While Kiera and Joric were absorbing the Quartermaster's masterclass in espionage, Ryu was dealing with a different kind of inheritance.
He sat in the med-bay, his body now fully healed, but his mind a turbulent sea of grief and guilt.
He could still feel the phantom echo of Jax's final, sacrificial act.
But there was something else. A new, strange presence in the back of his mind.
It was a fragment of Jax himself, a piece of his digital consciousness that had, in their final moment of empathic connection, imprinted itself onto Ryu's own ChainForce.
It was not a voice, but a stream of pure, raw data. When Ryu closed his eyes and focused, the world no longer just felt like a symphony of energies; it looked like a torrent of information.
He could 'see' the bunker's security network, not as a flow of power, but as a river of code.
He could 'read' the encrypted data packets flowing through the air.
Jax, in his death, had given him a key to a new language, a new way of perceiving the world.
He had inherited the ghost's senses.
He told Joric about it. The old medic, his cynicism now permanently replaced by a state of near-constant scientific astonishment, ran a series of deep neurological scans.
"Incredible," Joric muttered, staring at the results.
"The ChainForce isn't just a power source; it's a processing engine. Your empathic connection with Jax, combined with the massive energy surge, has... rewritten a part of your neural architecture. You're not just sensing energy anymore, boy. You're parsing it. You're a biological quantum computer." The implications were staggering.
Ryu's ability was no longer just a passive warning system.
He could potentially become the most powerful cryptographer and intelligence agent in the world.
He could see the Vanguard's digital ghosts, pluck their secrets from the air, and read their intentions before they even acted.
It was a power that made his kinetic abilities seem like a child's toy.
But it was also a terrifying burden.
To open himself up to this new sense was to invite the entire city's digital noise into his mind, a cacophony of data that threatened to overwhelm him.
His first test came when Jin, their man inside the Azure Dragon clan, sent his next message.
Previously, Joric had to spend hours sifting through public data streams to find Jin's hidden message.
This time, Ryu simply sat down, closed his eyes, and listened.
He felt the vast, chaotic ocean of the city's data, but now, thanks to Jax's ghost, he could see the currents.
He looked for Jin's 'flavor,' the unique digital signature he now recognized.
He found it in less than a minute, a tiny, elegant string of code hidden in the metadata of a weather balloon's atmospheric report.
He didn't just find the message.
He *read* the encryption. He saw the layers of the cipher not as a puzzle, but as a beautiful, intricate piece of machinery.
He understood its mechanics, its logic.
He didn't have to break the code.
He just had to open the door. The message from Jin was dire.
Elder Valerius, furious at the public humiliation of his son and the loss of his Vanguard assets, was now using his position on the council to push the Azure Dragons towards a more aggressive, preemptive posture.
He was arguing that the destruction of the Correction Center was an act of terrorism by a rival clan, and that Kiera, his son's disgraced rival, was a traitor who had colluded with them.
He was twisting their victory into a pretext for war. The game board had shifted once again.