The insect army was terrifying — nobody was going to argue that point. But standing here cursing Nick Fury wasn't going to accomplish anything.
No matter how much Natasha wanted to vent, the mission had to be completed. She was not going to be the woman who got stopped by a caterpillar. She refused.
"Are there service tunnels? A maintenance entrance?" she asked Daisy. "Their own people need a way in and out."
Daisy checked her tablet. "No external access tunnels I can find. Visitors land on a rooftop helipad. Internal staff use pheromone tags — some kind of chemical marker."
The four of them stared at the creatures. It was one thing to fight something that wanted to kill you. It was another thing entirely to be disgusted by it. The giant insects weren't just dangerous — they were deeply, profoundly wrong to look at.
Combat was one consideration, but the moment gunfire started, the entire compound would be on alert. That was the worst possible outcome for a rescue op.
"Two teams," Hill said. Her tactical instincts were as sharp as ever, surfacing at the right moment. "One team draws the guards away. One team goes in for the doctor." Natasha had nothing better to offer. She nodded.
Same split as the previous night: Daisy had the heavy firepower, so she and Hill handled the distraction. Natasha — their strongest fighter — went in with Sharon, who had enough medical training to be useful once they found Pym.
Before they split up, Natasha handed out individual vials of broad-spectrum antivenom — S.H.I.E.L.D. formula, designed to handle most exotic toxins. Not a cure-all, but enough to keep someone alive long enough to get help. A quiet be careful passed between all four of them. Then they moved to their positions.
Silent approach would have been ideal. But there was nothing silent about fighting things this size. They were going loud.
Hill had set a few traps. She caught Daisy's eye and gave a nod.
Daisy raised the Rhino and fired.
The round missed — distance was too great, luck running against her. The .357 clipped the edge of the spider's eye cluster and went wide.
She fired again. This time the hornet intercepted, moving in fast at the sound — the round shattered one of its leg segments and cut its speed by a fifth, but the spider was untouched.
"Damn it." Twelve Magnum rounds total, and she was down two with nothing to show for it. She'd brought them mostly for style points. She hadn't anticipated needing them for something like this.
The insects reacted. Larger brains — or something functioning like them — came with larger bodies, apparently. All four of them locked onto Daisy as the primary threat and surged forward: the hornet, the centipede, the spider, and even the slow-moving caterpillar lumbering in from the flank.
Daisy turned and ran.
The centipede was fastest. Dozens of legs churned across the ground at terrifying speed, its red shell rattling as it moved, leaving everything it touched in the undergrowth scorched and smoking — whatever fluid it was secreting burned through vegetation on contact. Trees snapped sideways as it clipped them.
Daisy hit a full sprint, cleared a patch of brush in a long jump —
The centipede didn't see the trap. It crashed through and dropped straight in. The pit was shallow — they hadn't had time for anything elaborate — but there were two high-explosive grenades buried at the bottom.
Boom.
The detonation tore through the centipede's head and abdomen simultaneously. Black muscle and chitin fragments rained within a 30-foot radius. The thing was still moving — barely, but moving — so Hill stepped out of cover and put multiple rounds through the head at close range until it stopped.
Meanwhile, Daisy was running out of open ground.
In the clearing, the hornet had the advantage it needed. It flew. She didn't.
Two hundred meters (about 650 feet) out, she heard the wingbeats closing fast behind her. She rolled hard left — the stinger missed her by inches, displacing air against her cheek as it passed.
"You—"
She stopped running.
She let the power rise — all of it, no filter, no restraint. She raised one hand, palm forward, and pushed.
The concussive wave left her hand as a compressed column of force. It wasn't fast in the way a bullet was fast, but it warped the air around it as it traveled, folding resistance ahead and behind, creating a half-second of drag on anything caught in its path.
The hornet's wings slowed. One beat. Two. That was enough.
The wave hit its abdomen like a wrecking ball.
What had been an armored undercarriage became a crater. The stinger — still connected to the body by what might have been a strand of gut — swung loose, dangling uselessly against its wrecked host. Green fluid soaked the earth in a wide ring as the hornet dropped, twitching.
Daisy didn't have time to finish it. The spider had arrived.
She fired one round behind her without looking, felt the recoil, and spun.
The spider was already airborne — all eight legs off the ground in a single push, coming straight at her face.
She raised both hands. Tracked it. Fired twice into the abdomen in quick succession. Then, with it barely an arm's length from her chest, she threw herself sideways.
The spider compensated — that was its nature. Mid-lunge, it released a web: thick, elastic, covering a wide cone.
She was still in the air. Nowhere to go.
She dropped the gun, cocked her right fist, and punched the air in front of her.
The sound it made was like a pane of glass shattering — a single point of impact expanding outward in a web of fracture lines until a pocket of air simply stopped existing. The web had nothing to hold it up. It collapsed into powder.
The shockwave carried farther than intended. Two of the spider's left legs shattered at the joint.
Off-balance and gut-shot — two Magnum rounds had punched clean through its abdomen and out through its back — the spider hit the ground and dragged itself forward a few steps before going still.
Daisy sat down on the dirt and pressed her palm against her forearm.
"That really hurts," she muttered.
Both strikes had been full power, but they weren't the same kind of full power. The directed wave was controlled — it used penetration as its mechanism, spread the force cleanly. The air-punch was blunt instrument work, no technique, all brute resonance. Without a body built to absorb that kind of internal stress, her arm was already singing complaints at her.
Flashy move. Don't make a habit of it.
She spent a minute working the muscle, chasing the ache down to something manageable. Then she picked up the Rhino, put a finishing round through the spider's thorax, reloaded, and jogged toward Hill's position.