The air in the safehouse was thick with unspoken tension.
Kiera was a ghost, either out on her fruitless hunts or silently brooding in her room.
The training had stopped.
Ryu was left alone with his thoughts and the low, constant hum of the ChainForce inside him.
It was Joric who finally broke the silence.
He found Ryu in the training room, staring at the wall.
"She's a warrior," the old medic said, his voice raspy. "She's been trained to face enemies she can see, to counter attacks she can predict.
The Vanguard is a different kind of enemy. They don't fight with swords; they fight with whispers. And right now, they are screaming in her ear."
Joric pulled up a chair, his joints cracking in protest.
"Before I became a cynical old patch-up medic, I was an intelligence analyst for the Azure Dragons. My specialty was counter-espionage. I studied the Vanguard."
Ryu looked at him, surprised. "I thought they were a secret."
"They are a 'secret' the way a shark is a 'secret' to a school of fish," Joric corrected. "You don't see it, but you see the bodies. You see the chaos. The clans know *something* is moving in the shadows, but they are too proud, too consumed by their own rivalries, to admit a threat they can't meet on the battlefield. So they pretend it doesn't exist."
Joric began to teach Ryu a different kind of lesson. It wasn't about stances or breathing. It was about information.
He showed Ryu how the Vanguard operated.
They didn't use brute force. They used leverage.
They would find a disgruntled dock foreman and offer him a cut of their profits to control the flow of goods.
They would find a security officer with a gambling debt and pay it off in exchange for looking the other way.
They would find a grieving warrior and offer her the one thing she craved: a name.
"Their greatest weapon is not power; it's perception," Joric explained, his eyes sharp and focused behind his thick lenses.
"They make you see what they want you to see. They create chaos in one sector to draw the clans' attention, while they are quietly taking control of another.
The message they sent you? It wasn't just a threat. It was a calculated move. They knew it would drive a wedge between you and Kiera.
They are testing her, seeing how she reacts to the pressure. They are testing *you*, seeing if you'll break and run."
Ryu felt a chill run down his spine.
He had been so focused on the physical threat of Silas and his thugs that he hadn't seen the larger, more insidious game being played.
He wasn't just a target; he was a game piece.
"So what do we do?" Ryu asked.
"We do what they don't expect," Joric said, a faint, cunning smile on his lips.
"They expect Kiera to be consumed by her anger. They expect you to be paralyzed by your fear. They expect you to turn on each other.
So... we don't. Kiera needs to be reminded that she is a warrior, not an assassin.
And you... you need to stop being a victim. You need to become as much of a ghost as they are."