The Kamo and Zen'in clan elders had departed, leaving behind a chilling residue of their power play and political calculations. The air in the Jujutsu High training hall, once vibrant with the rhythmic clang of weapons and the crackling, energetic hum of cursed energy in its various forms, now hung heavy and oppressive with unspoken tension that seemed to press down on everything and everyone within it. Maki stood rigidly in place, her back deliberately turned to Arata, her polearm still abandoned on the floor where it had clattered, her entire body a taut instrument radiating barely contained fury and humiliation. Arata, meanwhile, stood frozen in place, his mind struggling to process what had just transpired, still numb with shock, his gaze fixed downward on his own hands as though they belonged to a stranger. The weight of the betrothal announcement pressed down on him like a physical force, suffocating and absolute, crushing any illusions he had maintained about his autonomy or control over his own future.
Gojo, after his terse and unmistakable warning to the assembled elders, had vanished from the hall as mysteriously as he had arrived, leaving Kusakabe and Nanami to navigate the volatile and dangerous aftermath of the meeting. They stood watchful, observing the two stunned teenagers with expressions of carefully maintained composure, their silence carrying a weight of its own—a silent acknowledgment of the impossible situation they had all been thrust into, a situation that transcended normal concerns and entered the realm of political inevitability.
"Training continues tomorrow, as usual," Kusakabe stated, his voice deliberately flat and emotionless, deliberately breaking the suffocating silence that had settled over the hall like a shroud. His eyes flickered between Arata and Maki in turn, a silent but unmistakable directive for them to regain their composure, to master themselves, to continue functioning despite the earthquake that had just occurred. "Politics don't stop the curses. Nor should they stop your growth as sorcerers. The world doesn't care about your personal circumstances."
The next few days blurred together into an exhausting sequence of enforced normalcy and suffocating awkwardness that tested the limits of Arata's endurance. Clan emissaries began to arrive in steady succession, their faces grim and formal, their purposes multifaceted. They came not just to conduct official business and solidify the arrangements, but to actively 'guide' both Arata and Maki through this transition, to shape them into something more suitable for public consumption. The two of them were forced into joint appearances with increasingly higher-ranking clan members, forced into polite though strained conversations, forced into discussions about 'future planning' for the respective clans, and how this union would strengthen them both. Arata found himself biting back sarcastic remarks with difficulty, his aristocratic upbringing and the ingrained courtesy of his position barely containing his rebellious fury and his burning desire to lash out. He could feel Maki's simmering rage radiating beside him like a bonfire, a palpable, almost tangible heat that perfectly mirrored his own emotional state, that spoke to shared outrage and shared violation.
One afternoon, a wizened Kamo elder named Hiroto—a man whose papery skin seemed barely stretched across his skull, whose eyes held the cold calculation of generations—attempted to engineer what he called a 'bonding exercise': a carefully orchestrated walk through the Kamo estate's meticulously manicured gardens, each stone placed with precision, each plant trimmed to perfection, a reflection of the clan's obsessive control. "You are to be the pillars of our future, Arata, Maki," Hiroto droned, his voice like autumn leaves rustling, thin and insubstantial yet somehow suffocating. "Your destinies are now irrevocably intertwined by this union. You must learn to walk together, in harmony and understanding, for the sake of both our families."
Harmony was the furthest thing from both their minds. Arata walked stiffly, deliberately formal, his hands clasped tightly behind his back, his entire posture screaming tension. His mind raced constantly with strategies, with ways to escape this nightmare, with fantasies of simply walking away from everything and everyone. Maki strode beside him with deliberate heaviness, each step a statement, her silence more scathing and cutting than any words could be. Every rustle of leaves in the carefully tended garden, every distant bird call from the surrounding trees, seemed to mock the forced quiet between them, seemed to underscore the artificiality of this arrangement. Arata found himself glancing at her from the corner of his eye, catching fleeting glimpses of raw humiliation and barely concealed anguish in her expression before she quickly averted her gaze, lest she be seen showing weakness. He felt a strange, uncomfortable pang twist through his chest—something he couldn't quite name or categorize.
He resented her, yes, resented her for being inextricably bound to this unwanted union, resented her for existing in the circumstances that had led to this disaster. But beneath that resentment, he was beginning to see her pain, beginning to understand the depth of her suffering. She was as trapped as he was, perhaps even more so, given her complicated and painful history with the Zen'in clan, the way they had cast her out only to drag her back when she suited their purposes. The very air around them felt thick and suffocating with unspoken accusation: This is your fault. Your blood. Your power. Your cursed technique is why we're suffering. Neither of them had chosen this, and yet both of them were imprisoned by it.
Their training sessions with Kusakabe, however, became an unexpected and almost miraculous outlet for their mutual frustration and accumulated rage. Kusakabe, perhaps sensing the inner turmoil that threatened to consume both of them, deliberately pushed them harder than ever before, driving them to new limits, forcing them into intense weapon spars that bordered dangerously on actual combat scenarios. The tension and resentment from their forced engagement manifested directly in their training as a desperate, sharpened edge in their attacks, a furious and almost brutal precision in their defensive blocks and evasive maneuvers. It was a pressure cooker, and Arata was acutely aware that it was only a matter of time, days perhaps, before everything exploded into open violence.
The explosion came during a routine sparring session, just two days after the betrothal announcement that had upended both their worlds. Kusakabe had deliberately pitted Arata against Maki in a standard one-on-one match, a decision that clearly had been made with full knowledge of the tension between them. They began, at least superficially, with the formality and discipline of trained sorcerers. Arata's Minazuki hummed with controlled power in his hand, while Maki's polearm traced rhythmic arcs through the air as she moved through warm-up forms. But the undercurrent between them was a live wire, buzzing with barely suppressed hostility and resentment.
Arata launched a Piercing Blood shot—a technique he had refined through countless hours of practice, precise and fast, designed to test her reflexes. Maki, having trained alongside him and studied his patterns, anticipated the shot with ease and deflected it with a sharp, economical twist of her polearm. But instead of following up with a standard combination attack, she suddenly charged forward with raw aggression, a snarl twisting her lips into a grimace. "Too slow, Kamo! Always holding back! You think your fancy blood manipulation makes you invincible?! You think having the perfect technique excuses you from actual combat?!"
Her polearm came down with deliberately unnecessary force, aimed at his shoulder, forcing Arata to bring Minazuki up in a hurried, reactive block. The impact jarred through his entire skeleton, making his teeth clench together painfully. "I calculate my moves strategically, Zen'in!" he retorted, his own anger flaring to life in response to her provocation. "Unlike your reckless abandon and your thoughtless charging forward! There's a difference between courage and stupidity!"
"Reckless?! I'm fighting to survive, not to look pretty for the assembled elders and impress the higher-ups!" Maki spun, using her momentum to whip her polearm around in a wide arc, forcing Arata to execute a desperate Flowing Red Scale technique to evade the strike entirely. He felt his blood drain dangerously with the exertion, felt the familiar lightheaded sensation that came with overuse. "You think you know about fighting, with your endless supply of cursed energy and your daddy's money buying you Special Grade titles?! I earned mine through blood and actual survival!"
The words struck at something raw and vulnerable, something Arata had been struggling with internally ever since his power had manifested. "My cursed energy is not endless! And my title was absolutely earned! I bleed for it—literally!" Arata snapped, his carefully maintained composure shattering entirely, his voice cracking with emotion. He lunged forward, abandoning strategy and calculated precision entirely, moving instead with pure fury and rage. He unleashed a barrage of hardened blood blades, firing them rapidly from his free hand as he closed the distance between them with Minazuki held high and ready. It was less a refined technique and more a desperate, furious spray born from emotional desperation rather than tactical intelligence.
Maki met the attack with matching savagery and intensity. She shattered the blood blades one after another with sweeping strikes of her polearm, her eyes blazing with their own intense fire. "Bleed for it, Kamo? You've had everything handed to you on a silver platter! Wealth, power, potential, respect! You have no idea, not even a fraction of a clue, what it means to truly fight for your place in this world! To be discarded by your own family like garbage!" Her final strike came with a roar torn from deep within her chest, a furious overhead smash with her polearm aimed directly at his head, carrying all her accumulated pain and rage.
Arata blocked it with Minazuki, his blade held steady, but the force was immense and nearly overwhelming. He poured cursed energy desperately into the blade, solidifying a defensive layer of blood over its surface, but the impact still sent him skidding backward, his feet tearing furrows in the earth as he struggled to maintain his footing. His chest heaved with exertion, and he felt a sickening emptiness spreading through his veins, a hollow sensation that spoke of dangerous blood loss. He had overused his blood reserves, had burned through them, fueled entirely by pure rage and desperation.
"Enough!" Kusakabe's voice, sharp and commanding and utterly unmistakable, cut through the red haze of fury that had consumed both of them. He materialized between them with practiced efficiency, his own katana drawn just far enough to flash its steel in the light, a clear warning to both of them. "This is training, not a duel to the death! Get a hold of yourselves! Now!"
Maki, breathing heavily, her entire body still vibrating with adrenaline and residual anger, glared at Arata with raw intensity, but gradually lowered her weapon to a neutral position. Arata stood panting and trembling, his body screaming with exhaustion and the strain of blood loss, his initial fury giving way to crushing exhaustion and a profound sense of self-loathing. He had let his anger consume him entirely, had almost wasted precious blood reserves on a pointless clash with another student, an had allowed his emotions to dictate his actions rather than reason and calculation.
Kusakabe sighed heavily, the weight of the moment visible in his shoulders as he sheathed his blade. "You two are both powerful, yes. That much is obvious. But you're both fools, operating from a place of emotional reaction rather than clear thinking. You fight each other because it's easier than fighting the real enemy—the systems that have trapped you both. Your mutual resentment for this forced union is making you blind to larger truths." He looked directly at Maki, his gaze unwavering. "Zen'in, your rage is a bonfire, undeniable and powerful. It can burn down curses, can drive you to feats of strength, and will that others cannot match. But it can also consume you from the inside, can destroy you as easily as it destroys your enemies. You must learn to control it. Direct it with purpose. Don't let others, don't let circumstance, don't let the clans dictate where your fire goes or how it's used." Then his attention shifted to Arata, his voice taking on a note of particular intensity. "Kamo, your precision is a scalpel—sharp, accurate, capable of incredible delicacy and deadly force. But if your emotions dull the blade, if you allow resentment and frustration to cloud your judgment, then it becomes useless. Worse than useless. You have the power to create and destroy with your blood, but you lack the fundamental understanding of how to apply it beyond your own emotional state, beyond your own immediate reactions. That's a weakness that will get you killed."
He left them standing there, both exhausted, both humiliated, both forced to confront uncomfortable truths about themselves.
The silence that followed was thick and heavy, but different from the hostile tension that had preceded it. The air remained charged with lingering energy, but the raw, uncontrolled anger had dissipated, replaced by something more complicated—a weary understanding that transcended their individual resentments. Maki looked at Arata, her eyes still holding a flicker of defiant fire, but also revealing a new, unsettling vulnerability that she clearly hadn't wanted to expose. She looked away quickly, as though remembering to armor herself.
"This whole thing," Maki muttered, her voice rough and hoarse from exertion and emotion, still not looking directly at him. "It's disgusting. Absolutely disgusting." She wasn't looking at him, but rather down at her own hands, her fists still clenched from the intensity of their fight. "To be used like this... to be dragged back into the Zen'in machinery after they threw me away... I won't let them break me. I refuse."
Arata looked at her, truly seeing her, for perhaps the first time without the distorting filter of his own resentment and self-centered concerns. He saw her pain, acute and present. He saw her defiance, burning bright. He saw her utter refusal to yield, to submit, to accept the role they had assigned her. He understood it intimately because he felt it too, resonating in his own chest. "They won't," he said, his voice quiet and hoarse, the words coming from somewhere deep within him. "Not if we don't let them. Not if we refuse to be broken by their schemes."
Their eyes met. There was no warmth between them, no sudden affection born from shared trauma. But there was a flicker—barely perceptible but undeniable—of shared defiance, a mutual recognition of their predicament and their shared agency within it. They were bound, yes, bound by forces far beyond their individual control. But perhaps, in that binding, they could find a different kind of strength, one forged not from romantic love or genuine affection, but from a mutual, desperate, almost primal refusal to be broken by those who would use them. The theme of Redemption Through Connection, though still nascent and fragile, had taken a brutal, painful, but significant step forward. They had become, whether willingly or not, forced allies against a common, unseen enemy—the systems that sought to consume them both.
Meanwhile, removed from the immediate drama but connected by threads of fate and circumstance, Yuta Okkotsu continued his own arduous and painful journey of self-discovery and mastery. Under Maki's harsh but undeniably effective tutelage—her no-nonsense approach to training having only intensified since the betrothal announcement—and Gojo's distant yet profoundly crucial guidance, Yuta was slowly, incrementally gaining genuine control over Rika and her overwhelming power. Arata observed Yuta from a deliberate distance, watching him practice simple sword forms, movements that were initially clumsy and awkward but that were growing steadily more assured and confident with each passing day. He witnessed Yuta making conscious, deliberate efforts to suppress Rika's violent outbursts through sheer force of will, his brow furrowed in deep concentration as he struggled against the cursed spirit's desire for destruction and chaos. The immense, ssorrowful cursed energy that surrounded Yuta like an aura—a manifestation of Rika's accumulated resentment and pain—while still palpable and undeniable, felt somehow less chaotic than before, more contained and directed, as though Yuta was slowly learning to channel it rather than merely endure it.
One afternoon, Arata witnessed a pivotal moment: Yuty completed a difficult and intricate evasion drill, managing to avoid every single one of Maki's strikes without Rika manifesting fully, without losing control. The usually stoic and professional Maki allowed a faint, proud smile to cross her face, only to quickly hide it beneath her characteristic scowl as though embarrassed by the display of emotion. On Yuta's face, Arata saw raw relief and the first glimmers of genuine confidence. It was a small victory in the grand scheme of things, but it was significant—proof that even overwhelming power could be mastered, that even seemingly impossible situations could be gradually conquered through discipline and effort.
Arata felt a strange resonance with Yuta's struggle, a connection born from shared experience. Yuta, with his wild, overwhelming cursed power, was learning painstakingly to control it, to integrate it into his sense of self rather than remaining a helpless victim to it. It fueled Arata's own desperate quest to fully master Crimson Erosion, to bend its monstrous power entirely to his will and his vision, rather than allowing it to dominate him. Both were striving constantly for mastery, but in their own distinct ways, both were pushing deliberately against the limitations of their power and the expectations that others had placed upon them. Both were fighting an internal battle that mirrored the external struggles of their world.
However, all of this personal drama and emotional turmoil played out against an increasingly grim and ominous backdrop that was impossible to ignore. Reports of cursed spirit activity grew more dire with each passing day, more frequent and more powerful. Missions outside the school became increasingly more frequent and dramatically more dangerous, pushing even experienced sorcerers to their limits. Whispers began to circulate among the teaching staff and the higher-ranking students, whispers of a unifying, malevolent force, a darkness that seemed to be coalescing and gathering strength. Those who spoke of it bore the weight of that knowledge on their faces, their expressions etched with deep concern and something that looked disturbingly like fear.
Gojo Satoru's absences became longer and more frequent, his periods away from school stretching across days. His conversations with the higher-ups became more terse and guarded, his words measured and careful. His usually casual and carefree posture often betrayed a deep, underlying worry that he could not quite mask, no matter how hard he tried. It was clear, even to students who were not particularly perceptive, that the world was spiraling inexorably towards a crisis, that something fundamental was shifting in the balance of power between the human sorcerers and the cursed spirits they fought against.
The clan politics, the arranged marriage between Arata and Maki—they now felt like petty squabbles and trivial concerns in the face of the encroaching darkness. The shadows were lengthening, growing darker and more substantial with each passing day, and soon, they would engulf everything and everyone in their path. The distant storm was no longer distant. It was nearly upon them, and nothing would ever be quite the same again.