Daisy slipped around to Darren Cross's heel, charged her power into her palm, and drove it straight into his ankle — shouting "Heart-Crusher Palm!" as she struck.
It wasn't middle-school cringe — screaming technique names mid-fight was actually embarrassing. But she wanted to leave an impression on old Hank, so she did it anyway.
In her perception, the "Heart-Crusher Palm" punched through skin and subcutaneous fat, riding a vibration wave deeper and deeper into the tissue.
Cell structure should be tight and orderly. Cross's was anything but. His cellular architecture was chaotic — wildly varying in size. Her vibrational ability worked like a sixth sense; she saw countless cells rupturing under some unknown force, then watched new ones spring into existence under that same force's catalytic push.
The whole process was grotesque. A complete violation of the laws of biology.
The most critical detail: these cells were materializing from nothing. The Pym Particles seemed to act as a bridge, continuously drawing power from another dimension to fuel Cross's body.
"Get off me, insect!" Cross felt a numbing tingle shoot through his heel. The discomfort faded fast, but his fury didn't — he swatted at Daisy the way you'd slap a mosquito.
Air resistance. She'd just discovered another major weakness of the giant form: too much air resistance. His movements were sluggish — like Ultraman running low on power.
She planted one foot on a nearby boulder, leapt three meters (~10 feet) into the air, flipped, and landed on the back of Cross's hand.
Both fists swung down together. Thud. A deep, muffled impact. The vibration tore through air, punched through the hand — shredding cell connections, pulverizing others into dust.
Internal cellular destruction meant external bruising: the back of Cross's hand bloomed black and purple. But with the nerves severed, he didn't register the loss of motor control right away.
He tried to raise his arm to fling her off — and only then realized his left hand had gone completely dead.
Not the pins-and-needles of poor circulation. Something worse: an unidentifiable necrosis spreading through the tissue.
Daisy flipped off and landed, then circled back to attack the ankle again.
Two exchanges in, she'd already mapped out his pattern. She had no idea how the enlargement process worked theoretically, but destruction had always been easier than construction — and vibration was built for destruction.
Two consecutive strikes to the same spot. Cross — ten meters (~33 feet) tall — finally buckled, face twisted in agony, dropping to one knee.
The moment he realized it was this little mosquito causing his injuries, he grabbed at boulders and uprooted trees and hurled them in a frenzy.
Daisy kept circling — left, then right — exploiting every inch of his sluggishness.
Her mouth never stopped, either. "Heart-Crusher Palm!" "Through-Arm Fist!" "Tiger-Crane Double Form Fist!"
Whatever the truth behind the techniques, old Hank was genuinely shaken. To his mind, Eastern martial arts had always carried an almost mystical reputation — and as a former S.H.I.E.L.D. senior official, he knew enough to take it seriously.
This girl is something else. He watched Daisy lap Cross more than ten times, each pass landing another hit. Cross's body was hemorrhaging from multiple sites of cellular damage; he was spitting blood in great spurts. Finally, he crashed face-first into the earth.
Daisy hadn't gone for the kill. Partly to avoid leaving a bad impression on the old Ant-Man — and partly to protect her secret.
Those giant insects had shown signs of biochemical modification, presumably weaponized. Their internal cell structure was a mess; no vibration signature would survive autopsy.
Cross was different. If she killed him now, the cellular damage she'd caused would be immediately obvious on the table. Left alive, the Pym Particles' regenerative effect would erase every trace within days.
"Doctor — can he revert to normal size? S.H.I.E.L.D. might need evidence." Daisy waited until Cross's body had recovered roughly sixty percent before pulling Hank Pym over.
Hank studied the helmet for a moment, then pressed a blue switch on the left side. Cross's body shrank rapidly, collapsing back to human scale.
Daisy stared.
The man can grow and shrink — and so can his lab coat. She almost couldn't form words. She picked up the fabric and tested it — texture, elasticity. Completely ordinary. Just a normal coat.
Marvel physics. Quantum physics' most unhinged subdivision.
Hank stood over his fallen opponent, looking pleased with himself. Daisy shook her head and used the lab coat to tie Cross's wrists.
Five minutes after the fight ended, a blast rocked the research building — and Black Widow's team finally arrived.
Black Widow's claim that she'd been chasing down the remaining hostiles hadn't been a lie. Cross's dozen-plus assistants? All dead.
The group exchanged brief updates.
The other agents hadn't seen the "giant" firsthand — they'd underestimated just how formidable large-scale transformation could be. From their perspective, if Daisy could take down a giant alone, they probably could too.
That applied even to Hank himself. Watching the "basic prototype" get taken apart by a young woman in a few minutes was... humbling. He quietly resolved to go back to the drawing board.
Two Quinjets arrived in response to Black Widow's signal. One would transport Cross to a classified facility for interrogation — the secrets of his Pym Particle scaling process, the identity of those highly trained, fanatically loyal soldiers. Cross had a long stay in a S.H.I.E.L.D. prison ahead of him.
Even with HYDRA's backing, breaking him out from under Nick Fury's nose wouldn't happen fast.
The giant insect corpses were... unanimously left undocumented. Green ichor as far as the eye could see. If Fury wanted crime scene photos, he could come take them himself.
The second Quinjet took them back to Washington. Post-mission protocol: a few days' mandatory rest.
En route, Black Widow filed her separate report. Then Hank Pym had a private word with Nick Fury over comms.
When the call ended, he fixed Daisy with an odd look. "You want to study quantum physics? Why? In all my years of observation, women drawn to physics research are genuinely rare — and you're an agent on top of that..."
Daisy filed that particular observation away without comment. Some biases weren't worth correcting mid-flight.
He was worried. S.H.I.E.L.D. had been after his Pym Particles for years — hard tactics hadn't worked, so maybe now they were trying soft ones. He'd just been rescued, though; turning on her immediately felt excessive. He wanted to probe first — gauge how much she actually knew. If her foundations were weak enough, he'd have a clean excuse to send her off to study basics.
The other female agents perked up too, curious smiles on their faces. All of them dying to hear how Daisy would talk her way through this one.