Sif was the tallest woman Daisy had ever seen—six feet two inches, a towering 188 cm (6 ft 2 in)—with distinctly Nordic features and hard, sharp facial lines.
She bared her arms and thighs in the frozen wasteland without feeling the cold at all. Unlike those tall, slender Western models, her limbs were packed with power, and her battle cry as she charged was high and clear, shaking the heavens.
From sole to toe, every muscle and bone mobilized with her charge. That momentum alone marked her as a formidable opponent.
"Not bad at all!" Daisy set aside her nonchalance. In the real world, there was no chance of some five-thousand-year martial art thrashing a ten-thousand-year-old monster—and these Asgardians had each trained for thousands of years. She had no intention of showing off her own meager fists and kicks. Instead, she'd play it the hard way.
Roaring flames burned across her palm. Her five fingers clenched into a fist, hard as refined steel, and she drove it straight at Sif.
Facing this mysterious Midgardian woman's first attack, Sif neither underestimated it nor flinched. As a warrior of Asgard, a deity, she had her own pride. Sif raised the shield on her arm and chose to take the blow head-on.
A thunderous boom erupted. Her iron-hard fist was indestructible, and the Phoenix Force broke through anything. Daisy's punch was like a meteor falling out of the sky, carrying the force of ten thousand tons, and it slammed into Sif's shield.
Even forged from Asgardian metal, the shield failed to hold against the Phoenix Force's impact. Plain to the eye, a fist-print appeared on the shield first; then, in less than a tenth of a second, the shield reached the limit of what it could bear. Cracks of varying depth spread outward in every direction, until with a sharp crack it shattered into three pieces.
Sif's vambrace was crushed in the same instant, fragments scattering across the ground. The shockwave left her unsteady, staggering back several meters, her battle boots gouging two shallow furrows into the ice.
"What a weak god." This time no one warped her words, because what she said was already plenty arrogant…
The courage of the Asgardians deserved credit. Sif's shield was shattered, but she showed not a trace of fear. Her longsword whirled with ferocious force, and the three warriors of Asgard charged in too, each gripping his weapon.
Another punch snapped the golden-mustached man's rapier, and after that none of them dared trade blows with her directly.
"There's something wrong with her flames! At her power level it should be impossible to punch through Asgardian metal—it's that fire boosting her attack power!" Blood streamed down Sif's arm, but she only tore a strip from her battle skirt to bind it and fought on through gritted teeth, single-handedly absorbing well over half of Daisy's attacks.
"Make it a war of attrition—her flames can't last forever!" Neither Sif nor the three warriors were skilled at evasion. Asgardian warriors were all brutes who loved to charge and trade blows. But after Daisy's flames punched through the big man's armor too, they were forced into a few dodging maneuvers.
Wear down my flames? Ha! With Shou-Lao's power as the core and the Phoenix Force as the surface, inner and outer working in concert, she possessed both the endurance of the former and the keen edge of the latter. With her current three hundred years of cultivation, if she wanted to, she could melt half of Antarctica given a little time. Daisy feared nothing.
Still, to flush out the enemy hiding in the shadows, she reached out and produced her lasso. With a shudder of her arm it became a long golden whip, its tip trailing a sky full of afterimages, and all four were caught within its sweep.
Yet no matter which direction she struck, she saw no sign of any hidden enemy.
Anyone playing tricks of misdirection at this particular moment, she figured, had to be Loki. But plenty of others could turn invisible too—even certain pieces of high-tech equipment could achieve a similar effect—so she wasn't a hundred percent certain.
She had to admit the method of concealment was masterful. Whether by physical attack, by vibration sensing, or by mid-range strikes with the Phoenix Force, she couldn't smoke out the enemy lurking and watching.
If I can't find you, then I'll make you come to me on your own.
Shifting the whip to her left hand, she drove the four back with a flurry of blows, then sensed for the location of Thor's Hammer. It wasn't too far—only a few hundred meters away. The Hammer of Skadi was steeped in malevolence and she didn't want to touch it, but Thor's Hammer was safe and harmless. Picking it up to play with was perfectly fine!
A bright, dazzling smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. As she mobilized magnetism and gravity, the earth gave a faint tremor. Then her right arm stretched out, level with her shoulder, fingers spread, as if to grasp something out of thin air.
That familiar gesture left the four Asgardians stunned. Their faces filled with shock, and Sif's eyebrows shot up—she regarded it as blasphemy, an affront to Asgard.
Sif watched, helpless, as Daisy left the ground and hovered in midair, the ground around her beginning to shake. She didn't know it was magnetism and gravity at work, and an uneasiness stirred in her heart. This Midgardian woman didn't seem to be bluffing?
"Unforgivable! Do you know what you're doing! You—oh gods!" Before Sif could finish, she saw the familiar Mjolnir come flying straight over and, under the horrified gazes of the group, land squarely in the palm of Daisy's right hand.
"This is impossible!" they cried out as one, their expressions as if they'd seen Odin doing line dances on Earth.
Daisy's eyebrows lifted slightly, her manner composed, pretending she'd merely done some trivial little thing.
In reality she was cursing inwardly at that moment—damn it, no reaction whatsoever! She'd put in all that effort, hauling with gravity, pushing with magnetism, finally lifting Mjolnir off the ground, then dragging this stubborn ox into her hand. It had cost her plenty of strength, and Thor's Hammer paid her no mind at all.
"Whosoever can lift this hammer shall possess the same power as Thor?" Daisy held the hammer and read aloud the inscription on its side.
The four Asgardians were dumbstruck. They all stopped at once. The fight had become utterly meaningless now. They strained their rather sluggish minds, as if trying to grasp the far-reaching implications of this event.
Daisy burst out laughing, though inwardly she was a string of curses—this lousy hammer's intelligence level wasn't low! After she finished reading the inscription, another line of small golden script surfaced on the hammer's face. Fluent in runes, she could just make it out on a careful look.
"…shall possess the same power as Thor, if he or she is worthy of holding it…" The hammer's small line was written vaguely. Worthy by holding what? It didn't say. Daisy felt as if the hammer were sneering down at her.
The hammer seemed to be mocking her complete lack of virtue, and flatly denied her ownership.
"What's so impressive about it!" Under the four Asgardians' horrified gazes, she gripped the hammer and gave it two swings. The gesture was completely superfluous, in fact—gravity and magnetism had been doing all the work on the hammer the whole time, with nothing to do with her arm.
But the four Asgardians didn't know that! They were terrified.
Sif, an officially recognized goddess of Asgard, felt a measure of confusion—this Mjolnir was different from the one in her memory. The three warriors couldn't keep their composure at all. Strictly speaking they were Thor's guards, and whoever Mjolnir acknowledged would be the God of Thunder. The three exchanged glances. What were they supposed to do now?