The underground city was structured like a series of concentric rings — the center was her goal. An hour of walking, and Daisy had to admit that even the worst navigator couldn't get lost here: straight down the main corridor, all the way in.
She kept her guard up regardless. Every time the path curved and rejoined the straight line, she drew an arrow on the ground — her own breadcrumb trail, marking the direction forward.
In the empty passages, only her footsteps made sound. To keep herself from drifting into careless autopilot, she stopped every two hours to sit, drink water, and recover.
She'd stepped into the sentry box at noon. According to her mechanical watch, it was now eight in the evening. She felt like she'd done nothing but walk.
She sat on the ground and chewed a few bites of compressed rations before stuffing them back into her bag. Completely inedible. Too dry. She didn't want to waste water, either — she had to ration carefully. Quake or not, she wasn't Superman. She'd need her strength for the walk back out.
She closed her eyes briefly to ease the strain on her nerves, and discovered something: gripping the Obelisk restored a small measure of energy. Not much, but in a place like this, not much was everything.
She forced herself back to her feet and kept walking.
Her handgun stayed in her grip the whole time. She hadn't seen a single thing in these tunnels, but it was still her only guarantee of survival.
By midnight, her body still had reserves left — but her mind had hit its limit.
She called it. Chose a spot some distance away to handle the necessities, then settled against the wall with her pack braced against her chest, the Obelisk in her hands to stay warm. She closed her eyes and let herself sink.
This sunless, ancient place, sealed away for thousands of years, was objectively not a good place to sleep. No bed. No pillow. No blanket. She curled up against the stone wall like a castaway and drifted in and out.
Her half-sleeping mind went in strange directions. At one point she was back in her old life, watching a web novel she'd spent months on crash spectacularly on its first day. Then Thanos had her pinned to the ground, and blood was spreading across the stone floor beneath her.
She woke after roughly three hours of this patchwork sleep and discovered, with considerable embarrassment, that blood actually had been involved — just nothing to do with Thanos. Purely a matter of physical circumstances.
She spent a few awkward minutes sorting herself out using the previous Daisy's residual memory, then gave up on sleep and pressed on toward the city center.
"Finally."
Daisy looked absolutely wrecked. Forget sixty out of a hundred — if it weren't for the long hair, you might struggle to identify her on sight. Three days of stumbling through underground passages had left their mark. But she was here. The heart of the city.
Six enormous stone doors stood in a ring, evenly spaced roughly 6 feet (about 2 meters) apart, forming the walls of an inner chamber. At the center of the space, a stone dais approximately 3 feet (1 meter) tall stood directly beneath a narrow shaft of light — filtered through some unknown series of reflections deep in the architecture above, it fell precisely onto the platform's surface.
She rolled the stiffness out of her jaw and made a full survey of the space.
From what she remembered, the moment the ritual began, the six doors would close and seal the chamber. The Obelisk would shed its metal casing and reveal the Terrigen Crystal inside, which would then release a mist that filled the sealed room.
Her concern: once the transformation was complete, would the doors open again? Or would they lock forever?
She studied them for a long time. No mechanical linkages. No power supply. No visible explanation for how stone doors this size could move on their own.
Do it anyway. She'd made the decision the moment she got here. If she came out of this with her powers, she could blast her way out if she had to. The ones who should worry were the Inhumans who emerged with useless abilities. Quake didn't have that problem.
She poured a little water into her palm and pressed it against her face — a token attempt at looking like a human being.
She placed the Obelisk at the center of the dais, stepped back two paces, and waited.
A low rumble moved through the stone. All six doors began a slow, deliberate shift along their predetermined tracks. Three minutes later, they had merged into a seamless seal. The chamber shrank to half its former size. Airtight.
The Obelisk caught the beam of light from above and began to spin — slowly at first, then in sync with the rotating dais.
Sharp clicks. The metal casing split apart and fell away in segments, revealing the crystal within — pale blue, almost alive-looking. It didn't stay a single crystal for long. Branches erupted from every facet, multiplying outward until a full cluster filled the platform where there had been one stone seconds before.
Daisy stared, knuckles white, nostrils flaring.
In the original timeline, another Inhuman had shared half the crystal's energy. Then someone well-meaning had shattered the crystal before the process finished. The result was a Quake who never reached her actual ceiling.
Not this time.
She watched the crystal cluster stabilize, the dais slow and stop, the room settle into silence. Nothing happened.
Is that it?
She stepped forward.
The room changed.
The chamber was dim, and she couldn't make it out clearly at first — but the crystal seemed to exhale from the inside, a jet of gas bursting outward. In the sealed space, it spread fast. A sharp, faintly acidic smell reached her.
The air quality was terrible. She was almost certain the PM2.5 count was off the charts, and she had a brief, absurd thought about what any of this was doing to her lungs.
Then her body started going numb. She looked down.
From her fingertips to her wrists — petrification. Grey-black stone crept up her skin.
Anyone who didn't know what this was would have had a complete breakdown.
Daisy wasn't doing much better. Her body stiffened rapidly, the dark mineral tide climbing faster than she'd expected.
Calm. This is the process. This is how it's supposed to go. She kept chanting it internally, even as her thoughts went blank and the stone covered the last of her and her connection to the outside world went silent.
She was a statue.
The ritual didn't stop. Crystal mist continued to pour into the sealed chamber. With nowhere to go, the concentration rose — and most of it found its way into Daisy's stone form, absorbed through whatever mechanism made this ancient process work.
When the crystal finally exhausted itself, it dissolved into the air with no ceremony, no trace. The chamber settled into absolute stillness.
Thud. Thud.
Some unknown amount of time later, a sound emerged from the statue. Barely audible. A heartbeat, growing stronger with each pulse.
Crack.
Crack.
The statue began to break apart from the inside. The first fractures appeared at the fingertips — and where the stone fell away, the skin beneath was clean. Luminous, almost. Any smudges of grime from the journey in had been scrubbed away entirely. Her hands looked like they'd never been used.
The cracks spread — palm, forearm, shoulder, face.
Daisy felt it: the world had changed in her perception, though she couldn't yet identify where the change was. Inside her body, something new occupied space that had been empty before. But it was all bottled behind a thick shell of stone that pressed against it, muffled it, held it in.
"HAH!"
She let out a sharp cry, and something in every cell of her body answered. Power surged up from somewhere foundational — like a dam breaking all at once, the force of it flooding outward with nothing to resist it. The stone shell detonated from the inside.
The chamber rang with the sound.
And Daisy Johnson stood in the wreckage of her own cocoon, breathing hard, every nerve ending alive with something that hadn't existed in her yesterday.
She had her powers.