She couldn't help herself. "Lady, did you even consider wind resistance when you picked that outfit?"
Viper scoffed. "Wind resistance? What's that supposed to mean? I never run from anyone — no man has ever slipped through my fingers."
The two of them were talking completely past each other, on entirely different wavelengths.
Daisy would sooner die than wear something that impractical. She changed the subject fast. "Where's the guy?"
Viper looked mildly offended — they'd been having a perfectly decent conversation, and now Daisy was asking about him. Still, she clapped her hands. Within ten minutes, her men dragged someone in like a sack of garbage: a muscular Black man with a mess of lopsided braids covering his head.
"This guy actually knows something useful," Viper said. "He wasn't easy to find, either. Impressive fighter — he caught us off guard and killed seven of my men, injuring over a dozen more. We finally took him down with poison gas." She was making sure Daisy understood she hadn't been careless, and that completing this task had cost her.
Daisy acknowledged it. The job had been difficult. The U.S. military had so many covert units that even the Secretary of Defense didn't know about all of them — each one operating under code names and aliases. Finding a single person in that maze was like searching for a needle in a haystack. The fact that Viper had managed it spoke to just how deep her connections ran in certain circles.
She looked at the man before her — Erik Killmonger, the one who would one day take the codename Killmonger. The sight made her stomach turn. He carved a scar into his body for every life he took, and Daisy, with her mild phobia of clustered patterns, took one glance and snapped her gaze away toward Viper instead.
"Thank you for your help." Empty pleasantries, but they cost nothing.
Viper wasn't accustomed to that kind of expression. She only grunted in response.
"His belongings — was there anything particularly... noticeable?"
Viper waved dismissively at one of her men, who brought over a worn woven sack. "I pulled everything from his Swiss account as well. I didn't look through it myself." A pointed remark.
Daisy didn't care either way. She tore the bag open and dumped everything onto the hotel's expensive carpet.
A rhino horn, a cup, and a few ornaments with a distinctive style.
She ignored the junk. Her gaze went straight to a brown leather notebook.
She flipped through it quickly. The pages were dense with handwriting — the author had written in two languages, apparently worried future readers might not understand either one alone: English and something else she didn't recognize.
The strokes were pressed hard into the paper, as if the writer had tried to carve the words in, yet the handwriting was precise and even.
"What language is this?" Viper leaned in, curious. "The characters look very compact. Some African tribal dialect?"
Despite her reputation, Viper had a genuine gift for language — she'd taught herself nearly every tongue in the world through sheer stubbornness, no powers required. In that way, she was something of a prodigy.
Daisy's talents clearly lay elsewhere. She only spoke Mandarin, English, Spanish, and Japanese — respectable by civilian standards, but in the world of intelligence and espionage, she was firmly at the bottom of the ladder.
"It's an African language," she answered offhandedly, most of her attention still on the notebook. Killmonger's father had apparently anticipated his son might not be able to read the native script alone, so he'd written the journal bilingually in both Wakandan and English. Convenient.
Tucked between the pages was a royal ring — Killmonger's father's. Daisy pocketed it without a second thought.
She had no intention of impersonating royalty. But the ring was exquisitely crafted, and the metal was unlike anything she'd ever seen. Vibranium, almost certainly.
It amused her, in a dark way, that Wakanda treated every scrap of leaked Vibranium like a violation of something sacred — when they were sitting on deposits so vast they'd been mining for thousands of years and barely made a dent. The amount that trickled out into the world wasn't even a rounding error.
And then there was the Busan chase. A full car made entirely of Vibranium had been torn apart in that fight, and not one of them had bothered to collect the pieces. They chased a fragment the size of a hammer and lost an entire vehicle in the process. The priorities made no sense.
"Looks like you found what you came for," Viper remarked, her tone silky.
"I did. And I really do owe you one." A pleasantry — but she meant this one.
Viper considered for a moment. "Then I suppose you no longer need me to come to Africa with you? You understand — I'm very occupied right now. There's a... small matter involving the Nazis that's causing me some complications."
Daisy's feelings on the matter were complicated. Their relationship was tangled to begin with — an odd, accidental weave of conflicting interests and shared circumstances that had somehow knotted them together.
Having Viper along in Africa would be useful. But she'd also need watching. The benefits and risks balanced out almost exactly.
She weighed it, then asked with unusual seriousness, "Ophelia — are we friends?"
Ophelia Sarkissian. Viper's real name, glimpsed in a memory she'd once been made to share.
Viper's eyes shifted. But under Daisy's steady gaze, she slowly lifted her head and met her eyes directly. Her expression moved through several things before settling. Nearly half a minute passed.
"If there's no conflict of interest," she said at last, with a trace of hesitation, "then... yes. I suppose we are."
"Then would using your connections to hire a crew for me — to go to this man's homeland — damage your interests?"
Daisy tilted her head toward the unconscious Killmonger.
"What kind of job?"
"Disruption. Arson. Casualties. Whatever they feel like doing, really — the louder the better."
Viper tilted her head. "And you? What's your role in all this?"
"I'm obviously the good guy." Daisy gave her a sideways look, as if questioning her intelligence.
Viper covered her mouth and laughed.
That was how they reached their agreement — no pretense, no euphemisms. Their relationship moved one small step forward.
Over the next few days, Daisy settled into the hotel. She waited for Viper to construct a new identity for her, and spent her time studying the Wakandan language.
As for Killmonger — everything he knew about Wakanda came from his father's journal anyway. The man himself wasn't particularly useful. Viper had her people take him away. Whether they erased his memory or dissected him afterward was none of Daisy's concern.
As for why Killmonger had delayed returning to Wakanda — waiting another ten years before making his move — Daisy suspected he simply wasn't ready. Not physically, not mentally. Without the kind of accumulated advantage that came from knowing the whole story in advance, approaching a country of legend required serious preparation.
One week later, Daisy left Southeast Asia and boarded a flight to Nairobi, Kenya.
Viper wouldn't go herself. Instead, she worked through intermediaries — seven or eight layers of separation — to route a mercenary crew toward the target.
They departed at roughly the same time, but Daisy had deliberately spent several days playing around with the lions on the road, keeping herself a few days behind schedule. That was the plan.
She hadn't known in advance that Viper would manage to hire Batroc. The French-Algerian mercenary was built at the absolute peak of human physical conditioning — a former Olympic weightlifter with legs like iron pistons. Sharp-minded, technically sound across every fighting discipline, with a specialty in kicks. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, he'd traded blows with Rogers on something close to equal terms. His credentials spoke for themselves.
In Nairobi, Daisy rented a jeep and drove north along the highway. Following the route detailed in Killmonger's father's journal, there was a narrow path near the Ethiopia border along Lake Turkana — a path that wound into the ring of mountains surrounding Wakanda.
On the seventh day, she left the road and entered the open expanse of raw, ancient savanna.