The explosion shattered the rock cocoon, and it felt like emerging from a second birth.
Her clothes were still on — intact, nothing scandalous had happened. Daisy didn't stop to worry about whether the foul air down here would wreck her lungs. She ran her hands over herself from head to toe: all five senses accounted for, all limbs present. The one thing she'd been quietly dreading — the Inhuman defect — hadn't manifested.
Maybe mine is just well-hidden, she told herself.
Light. Unburdened. Like she'd shed thirty pounds of dead weight overnight.
She clenched her fist and felt the difference immediately. This wasn't just stronger than her current female body — it was stronger than the male body she'd lived in during her past life. Her frame was still lean, no different to look at, but from somewhere deep in her cells came a surge of fresh vitality. Speed, reflexes, endurance — all of it had spiked.
Her technique was still raw, her fighting instincts still unpolished. But her physical baseline now matched soldiers who'd trained under brutal conditions — and all of that had happened in the span of ten minutes.
The Terrigen Mist had remade her from the inside out. Every cell, every organ, her blood, her lymph, her bones — everything had been reborn.
The physical upgrade was just a bonus. What mattered was the power.
Daisy reached inward and felt it out. The bloodline awakening had gone roughly how she'd expected. The stone door hadn't opened automatically — there was probably a switch somewhere outside — but she was alone in here, which meant she'd have to carve her own exit.
Real life wasn't a video game. Powers didn't come with a UI icon you could just tap to activate.
A power gave you potential. How far you pushed that potential was up to you.
In theory, any ordinary person could compete in the Olympics. How many actually could? Without training, almost none. Powers were the same — they had to be studied, developed, drilled, shaped into something that belonged to you.
Daisy focused on the strangeness living inside her now. Her vibration ability. It wasn't an energy that pooled in some mystical point in her body. It was more like... a new mode her body could run in. She could feel it the way she felt the ability to walk, to jump, to run. Except now she could also shake things.
She followed the marks she'd scratched into the walls, found the direction she'd come from, and pressed her hand against the massive stone blocking the way.
Half a meter (about 20 inches) of solid rock. She had no idea if she could break it. Too little force and she'd be trapped. Too much and she might bring the entire underground city down on top of herself.
Hmm.
First attempt — a low hum, and nothing. The door didn't budge. Her vibration hadn't even reached it before something in her subconscious yanked it back.
Not intentional. Pure instinct. Some buried reflex pulling her back.
Again.
She reached for the stone a second time. She combed through her patchwork of physics knowledge — she remembered something about resonant frequency. Every object had its own. Find the right frequency, and you could shatter it.
She searched. And searched. Finally found it — the stone's frequency — and adjusted herself to match.
Two pulses in, and her whole body screamed. The ability was double-edged: it hurt her as much as it hurt the target. But stubbornness won out over discomfort. She gritted her teeth and kept adjusting.
Crack. Crack.
She yanked her hand away.
The vibration radius had been too wide. The entire door had been caught in it. If that slab toppled, the shockwave could cascade — five more stone doors, the temple collapsing. She'd be scheduling her next reincarnation.
She studied the fracture lines. Found the worst-damaged section and went in for a third attempt.
This time she kept the zone small. Precision demanded more focus, but the blowback on her body was lighter.
Hold it. Slower. Smaller. Lighter.
She pushed encouragement to herself with every passing second.
BOOM.
A muffled crack — and a third of the stone door crumbled. Daisy didn't wait to assess the dust damage to her lungs. She bolted through the gap.
She checked the marks on the ground and ran.
The journey back had no Obelisk to light the way. Pure darkness. But every one of her senses had been enhanced — she could make out faint shapes in the black, and her heightened hearing and spatial awareness kept her on a straight line even at a dead sprint.
Her sense of direction had tended to be weaker. That weakness had been patched. She wasn't Daredevil-level — nowhere close — but in a corridor three meters (roughly 10 feet) wide and two meters (about 6.5 feet) tall, it was more than enough.
She ran with a lightness that felt almost absurd. Full of energy. Even without any formal running training, she was confident she could match a professional sprinter right now — and outlast them.
She stripped weight as she went, dumping anything she didn't need, prioritizing speed.
Daisy was genuinely terrified that at any moment she'd hear the groan of a collapsing ceiling, the rush of flooding seawater, the click of a self-destruct mechanism — she'd seen this exact scenario in too many movies to feel calm about it. She didn't stop once. Sheer stamina and sheer stubbornness carried her through. Three days of walking on the way in. One day of running on the way out. She burst back into the watchtower gasping.
"They really do lie in the movies..." she muttered between heaving breaths, collapsed on the floor.
The watchtower was still a disaster zone. She didn't linger. Packed her bag, changed into summer clothes so she'd look slightly less insane, and walked out.
Back at the hotel, she ran a hot shower, pulled on a bathrobe, twisted her hair up, and stood in front of the mirror.
The eyes looking back at her were bright and stubborn. High nose bridge. Her skin — noticeably smoother, like she'd finally gotten real rest.
And her legs were longer.
She'd been 170 cm (about 5'7") before. Now she looked closer to 172 or 173 cm (around 5'8").
She sat down at her laptop and searched local news. Nothing connected to her. The only mention was an internal bulletin from the San Juan Police Department — a lost-child notice, trying to locate her "missing parents."
She lay back on the bed and started thinking about the road ahead.
Hacking was the first career she crossed off. The original Daisy had never made it amount to much, and the golden age of the lone-wolf cyber vigilante was over. Hacking without a network behind you was suicide. And beyond the skills, a hacker needed instincts — the right mental architecture. That architecture had belonged to the person she'd displaced, not to her. Imitation without understanding would end badly.
Her vibration power. That was what she had.
On the run back, she'd been experimenting. She'd channeled the ability into the soles of her feet — a sort of assisted spring with every stride. It looked a little ridiculous, probably, but the speed gain was real. And the more she ran, the better she got. Raw and fumbling at first; slowly, gradually, more controlled.
The future was looking up.