The mouth of the cave was already warm, and the deeper she went, the hotter it grew. Daisy had no idea how the Iron Fists of past generations had adapted to heat like this; fighting in such conditions had to be a brutal trial for an ordinary martial artist.
A faint sheen of sweat beaded on her forehead. She didn't draw on her chi to resist it, but instead used her footwork to regulate her body's state.
Their strength might be roughly even, but in the finer details a powered individual still fell short of a martial artist tempered by a thousand hammer blows. She would need a long stretch of time to bring herself to her combat peak.
There was no vegetation anywhere in the cavern. Even the stones, scorched year after year, were searing to the touch.
After Daisy had walked a five-hundred-meter (1,640-foot) passage and rounded a bend, the view shifted and another path opened before her—clearly dug by later hands, winding down into the earth at a thirty-degree slope.
She kept a steady pace the whole way, neither fast nor slow, passing through six such passages in a row, until at last she stepped into an enormous underground space.
The chamber sprawled across a vast area. Without flying up for a survey, Daisy gauged it at no less than twenty square kilometers (about 7.7 square miles)—maybe more.
She paid the dimensions little mind. Her eyes went straight to the center of the cave, to the divine dragon crouched against the ground.
Though sparks spat now and then from his mouth, the dragon had no fixed elemental aspect—he belonged to none of the fire-wyrms or frost-wyrms by which humans sorted their kind.
From head to tail he ran a hundred meters (328 feet) long. Two enormous wings were folded against his belly, his four limbs thick and powerful, his scales a dark crimson. He had a long, birdlike neck, a head that looked slightly small against his body, and a long, sinuous tail studded with several barbs that promised no small amount of harm.
The pressure of a higher being blanketed the entire cavern, and Daisy was forced to channel a portion of her mental power to resist the dragon's aura.
By that aura alone, it was hard to imagine this was a dragon of only three hundred years—and that her predecessor had defeated one of at least a thousand.
By Western game classifications, a five-year-old was a hatchling, a three-hundred-year-old was unquestionably an adult dragon, and anything past a thousand belonged to the ancient-dragon tier.
Eastern dragons differed somewhat in combat strength, but the gap in age tiers wasn't large.
The dragon before Daisy was a full-grown adult, no question—the real deal, without the slightest exaggeration.
Hearing movement, the dragon opened his eyes and looked Daisy's way. Two emerald-green eyes seemed to weigh her strength, and when he took in her getup—decked out like a hero straight off a Dragon Quest cover—even those eyes betrayed a flicker of resignation. Wasn't she just stacking the deck?
Daisy was sizing him up too. He really was huge. The dragon's build reminded her of the Panther God she'd met in Wakanda's spirit world—similar in size, except that one had been a phantom, while the one before her was a flesh-and-blood divine dragon.
"So you're this generation's Iron Fist? I'd never have guessed that K'un-Lun, which favors sons over daughters, would pick two women in a row." The dragon's voice rolled long and slow. Daisy couldn't understand his words, but the language passed straight into her mind through mental force and resolved into something she could follow.
"Oh? You seem to carry the Phoenix's power as well. Could it be that my karma with the Phoenix isn't over yet? What a marvelous fate." Even as he studied her, the dragon rose slowly to his feet, and the towering cavern itself seemed to shudder twice at his shape.
"Yes—I didn't want this either, but it seems we don't have much choice. I can only fight you. Please, forgive me." When it came to being killed every few years or few centuries, then having his heart cut out and his blood drunk, Daisy—as the one set to profit—had no standing to weigh in on the rights and wrongs of it. She was only stating how she felt.
If she put herself in the dragon's place—K'un-Lun, the Celestial Court, all of it—she'd have rebelled long ago.
The dragon looked ferocious but was in truth remarkably mild-mannered, probably afraid that being too fierce would frighten a challenger to death. He chatted on with Daisy like an old neighbor for a few more idle lines—whether the food in K'un-Lun agreed with her, whether the training was wearing her out, and so on.
Treat me with a foot of courtesy and I'll repay you with ten. With the dragon being so gracious, a certain someone who'd been planning a sneak attack hurriedly tucked away her Atomic Cutter ring and, with a properly solemn face, took up her shield and longsword.
This fight was going to be a hard slog, because she'd been looking for a good while and hadn't found a single fatal weak point on the dragon.
Shou-Lao existed somewhere between the solid and the illusory. In K'un-Lun he could not truly die, but he could still be wounded—he'd respawn after a corpse run, just like in a game. Which was to say, he had a ceiling for the energy he could absorb; exceed it, and his consciousness would briefly leave his body.
Daisy was like one of those game protagonists fighting a boss: only when she'd emptied the other side's health bar would the fight be over.
"Here I come, Senior!" She gave a great shout, chi reinforcing her body. Rather than using gravity, she launched herself up on the strength of her own feet against the ground. The blade was crowned with a layer of dazzling, brilliant red light, as if she held an oversized torch in her hand, and Daisy swung the sword down toward the dragon's neck.
The dragon roared too, announcing that he had entered his combat state. His left claw lifted, then swept hard from left to right.
The claw strike looked leisurely, as if it carried no real force, but under the dragon's strength it was in fact very fast, and its angle of attack swept across a wide swath of the space around Daisy.
Given the contrast in size and power between them, one hit and Daisy would be taking up residence inside a wall.
She hadn't expected to fell the dragon in a single stroke, then absorb three hundred years of cultivation and stride to the summit of her life.
She hadn't put her full strength into the swing. Facing the claw, she stayed cool and composed, swiftly running the calculation of the distance and angles between them.
She couldn't match the previous Iron Fist—that woman had been the Phoenix host of her age—but she had advantages of her own.
Compared to a born-and-bred native of K'un-Lun, her combat experience was richer, her vision broader; or rather, she wasn't so hidebound by the contest of martial technique.
She teleported behind the dragon's head and brought her solid, heavy shield smashing down toward the back of his skull.
"A spatial ability?" The dragon was massive, but his movements were anything but slow. His head darted slightly forward, dodging the shield strike. Daisy was limited by her own size—her arms only reached so far—and the dragon, pleased with his own cleverness, twisted back and spat out a jet of jade-green energy flame.
What he hadn't reckoned on was that Daisy wasn't exactly above dirty tricks either; she was frighteningly good at sneak attacks and cheap shots. Halfway through the shield strike, her other hand drove a fist straight at the dragon's head.
In the roaring blaze, that punch carried her vibration powers as well. The two streams of energy flame met in midair, and in both quality and quantity the dragon's was the stronger—except his energy flame was a pure outpouring, lacking the penetrating quality of Daisy's vibration waves.
The flame's outer layer was breached outright, but as the shockwave's energy was steadily spent, her thrust slowed and slowed. The dragon's flame had tremendous toughness and a clinging, adhesive quality; even with its outer layer shattered, it would not be broken off, and Daisy's surging flame was like a doomed soldier surrounded on all sides, collapsing at last on the road of its charge.
Seeing that her Fire Fist was ultimately no match for the dragon's breath, she had no choice but to raise her shield in defense.