[ Forest outside Yashida Castle, Shikoku Island, Japan]
Daisy didn't waste a single thought on whether the Silver Samurai was a cranky old man Yashida stuffed inside antique armor. Every grievance has its perpetrator—and frankly, this one wasn't hers to deal with. Logan could handle that history-laden cosplay disaster. She had more pressing matters to handle, and her prey was already bleeding a trail through the forest.
Thanks to the White Tiger Amulet now humming against her skin, Daisy's tracking instincts had gone from excellent to animalistic. The world sharpened—scents, motion, even blood trails were visible like glowing neon in her mind. She was the hunter now. And predators don't get distracted.
Two red-cloaked ninjas—clearly not briefed on the futility of shuriken against someone who could literally vibrate buildings—tried to ambush her. Poor souls. One even threw with such wild flailing energy she thought he might've pulled a muscle. Daisy dispatched them with brutal precision. One was taken down from his shuriken in the neck which Daisy reflect with her vibration energy blast. Other didn't even get to finish yelling before she silenced him by rupturing his heart with vibration.
The forest swallowed her whole as she followed the crimson trail, moonlight filtering through the ancient trees. Somewhere behind, chaos reigned in the burning castle, but here—amid rustling leaves and beastly tension—it was silent. Too silent. Nature itself was uneasy. Even the animals sensed the presence of two apex predators cutting across their territory, and wisely chose to shut up.
"Gao!" Daisy called out, her voice carried by the wind. "There are only two of us left. Let's fight to the death and make this final act worth my plane ticket price to Japan."
She surged forward, every inch of her body in sync with the magic-infused amulet. With every short speed burst from vibration energy. She became Faster. Deadlier. Gao, already weakened, was still limping ahead, stubborn as ever. But Daisy knew Gao couldn't run forever. This wasn't a chase. It was a countdown.
And right on cue, as the distance between the two got closer and closer, Daisy again sense danger, the old hag tried a desperate backhanded ambush—like a cornered rat. Daisy had seen it coming before it even began, sidestepping with a fluid grace. "Sloppy," she muttered, then spun and hurled a dagger straight at Gao's face.
She didn't need Clint Barton's archery skills when she had poison-coated adamantium serrated dagger—from Viper's personal stash.
Gao, half-blind and fully desperate, mistook the whistling air for a shockwave and raised her hand to block it. A foolish, final act. The blade bit into her hand—deep. She screamed, the poison already burning through her bloodstream, her flesh sizzling as half her right hand cut off and fell uselessly on the ground.
Staggering, Gao tried to flee, but her body betrayed her. Blood gushed. Muscles failed. And within moments, she crumpled into the forest floor on her back like a broken marionette.
Daisy strolled over, calm and regal, not a hair out of place. "Old thing," she said coolly, crouching beside her. "Could you have ever imagined your centuries would end like this?" With no warning, she seized Gao's other hand and snapped it like dry twigs. "Even your bones feel tired."
Seeing this vicious old hag like this who treated her like an ant on the roadside.
Joy bloomed in her chest—not the sadistic kind, but a cathartic one. This was the woman who had been harassing her like a ghost for whole year, who scattered corpses in her wake like breadcrumbs. No more. Today, the ghost became the corpse.
"Please... have mercy...I promise I won't bother you anymore.." Gao rasped, her voice threadbare.
"Mercy?" Daisy tilted her head, her expression unreadable. "Did you spare those whose eyes you gouged out? Or were they just... pigs and dogs to you?" Her tone dripped with venom.
The more Daisy looked at the old woman, the more disgusted she felt. This woman had lived too long and her mind was completely twisted. In her eyes, ordinary people were pigs and dogs, inferior life forms, and not worth mentioning at all.
Gao begged again, still clinging to her last card. "The Hand... if you kill me, they won't let you go."
Daisy gave a dark chuckle, drawing her gun slowly like it was a theater prop. "You say that as if the Hand ever intended to let me go. We're already mortal enemies. It doesn't matter whether I kill you or not. Don't you know this? I'm just putting down the final brick."
"Wait! Viper... she's Hy—"
Bang.
A single shot ended the sentence and the life behind it. Blood poured from Gao's forehead, her limbs twitching before going limp. Without the protection of Qi, even four-hundred-year-old murder grandmas fall like mortals.
"'Hy'? Nice try. Trying to send me into Hydra's meat grinder as a parting gift?" Daisy shook her head and holstered the weapon. "Old habits die hard, don't they?"
With zero reverence, she rifled through Gao's belongings. Contrary to fictional villains, there was no grand martial arts manual, no phoenix feather, no glowing orb promising eighty years of cultivation in one bite. Disappointing, but not surprising.
Still, her vibration sense pinged something interesting.
A ring.
Worn on the old woman's gnarled finger, it emitted a frequency distinct from anything else. Daisy plucked it off. No security mechanism, no self-destruct spell. It came off as easily as plucking a weed.
The ring was carved from wood—or something that looked like wood—and featured a dragon's head whose body coiled around to bite its own tail. The artistry was exquisite. Each scale and whisker bore a silent, ancient dignity. At the back, two small seal-script characters read: K'un-lun.
The ring of the Kunlun elder? It was not difficult to come to this conclusion, but Daisy was curious about why Madame Gao still carried this ring with her.
Recalling the glorious past?, Daisy thought it was a bit far-fetched. If Gao missed the past so much, she would not have run away in the first place.
There should be no tracking function on the ring, otherwise these stray dogs would have been wiped out by the Kunlun masters long ago.
Is it some kind of curse? Once you put it on, you can't take it off?
Daisy conducted few tests on the old woman body and found that it could be taken off completely, without any locking mechanism.
Kunlun, that mystical pocket-dimension that opened once every ten years like a cranky interdimensional elevator, had always been stingy with artifacts. What was this doing on a runaway murder crone?
Curiosity piqued, Daisy tested the ring. She didn't wear it—she wasn't suicidal—but used vibration frequency to scan it.
The ring resisted at first, as if offended by her probing. But then... something shifted. It tasted her frequency, paused, then submitted.
She blinked. "Well, that's new."
Mentally, she received fragments—snippets of psychic information. The ring wasn't a power boost. No hidden master inside ready to monologue. But it was significant. It marked her as an elder of Kunlun. And with that title came perks.
Chief among them: a mental shield.
An energy field subtly tuned to repel most forms of psychic manipulation. Not impenetrable—Professor X with Cerebro could still crash through like a wrecking ball—but enough to block most of the telepaths out there. Far better than the generic SHIELD-issued anti-mind patches Nick Fury handed out like aspirin.
Grinning, she finally slipped the ring on. It pulsed faintly, settling on her finger like it had always belonged there.
"Not bad," she murmured. "A little light on the pyrotechnics, but it'll do."
She stood in the moonlight, unbothered, brushing off blood from her sleeves like lint. Behind her lay the final chapter of Madame Gao's wickedness.
To Be Continued...
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[POWER STONES AND REVIEWS PLS]