Maya watched as the cool blonde clutched her massive bag and walked away from the register, glancing back three times in the span of ten steps.
There was something striking about her—sharp, upswept brows, a firm nose, an oval face tanned to a warm bronze that suited her somehow, and lips pressed into a determined line. Everything about her projected toughness and resolve. Yet those sky-blue eyes had gone completely soft, like a pitiful little deer.
That gap between her vibe and her expression hit Maya square in the chest. She came this close to digging out her own battered wallet and paying for the mask herself.
Then she remembered she wasn't a guy anymore, which made the impulse considerably easier to dismiss. In fact, she was now half-tempted to ask the girl to pay for her lightsabers instead.
Good thing the girl had no idea what was running through the President's head.
While Maya was paying, Natalie materialized with a full boxed set of Star Wars VHS tapes she'd somehow unearthed from the shelves.
Maya glanced at the price tags. Her two lightsabers together had come to thirty dollars—a bit steep, but the handles were solid steel, finely crafted and engraved with the characters' names. Fair value. Natalie's complete three-film, nine-cassette collection, on the other hand, had run her two hundred and fifty dollars.
Lucas was absolutely printing money.
Only someone with Natalie's cash flow—and a fresh slice of her paycheck—could drop that kind of money on cassette tapes without flinching. Most people just rented from the video store.
Not that the short-haired girl counted as "most people." She'd wiped herself out entirely. Judging by the way she'd been counting coins, she'd just gotten paid and spent it all at once.
After paying, Maya treated Natalie to dinner—burgers from a street-side fast food joint, one each. Natalie accepted without a word of complaint.
Maya didn't offer to walk her back. Natalie's hotel was visible from the corner—well outside Hell's Kitchen and perfectly safe. If anything, Natalie was the one who tried to walk Maya home, which Maya shut down immediately. The last thing she needed was Natalie getting a guided tour of the neighborhood and then needing to be escorted back to the hotel afterward.
Once she got home, Maya gave Jennifer a brief, vague explanation, then retreated to her room to prepare for her first real act of vigilante justice.
She sat at the center of her small bedroom. Her hands blurred through the nine-seal sequence, and with a thud, a bare Shadow Clone materialized beside her.
Once the clone was stable, Maya didn't stop. The pale-gold chakra in her sea of energy began flowing out—and as it left, her body's cells responded to her mental energy, generating fresh chakra in a continuous cycle, drawing in ambient natural energy along the Hansen Sage Ninja Circuit and refining it into 01-version sage chakra.
She kept it going for nearly ten minutes, until the first wave of fatigue crept in. Then she stopped the transfer.
This was one area where the Hansen Shadow Clone outperformed Naruto's version. She could consciously control how her chakra was distributed between herself and the clone. At close range, she could actively channel chakra into the clone—far more precise and flexible than the brute-force equal-split of the original.
Once the transfer was done, the clone formed its own seals. Pale-gold chakra began circulating through its body.
Slowly—then not so slowly—a faint golden glow began to emanate from the clone's skin. It intensified, until the clone looked like a goddess cast down into the mortal world.
The clone stood taller than Maya's original body. Its shadow stretched long across the floor, curling forward like a living thing—reaching the small box under the bed, barely visible. An unseen force pulled the box out from beneath the bed frame, the lid lifted by what appeared to be nothing, and then a red-and-black skintight suit drifted upward from inside and floated through the air toward the clone.
And yes—this outfit meant the President was heading out to show off in the city center tonight.
"Not bad. Definite Spider energy."
The voice that came from beneath the mask was genuinely androgynous—neither male nor female. The vocal modification had worked.
The one eyesore was the pair of matte-black metal boxes at the clone's hips. But Maya didn't have a better option.
She couldn't produce actual webbing. She didn't have the formula for web fluid. So she'd had to improvise—borrowing the concept from the Three-Dimensional Maneuver Gear in Attack on Titan.
But isn't a 3DMG way more high-tech than web-shooters?
Well, yes. But if this was a knockoff Spider-Man, then a knockoff 3DMG was perfectly on-brand. Knockoffs were called knockoffs precisely because they were inferior to the original. If the quality were the same, you'd just register it under a new brand name.
And this particular Hansen-brand Maneuver System was, genuinely, an extremely knockoff version of a knockoff.
Issue one: No gas propulsion. Not even the most basic power component. Zero.
Issue two: No wire. Not a single filament of cable in those boxes. What would come out of them—if they worked at all—was Jennifer's knitting wool.
Actual knitting wool. Ordinary cashmere yarn. Not Stark Industries nanotech fiber. Not anything engineered. Just the kind you buy off any street corner for next to nothing.
And no, it was not unusually thick or reinforced.
Even Captain Levi would die using this setup.
Even though this was only a clone, Maya wasn't about to blow through a massive chakra investment just to let it splat on the pavement.
Chapter 857: Sealing and Return