With the shinobi world fully unified, Senju Haruto had finally secured his rear base.
The next step was clear—head to the next sign-in location and obtain a new ability.
During this brief lull, Haruto dispatched both the ANBU and Root to take control of Iwagakure and Kumogakure. At the same time, he abolished the daimyo clans. The Land of Lightning's territory was handed over to Might Guy, while the Land of Earth went under the joint management of Zabuza and Haku. The Land of Water fell to Aburame Torune, and the Land of Wind was entrusted to Tenzo.
As for the Land of Fire, the main base of operations, Kakashi was placed in charge.
Haruto also appointed Orochimaru as his chief scientific advisor—on one hand to treat Uchiha Itachi's body, and on the other to help him dismantle and study Marvel's technology.
Take smartphones, for example. If they could be popularized throughout the Land of Fire, it would be no small achievement.
While the technology of the shinobi world wasn't primitive, it was… misshapen. Integrating Marvel's tech with that of the shinobi world had become a necessary step in his plans.
Once all of these matters were settled, the time for his next sign-in drew near.
"If anything happens, contact me through the phone," Haruto said before activating the power of the Suspended Ring. A glowing portal appeared, and he stepped through—
arriving in the very cave where Tony Stark had first been imprisoned.
It was also a Ten Rings stronghold, packed with weapons and ammunition.
"Maybe I should just take everything back with me," Haruto murmured after a brief thought. In the original story, Stark destroyed it all, but to simply wipe everything out felt wasteful.
These weapons, after all, carried destructive power surpassing ordinary ninjutsu. And in the Land of Fire, not everyone was a trained shinobi. The number of people born with chakra and capable of ninjutsu was already small—truly powerful shinobi, rarer still.
Take Konoha for example: the elimination rate at the academy was sixty-six percent before even graduating as a genin. During the chunin exams, among hundreds of genin, only Shikamaru had passed and been promoted.
And even beyond chunin and jonin, there were the ranks of elite chunin and special jonin. The higher the rank, the rarer the shinobi.
More importantly, the armies Haruto had absorbed from the five great nations' daimyo were not shinobi at all, but samurai. They could only channel chakra into their blades and rely on swordsmanship in battle.
There were hundreds of thousands of such men.
If they could be transformed from samurai into technology-based soldiers, armed with firearms, their killing power could surpass that of ninjutsu. Especially if they were organized into three-man squads like shinobi teams—it would far outstrip their current development.
"Come to think of it, if chakra can be infused into swords and other shinobi tools… why not bullets too?"
Haruto's thoughts raced, recalling an online game he had played before crossing worlds: Dungeon Fighter Online.
In that game, there was a class called the "Ammo Specialist," who could enhance bullets through enchantments. Explosive rounds could cause secondary detonations, incendiary shots could leave behind molten lava, and frost rounds could freeze enemies solid.
And more.
In Haruto's mind, there was no reason shinobi couldn't do the same. The deeper he thought, the more possibilities opened before him, and his excitement mounted.
To build a super-nation of his own in the Marvel world… now that was an ambitious and fascinating goal.
By the time he came back to himself, he had already stepped through the portal and arrived inside the cave where Stark had been imprisoned.
Haruto didn't know much about the Ten Rings' stronghold, but he remembered the key scenes: Stark and Dr. Yinsen forging the Mark I armor, and later, Stark blowing up the stockpile of weapons.
The Suspended Ring's portal depended entirely on the user's imagination. For instance, in Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, Strange had to board a spaceship with Stark to travel to Titan. That was because Strange had no idea what Titan looked like, and without an image in his mind, he couldn't conjure a portal there.
But coming back was easier—he only had to picture something familiar on Earth, and he could open a portal to it.
This was a unique rule of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
So when Haruto appeared in the Ten Rings' cave, his sudden arrival made Dr. Yinsen cry out in shock.
"Who are you?!"
"What did you just do?!"
Yinsen's eyes went wide, his hands clutched his head, unable to comprehend what he was seeing.
Haruto ignored him, scanning the cave with a calm expression. The Mark I armor was already completed, and Yinsen and Stark were in the middle of uploading data to it.
If he was right, this was just before Stark's escape.
That much was within Haruto's expectations. After all, Stark rampaging through the cave in the Mark I was one of the most iconic moments in Iron Man.
"This isn't the time for shouting," Stark muttered tensely, rising from beneath the table. The computer needed more time to finish uploading.
Meanwhile, the Ten Rings had already realized the two weren't making weapons. To buy time, Stark had just set explosives at the cave entrance, taking out some of the terrorists. But more would be flooding in soon.
He needed another plan to get Yinsen out alive. The tension in the air had him so on edge that he didn't even process Yinsen's words at first.
"No—we need more time," Stark barked, his eyes flicking from the upload progress to Yinsen. But the moment he caught sight of Haruto standing beside him, he froze.
Not because there was suddenly another person in the cave—
but because the man standing in front of Yinsen seemed familiar.
Stark's pupils constricted, then widened in recognition.
"You… you're that magician!"
Stark rarely remembered a face after just one encounter. But Haruto's arrival and departure back then had been so shocking, so impossible to forget, that Stark had pulled security footage to study it.
Even then, he couldn't figure out how Haruto had pulled off that "trick."
He'd even gone so far as to use JARVIS to hack into several systems, trying to trace Haruto and Kaguya's identities. But he'd found nothing.
They were enigmas—appearing suddenly, vanishing just as suddenly.
That was why Stark had burned Haruto's face into his memory.
But never—not in a million years—had he expected to run into him here.