[ Kandahar, Afghanistan ]
Mandarin lifted his right hand, his ring finger glowing with a silver, unnatural brilliance.
The air itself seemed to shudder.
A beam—thin as a hair, sharp as death—lanced outward in every direction. It spun from his hand in a perfect arc, stretching out for hundreds of meters like a blade of light, cutting the world at the molecular level.
The Atomic Cutter.
In a single rotation, with Mandarin at its center, the beam swept the battlefield in a perfect, lightning-fast circle.
The effect was immediate. Silent. Total.
Soldiers were cleaved mid-sprint. Weapons split apart as if drawn in blueprint lines. Concrete buildings collapsed, army trucks slid sideways, sliced in half like buttered bread. It was the deadliest strike since the confrontation began.
Then the silence end and what followed was carnage.
Screams.
Agonized, human screams.
The street was painted red. Arms. Legs. Burnt torsos. Corpses piled like wreckage. The lucky ones died instantly. The rest thrashed, howled, crawled through blood as their lifeblood soaked into dust.
Those still breathing didn't wait. The illusion of duty shattered. What Pentagon? What orders? They just dissolved into panic.
One soldier dropped to his knees, hands trembling. "I'm done—I'm not dying here!"
Someone else shouted, "Screw orders, screw the Pentagon! Run!"
And that shout broke the dam, and with it came the stampede.
Helmets flew. Rifles were discarded. Bodies bolted in every direction, some even tripping over the wounded to get away.
At this point, there was no rank—no elite, no regular. Training meant nothing. Firearms felt like toys. The instinct to live drowned everything else. Run or die. That was it.
This wasn't a tactical withdrawal. It was pure terror. Even the fastest among them felt too slow. They would've traded anything for another pair of legs.
...
In the command center, silence suffocated the room. The two generals met each other's eyes—both trying to hide the same truth. They were afraid. Neither wanted to admit it first.
Troops could flee; democracies forgive the masses. But generals? They were symbols. If they gave the order to abandon Kandahar, who would explain it back home? That a single man toppled an entire U.S. military garrison?
Daisy didn't speak. But she felt it too—a ripple of unease. Even with everything she'd seen, this... this pushed the edge of reason.
The Mandarin's atomic cutter was ruthless—clean, blinding, and without hesitation. One arc of silver light, and everything in its path split. Daisy had seen plenty of destructive power before, but this felt limitless. Worse, the speed of deployment was near-instant. She ran the numbers in her head—there was no countermeasure. Not for her, not now.
But metaknowledge served as her second skin, and her eyes missed nothing. As observation had always been her edge. After a breath, she said evenly, "Generals, focus on his hand. After that last strike, the ring on his right ring finger went completely dim."
The generals leaned in, squinting as if sheer effort would sharpen their vision.
General Green said after looking at the ring. "Looks the same to me." General Edward also nodded in agreement with General Green.
To them, the ring was unchanged. Whatever glow she saw, they couldn't track with eyes alone.
Hearing their response, Daisy's eyebrow twitched. Of course. How could I forget—they didn't have my metaknowledge or superhuman eyesight.
Luckily, instruments didn't rely on guesswork. One of the tech officers ran a scan, the system comparing pre- and post-attack metrics. "Generals, scan confirms it. After the energy discharge, the right ring finger's signature dropped significantly. Much lower than the others."
"So he can only use that attack once?" the Lieutenant General asked, grasping at the easiest answer.
Daisy didn't let the hope breathe. "There's a cooldown. But don't count on it staying inactive long."
The analysts around them reached the same conclusion. The atmosphere in the room lightened by degrees, though the fear didn't vanish.
"Generals, we underestimated him. Plan A is compromised. Begin Plan B. Pull the survivors back," Daisy said, her voice sharp with command despite her rank.
The command passed through quickly. Three Raptors took off from the base like shadows, their orders simple: strike, then disappear.
...
They didn't get close to Mandarin—speed and distance were their weapons. Each fired Sidewinder missiles from three different directions, striking Mandarin's shield in a staggered pattern.
BOOM—BOOM—BOOM.
Their angles were clean. Their exit strategies cleaner. Each Raptor after firing and peeled off in separate directions. The pilots weren't here to fight—they were bait.
Flames wrapped around his shield.
Mandarin, suspended midair, grimaced.
The missiles hit harder than expected. His shield held—but just barely. Cracks of golden light spiderwebbed around him.
His head turned slowly, tracking the sky.
He scowled. The aircrafts split in three different directions, but he couldn't be in three places at once. In the end, he turned his wrath back toward the retreating American troops.
"Run, insects." His voice carried like thunder. "I'll finish what I started."
And like a dark god descending from judgment, he went after the American troops on the ground.
He fired lightning strikes at running soldiers, turning them into charcoal. Then just as he went to follow up the lightning strike with another inferno.
BOOM!
He stopped his attack and put up the shield again.
The jets didn't let up. They returned.
He hovered midair, cloak tattered but eyes still blazing, as another missile streaked past him—BOOM!—detonating near his left side, just close enough to jolt his balance.
He snarled, spinning in the air.
Above him, the fighter jets dipped and vanished, banking wide, fast, untouchable.
Then—another missile.
He turned again, hand raised to shield himself. This one struck from a new direction. They were circling. Mocking him.
"Cowards!" he roared into the clouds.
They circled back in intervals, lobbing missiles to irritate rather than kill.
But even he knew the truth: he couldn't catch them.
He had already gave chase twice, each time only for a few seconds—only to watch the jets disappear beyond range, taunting him with every pass.
He stopped trying.
But every time he stopped chasing them, they returned—relentless, calculated pests.
Against raw energy, he was unstoppable. But speed wasn't his strength. With jets soaring at Mach 2, he couldn't keep pace. The sky belonged to them.
Meanwhile, on the ground, the slaughter continued between strikes of jets.
Lacking formation and leadership, the scattered foot soldiers were little more than walking targets. Even with retreat orders, their disarray was costly. The Mandarin didn't even need to try. They fell like cattle to a blade.
They tried to flee in twos, in threes—but Mandarin moved through them like a reaper in open fields.
Explosions of fire. Blades of wind. Lightning without warning.
One man turned to run, only to be pulled backward by gravity and incinerated before he hit the dirt.
Within minutes, the battlefield was a graveyard. Trails of smoke and blood marked where he'd passed.
Five minutes was all it took. The remaining troops vanished into the terrain, too broken to regroup.
Now the only sound left was the wind.
Mandarin stood in silence, surrounded by ruins and ash. The last soldier had run.
He didn't follow.
"Not worth the effort," he muttered, stepping over a body with disinterest.
Instead, he turned toward his true goal.
The U.S. base.
He knew a trap was possible inside. But arrogance made such risks irrelevant. He'd survived concussive bombs. What more could they do? To him, this was a game between predators and insects.
The gates of the U.S. military compound loomed ahead—steel, reinforced, sealed shut.
Mandarin didn't slow.
He raised his hand and blasted it apart—BOOM!—a shockwave ripped through the entry tunnel. The door, weighing hundreds of pounds, was reduced to molten fragments.
Drawing from the pilot's memories that had sketched the path for him, Mandarin walked forward calmly, smoke swirling behind him.
His footsteps echoed through the corridor, unhurried. Unafraid.
Then he shouted, voice resonating off the steel walls. "Come out and meet your king. I am the heir of Genghis Khan, the true ruler of this land. Bow to me, and your disgrace will be forgiven."
His words traveled far, filling the air with power and pride.
But the base stayed silent.
No alarms. No movement.
Only his voice echoed through the chamber, growing smaller as it drifted through the empty corridors.
"Stop yelling, it's giving me a headache," Daisy said flatly as she stepped into view from the far side of the chamber, adjusting the cuff of her agent uniform like it was just another routine assignment. "I expected a vacation op, not a walking temper tantrum."
She would've preferred staying behind the curtain, pulling strings from the dark. But when the entire American force disintegrated into panic and desertion, no rank could enforce order. If the trap was going to be sprung, she'd have to pull the trigger herself.
Her visible weapon—a standard-issue pistol—was nothing more than theater. The real blade, a sleek adamantium dagger, rested hidden beneath her vibranium wristband. Just in case theatrics needed a sharper point.
Mandarin's eyes narrowed. Recognition flickered.
"You..." he muttered, switching smoothly to English. Then, with arrogant grandeur. "Kneel. I will grant you unimaginable power."
His tone echoed like a sermon. He meant it.
Daisy's lips curled into a sharp smirk. "Does that come with a matching ring set, or just the delusion?"
His face twisted instantly.
"How dare you!" he roared, voice trembling with fury. "How dare you covet the sacred relics—!"
With a violent sweep of his left hand, the air crackled to life.
An explosion of lightning erupted across the room—blinding, deafening, a full storm conjured in an instant. His intent was to reduce this rude, insolent woman before him to a pile of ash.
The lightning surge was overwhelming. Every monitoring device inside shorted out, and half the base's lighting and surveillance systems went dark. In the heart of the storm, only blue arcs flickered—and the faint metallic gleam on Daisy's wrist remained visible through the chaos.
She almost laughed. With the cameras gone, the moral dilemma vanished. She no longer had to conceal her true strength.
And Mandarin's lightning? She didn't flinch from Storm's lightning, which was more powerful. Mandarin's attempt was amateur compared to what she could handle.
Using the wall as leverage, she burst forward, moving with the maximum speed expected of a normal human—just barely slipping past the lightning as she darted out of the room. She made it looked like a desperate dodge—but it was anything but that.
The Mandarin, unaware she was still holding back, took the bait and let out a dark sneer. "Run, little mouse. You'll learn soon enough—your struggle is meaningless," he said, his voice dripping with mockery.
...
Back in the command center, the screens had all gone black.
The staff stood in tense silence as explosions rumbled through the underground base, one after another.
Boom—Boom—Boom!
They couldn't see anything. No visuals. No audio.
Only the tremors and the distant echoes of explosions.
But the repeated blasts told them one thing: the Daisy was still fighting. Still holding on.
To Be Continued...
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[POWER STONES AND REVIEWS PLS]
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What do you think Daisy's trap plan is?