Their new war began not with a bang, but with a whisper, planted in the fertile ground of the Vanguard's own paranoia.
Their target was Vex. The destruction of the Correction Center had been a massive blow to his faction, a public and humiliating failure.
His rival, Charon, though captured, had proven his point: Vex's methods were loud, reckless, and attracted unwanted attention.
The whispers from Charon's loyalists within the Vanguard would already be circulating: *Vex is a liability.* It was time to pour fuel on that fire.
Their instrument was The Quartermaster. Under duress, and with a healthy dose of self-preservation, the captured spymaster crafted a masterpiece of misinformation.
It was a fragmented intelligence report, designed to look like a communication between two of Charon's high-level agents.
The report was a work of art, layered with half-truths and plausible lies. It hinted that the destruction of the Correction Center was not a failure, but an *inside job*.
It suggested that Vex, in his obsession with the 'anomaly' Ryu, had orchestrated the facility's destruction himself to cover up the embarrassing failure of his 'perfected' soldier, Silas, and to eliminate evidence of his costly and unsanctioned experiments.
The report was carefully designed to play on the existing fears and suspicions within the Vanguard. It painted Vex not as a leader, but as a rogue element, a fanatic whose personal obsessions were endangering the entire organization.
The final, brilliant touch was a single, cryptic line: "The asset Charon was tracking is proving to be more resourceful than anticipated. His control over the anomaly is a complication. He may need to be... retired." The line was a poison dart, aimed directly at the heart of the Vanguard's command structure.
It implied that not only was Vex a failure, but that Charon himself had been outmaneuvered and captured, and that a new, unknown power—our heroes—was now a significant threat.
Ryu's role was to deliver this poison.
Using the ghost of Jax's knowledge, he didn't just 'ghost' the file into the Vanguard network; he *wove* it in.
He took the fragmented report and broke it into a thousand pieces, embedding each piece in the junk data of a hundred different low-level, encrypted channels that The Quartermaster had identified.
It was untraceable. It would not appear as a single, suspicious file, but would slowly coalesce in the data streams, to be discovered independently by dozens of Vanguard analysts.
It would look like a genuine, fragmented leak, a whisper from within. The effect was exactly what they had hoped for.
Within days, Joric's monitoring of the Vanguard's encrypted chatter picked up a new, frantic energy.
The whispers about Vex's failure grew louder.
There were coded inquiries about Charon's status, about his last known location.
There were new, subtle power plays as Charon's lieutenants, now believing their leader to be compromised or dead, began to jockey for position.
Vex, in turn, reacted with predictable, brutal force.
He initiated a series of internal purges, desperately trying to root out the source of the 'lies' and reassert his authority.
But his every move, his every execution of a suspected 'traitor,' only seemed to confirm the rumors that he was unstable, paranoid, and desperately covering his tracks.
The two factions of the Vanguard were no longer just suspicious of each other. They were at war.
Kiera, Ryu, and Joric had not fired a single shot, but they had turned the Vanguard's greatest weapon—its secrecy and paranoia—against itself.
They were no longer just ghosts. They were puppeteers.