Daisy had no idea how the others were faring, but she figured they were all in much the same boat—and the others might not even have as many options as she did.
Nothing for it but to grit her teeth and tough it out.
After who knew how long, the roaring overhead finally died down. Daisy tried to shove upward with her magnetic field. It didn't budge an inch.
She was balled up in a cramped little pocket now, hemmed in on every side by densely packed rubble. At first she'd tried bracing large beams beside her to take some of the load, but the weight above was too great; every scrap of stone and metal had been crushed flat. By now, apart from her magnetic field, there was no spare space around her at all—it had all been packed solid.
"So, uh—anybody still out there? If you are, give me a shout. Not you, big guy—the one who fires a shockwave every time he opens his mouth. I already know you're alive…" Switching to darkvision to scope out her surroundings, she babbled nonsense to keep herself entertained.
As it turned out, Black Bolt was indeed alive. His combat power was a notch above Thor's, so a cave-in like this couldn't crush him. As for the others, that was anyone's guess.
"I'm still here—but Loki got away!" Thor's voice was thick with anger.
Daisy was mildly impressed. Loki really did have a gift for slipping off; escaping from a spot like this was no small feat.
"Did the almighty All-Father hand down any divine guidance?" Looking around, Daisy could tell she wasn't getting out any time soon, so she asked Thor whether their great King of the Gods might lend them a hand.
"Father has only just awoken, and his divine power is still weak. Asgard's Bifrost hasn't been fully repaired either. This time I came—" Thor rattled on and on.
Daisy started. Was Thor really this guileless? Then it clicked, and she cut him off in a hurry. "Stop talking! Supergiant's messing with your head!"
"Heh heh. You're very capable, Earth-woman. Any interest in joining Lord Thanos's ranks? You've earned the right to stand shoulder to shoulder with us." Called out on her little trick, Supergiant wasn't the least bit annoyed; if anything she turned earnest, recruiting Daisy on Thanos's behalf.
"Hmph. Ask me again once you've made it out of here alive." With that, she took up Godslayer and started digging at the earth beside her. Better to rely on herself than on anyone else—and with her stamina, tunneling a few hundred meters wasn't a tall order.
Rebuffed, Supergiant turned instead to Black Bolt with an order. "Dig us a way out, and get the Tesseract for my master."
This time Black Bolt refused. That all-out strike had snapped the mental shackles on his mind. He turned a cold gaze in Supergiant's direction—now wasn't the moment to fight—then fixed on the spot where his wife had last vanished and, hands like claws, began carving through the rock.
Thor set about saving himself too. His usually unstoppable hammer was, at the moment, less use than a shovel, so he could only follow Black Bolt's lead and slowly dig his way out.
The three of them were some distance apart, and none suggested pooling their efforts; each dug his own tunnel upward from below.
"Daisy, are you still there?" A garbled transmission crackled through her comm.
The signal was distorted, but she recognized the voice—Nick Fury—and, rare for him, a hint of urgency in his tone. Only after she answered did the other end let out a breath of relief.
Daisy felt a small flicker of warmth. Nick Fury was actually pretty decent to her; maybe she'd been a bit too disrespectful about him behind his back?
But Fury had never been the type to let a warm moment last three seconds. His very next line was, "Is the Tesseract still there?"
"…Yes, it's here. If your precious cube weren't, I'd have just teleported out already!" she snapped.
It took a herculean effort. Daisy dug for over two hours before she'd carved a winding tunnel upward from several hundred meters below.
Back when they'd reinforced the facility, they'd used a huge amount of alloy for support, and now digging up through it was pure misery. A lot of the metal was especially tough; in top condition she'd have split it in two with one punch, but her energy was running lower and lower, so she kept having to detour, changing direction again and again. At last, filthy and disheveled, she crawled up out of the ground.
She was so worn out her tongue was practically hanging out. There was too little oxygen down there—an ordinary person would black out within five minutes. Tough as her body was, she'd lasted two hours, and even she was nearing her limit now.
A knockout who'd normally rate a ninety-five was scoring under twenty at the moment: hair a mess, face grimy, dirt and grit caked over her face, hands, and neck. She couldn't have looked more of a wreck.
"Are you all right…?" Maria Hill—who had long since calculated her "surfacing point" and brought the Helicarrier in for support—rushed to steady her.
Hill tried to guide the wobbling Daisy back to rest, but she coughed twice and pointed at the collapsed building. "Down there—there are still enemies down there."
It was a sprawling underground facility, after all, with everyone far apart. Digging sideways meant bearing too much pressure, so without a word to one another they'd all chosen to dig straight up on their own rather than converge and cooperate.
Supergiant and Medusa were harder to call, but Thor and Black Bolt—two powerhouses—would claw their way out with bare hands even without a blade.
Most of the S.H.I.E.L.D. and NASA personnel had evacuated, but unfortunately some hadn't made it out. By Daisy's reckoning, the old white guy and the others had had precious little time to escape the facility; the odds they were dead were now all but set in stone.
The main building of the Dark Matter Research Center had collapsed entirely, dragging several nearby buildings down into the earth with it.
Even two hours on, the site still blazed against the sky. Fire trucks and ambulances streamed in and out, and violent explosions still went off now and then. The area laid out for the dead was packed body to body, and the wounded were beyond counting.
Before surfacing, Daisy had changed back into her agent's uniform; now she gave her face and hair a quick tidy and washed her hands.
Her injuries weren't exactly severe, but they were far from light either. Once her healing factor kicked in, a fierce hunger came hard on its heels.
Hill, who knew her well, discreetly slipped her two sausages. A certain someone wolfed them down and finally felt a little less ravenous…
Hill washed her face for her, hunted down something for her to eat, and pulled the incoming intelligence together into a report—a thousand threads to juggle all at once, and yet she managed it well, orderly and unflustered.
"Someone spotted that Loki you mentioned. He flew north, toward Canada. Here—have this chocolate."
"The First Special Operations Squad has gone dark. It looks like this Loki stabbed Crossbones with that spear of his?" Hill pressed an egg into her hand along with the tablet she'd been holding.
Daisy glanced at the screen and got a shock. Crossbones had been taken over by Loki? What kind of plot twist was this?!
The footage was what the squad had transmitted back to HQ at the time. You could see Crossbones hold out for two seconds before his pupils rapidly changed color—and then he turned and killed several of the squad's elite on the spot.
The brainwashing was unmistakable; anyone with a normal IQ could see exactly what had happened.
And the truly facepalm-worthy part came next: the group had also abducted the former director, Alexander Pierce.