Daisy took the stairs two at a time, light on her feet. She'd barely reached the ground floor when three robed figures stepped into her path. The one in front was a Black man gripping a staff roughly the thickness of a man's fist—she had a vague impression he was something like the guardian of the New York Sanctum, or maybe the chief sorcerer.
"Stranger. Stop."
One word to put her in a box. Suspicious unknown intruder.
Daisy looked genuinely puzzled. The three of them showed no sign of moving aside, and she had a fairly good guess about what this was—but she was willing to try talking first.
"Master Wong brought me in himself. Half the people in the building saw it happen."
She ran a quick check with her vibrational sense—since leaving the Ancient One's presence, it had come back online. She pointed at the robed figure on her left. "I saw you on the second-floor corridor earlier. Is that paint on your face, or are you going for the tactical camouflage look?"
Play dumb all you want. I could recognize you from ashes.
"Wong—still around?" she called out, her voice carrying cleanly up to the third floor.
It echoed back at her. No Wong. Not even a flicker of movement anywhere.
The three of them exchanged glances. The man with the staff swirled it theatrically, a cold smile at the corner of his mouth. Scream all you like. No one's coming.
He apparently read Daisy's darting eyes as panic.
They didn't actually want to hurt her. The plan was to use her as leverage—apply pressure on Kamar-Taj, use this person who'd clearly caught both the Ancient One's and Wong's attention as a bargaining chip, negotiate the Three Sanctums' independence. The Sanctums were spread across the globe and had been itching to break free of Kamar-Taj's oversight for years. To the Ancient One, mortal lives were simply too brief—every twenty years brought another ambitious subordinate eager to push their way into the world. She had dealt with this cycle dozens of times; what had once been mildly interesting had long since become tedious. She left things to run their own course. The Ancient One's passivity had been misread as weakness. The moment was ripe. All they'd needed was an opening. Today, Daisy had walked in and handed them one.
The staff-wielding man leveled it at her, satisfaction written across his face.
"Outsider. I'm Daniel. As a mortal, you have no right to enter a Sanctum. As guardian sorcerer of the New York Sanctum, I'm detaining you pending an explanation of your purpose here—pending judgment by the Sorcerers' Council."
The two flanking him flicked their wrists. Eldritch Whips crackled to life, gold and glowing, as the three of them spread into a loose half-circle. A neat little pressure play.
If the Ancient One was a once-mighty level 900 boss who'd simply grown tired of leveling—these three were NPCs who'd never broken past level 10. The gap wasn't marginal; it was categorical. By Daisy's estimate, Mockingbird could take all three with some bruises to show for it and two of them dead.
Daniel was the strongest of the three, but in the company of a few genuinely capable people, he was mid-tier at best. She wasn't certain whether he was the same man dark-circled Kaecilius would later run through with a blade—though his power level matched Wong's rough bracket.
"Is this really necessary?" She sighed. "Life's too short for this." She unholstered her pistol, tucked it into her handbag under their startled, uncertain stares, and left it there.
Fighting them properly wasn't worth it. Killing them definitely wasn't an option—whatever their behavior, they were still the Ancient One's people, and stepping on the Ancient One's toes over something this trivial would be rude.
At about twenty percent output, this group would be on the floor.
Solid stance? Sure, that matters in an even fight. But the fight is decided by force, and force was never even close to even.
Daisy took a short running start—like an arrow off the string—and was on Daniel in a blink. Her left foot landed on his knee; as he buckled under the weight, she shoved off hard and launched herself half a meter into the air. A spinning heel kick connected squarely with the left side of his face.
Thud.
Too fast to track. He'd had zero warning. Even holding back, the blow sent the world spinning—Daniel barely managed to jam his staff into the floor to keep from going down entirely.
"How dare you—he's the chief sorcerer!" The two flanking guards hadn't registered the gap in ability at all. They summoned their Eldritch Whips in a snap of gold light and lashed them toward Daisy's ankles—one from each side.
She stepped back fast. The whips followed, matching her pace: faster retreat, faster pursuit; slower retreat, slower stretch. Like they were teasing her.
"Cute trick." She fired two vibration blasts straight into the whips.
Different in nature entirely, but energy had common ground regardless. The pulses shredded the whips without effort.
The two guards finally realized this wasn't the opponent they'd assumed. But the attack was already committed—they had no choice but to push through.
Daniel, still fighting through the dizziness, planted both hands in front of him and made a complex gesture. The walls began to rotate. The floor cracked apart into fragments—like dominoes—and the pieces started tumbling away into undefined space, following some invisible logic.
The three of them seemed to know exactly what this maneuver did. They hopped smoothly onto the walls; Daniel went further, hanging upside down from the ceiling, eyes cold and fixed on Daisy.
"Is this your signature move? Some kind of ability triggered by the hand gestures?" Daisy wasn't rattled. The Ancient One could throw her into another dimension without blinking—no question about that. These three? Probably not on that level. If they could do what the Ancient One could, why hadn't they just tossed Thanos into another dimension? This looks like a parallel dimension anchored to the primary space.
She wasn't going to test that hypothesis with her body. That would be stupid.
To the three sorcerers' visible shock, Daisy's feet lifted from the floor. She floated.
Gravity was real—every place, every era, every dimension had it. This place—what the sorcerers called the Mirror Dimension—hadn't yet achieved the kind of structural independence that would let it override physical law. Where there was gravity, she could work.
The three of them looked pained. They scuttled across the walls like lizards, converging on her from multiple angles.
Daisy blocked without returning fire. She was studying the space.
Seeing her hold back, they assumed she had no offensive capability while levitating. All three committed fully, throwing everything they had at her.
Daniel also had an Eldritch Whip—but he kept returning to his staff, swinging it in wide arcs that carried a faint rumble of thunder in each stroke.
Daisy blocked a blow head-on. The impact sent a numbing force up her arm. That was a level comparable to Bucky.
"A magic weapon—impressive." She couldn't help herself.
Given Daniel's body, which was only marginally beyond baseline human, a hit that actually registered against her meant that staff was amplifying his raw strength by at least a factor of five.