[ Sendai Outskirts, Japan ]
Miss Wing—Colleen, to friends, or Miss Wing if you're feeling respectful—stood up and brought Daisy a large bowl with the gentle pride of a martial arts master turned soup chef. Daisy perked up immediately, eyes shining like a kid at a buffet.
Food. Real food. A whole bowl of it.
Her optimism lasted exactly three seconds.
Rice porridge.
And not the hearty, stick-to-your-ribs kind. No, this was the ghost of a meal, the sort of thing you might serve to a particularly pampered panda. Thin. Watery. Practically translucent.
Daisy stared into the bowl like it had personally offended her.
"Well, itadakimasu" she muttered under her breath. Her stomach didn't care about texture or culinary insult. It just wanted calories.
She grabbed the bowl and drank it straight from the rim—no spoon, no shame, just a raw, post-battle hunger powering her through like a feral raccoon with manners. Colleen moved to stop her, startled. Who drinks porridge like it's a sports drink?
Daisy waved her off with one hand. She was fine. Or at least, porridge-desperate.
Two minutes later, the bowl was empty.
Her stomach growled again almost immediately, unimpressed with the appetizer.
"I think I just metabolized that porridge faster than I drank it," she groaned.
Then, very sheepishly, she glanced up. "Uhh... any chance there's meat? Please?"
Colleen blinked. The audacity. The appetite. Was it that good? Was her humble porridge... secretly five-star gourmet?
Mariko covered a chuckle with the back of her hand. Daisy looked faintly embarrassed—but not enough to stop asking.
"I'm a special," she added casually. "My body burns through energy faster than a government clerk dodging paperwork."
Colleen nodded, more curious than judgmental. She'd patched up plenty of fighters, but this one was starting to resemble a bottomless pit wrapped in sarcasm and bloodied T-shirts.
Daisy leaned back and remembered who Colleen was. No powers. Just pure steel and sword. A future hero in her own right. Iron Fist's on-again, off-again girlfriend. Daughter of the Dragon. A woman with sharp eyebrows and sharper skills.
And a surprisingly nice host.
Colleen didn't scold. Didn't smirk. Just rolled up her sleeves and began prepping something more substantial. Mariko joined her, eager to help.
Meanwhile, Logan returned from doing... Wolverine things. Likely checking the perimeter or arguing with a tree. He gave Daisy a once-over, then leaned against the doorframe with a cigar between his teeth, doing his best brooding uncle impression. She flopped back dramatically on the futon, pretending to be dead.
An hour later, the smell of real food dragged her from the brink of dramatic starvation.
Dinner was served.
As it turned out, Logan could eat too. Like, really eat. Normally he'd mask it with whisky and gruff silence, but now? He was matching Daisy plate for plate.
The difference? Daisy did it with elegance.
Even as she inhaled enough dumplings to qualify for a professional contest, she looked like royalty doing it. Graceful chopstick technique. Perfect posture. If you ignored the stack of empty bowls, you'd assume she'd barely touched her food.
Colleen, watching in quiet amazement, kept sneaking glances at the growing pile of dishes.
After about thirty percent capacity—yes, she measured it—Daisy finally paused long enough to do some introspection.
Her powers had changed.
There was something new laced within her frequency—a fine, light-gold filament humming between her natural vibration patterns. Not harmful, not invasive, but definitely foreign. Like golden thread tangled through piano wire.
Chi. Or Qi, if you preferred the mystic pronunciation.
She could feel the leftover traces from Madame Gao's last attack. When the portal shattered, some kind of mystical energy had flooded the frequency field. Her powers had instinctively repelled most of it... but a trace remained.
It wasn't like absorbing power. More like... mimicking it. Like string theory had taken notes.
Qi, from a scientific perspective, was elegant. Self-contained cycles. Energy strings looping inside the human body. For Qi users, training was about refining those strings—making them resonate on higher dimensions. Most would never reach cosmic levels. Human lifespans weren't long enough.
So they weaponized it.
Temporary boosts. Superhuman bursts of strength, speed, or durability—by isolating and looping energy in parts of the body.
It was brilliant.
And Daisy, for all her sass and sarcasm, was a scientist at heart. She couldn't not try to understand it.
Sadly, partial understanding wasn't enough. And mimicking something mystical with vibration alone? That was a one-way ticket to internal combustion.
Still, her frequency had subtly changed. Her perception radius was broader, more precise. And the White Tiger Amulet's beast instinct layered onto that like frosting on an already-lethal cake. She was becoming a radar with claws.
Then there was the dragon.
The dream hadn't been just a dream. The massive red beast—Shou Lao. Kunlun's guardian. The source of the Iron Fist's power.
Powerful, yes.
Phoenix-level? Not quite. But enough to barbecue her in a heartbeat if provoked.
She remembered stories—especially about one female Iron Fist who had squared off against Phoenix fragments using the full might of the dragon.
Wild stuff.
But Daisy wasn't aiming for dragons. Yet. First, she wanted Madame Gao's head on a metaphorical platter. Preferably with a side of revenge sauce.
Still, she wasn't dumb. When Logan offered to take Mariko back to Tokyo to confront the source of their current mess, Daisy declined.
She needed rest. A plan. Maybe a snack.
"Mr. Logan," she said seriously, "Madame Gao is over four hundred years old. She's not just an old lady in orthopedic shoes. She's dangerous."
Logan puffed on his cigar like a cowboy in denial. "I've handled worse."
"Your confidence is inspiring," she said dryly. "But seriously—don't underestimate her."
He grunted and waved it off, the international sign for I'm about to ignore this perfectly good advice.
Daisy turned to Mariko and squeezed her hand. "Stay alert. And if he gets dramatic and sacrifices himself, smack him back to life."
They nodded and walked off into the moonlit forest.
She sighed.
Logan's style was chaos. No plan, just violence and luck. She preferred having a plan. Sometimes. Maybe a few backup grenades.
The house fell quiet again. Daisy and Colleen sat together by the open screen, watching fireflies dance in the darkness.
Colleen's heritage came up in casual chat—Japanese mother, American father. The surname "Wing" was unexplained, like a plot hole no one questioned. They bonded over chatting.
They also didn't sleep.
Midnight rolled in like a quiet guest, and they whispered small gossips and mused on weapon styles.
Colleen, ever the polite warrior, offered no flirty banter. And Daisy, perhaps for the first time that week, wasn't in the mood to tease.
Eventually, the night softened, and they drifted to sleep.
The war could wait.
For now, there was peace, porridge, and the promise of revenge.
To Be Continued...
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[POWER STONES AND REVIEWS PLS]