Without her eyepatch, hair drawn up into a single ponytail, dressed in the training uniform—Hanabi cut a sharp, capable figure.
The only thing that stood out was her pale white irises.
But the last training course with Instructor Shiki hadn't caused any trouble on that front. The people here probably wouldn't mind either.
And if they did mind—that would be even more interesting.
I want to see what happens.
"Can't waste the session time, though."
She had paid for these.
Hanabi left the small building and found herself in a training ground.
It was already full of recruits.
She seemed to have skipped the enrollment phase entirely and landed directly in the ODM gear portion of training.
The field was dotted with three-pillar rigs trailing steel cables, with some contraptions resembling swings hung below. Several recruits were strung up in harnesses, wobbling as they struggled to hold steady.
This was the 3D Maneuver Gear training setup and method.
Hanabi scanned the field.
No Mikasa. No Eren.
Different from the last session with Shiki, where she'd been treated to an encounter with that world's protagonist, this time she saw no Attack on Titan leads.
A little disappointing.
She wasn't particularly fond of the Attack on Titan setting.
Especially the ideology woven through it, and that ending. The reputational risk alone made it the wrong venue—one bad association and your reputation and popularity take a hit.
"Hey, you over there—you're next."
An instructor called out to Hanabi, who had been observing.
"Yes, sir."
She was lifted into the rig immediately.
Maintaining balance was child's play for a ninja. Hanabi could stand motionless on a single needle for a full day and night if she had to.
Two support points? Trivial.
Hoisted into position by the two cables, Hanabi hung in the air without moving—perfectly still, composure absolute.
"Oh... that's impressive."
"Do we know her? Have we seen her before?"
"What's with her eyes?"
After cycling through all the recruits, the bald instructor—shaved head gleaming like a hardboiled egg—gathered everyone together and began explaining the ODM gear's mechanics, movement principles, and technique fundamentals.
On the surface, the ODM gear looked simple: two wires suspending a human body in midair for three-dimensional mobility.
In practice, the training harness was an entire load-bearing system—a network of straps binding the torso—that allowed the body to form a new structural unit, transferring force through the harness rather than the skeleton, letting the user maintain balance, generate movement, and sustain three-dimensional control simultaneously.
In this world, the gear was typically paired with blades. Pressing the trigger on the hilt fired anchor bolts from the launch unit at the waist—think of them as high-tech grappling hooks, Titan World's proprietary science—which embedded in a Titan or a surface, then retracted the cable at speed using compressed gas, launching the user forward.
After running through the balance phase, Hanabi found herself thinking that the ODM gear wasn't without merit after all.
The gear enabled sudden mid-air repositioning—disrupting an opponent's read on trajectory, or forcing a rapid descent to avoid taking a hit while airborne.
Even in a ninja world, that utility had real applications.
The Leaf Village had a whole taijutsu form built around launching opponents into the air and pummeling them helplessly—Shadow of the Dancing Leaf had cost more than a few shinobi their dignity. With the 3D Maneuver Gear, you could neutralize exactly that: forced mid-air repositioning, even a full reversal, to counter the attacker.
The gear itself was proprietary technology and closely guarded.
But she wasn't here to learn the engineering behind it.
This is an action class.
"The gear technology might not exist in the shinobi world, but using chakra and ninja wire, I could get most of the way there. Actually—it'd be simpler."
No need for the equipment at all, in theory. Two lengths of wire and basic technique could replicate most of the motion set.
"Wait."
She'd called it simple on instinct. But thinking through the actual mechanics—it wasn't.
ODM gear wasn't like Spider-Man swinging on webs. This wasn't a person with superhuman strength just casually pendulum-swinging across the skyline. You needed to handle the recoil of full-body suspension, maintain stability under rapid directional changes, and retain offensive capability—simultaneously. Rapid cable retraction, chakra-flow management for controlled release and pull—that wasn't as easy as she'd made it sound.
And yet she'd processed all of it in moments.
She'd had no prior exposure to this technique. But from the instant she encountered it, she'd deconstructed it, internalized it, and already mapped out how it would look in a shinobi world context.
That was strange, even for her—and Hanabi was already a top student to begin with.
"I see. So 'stylistic reworking' is less about aesthetics and more like... an inspiration-driven adaptation."
As she trained, she'd unconsciously built out a complete framework for applying this to the ninja world.
That intuitive leap was almost certainly the passive effect of Temporary Star.
"Not just harnesses—rope would work too, if..."
The bald instructor wrapped up his lecture.
"Excuse me—can we move to live ODM gear practice now?" Hanabi raised her hand.
She wanted to learn how to use the gear. Everything else was secondary. In this world, Hanabi was an emotionless study-machine, pure and simple.
The instructor looked at her—something in his expression short-circuited momentarily. Who is this again? Have I seen her before? She showed real talent on the balance trainer... but still.
"Very well. Show me what you've got."
"Are you serious right now..."
"She's going to crash."
"What a waste. She's so pretty."
"Jumping straight to live gear? That's insane."
The trainees around her looked either horrified or pitying. In their eyes, Hanabi was a cautionary example waiting to happen—the moment she slipped on the gear, she'd be torn apart as a textbook case of what not to do.
To them, Hanabi might as well have announced she was entering a sprint final the day she learned to walk. Live 3D Maneuver Gear use wasn't something you attempted before one or two years—sometimes longer—of preparation. Most trainees in this room were still barely holding balance. The bar she'd just set for herself was absurd.
Even so.
The 3D Maneuver Gear's world didn't resonate with her—but the gear itself? The gear was cool.
Just not a great stylistic fit for who she was in the shinobi world.
"Feels intuitive. The best part is how little effort it takes."
Ninja speed was impressive. But ninja movement depleted stamina.
The ODM gear's core advantage was conservation of energy.
Maintain the gas supply, and high-speed movement could be sustained indefinitely.
Is there anything in the ninja world with the same efficiency profile?
Chakra was on-demand, but it wasn't necessarily unstorable. The Grail Stone from the theatrical films—a massive chakra battery, if the films were canon at all, which was debatable given their... questionable production values. There was also the Dragon's Vein in Loulan.
If none of those were available, ordinary metal could work.
A lot of fan theories posited that chakra couldn't conduct through metal—but that was the Hamon from JoJo, not Naruto. In Naruto's actual world, metal and chakra were naturally compatible. The affinity was just there.
"The mechanical principles are manageable. The energy storage, though—that's the piece I'd need to figure out..."
Blazing Arcana — Kiryu Mia mask
Senior is so cute~
These two characters' dialogue is really somethingIs it "Red-Braised Heaven" or "Blazing Arcana"?