She couldn't take the whole palm — so she went for the fingers.
In the split second she had to think, Daisy's eyes swept across the five rings. She immediately crossed off Hurricane and Vibration. The Dark Force Field ring on his pinky might have worked against people from ancient times, but in the modern world? Please. Smoke grenades did the same job for a fraction of the cost — buy one, get ten free.
That left Matter Reconstruction and Atomic Cutter, both solid options. Unfortunately, the thumb ring was too far back — already outside her attack window. Daisy locked onto the ring finger and brought the blade down hard.
"AHHH—!"
Adamantium didn't let her down. The Mandarin screamed as his ring finger — and the ring with its gold square face — was severed clean. His pinky got the worst of it too, sliced most of the way through, hanging by a thin strip of flesh.
Damn. If I'd known this fight was coming, I would've brought a bigger blade.
She dove forward, scooped up the severed finger and the ring without looking, and ran.
The blood-soaked finger was disgusting, but she kept it. When the time came to crack the ring's owner-recognition system, she was going to need that DNA.
This time Daisy didn't hold back — she pushed to full speed. But the Mandarin was completely serious now too. He was in pain. Physical pain, yes, but losing his most powerful cutting ring? That hurt somewhere deeper.
He gave chase, bellowing behind her: "Come back! My ring! COME BACK!"
Daisy glanced over her shoulder. The old man was fast — even indoors he had the edge on her, and in open sky he'd break the sound barrier without breaking a sweat.
The ring felt it too. Trapped in her fist, it thrashed and fought to get free. She kept running, kept talking.
"Look, your old man is short a finger now. Where exactly are you planning to go back to? Steal another ring's spot? Maybe go on a toe?"
She wasn't making it up — in the original timeline, after the Mandarin died, his ten rings scattered across the world hunting for new hosts. Some candidates were perfect matches by every standard, but got disqualified over something as ridiculous as the wrong finger shape. Aliens with no fingers. The Hulk's fingers too thick to fit.
The ring didn't care about her logic. It just kept straining to escape.
Daisy didn't argue further. She pulled out a SHIELD-issue containment box — small, square, the size of a ring box — with a special metallic coating on the outer shell that blocked all signals in and out. It was standard kit for agents lifting USB drives or sensitive devices when tracking was a concern. She'd grabbed one earlier for exactly this.
The moment she snapped the lid shut, the ring went still.
Outside, the Mandarin reacted like she'd just taken everything from him. He was screaming in a string of languages Daisy couldn't even identify, all of it threatening to wring her neck.
The old man dropped every pretense of lofty dignity. Daisy hit walls to slow him down — and she meant it literally. Hit them. A military facility rated for magnitude-7 earthquakes was being reduced to rubble around them, blast after blast cratering the structure along her escape route. If the building collapsed on him that would've been a gift, but not even that would have trapped Daisy herself.
BOOM. BOOM. CRACK.
Walls buckled. Ceilings caved. The corridor behind her became a gauntlet of falling debris, forcing the Mandarin to weave through the wreckage and keep blasting it clear with his rings.
In the command room above, the two generals stared at each other in silence. They had no camera feed, but the sounds of demolition told them enough. Whatever this was going to cost to repair, the paperwork alone would be brutal.
The Kandahar US military base had, in a single afternoon, effectively retired itself from active service.
Daisy Johnson had accomplished what the Afghan resistance had been trying to do for years and had never managed to do.
She'd been the one swinging the punches, yet she still looked like she'd spent three days hauling bricks at a construction site. Dust and grime coated everything — you could barely tell from her outline that she was female. The Mandarin behind her was even worse off. Any trace of his dignified bearing was long gone. Hair white with plaster, his dark green robes shredded down one side from a jagged edge, the continuous ring usage visibly draining him — though the fury on his face burned hotter than ever.
Daisy's biggest fear was that he'd suddenly leap out and unleash something devastating. Fortunately, his hatred for her was personal now. He didn't want her dying quickly. He wanted to kill her slowly, inch by inch.
She followed the route she'd memorized, threading through the base interior. The ambush point was close.
Almost there.
"Over here — move, move!" Colonel Rhodes and Mockingbird were waiting just ahead.
She barely heard them. She was already past them, a blur of speed so extreme that the air screamed in her wake.
Both of them froze.
Was that... a sonic boom? From a human being?
They stared at where she'd been for a half-second, then both snapped back to focus. Three — two — one — they slammed the controls simultaneously. A blast door dropped from the ceiling: a reinforced-alloy slab weighing thousands of pounds, fireproof and impervious to electronic scanning. The impact shook the floor.
This was the classified vault built for nuclear warheads — never actually used, with nothing inside but the structure itself. But the contractor had built it exactly to spec: a hundred square meters (roughly 1,000 square feet) of steel-reinforced concrete walls with high-hardness alloy plates bolted to the interior. Even with explosives, an ordinary person would need three days to get through it.
That said, none of this was going to hold the Mandarin forever. And everyone knew it.
When the old man came around the corner and found the blast door in his way — and heard the second door drop behind him — he actually smiled.
"You think this scrap metal is going to stop me?"
He pressed both hands against the door and began channeling power. But the moment he spoke, the trap activated.
High-pressure jets of acid erupted from all four corners of the chamber, aimed directly at him.
"Amateur theatrics." The acid did nothing to his skin, but his robes were another matter — and he had too much dignity for that. He turned and fired four ice arrows in rapid succession, freezing the nozzles.
Before he could say another word, the second wave hit.
Fast-setting concrete poured in from every direction.
The Mandarin's brow furrowed slightly. Nothing lethal. It felt less like an attack and more like someone was trying to annoy him.
Instinct kicked in. He summoned the fire ring and torched the slurry. The air in the sealed room turned thick and black, and then the smell hit — acrid, chemical, eye-watering.
In a corner he hadn't been watching, a cluster of thin probes exhaled pale green wisps of smoke into the chamber.
This was a compound from Viper's memory — something Daisy had quietly catalogued. It had no lethality whatsoever. An ordinary person could drink it by the gallon and be fine. But it did one thing, and it did that one thing extraordinarily well:
Paralysis. It was ten times more potent than the anesthetics used by SHIELD or the military.