[ SHIELD's local outpost, Kandahar, Afghanistan ]
Daisy sat upright, the fatigue etched into her posture but not her voice. "The Mandarin isn't just dangerous, Director. He's catastrophic. Full-scale city-level destructive capability, easy for him."
Daisy laid out Mandarin's threat profile in blunt, precise terms. There was no exaggeration—he had the power to level a city single-handedly. Even without one ring, his personal combat ability remained intact.
During that wild pursuit, Mandarin had begun layering his attacks—fire and ice paired together, lightning entwined with hurricane.
Aside from being psychologically unstable and intellectually erratic, the man had no exploitable weaknesses.
"He's impulsive, uncontrollable, and dangerously efficient at destruction." Daisy's assessment was calculated, nothing more.
Fury gave a shallow nod. "Our intel says he's buried under a Snowy mountains. What's your opinion on his chances of survival?"
"Snowy mountains?" Her brow lifted slightly.
"Yes." Fury forwarded her several satellite images. Daisy reviewed them silently. The frames were clear—Mandarin plummeted mid-flight, then vanished into the mountain after triggering a minor avalanche.
Daisy had never underestimated the durability of villains. She doubted snow alone would kill him. But if he was in a India, there were geopolitical lines SHIELD wouldn't cross lightly.
"He's alive. We should send in a recon unit—covert, small-scale…" She left the suggestion hanging.
Fury shut it down immediately. "This operation is now sealed under Level 10 classification. That's final. Rest up, Agent Johnson." The call ended without further comment.
In the dim room, Natasha, seeing there was nothing more to monitor, stretched and grabbed her gear for departure. "Well, that was charming," she muttered. "I've got a plane in twenty."
"Natasha—hold on a second." Daisy's voice cut through with purpose. She had something to ask.
"What is it?" Natasha paused, eyebrow arched, curious.
"Help me… bandage up?" Her request came flatly, with no emotion beyond necessity.
Natasha raised an eyebrow, gaze scanning Daisy from head to toe. "Where exactly are you hurt?"
Daisy's expression didn't waver. Calm. Controlled. "Yesterday. Multiple injuries. It was bad." She kept the answer vague, and Natasha immediately understood—this wasn't about pain, but maintaining a cover.
No further words were needed. Disguise was second nature to Natasha.
...
An hour later, Daisy sat in front of a mirror, wrapped in gauze and bruises so realistic she looked like she'd survived a bomb blast.
"No scarring," Natasha observed, wiping her hands on a towel. "Not even a scratch. You heal like a damn lizard."
She didn't wait for a reply—just smirked, grabbed her gear, and walked off.
Crutch in hand, Daisy limped through the SHIELD contact point with the grace of a half-dead operative. Agents paused mid-task.
"Ma'am—maybe you should lie down."
"You really shouldn't be walking—"
She gave them nothing but a faint nod, eyes unreadable. The image of a war-worn survivor.
She played the part a moment longer—then once out of view, she stepped into her room, locked the door, and tossed the crutch across the room.
In a flash, the bandages were off.
Then she grabbed her gear, checked the position coordinates, and vanished—teleporting straight to the outskirts of the desert canyon where it all began.
...
[ Afghanistan ]
The desert welcomed her with a sky full of dust and silence. Wind whipped through the sandstone cliffs, carrying yellow dust through the valley. It was quiet. Too quiet.
She stood for a moment, surveying the place Mandarin first appeared. The sky hadn't changed. The shadows hadn't moved.
But the story had.
What took hours by convoy took seconds now. That was the luxury of superpower—instant arrival, strategic movement.
Then she started moving between rocky outcrops and hidden ravines, she moved like a ghost. She timed every teleport between satellite sweeps, sprinted under tree canopies, ducked behind eroded ledges.
The goal wasn't just stealth. It was intent.
She wasn't looking for Mandarin.
She was hunting something else.
She was here to learn.
"Come on, old man," she muttered under her breath, scanning the terrain. "You must've left something behind..."
An ancient scroll. Qi techniques. Even the ring's user manual would do. Anything he might've left behind.
...
That danger she'd felt last time didn't return. The air was still, the land unremarkable.
Fifteen minutes of running through shifting sand and brittle scrub finally brought her to the remains of the Global Hawk.
She stood silently, taking it in. The drone—thirteen meters long, four meters tall with a wingspan of thirty-five—had been split in two. Something violent had snapped it apart. Shrapnel and carbon-scored debris littered the landscape in a violent eight-hundred-meter radius, charred and torn.
"How was it crash here?" Daisy murmured, eyes scanning the landscape. Kandahar lay to the north. Two mountains to the south. A narrow path snaked between them.
Nothing unusual, at least at first glance. The landscape played dumb, revealing no truths.
Then she contact her AI Danger and fed her the drone's wreckage coordinates. Altitude, speed, last known trajectory—all transmitted for analysis.
The calculation came back fast. Danger overlayed digital arcs and vector maps across her phone display.
A red pin blinked. Point of impact—right between the two mountains.
She stared at the space between them. Two minutes of stillness. Then a smirk touched her lips.
"Well, well. There it is."
Call it science or sleight of hand, but there it was—an invisible mountain sandwiched between the visible ones. Optical camouflage or reality distortion, she couldn't say. What mattered was that the Global Hawk hadn't fallen—it had collided.
It was the crash that had likely awakened the Mandarin from seclusion. Unplanned, uninvited.
But entry was another problem. As she paced in slow circles. There was no visible entrance or path. No shimmer. No shift in pressure or temperature. Just empty space that wasn't.
Teleporting in blind was reckless. Too many variables, no data. That left one option: brute force with a strategic twist.
So she muttered, lips curling wryly, "When in doubt... dig."
She resorted to one of humanity's oldest survival instincts—a time-honored tradition she'd skipped in Puerto Rico: dig a damn hole.
With powers now, she didn't need a shovel. Pressing her palms to the earth, she sent precise shockwaves downward and seismic pulses reverberated deep.
The ground trembled. Cracked.
She smirked. "Let's revive some ancient art forms."
Twenty minutes later, a slanted tunnel had been carved beneath the dunes—leading right into the invisible wall of the phantom mountain.
With a sudden crack, the illusion shattered at her touch. Stone dust billowed up. The void beyond, finally exposed.
"Knock, knock," Daisy whispered, stepping into the dark tunnel with practiced calm.
She landed silently on the stone floor, knees slightly bent to absorb the impact. The air was heavy. Still. Like it hadn't moved in centuries.
Her gaze swept the chamber without emotion.
The space carved into the mountain was narrow—structured like a tapered pagoda. Five levels in total. She'd landed on the third.
She checked the upper two first.
The upper floors were cluttered with relics—robes in imperial cuts, blades long dulled, saddles decorated with archaic emblems—all are relics from another century.
She picked up a curved golden scimitar, bejeweled sheath, fully decorated, she weighed it in her hand, and drew it from its scabbard. The blade gleamed faintly. Just one glance at this told her the blade was obsolete. Decent against ancient armor. Worthless against modern alloys.
"Trophy piece," she murmured. "Pretty… useless."
With a quick flick, her fingernails sharpened into obsidian-black claws, kissed by divine blessing from the panther goddess. She pried every gemstone from the scabbard without hesitation, dropping them into her pocket one by one.
"For the retirement fund," she smirked. "Or a bribe or two."
The blades and gear? She left them behind without a second glance.
But the fourth floor stopped her.
She stepped inside, and her breath caught—not from awe, but from sheer information overload. Every inch of the walls was covered in script—Ancient Chinese brush strokes, Old Mongolian slants, and curling Manchu calligraphy.
"Great," she muttered. "Three dead languages and no Rosetta Stone."
She squinted at a faded passage in Chinese. "That looks like… dragon? Or lunch? Honestly, it could be either."
Her knack for languages didn't extend to hieroglyphics. The Ancient Chinese was archaic, half-legible.
Mongolian? Machine translation might help. Manchu? A dead tongue.
Mongolian? Machine translation might help with it.
But the Manchu? She sighed. "If this is the key to unlocking immortality, I'm going to be very annoyed."
Still, she recorded everything—scripts, sketches, even random etchings. Every inch of ancient madness.
"Even if it's his grocery list, I want it analyzed."
The remaining floors offered nothing.
No food. No supplies. Just dust and silence. Which meant Mandarin had long since stopped eating. Fasting, likely part of his training. Grim, but effective.
Back outside, Daisy stood in the sand once more. She looked back at the illusion-veil of the hidden mountain, then slowly bent down and pressed her palms to the earth.
Shockwaves pulsed down her arms.
Again. And again. Compress. Load. Charge. Pressure screaming for release.
When the energy became unbearable, she whispered, "Rest in obscurity, Mandarin."
And released it.
The resulting quake mimicked a magnitude seven. The invisible mountain and everything inside it was entombed beneath tons of stone.
Afghanistan—rugged, remote, unstable. A graveyard of secrets. No roads, no patrols, no satellites watching. No one would stumble onto this ruin by accident.
To Be Continued...
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[POWER STONES AND REVIEWS PLS]