The new 'safehouse' was a state-of-the-art training facility hidden deep within the Sunstone Jaguar's military complex.
It was a gilded cage of a different sort.
The walls weren't locked, but they were surrounded by a small army of disciplined soldiers who treated them with a respectful, but watchful, distance.
They were guests, but also prisoners.
General Tarik was true to his word. He gave them access to everything.
Advanced combat simulators, a fully-equipped medical bay for Joric, and an intelligence suite that dwarfed their previous setup.
Kiera and Ryu's training entered a new phase.
They were no longer just sparring; they were running complex simulations, facing holographic recreations of Vanguard soldiers, and pushing their abilities to their absolute limits.
Kiera, despite her diminished power, excelled.
She was a strategist, and Tarik's resources allowed her to wargame a hundred different scenarios, to analyze the Vanguard's tactics, and to prepare for their next move.
She was a general without an army, and she poured all her energy into the one soldier she had: Ryu.
Ryu's growth was explosive.
His body, remade by the ChainForce, was stronger, faster, and more resilient than he could have ever imagined.
His control over his power was growing more precise by the day. In the simulators, he learned to move beyond simple pushes and vibrations.
He learned to create localized fields of intense heat, to generate concussive bursts of force, and to erect shimmering shields of energy that could stop a plasma bolt cold.
He was becoming the weapon Tarik wanted.
But the link between him and Kiera was a constant complication.
His growing power resonated through their bond. Kiera would often be hit with waves of vertigo when Ryu pushed himself too hard.
Conversely, her own frustration and grief over her clan's betrayal would sometimes bleed into Ryu's mind during delicate training exercises, causing his control to slip.
One evening, after a particularly grueling simulation, Ryu found Kiera staring at a holographic image of the Azure Dragon stronghold.
Her face was a mixture of anger and profound sadness.
"I can feel it," he said softly, stepping up beside her. "Your home. You miss it."
"I miss what I thought it was," she replied, not looking at him.
"I miss the honor, the loyalty, the idea that we were the guardians of order. It was all a lie." The bitterness in her voice was a sharp, painful thing that Ryu felt through their link.
"Not all of it," Ryu said.
"The part that made you save me... that wasn't a lie. The part that made you sacrifice your power for me... that was real. That's the part of the Azure Dragons that's worth fighting for."
Kiera finally looked at him.
In his eyes, she didn't see the broken dust-rat she had rescued.
She saw a warrior. A warrior she had created, forged in pain and sacrifice.
She had invested her power in him, and the return on that investment was standing before her, a testament to the fact that true strength was not about power, but about the choices you make.
"The training is not enough," she said, her voice regaining its familiar, steely resolve.
"Tarik wants a weapon. We will give him one. But we will do it our way. The Vanguard's greatest strength is their network of spies and traitors. It's time we started building our own."
Her plan was audacious.
They couldn't trust the high clans.
So they would look elsewhere. To the other forgotten souls of the city.
The disgraced medics like Joric. The masterless cryptographers like Jin.
The countless dust-rats who had been cast aside by the system. The Vanguard had built an army from the desperate.
Kiera would build a network of ghosts from the forgotten.