The Quinjet was fast—Natasha's piloting was nothing short of flawless, smooth and precise even at speed.
They'd flown from Washington to New York to pick up Coulson, then turned right back around. By the time Daisy had herself fully in peak condition, they were already approaching the Pentagon's restricted airspace.
Technically part of Virginia, Arlington County—where the Pentagon sits—hugs the edge of Washington D.C., separated only by the Potomac River. The two were practically on top of each other, which made the situation all the more critical: the Hulk was charging northeast from the southwest, and if he reached D.C., it wouldn't just be the iconic landmarks that had been "destroyed" a thousand times in movies—the S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters itself would be in the blast radius. The consequences would be catastrophic.
They had their ultimate anti-Hulk bioweapon, but dropping it straight from the air wasn't realistic. The fall alone would kill the little guys, and an even angrier Hulk was the last thing anyone needed. Real-world application required a bit more finesse than that.
"I'll draw him off," Daisy said. "Get everything set up and signal me when you're ready."
She popped the hatch and jumped.
Thousands of feet up, she sent a vibration wave rippling toward the Hulk from a distance.
He didn't even flinch. He just kept thundering forward, head down.
Seriously? Daisy felt a flicker of genuine irritation. You think that thick hide makes you untouchable?
She stopped holding back. Left, right, left—she hammered out over a dozen vibration blasts in rapid succession, targeting the Hulk relentlessly.
Her waves could crack bedrock. Even the Hulk's skin had limits. He finally stopped and looked up.
Where a normal person would need a moment to recognize a face, a creature running on pure instinct didn't—it just knew. The Hulk clocked Daisy instantly. He remembered her. He'd sprinted with Betty in his arms not long ago, and this was the woman who'd been flying overhead the whole time. The memory was vivid.
"ROOAAR!"
He crouched, coiled, and launched himself at her like a cannonball.
A wall of muscle hurtling toward her at several thousand meters of altitude. Daisy did not stick around to admire it. The moment she saw him leave the ground—bounding upward thousands of meters with terrifying ease, teeth bared, fury written across every inch of his face—she spun and bolted.
The Hulk didn't back down from a challenge. His original destination forgotten, he skidded to a halt right at the D.C. border and gave chase southward, following Daisy's lead.
Back in Washington, assorted officials breathed enormous sighs of relief and held hands and thanked God.
The people of Virginia had a rather different reaction.
He was already leaving—why did someone drag him BACK?!
Daisy flying overhead caused no damage. The Hulk was another story entirely.
Every time he crouched and launched, the force transferred into the earth like a localized earthquake. Cars, road surfaces, buildings—all of it caught under those massive feet. And those were the lucky ones.
In fairness, the Hulk wasn't a mindless killer. He was a creature running on overwhelming emotion—he preferred smashing things over killing people. He wasn't hunting civilians.
But he had no flight capability. Each leap—roughly 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) at a bound—still ended with him crashing back to earth. And whatever happened to be at the landing point had no say in the matter.
Five hundred kilograms of mass, multiplied by the acceleration of a freefall that long. Nothing soft survived it.
Cars were flattened to sheets of metal. Buildings were reduced to rubble. As for people—casualties were inevitable. This wasn't a movie. The kind of alien invasion scene from The Avengers where half of New York gets leveled and somehow not a single civilian dies? That wasn't real life.
Civilians were hit hard. Most were still asleep when the Hulk came down on them—whole sections of houses collapsing with people still inside, some dead on impact, some buried beneath the wreckage with just enough breath left to scream.
Daisy wasn't deliberately routing him through populated areas. The problem was geography. The eastern seaboard was the most densely settled part of the country—thirteen original colonies, centuries of development. North was D.C. Southwest was the Pentagon. East was the Atlantic. South was the only option she had.
She was running out of room to breathe herself. The Hulk's bounding looked almost comical from the outside, but the speed was anything but funny.
Two kilometers (1.2 miles) per leap. Daisy's flat-out flying speed approached Mach 1—roughly 750 miles per hour (1,200 km/h), around 1,110 feet per second (340 m/s). Factor in his approach angle, run-up, the delay between landing and relaunch... their effective pace was nearly matched.
The difference was stamina. Hers kept dropping. His didn't seem to have a ceiling.
He was already clearing nearly 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) per jump now, the limitless power in those legs still ramping up.
She had one advantage: she didn't have to fly in a straight line. Every time he closed the gap, she cut a sharp angle. Below, whatever civilians remained in the path—she couldn't think about that anymore.
The route behind them looked like a demolition site on an apocalyptic scale. Shattered masonry, billowing dust, debris scattered across miles of countryside.
"Hurry up back there!" she called over comms, fighting to keep her voice level as she dodged mid-flight. "I can't hold this pace much longer!"
Straight flight wasn't enough to stay ahead of him. He'd catch her eventually. It was a matter of when, not if.
Whoosh. A car sailed past her ear at high velocity, the displaced air hitting her like a wall. She twisted sideways in time to avoid it—the Hulk, unable to reach her, had started throwing whatever came to hand.
Good news: the military's Red Skull-era laser tank had finally reached the designated intercept point and was ready to engage.
The bad news was that the tank's propulsion system was vintage World War II. It had spent years gathering dust and broken down within a few miles of the Pentagon. It had taken an emergency military transport flight to get it into position at all.
Both sides wanted the same outcome, so nobody accidentally shot Daisy. That was a relief.
She looped around to the tank's flank. The area was pitch dark. She wasn't worried about revealing her identity—she just waited two seconds, puzzled.
Why isn't it firing?
Inside the tank, the crew chief was busy cursing the Pentagon's entire procurement bureaucracy. He hadn't noticed her.
This machine was older than the driver's grandfather. The firepower was real—no argument there. The targeting system, however, was another era entirely.
Modern tanks have passive sensors, ballistic computers, fire-control radar. World War II tanks had a palm-sized optical sight and a pair of human eyes. At this range, against a target that was airborne one second and grounded the next, bounding unpredictably across the landscape—Daisy watched the barrel creak upward with agonizing slowness, then whir back down in a panic.
What are they doing?