The problem was not one of force, but of access.
In the Sanctuary's tactical chamber, a holographic model of General Adler's Berlin bunker glowed with a malevolent red light. Jack Wilson, pacing before it, delivered the grim diagnosis.
"The bunker is a fortress, buried a quarter-mile beneath the city," he stated, his voice a low, frustrated growl. "Its upper layers are shielded by a kinetic dispersal field designed to repel an orbital strike. We can't drill. We can't bomb. We can't go through the front door. The only way in... is from below."
All eyes in the chamber turned to the silent, watching figure of Diego Rodrigues.
He returned to the Amazon not as a commander, but as a supplicant. He stood once more in the heart of the Nature's Guardian Zone, before the Heart-Tree, the colossal, ancient being that was the central nervous system of the entire rainforest. Queen Xhosa and the LAAU shamans stood with him, a silent, supportive council.
"The metal men have built their nest deep in the Earth's flesh," Diego whispered, placing his palm flat against the Heart-Tree's ancient, gnarled bark. "We cannot break it. But you... you are the bones of the world. I ask for your strength."
He closed his eyes and plunged his consciousness into the tree. It was not a trance; it was a homecoming. His mind flowed out, a single drop of water rejoining a vast, green ocean. He was no longer Diego; he was a part of the great, planetary web of life.
His perception expanded beyond the Amazon, beyond the continent. He felt the world not as land and sea, but as a single, living organism. He felt the "life-lines," the great, subterranean rivers of energy that flowed between the continents. He felt the "geo-veins," the deep, slow pulse of the tectonic plates. He saw the world as Sakura saw it, not as a tapestry of space, but as a body of life. And in the heart of Europe, he felt the same cold, dead knot she had described—a place of sickness, a stone of dead magic in the planet's heart.
He was a part of the whole. But to wield its power, he needed permission. He pushed his consciousness deeper, past the network of trees and roots, and spoke to the source. He spoke to the raw, primordial, and slumbering consciousness of the Amazon itself. The Rainforest Guardian Spirit.
He did not offer a trade. He offered a pact. A symbiosis.
I am your son, he projected, a thought of pure, unfiltered sincerity. And your children are being threatened by a poison they cannot fight. I do not ask for a weapon. I ask to be your weapon. Give me your voice, and I will be your roar. Give me your strength, and I will be your fist.
For a long, silent moment, there was nothing. Then, he felt a response. Not a voice, but an acceptance. A feeling of an ancient, immeasurable power, a power that had slumbered since the dawn of time, uncoiling and flowing into him. It was the raw, untamed strength of the Earth itself, and it was answering his call.
Diego's eyes snapped open. He was back, standing at the foot of the Heart-Tree, but he was profoundly changed. His eyes glowed with a faint, emerald light.
He looked not at the shamans or the Queen, but at a barren, rocky mesa a mile away, a place devoid of all but the hardiest scrub. He raised his hand.
He did not shout. He did not chant. He simply... commanded.
The ground around the mesa began to tremble. The rock cracked, groaned, and then exploded upwards. It was not a vine or a sapling that burst forth. It was a root. A colossal, gnarled, and impossibly ancient root, thick as a train car and hard as iron, that erupted from the earth, coiling around the mesa and crushing it into a shower of dust and gravel. It was a power that was not born of the local jungle; it was a power drawn from the deep, sleeping heart of the planet itself.
He had his answer. He could not drill through Adler's fortress. He did not need to. He would simply command the bones of the Earth to rise up from below and tear it apart from its foundations. He had reached his A-Class.