Two F-22 Raptors scrambled from Kandahar Air Base with a pair of sonic booms and arrived on scene. The generals back at base wanted to see for themselves just what one man could accomplish in an age where technology ruled the world.
The thunderclap of their approach pulled Mandarin's attention skyward. Daisy exhaled and floored the accelerator — all three vehicles burning for the horizon.
Whether those pilots made it home was out of her hands. Best she could do was say a prayer for them. After that, they were on their own.
The two pilots arrived thoroughly confused. Whatever their private misgivings, orders were orders.
The lead aircraft and its wingman flew in per their mission brief.
"What enemy?" The lead pilot craned his neck toward the ground. Dust, sand, heat shimmer. Nothing.
"Daniel! Above you!"
The wingman's shout made him flinch. He punched the throttle, gained altitude — and then he saw it. The generals watching from base saw it too.
An old man in green robes was standing in midair. No aircraft. No equipment. Just hovering there, studying the jets with quiet curiosity.
The ring on Mandarin's left thumb flared white. The F-22 — 20 tons (≈44,000 lbs) empty, 40 tons (≈88,000 lbs) fully loaded — was yanked toward him like a toy on a string. Had Daisy been there, she would have recognized it immediately: gravity manipulation. The pilot named Daniel hadn't touched his controls. The jet just moved on its own.
"Requesting permission to fire! Requesting permission to fire!"
He was still following procedure, still going by the book.
The response from base chilled him. Command wanted him to hold fire. The target demonstrated flight capability, they said. The target had high research value. They didn't want the specimen damaged.
He tried to comply. Then Mandarin's fingers began to glow again — and five long, ringed fingers punched straight through the nose of his aircraft like it was paper. After that, no general on earth could have stopped him. Pure instinct drove his thumb to the trigger.
He opened fire. A torrent of cannon rounds shredded the air around Mandarin. Daniel fought the controls, trying to break free of the gravity pull. The plane didn't move.
"What is this thing?!" The fire did nothing. An ice-crystal barrier had stopped every shell cleanly. He fired a Sidewinder missile. That didn't break through either.
Alien? Super soldier? He had no time to speculate. Mandarin — thoroughly fed up by the assault, especially that last Sidewinder, which had pushed him hard enough that he'd had to layer his energy shield, a rock barrier, and an ice wall just to hold it off — had run out of patience entirely.
His left index finger blazed red. A coiling dragon of pure fire materialized in his palm, growing larger as it caught the wind, until a wave of scorching heat rolled outward. The dragon lunged and wrapped itself around the F-22.
The cockpit temperature spiked in an instant. Daniel had just opened the canopy to eject when the heat vaporized him. The jet followed in a burst of shrapnel and flame.
The wingman watched in mute horror. Command's standing order had been to hold. But he'd just watched his partner die. He squeezed the trigger, firing two Sidewinders.
This time Mandarin didn't absorb it directly. His left middle finger sparked blue. Two brilliant arcs of electricity materialized and obliterated both incoming missiles, then kept traveling along the same vector straight toward the wingman.
The distance worked in the pilot's favor. He had just enough warning to haul for altitude and clear the lightning.
His luck ended there.
A cloud of absolute black mist engulfed his aircraft. Then a thread of silver light lanced from the ring on Mandarin's right ring finger — a disintegration beam. The mist pinned the jet in place; the beam unmade it at the atomic level. There was nothing left to find.
Two F-22 Raptors, gone in minutes. The generals went very quiet. They were generals, yes, but at the end of the day they were ordinary men. Against something like this, rank meant nothing.
Their confidence in superior weaponry had just been disproven. What replaced it was helplessness, confusion, and fear. The generals scrambled to reach Daisy's group.
The thought sat badly with her, but those two Raptors had bought enough time. Daisy's convoy made it back to Kandahar Air Base in one anxious, white-knuckled run.
She'd expected Mandarin to come for them a fourth time. He didn't. Even after they rolled through the gate, there was no sign of him.
The base klaxons wailed. Troops formed up by unit across the installation.
Even inside the perimeter, Daisy didn't relax. He'd come — she felt it. She was like the protagonist who'd dragged an end-game world boss back into the starting zone and now had nothing to do but wait.
In the middle of the repeating PA announcement — This is not a drill. All combat units to assigned positions — a messenger found her. The base generals requested her presence.
She'd brought this threat to their door. She owed them an explanation. Daisy followed without argument.
The Kandahar US base was built underground. Hardened against the remote possibility of a nuclear strike, the structure had been reinforced to survive near-anything, its walls stocked with enough ammunition and supplies to outlast a long siege. Walking through it, Daisy — who generated earthquakes for a living — privately estimated that collapsing this place would take serious effort even from her.
The soldiers stationed here were a different breed from Colonel Rhodes's unit. These weren't pampered troops. Every man she passed had the quiet, controlled edge of someone who had been places and done things.
Inside the command center, Daisy got the full picture. Both F-22s were confirmed destroyed. One pilot was KIA. According to satellite analysis, Mandarin had briefly detained the second pilot — but Daisy had a different read. He'd been having his memories extracted.
She knew from experience how unpleasant that was. She'd once absorbed a brief fragment of Viper's memories and ended up with a splitting headache for hours. Without a specially developed psychic ability — the kind needed to expand mental capacity — processing a large volume of memories through an ordinary human brain was a slow, grinding, painful ordeal. Even Charles Xavier, who had spent fifty years researching psionic abilities, still needed time to read a mind, and he did it selectively.
Mandarin, apparently, had no interest in being selective. He'd started from the pilot's earliest memories — bedwetting, grade school, teenage brawls, old friendships — then plowed through deep memories and surface memories alike in no particular order, a chaotic sweep through an entire life at once. That was why he'd been slow to give chase.
The command center held seven or eight field-grade staff officers, with two senior figures presiding: an Air Force Major General and an Army Lieutenant General.