactly like someone who desperately wanted to be somewhere else.
And he had no idea that he was the entire reason this battle was happening at all.
Obito's footsteps—deliberately audible now, thump-thump-thump against packed earth—made Yuta spin around with the kind of speed that suggested his nerves were wound tighter than piano wire.
"Senpai?" Yuta's voice cracked slightly on the second syllable. His eyes widened, cataloging Obito's appearance with frantic efficiency. Checking for injuries. Checking for blood. Checking for that particular slackness in the face that meant someone was running on borrowed time. "Is that you? Why did you come here? Is there a problem?"
The questions tumbled out of him like marbles spilled from an overturned jar, each one bouncing and rolling and demanding immediate attention.
Obito tilted his head. The late afternoon light caught the edge of his mask, and somewhere in the distance, a crow released a long, rattling caw that sounded almost like mocking laughter.
"There won't be a problem," Obito said. His voice was flat. Calm. The voice of a man who had already calculated every possible outcome and found most of them acceptable. "War is about to begin. I decided to stay here. I thought of something horrible, and I decided I need to see if my conclusion is correct."
Yuta blinked. Once. Twice.
The wind shifted. The cherry trees shivered. Somewhere in the distance, the pigeons had abruptly stopped cooing.
---
In another region of Japan—precise location irrelevant, because cursed spirits did not respect prefectural borders—the skies began to weep monsters.
It started subtly. A darkness at the edges, like a developing bruise. Then the air thickened, grew viscous, grew wrong, and the first of the cursed spirits plummeted from the fissure in reality like rain from an overturned bucket.
Then the second.
Then the twentieth.
Then the two-hundredth.
Sorcerers stationed across the country looked up from their positions—from rooftops and highway overpasses and the crumbling balconies of abandoned apartment complexes—and watched the sky tear itself open with the kind of existential dread that settled in the bowels and refused to leave.
"What the fuck," one sorcerer breathed, his voice barely audible over the rising cacophony of shrieks and wails and the wet, horrible sounds of cursed spirits pulling themselves into existence, "is that scale?"
It was, objectively, a fair question.
The sky was no longer sky. It was a wound. A weeping, suppurating laceration through which an army of nightmares was descending upon Japan with singular, unified purpose.
"That man," the same sorcerer continued, his knuckles white around the hilt of his blade, "is absolutely insane."
Another sorcerer—older, wearier, with scars that mapped decades of this exact bullshit—drew his weapon with a long, metallic shiiiiing that cut through the chaos like a razor.
"This battle is going to be extremely difficult," he said, and his voice carried across the assembled sorcerers with the grim weight of prophecy. "All of you need to be ready."
Shink. Shink. SHINK.
Weapons cleared sheaths across Japan. Cursed energy flared. Hearts accelerated.
And in a different district entirely, separated by miles of Tokyo sprawl and approximately fourteen years of friendship turned to ash, Gojo Satoru watched the same sky-tearing spectacle unfold and smiled.
His blindfold hid his eyes. It always did. But anyone who knew him—truly knew him, not the persona he wore like armor—would have recognized the way his shoulders stiffened almost imperceptibly, the way his fingers curled into his palms with slow, deliberate pressure.
"Geto," he said, and his voice was light, almost conversational, the voice of a man discussing the weather or the regrettable quality of convenience store coffee, "it seems you've made your final decision."
A pause. The wind screamed. Cursed spirits continued their endless descent.
"So don't blame me."
---
Back at Tokyo Jujutsu High, the army that Suguru Geto had spent ten years assembling—ten years of swallowing curses, ten years of hatred distilled into something vast and terrible and hungry—began its advance toward the academy gates.
Obito felt them before he saw them.
It was like pressure change before a storm, that subtle shift in the atmosphere that made hair stand on end and skin prickle with primal, irrational fear. The cursed energy rolling toward them was so dense, so concentrated, that it created its own weather system—the temperature dropped several degrees, shadows deepened, and the light filtering through the clouds took on a sickly, jaundiced hue.
Obito's gaze tracked eastward, toward the source of the encroaching malice. His Sharingan—not yet activated, just his normal eyes—registered movement at the tree line.
Something was coming.
Something big.
"Get ready," Obito said, and his voice was so low it was almost subsonic, a vibration in the chest rather than sound. "It seems things are about to begin."
Yuta's head snapped toward him. His mouth opened, closed, opened again. How do you know? How could you possibly know? What aren't you telling me? The questions hung in the air between them, unspoken but deafening.
Then Yuta's jaw tightened. His hand found his sword hilt. His breathing steadied.
Shiiiiing.
The blade cleared its sheath with a note like a struck bell.
"Certainly," Yuta said, and his voice was steadier now, anchored by purpose, "this is—this is truly the beginning of the battle."
He swallowed his questions. Packed them away in the same compartment where he kept his fear and his uncertainty and his desperate, aching hope that he was strong enough for whatever came next.
The barrier around the academy hummed—a low, resonant thrummmmmm that vibrated through teeth and bone—and then, with a sound like shattering crystal, it broke.
CRASH. TINKLE-TINKLE-TINKLE-TINKLE.
Shards of protective energy rained down like confetti at a funeral.
And riding atop the largest of the descending cursed spirits—a grotesque, centipede-like thing with too many segments and not enough eyes—Suguru Geto looked down at the two young men standing in the ruined courtyard and laughed.
It wasn't a warm sound. It wasn't even particularly cruel. It was simply cold, the laugh of a man who had stopped finding irony amusing and had moved on to finding it inevitable.
"As expected," Geto said, and his voice carried across the distance between them with unnatural clarity, "Gojo always falls for the trap, and no one else can escape it. This is the nature of the strongest. He can't do anything except be stupid."
Yuta's grip tightened on his sword. His knuckles went white. His teeth ground together with an audible creak.
Obito, by contrast, remained perfectly still.
The cursed spirits encircled them. Dozens. Hundreds. They filled the courtyard, crawled across the rooftops, dripped from the eaves like black tar. Their eyes—those who had eyes—reflected the dying light in too many directions.
Geto settled into a more comfortable position atop his centipede-throne, crossing one leg over the other with the casual ease of a man reclining in his own living room. His gaze found Yuta. Lingered. Appreciated.
"You are special grade because of that curse I want," Geto said, and his tone was almost conversational, almost pleasant, the tone of a collector discussing a particularly coveted acquisition. "So I will take her. But before that—"
He smiled. It didn't reach his eyes.
"—I will make you understand the difference between my special grade and your special grade."
He didn't gesture. Didn't command. The cursed spirits simply moved, a tide of teeth and claws surging toward Yuta with singular, coordinated purpose.
But before the first spirit could reach its target—
SNICKT.
Its head separated from its body. The two halves tumbled in opposite directions, already dissolving into black mist before they hit the ground.
Obito's Sharingan blazed crimson in his sockets. Three tomoe spun in lazy, predatory circles. He hadn't even seemed to move—one moment he was standing beside Yuta, the next he was positioned between the boy and the oncoming horde, his sword angled downward, a single drop of cursed spirit blood sliding along its edge with a wet drip.
A second-grade curse. Ten meters tall. Eliminated in less than a fraction of a second.
"Stop talking nonsense," Obito said, and his voice was very, very quiet. "You're just a madman who wants to do something even madder. And in the end, the only thing you're going to get is me killing you and throwing your body into oblivion so that no one can ever use it again."
Geto's eyebrows rose. Not with alarm—with amusement.
No one will use my body? What nonsense is this child speaking?
He examined Obito with fresh eyes. The Sharingan, certainly, was unusual—a cursed technique he'd never encountered, never even heard referenced in any of the jujutsu world's extensive archives. But unusual didn't mean threatening. Unusual didn't mean dangerous.
Geto had swallowed thousands of curses. He had spent ten years refining his hatred into something surgical, precise, effective. He had faced Gojo Satoru—the actual Gojo Satoru, Six Eyes and all—and walked away breathing.
A boy with fancy eyes didn't frighten him.
"If you're only brave because you broke one of my toys," Geto said, and his tone was the particular brand of condescending that suggested he was speaking to a very slow child, "then I think you need to reconsider."
He clapped his hands together once.
CLAP.
The sound echoed across the courtyard like a starting pistol.
And the cursed spirits—the dozens, the hundreds, the thousands of cursed spirits that had been circling overhead like vultures awaiting a death—descended.
Yuta moved immediately, his blade tracing silver arcs through the air as he engaged the nearest wave. His voice was tight, controlled, the voice of a man who was very carefully not panicking.
"Their numbers are too great, Senpai!"
SHING. THWACK. CRUNCH.
But Obito wasn't looking at the cursed spirits.
He was looking at Geto.
He was always looking at Geto.
"Yuta," Obito said, and his voice carried across the chaos with unnatural calm, "I want you to handle these curses. I'll fight Suguru Geto."
Yuta's blade paused mid-swing. His head turned. His eyes—wide, disbelieving—locked onto Obito's crimson gaze.
"What—"
Even Geto seemed surprised. His carefully cultivated expression of bored amusement flickered, cracked, revealed something almost approaching genuine curiosity beneath.
Then Geto laughed again, and this time there was an edge to it, a serrated quality that hadn't been there before.
This child is insane.
Excellent.
And the truth was, yes. Yes, Obito was insane. He was fully, completely, exquisitely aware that he could not defeat Suguru Geto in a straight fight. He had no large-scale offensive techniques. No Hollow Purple. No Love Beam. No Uzumaki. If Geto decided to unleash his maximum technique, Obito would be reduced to a fine red mist scattered across Tokyo's carefully manicured jujutsu campus.
But Obito didn't need to defeat Geto.
He just needed to stop him.
And for that, he had plans. Six months of plans. Contingencies upon contingencies upon contingencies, stacked like playing cards in a house that would either stand against the wind or collapse beautifully.
Now it was time to play.
---
Yuta launched himself at the nearest cursed spirit with a sound that was half-war cry, half-relieved exhale. "Alright! I'll leave it to you! I'll handle the curses and join you when I'm done!"
SHINK. CRACK. THUD.
A head rolled. Another spirit dissolved. Yuta's blade continued its deadly, beautiful dance.
And on the opposite side of the courtyard, Obito moved.
FWOOOOSH.
The air itself seemed to compress around him as he crossed the distance between himself and Geto in less than a heartbeat. His sword—Kuryuoki, the blade he had spent six months learning, six months bonding with, six months infusing with his own cursed energy until it sang in his grip—arced toward Geto's throat with murderous precision.
Geto's eyes widened.
Fast. Too fast. Is this speed illusory, or is it the eyes?
He blocked. Barely. His forearm caught Obito's blade at an awkward angle, and the impact sent a shockwave up through his elbow, his shoulder, his spine. He retaliated with a punch aimed directly at Obito's skull—
And missed.
Obito's body twisted. Bent. Flowed around the strike like water around stone. His blade reversed direction, and suddenly he was attached to Geto's summoned platform-curse, his feet somehow adhering to its carapace with impossible traction, his center of gravity so perfectly aligned that he might as well have been welded in place.
What—
How—
Geto's gaze locked onto Obito's eyes. Those crimson, spinning, seeing eyes.
An ocular technique. It has to be. It allows him to perceive and react to my speed.
A logical conclusion. Also, completely wrong.
But Geto didn't know that. Geto couldn't know that. Because what Obito's Sharingan actually did—what it had always done, from the moment it first awakened in another world, another life, another body—was not simply see.
It predicted.
Every twitch of muscle. Every shift of weight. Every subtle, unconscious tell that preceded an attack. Obito didn't react to Geto's strikes; he reacted to the intention behind them, the split-second before they became manifest.
And while Geto was underestimating him, while Geto was dismissing him as a first-grade at best, while Geto was calculating and analyzing and coming to all the wrong conclusions—
Obito struck.
CRACK.
His blade, reinforced with cursed energy until it glowed with malevolent light, sliced cleanly through the head of Geto's platform-curse.
The centipede-thing screamed—a horrible, keening SKREEEEE—and dissolved into nothing.
Geto and Obito plummeted toward the earth.
Wind screamed past Obito's ears. The ground rushed up to meet them. In the space between one heartbeat and the next, Geto summoned another curse beneath himself, redirecting his momentum, landing with the precise, controlled grace of a man who had done this a thousand times before.
THUMP.
His feet touched down. He straightened his robes. Smiled.
Obito, by contrast, hit the ground hard—CRACK, the impact jarring up through his ankles, his knees, his spine—and immediately snapped into a combat stance, his blade angled forward, his Sharingan spinning.
"You're supposed to be special grade," Obito said, and his voice was pure, undiluted mockery, each word dipped in contempt and sharpened on a whetstone of genuine hatred. "And yet you couldn't kill me on the first exchange. Is this your full power? Or are you just empty talk wrapped around things bigger than yourself?"
The insult hung in the air between them, glinting like a thrown blade.
Geto's smile didn't waver.
But his eyes—his eyes were very, very flat.
"Why do you fight me, young one?" he asked, and his voice was soft now, almost gentle, the voice of a man who genuinely wanted to understand. "Don't you know that I'm trying to save all sorcerers? By eliminating ordinary humans, we can create a world without—"
He gestured vaguely at the cursed spirits surrounding them, the churning mass of negative emotions made flesh.
"—these things."
His lip curled. Just slightly. Just enough to reveal the disgust beneath the composure.
"Do you think the world will remain as it is if ordinary humans are eliminated?" Geto continued. "The lives of everyone else will be much better. So why don't you join me, young one?"
In the distance, explosions punctuated his words—BOOM. CRASH. RUMBLE—as Yuta's battle against the cursed spirit army intensified. The sound of shattering concrete. The shriek of dying monsters. The rhythmic SHINK-SHINK-SHINK of a blade that refused to stop moving.
Obito listened to the sounds of war and felt nothing but cold, clean certainty.
"You're not a hero," he said. "You're just a madman who's going to destroy everything people care about."
He moved.
FWIP. FWIP. FWIP.
Three strikes. Four. Five. Each one aimed at a vital point, each one dodged by millimeters, each one met by Geto's infuriatingly calm evasion.
"And how am I the one in the wrong?" Geto asked, deflecting Obito's blade with a summoned curse's carapace. "Do these creatures exist for any reason other than that the monkeys release cursed energy without stopping? If we eliminate them, we save everyone."
Everyone.
The word echoed in Obito's skull, bounced off the walls of his memory, returned to him distorted and monstrous.
Everyone, to Geto, meant only sorcerers.
Not the ordinary humans who had families and dreams and lives that mattered. Not the non-sorcerers who would inevitably be born into jujutsu clans alongside their gifted siblings. Not the millions upon millions of people who had never seen a cursed spirit and never wanted to.
Just sorcerers.
Just them.
"You're defending the ordinary humans, aren't you?" Geto asked, and there was something almost wondering in his voice, as if the concept was so alien he had to examine it from multiple angles to understand.
Obito laughed.
It wasn't a pleasant sound. It was the laugh of a man who had spent years being called a hero and knew, with absolute certainty, that he didn't deserve the title.
"I'm not defending ordinary humans," he said. "I'm not brave. I'm not a hero."
FWIP. CRACK. SHING.
His blade traced an arc of silver through the air. Geto's sleeve separated from his robe, fluttered to the ground like a wounded bird.
"I just know that letting this society fall means letting myself fall too."
His Sharingan burned.
"Do you think the world is only heroes and villains? The world is full of contradictions, you madman."
CRASH.
Their blades—Obito's sword, Geto's summoned claw—collided with enough force to crater the ground beneath their feet. Dust billowed upward. Cursed energy sparked and crackled.
And then Geto stepped back.
"It seems our fight is about to end, boy," he said, and his voice had returned to that terrible, calm pleasantness. "I need to capture the person I came here for. There's no time to play philosophy games with you."
Obito's Sharingan caught the movement before his conscious mind processed it.
The cursed spirits—deformed, twisted, wrong—surged toward Yuta.
FWOOOSH.
Geto himself was among them, his hand outstretched, his target finally in reach.
Yuta's blade was mid-swing, committed to a strike against an approaching third-grade spirit. His stance was open. His guard was down. He didn't see Geto until it was almost too late—
Almost.
Obito's Sharingan blazed. The tomoe spun faster, faster, faster, and the world slowed to a crawl around him. He saw Geto's trajectory. Yuta's vulnerable position. The exact angle and velocity required to intercept.
He moved.
SCREEEECH.
His feet adhered to the school building's wall, Kuryuoki's cursed energy granting him impossible traction against vertical surface. He pushed off with explosive force—FWOOOOSH—and launched himself upward, his blade already extended, already tracing the arcs that would claim three cursed spirits in the same breath.
SHINK. SHINK. SHINK.
Three heads. Three dissolving bodies. Three less threats for Yuta to worry about.
Obito's feet touched down on the shattered concrete. His knees bent. His breath escaped in a controlled exhale. And then, before his heels had even fully settled—
BOOM.
An explosion rocked the courtyard.
No. Not an explosion. A release.
From the opposite side of the battlefield, from the position where Yuta had been fighting alone against impossible odds, a beam of pure, concentrated cursed energy erupted toward Geto with the force of a divine judgment.
ROOOOOOOAR.
Geto's eyes widened. His hands moved—fast, so fast, the reflexes of a special grade sorcerer who had survived a decade of hunting curses—and a summoned spirit interposed itself between him and the oncoming attack.
It wasn't enough.
CRACK.
The spirit shattered. Geto's body—caught in the peripheral edge of the blast—flew. He tumbled across the courtyard like a discarded doll, his robes shredding, his skin abrading against broken concrete, his arm leaving a wet smear of crimson against the ground where the Love Beam had clipped him.
SKID. SKID. SKID. THUD.
He came to rest against the base of a cherry tree. His breathing was ragged. His arm—his left arm—was a ruin of torn flesh and shattered bone.
And he was laughing.
"Hah. Hahahaha. Hahahahahaha."
He pushed himself upright with his remaining functional limb. His hair—usually so carefully arranged—hung in disheveled strands across his face. Blood dripped steadily from his fingertips.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
"This is definitely not a game," he said, and his voice was warm now, genuinely warm, the warmth of a man who had just remembered why he loved fighting in the first place. "As expected of the Queen of Curses. You're so hard to please."
He tilted his head. Smiled. That terrible, fond, hungry smile.
"Why don't you come to me? I'll please you as much as you want."
"YUTA!"
Rika's scream was deafening, a psychic shriek that rattled windows and sent lesser curses recoiling in instinctive terror. Her form materialized behind Yuta, more solid than it had been in months, her eyes burning with possessive, protective fury.
Yuta's hand found hers. Squeezed.
"Don't even dream about it," he said, and his voice was remarkably steady for someone who had just fired a city-block-destroying laser from his dead girlfriend's soul. "We have our own relationship. We don't want you interfering in it. Ever."
Geto made a sound—a small, wounded hmph—that might have been genuine emotional pain or might have been theatrical performance. It was impossible to tell.
"In that case," he said, and his smile sharpened, "when I take control of her, I'll see exactly how strong your relationship is."
---
Obito watched from across the courtyard.
His Sharingan recorded everything—the angle of Geto's ruined arm, the position of Yuta and Rika, the diminishing numbers of cursed spirits still shrieking through the air. His mind, that endless machine of calculation and contingency, processed data at inhuman speed.
His plan was working.
Geto was injured. Distracted. Focused entirely on Yuta and Rika, the prize he had spent a decade pursuing. He had forgotten about the boy with the strange eyes.
He had forgotten about Obito.
And Obito—Obito was very, very good at exploiting what people forgot.
His fingers tightened around Kuryuoki's hilt. His Sharingan tracked Geto's movements, his breathing, the subtle shifts in his posture that preceded every attack and evasion.
If I kill him here. If I destroy his body completely. If I ensure that nothing remains for Kenjaku to claim.
No Shibuya. No Culling Games. No merger.
No future where millions die screaming.
His jaw clenched. His teeth ground together with a sound like crushing stone.
And after that?
After that, I live. Maybe to eighty, maybe to ninety. Maybe I find a way to go home, or maybe I stay here and pretend this was always my life. Maybe I'm happy. Maybe I'm not. Maybe I spend every night wondering if I did the right thing, killing a man who was once Gojo Satoru's best friend, killing him not for justice or revenge but simply because his corpse was too dangerous to leave unburned.
But I'll be alive.
And the next generation?
They can deal with Kenjaku's madness themselves. I'll be in the ground by then. It won't be my problem anymore.
Isn't that better? Isn't that easier?
The wind shifted. Somewhere above, a crow released another mocking caw.
Obito moved.
Not toward Geto. Not yet. He retreated into the shadow of the school building, pressing his back against cool concrete, making himself small and invisible and patient.
He would wait.
He would watch.
And when the perfect moment arrived—
He would end this.
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END OF CHAPTER.
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