Fingernails biting into diamond made a sound like a blade dragged across glass—continuous, harsh, deeply unpleasant. But friction was friction. The grip held.
Daisy hauled Emma back.
"We're not done, Miss Frost. Don't rush off."
Light tone. Internally, not so light—Emma could switch forms too fast, and any unexpected shift back to human could open a split-second window for a psychic attack. She couldn't afford to be caught off guard.
She went straight for what she thought was her trump card: contact through the wrist grip, vibration transferred directly.
Body versus organic diamond. The frequencies were entirely different. Diamond Form Emma operated at extreme density with a stable molecular structure. Two pulses—nothing. The vibration didn't transmit.
"Interesting." She sheathed the Godslayer and used her free hand to take hold of Emma's neck.
Emma had some combat training—street level, functional for ordinary situations. Not for this. Daisy had trained in K'un-Lun. She could read every opening in taekwondo, karate, anything, before it formed.
She locked Emma's elbow, dropped her weight, and pressed Emma to the carpet. Knees braced against Emma's waist, holding her firmly in place. She pinned Emma there, expression very serious.
Mystique had escaped from right under her nose. Now Diamond Form was shrugging off her vibration. Two consecutive failures for her core ability, back to back. She was going to find the frequency if it took the rest of the afternoon.
The position was somewhat unusual—in the psychic standoff earlier, Emma had been on offense and Daisy on defense. The positions were now entirely reversed.
Emma's physical strength was only marginally above baseline human—nothing against someone who could arm-wrestle Asgardians. She was pinned, and she knew it. She maintained Diamond Form as the only protection available, and since Daisy might at any moment decide to do something far more dangerous, Emma held still and let her work.
In the spirit of inquiry, Daisy explored.
Emma's Diamond Form had extraordinary hardness and strength. "Diamond" was an analogy, not a chemical description—the actual composition was something else entirely, explaining why standard carbon-lattice vibration frequencies didn't apply. She had to find the real resonance from the ground up.
She lifted Emma's hands above her head, pinned both wrists with one hand, freed the other for finer work.
No human skin texture. More like polished jade—cool, impossibly smooth. An honest assessment: not an unpleasant sensation.
"Wow, big sis—even your chest is all diamondized! What an incredible ability." Harder than stone, so surely no one could call this harassment. Same shape as before, completely different feel. She didn't dwell on the observation—she pressed her palm flat and began feeding vibration pulses inward, working toward the interior.
From lower back, moving upward. From below, to the chest. After a great deal of effort, Director Daisy finally isolated a specific frequency, a unique resonance in a very particular band.
Emma Frost, for the first time in her life, discovered that Diamond Form had responses.
This was something even she hadn't known about herself. It took someone with genuine research spirit to find it experimentally.
In human form, external stimulus converts to nerve impulses and transmits to the cerebral cortex—a layered process. In Diamond Form, the nerves were far more resilient, but apparently far more sensitive.
And the lingering sensations from earlier hadn't gone away. Just as Daisy's own forms didn't erase what the body had experienced when she switched, the feeling didn't vanish into thin air just because you changed shape.
"You…" Emma said one word—and forgot entirely what she'd been about to say next.
"Oh?" Daisy's eye fell on the bag. "Heh. Look what I still have. I hear you're quite fond of this sort of thing?"
She produced the lasso, held it in Emma's sightline long enough to register what it was, then wrapped it around Emma's wrists and looped the other end twice around a nearby column.
Daisy laughed with genuine delight and freed both her hands. The vibration accelerated.
The Phoenix phantom woven into the lasso was not the Phoenix Force itself—a shadow of a shadow. Even so, against a psychic of Emma's caliber it was a meaningful constant drain. She had to maintain partial attention on it at all times.
"Just follow your instincts. You're curious how far this goes, aren't you?"
Emma's composure cracked. "Don't you dare try psychic temptation on me, you little—you're nowhere near good enough."
The anger cut through everything else for a moment. Daisy cursed herself internally—she'd overplayed that hand.
She wanted Emma on her side long-term. Emma's resistance to psychic threats was exactly the gap she needed to cover in her team.
But anger dispersed focus without eliminating the underlying pressure. Nothing for it—continue. Endurance contest. Everything had a threshold.
The mounting pressure halted Emma's breath. What had been building since the original standoff reached its ceiling—and all at once white light filled her field of vision.
She finally let go of the shackles on her body.
Daisy, waiting comfortably for the result, found something slam into her from close range—fast, hard, impossibly sharp.
Diamond shards. Countless crystalline fragments expelled outward from Emma in a thirty-degree cone to nearly half a meter (about 1.6 feet). Ninety percent of them caught Daisy square on.
No room to dodge at this range. She got half a step back, threw her arm up to protect her face.
The sound was rapid and continuous: crystalline splinters punching into skin. Fast, razor-edged, hardness that exceeded everything ordinary. Even her enhanced constitution got shredded—dozens of lacerations opened across her forearm and the back of her hand. A long cut ran along her cheekbone.
An ordinary human would not have survived it.
Muscles flexed. The shards forced themselves out. Wounds began to slowly knit.
She stood there in complete bafflement. She had not seen that coming. Not remotely. The White Queen had diamond shrapnel hidden weapons in her power set? That was vicious.
For world peace, she had to put Emma down.
"Admit defeat!"
"Yield!"
"You wanted to see what I could do—didn't you say you weren't afraid to die?"
Emma kept firing. Wave after wave of diamond shards, methodical. Daisy's arm was a mess of blood and torn fabric. In the urgency of it all, she couldn't let go—couldn't retreat, couldn't reposition, locked in the line of fire.
She activated the Asgardian armor.