Even after swearing her oath, Dagger—still entertaining quiet hopes of squeezing some money out of Daisy to improve her circumstances—had become the second person to loiter near the villa, following the blind lawyer Matt Murdock in that particular tradition.
Her luck, however, left something to be desired. She'd barely turned around before she collided head-on with Cloak, who came barreling out at full speed.
When Dagger met Cloak, fate pulled the pin on a grenade. One of light, one of darkness—a perfect collision of opposites, their energies violently incompatible. The impact didn't just crater Daisy's lawn; it blew a pitch-black hole through the air itself.
Through the opening: an abyss. A darkness so absolute it seemed to swallow light itself.
Daisy stared, eyes going wide. She didn't know much about magic, but she knew spatial coordinates—those two had just blown open a planar portal right on her front doorstep.
The gap was barely half a meter (about 20 inches) across. Nothing of the Boss-tier variety was squeezing through that. Still, she felt a flicker of unease.
The problem was location. Right on her front doorstep. What if a sufficiently bored villain stretched an arm through—just for entertainment—would anything of her villa survive?
She sighed, contemplating the uncertainty ahead. Her peripheral vision caught something off. Glancing left and right: Dagger and Cloak still wore masks of stunned panic; a curious elderly woman nearby was craning her neck, squinting to make out what had happened; and the maid stood with her guard up, hand already moving toward her weapon. But every single one of them had frozen solid.
The whole area had gone still—suspended, as if time itself had been paused. Or rather, as if Daisy alone had been pulled free of it.
The spatial dislocation told her this was either high-level magic or an extraordinary ability, well beyond anything ordinary.
Then, stepping out from the stillness—exhaustion carved into every line of her face—the Ancient One appeared in her yellow robes. She managed what she could of a smile. "Ah—Daisy? It's been a while."
A while? They'd met four months ago. Daisy understood, though—time meant something very different on the Ancient One's timeline. She dipped her head respectfully. "Master."
"Do you know where the portal that young man opened leads?" The Ancient One gestured toward the void.
Between higher-dimensional multiverses, other-dimensional universes, and everything in between, Daisy had no idea where a half-meter black hole deposited you. Whatever lay on the other side, nothing about it looked welcoming.
She shook her head. The Ancient One didn't press; she moved to the matter at hand.
"Could you keep an eye on these two for me? The young man especially—his ability is enormously useful, and enormously dangerous."
The Ancient One's tone was serious. Daisy asked, curious: "Why not take them out before it—"
She left the sentence unfinished. Both women understood exactly what she meant. The Ancient One shook her head gently. "Gateways to other dimensions will always surface in this world. Better they appear through this boy than manifest at random somewhere. He is genuinely good. Guided onto the right path, he will become a vital safeguard for humanity."
After that much explanation, the picture assembled itself in Daisy's mind. Dark Dimension. Cloak could open a conduit between the Dark Dimension and Earth. Dormammu waited on the other side. The Ancient One held the line on this end. The boy was a pivotal piece on the board.
"All right. I'll keep an eye on him."
With Daisy's agreement secured, the Ancient One sealed the planar conduit with a sweep of her hand, stepped away, and let time resume its normal pace.
Daisy looked at the two bewildered teenagers and called Coulson in. No point keeping this particular delivery herself—Coulson was already running a school. Sending him two more transfer students would take all of five minutes.
"Are they important?" Coulson studied Cloak and Dagger with mild curiosity. Neither struck him as having Peter Parker's kind of sharpness. The girl had a criminal record; the boy seemed a bit wooden.
"Trust me—this came directly from a highly respected senior figure." Without quite brandishing a tiger skin as a banner, every word Daisy said carried the unmistakable weight of this matters, handle it carefully.
He took one look at her expression and nodded.
As an educator with the right connections, arranging two transfer students was trivially simple. Coulson wasn't just a school principal—he was also a Level 8 Agent, and the paperwork practically sorted itself. Two kids, transferred to New York, into Lorna's class.
Daisy had been handed a massive headache by the Ancient One and immediately passed it along to Coulson. In her view, that was what delegation was for. She was not equipped to raise teenagers. Anyone who learned from her ran a higher-than-average likelihood of ending up on the wrong side of the law. Coulson—who modeled himself on Captain America—was far better suited for shaping impressionable young heroes. He'd run through the same material on endless repeat: the spirit of duty, Captain America's sacrifice, and so on down the playlist—until Dagger and Cloak inevitably became model superheroes. Daisy was confident the Ancient One would approve of the outcome.
November came and went—and the Fear Itself event came and went with it, quietly, without incident. Only a handful of people knew anything about it; ordinary citizens had no idea there was a terrifying truth hidden behind that day's action movies and cartoons.
Post-event analysis made it clear that S.H.I.E.L.D. had orchestrated the whole thing, but they'd covered their tracks impeccably. Daisy, who'd led the frontline, and Pierce, who flew to Washington for formal inquiries, both denied any involvement with absolute composure: S.H.I.E.L.D. had nothing to do with it.
The blatant stonewalling was perfectly political—exactly in keeping with the rules of the game. Without hard evidence linking S.H.I.E.L.D. to the events, those who knew knew, and those who didn't would never find out.
"Agent Johnson—the Council commends your methods and your results. We are in unanimous agreement that, at this critical juncture, S.H.I.E.L.D. requires talent of your caliber as its backbone, to help stabilize an increasingly severe global situation."
In London, England, Daisy attended a meeting of an exceptionally high order.
Four members of the World Security Council. Pierce, who held a Council seat of his own. The current leaders of five major nations. The President. And Nick Fury.
Agenda: the creation of a Deputy Director position within S.H.I.E.L.D.
The Council had grown deeply uneasy about Fury's near-unchecked authority—uneasy enough to lose sleep over it.
There had been quiet rumblings at the top about breaking S.H.I.E.L.D. apart entirely. Floating the Deputy Director proposal now was the logical move—a necessary compromise to ease tensions between the competing factions.
Pierce had been pressured into smoothing the path. Baldy himself had no interest in being labeled a traitor. The national leaders each weighed their own calculations and ultimately endorsed the proposal.
The Council members dutifully relayed their superiors' wishes and delivered a solemn recitation of the proposed position's significance and guiding principles.
The implication: this was an act consistent with constitutional law, international relations law, and a long catalog of additional statutes, ethical standards, and social norms.
From procedural form to underlying meaning, from international precedent to the gravity of the present moment, each national leader contributed their views and recommendations in turn.
The meeting ran for the better part of a day. Even Daisy's enhanced physique was feeling the strain by the end—but watching Fury and Pierce, both ordinary humans, still standing ramrod straight, she had no choice but to hold firm.
After every procedural step had been confirmed and rechecked, the resolution to create the Deputy Director position formally passed.