Diamond Form multiplied Emma's physical defenses immeasurably—but the moment that layer was breached, the interior sensitivity spiked to extremes. Once she was through, Emma was even more helpless than Viper had been back then. Daisy's psychic ability had grown several hundredfold since that first encounter.
While deflecting the diamond shards, she shifted her approach. Not an attack frequency—something closer to a compatibility calibration. She wanted to reshape the baseline resonance between herself and Emma. Not mind control. More like manually adjusting the underlying parameter that determined how naturally two people's temperaments inclined toward each other.
The concept wasn't complicated. Some people were simply naturally compatible. Stark and Thanos—mutual respect, genuine admiration across enemy lines. Or Daisy with Baldy, and with Coulson—natural affinity running deep, the father-daughter bond from the original timeline anchoring it even now. Even one step removed, she still fit the role of someone Fury would groom as a successor.
Or Cyclops and Emma. Natural compatibility—that was the only real explanation for why Emma, with a thriving business empire to run, had agreed to teach at Xavier's School at all.
Daisy was now forcing that parameter in a new direction.
The limits were real. If the underlying gap was too wide, no adjustment worked. Take Black Widow—she liked heroes, genuinely. And Daisy was roughly ten thousand miles away from qualifying as a hero in that sense. No frequency adjustment could bridge that.
The memory contact came and went in seconds. Emma's psychic command of her own interior was expert-level; Daisy was pushed out almost immediately. She caught flashes—a father who used his fists, a mother who medicated instead of coped, a brother who loved men and lived under the family's quiet condemnation, a sister who treated Emma as an enemy from childhood.
She felt like an outsider watching through glass, fast-forwarding through nearly Emma's entire childhood in a few compressed moments. Then the connection broke.
She sat on the floor nursing a headache, sorting through what she'd taken away.
Results: one psychic blast, one psychic shield—roughly absorbed from observation before being ejected. Her existing telepathy had been refined by the contact. More advanced techniques she hadn't had time to absorb.
She sat for a moment with the honest assessment: most of Emma's psychic techniques wouldn't translate to her own power set. It was far less effort to close the distance and punch once than to build up a psychic blast. Why go the long way around?
"What exactly did the two of you—" Cyclops had something of Professor X's quality when it came to waking up. True to his training under the old bald man, he came around with the same eerie timing.
He surveyed the scene.
Daisy was half-leaning against a solid oak desk, wearing armor from somewhere (antique, genuinely striking)—cuts across her face and both hands, a long sword on the floor. Emma was flat on the carpet, one stiletto heel embedded in the chandelier overhead, lying spread in a wide X shape, breathing once in a great while.
Cyclops mentally filed this under brutal mutual combat.
"I'm fine." Daisy's surface cuts were already knitting. She straightened up.
Emma took a little longer. She released Diamond Form, kicked off the remaining heel, and sat in her own chair, drawing slow deliberate breaths.
They'd shared memories—a two-way process. Emma had seen fragments of Daisy's: HYDRA's actual scope, S.H.I.E.L.D.'s reach, the volume of resources Daisy was adjacent to. These were things Emma had known about in rough outline. Seeing them clearly made something shudder in her chest—she loved power, genuinely, to the marrow. What she was being shown was not a small offering.
Daisy had also, with no great subtlety, surfaced the image of Cyclops on a bicycle. Memories couldn't be faked—at least not at Daisy's current level—and Emma knew it.
Emma processed this. Still handsome. Still principled. But the man commuted by bicycle. Broke, evidently. You could respect idealism, but there were limits.
She drained most of a glass of water and recovered her equilibrium.
Daisy went home, showered, changed clothes. When she returned to Frost International an hour later, Emma had done the same—fresh change, visible recovery in her bearing. Daisy teleported all three to Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters.
Storm had called in Dr. Hank McCoy while Daisy was away. Beast had completed a thorough inspection of Cerebro's hardware: the sabotage was cleared, the systems were clean. Safe to use.
Daisy, invited as a friend, followed them into the Cerebro chamber.
She took her time looking at the device—the combined product of Charles Xavier, Magneto, Beast, and Mystique's engineering genius. She could grasp pieces of the mechanism, but as a complete system it exceeded her. Amplification without proportional energy cost shouldn't be possible, but they'd apparently used energy itself as a support structure, with the machine as the buffer. Clever—and one critical flaw: total hardware dependency. Mystique had exploited that, tampering with the power supply to take out the X-Men's greatest asset in a single move.
"This is it?" Emma eyed the helmet on the control console and asked in passing.
She put it on.
The world detonated.
Every mind within range flooded into her at once. Not a trickle—an ocean at full tide. Everything was fragile; everything was within reach. One directed thought and thousands could die. The psychic amplification moved beyond all scale—she felt herself become something higher, something that wore a body as a formality. The body felt like a cage. Ethics felt like a joke.
She could sense Cyclops behind her without turning—directly, through the texture of his presence.
"This is… me—no. This isn't me—" She was starting to slip.
Daisy placed a hand on Emma's shoulder, lending her own psychic weight to anchor her from outside the spiral.
"I'll help too." Storm had limited psychic capacity—not her specialty, but real. She placed her hand on Emma's other shoulder.
Together it barely counted. But it held.
Emma found her center. She pulled herself back from the edge, reclaimed herself from the amplified flood. Even so—she was not Charles Xavier. Not in raw psychic power, and not in sheer willpower.
"I can't find Erik." She spoke carefully, managing the Cerebro input with half her attention. "He must still be wearing the helmet."
White Queen knew Magneto well enough to call him by his given name—that said something about how long they'd known each other. He'd invited her to join the Brotherhood of Mutants more than once. She'd never agreed, and she'd never refused.
"Sabretooth and Toad are both in New York. The girl you're looking for—Rogue—I can see her. She's not with the Brotherhood."
A longer pause.
"Mystique—I'm not certain. Her mutant signature is strange."
Beast leaned forward. He'd always carried a complicated soft spot for Mystique—as had many mutants, if they were honest. She had a way of inspiring complicated feelings in people. Hearing that Mystique might be in some kind of trouble, he asked immediately.
"Strange how?"