Whatever roundabout path Viper had taken to assemble this group, Daisy couldn't begin to guess. Looking them over, she decided that apart from Batroc and his crew, the rest were amateurs — a rabble with weapons and no real cohesion.
As the mercenary column stretched out across the terrain, the figure bringing up the rear caught her attention immediately.
The man was enormous. He was nearly three meters (10 ft) tall, with a build that pushed the concept of "muscular" into another category entirely. He wore a deep crimson half-plate across his chest, a rounded metal helmet that swallowed his head completely, and arms corded with muscle so pronounced that every step sent a low, heavy thud reverberating through the earth beneath him.
Daisy felt a cold jolt of recognition. She hadn't expected Juggernaut to be in Wakanda.
He'd gone three rounds with the Hulk and lost all three, but the gap hadn't been big. The man — and people mistook him for a mutant, but he wasn't — drew his power from the Crimson Cosmos, from the demon Cyttorak, a force so ancient it had once gone toe-to-toe with the Living Tribunal without flinching. That raw power had diminished over the years, but Juggernaut could still brush off the Infinity Gems. The other mercenaries were a non-issue, but Juggernaut plus Batroc together? Daisy wasn't liking T'Challa's odds.
Batroc went roughly even with Captain America. Juggernaut could match the Hulk. The Black Panther was essentially being asked to handle an evil Captain America and the Hulk at the same time.
The future version of T'Challa — seasoned, experienced — might have managed a two-on-one through sheer equipment advantage. But the T'Challa standing in front of her was barely past twenty, all youth and pride. Whether he'd come out on top was genuinely uncertain.
"I'll come with you," Daisy said, nodding toward Juggernaut. "That one. Look at the size of him — pure brute force."
Her plan for acquiring the Heart-Shaped Herb — whether to take it or get them to give it willingly — was coming together. She'd been vaguely concerned that Batroc alone wouldn't be enough. Juggernaut's arrival changed the equation perfectly.
T'Challa was cautious at his core. Even at his current age, that wouldn't have changed much. He thought about it, didn't make any dramatic declarations about finishing the fight and coming straight back, and simply nodded his agreement.
Storm's position in Wakanda was quietly awkward. She wasn't quite an outsider, but she wasn't fully an insider either. The queen had designs on marrying her niece into the royal line — keeping her clan's political foothold in the kingdom secure. That meant T'Challa's mother looked at Storm with a barely concealed discomfort, and Storm, for her part, carried all the pride befitting a Kenyan sangoma, a holy woman, and an X-Men deputy leader. Learning to smile demurely and absorb her future mother-in-law's wisdom wasn't in her nature. The moment she saw T'Challa and Daisy moving out to engage the enemy, she didn't ask a single question — she just followed.
The three of them linked up with the bald royal guard and boarded one of Wakanda's electric rail transports, cutting rapidly toward the mercenaries' position.
The mercenaries, meanwhile, were bewildered. They'd expected a job in Africa — stolen artifacts, gold, ivory, that kind of thing. What none of them had anticipated was that winding through a specific sequence of mountain passes would deposit them at the edge of a high-tech city buried in the ranges.
They had no idea Wakanda had already spotted them. The faction leaders were still arguing.
The Americans wanted to pull out immediately and report what they'd found.
The Russians wanted to grab something first, then worry about the rest.
Batroc was the voice of reason. He didn't like the feel of this place. His instinct said retreat, bring more people, come back with a proper plan.
It didn't take long for Batroc's reputation among the mercenary community to shut down the arguments. The dissenting voices went quiet.
Then, from the outer perimeter, one of the sentries let out a short, sharp cry — cut off almost instantly.
"Contact!" Batroc's reaction was instantaneous. His predatory gaze swept the treeline, already calculating where the attack would come from.
He was right. When T'Challa took out the sentry and stepped back into the open, he walked straight into Batroc.
Batroc's leg came up in a blur — T'Challa twisted aside and let it pass. But Batroc's footwork was rhythmic and relentless, each kick flowing into the next with a lethal, almost musical precision.
T'Challa absorbed the exchanges, his Vibranium suit taking the weight of those heavy kicks, then pressed forward with his claws — relying on the metal's edge to cut through Batroc's defenses rather than trying to outlast him.
Batroc had built his entire career on those legs, and he hadn't survived this long by being stupid. He didn't know what Vibranium was, but he wasn't about to put his flesh against blades that gleamed like that. His footwork was extraordinary — not because he was fast, strictly speaking, but because the angles were wrong. It was a layered style that borrowed from half a dozen schools of movement, shifting left and right, forward and back, with such subtlety and unpredictability that it was already starting to throw off a fighter with considerably better physical stats.
Between slips and feints, the strikes kept coming.
A few kicks landing on T'Challa didn't mean anything — the Vibranium suit absorbed everything. But he couldn't afford to just stand there absorbing it, not with his girlfriend and the royal guard watching. The suit was matte black and imposing, and it now had several distinctly unimpressive boot prints across the front. He'd had enough. He stopped giving ground and started pressing for a finish.
The two of them were moving fast. It didn't take long for the rest of the mercenaries to catch up to what was happening. Batroc's standing in their world was too high for anyone to risk a stray shot — so they drew their knives and batons and swarmed in to flank.
"Kill!" One of the royal guards — their identical close-cropped heads and armor made them indistinguishable to Daisy — shouted and charged forward with her spear leveled.
The guards fought in coordinated cells of three: two attacking, one covering. The mercenaries met that disciplined pressure and started taking casualties.
Storm went to work. Her white hair fanned out, her eyes went blank, and her robes billowed as the wind gathered beneath her and lifted her skyward. Clouds rolled in fast, pressing down over the canopy, and the rain began — light at first, then heavy, then pouring.
Daisy watched Storm's flight and felt a private exasperation. The woman was being lifted by the wind. The wind was doing all the lifting. That was it.
The storm — gathering, darkening, drenching — barely slowed Wakanda's defenders. They'd trained in these conditions. The mercenaries had no such advantage and began to struggle.
Daisy, nominally committed to a peaceful approach, was keeping her hits light — wounding and disabling where she could, not going for kills. But the rain was already soaking through her shirt, making the fabric cling in ways she found irritating. After neutralizing two fighters, she retreated under the nearest tree to observe.
High above, Storm was fully in her element. Lightning forked out of the clouds and hammered down at the mercenaries in the clearing below. The royal guards, no longer overwhelmed, split off a unit to reinforce the ring around Batroc.
It was starting to look like victory.