Mandarin raised his right hand, and the ring on his ring finger blazed to life.
The Atomic Cutter ring.
This ring severed the molecular bonds in any material it targeted. A silver thread, hundreds of meters long, shot from the ring — and Mandarin pivoted on the spot, sweeping a full 360 degrees in a single, continuous motion.
Half a block of soldiers, weapons, and buildings was cut cleanly in half.
It was the highest single-strike casualty count of the entire engagement. Some died immediately. Most collapsed into the blood-soaked street, screaming.
Those who'd been outside the arc — through luck or positioning — hit their absolute breaking point. Court-martials, the Secretary of Defense, military law — none of it meant anything anymore. Someone screamed, "I quit!" — and that was it. A cascade of men dropped their gear and ran, howling, throwing everything they had into the sprint. Elite soldiers. Decorated veterans. Training, hardware — none of it made them feel safe, and the only remaining option was to run. Helmets and rifles hit the ground in a trail behind them, and still they felt they weren't moving fast enough.
Inside the command center, both generals turned to face each other with stiff necks and dead eyes. Neither spoke first. They'd both seen the fear in each other's faces.
Enlisted men could run — there was legal and historical precedent for that, especially in a democratic military. But generals couldn't abandon Kandahar. How would they explain it back home? One old man broke our entire garrison by himself?
Daisy's own pulse had ticked up, not that she'd admit it out loud.
The atomic cutter was brutal in the most absolute sense. One sweep, one line of silver light, and everything in its path was halved. She hadn't seen any upper limit to the ring's range or damage yet. The activation speed was terrifyingly fast — she wasn't confident she could block it herself.
But her memory and observation skills were sharp. And she'd noticed something.
"Generals — look at his right ring finger. After that last strike, the ring on that finger has gone dark."
Both generals squinted at the feed for a long moment. They didn't have Daisy's vision or recall. Rings that glowed, rings that didn't — honestly, it all looked the same to them.
Fortunately, the instruments could do what their eyes couldn't. A staff officer ran a sensor scan and confirmed: the energy signature on that one ring had dropped significantly below the other nine following the burst activation.
"So it can only fire once?" The Lieutenant General ventured carefully.
Daisy had to soften the hope: "It looks like a cooldown rather than a hard limit. But it won't be available again for a while."
The staff officers ran their own calculations and reached similar conclusions. Both generals let out a quiet breath.
"Both of you — we underestimated him. Plan A is over. Initiate Plan B. First priority is covering the survivors — get every man out." Daisy's voice was flat and deliberate.
The order went out. Three more Raptors launched.
Sidewinder missiles from three separate angles slammed Mandarin's barrier simultaneously. The jet pilots played it smart — fire and break, fire and break, never lingering long enough to present a clean target. Mandarin hesitated, weighed options, considered giving chase — but to him, all pilots looked much the same from their memories, and three aircraft splitting in three different directions was a problem he couldn't solve cleanly. He had no way to be everywhere at once. He let the planes go and turned back to the infantry.
The jets kept circling, kept peppering him with missiles whenever his attention shifted elsewhere. When he moved to engage, they ran. When he stopped, they came back.
He couldn't catch an F-22 at Mach 2 (≈1,500 mph / ≈2,400 km/h) under his own power. That was a fact he had to accept.
Harassed from above, hunting stragglers on the ground — the remaining soldiers, broken from their formations and cut off from their units, couldn't withstand him. Even with dispersal orders already issued, the casualties were severe.
A trail of the fallen marked his path through the streets.
After five drawn-out minutes, the last surviving American soldiers dissolved into the city's landscape. He lost interest. He stopped tracking individuals and walked directly toward the base.
Experience told him to expect traps. He expected them. After the concussion-grenade ambush, he'd already adapted his defenses. What else could they possibly have prepared?
The power gap between them was what it was. An elephant didn't worry about ant traps.
The armored blast door — weighing roughly 220–440 lbs (100–200 kg) — buckled and blew open. Mandarin walked through. He'd seen this underground base in the pilot's memories; he knew the layout.
"Come out. Come and kneel before your king. I am a descendant of Genghis Khan — the one true ruler of these lands. To submit is an honor I am granting you."
He bellowed it into empty corridors. His voice echoed through the tunnels. No one answered.
"Stop shouting. You're really annoying." Daisy emerged from the shadows ahead, in full field gear, expression flat. "I was hoping this would be a quiet assignment."
She'd wanted to stay in the command center and direct from the back. But the American soldiers had all broken — no amount of the generals' authority had changed that — and to execute the plan, she'd had to come in person.
Concealed in her bracer was an Adamantium dagger — her real ace in the hole. Her visible weapon was a single sidearm, which at this point served mostly as decoration.
"You again." Mandarin's English was serviceable. Through the static of his fractured mind, her face had stayed with him. "Kneel. I will give you power beyond anything you have ever imagined."
Daisy smiled thinly. "Kneel and you'll hand me a ring?"
"How dare you!" The words came out like a detonation. His left hand swept upward, and a lightning storm filled the entire room — a raw, uncontrolled discharge powerful enough to flash-fry everyone inside. He was going to reduce this insolent woman to carbon.
The surge was massive enough to fry every monitoring system in the chamber. Half the base's lighting and surveillance grid went dark. What remained visible was the blue-white crawl of residual arcing — and, barely perceptible at Daisy's wrist, a faint glint of metal.
The surveillance blackout was unexpectedly good news. She'd been weighing how much of herself to expose.
She showed nothing on her face. She could hold her ground against Storm's lightning, and Mandarin's attack was in the same range. But she played the role of an ordinary person reacting with pure desperation: bolted at peak human speed, looking barely fast enough, threading the gaps in the lightning net by the skin of her teeth, and sprinted out of the room.
Mandarin didn't catch the act. He smiled to himself — cold and satisfied.
"Little mouse. You'll learn soon enough that none of this changes anything."
The base shook. Explosions — distant, overlapping, continuous. In the command center, the staff watched the feeds stay dark and held their breath. No visuals. Just sound — and somewhere in that sound, one agent was still in the fight.