Daisy was quiet for a moment, running through her memory carefully. "Is the Yashida clan's patriarch still alive?"
Fury considered it. "He should be. We haven't received notice of his death."
He opened a drawer and set a credential wallet on the desk in front of her. "Your rank has been set at Level 5. SHIELD will cover the Adamantium costs."
She looked at the eagle insignia on the cover and hesitated.
SHIELD was a trap with good benefits. Walk in and you didn't walk back out easily. But standing still wasn't an option in this world. Having a mature, massive intelligence organization behind you carried advantages she couldn't manufacture alone. She weighed the calculus.
Fury didn't rush her. He simply waited.
"All right." She picked up the credential wallet.
Whatever the future looked like, SHIELD had treated her well. Up to now the balance had been almost entirely in her favor — she'd taken and taken and barely given anything back. And Hill's conversation, weeks ago — that had been Hill asking her to stay, in her own indirect way.
Fury looked completely unsurprised, as though he'd already written her answer into the script. Not a trace of guilt about steering a young woman into the spy life.
"Now that you're one of us, complete the mission as soon as possible." He reached for the documents on his desk, signaling the meeting was over.
"Hold on." Daisy stopped him.
"Does SHIELD have equipment for blocking telepathy? If I run into Professor X and he tries to get into my head — what then?" She had too many secrets. Psychics were nightmares she needed to plan around. Her vibrational ability offered essentially no defense against mental intrusion. She knew Professor X practiced restraint, but she couldn't count on every telepathic mutant in Japan sharing that quality.
Fury privately thought Professor X was unlikely to target a SHIELD operative, but he acknowledged the precaution was sound. The instinct to maintain a threat assessment at all times was exactly what good field work looked like.
He opened another drawer and produced a small case. "Developed by our science division. A high-tech patch — sits flat behind the ear, completely invisible. Full immunity from mental control is beyond current technology, but if someone targets you telepathically, the patch triggers a high-intensity thermal stimulus in your nervous system. Enough to give you time to break contact and run."
He paused. "Also — your ability. Don't use it in public areas. Too difficult to cover up afterward."
He picked up a report. The meeting was over.
Daisy left and went back to her room.
She opened the case first. The packaging was meticulous — the kind of nested-box approach common to high-end gift packaging: outer box, middle box, inner box, layers of foil and film wrapping. She unwrapped it all to find a transparent patch the size of a thumbnail.
SHIELD and its budget allocation, she thought darkly.
The patch had no immediately identifiable material. It felt slightly textured against the fingertip, but not quite like metal. Held up to the light, she could see infinitesimally fine particles inside — an intricate, cross-hatched lattice like a circuit board in miniature. Looking too long made her head spin.
She pressed it behind her ear. Nothing she could detect. The patch conformed completely to the skin — colorless, invisible, barely a raised edge if you knew where to press.
There was almost certainly a tracking device embedded in it as well. She didn't care much. SHIELD fed her, housed her, provided weapons, tactical gear, credentials. If they'd already slipped a micro-tracker into any of her equipment, she wouldn't necessarily have found it. One more didn't change anything.
Technical solutions aside, she'd rather develop an actual mental shield. The problem was that everyone capable of teaching her was a serious power in their own right — and virtually all of them had telepathic capabilities of their own. Approaching any of them was practically volunteering to have her mind read. Not an option.
For now: maintain distance from telepaths. Strengthen mental discipline through practice. Learn what meditation methods she could. Use the patch as backup. That would have to be enough.
She packed quickly. At the airport, she showed her credentials and boarded a flight to Tokyo.
On the plane, she opened the mission briefing materials and began cross-referencing SHIELD's internal records with her own memory.
In every official account, the Yashida clan's rise was dated to the post-World War II recovery. Clean, simple, respectable.
What she knew was different. The Yashidas were HYDRA. The clan's stronghold on Shikoku was one of HYDRA's active satellite bases.
After the Red Skull's defeat and Germany's collapse, the surviving ideologues of the Third Reich had fused with Japanese militarists to form the modern HYDRA. They'd rebuilt in the shadows, bankrolled by a massive war chest of looted wealth, quietly expanding for decades until they'd become what they were today.
The Yashida clan's so-called role in helping Japan "rebuild" was in reality a long, slow project to seize control of the country's core institutions from within.
In Kyoto, a HYDRA base codenamed "Crown" served as their financial nerve center. Off the coast of Okinawa, an underwater installation codenamed "Ichor" sat submerged in the Pacific. And then there was the Yashida stronghold itself. Japan, a country not especially large, housed no fewer than three HYDRA facilities. "Ichor" alone reportedly held fifteen thousand elite troops. The others wouldn't be smaller.
Factor in the Hand, whose relationship with HYDRA was cooperative but tense, and the picture became even more complicated.
She wasn't overly worried. HYDRA was still operating in concealment mode — without a significant clash of interests, they wouldn't expose themselves.
The most likely threat she'd face was one of HYDRA's key operatives in Japan: Viper, a woman who'd earned the title "Madame HYDRA," had defected from the organization multiple times and rejoined just as often. What her current status with HYDRA actually was, Daisy couldn't say with any confidence.
Her own framework was simple: Help where needed. Let Logan handle the big problems. When outmatched, run. She'd learned that philosophy from Fury himself.
The plane landed at Narita International Airport as the evening sun was fading.
Daisy emerged in a camel-colored trench coat, slim tailored trousers, a thick scarf wound at her neck, and a Burberry-checked tote bag in hand.
Her contact was waiting, easy to find.
The man — black suit, no expression — didn't react at all to her appearance. He'd clearly been briefed. A car door opened. They left the airport.
She tested the driver with a few questions in Japanese on the way. Her Japanese was serviceable, but he wasn't forthcoming — he was strictly there to transport her, he said. Nothing beyond that.
She let it go and opened her tablet, pulling up public information on the Yashida Corporation.
By every outward indicator, even with the old patriarch in retirement, the company under its new leadership was thriving. Momentum intact. Prospects healthy.
What she knew told a different story. The old man was a scheming ingrate who had never abandoned his obsession with Wolverine's regenerative ability — not for a single day. He'd retreated from visibility but never from control, still pulling every string remotely, funneling enormous sums of company capital into acquiring Adamantium on the global market.
Billions of dollars spent. Every trace of Adamantium on the open global market swept up and locked away.
From the outside, the Yashida Corporation looked prosperous. On the inside, its financial architecture was fractured — the kind of hairline crack in a load-bearing wall that, when it finally gave, would take everything else down with it.
And the person Fury had sent her to meet was the patriarch's son — nominally in charge, realistically a puppet: Shingen Yashida.