Daisy gave Fury the full picture on the Mandarin's threat level — and she didn't think she was exaggerating. One man leveling a city was within his capability. Losing a single ring had barely dented his overall power. During the pursuit, he'd already started chaining ring effects: fire layered with ice, lightning riding the wind. Apart from an unstable mind and volatile temperament, the man had almost no exploitable weaknesses.
"Unpredictable, impulsive, and massively destructive," she concluded. A fair summary.
Fury nodded slowly. "The target appears to have gone down in a snowfield. Survival probability?"
"A snowfield?" Daisy blinked.
He transmitted the satellite images. The footage was clear — the Mandarin falling from altitude like a puppet with cut strings, then vanishing as an avalanche swallowed him.
She thought about it honestly. Her gut said a snowfield wasn't enough to kill someone like the Mandarin. She didn't think she was being dramatic.
"I believe he's still alive. We could send a small team to search—"
"This matter is closed." Fury didn't pause. "Classified Level Ten. Agent Johnson — rest up." He disconnected.
Natasha was about to leave Kandahar. She had plenty of other assignments.
"Natasha, wait." Daisy stopped her.
"What?"
"Help me get bandaged up." An odd request.
Natasha gave her a long look from head to toe. Where exactly are you injured?
"Yesterday's wounds were serious," Daisy said, leaving it deliberately vague.
Natasha understood immediately — ah. Superhuman recovery speed. Disguising it from the medical staff. Completely within her skill set.
An hour of work followed. Bandages. Gauze. Careful bruising makeup on her face and arms. When Natasha finally stepped back and considered the result, she clicked her tongue.
"Not a scar on you. Your constitution is something else." A brief, appreciative look — then she was out the door.
Daisy made the rounds of the liaison point in full character: battered, limping, crutch under one arm. She looked as though a large vehicle had processed her. Every agent she passed immediately insisted she go back to bed and rest. She obliged, radiating fragility.
The moment she turned the corner into her room, she dropped the crutch, packed her gear, and teleported.
She reappeared at the desert stretch where she'd first encountered the Mandarin. Yellow sand in every direction. Unchanged.
What would have taken half a day by car took one blink.
She set off at a run, staying in ravines and tree shadows where military satellites couldn't track her, using short-range teleports when she had no cover. Target: the exact coordinates where the Global Hawk had gone dark.
She'd made the trip specifically to find out if the Mandarin had left anything behind in his hideout. Cultivation manuals. Martial records from ancient practitioners. At minimum, a user's guide for the rings.
No sign of the needle-prick warning sensation from before. No danger signals from the environment. Fifteen minutes of running brought her to the wreckage.
The Global Hawk had been everything its designers promised — 13 meters (nearly 43 feet) long, 4 meters (13 feet) tall, a wingspan of 35 meters (115 feet). It had been broken almost perfectly in half, as if something had reached out and snapped it mid-flight. Explosion residue everywhere. Debris scattered across a radius of 800 meters (roughly half a mile).
"What exactly hit you out here?" Daisy looked north toward Kandahar, then south at two mountains with a narrow pass between them.
She uploaded the full debris field to Crisis and let the AI run the trajectory. The answer came back quickly: the drone had gone down between those two mountains.
She studied the pass for two full minutes.
Then she laughed.
There wasn't a gap between those mountains. There were three mountains. The third one was simply invisible.
The drone had flown straight into a hidden peak. The collision had triggered the explosion, which had disturbed a certain old master who'd been deep in seclusion.
She circled, checking every angle. No obvious entrance or exit. Teleporting blind into an unknown interior was too much of a gamble. She'd have to do this the old-fashioned way.
Which meant employing an art form with a very long pedigree — technically an intangible cultural heritage — the same technique she'd almost used in Puerto Rico two years ago and never got around to:
Digging a tunnel.
No shovel required. She pressed both hands to the ground, fed a focused seismic wave downward at a precise frequency, and let the earth shake itself loose. Twenty minutes later, she'd excavated a slanted shaft straight through the base of the mountain and punched a hole through the hidden structure's outer wall from below.
She dropped through carefully.
Her boots hit stone — brick-and-mortar construction, centuries old. She looked around.
The interior was compact, built upward like a pagoda. Five floors in total. She'd entered at the third.
She checked the two floors above first. Clothing. Blades. Saddles. Old things.
One rack held a saber with a gold-chased hilt and a scabbard set with gemstones — visually impressive, but the blade itself was a disappointment. Lethal by ancient standards; modern high-grade steel would shrug at it.
Still —
Her fingernails extended briefly into the sharp-curved claws of the Cheetah's blessing. She pried every gemstone from the scabbard and dropped them into her pocket. The blades and saddles could stay. Someone else's problem.
The fourth floor was the real discovery.
Every inch of the walls was covered in text. Dense, layered, compact — Chinese characters, then a stretch of Mongolian script, then something else. Manchu, unless she was very wrong.
Daisy scratched her head. The Chinese was messy but she could puzzle through maybe half of it. Mongolian could be fed to a translator. But Manchu? Did anyone even speak Manchu anymore?
She didn't overthink it. She photographed every wall, every surface, every line of text. Whether it was ancient cultivation records, ring lore, or the man's private journal — she was taking all of it.
The fifth floor yielded nothing.
Which made its own point: no food anywhere in the hideout. The Mandarin had been fasting for a very long time.
She climbed back to the surface.
Both hands flat against the ground. She fed seismic energy downward — packing it in, building pressure, compressing wave after wave until the accumulation was at its limit. Then she let it all go at once.
The shockwave registered at roughly magnitude seven. The hidden mountain — and everything inside it — collapsed into the earth.
Afghanistan was seismic territory. The landscape was remote, uninhabited, outside US military control zones. Without specific intelligence and specific intent, nobody would ever come to this stretch of wilderness looking for anything.
She left it behind.