If the black iron staff had no owner, she'd have taken it for herself.
But between Agamotto—the first Sorcerer Supreme—and the Ancient One, these were people she couldn't afford to offend. This one she'd leave alone.
Nearly twenty exchanges in, Daisy had a clear read on how all three of them fought.
Solid fundamentals. Precise tactics. Clever coordination. Their ability to move along the walls came from thin coatings of magic applied to their feet—their bodies still responded to gravity, but years of dedicated training meant the compensation was almost invisible. Like astronauts who'd drilled long enough to make the unnatural look routine.
Training a group of sorcerers to fight like soldiers—Daisy privately found that funny.
The Ancient One was cannier than she let on. The line about physical training being a buffer against magic's toll on the body was real enough—there was truth in it—but Daisy suspected the other half of the equation was simply that the Ancient One had grown tired of managing troublesome subordinates and had no particular interest in teaching them anything too powerful. Keep them martial, keep them manageable.
Then there was the broader context. Industrialization had flooded the atmosphere with pollution; ambient magical energy had dropped sharply. Aside from people like Doom—steeped in it from before birth—most people couldn't produce real magic under current conditions.
All of these things had converged to produce exactly the group standing in front of her: a band of sorcerers who looked more like fighters than wizards.
She'd spent some time trying to work out the Mirror Dimension and had eventually given up.
Her original idea had been to use it as a relay point for long-distance teleportation, but the magical interference here was too dense. Her positional sense kept drifting—she'd checked the coordinates three times and gotten a different reading each time.
Even if she memorized her current frequency signature, re-entering this space through vibration alone the next time would be nearly impossible. The appeal wore off quickly.
She grabbed one of the nameless sorcerers by the arm, torqued her wrist, and flung the entire person sideways into the mirror-wall of the dimension.
He scrambled to stabilize in midair. His partner tried to haul him back with an Eldritch Whip. But Daisy's throw had been fast and clean—an explosive burst of force none of the three had time to read.
His back hit the wall.
The Mirror Dimension reacted as if it were alive. The impact fractured the surface and sent a cascade of disorienting images spilling out—faces, expressions, moments flickering between illusion and reality. Daisy saw countless figures projected across the mirror-wall. Some looked exhilarated. Some looked grief-stricken. Some looked utterly lost. One of them winked at her.
The robed extra coughed up a mouthful of blood. Daisy paid him no attention. She was watching the wall.
The surface of the Mirror Dimension moved like water—layered, tessellated like fish scales, the entire interior built from countless overlapping planes. The force of the impact was distributed outward in stages, diminished at each level until it dissipated entirely.
Daniel with the iron staff—still composed enough to sound smug—broke the silence: "Without our magic sustaining it, you can't leave. We can hit you, but you can't put us down for good—because you need us to open the Mirror Dimension to get out. Bit awkward, isn't it?"
All three of them laughed at that, as if they'd finally found Daisy's weak point. One of them—the nameless sorcerer she'd just thrown—hadn't recovered yet, but the other pulled back his hood to reveal a pale, drawn face, grinning now that he understood the position she was supposedly in.
Daisy wore a thoughtful expression in return.
Their teleportation needed rings, precise gestures, magical fuel, and a Sanctum anchor point. Compared to what she could do, it was cumbersome. This space couldn't hold her—she was confident of that. But she didn't know the time differential between the Mirror Dimension and the outside world. If hours had slipped by while she was in here and someone was trying to reach her, that would be a problem.
She sighed. "Right—I'm not interested in wasting time on this. I'm leaving."
She raised her left hand, fingers long and fine, red nail polish vivid against the air. She still wasn't entirely sure why she'd been gravitating toward red lately. She reached out with her senses, feeling the frequency signatures around her. To the three sorcerers, it looked like she was stroking the air.
"Enjoy yourselves." She opened a pale blue portal—tearing it directly through the Mirror Dimension's walls.
Then, just before she stepped out, she gathered her full strength and drove her fist into the fractured mirror-wall.
A punch that could trigger a tsunami.
The surface shattered. The ripple tore outward in every direction—wave after wave after wave, rolling through the entire space and enveloping it completely.
Daisy stepped through, a faint smile at the corner of her mouth.
The strong force, electromagnetism, gravity—all conserved under parity. But Chen-Ning Yang had shown that the weak force violated parity conservation. The weak force interfered massively with spatial mirror structures. Put broadly: after a weak-force interaction, what's inside the mirror and what's outside the mirror are not the same. That asymmetry was catastrophic for teleportation.
For Daisy, the weak force had almost no use in direct combat. But for dismantling spatial structures, it was exceptional—the kind of ability that let her throw one punch and leave the target unable to teleport for the next sixty seconds. Or, in this case, considerably longer.
Magic and physics shared more common ground than people admitted. She'd disrupted the normal wave patterns inside the Mirror Dimension. Those three idiots could stay in there for now. By outside-world reckoning, the interference wouldn't settle for three days.
If they decided, in that window, to go sightseeing in some unstable pocket dimension—that was entirely their business, not hers.
"Anyone home?" Back in the main hall of the New York Sanctum, she called out to the empty space.
Same as before. Only her own echo answered.
"Surely a whole Sanctum doesn't run on three people."
She stopped one meter short of the main door.
Without moving her upper body, she shuffled backward—eight, nine steps—like Michael Jackson's moonwalk, smooth and measured.
Agamotto, the first Sorcerer Supreme, was called the All-Seeing—currently keeping watch from somewhere in his pocket dimension over the entirety of the multiverse. The Ancient One was considerably less omniscient, but she could still navigate endless timelines at will.
Neither of them would mind if I had a look around the Sanctum's collection, right?
She shuffled back a few more steps, watching for any sign of a spectral presence materializing to tell her to leave.
Nothing.
Probably doesn't bother them. She filed that under confirmed hypothesis.
She turned on her heel and ran back up to the third floor. The door to the display room on the left was slightly ajar; she pushed it open.
Spread before her was an astonishing number of magical artifacts and relics, each radiating frequencies entirely unlike anything natural—clashing, competing, as if every object in the room was quietly arguing with its neighbors over who deserved the most attention.
Daisy pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. She was genuinely afraid drool might escape and profane these treasures.
She pressed her palms together in a gesture of prayer. She'd forgotten the exact invocation for the Vishanti—but on the principle that sincerity counted for something, she bowed respectfully toward the assembled artifacts anyway.
If I walked all the way up here and found no one watching—that means the powers that be don't mind me admiring the great works of those who came before, right?
And if it so happened that I had a connection with one or two of them and slipped them into my pocket on the way out—
They wouldn't mind that either, would they?