The delivery of the bait was a masterclass in subtlety.
Ryu, using Jax's ghostly inheritance, became a true digital phantom.
He didn't hack the Onyx Serpents' network; he simply found an unsecured, low-level data stream—a public weather and traffic feed—and inserted a single, encrypted packet into its flow.
The packet was a ghost, invisible to any but the most sophisticated analysis.
But it was tuned to a specific Vanguard encryption frequency that Ryu had learned from Charon's own mind, a frequency he knew Charon's lieutenants within the Serpent clan would be monitoring.
The packet contained the fabricated report: "CHARON COMPROMISED. VEX FORCES MOVING ON HOLDING FACILITY. ASSET RECOVERY IMPERATIVE." It was followed by the coordinates of a seemingly abandoned warehouse in the industrial no-man's-land between the territories of the three major clans.
It was the perfect location for their trap.
The warehouse was a crumbling wreck, but Joric's blueprints showed it was built over a nexus of the city's primary power, water, and sewer conduits.
It was a place of immense infrastructural vulnerability, a deathtrap for anyone who didn't know its secrets.
The Onyx Serpents reacted with a predictable, desperate speed.
Within an hour, Ryu felt the shift in the city's energy.
A small, elite team of Serpent commandos, their energy signatures cold and disciplined, began to move from the Serpent stronghold, their path a direct line to the warehouse.
They were moving fast and quiet, trying to get to their 'compromised asset' before anyone else.
Their desperation made them sloppy. But they were not the true target.
The true target was Vex. And Vex, as The Quartermaster had predicted, was always watching his rivals.
Ryu, his senses stretched across the city, felt the moment Vex's network noticed the Serpents' unusual, unsanctioned deployment.
A flurry of encrypted communications, which Ryu could now sense as sharp, angry bursts of data, erupted from Vex's known command posts.
Vex didn't know what the Serpents were after, but he knew it was something important.
His paranoia, so carefully stoked by our heroes, did the rest. He deployed his own forces.
A team of Praetorian guards, his new, perfected super-soldiers, was dispatched from a hidden base. Their energy signatures were like black holes, voids of controlled, violent power.
They moved with a terrifying, inhuman speed, their course set to intercept the Serpents at the warehouse.
The two sides were now on a collision course, two packs of wolves converging on a bait they didn't understand, a trap set by an enemy they didn't even know existed.
In their hidden bunker, Kiera, Joric, Ryu, and The Quartermaster watched the holographic map, a real-time display of the city's energy flows that Ryu was now able to project.
The Serpent commandos were a cluster of green lights. The Praetorians were a cluster of angry red.
And the warehouse was the point where they would inevitably meet.
"They've taken the bait," Kiera said, her voice a low, tense whisper.
"Phase one is complete." "Now comes the hard part," Joric muttered, his fingers hovering over a new console.
"Making sure they don't just kill each other. We need them to create a big enough mess that no one notices what we're really doing." Their plan was not just to make the two factions fight.
It was to use their battle as the ultimate distraction, a smokescreen for their true objective.
While the city's most elite covert operatives were engaged in a bloody, pointless skirmish, Kiera's team would be moving.
Their target: the one place Vex would leave unguarded, the one place he would never expect them to hit.
His personal, private data vault.