Kiera's new strategy was a war fought in whispers.
While General Tarik was preparing his armies for a conventional conflict, Kiera, Joric, and Ryu began to build their own intelligence network, a web of ghosts and outcasts.
Their first recruit was unexpected.
Joric, using his old, discreet channels, reached out to other disgraced medics and back-alley doctors in the Outer Sector.
He put out the word: he was looking for information on 'unusual medical enhancements' and 'catastrophic bio-feedback incidents.' He was hunting for other victims of the Vanguard's failed experiments, other soldiers like Silas who had been burned out by corrupted ChainForce.
He got a hit.
A medic from a slum on the far side of the sector reported treating a man with horrific internal burns and traces of the same black-filament technology they had seen on Silas.
The man had been dumped in an alley, left for dead. He was a former Vanguard recruit who had been deemed a failure.
And he was talking.
Kiera and Ryu went to meet him. They found him in a squalid med-bay, his body trembling, his mind shattered.
But he could still speak. He told them of the Correction Center, of the agonizing process of forced enhancement.
And he gave them a name: Vex. He confirmed that Vex was the architect of the program, the charismatic devil who promised power and delivered only damnation.
But he also gave them something more.
He told them that Vex had a rival within the Vanguard.
Someone who believed Vex's obsession with Ryu and the raw ChainForce was reckless.
Someone who advocated for a slower, more subtle approach to galactic domination. This rival was a spymaster of equal, if not greater, skill than The Quartermaster.
His code name was 'Charon.'
This was the first crack they had seen in the Vanguard's monolithic facade.
A schism. A potential weakness they could exploit.
While Tarik saw a battlefield of soldiers, Kiera and Ryu began to see a battlefield of information, a war of whispers where a single rumor could be more powerful than a battalion.
They began to plant their own seeds of misinformation.
With Jin's help, they created ghost transmissions, anonymous data-leaks that hinted at a 'new power' rising in the Outer Sector, one that was not allied with any clan.
They fed rumors into the criminal underworld about a warrior who could command gravity, about a medic who could cure Vanguard corruption.
They were building a legend, a myth.
They were turning Ryu, the 'anomaly,' into a ghost, a folk hero of the powerless.
Their goal was twofold.
First, to draw out Vex, to make him act recklessly in his pursuit of Ryu. And second, to attract the attention of his rival, Charon.
They were throwing a stone into the hornet's nest, hoping the hornets would turn on each other.
It was a dangerous, subtle game, played in the shadows, a war of deception against the masters of deception.
They were no longer just reacting to the Vanguard's plans.
They were writing their own. As they sat in their gilded cage, surrounded by the might of the Sunstone Jaguars, they were forging a new kind of weapon: not of power, but of truth, lies, and the gray spaces in between.