Daisy was a martial artist; she had no intention of trading raw energy with Loki. She blinked aside from the spear of ice and drove a fist straight at him.
Loki's face changed the instant he saw her teleport. He swore under his breath and flickered out of the way of the burning fist just as fast.
"Not bad at all! You're a far better god than the one down on the ground. Don't run off—let's go a few more rounds!" Daisy felt the thrill of the hunt. Her own strength had exploded upward, and finding nobody worth fighting would have been a genuine letdown. Loki, by her measure, was neither too strong nor too weak—just right for where she stood now.
Trading blows with a real, honest-to-goodness god—the very thought lit her up. Neither the washed-up web novelist she'd been in her past life nor the original Daisy who'd owned this body would ever have been fit to cross hands with a deity. The Phoenix and Shou-Lao had given her the nerve to stop flinching and simply go for it, and somewhere along the way her heart had grown far tougher than she'd noticed.
Both of them could fly. Both could teleport. Each had range and close-quarters power in equal measure—one fire, one ice—and the fight blazed gloriously across the sky, the outcome impossible to call.
An ice peak melted away, only to congeal again a heartbeat later. Flame scoured deep furrows into the frozen ground, and ten seconds on the frost had sealed every scar shut.
The four warriors below were forced to keep shifting position with the battle, and every one of them felt distinctly out of place here.
So what now? Throw in with God-King Loki? Not a soul among them wanted that—and besides, if their God-King were beaten by a mortal, better he die fighting than suffer the shame. That was exactly why Loki, who had no love for combat, hadn't ordered them in to help. Asgard's pride wouldn't let him call for backup, and he couldn't afford to lose that much face.
"I think Loki had us under a spell back there!" Sif was the first to surface from the fog.
The other three came to the same realization one by one. Their earlier brawl with Daisy had been baffling from start to finish—and the question simply circled back around: what were they supposed to do now?
"Go to Loki. He's bound to have word of Thor."
The four hurried off to chase the pair still dueling overhead. What none of them knew was that, far across the ice, someone had been watching the battlefield through a telescope the entire time.
It was a woman, wrapped in a cloak the exact color of the ice, who had lain hidden in a frozen hollow for a very long while. Her face looked as though acid had eaten it away—hair and skin gone entirely, leaving only blood-red muscle and a fleshless, skull-like mask. Her eyes were clouded, and the years had carved their weight into her. She was no longer young.
When she saw Loki and Daisy's fight drifting farther and farther off, drawing away the four warriors who had been guarding the hammer, she knew the moment she had waited so long for—the moment promised in a divine revelation—had finally come. Her hour had arrived.
She dragged herself out of the ice cave and cinched her coat tight; the old Nazi insignia on its upper sleeve stood out, stark and unmistakable.
The woman ran across the ice with everything she had left. Her body had once been enhanced, but seventy years had passed, and her strength now sat at less than a third of its prime. She didn't care. When she fell she got back up; she never bothered to skirt the broken, uneven ice, just hurled herself straight toward her goal.
A dull thud—she went down hard, her forehead cracking against a jutting block of ice. The blow split her brow wide open and dimmed her left eye, and still she paid it no mind, scrambling up to keep running.
She passed Mjolnir where Daisy had carelessly tossed it aside, sneered at it in contempt, and then in a few frantic strides plunged into the dead center of the storm.
The very tempest that had hampered even Daisy and Loki gathered around her of its own accord, knitting itself into a shield of impossible solidity. The woman forced her excitement down, muttering to herself, "S.H.I.E.L.D., Hydra, I'm coming for you. Everything you tore from me, I'm taking it all back."
Breaking through the wall of the storm, she finally stood in the place that had haunted her dreams a thousand times over—the Hammer of Skadi, the relic Red Skull had drawn into the mortal world through bloody, wholesale sacrifice. It blazed at her now, dazzling and radiant.
That light shot straight into the heavens, so brilliant that even Daisy and Loki, far from the scene by now, saw it flare.
"What is that?" she asked Loki.
Loki badly wanted to fire back (when did we get so chummy?), but he glanced over on reflex, and his stomach dropped. He knew something very bad was about to happen.
"It's Thor! Thor has come!" Below, the four warriors went sprinting joyfully back the way they'd come.
Daisy looked at Loki and found the God of Mischief neither pleased nor grieved—only faintly puzzled.
Realizing something had gone wrong, she teleported off at once, Loki close on her heels.
Forcing through the howling snow, Daisy saw the woman's fingers about to brush the Hammer of Skadi. She flicked her finger, and a fire bolt screamed out, searing away the woman's fingers, palm, and forearm in an instant. The woman shrieked, her balance pitching forward, her whole body lunging for the hammer.
"Get back here!" Gravity seized hold; the woman's body was hauled back several steps. Her last reserves of potential erupted all at once, and it still wasn't enough. She was a single step from the hammer, yet her body retreated against her will, the gap stretching wider and wider.
Only now did Daisy spare her a real look. This had to be Sin—Red Skull's daughter, by the math an old woman of seventy by now. For someone so brimming with malice, Daisy felt no instinct to defer to her elders, and she threw her power into it without restraint.
Even the Hammer of Skadi grew frantic, its glow flickering wildly—whether it was lending the woman strength or she was burning away her life and every scrap of her potential, she ground out one more step forward.
That made Daisy angry too. Looking down on me that badly? She poured on the full weight of her gravity. Human strength has its end; under the crushing pull the woman's feet plowed a shallow trench in the ground, her spine and bones grinding audibly—and then her body began sliding helplessly backward.
"Die, you blight!" Daisy had decided this finger-flick fire bolt was wonderfully handy: cheap, fast, sharp enough to punch clean through, and far from gentle on whatever it hit.
One bolt, meeting no resistance at all, bored straight through the woman's skull. A bright, bloody hole opened in the center of her forehead; despair flooded her, and the light in her eyes guttered out for good.
Daisy caught the corpse. Putting down Red Skull's daughter ahead of schedule gave her little satisfaction—the gulf in power had been so wide that losing was never on the table.
She let out a long breath, and only then noticed the Hammer of Skadi was still pulsing with light. Daisy edged back a step without meaning to. Enemies with a body she didn't fear; these unseen, untouchable ones were another matter entirely.
The glow flared blinding-bright, and she half-shut her eyes against it, retreating another step.
At the very edge of her vision, Daisy caught the woman's blood spreading across the ground—and one thin rivulet of it threading its way to the hammer, joining with it at last.
The hammer seemed to laugh, soundlessly, mocking her—mocking that all her effort had, in the end, come to nothing.