"I got friend-zoned because of you, Maya!"
Nana wasn't quite shouting, but she was close. There was a particular note in her voice — the grinding sound of someone who's figured out who to blame.
Maya's first thought was immediate and panicked. Please tell me this isn't going where I think it's going. Best friend falls for the same person. Classic three-way disaster. Complete destruction of everything.
"You've been doing it to boys for two years straight," Nana said, dropping into the chair across from Maya with the energy of someone putting down a heavy bag. "Any time some guy worked up the nerve to confess, you'd give him the whole speech. 'You're a wonderful person, but it's just not like that for me.' Word for word, every time. You've basically turned it into a local tradition." She crossed her arms. "So now Matt Murdock, who has apparently been paying close attention to how you operate, gave me the exact same treatment. That's on you."
Oh. Maya exhaled quietly. Not a love triangle. Just methodology transfer. That's much more manageable.
"I apologize for my influence on the local ecosystem," she said.
"Whatever." Nana waved it off. "Anyway. Andrew."
"...Sorry?"
"Your neighbor Andrew. I've decided to give it a shot." Nana said this the way someone announces a minor administrative decision. "He's not Matt — nothing like Matt — but his grades are decent and he's in good shape, and you've always told me to have a contingency for everything."
Two classrooms over, Andrew sneezed hard and immediately became suspicious. Maya hadn't made a scene in the cafeteria about the Will incident. In his experience, that kind of restraint always meant something worse was in the planning stages.
"I did say that," Maya agreed carefully, "about contingency plans. In the context of student council operations."
"Transfers to personal life," Nana said, already standing up. "I need to have your sports meet report submitted by end of day. I'll be back."
She was gone before Maya could formulate a response.
Maya stared at the door for a moment.
I have created this, she thought. This is my legacy.
She finished putting the lab back in order, then pulled a small paper sleeve from the desk drawer. Inside: a cluster of small latex balloons.
She'd bought them weeks ago. The Rasengan — Naruto's signature jutsu, the spiraling sphere of pure chakra — required a very particular training method: channel rotation into a balloon, use the feedback to develop the feel for multidirectional pressure, work up from there. She'd known the full technical procedure from memory long before she had enough chakra to attempt it.
It had taken her five afternoons in this lab.
She was done.
The balloons she'd bought were mostly still in the sleeve; she hadn't needed anywhere near as many as she'd expected. Her chakra control had been the advantage — she'd been able to feel the sphere forming rather than guessing at it. No wasted attempts. A few small pops, a few crumpled failures early on, and then the slow settling into something stable: a pale blue sphere sitting in her palm, rotating silently, not collapsing.
One jutsu, she reminded herself, setting the sleeve back in the drawer. One good jutsu. That's not nothing.
A few days passed. The school's collective attention had moved on from the Great Magazine Scandal and was now entirely consumed by the upcoming spring sports meet. Signup sheets circulated. Arguments broke out. The cafeteria noise level went up approximately fifteen percent.
It was during one of these loud lunches that Jamal Odom — nine years old, third grade — looked at his older brother across the table with an expression of complete sincerity.
"Andrew. I'm so jealous of you guys in the upper grades. I wish I could do the sports meet too."
Andrew looked up from his food. Jamal had never shown any interest in athletics before. He was a music kid, through and through. "Since when?"
"I just noticed," Jamal said, "that the guys in the sports clubs have really nice bodies. I like looking at them."
Andrew set down his fork.
He sat with this information for three seconds. Then a cold wave moved from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet.
My nine-year-old brother, he thought very carefully, is gay. And based on the confidence with which he just announced that, he is completely fine with it.
He said nothing. There was nothing to say. He picked up his fork again.
We are not sharing a bed anymore.
That night, Maya put on her standard setup — dark hoodie, leggings, soft-soled shoes — and swept her perception through the surrounding block. Nobody was watching. She slipped out the window, ran the wall at an angle, and was on the rooftops within a minute.
The city at night had a different texture. Hell's Kitchen held its usual undercurrent of low-level menace — voices through walls, distant engines, the particular flat silence of streets that had been cleared by reputation rather than law. Further out, neon and billboard light performed for the wealthier neighborhoods. She crossed rooftops in the dark, jumping and climbing on the route that was beginning to feel like muscle memory, and arrived at the facing building above Frank's territory.
She settled behind the rooftop heating unit. Ninth floor, second window from the left. Jimmy. Gold-rimmed glasses. The man who tracked Frank's movements.
She spread her perception toward the window. Jimmy was at his desk, bent over an open folder, working alone. No visitors. No phone calls. Just paperwork, and the scratch of a pen on paper.
Good. Stay there.
Maya left a thin thread of perception anchored on Jimmy and turned most of her attention inward. She settled her breathing, found the rhythm, and began to cycle the Hansen Sage-Nin Art — her own cultivation method, a hybrid thing she'd built from what she could reconstruct of the original techniques, running chakra through the body's pathways while drawing ambient natural energy in from the surrounding air.
The chakra that accumulated was different from what she'd produced in the early weeks. Faintly gold-tinted now. Denser. She could hold it longer before it dispersed.
Lower genin, she estimated. That's where I am. Less than two months of cultivation, starting from zero. She'd been told the fastest ninja prodigies made lower genin in a year or two of formal training. She'd gotten there in weeks.
She held the estimate for a moment without letting herself feel good about it. Then she ran the honest inventory.
Jutsu count: two. Kunai throwing, originally taught to five-year-olds. Rasengan — which technically far exceeded the level of a chunin — mastered, but through chakra control rather than standard training. Every jutsu in between? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. No three-body technique. No transformation technique. No shadow clone jutsu. Not even the basic substitution.
Taijutsu: nearly nonexistent. A few rough brawling habits from two lifetimes, no formal structure at all.
Tactical training: zero.
Ninja doctrine: she was mostly inventing as she went. If Iruka-sensei dropped her into the academy tomorrow, she would not graduate. If someone placed her in the Second or Third Ninja War, she'd be dead within a week — maybe she could drag one lower genin down with her if she timed the Rasengan correctly, but that was the ceiling.
The cold wind moved across the rooftop. She stayed where she was, small and patient behind the heating unit, and continued to cycle the Art.
Jimmy kept working.