Lightning struck Juggernaut from above — thick bolts and thin bolts of varying intensity. One or two he could shake off. This many, stacking on top of each other, left him twitching and numb. Daisy pressed through and hit him twice more with the blade.
There was something genuinely satisfying about swordfighting, especially with a sword this sharp. She put Colleen Wing's technique to work — left cut, right cut, using her speed to stay just outside his reach, circling and slashing in a continuous rhythm.
The only thing missing was a soundtrack. And she did have to dodge the occasional stray bolt from Storm — the woman's precision had improved a great deal, but "great deal" wasn't the same as "perfect."
When Juggernaut figured out that charging wasn't working, he switched to raw fistwork. Daisy intercepted a heavy punch with her shield and countered with a cut at his wrist.
Then his speed jumped.
He snatched the blade mid-swing, trying to crush it in his grip. Adamantium didn't cooperate. A Hulk- or Juggernaut-level force, applied deliberately, could probably snap it — but a frantic grab wasn't the same as a focused effort. His hand closed on the edge instead.
Daisy pulled the sword back immediately. The blade sheared across his palm with a wet, sharp sound, and blood came freely.
"AAAARGH!" The pain flipped a switch in him. His eyes went bloodshot. Losing all sense of balance, he bent his knees and drove off both feet — a head-butt launched like a striker going for the ball, that massive skull aimed straight at her.
The move made no sense at all. It disrupted her timing entirely. With a wall of flesh bearing down at her, there was no room to dodge. Daisy did the only thing available: she planted the shield between them and took the hit straight on, dropping her right foot back into a braced stance.
It wasn't enough.
BOOM. The impact launched her backward. The momentum kept going, tumbling her through seven or eight full rotations in the air before she came down hard, skidding across the ground after a flight of nearly three hundred feet (about 100 meters).
It was pure kinetic mass — his body weight and jump speed combined. Juggernaut hadn't even fully wound up for that one. Even so, Daisy estimated the effective force at over a hundred tons. The shield, the bracers, and her own reinforced constitution had absorbed most of it. The reason she'd gone flying was simply that she hadn't had enough mass to hold the line.
She wiped a thin streak of blood from the corner of her mouth, raised the shield again, and reset her stance — because Juggernaut had launched himself into the air, both fists raised, killing intent rolling off him in waves, and he was coming down.
"Idiot," she muttered.
There was no ground to push off from. A man with no flight capability and no wings had thrown himself into the air for a dramatic finish. All the raw power in the world meant nothing when there was nothing to push against.
She dropped the sword and shield. She picked her angle. Her right hand tightened into a fist, the bracers flaring with light as she drew on everything they'd stored. She aimed and fired straight up at him.
The shockwave spread in a wide fan. Juggernaut hit it first — her vibrational pulse struck him squarely, and then the stored energy from the bracers hammered into him on top of it. The combined force wiped out his momentum and body weight simultaneously. The leftover energy kept going and knocked him sideways and upward, sending him tumbling over thirty feet (roughly 10 meters) into the air at an angle.
Storm understood immediately. No hesitation — she switched from lightning to wind. The gust caught Juggernaut before he could land and flung him back upward.
Daisy watched him flail in midair, arms and legs windmilling uselessly, and felt a surge of satisfaction.
Up here, he was just a very large, very angry target.
The problem was that Storm was fighting physics. Keeping Juggernaut aloft took real effort, and she didn't dare push the wind to its upper limits — the ecological cost of a truly massive sustained storm was something she refused to pay. Under normal conditions, Juggernaut weighed over 1,700 pounds (roughly 800 kg). Combat-swollen muscles pushed him past 2,200 pounds (over 1,000 kg). Holding that much mass aloft required significant wind levels.
Storm fought to contain the footprint, but it wasn't clean. The wind spread across the battlefield anyway. The Dora Milaje retreated into the aircraft to wait it out. The mercenaries improvised: some tied themselves together, some drove their knives into the earth as anchors.
T'Challa and Batroc, closest to the center, got lucky — a large tree each, right at arm's reach. Both men grabbed on and proceeded to kick each other while clinging to their respective trunks, which was absurd.
Thud. The wind didn't distinguish friend from foe, leaving Daisy unable to move in and assist directly. Storm's sustained output finally fell a fraction short, and Juggernaut broke free of the air, hitting the ground like a dropped boulder.
Daisy had anticipated this. While Storm was maintaining the hurricane, Daisy had been down on one knee with both palms flat on the earth, her power running continuously, sending a slow, targeted vibration into the precise spot where Juggernaut was going to land.
The brute clambered upright — and immediately felt something wrong. The ground under his feet shifted and gave, one step solid, the next not. His already rattled head, having been through the equivalent of a high-speed spin cycle, had no idea what was happening. Before he could figure it out, Daisy drove both fists into the earth.
BOOM. The force drove downward through the ground layers, traveled through bedrock, and erupted upward at an angle — directly beneath Juggernaut.
Under normal circumstances that impact wouldn't have worried him. But his footing was already gone, and without that ground connection, his strength had no outlet. The force canceled his weight completely.
He went up like a cannonball — over thirty feet (about 10 meters).
Daisy looked up and waited for Storm's follow-through.
They'd found their rhythm. The same sequence as before: the hurricane caught him, he tumbled along the wind track, and when he began to fall, Daisy moved in for a strike, and sent him up again.
A few circuits in a hurricane at these speeds would make a normal person black out. Juggernaut's ridiculous helmet had some kind of psi-shielding — she recalled that much. But did it protect against vertigo? Against hundreds, maybe thousands of rotations?
Eventually, even the stubbornest brain had its limits.
Juggernaut tried to break free multiple times. He adjusted his center of gravity. He fired the thrust systems built into his boots. He worked through every trick he had.
Every time he showed signs of getting loose, Daisy put a shockwave into him and reset the process. One by one, his options ran out. The increasingly violent rotation did what nothing else had managed — it beat his dull mind into a fog, leaving him slower and slower, until the brain's self-preservation instinct finally triggered.
He lost consciousness.
Storm cut the power, exhausted. The hurricane dissipated gradually, letting the air go still.
Freed from the spin, Juggernaut dropped straight down from roughly 1,000 feet (about 300 meters) and hit the earth with an impact that shook the ground.
Both women flew over to assess. Juggernaut's eyes were blank, his breathing — surprisingly — even and steady.
"He's still alive?" Storm was genuinely astonished. A fall from that altitude should have killed anything. No visible major injuries. "That makes no sense."