Stark finished speaking and noticed that both Baldy and Daisy were wearing grave expressions. He immediately realized there was information he wasn't privy to, and his brows knitted together. "What are you two hiding from me now?"
The words had barely left his mouth when a massive tremor rolled through the atmosphere—continuous, unending, as if something were slamming into the Earth over and over again.
"You owe me an explanation. I'm going to see what's going on." With that, Stark fired up the suit and shot straight into the sky.
"I'll take a look too..." Daisy left Baldy alone, staring blankly at his comm unit, and under cover of darkness she rose into the high air as well.
From up there, everything was laid bare, and Daisy felt a surge of exhilaration. She could see the New York Sanctum projecting a pillar of energy—vast beyond measure, stretching for thousands of miles, seeming to carry endless power—that struck an incoming meteor with irresistible force.
The two locked into a stalemate. By now the London Sanctum and the Hong Kong Sanctum had surely fired at the same moment.
Daisy didn't have superhuman eyesight. Her vision was better than a normal person's, but she still couldn't make out what was happening beyond the atmosphere. Even so, judging from the energy signatures, the Three Sanctums were clearly giving it everything they had.
The energy was a chaotic, jumbled mix, most of it magic accumulated bit by bit over centuries. In terms of raw piercing power it was nowhere near her Phoenix Chi, but it won on sheer volume. She didn't know about London and Hong Kong, but the meteor over New York was visibly being ground down to nothing.
Daisy threw a punch in approval. The Ancient One really came through. Three of the eight hammers, gone in a single stroke—their odds had improved dramatically.
After grinding down three hammers, the Sanctums' magic slowly began to lose ground. The atmosphere was breached again and again, and five hammers streaked down in golden flashes, entering the Earth and following some trajectory of their own to seek out their hosts.
About what she'd expected—the hammers liked people with extraordinary raw strength, so Daisy hadn't even made the candidate list.
She couldn't see the distant hammers; she only caught one trailing a sonic boom, landing right on top of Xavier's School.
Running through the World Serpent's hammer-selection criteria—tall, immensely strong—Daisy guessed the one who fit was most likely Colossus.
She gave it a single glance, then looked away.
It wasn't that she was cold-hearted. She just wasn't worried.
With the Xavier School's current firepower, one puppet controlled by a hammer really wasn't much of a threat.
They had Professor Charles, Cyclops, Storm, Wolverine, Pyro and Iceman—and Jean, who, thanks to a certain someone's chats with her, had fused a sliver of her dark persona and was now a full thirty percent stronger than her original-timeline self.
With a lineup that strong, never mind a hammer-controlled Colossus—you could toss them the World Serpent himself operating at less than one percent strength and they'd still send him home with a lump on his head.
If they couldn't beat the World Serpent's puppet, then nobody on Earth could.
Eight hammers, down to four in one go. Daisy could barely keep from laughing out loud. For the World Serpent to crawl out and stir up trouble at a moment in time when the Ancient One was still alive—that was genuinely unwise.
Back at S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Information Department, Baldy had already pulled together reports from several fronts. Some of it was good news, some of it bad.
The first report to come in: someone in California had spotted what looked a lot like Blonsky's Abomination—a yellow-skinned giant clutching a spike-headed hammer, muttering words no one could understand.
The location was bizarre. From the outside it looked like an ordinary home, but the interior was something else entirely. The National Guard suspected it was a secret laboratory and was now massing troops to defend it and prepare a counterattack.
It was an A.I.M. secret base! Daisy and Baldy shared a knowing smile over the comm channel.
"Why the weird grins? Don't tell me that's your secret base. I'll go check it out." Stark didn't bother asking their permission—he just flew over.
The second report came from the Fantastic Four, who were in Eastern Europe hunting for relics of Doctor Doom. The Thing had been walking down the street when a hammer fell from the sky and struck him on the head; afterward he acted as if he didn't recognize his teammates at all, swinging the hammer wildly and smashing everything in reach.
Reed and the others were hamstrung—afraid to go all out for fear of hurting him—and were struggling badly just to cope.
After conferring with Baldy, Loki, and Reed, Daisy dispatched Lady Sif and the Warriors Three to lend a hand.
Seven against one. Surely they couldn't lose.
The third hammer-possessed target was that dog-lover, the Hulk—currently in Brazil, also rampaging like a madman, the kind that killed anyone he laid eyes on.
"This one used to be a scientist? I, the God King, shall deal with him personally."
Loki figured the Hulk had been a scientist before, so even if he was a bit stronger now, there was a limit to it. To fulfill his promise of handling half the enemies, Loki prepared to take on the Hulk himself.
Daisy watched with sympathy as Loki vanished from her sight, carrying Asgard's super-weapon, the Destroyer. She couldn't think of a single thing to say. Good luck, Loki. He'd probably make it back alive... probably.
"This host-selection standard seems a little off..." Baldy's face was grim, a sheen of fine sweat beading on his forehead.
In under two minutes, his premonition came true.
"Juggernaut's been taken over at one of my safe houses. This is the one thing I have to ask you to handle." Baldy was sick with regret. A base, blown. Had he known this damn hammer liked tall, powerful types, he'd never have parked Juggernaut at a secret base of his.
Daisy bit back a laugh and got the base's address.
One look confirmed it really did have to be her—it was way too far out.
Codename Rocket, located in the New Siberian Islands, well inside the Arctic Circle.
"Consider this a favor I owe you. You have to keep the fight strictly timed—I can cover for you for five minutes, tops." Baldy tossed off the promise of a favor as if it were nothing, and Daisy didn't care; that stuff was all hot air. But time was tight, so she wasn't about to make any demands.
At this stage, if Baldy got hauled up for financial irregularities, a lot of her own assets would be hard to keep hidden too.
"Five minutes? Fine. Five minutes it is."
Daisy threw on her gear in a flash. To keep from being photographed by Russian military satellites, she let her hair down—for the face-blind people of the Marvel world, that was plenty.
She'd never been to the exact spot, so she teleported once en route, corrected once, and only then reached Nick Fury's so-called safe house, which was in reality a military base.
A number of people who didn't know the truth—who thought they were S.H.I.E.L.D. agents but were in fact completely off the books—had already partially withdrawn. The rest were still fighting hard, buying time.
Daisy clicked her tongue at the sight. Baldy's bases were each more remote than the last; first the Blizzard down in Antarctica, and now this Arctic Rocket, which looked to be on a similar scale.
Even after a partial withdrawal, there were still forty or fifty people on site; at full staff the base had to top a hundred.
And this was just the small Arctic outpost. By Daisy's recollection, Baldy had thirty bases, large and small, that had been exposed to the public—and even counting the bare minimum staff, that came to three thousand people. To quietly build up this many off-the-books temp workers right under the noses of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Security Council—Baldy really was something else.