This blue-skinned woman possessed psychic power vast as the sea. Power this immense, Daisy had only ever seen in the White Queen and Professor Charles Xavier. This one clearly wasn't a mutant, but rather someone born with overwhelming psychic power, which was terrifying.
Her features looked a little like a Kree's, but not entirely. Considering the Kree occupied over a thousand planets, she probably carried partial Kree blood.
Kree females did indeed have documented cases of psychic mutation. Even Daisy's own awakening of psychic power was closely tied to Kree genes.
You couldn't afford to be careless with these mind-control types. Daisy laid down several psychic barriers in a row; however strong the other woman's power was, breaching these barriers would take time.
Neither Loki nor the suspected Kree woman counted as too great a threat. If she couldn't win, she could run, and they wouldn't be able to keep her here. That much confidence she had.
At this moment, Daisy's attention was entirely captured by the other man who'd walked out of the pillar of light.
A black skintight combat suit covered his whole body, solid muscle brimming with menace, solemn and imposing, and combined with the man's square, austere face, an unbearably heavy pressure bore down on Daisy.
This was a man with physical conditioning on par with Thor, yet whose burst lethality was several times higher than Thor's. Looking at the tuning fork on his forehead, Daisy identified the man at once: the King of the Inhumans, Black Bolt, who could level an entire city at will.
But this king's condition was equally poor right now. His clear gaze was shrouded in black mist, his hand trembling faintly the whole time, while the suspected Kree woman had to rely on her own psychic power and the Mind Scepter to suppress both Black Bolt and Loki.
"Fall back. Get out of here, all of you." Daisy signaled the research staff to run. She wanted to run too, but even in his wrong state, Black Bolt had spotted her the instant he arrived and locked onto her firmly in under half a second.
If she retreated now, what awaited her would surely be his thunderous strike. Rather than that, she might as well buy the research staff some time to escape.
Just as she could tell that woman carried Kree genes, Black Bolt could see her identity too. To handle the fight, she'd deliberately switched into her Inhuman state. Ordinary humans on Earth couldn't tell, but if the Inhuman king still couldn't, that would be too implausible.
The mind-controlled Black Bolt looked toward her automatically, his eyes holding alarm, confusion, and, more than that, perhaps a flicker of shame at being seen in his current state by one of his own kind.
The research staff bolted. Daisy took the chance to stride forward. The Fensalir Armor equipped itself automatically, the longsword appeared in her hand, and the bracers, which had been in her bag, came floating to her at a light hook of her fingers under gravity's control.
Her movements were unhurried. She equipped the bracers directly and activated them.
With the full set of gear backing her, she finally had a bit of nerve to face Black Bolt. As long as she could withstand one strike, she wouldn't dare claim victory, but she definitely wouldn't lose.
Just as Daisy was mulling over whether to strike first or waste a couple more words, a multicolored pillar of light ignored the Tesseract's properties and pierced the underground facility from another angle.
Boom. With a crisp crack like thunder, Thor, the God of Thunder, stepped forth from the multicolored pillar, red cape trailing, golden hair blazing.
"Asgard will never let you fight alone. You seem a bit stronger than the last time I saw you?" Thor was the same as ever, eyes locked tight on Loki, then giving Daisy a few sidelong glances.
"Thanks for the backup. If all three of them came at me together, I really couldn't win. But Loki's been controlled by that blue-skinned woman. His will is still resisting."
"Rest easy. My father is watching this battle too."
The two of them quickly traded information, and learning that Odin was watching, Daisy's confidence firmed up another notch, though the complaint about Thor paying to fix her roof, already at the tip of her tongue, got swallowed back down.
"A crude language, a wasteland of civilization. You have no idea how fortunate you are. I am Supergiant. Lord Thanos has issued a command. He wants only the Tesseract. Woman of Earth, clear the way, hand me the cube, and you will all receive rewards." The blue-skinned woman spoke like singing, cadenced and rhythmic, exceedingly elegant.
Her English was mellow and pleasing, downright flawless. Daisy knew she was reading it straight from the minds of the research staff with her powerful psychic ability.
Thanos? Was it strange for Thanos's underling to show up on Earth? Actually, not that strange.
This crummy little place called Earth got visited by aliens all the time.
Take that rough brute from the Guardians of the Galaxy, Drax the Destroyer. In one version of his origin story he was an Earthman, a real-estate agent no less. He went out to make a sale, ran into Thanos, and got killed. Then his soul was thoroughly reworked by Thanos's grandfather, and he ended up as Drax the Destroyer.
Or take Cyclops's parents, a couple who took their three kids out grocery shopping, only to be abducted by aliens. The parents threw Cyclops and his younger brother off the ship, while the couple and their youngest child were carried off.
The famous Star-Lord was the same. He ran crying out of his house and hadn't even made it two hundred meters (about 650 feet) before Yondu snatched him up.
Earth was like a sieve; everyone just wandered in—practically an open house for aliens, its doors flung wide in welcome.
So now, meeting a living alien, Daisy wasn't the least bit shocked. Strictly speaking, Black Bolt and Loki counted as aliens too. Hell, even she herself counted as one.
"I am Supergiant of the Black Order. Earthling, hand over the cube behind you. Compliance will earn a reward." The blue-skinned woman, Supergiant, softened her tone further, like a whisper in a dream.
"Heh." Daisy really couldn't hold it in; she laughed. Those two lines of Supergiant's were about the same as the brainwashing script she'd made up for Hydra. Could it be that the Hydra of the original timeline had run into Supergiant too?
Being laughed at meant her psychic power hadn't penetrated at all, and the blue-skinned woman's expression soured.
Just as she was about to order Black Bolt to attack in force, and Daisy raised her bracers to brace herself for the hit, another pale-blue orb of light appeared in the underground facility.
A rather high-level teleportation spell, though the caster didn't understand the Tesseract's properties, and it wasn't as formidable as the Bifrost. Direct teleportation like that would surely take some spatial backlash, Daisy analyzed in an instant.
But seeing the several figures who walked out, she knew her Inhuman identity probably couldn't be hidden any longer.
Leading the way was a young woman, her face lovely, her figure exquisite, one fair shoulder half-bared. But what drew the eye most was that head of red hair hanging all the way to the floor.
Beside the woman came a tall, powerful man, his muscles like stone and full of force, brown-skinned, coarse-featured, like a general who charged into the fray, except his lower legs were nothing like a human's—reverse-jointed like a demon's, with a pair of hooves where the feet should have been.
Behind the two of them trailed a colossal creature that looked like an English bulldog, only several times larger, the great dog bearing the same tuning-fork mark on its forehead as Black Bolt. It lay prone on the ground now, an agonized look on its face.