Nothing slowed the blood. Daisy watched, helpless, as it sank into the hammer and the two melded together without the faintest hesitation.
This hammer had been a dead, lifeless thing before, ignoring everyone who came near—and now it was suddenly bursting with life.
There wasn't much Daisy could say about its disregard for the rules. The thing was flat-out cheating, and it wasn't as though she could haul it before some Asgardian Hammer Committee and file a complaint: charge it with skipping procedure, with pulling stunts even after its host had died. Getting snubbed by Mjolnir she could swallow—at least that was a righteous hammer. But now even some winter goddess's relic was toying with her, and that she would not stand for.
This time she skipped the fire bolt. She gathered her chi through every inch of her body, and the Phoenix afterimage gave a soft cry of its own. To the Phoenix, a "Skadi" was nothing but an ant.
Her palm blazed with searing flame, five fingers locking into a fist. The distance between them was almost nothing, and the punch came down as though it carried the backwash of a world ending, slamming hard into the Hammer of Skadi.
Whatever this piece of junk wanted with the blood, she meant to shatter the hammer and the blood both.
The Iron Fist alone couldn't have done it—but fused with the Phoenix's power, it absolutely could.
The Hammer of Skadi sensed the danger to itself and detonated every last reserve at once. By the rules it had been built to, it needed a wielder before it could act, but it could no longer afford to fret over wasted energy. The sky-wide blizzard, bridged through that small pool of blood and the dead woman, forged a link.
Somewhere beyond Daisy's sight, a translucent phantom was wrenched bodily out of the woman's corpse.
Daisy's burning fist landed right on cue, and the hammer split off a huge share of its power to brace against it.
A sharp crack—and even after the Hammer of Skadi loosed nearly half its energy, its shield still gave way beneath her blow. The fire fist left a clean print stamped into the hammerhead, and the shockwave drove two cracks splintering out from it.
A full-force strike like that wasn't enough to drop Daisy straight into the spent, hollow slump Danny Rand fell into after an all-out punch, but it still demanded a moment to recover. In the heartbeat she spent steadying her breath, the Hammer of Skadi gathered up its host and shot off into the distance like a loosed arrow.
Daisy launched after it at once, but the hammer was going all out now, blasting up to somewhere between Mach 4 and Mach 5. Like a meteor it tore across the sky and vanished at the horizon.
"Damn it!" she cursed, snatching up the woman's corpse and turning it over. Not a breath in her—stone dead, no question. So how had that piece of junk flown off on its own?
"Her soul was carried away. You Midgard women truly know nothing." Loki wore an unreadable expression. Daisy's frustration delighted him—the petty kind of delight, the sort that cost the other person without doing him a lick of good.
Daisy cut him a sidelong glare. Loki smiled back.
Soul, was it. She certainly couldn't see any such thing; it sat well outside the bounds of physics. She got to her feet, thoroughly put out, and after a moment's thought decided to keep the corpse anyway—hauling it back would at least count as something to show for the day.
Seeing how pleased he looked, she promptly threw cold water on his good mood. "Your people back there called you Loki. That'd be your name, then? Do you have any idea what just flew off?"
Loki was no uncultured oaf like Thor; he'd read nearly every book in Asgard's libraries, and a moment's recollection was enough to name the Hammer of Skadi. He simply hadn't grasped how dire the matter was yet—he assumed Daisy was fishing for something.
"Midgard woman," Loki said, preening, "if you ask sincerely for instruction, then as God-King I shall grant you knowledge—"
Daisy waved him off with a snort. "God-King? Fine, let's say you are. All I know is that, by human record, that hammer is meant to wake the Midgard Serpent, Jormungand. And the moment the serpent rises, the first thing it does is take its revenge on Asgard—on you, the sitting God-King."
She fixed him with a you're-a-dead-man look.
Outwardly Loki kept his composure, but inside a tidal surge had broken loose. Earth's legends and Asgard's flowed from a single source; he knew of the Midgard Serpent—knew more of it, in fact, than Daisy did.
If the Midgard Serpent revived, the current God-King would be in very, very grave danger.
Someone of righteous bent might have started making excuses—maybe there's been a misunderstanding, maybe it isn't really so bad. Loki did no such thing. Schemer that he was, his mind leapt at once to the worst and most likely outcome of all: Odin had set him up.
First Odin had banished his eldest son, then sunk into slumber, dumping the whole mess on the ambitious Loki.
Give up the throne, run somewhere else, and save his own skin—the thought lasted barely an instant in Loki's mind before he cast it aside. However much wickedness he'd done, Loki still took pride in being an Asgardian. By that measure, at least, Odin's parenting had been a real success.
Looking at Gungnir in his hand, picturing himself carrying this sacred spear—one that wouldn't so much as heed him—into battle against the Midgard Serpent, his teeth ached. He had never been a fighter, and no one knew that better than he did.
"Where's the Midgard Serpent sealed? Do you know?" Daisy got in a couple more jabs, then circled back to the real question. A busted hammer—just smash it, and surely there'd be no reviving any serpent.
Loki let her down, unfortunately. The man in the goat-horned helm thought long and hard and still couldn't dredge up where the seal lay. Which made sense—Odin would never have set such a thing down in a book. It would be locked away in his own private records.
Daisy reached out and clenched her empty hand, and Mjolnir was dragged grudgingly back into her grip once more.
"Where's the hammer's owner? You can at least tell me that, surely."
The thought of Thor's present state gave Loki another spike of pain behind his teeth. If only Thor were out front holding the line right now, he'd have it easier. He didn't know where the Midgard Serpent was sealed—but Asgard's prophecy held that Thor, God of Thunder, would perish together with the Midgard Serpent. That much Loki knew.
The trouble was Thor's condition just now...
Daisy felt a flicker of surprise herself. From the look on Loki's face—Thor wasn't dead, was he?
Lady Sif and the Warriors Three had run a full lap across the ice by now, pounding along like distance runners in training. Their constitutions were genuinely fearsome; not one of them was even winded. Sif, with one whole thigh bared to the cold, didn't seem to feel it in the slightest. Hearing Daisy ask after Thor, they all turned their eyes to Loki as well.
"He's in New York." With that, Loki tapped Gungnir lightly. The spear could ferry him straight back to Asgard with no need of the Bifrost, and he had a serpent to read up on.
New York? Where was New York? The four warriors traded blank looks, and finally turned, in unison, to Daisy—the "local."
"Those outfits of yours are going to baffle ordinary people. Do any of you have a way to change your clothes?" Daisy looked at their armor and their axes and got a headache just imagining it. March these four back into New York and the public would assume a movie was being filmed.
She remembered Loki had a one-touch wardrobe change, snapping into a tailored suit in a blink. No telling whether this lot could manage the same trick.