The north entrance to the Hydra bunker was a slab of reinforced steel set into the mountainside, camouflaged with synthetic rock facing and flanked by two guard posts. The guards had approximately four seconds of warning.
Harley Quinn provided those four seconds personally.
She came around the tree line at a full sprint, mace already swinging, and hit the first portable barrier like it owed her money. The aluminum frame crumpled. The guard behind it stumbled backward into his partner.
"Evening, boys!" Harley shouted, planting her feet in the wreckage. "Delivery for one Zapdos, care of the Hydra Bunk— actually, no. Scratch that. This is a pickup."
The guards reached for their weapons. They didn't get there.
Kamala Khan hit the left post with an embiggened fist that folded the guardrail inward like tinfoil. The guard went down. Doreen came in from the low side, Emolga already sparking, and the second guard's rifle shorted out in his hands before he could raise it. He stared at the smoking weapon. Doreen patted him on the head as she passed.
"Should've gone into a different line of work," she said cheerfully.
Franklin brought up the rear, Ralts floating at his shoulder. His eyes swept the ridge above them. No snipers. No drones. Yet. He kept one hand raised, a faint shimmer of cosmic energy ready to become a barrier at the first sign of movement.
Harley was already at the blast door, examining it with the critical eye of someone who had broken into and out of a lot of buildings that didn't want her there.
"This is it?" she asked, rapping her knuckles against the steel. The sound was dull and final. "This is what three million dollars of evil buys you? My apartment in Gotham had better doors."
Ivy walked past all of them without a word. She went straight to the foundation wall where the bunker met the mountain, pressed her palm flat against the concrete, and closed her eyes.
The roots were there. Old ones, deep ones, threaded through the bedrock beneath the bunker's foundation like veins through muscle. She could feel them. Thirsty. Waiting.
She began to pull.
The first crack in the foundation appeared three seconds later. A hairline fracture that spread outward from Ivy's palm in a branching web. The concrete groaned. Rebar inside it twisted.
That was when the second blast door, the inner one, opened.
Crossbones walked out.
He didn't hurry. He didn't posture. He just walked, one heavy boot in front of the other, his tactical armor catching the last of the daylight. His eyes swept the scene. Harley. Kamala. Doreen. Franklin. The downed guards. The cracked foundation.
He ignored all of it.
His gaze locked onto Franklin.
"Kid," he said. His voice was low, flat, and completely without humor. "Move."
Franklin didn't move.
Crossbones took another step forward. Then another. He walked past Harley like she wasn't there. Past Kamala. His focus was singular, the way a battering ram has a singular focus.
Kamala stepped into his path. Her fist enlarged to the size of a beach ball.
"I wouldn't," she said.
Crossbones didn't slow down. He didn't dodge. He simply angled his shoulder and let her swing connect with the reinforced plating of her own extended arm as she pulled the punch at the last second, unwilling to put her full strength into a man who wasn't a monster.
That half-second of hesitation was enough. He was past her.
Harley swung her mace at his back. Crossbones caught the shaft one-handed without looking. The impact didn't move him. He redirected the momentum, and Harley's own swing carried her sideways into a support beam. She hit it hard enough to crack the wood and bounced off, swearing creatively.
"I hate the ones who don't even flinch," she spat, picking herself up.
Crossbones was ten feet from Franklin now. Eight. Six.
Franklin raised both hands.
The cosmic barrier snapped into existence between them. It was translucent, shimmering with prismatic light, and it covered the full width of the entrance.
Crossbones hit it.
The impact was enormous. The ground shook. The barrier rippled like the surface of a pond struck by a stone. Franklin's boots slid back six inches in the dirt.
The barrier held.
Crossbones stepped back. He looked at his fist. Then at the barrier. Then at Franklin.
He hit it again. Harder.
The barrier rippled again. Franklin gritted his teeth. His arms trembled. Ralts pressed against his leg, psychic energy flowing into him, reinforcing the wall.
The barrier held.
Crossbones stopped. He stood there, breathing steady, and looked at Franklin through the shimmer. Not with anger. With reassessment.
"The wall's real," he said. It wasn't a compliment. It was a tactical observation.
"Yeah," Franklin said. His voice was tighter than he wanted it to be. "It is."
Crossbones circled left. Franklin adjusted, widening the barrier. Crossbones circled right. Franklin followed. There was no gap. No angle. The barrier moved with Crossbones the way a shadow moves with its source.
Then the floor shifted.
Crossbones felt it before he saw it. A buckling beneath his left foot, a sudden give in the concrete that shouldn't have been there. He looked down. Roots. Massive ones, thick as his thigh, punching up through the foundation in a spreading network. The concrete was fracturing in a web pattern that radiated outward from a point twenty feet behind the team.
Ivy stood at the center of it, both palms pressed to the earth, her eyes glowing faint green.
The floor beneath Crossbones' feet dropped three inches. Not a collapse. A warning.
He pulled back. Not fast. Not panicked. Deliberate. The way a man steps back from a ledge he didn't know was there.
The blast door behind him slammed shut. The hydraulic lock engaged with a sound like a gunshot.
Crossbones was inside. The team was outside.
He looked at the sealed door. Then at the cracked, root-choked foundation. Then at the barrier, still shimmering, still held by a teenager whose hands were shaking but whose will wasn't.
Crossbones said nothing. He turned and walked back into the bunker. The door sealed behind him.
For a moment, no one spoke.
Harley was the first to break the silence. She leaned against the cracked support beam and crossed her arms.
"Well," she said. "He's got trust issues with doors. Noted."
Franklin dropped the barrier. The shimmer faded. He exhaled hard, and his hands were visibly trembling now. He shoved them in his pockets.
Kamala looked at the sealed blast door. Then at the fractured foundation. Then at Ivy.
"Is there another way in?"
Ivy didn't answer right away. She kept her palm against the ground, feeling through the soil, through the rock, through the network of roots that spread beneath the bunker like a second nervous system. Old roots. Deep ones. The kind that had been growing since before the mountain had a name.
She found them. Threaded beneath the foundation, around the support columns, through gaps in the bedrock that no engineer had ever mapped.
She opened her eyes.
"Below," she said.
Franklin stepped up to the blast door's lock mechanism. He raised his hand and hit it with a focused cosmic beam. The lock housing glowed white, then red, then disintegrated. Molten metal dripped down the door's surface.
The door didn't move.
He tried again. Wider output. The surface scorched. Hairline cracks appeared in the outer plating. But the door itself was three feet of reinforced steel alloy designed to withstand a direct artillery strike.
Franklin pulled back. His nose was bleeding. He wiped it with the back of his hand and didn't mention it.
"It's not locked anymore," he said. "It's just too heavy."
Kamala stared at the door. Then at the ground beneath their feet. Then at Ivy.
Ivy placed her palm flat against the dirt. The roots below shifted. Responded.
"They're waiting," she said.
Harley looked down at the ground. "The roots?"
Ivy didn't answer. She didn't need to.
The team stood on one side of a door that wouldn't open. Crossbones and Hydra were on the other. Zapdos was somewhere between them, caged and drained and running out of time.
But the mountain had roots. And roots went everywhere.
Franklin looked at Ivy. "How far down?"
"Far enough," she said.
Harley cracked her neck. "Well. I've always wanted to storm a bunker from the basement. Keeps things interesting."
Kamala enlarged one fist experimentally. The ground beneath her feet hummed.
Doreen looked at Tippy-Toe. Tippy-Toe chittered.
"Basement it is," Doreen said.
Ivy pressed both hands to the earth. The roots below began to move.
***
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