Yes—even though shadow clones don't fear death, President Maya would never deliberately send one to its doom.
When you strip it down, the Three-Dimensional Maneuver Gear works on a simple principle: generated pull force, not unlike Spider-Man's web-shooters. The difference is that the standard gear uses compressed gas for propulsion, making it relatively easy to operate, while web-shooters rely entirely on arm strength—useless for anyone without the upper body to match. Maya's custom Hansen-brand Maneuver Gear combines both concepts, though it falls well short of either on the physics side. Then again, this is a world where "physics" is more of a suggestion.
President Maya herself is a walking suggestion—her power source is her own chakra, and what actually moves her through the air is Shadow Jutsu.
The Shadow Gathering Technique can pull objects toward her. She uses it every day to drag boxes across her room, snag clothes off a shelf. This is just another application of the same principle.
And anyone who passed high school physics knows: forces are mutual. When you pull an object, the object pulls back. If Maya uses the Shadow Gathering Technique to grab onto a wall—and the pulling force exceeds her own body weight—the wall stays exactly where it is. President Maya, however, goes flying.
That is her "webline." That is why she's confident she can outdo Spider-Man at his own game.
Honestly, she could've gone out to show him up without the makeshift gear at all. But as the saying goes, shadow jutsu from the Nara clan shares one universal weakness: it needs shadows to work.
That doesn't mean it fails in the light—quite the opposite. Pure darkness actually makes it unusable, since there are no shadows without light. The problem is that light from certain angles can weaken shadows dramatically. Think of an operating room with surgical lights blazing from every direction.
Imagine Maya swinging across the skyline on a shadow-thread, when a burst of floodlights hits her from multiple angles. The shadow weakens almost to nothing. The pull becomes too great, the Shadow Touch snaps—and President Maya has a very bad evening.
The Hansen-brand Maneuver Gear solves this by using the Shadow Touch to drive a dart forward at speed, pulling the yarn behind it. The yarn itself is what the Shadow Touch anchors to, bypassing the vulnerability.
Yarn, as everyone knows, is opaque—and it's woven from countless tiny fibers, meaning it contains internal shadows that even direct light can't reach. Even if a dozen floodlights hit Maya while she's mid-swing, her Shadow Touch can still grip a building's wall through those fiber-shadows inside the yarn.
Since the Shadow Touch bears all the real load, it doesn't matter whether the yarn itself is strong enough to hold a person.
Spider-Man fires webs and abandons them when he's done. Maya's yarn, like the gear cables in Attack on Titan, has to be recovered. The Titans use mechanical retraction. Maya's yarn gets wound back into the iron box by shadows doing the spooling inside.
Simple, right?
Except almost no one in the Naruto world would dare attempt it this way. The few people capable of pulling it off are high-level ninja who have zero interest in something this janky—if they want to fly but can't develop a flight jutsu, the simplest option is to summon a flying beast. The real difficulty is twofold: ultra-precise chakra control, and divided attention.
Sloppy control and you'll snap the yarn—which is the minor problem. The major problem is applying too much force mid-swing and slamming yourself into a wall at full speed. Too little force and you fall.
The divided attention issue is obvious: she has to fire yarn forward while simultaneously reeling in the line behind her, all while watching her surroundings and adjusting her body orientation in real time.
The difficulty coefficient is higher than Spider-Man's and higher than Captain Levi's. Spidey fires and forgets; Levi has mechanical assistance and doesn't need to micromanage his cable tension to prevent it from snapping. Maya is working with yarn. Yarn. Yarn.
Ten o'clock Manhattan finally revealed why it deserved to call itself the world's premier city.
Times Square on Seventh Avenue is the jewel at New York's center—towering neon billboards blazing in every color, sidewalks packed shoulder to shoulder. Every building draped in screens and signs. Standing in the middle of it feels like stepping out of New York, out of America, out of Earth itself and into some luminous neon dimension.
Broadway, the art cathedral. The world's largest electronic billboards. Street performers from every corner of the globe, drawn here by the legend of the place.
The brilliant lights infect you. The surging crowd infects you. The roar of it all infects you. In the middle of Times Square, you stop being yourself—you become a single pixel in the most dazzling night scene on the planet.
At this moment, President Maya stood at the very top of the central tower at the triple intersection of Times Square—no disguise, mask removed, arms spread wide. Her entire body tilted at a forty-five-degree angle, suspended over the roof's edge, she embraced the full dazzling splendor of the world below.
For the first time ever, she felt truly, completely satisfied.
I'm really alive. Being alive is wonderful.
So I, too, could become king of the world.
She didn't leave when her legs got tired. Tonight she wanted to let herself go—forget studying, forget jutsu, forget the System entirely. Tonight she would be Maya Hansen. A thirteen-year-old Maya Hansen. Not Student Council President Maya Hansen. Not transmigrator Maya Hansen. Not "other people's kid" Maya Hansen.
She lay back on top of the largest billboard, staring at the massive screen across from her—maybe fifteen meters tall—cycling through a Madonna advertisement.
"No wonder Spider-Man loves coming out to play hero," she murmured. "Times Square is the center of Seventh Avenue. Seventh Avenue is the center of Manhattan. Manhattan is the center of New York. New York is the center of America. America is the center of the Marvel Earth. Earth is the center of the Marvel Universe. And right now, I, Maya Hansen, am the center of Times Square—the center of the multiverse."
She pillowed her hands behind her head, crossed her ankles, and hummed softly to herself, fantasizing about being the axis around which everything else turned. King of the cosmos.
The noise drifting up from the crowd far below only deepened the sensation—the feeling that the whole world was beneath her feet. Was this the illusion of standing above all beings that Spider-Man chased every night he swung through the city?
Maya didn't know about the others. But right now she felt an urge she'd never felt before: to stay up here forever and never come back down.
Once a caged bird has flown, it will never willingly return to its cage.
Yes—President Maya was feeling an urge to show off now that she had power. Part of it was the intoxicating view. But mostly, she had to admit, her abilities had been growing almost uncomfortably fast lately. In cultivation terms: her mental state was becoming unstable.
Still riding that euphoric high, Maya was suddenly jolted by a sharp, acrid stench.
"Ugh—what is that? What is that smell? So pungent—and it reeks—"