Natasha found a service tunnel and vanished into it alone, hunting. Hill and Sharon stayed behind to run S.H.I.E.L.D.'s standard data-extraction protocol — copy first, destroy second.
Daisy hauled Pym out of the building at a run.
The old man kept up. That was the first surprise. He'd served in World War II, worked alongside Captain America's generation — and long-term exposure to Pym Particles had left his body in far better shape than any eighty-year-old had any right to be. He matched Daisy's pace without complaint.
Then a frequency hit her from the left — fast, wrong, and getting bigger.
"Stop—" She threw an arm out to block him. "What is that?"
She barely got the words out before the answer presented itself.
A giant stepped around the tree line.
Ten meters tall (about 33 feet). Moving with the slow, ground-shaking confidence of something that didn't need to hurry. Wearing — or rather, dressed in a version scaled to its dimensions — a white lab coat over a dress shirt and tie, a wristwatch on one enormous wrist.
The face was the thing.
Egghead had earned his name. His skull was pear-shaped — narrow at the crown, widening toward the jaw — completely hairless, and perched inside a transparent helmet that he'd apparently thought to scale up with the rest of himself. Round wire-frame glasses. An expression that suggested he was looking forward to whatever came next.
Daisy took an involuntary step back.
She knew what she was looking at. Pym Particles, giant configuration. The second Ant-Man had fought several opponents at once using this — Iron Man, War Machine, Spider-Man, Vision, and Black Panther — and held his ground. That was the polished version. And the original Hank Pym had stood alongside one of the cosmic beings, having a quiet conversation at eye level.
This version was clearly rough around the edges. Prototype. But ten meters was still three stories, and the weight behind each footstep was loud enough to feel through the ground.
She looked at Pym. "Can you—" She clocked his empty hands and the way he was already squaring his shoulders to deliver a speech. No. She drew the Rhino.
She also hit her comms. Boss fight. Northwest exit. We need backup.
The giant was speaking — Hungarian, from the sound of it, thunderous and slow. None of it landed. Daisy didn't understand a word.
Pym, apparently, understood enough. He set his jaw and started to respond.
The giant's foot came down.
Daisy grabbed Pym's arm and yanked him sideways. The impact hit where he'd been standing like a depth charge, throwing loose dirt and rock in all directions.
She kept moving — retreating and angling for a shot at the same time. One-handed, she raised the Rhino, led the target, and fired.
The .357 Magnum round closed the distance in an instant and hit Egghead's skull dead center.
He was slow. Science had been his whole life, and even now, as a giant, he was still a researcher at heart — his reflexes were laughable. He caught the incoming shot barely in time to tilt his head, and even that adjustment came a half-second too late. The round hit the side of his skull clean.
And didn't penetrate.
It had punched through the skin and lodged in the fat layer. Blood welled up. Egghead winced. But the damage was surface-level — his enhanced mass worked both ways, and the soft tissue at that scale could absorb a Magnum round the way a sandbag absorbs a punch.
"What kind of physics is this?!" Daisy kept running, Pym close behind her. She'd always found the size mechanics in this universe quietly maddening — if you shrank and your mass didn't change, you should be sinking through whatever you were standing on. And yet Ant-Man rode ants. He didn't crush them. And when he went large, the force multiplication was exponential. He'd thrown War Machine around like a toy.
It was all completely impossible. And it was staring her in the face.
She turned to Pym mid-sprint. "When the size increases — does the density scale with it?"
"Obviously," he said, throwing a glance back at their pursuer. "Density, mass, volume — everything scales." He seemed genuinely curious that she was asking. Most people in this situation were focused on running, not the mechanics of why.
Backup still hadn't arrived. Wasn't going to matter much anyway — what backup could do against this was limited.
Egghead had given up on conversation. He was herding them now, one step covering what took them four — ripping trees out of the ground and sweeping them through the air like brooms, then picking up rocks and dropping them from above, targeting their path.
There was no outrunning him. Not sustainably.
Daisy made a decision. She tucked the Rhino into the back of her waistband.
The cover story she'd already worked out: Chinese kung fu. It wasn't even wrong, technically.
"Doctor — does the enlargement affect structural integrity? Bone and muscle density?"
"Yes — all of it, proportionally."
Good. So the ankle wouldn't be the soft target she'd normally expect.
She could still aim for it. At ground level, she had room to move in ways she didn't have in the air. And the ankle joint — even at scale — was still a pivot point under load.
"Go," she told Pym. "I've got this."
The old man hesitated. She could see him doing the math — split up, and he'd be the one who got caught. He was trying to be noble. It was going to get him killed.
"Doctor. Run." She didn't wait for him to agree.
She turned and charged straight at Egghead.
Her footwork hit its peak — two bursts of acceleration, eating the ground between them at a speed that made Egghead blink. She reached the base of his body, looked up at the sheer cliff-face of shin and knee above her, and angled for the ankle.
Jumping for the knee means airtime. Airtime means reduced options. Stay low. Hit the joint.
She pulled the power up from her core and drove it into her fists.