The ninjas' formation was intricate—calculated movements, exploiting angles and light refraction to deliberately disorient Daisy's sense of direction, creating the illusion that enemies surrounded her on all sides.
"What a mess," she muttered, unimpressed. Her stats across the board were dominant, and her confidence was absolute: none of these opponents could survive a single exchange. The formation didn't matter. Kill them all, and who's left to hold it?
She accelerated toward the nearest target and unleashed a solid kick. The man sailed at least thirty feet (~9 meters) before hitting the ground—he wasn't getting up.
The ninjas showed no fear. Emboldened by their numbers, they kept trying to tie her down, peppering her with darts and projectiles from a distance to slow her pace and buy Bakuto more time.
Daisy's main weapon was still her sword. She cut through the mob with savage efficiency—seven passes forward and back, bloody and unstoppable.
But she hadn't been at it long before someone began pouring cold water on her momentum. Stick, still engaged with Bakuto across the clearing, was critiquing her. There was no other word for it.
"Girl, who taught you that sword technique? It's dreadful. If you'd reversed your grip on that last thrust, you could've taken the enemy behind you. Why go all the way around?"
"Oh, and there—if you'd carried that cut through to the right, the one throwing darts would be dead right now."
"Are you even using sword technique? You just bludgeoned that one with the flat of the blade. That's staff work. Don't tell me you want me to teach you staffwork?"
Stick rambled on without pause. Daisy yelled at him to shut up. He acted like he hadn't heard her.
"Isn't Bakuto supposed to be the greatest swordsman alive? And you still have bandwidth to commentate over here?"
She said it nicely: she wasn't bound by form. She said it honestly: everything Colleen Wing had ever taught her was long gone. Stick wasn't wrong. Her technique was rough. But she'd gone past caring—she was swinging on raw stat advantage, bullying the foot-soldiers into the ground, and it was working just fine.
"The greatest swordsman alive?" Stick's voice was soaked in contempt. "This man gave up his warrior's heart long ago. His spirit is dead. 'Greatest swordsman'—what does that even mean now?"
Contempt or not, Bakuto's blade was still formidable—second to none in the world. What Stick was actually doing was exploiting the missing right hand and using words as a weapon. With one hand gone, the two were roughly evenly matched, and the clearing on their side rang with a steady clang of steel.
Daisy's side produced a different sound altogether—the wet, rhythmic thud of a blade finding flesh.
The foot-soldiers fell one by one. No formation mattered when the numbers kept shrinking. After nearly five minutes of relentless cutting, every ninja on her side was down.
She walked among the few still barely breathing and drove her sword into each of them, then looked toward the center of the mist.
"Old man. I'm done over here. Wrap it up."
The words had barely left her mouth when Stick hurled Bakuto's head out of the haze—curly black hair and all. Stick followed, wounded: his side was a ragged mess of blood and flesh, and a cut ran down his left leg. His katana had been snapped halfway.
He was carrying Bakuto's sword, and he showed no intention of handing it over.
The old man didn't act like a blind person at all. He sat down on a corpse and tore a strip from the hem of his shirt to bind his wounds.
Daisy stepped forward and drove a flaming fist down. The fire reduced Bakuto's severed head to ash. Even if there was a consciousness-transfer device waiting somewhere, it couldn't capture anything from a pile of cinders—could it?
Stick seemed to read her logic: "Won't matter. Bakuto backed up his own consciousness. He'll be reborn in a new body—but without any memory of today."
Daisy's pulse quickened slightly. Stick continued: "Madame Gao won't come back. She was too old; her memories too dense. She opposed this technology from the start. The device can't resurrect her."
More than once now, this man had read her thoughts at the exact moment she had them. Daisy studied the upturned whites of Stick's eyes and felt a jolt of unease. She detected no sign of telepathy. The old man was running entirely on human experience and raw intuition.
"How does the Hand even have technology like this? It's way beyond current science. And the version that gets reborn—is that still Bakuto?"
Stick shook his head: "How would a blind old man know? Isn't that the sort of thing S.H.I.E.L.D. is supposed to investigate? I only know they encountered someone in Britain, and after that they had the consciousness-transfer device."
Daisy held that for a moment. "Britain? When?"
The upturned whites of his eyes tilted toward her. "All I know is it was long before my time. Bakuto has transferred at least three times."
"You may find answers. You may not. Either way, it doesn't matter to me. The Hand is the enemy I've sworn my life against. Even if I can't kill them all, I'll train successors to keep killing them."
The last word—kill—landed like a stone. Not a boast. A conviction. Something immovable.
He could be beaten. He could be killed. But this belief was not something that could be taken from him.
Stick finished binding his wounds, picked up his cane and Bakuto's sword, and walked away alone.
"Hey—old man. Do you know where I'm headed?"
She called after him. She seemed to recall that Stick had been searching for an entrance to K'un-Lun for some time.
"Not interested. Every place is the same. Wherever people go, feuds follow. There's no paradise anywhere."
He didn't slow down. He walked briskly out of the forest and disappeared from Daisy's perception.
His words didn't change her plans. She hadn't been born yesterday. She knew K'un-Lun wasn't some flawless utopia—Kamar-Taj was crawling with political nonsense, and K'un-Lun was hardly going to be cleaner. She simply didn't care. It was still where she needed to go.
She searched Bakuto's body thoroughly. Just as Stick had said, this man treated his physical form as nothing more than a container. He backed up his memory on a rolling basis, which meant he had no reason to wear a K'un-Lun Elder Ring. The ring was nowhere on him.
So whose black-box technology was it? Daisy wasn't especially concerned with the philosophical question of whether the reborn version was still Bakuto. What gnawed at her was the practical problem: she could kill this enemy, and a few days later he'd simply walk back into the world wearing a new face. That was insufferable.
Smash him into pieces, and it still wouldn't matter—the man had a one-click restore.
Infuriating. That was the only word for it.
Who in Britain had that capability? The answer didn't take long to surface. There weren't many candidates, and Daisy arrived at the obvious one immediately: Mister Sinister.
A scientist who had lived contemporaneously with Charles Darwin. Apocalypse had unlocked his latent power, granting him an intellect that defied all limits. He had constructed a vast subterranean city beneath London—populated entirely by his own clones. As long as even one clone survived, his consciousness could transfer into it.
Mister Sinister had spent over two hundred years in the shadows, studying mutants with patient, predatory interest. Cyclops and Jean Grey were his prime subjects. He had even engineered a clone of Jean herself—Madelyne Pryor, the Red Queen. And he had maneuvered Apocalypse like a piece on a chessboard. As supervillains went, he was in a category of his own.