Two weeks after Youngstown, Thorne finally stopped arguing in boardrooms and started moving hardware.
Reeve's telemetry—contaminated by a foreign Verdant imprint—kept broadcasting a stable uplink, and Kael Voss signed the authorization before anyone could talk themselves out of the word strike.
Day 16 Post-Transformation | Primordial Territory
Ethan Cross — Verdant Sovereign (Stabilized)
Territory Size: 23 sq. miles
Connected Trees: 14,200 (pre-strike)
LE Reserves: 12,450/15,000
The forest wasn't Ohio anymore.
It still sat on the same map. Same latitude. Same county lines if anyone cared. But the ground had been rewritten. Twenty-three square miles of green structure—walls made of living trunks, corridors of thorn and vine, soil packed so tight it fought boots.
Ethan didn't "stand" in the center.
He occupied it.
He was sixty feet of wood when he needed intimidation. Eight feet when he needed precision. Thirty when he needed to remember what it felt like to be a person with one spine and one set of eyes.
Most of the time he didn't pick a form at all. He let the network hold him like a thought.
Words had become optional.
He didn't think in sentences. He felt in flows.
Water pressure in a root. Sugar transfer through bark. Heat moving across leaf surface. Fungal signals pinging under the soil like a second nervous system.
He could tell when a deer stepped wrong. He could tell when a helicopter's rotor wash disturbed the canopy two miles out. He could tell when a satellite passed overhead because the shadow on his leaves felt colder than the air around it.
Thorne Corporation was still watching.
He could feel their attention the way he used to feel someone stare at the back of his neck.
He hadn't slept in days. Sleep didn't work the same when your body extended into fourteen thousand trees and the ground itself counted as skin.
He was awake.
Always.
A ripple moved through the canopy.
Not wind.
Something faster. Sharper. Wrong.
High above, sixteen objects punched into the atmosphere.
Ethan felt them before he saw them, because the network tasted the change in pressure. The tiny change in vibration that meant metal was falling from space.
Sixteen.
No explosion. No screaming rocket trail. Just mass and speed.
Kinetic rods.
The kind people built when they wanted nuclear-level force without nuclear fallout.
Thorne had done its homework.
His interface didn't open like it used to. It didn't need to. But Sylvara still existed in the margins of his perception like an old scar that talked.
[THREAT DETECTED: ORBITAL KINETIC STRIKE]
[Inbound objects: 16]
[ETA: 93 seconds]
↳ Sylvara: I would like to file a complaint with the universe.
Ethan's first human thought was small and stupid.
Ninety-three seconds.
That's not enough.
Then the Primordial moved through him—no panic, no debate—just response.
Ethan wasn't directing the forest.
He was the forest.
The ground ruptured.
Roots erupted in coordinated columns, not random growth. Soil and stone blasted upward as the network forced itself into shape.
A dome formed.
Three hundred feet high.
Layer one: living oak, thick trunks interlaced at angles that made ricochet geometry. Layer two: ironwood, dense, flexible, built to take impact. Layer three: mass—compressed root matter packed so tight it felt like sandbags and concrete had a child.
It wasn't pretty.
It was armor.
Ethan felt the construction like muscle strain. Not one body straining. Thousands.
The network didn't complain.
It just did the work.
The first rod hit at 0347 hours.
The sound came a beat later.
Impact first, then thunder, then the delayed scream of wood turning into splinters.
The dome's outer oak layer detonated.
Trunks vaporized. Leaves flash-boiled. The air turned into hot grit that sliced across bark like shrapnel.
Ethan's vision snapped white for a fraction of a second.
Not from light.
From pain.
His entire territory shuddered. Every connected tree flinched in sympathetic trauma. The mycorrhizal network spasmed under the ground like a nervous system taking a punch.
He heard a sound he hadn't heard since he was human.
His own breath.
A forced exhale.
"Fuck," he said out loud, and his voice sounded layered, thick, like it belonged to a room full of people.
The second rod hit.
Then the third.
Staggered.
Thorne was smart enough to avoid a single point of failure. They walked the strikes across the territory, trying to turn his domain into a crater field.
Each impact carved trenches fifty feet deep. Soil turned to glass. Roots burned from the inside out. Trees died fast—no drama, no slow wilting. Just instant collapse and then fire.
Fire was the part Ethan had expected.
What he didn't expect was how quickly the fire spread in a forest designed like a fortress. He'd built barriers, kill zones, chokepoints. But orbital strikes didn't care about chokepoints.
A bloom of flame raced through undergrowth. Smoke rose in a column thick enough to stain the dawn.
By the sixth impact, four square miles were burning.
By the tenth, the dome had collapsed in multiple places, punched through like a skull cracked by a hammer.
Ethan's mind tried to count casualties.
Three thousand trees.
Four thousand.
Numbers felt wrong. Too human. Too small.
But he still did it because a small piece of him still believed loss should be counted.
The eleventh rod hit.
The compressed root core held again, barely, distributing force across the network the way a body spreads pain. It saved him. It killed thousands of others.
Ethan's hands clenched. His fists were wood. The pressure was real.
He tasted ash.
He tasted burned sap.
He tasted his own territory dying and the taste wasn't metaphor.
The fifteenth rod hit.
The sixteenth came down like judgment.
For a second, Ethan thought the dome might fail completely. Thought the center would be cratered, his core ripped open.
Then the network did something he hadn't learned until lately.
It gave up parts of itself on purpose.
The root layer shifted. Sacrificed one section to save the rest. It wasn't a decision with emotion. It was a decision with math.
Impact.
Shockwave.
Silence.
Then heat.
Trees within a quarter-mile vaporized. The air flashed white-hot. The ground screamed as moisture turned to steam in one violent pulse.
Ethan felt it like a fist through his ribs, except his ribs were now thousands of trunks.
The dome broke.
But Ethan didn't.
When the dust settled enough for sight, Ethan pulled himself into his smallest functional form—eight feet tall, bark-skin darkened to charcoal, bioluminescent veins pulsing under the surface like embers that refused to die.
He stepped out of wreckage that had been a fortress seconds ago.
Ash fell like dirty snow.
Around him, the Primordial began to respond.
Seedlings erupted from scorched soil. Not slowly. Not naturally. They shot up in time-lapse speed, driven by a need older than human warfare. Nutrients pulled from dead wood. Water rerouted. Energy redirected.
Ethan lifted a hand toward a line of fire cutting across a trench.
The flames bent.
Not like a magician trick.
Like a direction change. Like heat obeyed the root network because the network gave it somewhere to go.
Ethan pulled the fire down into the ground.
It didn't extinguish so much as vanish into the soil, absorbed as raw thermal energy.
The sensation in his body was immediate—heat flooding through roots, a painful warmth, then a conversion into growth pressure.
He exhaled.
The smoke didn't clear, but the line of flame collapsed inward and died.
Within an hour, burn zones became firebreaks.
Within three hours, fresh growth had crawled over half the impact craters.
From orbit, Thorne's satellite feeds kept rolling.
Their thermal maps showed a biological system doing something that shouldn't be possible: metabolizing modern warfare.
Ethan looked up through a gap in the canopy.
He couldn't see the satellite.
He could feel it.
Watching.
And he could almost imagine the faces in an office somewhere, staring at footage and trying to pretend this wasn't happening.
He didn't smile.
He didn't have the human muscles for it anymore.
But he felt something that used to be satisfaction.
Cold. Flat. Efficient.
If they wanted a war of energy…
He would eat it.
THORNE CORPORATION HQ | EMERGENCY SESSION
Vivienne Ashcroft stood before the board and let the footage run.
Again.
Again.
Again.
A rod hitting forest.
Forest breaking.
Forest healing.
Director Kline leaned forward, voice tight. "Explain to me how we spent forty million dollars to give that thing a tan."
Vivienne didn't blink. "Kinetic penetration achieved partial results. We removed approximately twenty percent of target biomass."
"So we fed it," Director Yoon said. No question. Just accusation.
Vivienne clicked to the next slide: a root network diagram that made the target look less like a creature and more like infrastructure.
"The Primordial is a distributed intelligence," she said. "The Sovereign—Ethan Cross—is a central processing node. Killing the node won't kill the network."
Director Okonkwo rubbed his temple. "So what do you propose?"
Vivienne's mouth curved slightly. Not a smile. A solution.
"We attack the network's anchor points."
She highlighted a map. Seventeen red dots across North America.
"These are known Heartwood Trees," she said. "Primary hubs. Millennia old. If we eliminate them simultaneously, the network collapses."
Kline scoffed. "How do you eliminate a tree that's been alive since the Bronze Age?"
Vivienne switched slides.
A pathogen diagram.
"Blight-7," she said. "Engineered to target Primordial-connected flora only. We introduce it at the Heartwood sites. It spreads through the root network. Necrosis within seventy-two hours."
The room went quiet.
Director Yoon said it first. "You want to kill every Primordial-touched tree in North America."
Vivienne met his gaze. "I want to stop an extinction-level threat that grows."
The vote was ten to two.
Blight-7 deployment authorized.
PRIMORDIAL TERRITORY | ETHAN'S PERSPECTIVE
Ethan didn't sleep, but he drifted.
Sometimes his awareness spread so thin across the network that he barely remembered he had once been one body. Sometimes memories surfaced like debris in water.
Tonight it was his father. A campfire. A story about how forests communicate.
"They're older than us," his father had said. "Smarter in ways we don't understand."
Ethan had asked, "Would it be bad if they didn't need us anymore?"
His father had smiled like it hurt. "Depends on whether you think humanity deserves to survive."
The memory dissolved.
Ethan was back in smoke and ash and new growth.
He could feel satellites. Aircraft. Distant engines.
They were planning something.
The Primordial knew it too.
A pulse of anticipation moved through the network, not fear.
Eagerness.
Then he felt something else.
A familiar presence at the edge of his territory.
One human.
Alone.
Approaching the treeline.
Ethan shifted to his human-sized form and moved through the forest without walking. The trees made space. Roots guided him. The network delivered him to the perimeter like a thought becoming a body.
Mira Chen stood fifty feet from the treeline with a lead-lined case in her hands.
"I know you can hear me," she called. "I'm not armed. I'm here to talk."
Ethan stepped out of the shadows.
Mira flinched.
He looked less human than the last time she'd seen him. Bark texture across skin. Eyes glowing steady emerald. A faint rustle when he moved, like leaves brushing together under his flesh.
"Talk," Ethan said.
His voice came out layered again.
Mira swallowed, then set down the case and opened it.
Inside was a metal cylinder. Frost clung to the surface.
"Thorne is deploying a biological weapon," Mira said. "They're calling it Blight-7. It's designed to kill everything connected to the Primordial. I stole this sample."
Ethan didn't step closer.
He stared at the cylinder like it was a small object and a large problem.
"Why tell me," he asked, "instead of running."
Mira's mouth tightened. "Because I don't think you're a monster."
Ethan didn't respond.
Mira's voice cracked anyway. "Your mother asked me to try to reach you. She wanted me to tell you she's still waiting for you to come home."
For a second—just a second—something in Ethan's chest shifted.
A memory of Diane's face. Her hands. Her voice saying his name like it was safe.
Then the Primordial's presence rose inside him like a tide.
Cold. Vast. Patient.
It pushed the human feeling down and kept it there.
"Ethan Cross is gone," he said quietly.
Mira's shoulders dropped. "So that's it? You're letting it take you completely?"
"It already did."
Ethan turned away.
Then paused.
"The weapon won't work," he said, and he didn't know if it was true. The Primordial seemed confident. Confidence wasn't proof. "But I appreciate the warning."
He looked back at Mira once. Long enough for her to see there was still a person in there, somewhere, drowning.
"Leave now," he said. "The war is coming. And I can't promise I'll recognize you when it starts."
He stepped back into the trees.
The forest shifted.
The path closed behind him.
Mira stood in the smoke and silence, tears running down her face, and then she picked up the empty case and walked away.
Deep in the center of the territory, Ethan's consciousness sank fully into the First Tree's awareness.
This time, the human part didn't come back up.
The Sovereign was complete.
And somewhere far away, a boardroom had just voted to poison an entire continent.