Whether old man Yashida was inside that suit or not, Daisy wasn't going to stand around figuring it out. Debts get paid to the right person — Logan could handle it.
The White Tiger amulet brought her tracking and hunting instincts to their limit. She put down two red-clad ninja on the way out — both of them lurching desperately as they tried to intercept her with throwing stars — and followed the blood trail out of the castle, into the dark.
The noise of battle fell away behind her. The mountain at night was quiet, the kind of quiet that had weight. Moonlight broke through the canopy in slow shafts, and somewhere above, branches rustled with the wind. Both of them were moving fast, and the animals in the undergrowth that dared to call out quickly went silent at the pressure rolling off both women.
"Madame Gao!" Daisy pushed the White Tiger's power to full, weaving through the trees at a pace that was slowly, steadily outstripping the old woman. It was only a matter of time. "It's just us now. Turn and fight."
Madame Gao ran like she hadn't heard a word.
When the gap had closed to striking distance, the warning fired again — a spike of cold certainty. Daisy swore under her breath and sidestepped two paces, letting Madame Gao's counterattack sweep the empty air where she'd been a moment before.
The loaded strike had missed. Daisy saw the opening and took it — her hand snapping out to fling a knife directly at Madame Gao's face.
She hadn't learned much of Hawkeye's archery, but thrown blades were a different story. This one was Viper's — solid adamantium, serrated edge, coated in the same potent poison that had already cost Madame Gao half her face.
Madame Gao was already wrecked. Her qi reserves were nearly gone. Her one remaining eye was clouded with blood, the world in front of her a smear. She heard the air move — assumed shockwave, moved on instinct — and brought her hand up to intercept.
The moment the knife touched her palm, she knew she'd made a mistake.
She screamed. Half her right hand was gone, severed cleanly by the blade. The wound blazed — and behind the pain came the poison, corrosive and relentless, eating through what was left of her defenses.
Madame Gao staggered. Managed two steps. The blood flow faltered, her body's last systems failing, and with a long, raw wail, she collapsed onto her back in the undergrowth.
"Did you ever think it would end like this?" Daisy walked up and broke the old woman's other hand.
She wanted to feel this. Let herself feel it. Because of this woman — this one woman — she'd gone months without a decent night's sleep, running constantly, always looking over her shoulder. It was done. Four hundred years of training, all that cunning and viciousness, and here she was: lying in the dirt like a sick animal, howling at the sky.
Daisy looked at her. This woman who had passed her on a street a year ago, looked her over like she was an insect too small to notice — and then decided to have her killed for the sake of a fleeting impulse.
"Please... I swear I'll leave you alone. I'm finished with you..."
Madame Gao's voice had been reduced to a rasp, barely audible.
"Leave you alone?" Daisy's lip curled. "What about the people whose eyes you had gouged out on a whim? Did you leave them alone?"
The old woman kept begging. When she got nowhere, she played her last card.
"The Hand... kill me, and the Hand won't let you walk away from this."
Daisy smiled. The gun came up. "You say that like the Hand was ever going to let me walk away. We're already enemies. Killing you doesn't change the math — and you know that better than anyone." She steadied her aim. "End of the line."
"Wait — I have something to tell you — Viper is Nine—"
Daisy pulled the trigger.
A neat hole appeared in the center of Madame Gao's forehead. Without qi to armor her, she was no different from anyone else. Her feet twitched twice and went still.
"Nine what, genius." Daisy already knew exactly what she'd been about to say. The old woman had been trying to point her at HYDRA and let them finish the job. She'd calculated everything — except that Daisy already knew.
She ignored the ruin of Madame Gao's skull and went through the body methodically.
The cliché about villains carrying their life's work in a handwritten manual turned out not to apply in real life. No hidden manuals. No rare elixirs that would add eighty years to her cultivation. Nothing like that.
But Daisy's senses were sharp, and at a different vibrational frequency she caught something unexpected.
Madame Gao's right hand wore a ring — a ring with a vibrational signature unlike anything ordinary. Daisy took it without hesitation.
The design was old. Almost primitive. Carved from what looked like wood, the face sculpted into a dragon's head, the body coiling around the band and connecting head to tail in one unbroken loop. The craftsmanship was extraordinary — every scale, every whisker rendered with precision — and the longer she looked at it, the harder it was to look away.
On the inner band, two small characters were engraved in seal script: K'un-Lun.
An Elder's ring. Not a difficult conclusion. What Daisy didn't understand was why Madame Gao had still been carrying it. Nostalgic, maybe? Hard to believe — if she'd been that attached, she wouldn't have left.
No tracking function, either. If there were, the three of them would've been hunted down by K'un-Lun masters long ago.
Some kind of curse? Put it on and you can't take it off?
She ran a few tests with the body. It came off without any resistance — no locking mechanism she could detect.
She didn't put it on herself. Instead, she held it carefully and sent a light pulse of vibrational energy into it, trying to read its frequency.
K'un-Lun existed in another dimension, and only crossed over to Earth every ten years. She wanted to understand what that frequency felt like.
She didn't get far before the ring seemed to start running some kind of authentication sequence. It resisted her at first — and then, somewhere in her frequency, it caught something familiar. A trace of qi. Something it recognized, even if it couldn't place it. It hesitated.
Daisy was about to cut the connection when the ring reached out and copied a fragment of her vibrational signature, then went quiet.
She scratched her head. Something had settled in her awareness — a new thread of connection. The ring had, in its own fashion, decided to accept her.
She checked the stored information carefully. No power boosts. No wise old spirit waiting inside to give lectures. It was, as far as she could tell, simply a symbol of Elder status within K'un-Lun.
She put it on anyway, grinning.
As a precaution against the psychic threats that K'un-Lun's Elders had encountered over the centuries, the ring had been designed with a specific function: a mental shield. The energy embedded in it could protect the wearer against psychic influence and mind control.
Nothing was absolute, of course. The ring was an object; it had limits. Xavier with Cerebro could probably punch through it without breaking a sweat. But it was already a significant upgrade over the anti-mind-control patches S.H.I.E.L.D. had issued her. Combined with her own limited psychic resistance, it would hold against most threats.