The problem was not the strike; it was the arrival.
"We cannot fly in," Jack Wilson stated, his voice a flat line of pragmatic reality in the Sanctuary's tactical chamber. A holographic globe spun before the Council, a web of red lines indicating Adler's overlapping sensor grids over Europe. "His long-range defenses are designed to spot a Vulture ship in orbit. A conventional troop transport, no matter how stealthy, would be a blip on his screen an hour before we even hit German airspace."
"Then we go in quiet," Lin Feng said, his arms crossed. "Submarine insertion on the coast, overland march."
"It would take three weeks," Jack countered, shaking his head. "By then, Adler's 'Perfect Race' would be having their first national holiday. We need to be there yesterday. We need a miracle."
A quiet voice, soft as a falling leaf, cut through the tension. "You are thinking in terms of distance," Sakura Miyamoto said. She stood, a small, unassuming figure in the room full of warriors and geniuses. "We must think in terms of connection."
Jack turned to her, a skeptical frown on his face. "Sakura, I've seen your power. You can create short-range cuts, maybe even move yourself across a city. But a stable, two-way doorway, big enough for a strike team, halfway across the planet? The energy required would be... astronomical. It would kill you."
"I will not be the power source," Sakura replied, her expression calm and certain. "I will be the key. Adler's fortress will provide the fuel."
Two days later, Sakura stood alone in the crumbling remains of a Cold War-era listening post in a forgotten forest on the outskirts of Berlin. She had been brought here by a Coalition stealth jet, a ghost dropped from the sky. The air was cold, smelling of damp earth and pine. But beneath it, she could feel a different kind of cold. A wrongness.
She closed her eyes and reached out with her mind. The world of sight and sound vanished, replaced by the symphony of space-time. And here, beneath her feet, was a screaming, discordant note. The knot. It was a psychic and spatial pressure, a feeling of cosmic gears grinding against each other, a wound in reality that pulsed with a chaotic, furious, and immense power.
She needed to tap into that power. It was like trying to draw a glass of water from a tidal wave, like trying to light a candle from the heart of a raging star.
She raised her hands, not to cut, but to open. She did not fight the chaos. She invited it. A torrent of raw, untamed spatial energy, the psychic shrapnel from the wound Adler had built his fortress upon, flooded into her. It was an agony of disorientation, a feeling of being pulled in a thousand different directions at once.
But Sakura was the mistress of the void. She did not try to contain the energy. She gave it a shape. She took the screaming chaos and began to weave it, her will the loom, her knowledge the pattern. She was no longer just cutting the threads of reality; she was weaving them into a new, impossible shape.
Sanctuary, Giza
In the main hangar, Lin Feng and the assembled "Vanguard" strike team stood, waiting. Before them was an empty patch of reinforced concrete.
Suddenly, the air in the center of the hangar began to shimmer. It did not explode or tear. It folded. A perfect, shimmering circle of silver light, ten feet high, appeared from nothing. It was not a violent rift; it was a silent, beautiful, and utterly impossible window. Through the shimmering surface, they could see not the hangar wall, but a dark, pine-filled forest under a grey German sky.
Jack Wilson, standing at a console, stared at his energy readings, his mouth agape. "It's... it's perfectly stable. The event horizon has zero energy bleed. It's theoretically impossible."
A voice, calm and quiet, echoed from the portal, a whisper that was both in Berlin and in Giza at the same time. "The door is open, Commander."
Sakura had not just built a bridge. She had reconciled a paradox. She had taken the enemy's madness and turned it into their own miracle. She had reached her A-Class.
Lin Feng looked at the calm, waiting doorway, then at the faces of his team, their expressions a mixture of awe and grim resolve.
"The path to the serpent's head," he said, his voice a low, hard rumble, "is now clear."