The warehouse became a microcosm of the city's self-destructive clan politics.
The Onyx Serpent commandos arrived first, their movements swift and professional. They breached the warehouse, expecting to find their compromised spymaster, Charon.
Instead, they found an empty room, a single, flickering lamp, and the sudden, chilling realization that they had walked into a trap.
Seconds later, Vex's Praetorians descended.
They didn't bother with stealth.
They crashed through the warehouse's decaying roof, landing like meteorites of black armor and contained fury.
Their orders were simple: eliminate the Serpent team and secure whatever asset they were after. The battle that erupted was not a graceful duel of warriors.
It was a brutal, ugly meat-grinder. The Serpents were skilled assassins, masters of stealth and subterfuge, but they were facing a force of nature.
The Praetorians were walking tanks, their corrupted ChainForce enhancements making them almost impervious to conventional plasma fire.
They shrugged off wounds that would have killed a normal man, their only purpose the complete and utter annihilation of their targets.
The Serpents, realizing they were catastrophically outmatched, switched tactics. They used their agility and knowledge of urban warfare, turning the crumbling warehouse into a deadly maze.
They set trip-mines, created bottlenecks, and used the environment itself as a weapon, trying to wear down the unstoppable juggernauts that hunted them.
From their bunker, Ryu's team watched the conflict unfold as a chaotic storm of energy signatures on their holographic map.
It was a battle of fools, two factions of the same secret society tearing each other apart over a phantom, a lie they had so carefully constructed.
The battle was a perfect, bloody smokescreen.
As the city's security forces, and General Tarik's own monitoring stations, focused on the massive, unsanctioned firefight erupting in the industrial sector, Kiera, Ryu, and Joric made their move.
Their target was a place of quiet, unassuming power: a luxury apartment in one of the Core's most exclusive spires.
It was Vex's private residence, a place he believed to be utterly secure.
But The Quartermaster had given them its secrets.
"Vex is a narcissist," the captured spymaster had explained.
"He believes his own intelligence network is impenetrable. He would never keep his most sensitive data in a military bunker, where it could be subject to audits or rival factions. He keeps it somewhere close. Somewhere personal." The apartment was a fortress, protected by layers of biometric and energetic security.
But Joric, using the protocols provided by The Quartermaster, bypassed them with a series of quiet, elegant keystrokes.
They slipped inside, ghosts in the machine.
The apartment was a monument to Vex's ego.
It was filled with priceless art, ancient artifacts, and opulent furniture. But they were not there for the decor.
They were there for the vault. Behind a painting of a long-dead clan leader was a hidden panel.
This was Vex's personal data vault, a place he believed no one could ever reach.
Its lock was not electronic.
It was biological, keyed to Vex's own unique ChainForce signature.
No hacker, no engineer could break it. But Ryu was not a hacker.
He placed his hand on the panel. He closed his eyes and reached out with his senses.
He could feel the intricate, complex lock, the 'shape' of Vex's power.
He remembered Kiera's training, the lessons on mimicry and resonance.
He didn't try to break the lock.
He simply changed the shape of his own energy, molding it, twisting it, until it was a perfect, resonant copy of Vex's.
He became the key. With a soft, almost inaudible click, the vault door slid open.