Sparks scattered through the air. Lightning forked across the courtyard.
Danny watched, transfixed—and uneasy at the same time. Could I ever reach that level? It looked daunting, to put it mildly.
"Danny, move." Four years in K'un-Lun had earned him a couple of acquaintances, and two of them now saw him standing slack-jawed, staring at the fight as if he'd forgotten to breathe. Afraid he'd get pulled into the chaos and killed for it, they each grabbed an arm and hauled him out of the courtyard.
The crowd scattered in every direction, each person terrified of being too slow. The fight was simply too dangerous. Take one stray Fire Fist, then a Thunder Palm on top of it, and you'd be paying your respects to K'un-Lun's ancestors in person.
Neither combatant let the panic around them slow their pace by so much as a breath. The instant their fists collided, Daisy pressed the attack, a single thought rising in her mind, urging her to destroy, to break, to flatten everything in front of her.
She knew the Phoenix Force was bleeding into her, drop by drop. To her mind, you didn't dam a flood—you channeled it. Professor Xavier surely understood the same principle, yet he and his people had chosen to dam. Daisy chose to channel.
Flame bloomed out of nothing. The air behind her boiled into a vast cloud of red mist, and within that haze the faint outline of an enormous Phoenix took shape, its radiance overwhelming K'un-Lun's dawn until half the mountaintop glowed crimson.
The light was blinding, but the apparition inside it was thin—faint, barely there, impossible to make out unless you looked closely. Lei Kung looked closely. His expression turned deadly serious as he traced every contour of the Phoenix outline, as if trying to burn the pattern into his memory.
Lei Kung drew a sharp breath, then expelled it all at once. With a great roar he mustered the whole of his chi. This had nothing to do with honor or duty—after centuries of cultivation, he simply wanted to see how far he could go.
His shoulders shook. The bones throughout his body cracked like beans popping in a pan, a crisp, unbroken cascade of sound. His frame, already a meter ninety (6'3"), gained several more centimeters out of thin air, and the churning of wind, thunder, and cloud in the air around him grew heavier still.
Flame coiled around Daisy's fists as she hammered Lei Kung with blow after blow, each carrying immense force. She'd never trained in any profound fist art, but she knew the basics of a fight well enough.
Stripped of finesse, the contest came down to raw strength and speed alone—and even a master like Lei Kung could barely keep up. Realizing his offensive power couldn't match hers, he quickly shifted tactics, drawing on the agility of wind and thunder: blocking here, parrying there, slipping aside elsewhere, fending off her assault with one exquisite technique after another.
The first drumbeat rouses courage, the second drains it, the third exhausts it. The old saying fit the Phoenix perfectly. Unable to break through, her hands wreathed in fire, Daisy grew restless.
Lei Kung had all but abandoned attacking, throwing himself entirely into defense, intending to wear down her Phoenix Force with his own deep, enduring chi.
One of them attacked with everything she had. The other set his mind on holding the line to the death.
Would the attacker win out in the end, or would the defender outlast her? The fight was so tightly locked that no one could say who would come out ahead.
Daisy was enjoying herself, and she gradually stopped confining herself to the form of a sparring match. She bent gravity and shot three meters (10 ft) into the air, like a true firebird, swooping in now and then to throw off the rhythm of Lei Kung's defense.
The earlier exchange might still have passed for martial arts, but flying into the air was bending the rules a little.
Lei Kung didn't complain. He'd never expected the Phoenix to fight him on the ground. Centuries of tempering his mind kept him unshaken, and he defended with extreme care—seeking not to win, only to avoid losing—single-mindedly bent on draining her Phoenix Force.
The longer the fight dragged on, the more that power would inevitably wane.
Lei Kung was confident. His disciples, however, saw it differently.
All they could see was Daisy streaking across the sky now and again, her attacks fast and vicious, while their teacher seemed able only to take the blows. Was he about to lose?
Daisy's momentum only swelled. The Phoenix was deeply pleased with her, and a soft cry seemed to ripple out of the very air, strengthening her power by another twenty percent. She dropped the tricks, gathered the strength of her whole body, and, like a meteor falling from the heavens, drove a single punch straight at his centerline.
Fire tore across the sky, as if the cloud layer itself had been set alight. Daisy came crashing toward him behind an unbroken sea of flame, and as that punch came, every person in K'un-Lun unconsciously took a step forward in its wake.
The force was vast, irresistible—it even seemed to drag part of the heavens along with it. Lei Kung, square in its path, broke out in a flood of sweat. The pressure nearly bent his spine. It was as if he faced not a single person, but the whole of K'un-Lun.
He had no certainty he could take this strike, but the situation left him no room to think. With another great roar he marshaled every scrap of chi, all but overdrawing it, raised both hands, and braced to meet the punch head-on.
"Ah…" The sigh echoed in everyone's ears. An azure-robed figure appeared between the two of them like a phantom. With his left hand he brushed Lei Kung's arms aside; with his right he caught Daisy's fist. Borrowing a measure of momentum from each of them, his body executed a deft turn in the air, throwing the one on the left to the right and the one on the right to the left.
"Your battle is entirely unnecessary." He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his voice soft but his tone beyond all dispute.
Lei Kung immediately bowed in apology. Daisy, having vented the fury in her chest, returned to her senses. There was no telling how many centuries this man had trained, or what art he practiced—but instinct told her she couldn't beat him, so she copied Lei Kung, bowed, and went on playing mute.
Looking at Daisy, the Yu-Ti felt a headache coming on. In that moment he shared a thought not far from Nick Fury's: this girl is far too much trouble.
If their fight had continued, it could have torn down half the Sacred Mountain. He couldn't simply stand by.
On one hand, he found Daisy reckless—coming to blows over a single disagreement hardly suited K'un-Lun's principles. On the other, he had a quiet reproach for Lei Kung too. Teaching her horse-stance punches the moment she arrives? The perfunctory attitude is a little too obvious.
Both bore responsibility. The Yu-Ti gestured for Daisy to walk with him.
The two of them stopped before a pool of water, and the Yu-Ti spoke first.
"The Phoenix will return one day, and the Iron Fist is the only weapon capable of holding Her in check." He opened with that.
Daisy disagreed. The Phoenix had never truly entered the Marvel multiverse. She was an entity beyond the tenth dimension, with a host in every universe—which meant She had countless hosts at any given moment. Jean was the most perfect, the one who drew the Phoenix's gaze most strongly, but she was not the only one.
Whether Dark Phoenix or White Phoenix, each was only a fraction of the Phoenix—a negligible sliver.
As for the source of the Iron Fist's power: defeat the divine dragon, cut it open and tear out its heart, and after completing a ritual one gained the dragon's strength. But to rely on the power granted by a single planet's guardian dragon to defeat an omniversal-level Phoenix?
Daisy could only say they were overthinking it. The previous female Iron Fist had defeated nothing more than a Phoenix avatar—a shadow cast by the entity's own power the first time it laid eyes on Earth.