The ring could store ambient energy over time — her own vibrational frequency counted as a source — and with enough charge, raising a powerful mental shield would be trivial.
"This is perfect." Daisy was more than satisfied. Because the ring was a construct from another dimension, ordinary people simply couldn't perceive it — entirely in line with how she preferred to operate.
She retrieved Viper's knife from the forest floor, steeled herself, and decapitated Madame Gao. Then she opened a portal at random and dropped the head through it.
The Hand had a habit of bringing people back. Could they manage that with the body and the head on opposite sides of wherever that portal led? As for cloning — well, that was a problem for another day.
She searched the body once more, then used Viper's distinctive knife to stab the corpse twice through the heart and drag the blade across the wound back and forth, leaving the weapon's signature marks clearly embedded in the flesh. The message: Viper did this.
Whether the Hand actually believed it was beside the point.
Satisfied there was nothing left to do, she turned and ran back.
By the time she reached the castle, the fighting had mostly wound down. Viper's mercenaries and Madame Gao's guards had both pulled back once their employers were out of the picture — one unconscious, one gone — and the two ninja factions had called it when they had no one left to fight for.
Only Logan was still going, trading blows with the Silver Samurai.
The Samurai's technique was rigid — he had two moves, a horizontal cut and a vertical chop, and he rotated between them — but the massive blade was channeling some kind of energy amplification through its interior system. The edge ran red-hot and hit like a freight train, shearing through every piece of interior furnishing it touched as if the wood and stone weren't there. Even Logan had to respect the reach, sidestepping rather than risk being split in half.
The problem was that Logan's offense was suffering. His claws could barely score the surface of the armor — it was simply too thick.
Standing there absorbing hits without any real way to answer them wasn't a winning position. Things were looking grim.
Shingen's swordsmanship was useless against a man-shaped tank made entirely of adamantium. He'd retreated to the sideline and was just watching.
Daisy jumped in and traded two exchanges herself before backing off. The Samurai's fighting skill was nowhere near Madame Gao's level — night and day between them — but it didn't matter. Every attack she threw was absorbed by the armor before it got anywhere close to the person inside.
She could still help from the outside. Calculating the timing and position, she sent a localized vibration through the floor, just enough to destabilize the ground under the Samurai's next step.
The massive armored body was sluggish. One foot went down on compromised ground and it lurched — a small stumble, but that was enough. Logan had been looking for exactly this. His claws found the gap between the helmet and the neck plate, hooked in, and with both hands he wrenched the entire helmet free.
The face underneath was ancient. Pale as chalk, covered in liver spots, the cheeks burning with an unnatural flush that stood out like paint against white paper.
"He's still alive?" Logan sounded genuinely thrown. Beside him, Shingen's expression went cold and hard, and Mariko could only stare.
This was Daisy's first look at old man Yashida. He was far gone — his natural lifespan had burned out long ago. What she felt from him through her vibrational sense was closer to a corpse than a living person. He was being kept going by a cocktail of drugs and the Samurai suit's life support system feeding off each other.
Madame Gao's poison — apparently not up to Viper's standards — had destroyed his mind completely. His eyes were wild and unfocused, his lips moving in a continuous, soundless mumble. He was barely there.
The fight ended fast. The life support inside the armor was breached. Within thirty seconds, the toxins in his system overwhelmed whatever had been holding them back, and the old man was gone. The Silver Samurai — billions of dollars' worth of adamantium engineering — became a very expensive piece of scrap.
"Rise and shine." Daisy crouched beside Viper and tapped her lightly on the smooth skin of her back. This woman had probably been injured at first, then decided to stay down once she realized how the wind was blowing.
Viper took it in stride. Not a trace of embarrassment. She accepted her knife back and slowly sat up.
"All dead?" she asked quietly.
Daisy knew what she meant. "Both of them. Their assets are unclaimed — the money, the territory, all of it. How much you can take depends on what you can manage."
"Dealing with men is something I'm very good at." Viper stood, broke into a run, and disappeared into the dark without a backward glance.
Shingen left shortly after. He had a city to return to and a family empire to reclaim, and the ambition in his eyes looked like a man finding a second wind. He reached out to the Kochi Prefecture police on his own — they didn't know he'd spent months as a figurehead — and at the word of the Yashida head, a helicopter was dispatched within the hour to take him back to Tokyo.
Mariko was busy. She found her way to the family's underground cells and freed Yukio — her childhood friend, the mutant with a trace of precognition — who emerged looking thoroughly confused about how her visions had missed this by such a wide margin.
"Logan..." Mariko approached the Silver Samurai's fallen bulk. She looked at the old face inside, half-familiar, half not. She didn't know what to say.
Logan didn't look much more comfortable, for his part. Old man Yashida had been greedy and treacherous — the betrayal had been entirely his — but Logan had still killed the man, and the fact that he'd had reasons didn't make it something worth bragging about.
Yukio watched them both with undisguised envy, her wide eyes darting from Mariko to Logan and back like a jealous goldfish.
Daisy left all three of them to sort out their feelings. She plugged into the Yashida corporate network and started pulling research files.
Fifty years of genetic study. The old man had been thorough. The primary focus was mutants — and of all the data sets, two dominated: Logan and Sebastian Shaw.
He'd spent decades on both. Logan's blood had been easy enough to collect — the man fought like he was daring the universe to kill him, and a meticulous collector could scrape together quite a bit. Shaw's blood was a more interesting question. That kind of access implied substantial back-channel dealings with powerful people back in the States.
Neither set was something she could just inject herself with — she was Inhuman, Logan was a mutant, and the cross-contamination risks were unknowable — but that didn't mean she couldn't learn from the research.
She copied all the experimental data to her private server, packaged the blood samples, opened a portal to the rented safe house she kept in Kochi Prefecture, and sent everything through. A quick call to her housekeeper handled the rest — pickup and transport back to New York.
Then, following Viper's directions, she hunted through several encrypted files and found what she'd been looking for: Nazi records.
She added two layers of encryption over the relevant files and staged a clean "decryption trace" that made it look like she'd just cracked them herself.
She read everything twice, checked for any inconsistencies, and found none. Then she sent a priority encrypted message to the Director.
Fury arrived fast. Daisy suspected he'd been in Japan this whole time, staying out of sight.
He came off the helicopter moving fast, and she met him at the landing.
Nick Fury's expression was grim. "What kind of intelligence warrants a priority alert?"
Daisy walked him through it on the spot. "Shingen mentioned months ago that a significant portion of Yashida Industries' capital had been funneled into material purchases — supplies, equipment — and then gone dark. I just finished cracking their encrypted files. Look at this."
Fury read through everything. Daisy pulled up several additional reports, each one telling the same story between the lines.
Antarctica. A secret Nazi base.