The two of them settled into a pair of high-tech reclining simulation chairs. The supercomputer would scan and replicate all their biometric data and equipment — which was why Storm had stepped away earlier to change into her gear.
The hard-light holographic simulation powered on. The vast, empty training floor was instantly transformed: buildings and skyscrapers materialized from nothing, with the ground a jagged sprawl of rubble, like the ruins of a city ravaged by war.
Daisy knew she was still sitting in the chair, but the holographic simulation gave her full control over a perfect digital copy of herself — same height, same weight, same strength and speed. She reached out and touched the wreckage of a nearby car. She knew it was fake, but the sensation against her fingertips was utterly convincing. She had to hand it to Professor Xavier — the tech in this place was something else.
"You pick the terrain," Storm said, conceding the home-field advantage to her guest.
Daisy didn't hesitate. Fighting Storm in an aerial battle would be brutal. She was a ground fighter.
She scrolled through the map options. "Hawaii."
Storm's brow creased slightly, but she said nothing.
The post-apocalyptic wasteland dissolved in an instant. Sandy beaches, open ocean, palm trees, and jagged reefs took its place.
"Come on then!" Storm knew Daisy could fly too — no reason to hold back. She shot into the air first, drawing up massive quantities of seawater. A storm began to take shape across the entire arena. A hurricane answered her call. Fat drops of rain flooded the air, and through the thunder and lightning, Storm's silver hair whipped wild around her. She looked, genuinely, like a goddess.
Daisy didn't flinch. She spread her vibrational frequency across the training grounds — not exactly small, not exactly large — and got to work.
She dodged two lightning bolts in quick succession, locked onto Storm's position, and teleported directly to her. Then she kept it simple: she aimed a punch straight into the air.
The Danger Room's processing power was extraordinary. It simulated the strike with perfect fidelity — the shockwave from the impact ripped outward through the air at blistering speed, shattering the atmosphere into fragments like shards of broken glass.
Since the near-death encounter with Juggernaut, Storm had become acutely aware of her own speed. Heart-Shaped Herb enhancement had strengthened her body, letting her push through far greater wind resistance than before.
Faced with Daisy's charge, she chose to retreat — ranged combat was her forte anyway. Like a great bird on the wind, she rode her power backward thirty or forty feet, then raised both arms above her head, eyes rolling back until only the whites showed. She seized a bolt of lightning — a half-meter-wide column of silver-white electricity — and pulled it down through sheer will.
"Heads up!" She poured everything into it — her full mutant power, and a thousand years of her family's magical bloodline — and gave Daisy one warning. Then she channeled the lightning through herself, a conduit between sky and earth, and sent the serpentine silver bolt crashing down.
Daisy had already landed. Aerial combat wasn't her game. She saw the lightning coming and didn't run. She crossed her arms in front of her, vibranium bracers igniting with a flash of white light, and braced to take the hit head-on.
BOOM.
The bolt struck. A blazing pillar of white, wild and thunderous, carrying the force of the sky itself — it slammed directly into her bracers.
Left foot forward, right foot back, in a half fighting stance. The lightning shoved her backward nearly thirty feet, her boots carving two shallow furrows into the ground before she finally absorbed it.
"Not bad. Genuinely not bad." Vibranium absorbed energy — but kinetic force was a different story. Captain America getting blasted around by rocket fire was proof enough of that.
"My turn." She gave Storm fair warning. Her vibrational frequency spread across the entire arena. Hawaii sat atop a massive volcano chain. She located five weak points in the mantle — moved fast, a blur of motion — struck each one in rapid succession, then drove her fist into the center point with everything she had, and leaped clear.
The Danger Room rendered it perfectly. The mantle buckled under the stress from all five points. Directly beneath Daisy's final strike, the rock cracked open, and magma — under tremendous compression — erupted upward at the precise angles she had calculated, blasting toward Storm.
Lava geysers erupted at ninety meters per second (roughly 295 feet per second). Mixed in with the magma: chunks of mantle rock, unidentified mineral fragments. The eruption covered an enormous area. The surrounding air warped with heat — the light itself seemed to bend.
Daisy kept feeding energy into the earth, driving the tectonic plates from multiple directions, accelerating the eruption with each pulse.
Curtains of fire and lava rolled toward Storm like a tidal wave.
She could unleash this much force without any damage to her own body. The freedom of it made her mind drift mid-fight — to Hill's cold dismissal, to how she'd spent every day since arriving in this world walking on eggshells. A wave of frustration surged through her.
The Danger Room's neural simulation made it worse, dredging up all the feelings she'd buried.
She hit the ground again and again, almost like venting. No resonance feedback. Her power ran completely unchecked.
The rumbling was constant and deafening. Three fissures were punched straight through. Lava sprayed skyward, heat blasted outward, debris flew in every direction. The temperature in the training room spiked by ten degrees. What spread before her looked like the end of the world.
Storm didn't know about the storm brewing in Daisy's head. She assumed this was Daisy's real power level — and while she was startled, it only sparked her competitive instinct.
Same element. Mutant power amplified by bloodline magic. Storm had been exceptional from birth. She wasn't about to accept defeat.
Under normal conditions, there was always a slight lag in drawing magical power from across dimensions. In the simulation, that limitation didn't exist.
Silver hair flying, Storm called on everything — every drop of mutant ability, every strand of ancestral magic.
The training room turned into a downpour. Hurricane-force winds bent the lava flows off course. Rapid-fire lightning strikes began picking off the cannonball-sized rocks one by one.
"Ororo — you really think a storm can outmatch the earth itself?" Daisy's vibrational power had sunk all the way down to the planet's core. The entire Hawaiian island began to shake violently.
Vibrations compressed the ground, building enormous pressure. Eruption speed climbed. The deeper she pushed into the volcanic core, the hotter the magma became. Ordinary rain vaporized on contact. Lightning bolts shattered against the lava streams. The upper hand was shifting back to her.
"Ha! Like I'm scared of you!" Storm thought of the vicious insults from T'Challa's disapproving mother, and her mood curdled. "I'm not afraid of that old woman in Wakanda. I'm certainly not afraid of you!"
One in the sky, one underground. Rain against lava, flying debris against lightning. Without either of them quite noticing, they'd stopped holding back.
Outside the Danger Room, the observers were stunned into silence.
Cyclops and Jean looked at each other.
"Aren't they supposed to be friends?"
"Quick — check the load capacity. Is the training room about to hit its limit?" Cyclops was already inspecting the conduit panels. Jean was at the main control computer.
The elegant woman was working fast, hair falling across her face with no time to push it back. She couldn't figure out how a friendly sparring match had turned into this.