As the chakra inside her body drained steadily, the swirling mass of light and shadow beside her continued to warp and distort. Beads of sweat had begun to form on the President's forehead.
Just as Maya was on the verge of giving up, something took over. Her hands moved on their own, weaving nine seals in rapid succession.
The moment the final seal was completed, the chakra inside her body found its outlet—and half of it vanished in an instant.
A presence with a wavelength identical to Maya's own rippled in from her left. Then came a thud—Another President had arrived!!
The new Maya, however, was a little... underdressed.
To put it precisely: she was completely naked.
The original Maya reached over and curiously poked and prodded her clone, turning her this way and that. After a long moment, both of them turned bright red at the same time.
It wasn't that they were sharing sensations—not exactly. As Maya began channeling her consciousness into the clone bit by bit, it became less like examining someone else and more like touching herself.
Strange, and oddly fascinating.
Unlike the clones in the Naruto world, where you only received memories after dispersing them, Maya's clone and her original self were linked like two devices on the same network—data transferring in real time.
Of course, that might just be because they were so close to each other.
Maya replayed the sequence of events in her head. She'd acted like something had possessed her—hands moving without thought, weaving nine seals in a row. And not a single one of them was drawn from the standard Twelve Basic Hand Seals of the Naruto world.
Without warning, the President found herself contemplating a very philosophical question.
Which came first—the chicken or the egg?
Or in this case: which came first—the jutsu, or the sequence of seals?
She'd actually worked this out a long time ago. In her mind, developing a jutsu should go something like this:
Step one: Form a concept. I want to fly. I want to breathe fire. Rocks hurt when they hit people—I want to summon a rock and hurl it at someone.
Step two: Research the underlying principle. To fly, I could reduce my own weight, like the Third Tsuchikage's Light-Weight Rock Technique. Or I could take flight like a bird, the way Konan did in her angel form.
Step three: Build the jutsu from that principle, including the precise routing of chakra flow and the fine-tuned application of mental energy.
Step four: Develop a seal sequence to support and stabilize that chakra flow and control.
The Hansen Shadow Clone Technique had cleared the first three steps—barely, and with tremendous difficulty. Then, at the critical moment, something clicked. Her hands wove the seals instinctively, and gave the jutsu the final push it needed to succeed.
Her analysis hadn't been wrong, as it turned out. Even if that moment of inspiration hadn't struck today, a failed clone wouldn't have been the end of the world. Once her mental energy and chakra reserves grew stronger—and her control more refined—she'd eventually manage the technique without seals at all.
It was a bit like the author of A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality—supposedly, when that legendary webnovel first launched, it went hundreds of thousands of words without landing a publishing contract, without any promotional placement, without any guarantee of success. But because the content was genuinely compelling, the readers showed up on their own—and eventually, a legend was born.
Seals weren't the destination. They were a means to an end—a scaffold. Because this world operated differently from the Naruto world, Maya's seals were entirely unlike anything from that franchise. But the purpose of those seals was identical: to serve as a framework that allowed the jutsu to take shape.
What Maya didn't know was that the greatest ninja talents in the Naruto world had gone through this exact same process every time they developed their own signature techniques.
Kakashi, for instance. No one taught him the Raikiri. But inspired by his mentor Minato's Rasengan, he conceived the idea of a lightning-nature transformation. With backing from several elite shinobi and access to solid theoretical foundations, the seal sequence for the Raikiri came to him in a single flash of insight.
The lesson was clear: learning seal sequences matters—but understanding the core principle behind a jutsu matters far more.
You could brute-force a jutsu through repetition, drilling the seals into muscle memory until your body performed them automatically. But you'd be capping yourself. Any deeper development, any future evolution of that technique, would be completely out of reach.
Think about it: even Naruto—a one-track-mind if there ever was one—had to ask Asuma to explain the nature of Wind Release before he could evolve his Rasengan into the Wind Release: Rasenshuriken.
Anyway. Back to Maya.
The original had gone downstairs to eat breakfast, leaving the clone—dressed in a pink Superman pajama set—alone in the room to read, study, and practice jutsu.
After breakfast, Maya walked about 650 feet (200 m) from the apartment before the link to her clone finally cut out.
So there was a distance limit to their shared perception. And the reason that link even existed in the first place? It might actually be a mutation of her Sensing talent.
Her sensing range was also around 650 feet (200 m). Beyond that, it didn't cut off entirely—but precision dropped dramatically, like going from 4K resolution down to 10p.
After returning home and staying another two hours, the clone still showed no signs of dispersing. Eventually Maya had to manually channel her chakra to disperse it herself.
"Ugh, my head's killing me. I only left it reading for a few hours—it's not like I had hundreds of clones like Naruto. Seriously, that guy is a menace."
Maya had expected the memory transfer. She'd burned through a mountain of brain cells, spent a ton of chakra, and woven nine seals. If all that effort had only produced a basic clone technique, she'd have locked herself in her room and cried.
But clearly, the Hansen Shadow Clone was something else.
It was, functionally speaking, the Shadow Clone Jutsu—Naruto's version.
A mutated Shadow Clone Jutsu, no less. More seals, more complex to activate, and it seemed to last considerably longer than the original. Though that might partly be because the clone had been sitting quietly in the room the whole time, not burning through chakra on other techniques.
There was one other difference.
Her clone had appeared in the buff.
...Which was a little embarrassing.
Maya resolved, then and there, never to use this jutsu in public.
Why did it come out naked? Simple: she couldn't produce clothing.
Which brought her back to the Transformation Jutsu.
The Shadow Clone Jutsu in the Naruto world had a subtle overlap with the Sexy Jutsu. When clones appeared, chakra automatically shaped their clothing. Similarly, Naruto's Sexy Jutsu combined cloning with a full-body transformation in one seamless motion.
The reason Naruto's ninja academy graduates did it automatically was because they'd spent six years drilling all three basic techniques until the combination was second nature.
But the Marvel world was different. Maya could only sense the wavelength of her own body. Clothing? She couldn't feel its wavelength at all. So her clone arrived—and departed—exactly as she came into the world.
Did this mean she'd have to duck into a women's restroom every time she needed to use her Shadow Clone, with a spare set of clothes in tow?
And in the moments when you actually needed a clone—was there ever going to be time for a bathroom break to get the clone dressed?
Maya pictured it: deep in the middle of a fight against a crew of supervillains, realizing she needed more hands, She raises one hand, steps back, and shouts —
"Hold on! Give me a minute—I need to use the restroom first!"
And the villains just... dissolve into hysterical laughter.
The mental image was absolutely mortifying. If she ever pulled that in real life, her entire reputation as the President would be finished.