Once Maya finished her explanation, Stick finally came back to himself, though his voice still carried a note of desolation. "Maya, you really are a genius. You were right to hold your ground—chakra truly has enormous potential. Next to you, I might as well have spent these hundred-odd years living like a dog."
"Master, no need to be down about it. You just have to reframe it. I'm your disciple, after all. Give it a few years—once I surpass the Ancient One, who's even older than you, then you'll both rank below me. Which puts you, Master, on the same tier as the Sorcerer Supreme. Think of it that way. Doesn't that feel a lot better?" Maya offered her comfort without much thought for her words.
"Give you a compliment and you start puffing yourself right up. Forget surpassing the Ancient One—outlive her first, then we'll talk about the rest."
Maya's little interruption settled Stick's mood. Her words reminded him: this world was fundamentally, deeply unfair. The Seven Capital Cities of Heaven had stood for tens of thousands of years, and all that profound heritage still couldn't measure up to the Ancient One's few centuries of cultivation. Who could you even take that grievance to?
It was like Wudang and Mount Hua in the old martial-arts novels. Mount Hua traced its line to Wang Chongyang, the greatest martial artist under Heaven, who had inherited the Daoists' thousand-year treasures—pedigree as pure and orthodox as it came, the true Daoist bloodline. Wudang, by contrast, was founded barehanded by a lowly little Shaolin novice. And yet Mount Hua, which should have been the rightful Daoist heir, ended up an ordinary martial sect, while Wudang—Buddhist-born—became the holy land of Daoism across the land.
Having thought it through, Stick went on. "Your Chakra Enhanced Strength wounds the enemy at a cost to yourself—clever in conception, but shallow at the core. The Iron Fist, trained to true depth, is no weaker in power than your Chakra Enhanced Strength, and yet it doesn't harm the body at all. On the contrary, it vastly strengthens the constitution. Put it this way: your Chakra Enhanced Strength can only be used, not trained. It can't serve as a cultivation method. The Iron Fist is different. It is itself a supreme art for tempering body and self.
"Let me put it more concretely, lay the difference out for you. Face down a bullet with your Chakra Enhanced Strength and you'll still take the wound—it's only that your Medical Ninjutsu is so strong it heals you fast. But K'un-Lun's Iron Fist being impervious to blade and gun is no empty boast. Given time to prepare, even high-powered military firearms can't break its guard. And that's been proven in real combat."
(Author's note: A ninja who takes a kunai dies all the same, never mind high-powered firearms—yet even the weakest, TV-series version of the Iron Fist can tank a modern military's attacks head-on. I'm not making this up: Iron Fist, season one, there's footage to prove it.)
Maya nodded along. Chakra Enhanced Strength was an amplifier, pure and simple: it took an ordinary body and multiplied its striking force tenfold. The Iron Fist, by contrast, strengthened the constitution itself tenfold, so the power of the punch naturally rose along with it. By every measure, Chakra Enhanced Strength fell far short of the Iron Fist.
And Maya's idea was to layer Chakra Enhanced Strength over an Iron Fist–tempered body: a tenfold constitution multiplied by a tenfold force boost—one hundred times the power. The picture was almost too good to bear. She couldn't hold back another second. "Master, just hurry up and teach me the Iron Fist cultivation already!"
"The Iron Fist cultivation is this: in meditation, you commune with the natural primal energy all around you. In the state where Heaven and man become one, you envision yourself as the cosmos itself—and at that moment, you circulate the Power of Shou-Lao within you. In the churning chaos of the universe, Pangu stands at the center; one swing of his axe splits the primordial murk, and the clear and the turbid part into sky and earth. In the cosmos of your own body, the Power of Shou-Lao is that great axe—it is that light that cleaves the heavens open. You have no Power of Shou-Lao, so you can't—holy shit! What just happened?"
"Master—Maya's giving off a golden light all over, what's happening? Aren't I blind? I'm not supposed to be able to see!" Matt cried out too.
Stick had been meticulously expounding the fine points of the Iron Fist when he abruptly felt a mighty aura bloom across from him—a presence so strong it took the shape of a golden human figure in the sea of his consciousness. Hearing Matt's shout now, he understood: his disciple Maya had most likely substituted chakra for the Power of Shou-Lao.
"Reckless—utterly reckless! Maya, you—" He sighed. "Never mind. This is already past anything I can control!" Stick was about to shout for her to stop when the memory of that punch came back to him, and in the end he could only get to his feet, resigned, and stand guard over her.
Stick had guessed right: Maya really had swapped her dantian's pale-gold chakra in for the Power of Shou-Lao—and she wasn't just being reckless. First, that pale-gold chakra already carried the breath of immortal-Dao power; it had, after all, mutated out of an immortal-cultivation foundation-building art. Second, with Master Stick right there, practicing now beat groping through it alone down the line. And last—most important of all—this was only a Shadow Clone. No fear of breaking it. Worst case, the original just suffered a little extra when she took the memories back.
A little over half an hour later, the Shadow Clone burst—poof—into a cloud of golden light. As it vanished, a heap of things clattered onto the grass: a Spider-Man suit, a set of ODM gear, a kunai, a counterfeit Neural Pulse Sniper Rifle—everything the clone had been carrying. All of it solid, physical; none of it conjured out of the clone itself.
"Pfft! I forgot this was only a Shadow Clone. Heh—what a sly little girl!" Stick sat stunned for a moment before it clicked.
At that very moment, Maya bolted upright on her sleeping mat, clutched her head, and hissed in pain.
Ding! Congratulations, Host! By combining your Chakra Enhanced Strength with the K'un-Lun Iron Fist Secret Technique, you have developed a new skill. This skill possesses the power of Chakra Enhanced Strength yet will no longer inflict harm on the body; regular meditation practice will further strengthen your sinews and build your physique. If you enter Overclock, you can double its power—at the cost of bodily injury. This skill is rated by the System as Diamond 3. Please name it now, Host!
Maya stopped groaning at once. She was genuinely stunned. This was a first—the very first time the System had prompted her about a new skill on its own initiative. In the past, even when she gained a new skill, the System wouldn't say a peep unless she went and checked it herself.
Diamond 3 was the highest-ranked skill Maya currently had. But in Naruto, Chakra Enhanced Strength was rated an S-rank forbidden technique in its own right, which converted to at least Gold 5 or higher on the System's scale. Fold in the Iron Fist Secret Technique, stronger still, and merging up to Diamond rank was only to be expected.
After puzzling over it a good while and getting nowhere, Maya gave up trying to work out why the prompt had appeared. She'd just chalk it up to the System having a glitch.
The pressing matter right now was giving the skill a decent name.
Chakra Iron Fist? No—too tacky. Strong Fist? Eh—set against the Hyūga Clan's Gentle Fist, Chakra Enhanced Strength is already called Strong Fist in Naruto. The fist glows gold when it lands, so—Golden Sacred Fist? Too chuuni. And this isn't only a fist art, it's a mighty body-tempering technique too. Golden Bell Shield? Nah—the foreigners wouldn't get the reference. Think about what your dream actually is: keeping your family alive through Thanos's snap.
"In that case—the Thanos Killing Punch it is!" Maya decided at last.
And so the even goofier name was locked in by Maya, chronic sufferer of Naming-Things Disorder.
Ding! Thanos Killing Punch: Diamond 3. Three functions—damage-free standard Chakra Enhanced Strength, Overclocked Chakra Enhanced Strength, and meditative body-tempering!
Reading the rating, Maya propped up her little head and thought it over. Her abilities were still a bit on the weak side; the Superman persona was off the table for now. But a certain unmotivated bald guy—him she could consider. Normal Punch, Serious Punch—wasn't that basically her?
I've fleeced Tony so many times, and pocketed a huge buyout fee off him besides. A girl's got to have some scruples in the end. Better go easy on Spider-Man from here on. Right—that's settled: unless it's a truly earth-shaking emergency, no more Spider-Man.
Somewhere, Tony bellowed: Boss—using the Spider-Man persona for the day-to-day, I'd give anything for that! But the earth-shaking stuff, I can't tank that either! Have mercy, I'm begging you!
Brimming with what she took to be scruples, Maya thought: From now on I'll keep a red cape and a mask ready. The long-haired One-Punch Man is about to go live.