The day after Logan left, Colleen asked Daisy a lot of questions about New York. Then she proposed that swordsmanship could help stabilize a disturbed mind.
She asked whether Daisy wanted to learn.
Nothing better to do. Daisy said yes immediately.
With her physical baseline, she could hold her own against Colleen for dozens of exchanges —
"Daisy. Your intent to kill is working against your recovery." Colleen felt the emotional undercurrent in her movements and stepped in quickly. "You need to calm down."
Daisy smiled. "Inhuman abilities don't work the same way as your kind of training. Emotional intensity makes my power stronger, not weaker."
Colleen watched her — this woman with such extraordinary physical gifts, swinging a sword like she was chopping vegetables — and felt it was a genuine waste. She took her time explaining the philosophy. "Swordsmanship is a killing art. But within that, there's a deeper truth. You have to feel it with your heart, not just your muscles."
Daisy wasn't slow. The problem was she had too many things to learn and not enough time — astronomy, geography, languages, customs, driving, combat, firearms disassembly. She'd been collecting skills like a hoarder. Swordsmanship had come up briefly during S.H.I.E.L.D. training, but she hadn't put into it a fraction of what Colleen had given up everything else to master.
What Daisy had was competent basic cuts and strikes. The profound principle supposedly contained within those cuts — she hadn't found it yet.
She listened to Colleen's explanation with genuine patience. She had her reservations, but she practiced each form carefully, exactly as instructed.
That night, she noticed that somewhere while she wasn't paying attention, a small portion of her mental damage had quietly repaired itself.
She asked about it. Colleen's explanation: the swordsmanship had soothed and restored the wound.
Daisy's personal hypothesis: her recovery factor was just that strong.
Either way, it didn't interfere with learning. Colleen's repertoire was wide — Chinese sword forms, Japanese kenjutsu, various European fencing traditions, she'd dipped into all of them. The difference between Colleen and Daisy was fundamental: Daisy thought of a sword as a tool. Colleen was a swordsman.
Colleen taught with real care. And somewhere in the practice, when Daisy let herself sink completely into it, she did feel something different.
A thought occurred to her. The ancient duelists — and Colleen now — they believed it was the sword that carried the healing property. But she suspected that deep focus on anything would produce the same effect on the mind. The sword was just one path, and a particularly vivid one.
There was a reason old stories always showed swordsmen training in storms, in rain, in bitter cold — going out specifically when conditions were harsh. Some of it was visual drama, of course. But some of it was genuine. Difficult conditions forced out distractions. What remained was pure focus. And pure focus, sustained, built something in the mind that ordinary rest couldn't reach.
The human mind was a vault with no visible bottom. After a week of training alongside Colleen, Daisy was nowhere near mastering any grand sword art — but her existing damage had healed completely, and she'd gone further. Her baseline had shifted.
Portal range expanded from the previous ~10 km (6 miles) to nearly 50 km (31 miles). Detection accuracy improved significantly. The integrated trace of Madame Gao's qi had seeded something new — a dim, blurry suggestion of telepathic sensitivity. Too faint to be reliable in practice; in the moment, reading facial expressions and body language was still faster. But it was there. It was real. And it could be trained.
Against baseline telepaths and mind-controllers, her mental defense had gone from zero to something. Not much — call it a one on a scale built for tens — but it was a start, and it would grow.
"You mastered the fundamentals in under a week. It must be because I'm such a good teacher." Colleen had relaxed considerably as they'd grown more comfortable with each other, and this particular streak of self-congratulation was apparently core to her personality. She was completely convinced that Daisy's rapid progress reflected her own teaching quality.
Daisy was eating Colleen's food, sleeping under Colleen's roof, and now learning Colleen's sword style. She didn't have the heart to undermine the woman's enthusiasm.
And then Colleen announced she was going to open a dojo. Teach swordsmanship. Full-time.
Daisy had to say something.
"Teaching this broadly... there are social risks to consider—"
"How? Swordsmanship builds discipline and health. I'll emphasize ethics and responsibility. I won't cause trouble for S.H.I.E.L.D., I promise." Colleen waved it off completely.
Daisy went quiet.
She couldn't exactly say: Your future teacher Bakuto is one of the Five Fingers of The Hand, and he will use your dojo as a training ground for their operatives. That hadn't happened yet. The dojo itself didn't exist yet. And in some sense, Daisy had caused this — it was watching Daisy's rapid progress that had crystallized Colleen's decision to open a school in the first place.
Without this meeting, Colleen might have continued her solitary practice in the forest indefinitely. No dojo, no Bakuto pipeline, no entanglement with The Hand. The relationship with her future teacher might have remained exactly what it appeared to be.
Now Colleen Wing was going to open a dojo, full of energy and resolve, and Daisy genuinely didn't know how to argue against it without revealing things she shouldn't.
Maybe it would turn out differently. The timeline was already shifting. She chose not to push further. She told Colleen to look her up if she ever came to New York, then opened a portal and left Sendai behind.
With her current range, 50 km (31 miles) was the safe limit per jump. The distance back to Tokyo was over 300 km (~190 miles) — too far to portal directly without burning herself out. Daisy made her way to Fukushima Station and caught a bullet train back to Tokyo.
The artifact mission, the Adamantium — all of it came second now. She was going to find Madame Gao. And then she was going to end her.
She went first to the temple where the funeral had been held. It was surrounded by police tape.
What had been a solemn ceremonial space was now a ruin. Scorched walls, shattered pillars, the smell of old ash still hanging in the air. After the battle cleared, someone had set the place on fire. The walls were blackened as if trying to narrate the catastrophe themselves.
A week later, police presence was still heavy. Workers in protective gear moved in and out of the wreckage, carrying fire-blackened remains — charred bodies, warped blades, deformed firearms, burned fabric. Beyond the cordon, a mob of reporters shouted into cameras.
Daisy flashed her FBI credentials. A young officer looked visibly angry about it — loud, pointed commentary on the arrogance of federal jurisdiction — but a senior officer overruled him and walked her inside.
"What about Shingen Yashida? Has his body been identified?"
She did a slow circuit of what she could see. It wasn't particularly informative. After the major combatants had withdrawn, The Hand had taken the field — and they were professionals at killing and burning and leaving nothing useful behind. Even if there were clues, she wouldn't find them.
The senior officer beside her, slightly heavyset, shook his head with quiet apology: "I'm afraid not. The fire was severe. There were many casualties. The identification process is still ongoing."
Daisy's private theory: Shingen was too competent to have died here. More likely he'd been taken alive.
She was turning to leave when an older officer looked at her twice, then broke into a rapid approach and bowed deeply. "You are Miss Daisy Johnson, aren't you?"
Daisy's expression shifted. Her FBI credentials used a cover identity. How did this man know her real name?
He straightened. His face was a catalog of damage — bruised nose, blackened eye sockets, a jaw that had clearly been rearranged, a ring of bruising around his neck.
He was frightened. Visibly. He bowed again, held out an envelope with both hands, and then — ignoring the senior officer's questions entirely — turned and walked rapidly out of the scene.