The wound in the Earth bled poison.
Diego stood at the edge of his home, the Nature's Guardian Zone, and looked out at the jungle. The air, which should have been sweet with the scent of damp earth and blooming orchids, was tainted with the acrid, metallic tang of industrial runoff. A stream that had once run crystal clear now flowed with a sickly, rainbow sheen on its surface.
The source was a kilometer away: a new mining operation, sanctioned by the LAAU high command, chewing at the edges of the protected lands. They were not as brutal as the Alliance, their drills less invasive, their presence smaller. But a slow poison is still poison. They were harvesting stellar nucleus crystals, the "strategic resource," and the runoff, the "acceptable environmental cost," was bleeding into the fragile ecosystem.
He had pleaded with the LAAU council. He had argued, his voice raw with a desperate passion, that they were becoming the very thing they had fought against. They had listened with patient, condescending smiles, spoken of "difficult choices" and "the greater good," and then politely, firmly, dismissed him.
He had lost the political battle. So he chose a different battlefield.
He walked into the jungle, his people, his own tribe, following him in a silent, grim procession. They were no longer soldiers of the Union; they were children of the forest, and their mother was crying.
Diego knelt, placing his palm not on a tree, but on the poisoned earth itself. He closed his eyes and listened, not to the screams of the dying saplings or the pained cries of the animals, but to the deep, slow, and ancient anger of the jungle itself. It was a rage that had slumbered for millennia, a power that was not in the trees, but was the trees. And for the first time, he did not just listen to it. He gave it a voice. His voice.
"Rise," he whispered.
The ground around the LAAU mining camp began to tremble. It was not an earthquake. It was the movement of a sleeping giant.
From the jungle floor, a hundred yards from the camp's perimeter, the earth erupted. Colossal, woody vines, thick as an anaconda and covered in thorns the size of daggers, burst from the soil. They were not the swift, lashing vines he had summoned before. These were slow, immensely powerful, and they moved with a grinding, inexorable purpose.
The LAAU soldiers, caught by surprise, opened fire. Their assault rifles, weapons that could tear through flesh and bone, were useless. The bullets splintered and ricocheted off the iron-hard bark of the vines.
The vines ignored the soldiers. They were not there to kill men. They were there to excise a sickness.
They descended upon the mining equipment. A massive sonic drill, the pride of the LAAU's new technological push, was engulfed by a dozen vines, the sound of its tortured, screeching metal a symphony to the enraged forest. A power generator was crushed, its housing imploding with a shower of sparks. The main shaft of the mine itself was sealed, plugged by a knot of ancient, impossibly strong roots that rose from the earth like the fist of a buried god.
In under five minutes, the entire operation was a ruin of twisted metal and shattered technology, engulfed by a new, thorny wall of living, angry jungle.
Diego stood on a ridge overlooking the destruction, his face a mask of cold, righteous fury. The LAAU soldiers were not attacking him. They were staring, their faces a mixture of terror and awe, at the boy who had just commanded the forest to declare war on its own army.
He had not attacked the Union. He had not attacked its people. He had performed a surgery, cutting a cancer from the heart of his home.
A message was sent across the LAAU high command, not in words, but in the silent, shocking images of their ruined mine. The message was clear. The Amazon was no longer a resource to be managed. It had a guardian. And its wrath was absolute.