Why had Maya said she'd been operating under a massive assumption?
Because she had believed, from the start, that the Transformation Technique immediately jumped to Phase C.
The logic had seemed clean: sense the target's frequency, shift your own to match it, and the transformation was complete.
But Naruto's failed exam attempt had just flipped her entire model.
Because if you looked at the Transformation Technique as actually practiced in the Naruto world—the one that even a nobody could learn, the one that was completely dirt-common—no one in that world had ever reached Phase B. Not a single person. Not the Sage of Six Paths. Not Kaguya Otsutsuki. In thousands of years, with countless millions of people and countless prodigies, no one had pushed the Transformation Technique past Phase A.
How could she be so certain?
Because if anyone had reached even the early stages of Phase B, they would have been able to temporarily copy the target's abilities during the transformation—including bloodline limits.
Everyone was stuck in Phase A. The difference between masters and beginners was just how close their "Earth" had drifted to the target's "Mars." The best jonin could get close enough that even careful observers might be fooled, while pre-graduation Naruto's transformation was so off that anyone could see through it at a glance.
This meant that even with chakra resonance as a shortcut, the Naruto world had never been able to fully determine another object's frequency—only approximate its "position in the star system."
In the Marvel world, without any chakra resonance, Maya couldn't even determine the target's galaxy—let alone its star system. Even mapping the target's broader "galactic cluster" was a tangled mess. The very "dimensional space" of another object's frequency was a complete unknown.
For the average person, this meant the Transformation Technique was genuinely impossible. A high-difficulty technique with no accessible entry point.
But Maya had already found the path forward.
The roadmap was actually straightforward, broken into sequential steps: first, determine how many dimensions the target's frequency occupied; then locate its position in the cosmic scale; then narrow to its galactic region; then identify its specific orbital path within that galaxy.
In the Naruto world, almost any competent ninja could handle Phase A. Phase B had one known practitioner in the Marvel universe: Mystique—Raven Darkhölme—who appeared to have just crossed the Phase B threshold. When she transformed, she could temporarily access the target's abilities, though only a pale copy, significantly weaker than the original.
The Sentinels derived from Mystique were a different story. They seemed to have reached the later stages of Phase B—nearly full replication of mutant abilities.
"As for Phase C," Maya thought, settling back against her pillow, "I doubt anyone in the Marvel world has reached it. That would be completely broken. You'd be able to fully replace someone. Just thinking about it is terrifying. The implications for your own existence alone..."
She pulled her blanket tighter without meaning to.
She had, in the space of an evening, reverse-engineered the complete theoretical framework of the Transformation Technique—starting from almost nothing. Working from a handful of clues and the briefest moment of insight, she had decoded its ultimate secret.
The only thing Maya didn't know was that she was slightly wrong about Phase C having no practitioners.
It wasn't zero practitioners.
It was an entire species.
An alien species. One that had already arrived on Earth. One that had already mastered Phase C of the Transformation Technique.
If Maya had known that, she might not have been in such a cheerful mood about trolling Spider-Man.
She should probably also count herself lucky she'd come through a year early. If she'd transmigrated from 2019 instead, she would have arrived with more future knowledge—and zero childhood. The carefree, overpowered, growing-up years she'd enjoyed for over a decade? Gone entirely. There was a particular kind of torment in knowing everything and being powerless to change anything. Maya had been spared that.
Blissfully unaware of all this, Maya was jarred awake the next morning by something slamming repeatedly against her bedroom door.
She had installed soundproofing—but soundproofing didn't extend to the door itself when someone was hammering on it.
Maya stumbled to the door in her pink superhero pajamas, long hair loose and tumbling down to her waist in a chaotic sprawl. Still half-asleep. Eyes unfocused.
From Jennifer's expression the moment the door swung open, she found this deeply endearing.
A sleepy little angel, Jennifer thought. An angel who might be willing to grant one small wish.
"Baby, do you have any more of those fruits?" Jennifer grabbed Maya by the shoulders and shook. The already-messy hair went flying. "Do you? Do you?!"
"What—it's the crack of dawn, Jennifer, what is wrong with you—"
She had half a mind to hit Jennifer with a Rasengan. She restrained herself.
"The fruit! The one you gave me last night! You said it was good for your complexion—I didn't really believe you, but Maya, I woke up this morning and I think it worked! I think I look better! Do you have more? Give me more, I want to look even younger!"
That woke Maya up.
Through Jennifer's chaotic explanation, the story assembled itself. Yesterday's gacha session had gotten out of hand. Maya had bought a lot of things she didn't strictly need—including grilled meat that cost ten times what it would on Ninth Street. She'd also picked up a specialty fruit from the Hidden Mist Village: something like a green-skinned kiwi, supposedly good for hydration and skin elasticity.
Maya had figured Jennifer deserved it more—she'd been managing a household and raising two children.
She hadn't actually believed the thing worked.
But Mei Terumi in the Boruto era still aged despite presumably having access to the same things, Maya thought, brow furrowed. If this fruit did anything, surely the Fifth Mizukage would have just... eaten more of it?
She leaned in and studied Jennifer's face seriously for a long moment.
"Jennifer, I think you're imagining it. You look the same as yesterday. It's probably just your mood. Get out—it's Sunday, I'm going back to sleep."
Jennifer was outraged. "Look here. Look at this spot." She pointed to the outer corner of her eye.
Maya looked. Nothing obvious.
Jennifer was, objectively, still a good-looking woman. She worked hard at it—regular appearances at Broadway-adjacent productions, decent skincare habits, and strong bone structure to begin with. At her age, she had a certain Hollywood-glamour quality to her, a passing resemblance to Kate Beckinsale. That said, Western features tended to show the passage of time differently, and two pregnancies had taken their toll—there were some fine lines at the corners of her eyes, and her face had lost some of the elasticity of her twenties, but that was it.
"What about your eye corner?"
Jennifer drew herself up with the expression of someone who had been tracking this very carefully. "Yesterday I had six wrinkles there. I counted. This morning I only have five. And the fifth one is almost gone—if I don't look closely, I can barely see it."