"Thor sounds like a name. Who's Thor?" Amusement brimmed in the corners of Daisy's eyes. She was asking what she already knew.
Big Volstagg was the eldest, and he felt it fell to him to step up and answer the question. Head bowed, axe held upside down, he looked like a defeated rooster. He was just about to speak when a man with a deathly pale face stepped out of thin air.
The man wore pale-gold scale armor, a dark-green cloak trailing from his shoulders, and beneath a goat-horned helmet was a gaunt face. The emotions in his eyes were complicated: cunning, pain, and a thread of madness. The most striking thing of all, of course, was the golden spear clenched in his right hand.
Said in legend to never miss, to streak across the sky like a meteor with every throw—this was Odin's eternal spear, Gungnir, the Spear of Odin.
The one standing before Daisy was certainly not Odin. Against a Skyfather-level being like that appearing in front of her, she'd have little resistance. The one holding the spear now was merely the self-proclaimed God King, the brat-like Loki.
After carefully sensing him, Daisy smiled. This fellow's situation was actually much like her own. For all that he gripped the eternal spear, he couldn't bring out a shred of its power—its value for posturing far outweighed its practical use.
The difference was that Daisy couldn't wield Mjolnir's power at all, while Loki could probably use part of Gungnir's functions back in Asgard. How much he could pull off on Earth, though, was anyone's guess.
"Woman, put down the hammer—that is not something you should covet!" Loki, too, was holding the eternal spear for show, not a sliver of Odin's power lent to him. Daisy's hammer sneered at her, and the spear in Loki's hand seemed dead as a doornail.
Both were putting on a bluff, and each could tell the other was bluffing—but for their own separate purposes, neither said so out loud.
Seeing this self-styled God King Loki arrive, whatever was going through their minds, the four still bowed in salute.
"This is not a matter for you to meddle in, Midgardian woman. Put down the hammer and leave this place." Loki's voice was soft, and he couldn't help but employ his hypnotic enchantment again.
It was no match for those martial artists whose wills were hard as iron, but Daisy had, after all, gained over three hundred years of Shou-Lao's cultivation. In theory, if Loki chatted with her eight hours a day for a month, he could enchant her—but a single feather-light sentence now stood no chance of shaking her will.
"So you were the one pulling tricks from the shadows just now! You're the one who should be leaving! This is Earth, not your so-called Midgard!" she said, hoisting the hammer.
After cursing him out a couple of times, she was already preparing to leave—taking Thor's Hammer back would count as completing the assignment.
Unfortunately, the hammer was a proud thing and refused to leave Antarctica. Still, the hammer seemed to think it over and offered her a condition: beat Loki up! Satisfy that one condition, and it would be willing to leave Antarctica.
"Is that really necessary?" she asked in the mental realm.
The hammer said it was very necessary!
Daisy ran through it quickly. She couldn't gauge Loki's depth. This fellow was definitely stronger than Sif, but Loki wasn't skilled at fighting—he was skilled at schemes and trickery. That much Daisy understood well. It wasn't as though the two of them couldn't fight.
"Best if you let me be the one to beat him!" The hammer threw in an extra clause, and to show its sincerity it reduced its own resistance. Daisy found that rather interesting. In any case, Loki had just pulled a dirty trick on her and was no good sort, so she happily agreed.
"Leave Earth, Asgardian!" she declared loudly.
Loki naturally wouldn't agree. You tell me to go, and I just go? Are you joking?
"Midgardian woman, you insult the God King!" His gaze was cold, his tone grim.
The two couldn't see eye to eye, and they went straight into a fight.
The hammer still didn't acknowledge her, but with its resistance lowered, it was considerably easier to manage.
Daisy controlled Mjolnir while making a leaping, arm-swinging motion herself, pretending her hand "gripped" Thor's Hammer as she smashed it down at Loki.
Loki was momentarily startled. He could tell Daisy couldn't use Mjolnir at all and didn't understand the point of her doing this—but he had to admit he was a fine actor too. His method of using the eternal spear was much the same as Daisy's: practically hoisting along this "lord" who ignored him completely, he made a parrying motion.
A crisp clang rang out as the eternal spear and Thor's Hammer collided in the most perfunctory fashion.
No lightning, no thunder, no streaking meteors appeared whatsoever.
To cover for her own shortcomings, Daisy gave a loud shout, "So powerful!"
Loki nodded sinisterly as well. "Woman, your strength is nothing to scoff at!"
Hammer and spear kept clashing—a thrust here, Daisy raising the hammer to meet it, then a backhand smash, Loki parrying again with the spear. The two went back and forth, looking for all the world like a lively brawl…
The four watching from a short distance away were a little dazed. A battle between two divine artifacts ought to bring down heavenly thunder and earthly fire, blot out the sun and moon—shouldn't it crack a planet open with a casual stroke? Wasn't this attack power of yours a bit on the low side? It hadn't even broken a single iceberg, had it?
At first they assumed the artifacts were afraid of harming Earth. Later it didn't seem that way. They'd rarely seen the power of the eternal spear, so that was hard to judge—but Mjolnir they knew well, and by no reckoning should its power be this feeble.
Realizing the act was about to fall apart, Loki angrily stabbed the spear into the ground. "Your blood is unworthy of staining the holy spear!"
Daisy looked plenty angry too. She tossed aside the somewhat unsatisfying Thor's Hammer—annoyed she hadn't gotten to beat Loki, and that it wouldn't lend her its power. "For an evil god like you, fists are far more satisfying anyway!"
The moment the two of them threw off their cumbersome disguises, their combat strength shot up several times over!
Loki had the bloodline of the Frost Giants, born with the power to control ice and cold, and he'd studied a great deal of dark magic in Asgard besides. Now he flew up into the air, and as his magic flowed, dark gray ice and snow shrouded a radius of several thousand meters.
Daisy wasn't afraid in the slightest. With the Phoenix energy reinforcing her, she likewise floated in midair, and behind her loomed the faint shape of a firebird soaring on spread wings.
The sight made Loki wince. He loved schemes and trickery, loved watching others get spun around by him—the one thing he didn't love was fighting. He hadn't expected Daisy to have such a fiery temper; two sentences in and she wanted to brawl. One word had led to the next, and now there was no getting out of it.
Crude woman! he cursed inwardly. Marshaling his dark magic, a mass of drifting ice rose into the air, ground smooth by his power into countless ice spikes.
Loki swept a hand, and the ice spikes surged toward Daisy like a crystalline silver dragon.
Daisy gave a great shout. The roaring flames wouldn't scorch her, so her suit and blouse remained perfectly intact. She fixed on the angle and, the instant the ice dragon bore down before her, took several quick steps back, then smashed a punch straight into its midsection.
The flames raged without restraint, like a savage beast, wild and swift as they cleaved the ice dragon in two at the waist.
Loki gave a snort, and the ice dragon transformed into a sky full of ice spikes that rained down on Daisy.