"I always thought our soldiers had weak willpower — but I never expected them to be outshone by a woman." The two generals were talking in low voices off to the side. The Army general said it with real bitterness; most of the men who'd bolted were his.
The Air Force general outranked him in neither seniority nor grade, so his job was to smooth things over.
"She's a senior agent with specialized training. That's a different category entirely from regular infantry."
The Army general had no intention of publicly admitting fault in front of the troops, of course. To give his men cover, he had to exaggerate the enemy's strength — and that meant incidentally elevating Daisy's abilities in the same breath. The exit ramp had been handed to him, and he took it, steering the conversation toward the standards of covert operations training.
Daisy had no idea any of that was happening. At the moment she was being chased through the dark by fire, lightning, and ice, and "somewhat pressed" was an understatement.
She had dark vision. She was fairly sure the Mandarin — a man who had clearly spent decades training under brutal conditions — had it too. The total blackout in the room hadn't given either of them any particular advantage.
"I'll admit I underestimated you." He'd thrown everything at her across multiple passes and she was still on her feet. The Mandarin had finally revised his opinion of Daisy, from nameless extra to real elite. "In my era, no woman could have come this far."
But that was it. He still couldn't identify what her actual ability was. In his assessment, getting caught and killed remained her only possible endpoint.
Cat and mouse — that was how he saw it. He was the cat. Daisy was the mouse, burning every resource she had to stay alive at the edge of death.
The enemy's struggle was the Mandarin's pleasure. He was thoroughly enjoying the sensation of absolute control.
What she was actually doing, each time she barely dodged his attacks at the last possible moment, was studying him.
His offense was ferocious. If Storm was a mage, this man was practically an archmage. But his entire combat framework depended on the rings. No matter how powerful the rings were, without a functioning user, they were dead weight.
Hidden in her wristband all along was an Adamantium dagger, forged from the material left over from Shingen Yashida's alloy blade. At full force, that blade could sever Wolverine's claws — this dagger would be no less sharp.
The Mandarin's skin might have been tempered to something like iron through decades of cultivation. It still wasn't going to be harder than Wolverine's claws.
Daisy drew the dagger from the wristband. She'd been waiting, letting him grow comfortable, building the right moment. Now she had it: a single strike, with surprise on her side.
One dagger — could it kill the Mandarin outright? Probably not. But stabbing out an eye or cutting off half his nose? Useless. A wasted opportunity.
To account for him dodging and the counterattack that would follow, she picked her target: his right hand. Five rings on that hand, and any two of them would keep her well-stocked for a long time.
Even if the rings had an owner-recognition function, she wasn't worried. She knew the truth — these were technological constructs, not magic artifacts. Block the external signal and she'd have plenty of options. If nothing worked, she'd destroy them rather than leave them on his hand.
She calculated the distance quietly. Then, the next time she sprinted out of a fire blast looking thoroughly ragged while the Mandarin laughed with satisfaction — she teleported directly behind him.
Her left fist was clenched tight. Pale white energy in the pitch-black room stood out like a light. From the corner of his eye, the Mandarin caught only the afterimage of the displacement — and before he'd even processed what he was seeing, Daisy's fist connected with the back of his skull.
Invisible shockwaves swept the room. The space was too narrow to contain the full force of the blow — the walls twisted under the invisible pressure, then crumbled to dust.
The Mandarin, who had taken the hit directly, felt the weight of a mountain compress through his skull. His mind scrambled. But his reflexes were far faster than any normal person's — he spun immediately and countered.
His most reliable technique. Lowest energy cost. A fire strike.
But a ring is an object. Against a blow Daisy had been charging for this entire fight, the fire barely ignited before the shockwave shattered it.
"You tricked me." An attack that strong couldn't have come from a sudden burst of hidden potential — the Mandarin understood in the same instant that he'd been played. Shock and fury together. But even with his body refined to its peak, he wasn't confident about absorbing a strike that felt like it could break mountains and split seas head-on.
On instinct, he raised his right hand and countered with a shockwave of his own.
Two shockwaves of completely different frequencies and energy structures, but the same fundamental nature, collided head-on.
One of them was a ring. The other was a living person — one who had been physically enhanced twice, wearing Vibranium wristbands that had no business existing.
The result was not close.
Whump. The invisible waves slammed into each other. The Mandarin's eye twitched. He watched his own shockwave disintegrate like paper in a storm. This wolf in sheep's clothing was stronger than he'd ever imagined.
He had no choice but to summon the hurricane ring — to buy himself a moment.
After breaking through the fire strike and the shockwave counter in sequence, what remained of Daisy's punch finally spent itself against the hurricane.
She'd also gathered enough data to estimate where she stood: roughly equivalent to his two-ring output.
The distance between them now was almost nothing. Close enough that even in a completely darkened room, each could make out the other's expression.
The Mandarin looked at her face for panic. Fear. The look of someone whose gambit had failed. He found none of it. She wasn't even looking at him.
She was staring at his right hand.
She was in midair. Her left fist had missed. In the same motion, she'd drawn the alloy dagger and was bringing it down toward the raised right wrist.
She'd noticed it some time ago: the Mandarin needed a window between each ring activation. The posturing, the speeches, the dramatic declarations every time he fired — none of it was confidence. It was cover for the recovery time. Using all ten rings through his own body in rapid succession built cumulative strain. After three consecutive activations, he needed two to three seconds before the next one was ready.
That window was hers.
"Wretch. You dare attack me?!" Whether he'd understood her intent or simply felt the challenge to his pride, the Mandarin's beard and hair were practically standing on end. Murder filled his eyes. He pulled his right hand back and simultaneously drove forward with his left arm, twisting at the waist to throw a punch at Daisy with everything in his body behind it.
The Mandarin was the man who had torn through an Iron Man suit with his bare hands. This was not a slow punch.
No ring energy. Pure physical force. Fast, heavy, and backed by what was clearly a lifetime of brutal close-quarters training.
Daisy kept her target. The dagger kept going down. She used gravity manipulation to shift herself thirty centimeters laterally — enough to let the punch miss her center — and rotated her arm to catch the impact on the Vibranium wristband.
Vibranium earned its reputation. The Mandarin's strike did zero damage. But the kinetic force was still enough to knock her back a step.
The dagger's angle had shifted off the wrist.