[ Afghanistan ]
Saying that Iron Man was the Mandarin's nemesis was frankly giving Stark too much credit. The Ten Rings were alien artifacts—high-tech tools of war masquerading as jewelry. Shockwaves, mind control, magnetism, matter reorganization, absolute zero—each one wielded the destructive might that could level armies.
To put it in perspective: imagine taking the raw abilities of Daisy, Magneto, Charles Xavier, and Iceman, then distilling them into rings worn on one man's hands.
One man wielding the essence of ten superhumans—too compact, too efficient, too dangerous to ignore. That's what Mandarin brought to the table.
If Madam Gao was a relic of martial tradition, then the Mandarin was myth given breath, an immortal warrior torn straight out of some celestial epic.
Daisy couldn't explain Ten Rings, Qi manipulation, or metaphysical combat to Colonel Rhodes. Instead, she pinned it on the most comprehensible boogeyman. "I'm speaking from experience—there's a mutant down there. Incredibly powerful. You need to trust me." It sounded ridiculous. But it was all she could offer.
Their convoy screamed north, kicking up sand as Daisy glanced back once, her jaw locked.
Her silence, her unreadable tension, her calculating gaze—it was enough for Rhodes to believe her halfway.
The rest of the team had no idea what danger lurked behind. Once the miles stretched and the engine noise settled, they began to relax, whispering behind grit-stained helmets.
"Don't ease off. Keep the convoy moving. We return to Bagram Air Base directly." Her voice cut through the radio like a blade.
They grumbled. Of course they did. But they obeyed. Orders were orders, and the word Bagram was like salvation. They pushed forward.
But Daisy wasn't banking on Bagram. The pulse behind her wasn't fading. It was following. Her instincts—feral, gifted by a panther goddess—screamed of something hunting them.
Bagram Air Base housed tens of thousands of U.S. troops. In theory, the Mandarins wouldn't risk a direct confrontation with modern firepower. But they were in Kunar Province, deep in the south—while Bagram sat in Parwan to the east. Even under ideal conditions, a straight push would take two days. And nothing about this situation was ideal.
Southern Afghanistan had few stationed troops—some bases held barely a few dozen. They were called bases, but in reality, they were little more than outposts. Daisy wasn't about to let these people die for nothing. For now, her only option was to retreat to Kandahar, disappear into the sprawl of the city, and deceive the Mandarin.
She had considered flying alone. But high-speed movement, teleportation—any exotic escape would shine too brightly. If the Mandarin marked her, it wouldn't matter how far she ran. She wouldn't outrun her opponent. Not this time.
Better to stay submerged. Let Mandarin hunt for a ghost in a crowd, not a flare in the night. In the absence of certainty, survival demanded shadows.
Still, part of her hoped this was paranoia. Maybe there was no hunter behind her. Maybe her instinct had been wrong.
But hope had never been part of her strategy. And when things could go wrong, they usually did. Murphy's Law was a bastard with perfect aim.
"Who are you?" The voice rang out after three hours of relentless retreat—elegant, almost theatrical.
The words danced like a performance—each syllable deliberate, smooth as drawn silk.
He floated toward them. Green silk robes rippling like smoke. Hair black as ink. Chin lifted, hands clasped behind him, an illusion of serenity that Daisy didn't trust for a second.
If this had been a random civilian, Rhodes might have ignored him or cuffed him for drama. But not now. Now even the colonel, his troops, and her agents stood frozen—staring at an old Asian man slicing through the sky like thunder wrapped in silk.
To everyone except Daisy, he seems to float in the air without aid—no propulsion, no visible mechanism. In a world governed by science, the Mandarin's arrival shattered assumptions. Soldiers and agents, trained by technology and tactics, now faced something ancient and unnatural.
Rhodes' glance toward Daisy was subtle but clear. Is this the threat you spoke of?
She answered with a slight nod, eyes sharp, voice low as she signaled her team to prepare for attack. No panic. Just precision.
Daisy narrowed her shockwave frequencies, tuning into the environment. The ring on Mandarin's right index finger pulsed with microwave emissions—foreign, artificial, and utterly distinct from both her power and his own. The ring had its own signature.
When her wave brushed his, the interaction was brief and clean—two forces meeting, neither submitting.
It intrigued her. Mandarin, despite wielding all ten rings, seemed to draw from a limited set of abilities from the ring—just as she herself had once been confined to generating shockwaves when her abilities first awakened. Did the rings lack derivative functions entirely?
It was a hypothesis—one that marginally reduced her calculated threat level. But only marginally. Even without evolved abilities, Mandarin with ten rings outclassed most enhanced beings.
This wasn't Gao's brute finesse. Each ring was a weapon and a shield—mind control, kinetic shock, glacial fields, plasma storms, lightning arcs, atomic rearrangement. A balanced arsenal with no obvious gaps.
With the Ten Rings and his own thousand years martial experience, the Mandarin stood firmly among the top-tier threats on Earth. As he wasn't just armed—he was myth incarnate.
Backed by Dormammu, the Ancient One might manage to hold her ground against him. Excluding the sky-level gods, perhaps only the Dark Phoenix could overpower him.
In summary, Daisy thought coldly, this wasn't an opponent. This was a catastrophe with a face.
The soldiers exchanged confused and wary glances after hearing Mandarin's voice. None of them spoke Chinese, and Mandarin's voice—sing-song, operatic—was completely unintelligible to them. Daisy, however, understood enough to recognize its cadence and tone. She stepped forward. As commander, it fell to her.
She adjusted her posture, smoothing her features into what Coulson would have called a diplomatic grin—harmless, polite, laced with undertone. At the same time, she subtly altered the frequency of her biofield, radiating a pattern of calm harmlessness like perfume laced with anesthesia.
With a light wave, Daisy called out, tone breezy and eyes amused. "Old man, we came from Maiwand, on our way to Kandahar for his cousin's wedding." She nodded toward Rhodes without missing a beat, as if the stern-faced colonel were an overjoyed groom's relative.
No rational person would fabricate a story this absurd. But Daisy had been watching closely. Something was fractured in the Mandarin. His long seclusion—likely under the guise of spiritual cultivation—had not left him enlightened, only unmoored. His gaze wavered unnaturally between lucidity and something darker, something scattered.
She recalled an important detail: the rings were not mere tools. They possessed sentience—whispers layered over thought, entities that didn't remain quiet. The Mandarin was not wearing ten weapons; he was hosting ten distinct minds, each clawing for his attention, all using him as their mouthpiece.
Even with mental fortitude bordering on superhuman, no one could remain unshaken under that pressure. Ten voices, day and night—like spirits chained to a single soul. Whatever power he wielded, Daisy suspected clarity of thought was not part of it.
So she exploited the crack. Deliberate lies, cloaked in charm, baited with familiarity. Let him try to rationalize why a wedding entourage would include armored vehicles and military-grade weapons.
If he challenged her story, she'd blame the chaos of Afghanistan—where logic collapsed and absurdity was currency. But if he let it pass unchallenged, then Daisy would know with certainty: the Mandarin's mind wasn't intact.
The Mandarin, regal and aloof in his bearing, showed no reaction to Daisy's feigned innocence. Instead, his gaze lingered on her, narrowed not in admiration but distaste—as if something about her presence unsettled him. Compared to the others beside her, there was something in her demeanor or appearance that earned a flicker of consideration. Not respect. Not trust. But perhaps tolerance.
Yet even in the Mandarin's contemptuous gaze, Daisy saw calculation.
To Be Continued...
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[POWER STONES AND REVIEWS PLS]