Armed with Joric's chilling lecture on Vanguard tactics, Ryu understood that his fear was a weapon being used against him.
The safehouse, once a sanctuary, had become a pressure cooker, and the tension with Kiera was exactly the outcome Vex and his puppeteers had orchestrated.
To stay hidden was to play their game. He had to change the board.
He found Kiera in the safehouse's small armory, sharpening her blade with a whetstone.
The rhythmic scrape of steel on stone was the only sound. She didn't look up as he entered. The rift between them was a palpable thing, a cold, dead space.
"They want me to be afraid of you," Ryu said, his voice quiet but steady. "They want you to see me as a bargaining chip. They want us to tear each other apart so they can sweep up the pieces."
Kiera's hands stilled. She finally looked at him, her eyes guarded. "What's your point?"
"My point," Ryu continued, taking a step closer, "is that we're doing exactly what they want. You're out there, hunting for ghosts in the dark, and I'm in here, waiting for the axe to fall. We're reacting. We're not fighting."
A flash of anger crossed her face. "You think you know how to fight them? You can't even win a match in a third-rate arena."
"No," Ryu admitted, "I can't. Not with your way. But I'm starting to understand *their* way. They use information. They use psychology. So let's use it against them. They've made you an offer. Let's pretend you're considering it."
Kiera stared at him, her expression a mixture of disbelief and a dawning, dangerous curiosity. "What are you suggesting?"
"I'm the anomaly," Ryu said, the word no longer feeling like an insult, but a designation. "I'm the prize. So let's move the prize. Let's make them come to us, but on our terms.
You can't find them in the shadows, so we need to make them step into the light. Using me as bait."
The audacity of the proposal hung in the air.
For a dust-rat, a boy who had spent his entire life running and hiding, to suggest making himself the target was insane.
It was a calculated risk, a gambit born of Joric's lessons and his own desperation to break out of the victim's role.
Kiera studied him for a long, silent moment.
She saw not the trembling boy she had rescued in the alley, but someone with a new, hard-won resolve in his eyes.
He wasn't cowering. He was thinking. He was, for the first time, trying to control his own destiny.
"This isn't a game, Ryu," she warned, her voice low. "If we do this and it goes wrong, they won't just kill you. They will take you apart, piece by piece, to see how you work."
"I'm already a dead man, according to Joric," Ryu countered. "My only choice is what kind of death I get. I'd rather die fighting their game than die in this room waiting for you to make a choice."
The raw honesty of his words hit her like a physical blow.
He was right.
He had given her back the choice that the Vanguard had tried to steal.
She could let her grief and anger drive her, or she could be the warrior her brother believed her to be.
She sheathed her blade with a decisive click.
"Joric," she called out, her voice ringing with newfound authority. "Get your diagnostic tools. We're going fishing. And we're going to need the right kind of lure."