Daisy took the envelope and looked it over, a cold smile creeping onto her face.
Brown paper, antique-looking — the kind that tried too hard to seem old. What made her eyes narrow was the name written on the front in brushstroke calligraphy: Daisy Johnson — Personal. To be fair, the calligraphy itself was genuinely impressive, better than anything most modern masters could produce. But that didn't make it less irritating.
This had Madame Gao's fingerprints all over it.
Dealing with an old monster with no real sense of honor meant staying cautious. She'd already had the officer who handed it to her confirm the envelope's exterior was clean — but the inside was another matter entirely.
She ran it through the few detection methods she knew, found nothing, then left the scene and tracked down a tattooed yakuza street tough at a corner to open it for her. The young man was visibly unhappy about it. Under the barrel of Daisy's gun, though, he kept his complaints to himself.
He held the letter up so she could read it.
Madame Gao's wording was almost comically polite — something about admiring the moonlight, something about the Yashida family cordially extending an invitation to visit Kochi Prefecture on the island of Shikoku. The whole tone read like a letter to an old friend.
Daisy knew exactly what it was: a trap. A blatant one.
Any ordinary woman would've been terrified by now.
Any hot-blooded protagonist would've charged in solo, guns blazing, fighting through a hail of bullets to save both the hero and the girl.
She was neither terrified nor stupid. Knowing a trap existed and jumping in anyway? That wasn't brave — that was a death wish. Her solution was simple: find backup.
S.H.I.E.L.D.'s operatives in Japan were too weak, and their loyalties were muddled at best. She wouldn't trust them.
What she needed was an ally with substantial manpower at their disposal. Madame Viper came to mind immediately.
HYDRA and the Hand had once shared common ground — both were war's losers, clustering together for warmth, pooling resources out of sheer necessity. But sixty-some years later, things had curdled badly. The stronger HYDRA factions wanted to swallow the Hand whole, while the Hand's Five Fingers — all K'un-Lun elders exiled from their order — possessed centuries of life and looked down on HYDRA's leadership with undisguised contempt. The friction between them had become impossible to ignore.
Baron Strucker, Doctor Whitehall — their focus was squarely on Europe and the Americas. Only Madame Viper operated primarily in East Asia. And to believe she and the Hand were one happy family? Daisy wasn't buying it.
Madame Gao would never bow down. Neither would Viper.
It was deeply ironic, Daisy realized — HYDRA might actually be useful to her.
Finding Viper wasn't hard. After spending an entire night using her vibrations to track frequencies, she'd gotten very familiar with Viper's signature. A half-loop around Tokyo by cab later, she found the woman's current hideout — not far from the warehouse where the "rough interrogation" had taken place. Daisy had no idea Viper had caught a bad cold, so she was genuinely curious why she hadn't moved farther away.
Viper was holed up in an ordinary rental apartment. Not a trace of the powerful Asian crime boss about it.
Once Daisy confirmed the perimeter was clear, she slipped in through the window.
Her boots hit the floor and someone in the bedroom stirred. The unmistakable sound of a pistol being cocked.
Daisy pressed herself against the doorframe. The other person didn't move either. The room fell absolutely silent.
She pushed out a wave of her new invisible resonance scan — no ambush, just one faint, weakened life signature.
Huh? Only then did she notice something was wrong with Viper.
Viper had always projected a lethal, delicate beauty — the kind of woman who looked like a strong wind might topple her, but was in reality extremely hard to kill. She'd made a contract with Chthon, the lord of dark magic, after all.
Yet right now, what Daisy sensed was barely a step above a candle flame in a storm.
"Hey," she said through the wall, her tone matter-of-fact. "I'm here as an old acquaintance. I let you walk once before — I'm not here to finish you off now. Keep this attitude up and I'll just leave."
Three seconds passed. A gun clattered across the floor somewhere in the other room. Daisy ran another resonance sweep to be sure, then walked in.
One week. That's all it had taken to transform Madame Viper completely.
The woman looked wrecked. Those famously seductive fox-like eyes were now raccoon eyes, ringed with dark circles. The beauty mark at the corner of her mouth had lost its allure. Her carefully kept golden hair hung in damp, limp strands against her face. And from where Daisy was standing, Viper's usually impressive figure had... noticeably diminished.
"What happened to you? Poisoned?" Daisy genuinely didn't understand. Viper had a contract with Chthon — couldn't the great demon lord at least cover a cold?
"I... I am not poisoned!" Viper sputtered, too furious to get the words out cleanly. She was the foremost poison expert alive — what toxin could possibly take her down? She was sick. Just sick.
Daisy put it together quickly and nearly choked trying not to laugh. Viper had been lying in that bed alone for a week, trying to tough it out. Ironically, people with robust immune systems often got hit hardest when something minor like a cold finally broke through their defenses.
When Chthon had written up that contract, he probably hadn't considered that his contractor could be laid low by something as mundane as the common cold.
Viper was practically dying, and the great demon lord hadn't sent a single ounce of life force through the contract — whether out of indifference or genuine helplessness, Daisy suspected both.
She'd had a rough week herself, but finding someone worse off than her made her feel inexplicably better. She finally let herself laugh out loud.
"You bastard! How dare you laugh! This is all your fault — your power did this to me!" Viper was livid. Years of carefully laid plans within the Yashida clan, nearly ready to harvest, and it had all fallen apart at the worst possible moment. Not only had her investment benefitted someone else — she'd nearly lost her life on top of it.
"Oh, you want to yell at me? Fine, I'm leaving."
"Don't go — help me find some fever medicine. I'll owe you one." Viper scrambled to add more leverage, forcing herself to sound stronger: "I've already found the person you're looking for. But I can't tell you now — you have to save me first."
Daisy wasn't moved. Viper was burning up — what useful information could she possibly have? It was obviously a bluff. And "owing her one"? If Viper recovered and then poisoned her and let her go, that would technically count as repaying the debt. Daisy needed things she could see, things she could actually hold.
Watching Daisy remain unmoved, Viper grew quietly desperate. She knew that without something concrete, she wasn't getting out of this one.
She cycled through every piece of intel she had — something that would actually move Daisy, without dragging herself into something worse.
Nearly two full minutes passed before her feverish mind landed on something: "Nazis. I know where the Nazi remnants are hiding."
That made Daisy stop cold.
She'd already figured out her situation. She felt a little bad about what it meant for Hill, but she still wanted to climb the ranks — and she could always deal with Fury later, make Hill her deputy instead. To get there, she needed achievements that would genuinely shake people.