Daisy wasn't surprised at all. Three hundred meters, three thousand meters, thirty thousand meters — it didn't matter. Juggernaut would walk away from any of them.
He and Viper shared a basic structure: both were pieces on a board controlled by someone far above them.
Cyttorak. A high-dimensional demon of the Crimson Cosmos, and the source of Juggernaut's power.
By Daisy's estimation, Cyttorak was simply too powerful to have anything meaningful to do. An entity of that tier, bored out of his mind with no one to talk to and nothing to occupy the endless stretch of time, reached down and dropped a ruby saturated with his own power somewhere on Earth, and waited to see who picked it up. Whoever did — man, woman, short, tall, whatever — became Juggernaut: roughly nine feet (nearly 3 meters) tall, over 1,700 pounds (about 800 kg), running on instinct while the demon in the background held the reins like someone controlling a puppet.
If the host were killed, the power would simply find someone new. Better not.
But letting this particular host wander off wasn't an option either. Daisy had retained a fair amount of Viper's pharmacological knowledge — the complex formulations were beyond her, but sedatives were straightforward. Before the aircraft left Wakanda, she'd synthesized a sizable batch. She loaded a dosage calibrated for a large elephant, multiplied it by ten, and administered it to Juggernaut.
Even with demonic healing restoring his tissues, the conservative estimate was a solid two days of unconsciousness.
With Storm ending the storm and joining the cleanup, the Dora Milaje wrapped up their engagement against the mercenary remnants shortly after. Enhanced individual skill and tactical instincts only carried so far when lightning was falling from the sky. The mercenaries never had a real chance.
That left only T'Challa and Batroc still going.
T'Challa was too young, and too eager to perform in front of Storm. He was getting increasingly reckless as the fight dragged on.
Batroc, meanwhile, had spent the entire engagement running into Vibranium and getting nowhere. In simple terms: he'd been attacking for a full round and still hadn't scratched the armor. He'd drained some of T'Challa's stamina — but that was all he had to show for it.
He'd considered pulling the trick that worked on Captain America — baiting the opponent into setting aside the shield advantage and meeting him on pure technique — but there was no equivalent move against Black Panther. He couldn't exactly ask the man to strip.
They also couldn't understand each other. T'Challa's English carried a distinctly African cadence. The French, in general, know English perfectly well — they simply pretend not to. Batroc was an exception even among them; he'd spent all his time on fighting and had genuinely neglected the language, leaving him with something functional at best.
The two of them had several attempted exchanges that went nowhere and then gave up and went back to fighting in silence.
After another dozen or more traded blows, Batroc's outlook grew bleak.
T'Challa wasn't going to become a superhero on equipment and genetics alone — his natural ability was genuinely elite. This fight had exposed a dozen things Batroc did better than him, and T'Challa was actively incorporating them in real time. The man learned while he fought.
"I surrender!" Batroc had never been burdened by excessive pride. Nick Fury would later hire him, which said everything about his relationship with loyalty. When winning was clearly impossible, he put his hands up without ceremony. He was done.
An opponent surrendering outright left T'Challa slightly at a loss. He'd wanted to win more conclusively. Good breeding won out, though — he said nothing and simply produced restraints.
Batroc and the remaining mercenaries were cuffed. The group reunited — T'Challa, Daisy, Storm — and loaded Juggernaut onto the aircraft. They flew straight back to Wakanda.
Inside the palace, the old king came to meet them immediately, anxious for a report. When he heard that the prisoners were all secured, the heavyset old man visibly deflated with relief.
He needed to know how this group had located Wakanda's entrance.
The interrogation was quick and inconclusive. The ordinary mercenaries knew almost nothing — they'd simply followed Batroc in. He'd led them through the jungle in what felt like a maze: walk forward a mile, retreat five hundred meters (about a third of a mile), rest thirty minutes, move eighty meters (about 260 feet) west, then north. The pattern had no logic that the mercenaries could follow. Most of them genuinely had no idea how they'd gotten in.
Juggernaut's interrogation was equally brief. The assembled team of Wakanda's most experienced interrogators reached a unanimous conclusion: the man was simply too dim.
That left Batroc.
Whips, batons, hallucinogenic plants — they ran through the toolkit. Batroc maintained his innocence, and the evidence bore him out. Everything had been brokered through intermediaries. He'd been given a retainer and no actual mission brief — he hadn't known what he was looking for in Africa. The entry route into Wakanda had arrived in his personal email from a hacker contact.
When nothing useful emerged, the interrogators passed their report up to the old king and the elder council.
T'Challa, Storm, and Daisy attended what was officially being called a "royal consultation." Their respective credentials: the crown prince; a neighboring nation's holy woman and the prince's partner; and one person who had technically wandered in by accident and had assigned herself the title of International Observer.
It was also Daisy's first real look at the four tribal leaders.
She had to admit: these people matched the country. Unusual was one word for it.
The Merchant Tribe's leader was a wizened old woman, all sharp angles and wiry frame. She had a gaudy wrap of clashing fabric wound around her head, enormous earrings that pulled at her earlobes, and narrow, calculating eyes. She leaned on a walking stick. Ever since Daisy had dealt with Madame Gao, she'd developed an involuntary hostility toward this particular silhouette. She gave the woman a sidelong look and moved on.
The Border Tribe's leader was a broad-shouldered middle-aged man with a chocolate-brown complexion, his face densely covered in ritual scarification. The more marks, according to tradition, the higher the rank.
The River Tribe's leader was a lean middle-aged man — the queen's brother. He had plates in his lower lip and earlobes, the distended lip parting every time he opened his mouth. He appeared to consider himself quite stylish; he was wearing a bright emerald-green suit. Daisy found the whole picture deeply unpleasant.
The Mining Tribe's leader was a heavyset older woman — comparatively the most conventional-looking of the four. Her hair was braided into more than a dozen tight plaits, each one tipped with small decorative ornaments.
The three visitors were seated in the observer's section. The meeting came to order.
The old king wasn't a fool — quite the opposite. He'd already guessed that his brother had probably set this disaster in motion, and if the matter was examined too closely it would trace back to him as well, since he was the one who'd allowed the entry path to exist in the first place. To protect himself while ensuring his son's clean succession, he needed to steer the discussion.
"How should this situation be handled? I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts." He opened the floor.
"Execute all the outsiders. We cannot allow Wakanda's location to leak." The River Tribe leader stated his position immediately, hostility undisguised. The other three elders exchanged glances — some nodding, some shaking their heads, one letting their gaze drift with studied casualness toward Daisy and Storm.
Daisy kept her expression neutral. The statement was transparently opportunistic — a pretext to remove Storm and clear the field for one of his own people to become the future queen.
The personal politics had nothing to do with her. But Daisy had a long memory. She filed the River Tribe leader's name under future debts and moved on.
Plate-face has no idea what he just started.