"Finally." Daisy let out a long breath as the enemy went limp. Sustaining that level of power output for so long had taken a real toll.
She changed out of her yukata and back into her clothes. Time to get some answers.
First, she stuffed a cloth into Viper's mouth — the woman had venom in her teeth, and there was no telling when she might wake up and give Daisy a very unpleasant surprise.
She couldn't interrogate her here at the Yashida estate. The S.H.I.E.L.D. local field office was out too — she walked in the front door, and HYDRA would send a rescue team through the back within the minute.
She needed somewhere with space. Somewhere no one would come looking.
Daisy teleported out of the estate, scanned her surroundings, and zeroed in on a nearby warehouse. She snapped the padlock with a focused vibration, shouldered Viper, and carried her inside.
Four lengths of chain. She secured the woman spread-eagle, suspended in the air.
The warehouse was cold — the kind of damp, bone-deep chill that settled in even through a jacket and long sleeves. Daisy tugged her coat tighter.
If I'm cold, she must be suffering. Viper was wearing next to nothing.
The draft off the concrete floor, the rattle of chain, cracked lips, obvious dehydration — it was enough to pull Viper back to consciousness. She stirred slowly, then opened her eyes.
You had to hand it to her — the woman was sharp. The moment she had enough clarity, she was already reading the room.
One captor. No backup. Viper's brow furrowed.
Seduction was a tool that technically worked across the board, but years of playing close to the edge had left their mark. She'd been captured before. Always found a way out. But never under circumstances this strange.
Her target was a woman. A trained woman. Someone who had already shown the will to kill — which meant the odds of a charm offensive working were basically zero.
The cold air moved over her skin. The exertion from earlier had left her soaked, and the chill now brought involuntary shivers. She could feel a cramp threatening in her calf. But she held her smile — warm, effortless, as though none of this was happening. It was her only card to play, working on the assumption that Daisy didn't know the full picture.
And she was mostly right. In the absence of a clean kill option, Daisy had to play along.
She kept her hands in her pockets, head tilted slightly. "I've seen your file. You're Dr. Green, the physician treating the Yashida patriarch. So why did you come to kill me?"
How do I steer her into revealing something HYDRA-related without tipping my hand? It was a genuine acting challenge.
Viper was running her own parallel calculation — how to stay alive while giving up as little as possible.
"It was the old man's orders," Viper said, working backward from Daisy's presumed intelligence picture to construct something plausible. "He's unhappy about you conspiring with his son to strip him of the company."
Daisy looked at her for a moment. "Not convincing. Shingen has plenty of allies — people from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Economy. Is he having you go after all of them too? Dr. Green seems to think I'm an idiot."
Viper's frown was slight. Even she felt the story had holes. She blamed it on dehydration.
Daisy produced a knife. She drew the flat of the blade slowly across Viper's skin.
Viper laughed — low, languorous, unbothered. "A little girl doing the rough stuff? Please. I've been taken prisoner fifteen times. Every captor was ten times crueler than you. You think I scare?"
She even tilted her chin up and threw Daisy a look of pure, baiting confidence. The effect was somewhat undermined by the damp strands of hair plastered to her face.
Daisy pocketed the knife. "Fair point. Conventional methods clearly won't work here. What I'm about to do is a bit inhumane, and I apologize in advance."
She placed her right hand flat against Viper's abdomen and, in the face of the woman's widening eyes, activated her power.
The vibration ran for thirty minutes. By the end, Viper was soaked through — drenched as if someone had thrown a bucket of water over her. Her head lolled. She blacked out again.
When she drifted back to consciousness an hour had already passed. Daisy was sitting across the room with a tablet, seemingly playing a game.
"Still not talking?" Daisy had pulled her hair back into a ponytail. Tonight, she was going to crack a door open.
Inhumane? She didn't think so. It wasn't blood or broken bones — just a controlled, invasive stimulus designed to shatter focus.
Viper's eyes were unfocused. Suspended in the air with all her weight on her wrists and ankles, then hit with it, over and over — it was a misery she had no framework for.
"You... you're a mutant?" Viper's enticing eyes now held a thread of venom — a coiled snake waiting for an opening. "What a repulsive ability."
Being called repulsive by the leader of a terrorist organization? Daisy accepted the title without complaint.
"A mutant? You've got it wrong. This is just Eastern massage technique. Looks like you're still not ready to talk." She settled in, as relaxed as if she were running a training drill. Not a single impure thought. This was just work.
Viper was, it had to be said, extraordinarily tough. Seducing men and withstanding this were entirely different disciplines, and her pride would not let her make a sound. She clamped down on it for half an hour before losing consciousness again.
Even as she hung there unconscious, her calves trembled continuously, muscles firing on their own.
Daisy's temper was up now too. Fine. We can do this all night. There's plenty of time before dawn. Let's see who outlasts who.
"Talk, or this keeps going." She sent the hum out again.
"Still holding out? Keep going then." The vibration continued.
"Achoo!" Before Daisy could even ask her question again, Viper let out a tremendous sneeze.
Daisy snapped a glance toward the door. Outside: complete silence. No one had heard.
"Oh, clever. Trying to sneeze your way into getting someone to come rescue you?" Daisy gave her a look of exaggerated admiration.
Viper was barely holding together at this point. Her golden hair hung in wet ropes across her face. Her eyes were shot through with red. Her lips were cracked. Her nose — that elegant, aristocratic nose — was now running freely. Any trace of glamour was long gone.
Daisy's remark nearly finished her. Whatever dignity remained evaporated. She tore open a raw, hoarse voice and let loose.
The first few sentences came out in Hungarian, which Daisy didn't catch. Then Spanish. Then French. Finally English.
The message, across all four languages, was the same: "I am freezing to death. Put something on me. Right now."
Daisy made a show of realisation. She'd been doing it on purpose, of course.
Viper cared deeply about her image. If standard interrogation methods weren't working, the next move was to strip the enemy of what she was most proud of. Lose your head if you must, but not your dignity — that was Viper's type exactly, and Daisy had clocked it from the start.
Besides, death by cold was something even Chthon couldn't hold her accountable for.