Japan wasn't Madame Gao's home turf, but she'd spent scattered centuries building roots here — deep enough that she wasn't afraid of Viper. At least not of her combat ability.
"Viper." Madame Gao crouched behind a concrete pillar, speaking in Mandarin. "I'll give you half of the Yashida fortune. Walk away. We both win."
"Grandma," Viper called back from behind her own pillar, neck craned around the edge, "you're getting on in years. Why not hand everything over? I'll manage it for you."
Watching from the shadows, Daisy blinked. She hadn't expected Viper to speak Mandarin — and decent Mandarin at that.
While talking, Viper signaled her men to converge. Many of Madame Gao's guards had already been taken out by her poison ahead of time; her forces now held the numbers advantage.
As for fighting fair? That concept didn't exist in Viper's world. Bury the enemy in firepower — that was the only strategy worth having.
A mercenary — built like a Norse strongman — shouldered a rocket launcher, aimed at Madame Gao's position, and pulled the trigger.
The rocket screamed through the air on a tail of red fire.
Madame Gao saw that words had failed her. She didn't hesitate. Power surged through her body — the hunched, frail figure seemed to gain inches as her spine snapped straight. Her feet hammered the floor in rapid sequence, and she launched forward like an arrow loosed from a bow, driving straight at Viper.
Three of Viper's ninja intercepted her on the way. Three moves. Two dead, one wounded. One ninja took a palm strike to the chest — the impact caved it inward like a broken drum — and he was dead before he hit the ground, not even a sound escaping him.
Viper let the seductive softness drain from her eyes. She flicked her tongue across her fingernails, then lunged forward to meet Madame Gao with a raking claw strike.
"Hmph." Madame Gao met her with open contempt. "You Westerners have no idea how vast and magnificent true martial arts are. To me, what you're doing looks like a child throwing punches."
She had every right to be contemptuous. Four centuries of practice, absorbing every Eastern and Western fighting discipline she could find — if she couldn't handle a woman whose greatest asset was her face, that would be a genuine injustice.
She deflected the claw strike with one hand, then snapped a palm back at Viper in the same motion. Viper wasn't helpless — she shifted two steps to the side, barely avoiding the thunderclap blow — and then used her height advantage to extend her left hand, five fingers spread wide, the tips gleaming with an eerie green light, slashing for the old woman's eyes.
Madame Gao had a healthy respect for that poison. She held back in the opening exchanges, testing and probing rather than pressing hard.
Two hulking mercenaries and two more ninja drew cold weapons and joined the pile-on.
Their contribution was mostly just noise. Against Madame Gao, even these well-trained, disciplined fighters weren't worth a single exchange.
One ninja in green threw himself at Madame Gao's legs in a desperate grapple, trying to buy the others a moment with his life. Madame Gao answered with a qi-infused punch. Every bone in his body snapped. His arms went limp at his sides, his neck twisted at an angle necks shouldn't twist, and he died without a whisper.
Covered by her subordinates buying time with their lives, Viper managed several exchanges.
Her heart sank. Where's my backup? The people dying around her were loyal — genuinely loyal — and charm was a skill, a way of leveraging what you had. It wasn't magic. She actually cared when the devoted ones fell.
From the outer ring, Daisy watched just long enough to confirm what she already suspected: Viper wasn't winning this. She could keep waiting and find a cleaner opening — but she and Viper had barely any trust between them. If Viper thought she was playing both sides, the alliance would collapse before it even started.
Daisy measured the distance. One spatial jump, and she materialized behind Madame Gao, gun leveled at the back of her skull.
Madame Gao didn't catch the bullet bare-handed. She moved fast — wrenching her head aside just enough — and then twisted around to face her new threat.
"Hmm. The two of you are working together?" She had more to say — Daisy Johnson, when did you team up with HYDRA? — but she bit down hard on the words. HYDRA was still lying low. If they wanted to surface, that was their business. If she was the one who exposed them, the fallout would land squarely on her head.
An organization that large, holding a grudge that deep — no matter how good her martial arts were, she couldn't stop every knife in the dark. She'd seen the Winter Soldier with her own eyes. Open combat she could handle. Assassination was another matter entirely, and assassination was HYDRA's specialty.
Viper shot Daisy a look — the meaning was clear: we have a deal, don't cross the line — and Daisy played innocent, as if she hadn't understood a word.
Bang.
Madame Gao's attention had split. Daisy put a round into the floor just ahead of the old woman's next footfall, forcing her to break stride. The moment her footing shifted, Daisy snapped her arm up and fired a shockwave at Madame Gao's chest.
The translucent wave of energy came in fast. Madame Gao's reaction was extraordinary — she couldn't load a full qi defense in time, but she threw a palm strike directly into the wave to meet it.
Ability versus ancient martial arts. Daisy had been hiding her power behind her gun precisely for this moment — an ambush from a direction Madame Gao wasn't watching. It worked. The palm force shattered on impact, and the remaining energy rolled forward.
Madame Gao had no clean answer. She crossed her arms in front of her body, borrowing from Tai Chi's deflection principles, trying to redirect the shockwave rather than absorb it.
And in that moment, she felt something. A strange vibrating force — almost like the zhen technique she knew from Eastern arts. She answered it with a split approach: soft hand to dissolve, hard hand to redirect, forcing the wave off course.
Daisy stared. Her jaw wanted to drop. This old woman was beyond anything she'd expected — put her next to the combat training a standard S.H.I.E.L.D. agent received, and it wouldn't even be a comparison. She thought back to that night in New York. The NYPD had gotten lucky that Madame Gao chose to flee. If she'd decided to fight, a thousand officers might not have been enough to bring her down.
Daisy stopped relying on her own version of a teleporting blitz. She rubbed her wrist, then deliberately activated the White Tiger amulet.
A silent tiger's roar moved through her — invisible, felt rather than heard.
The White Tiger's strength flooded in.
Her body wasn't dramatically stronger, but the Tiger's hunting instincts closed the gap in her close-range fighting, and her animal senses sharpened to their peak.
Hands curving into claws, she went for Madame Gao's throat.
"The White Tiger?" Madame Gao recognized it immediately. As a former Elder of K'un-Lun, she knew what that amulet was. A small surprise — she hadn't known Daisy carried one — but ultimately inconsequential. The White Tiger didn't concern her.
The two traded three rapid exchanges. The amulet sharpened Daisy's fingernails to blade-points — five daggers on each hand — and she drove them in a direct thrust at Madame Gao's forearm.
Madame Gao answered with a counter-claw of her own, fingers locking against Daisy's in the opposite direction.