Wakanda conquering the world was perhaps ambitious. But Wakanda unifying the African continent—genuinely within reach.
Compared to Magneto's terrorism, T'Chaka's willingness to absorb condescension and pointed challenges with unreadable dignity was, on reflection, a far more sophisticated play.
Whether the old king was genuinely a man of peace or was simply holding his punch until the right moment to swing—that was between him and the universe. Either way, every humiliation he absorbed today would calcify into a conviction among those powers: Wakanda is small. Weak. Negligible. And when someone eventually told those same leaders that this nation harbored technology generations ahead of theirs, centuries of ingrained condescension would make them dismiss it without a second thought.
Once real conflict started, today's face-losing would buy him enormous time. Against Magneto's brand of antagonism and Doom's hermetic defiance, the fragile-looking old king was, in Daisy's private estimate, the most genuinely strategic of the three.
The summit proceeded on schedule. Daisy in her tactical uniform stood with the heads of the other major intelligence services and waited. Nothing happened. X-Men reported nothing. S.H.I.E.L.D. agents reported nothing unusual. The event ran its full course and concluded without incident—no uninvited guests, no explosions, no dramatic entrances.
So where was Magneto? Daisy stared at the two anti-Magneto combat robots positioned behind her and felt a deflating sense of anticlimax. If the villain didn't show up, the robots had no purpose.
"Director!" Mockingbird handed her a tablet.
Daisy looked at it, and her worldview was briefly rattled.
The footage was direct satellite feed. Crystal clear. The content was entirely unexpected.
Rogue—green hood up, a streak of silver at her temple—was methodically dismantling the Brotherhood of Mutants.
One kick sent Toad flying, his amphibian face a picture of uncomprehending misery. She grabbed a tree and swung it like a windmill straight into Azazel. She heaved a boulder the size of a small hill to drive Magneto back. Only the thick-skinned Sabretooth absorbed two direct punches—exactly two.
Daisy, exercising entirely appropriate cultural instinct, said: Oh my God.
If she didn't already know Rogue personally, she'd have assumed Supergirl had crossed over from the wrong universe.
She hadn't yet processed the deeply improbable power-transfer chain that explained this—and hadn't connected it to herself at all. From where Daisy stood, Rogue was simply operating at a level she'd never seen—an incomplete version of something, given that the energy was clearly dissipating over time, but with enough total volume to sustain combat for an hour without difficulty.
The Brotherhood, however, was not going to last an hour.
Toad had already been knocked into the ocean. Fate uncertain. Sabretooth was flat on the ground, waiting on his healing factor. Azazel had adopted self-preservation as his primary operational objective from the first swing and was largely avoiding contact. Only Magneto was managing something resembling an exchange.
But the old man had no real answer to rocks hitting with the force of artillery shells. He was scrambling, evading, wholly on the defensive.
Then the retreat: Azazel teleported out first—villain instincts, clean and unapologetic. Magneto, a moment behind, wrenched a mass of cars and debris between himself and Rogue to buy space, then rode the magnetic field out. Sabretooth pressed a hand to his chest, limped deep into the crowd, and vanished.
The fight had started fast and ended faster. By the time S.H.I.E.L.D. had even begun formulating a response, Rogue had already planted her feet, launched herself skyward, and cleared the area entirely.
"A mutant that powerful actually exists?" Mockingbird still looked like she was waiting to wake up.
Daisy had already worked out the rough shape of it. Eternal gene—an incomplete version, no heat vision, no ice breath, nothing sophisticated, just raw power output. The mystery was where Rogue had absorbed it from. Were there Eternals still active on Earth at this point?
The summit concluded with the expected outcome: the assembled nations agreed in principle to a Mutant Registration Act. Implementation would require substantially more negotiation—a summit of this scale needed at least two follow-up sessions before anything could be finalized.
Mutants had their own pragmatists. A meaningful fraction of them—those with no outwardly visible features—had built lives fully integrated in human society, some reaching positions of considerable influence. They had no intention of being pushed into open opposition to the rest of humanity. The politicians who worked with them had no intention of surrendering their advantages; telepathy, invisibility, and eavesdropping deployed in political competition were worth a great deal to the right person.
On the matter of Rogue, Daisy placed a call to Xavier's School directly. The school's response was measured. The charter said no student left behind—but Rogue had been there for three days, and her absorption ability made even her fellow students nervous. Storm and the others weren't going to rearrange their chaotic lives to hunt down someone they'd barely met. Mutants numbered in the tens of millions worldwide; they didn't have the bandwidth for that kind of sainthood.
Their position: if she came back, X-Men protection was available. If she didn't—well, the relationship simply wasn't deep enough to merit a global search.
"Keep eyes on her. She's dangerous—but if she's not breaking laws or hurting people, maintain limited surveillance only."
Daisy assigned a unit and moved on. The world had too many dangerous people; trying to neutralize each one immediately was a good way to run out of agents.
The days after the summit were quiet. The world's leaders dispersed from New York. Xavier's School kept searching for Jean. Then, ten days into his latest coma, Professor X woke. Faced with what his old friend had done, he was visibly grieved.
Daisy, meanwhile, was making good use of the Professor's old friend—Magneto—as her primary sales pitch. Magneto had failed to appear at the summit, gotten intercepted and routed by a temporarily supercharged young woman instead, and the two anti-Magneto combat robots she'd had Reed build on a crash schedule sat there having accomplished precisely nothing.
She'd thought it over, and decided: this was actually better. A sword hanging overhead was a far bigger threat than a man locked in a plastic prison—and a bigger threat made a more compelling sales pitch.
After the summit closed, she shed the tactical uniform for a suit, assembled a Hammer Industries delegation, and began making the rounds of national governments to pitch the anti-Magneto combat robots.
Hammer Industries' name was on the invoice that cleared Reed Richards' debt to S.H.I.E.L.D.—one hundred fifty million dollars, which was, from a certain angle, just Daisy moving money between pockets. But on paper, Reed's loan was paid in full.
Reed's Baxter Building had been more than half demolished when Doctor Doom decided to redecorate it. Hammer Industries covered the reconstruction costs and supplied all the laboratory equipment.
The perpetually underfunded Mr. Richards was delighted. Loan wiped out, research guaranteed—this was windfall territory. He handed over complete technical blueprints and design specifications without further discussion. Whatever profit the anti-Magneto robots generated afterward was no longer his concern.
Under the pretext that most countries' manufacturing infrastructure wasn't up to the production specifications, Daisy had Reed develop three tiers: low, mid, and high. What she was pushing to national governments was the baseline tier—ten to fifteen units coordinating together could drive Magneto into retreat.
"Gentlemen, ladies! Safety is priceless—and all of you bear the weight of entire nations on your shoulders. As you witnessed with the late Senator Kelly—turned into a puddle of water, a man who devoted his whole life to his country and his people, a man worthy of respect, cut down by the savage Magneto! He didn't just defile the American spirit—he's launched an assault on the world's values of freedom and democracy!..." Justin Hammer kept blowing at the assembled world leaders.