Daisy recognized her technique had some gaps, but she had no patience for parrying and countering blow by blow. She raised her shield and drove it straight into the face of the short-blade ninja.
The ninja was nimble—slippery as an eel. But he had badly misjudged her strength. Out of habit, he'd sized her up using past experience: a slender young woman, a scientist according to the dossier, who might have undergone field-agent training at most. Standard reasoning said she'd be barely a step above an ordinary person in close combat.
That miscalculation cost him his life.
The dual-sword ninja watched Daisy's move with mild contempt, though he didn't drop his guard entirely. He curled his body mid-air, caught the edge of her shield with both blades to press it down, and torqued his waist to launch a follow-up kick.
He'd only completed half the motion when a thunderous crack exploded beside his ear. It was as though a freight train had slammed into him head-on. Before he understood what had happened, he was launched sideways—more than thirty feet (~10 meters) through the air—and crashed headlong into a distant tree.
Only then did his body register the damage. Blood flooded from every part of him at once, both eyes drenched red. More burst from his mouth in a violent spray; the pressure was so immense it blew straight through his mask, throwing a crimson mist into the air. More than half the bones in his body had snapped. The ninja convulsed twice, then collapsed in a boneless heap at the base of the tree. He didn't breathe again.
Daisy felt a wave of satisfaction. The irritation that had been simmering in her chest eased considerably. She smiled and turned toward the chain-mace ninja, who had already spun to run. She raised one hand and sent a shockwave after him.
It was slightly different from before—the wave now seemed to be wrapped in a thin layer of flame, which the friction with the air only fed further.
The shockwave, blazing with fire, hit the chain-mace ninja square in the chest. He died faster than the one she'd shield-bashed across the clearing. A scorched, smoldering hole punched clean through his torso, and his body split in two as it tumbled through the air.
The change in her power made Daisy curse under her breath. But the carnage around her sent a fierce, savage thrill coursing through her.
"Bakuto, buddy—you're next."
With two down, she swept back and dispatched the three ninjas whose sword hands she'd already severed—none of them had recovered their fighting capability. Five lives, and it hadn't taken her long at all. She closed the distance to Bakuto with quick, skimming steps.
As a major figure within the Hand, Bakuto knew the ninja arsenal well enough—he simply didn't use it in daily life. To buy time, he reached into his coat and hurled a fistful of odds and ends straight at her face.
Throwing darts. Needles. Knives. Shurikens. And something else—pills of some unknown substance.
A pale green haze spread across dozens of meters (~100 feet) in every direction. Daisy wasn't arrogant enough to think she was immune to poison. She had no choice but to circle wide around it.
Bakuto felt a flicker of recovered confidence when he saw her give the mist a wide berth.
The intelligence failures had piled up catastrophically. The silver threads she'd used at the start were still a mystery—but the fire punch afterward had been unmistakable. This was a fire-based superhuman. In his view, superhumans always had limits. He had lived for centuries and killed his share of them—and Bakuto still believed he had the advantage.
He decided to play to his organization's numbers advantage. His elite were all gone; Bakuto didn't mind throwing more cannon fodder at the problem.
He reached into his coat and drew out a small jade-green bamboo whistle, then blew it with everything he had. The sound rang through the forest, bouncing off trees. In less than a minute, the soft rustle of approaching feet closed in from all directions.
Bakuto's face lit up at the sight of his reinforcements pouring in. He might as well have shouted "save me."
Daisy's expression soured. The Hand always hid behind sheer numbers. Fine. If they were here to die, she didn't have an ounce of mercy to spare. She'd oblige them.
Still, the Phoenix Force hadn't buried her instincts. She retained her respect for the Eastern dragon ley lines beneath this land. Using her seismic power in this terrain would be wrong. She set the idea aside.
Without a wide-area technique at her disposal—and still wary of what her shockwaves had become—she drew her long sword.
One hand on the blade, a quick flourish, and she assessed the new arrivals: more than fifty ninja surged out of the trees. Their footwork, speed, weapons, and the stitching on their uniforms all marked them as clearly inferior to the dozen elites she'd already killed. What unsettled her more was the blank glaze in their eyes—whether that was their natural state or the result of Bakuto's whistle, she couldn't tell.
The ninjas drew their weapons and closed in, surrounding her on all sides.
They meant to stall, to hold her in place and buy Bakuto time to escape. She'd need her ally.
Daisy called out toward the dense forest on her left: "Old man. Done spectating? And where are your people, exactly? Don't tell me you came alone."
From among the trees, a gaunt old man emerged—worn shirt, jeans, dark glasses, walking cane in hand. That was Stick. He drew a katana from his cane, tilted his head as though trying to read something in the air, and said dryly: "I wasn't spectating. I can't see."
He was shameless. Daisy didn't care. He was her only ally here.
"Your sword work is terrible," the blind old man said, shuffling onto the field. "I'll kill Bakuto." He sniffed at the pale green mist Bakuto had spread across the ground and strolled directly into it.
Oh, the audacity. Daisy couldn't help but silently critique Stick's flair for the theatrical—but there was nothing to be done. She was the one facing fifty-plus ninjas.
No need for defense against this rabble. She holstered her shield, looped her lasso around her left hand, drew her sword in her right, and shot forward like an arrow loosed from a bow.
The foot-soldiers had no idea what they were dealing with. A great swarm of shurikens and kunai came sailing at her.
Backed by the inexhaustible psychic power the Phoenix Force provided, her magnetic control had climbed well beyond where it had been. Back home, moving a fork or an iron spoon was trivial. Now she was facing a barrage of projectiles from all angles, some thrown with specialized techniques, flying in at vicious speeds.
She decided showing off wasn't worth it.
Anything that got close she deflected off her Vibranium bracers, weaving through the storm of projectiles until she reached the enemy.
"Come here."
She flung the lasso out and caught a ninja around the throat. He showed no reaction to her fear aura—confirming they were operating without any individual will of their own. She yanked him to her by sheer force and took his head with one clean stroke.
Two katanas swung in from either side. She deflected both with her bracers, then drove her sword upward from low.
The blade drew across the throat of a short-blade ninja to her side, then carved open the chest of a katana-wielder. Blood and viscera sprayed outward. Daisy had already swept past, hunting the next target.
Bakuto—still locked with Stick—shouted a command in Japanese, and the ninjas scrambled into formation. Some sprinted left to right; others surged from behind; still more cut diagonals across the field. Two more, right under Daisy's nose, tossed smoke bombs and vanished.