The leak was a firestorm. The story broke on a dozen independent news feeds simultaneously.
'Azure Dragon Elder Implicated in Outer Sector Corruption Scheme.' The initial reports were met with derision from the Core Sector's official media outlets, dismissed as the usual 'gutter journalism' of the lower city.
But the evidence was too clean, too precise.
The laundered credits, the shell corporations, the falsified land deeds—it was all there, an undeniable trail of corruption that led directly to Elder Valerius's personal accounts.
Within hours, the story was no longer a fringe rumor; it was a full-blown political scandal. The other clans, always eager for a chance to weaken a rival, seized upon the news.
The Sunstone Jaguars, secretly fed talking points by General Tarik, expressed their 'deep concern' over the 'erosion of honor' within the Azure Dragon leadership.
The Onyx Serpents, still reeling from their own internal purges, used the scandal as a public relations weapon, painting the Azure Dragons as a clan consumed by greed.
The political pressure was immense. Elder Valerius was caught completely off guard.
He had been preparing for a war of armies, not a war of public opinion. He held a press conference, his face a mask of practiced outrage, and denied everything.
He called the reports a "slanderous attack" orchestrated by his enemies, a desperate attempt to destabilize the Azure Dragon clan.
But the data was too specific. The denial, which was meant to project strength, came across as the hollow blustering of a guilty man.
His political capital, which he had been preparing to spend on a motion for war, was now being burned on damage control.
His carefully laid plans were unraveling. From their bunker, Kiera, Ryu, and Joric watched the chaos unfold with a grim satisfaction.
They had not exposed his treason, but they had crippled his authority.
They had used the Vanguard's own methods to turn a powerful leader into a political liability.
The accusations of Kiera being a traitor were now drowned out by the much larger, much more scandalous story of a corrupt elder.
She was no longer the focus of the news cycle; she was a footnote. But their victory was a double-edged sword.
In the Azure Dragon stronghold, Jin sent them a frantic, encrypted message. The scandal had thrown the clan into turmoil.
The council was in chaos. And in that chaos, Valerius was becoming more dangerous, more desperate.
He had initiated a full-scale internal security review, locking down the clan's data networks and launching a brutal witch hunt for the source of the leak.
Jin's position was becoming more precarious by the hour.
But the most important piece of intelligence was this: Charon had made his move. He had sent a message to Elder Valerius, a message that Jin had barely managed to intercept a fragment of.
The message was cold and simple: "You have become a liability. Your noise is attracting unwanted attention. Clean up your own house, or we will clean it for you." The Vanguard was cutting its losses.
Valerius, their powerful pawn, was now a loose end.
Charon had used our heroes' own attack on Valerius as the perfect justification to purge his rival's most powerful asset.
The game had reached a new, terrifying level of complexity. They had been played, even in their victory.