Emma Frost had known what every person in the room was thinking before they finished their first drink.
This was not a remarkable observation. It was simply a regular Tuesday, at least, for her.
The gala circuit was, in Emma's professional opinion, the most useful and most tedious environment she regularly inhabited. Useful because powerful people with expensive tastes and fragile egos tended to think loudest in rooms where they felt safe, and tedious because the thoughts themselves were rarely worth the effort of listening to.
A senator near the bar was thinking about his mistress. A hedge fund manager was thinking about a shady deal he had made with a foreign government. The New York mayor's chief of staff was thinking about how much he hated the mayor.
Emma lifted her champagne glass and surveyed the room with her trademark uninterested and cold expression.
At twenty-four, she was the youngest person in the room by a significant margin, a fact that nobody who looked at her ever seemed to understand.
When she first entered the high-class world, she found their initial assumptions regarding her to be annoying, but at this point, she welcomed it. Those who underestimated her tended to reveal their thoughts far more easily.
The Black King, Sebastian Shaw, was somewhere behind her. She didn't need or care to look to confirm it.
His presence registered in her mental awareness the way all familiar minds did, a known shape in her psychic landscape.
He was watching the door with an expectant yet unpleasant expression.
Emma looked into his mind.
'Fisk,' he thought, with the particular flavour of contempt he reserved for people he hadn't managed to chain under his command.
Emma was about to return her attention to the room when she felt it.
It was subtle at first. A pressure at the outermost edge of her awareness, the equivalent of a slight change in air pressure.
It wasn't a mind that she felt, not exactly. More like something large and dense moving at the periphery of her perception in a way that made the hairs on the back of her neck rise before she knew why.
She had felt powerful minds before. Not necessarily those with psychic abilities, but those who had honed their minds through decades of struggle.
This was not that.
This was something that hadn't even entered the room yet had already made the air feel heavy.
Around her, the gala continued entirely undisturbed. Politicians chattered, glasses clinked, people laughed, the usual.
Nobody else seemed to feel any discomfort.
Emma turned towards the entrance slowly as her airways seemed to be restricted.
The doors opened.
Fisk entered first, his large frame moving with the confidence of a man who felt he owned the world. Emma had seen into his mind plenty of times, yet this time was different.
He was excited.
Excited to see her.
Because of the person next to him.
The person beside him was someone she didn't recognise. A young man with blonde hair, green eyes, and a stiff expression.
Naturally, she reached out, the way she always did with anyone unfamiliar to her, to take a cursory glance at the man's thoughts.
---
I felt it.
As soon as we entered the room, I caught sight of Emma Frost.
But before I could make any kind of judgment regarding her, I noticed an invisible presence.
My Haki wasn't even active, yet I felt something reaching out to me.
So I retaliated.
Without hesitation, I launched the full force of my Conqueror's Haki towards Emma Frost.
---
Her eyes were blinded with a flash of black and crimson thunder.
The world around her seemed to distort, as if her vision had been bent and stretched out.
That was the only way she could describe the horrendous feeling.
One moment, she was reaching out with the casual effortlessness of someone performing a task so routine it required no conscious thought.
Next, she was assaulted by an endless barrage of pressure and what could only be described as black and crimson thunder.
The floor came up to meet her.
She didn't process the fall. One moment she was standing, the next moment her legs simply stopped functioning, and she was on the marble floor of the Hellfire Club's gala with her champagne glass shattered beside her.
A ripple moved through the room; conversations stopped, and heads turned.
Shaw was crouching beside her in an instant, his hand on her arm, his voice saying something that she couldn't process.
The constant awareness she maintained of everything around her at every waking moment of her life since she was a teenager had simply ceased to function.
Silence.
And in that silence, she saw it.
Black lightning, vast and unending. It moved in slow waves that filled her entire perception, both psychic and her regular vision. Crimson threaded through it in irregular arcs, burning bright before being swallowed back into the void of blackness, a cycle which seemed to repeat endlessly.
It was not chaos. From what little she could comprehend, she could tell it was controlled. Controlled to assault her and only her.
At the origin of it was a young man with green eyes, who stood perfectly still with a confused expression, as if he had no idea of what he was doing to her.