Daisy's tone carried a trace of contempt. "I don't know if his suit has any defense against psychic attack. If it doesn't, Professor Xavier could shut him down without breaking a sweat. And Magneto could strip that armor apart at range."
"The green thing Victoria Hand went after could destroy that armor in a straight fight."
She counted them off on her fingers. Iron Man was nowhere near invincible.
"Suit aside—the man himself is the real vulnerability. Get close enough, and I could pull him out of the armor myself. What, do you need me to kill him?"
Fury immediately clarified that was not the request. Tony Stark was the son of one of the founders. You didn't just take someone like that out.
"I want to bring him into SHIELD—" His phone rang before he could finish. Fury answered, listened without expression, said he understood, and hung up.
"Can you get me to Tony Stark's Malibu house? It's urgent." He put emphasis on the last word.
Daisy blinked.
We're in New York. East coast to west coast. That's over four thousand kilometers—somewhere around two and a half thousand miles.
"You think you can manage it?" Fury asked, not entirely certain.
She might not be a man anymore, but she wasn't about to say she couldn't.
A quick mental calculation. Direct teleportation—out of the question. She was not going to deposit Fury in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. At least not tonight. Multiple jumps, though, were feasible.
Fury had the look of someone whose house was on fire. Daisy sighed inwardly and agreed.
She gave Tangbao a pat on the head—play, then go home—and took hold of Fury's arm.
"Let's go."
First jump: New York to Chicago. She reset her bearings, recalculated the remaining distance, and jumped again. Then again.
On the third jump, they nearly ended up somewhere in Canada. She corrected quickly. By the fifth jump, they were standing outside Tony Stark's house in Malibu.
Daisy moved toward the front door. Fury—still pressing a hand to his lower back—stopped her with a gesture: go through.
Daisy's brow furrowed. Were they here to steal something?
She wasn't particularly squeamish about it. But Fury's expression said the matter was settled, so she teleported them both inside.
It was her first time in the house. The lights were off, but moonlight reflecting off the ocean poured through the glass walls and painted everything in silver. The whole place screamed luxury. There was something about the space that made you feel quieter the moment you stepped into it. The designer had clearly put serious thought into that effect. The distant sound of waves only added to it.
"Miss Daisy Johnson and her companion—you do not have authorization to be on these premises. Please vacate immediately." The electronic voice rang out, and warning lights began pulsing along the walls.
Nick Fury—officially a ghost in the official record, referred to by JARVIS only as "her companion"—settled calmly into the couch, produced a tablet from inside his coat, and gestured to Daisy: kill it.
Watching Fury make himself at home like he owned the place, completely unbothered, Daisy had no choice but to go to work.
Breaching an AI of this caliber from the outside would require thousands of coordinated hackers. From the inside, the math was different. She wasn't trying to steal data. She wasn't planting anything. She just needed it to stop paying attention.
Her fingers moved quickly. Within minutes she had a patch written and uploaded—not a shutdown, just a selective blindfold. JARVIS would continue functioning normally. It simply wouldn't register what was happening inside the house.
"So what exactly are we here for?" Between the five-jump transcontinental relay, running navigation calculations the whole way, and now patching a cutting-edge AI, Daisy felt like her brain was running on fumes.
Fury checked the wall clock. "Five minutes ago, Tony Stark stood in front of a room full of reporters and admitted he's Iron Man."
Daisy knew this moment well. It was, in a very real sense, the starting pistol for everything that came after. She asked, "And?"
"And I'm here to show him the reality of the world he just stepped into. If that's all, you're free to go."
He wasn't even trying to hide the dismissal.
Daisy turned it over. She'd been bracing herself for something serious—the palladium poisoning had even crossed her mind—and instead it turned out Fury had dragged her across an entire continent in five teleportation jumps, urgent as a five-alarm fire, just to make a dramatic entrance.
Leave now? After all that?
She wasn't going anywhere.
"I'm wide open tonight, actually. Might as well stay and see how this goes." She selected a bottle from the wine rack—couldn't read the label—poured two glasses, and slid one toward Fury. "By the way—what happened with Obadiah?"
Fury waved off the glass. He didn't drink from unverified sources. "Obadiah sustained severe head trauma in the fight. Still under observation at the hospital."
Daisy felt a faint twinge of something. Her working relationship with Obadiah had been, in its way, functional. The old man was a pure businessman—everything negotiated on terms, no sentiment involved, no face-saving required. Very much in keeping with how things worked over here. Most successful people operated exactly that way.
Stark, by contrast, was an idealist. Ideas came to him at random, and he chased them. Unpredictable. Exhausting to work alongside—not because he was malicious, just because he had no consistent pattern. You never knew what was going to come out of him next.
She preferred dealing with businessmen. But the scoreboard had spoken. Obadiah was history. And whether she liked it or not, Tony Stark was the future she'd be working with.
They waited half an hour.
The door unlocked with a soft beep. Tony Stark walked in.
"Who's—" He went alert immediately, scanning the room. Then he registered the figure standing near the wine rack. "Miss Johnson? ...JARVIS, you there?"
Stark's ego didn't run from women, but he shifted into a guarded stance—wary, reassessing. He'd been on high alert since the press conference.
It was only then that Daisy noticed Fury in the shadows. He'd been sitting with his back to the door the entire time, and Stark's eyes had simply slid past him without registering.
"There's someone here who wanted to see you," Daisy said helpfully. "Someone I don't actually know."
She pointed. Stark followed her gesture—and finally saw the figure rising from the couch.
Fury stood slowly, unhurried, with the calm of a man who had all the time in the world.
"'I am Iron Man?'" he said. "That's a hell of a line." His voice was level, eyes steady. "You think you're the only superhero out there?"