The aftermath of the vault raid was everything they had hoped for and everything they had feared.
Vex, returning to his desecrated sanctuary, his life's work stolen and erased, did not descend into a quiet paranoia.
He erupted. The Vanguard civil war, which had been a conflict of whispers and shadows, now became a brutal, open purge.
Vex, armed with the knowledge that his rival's faction was not just undermining him but actively colluding with the clans, abandoned all pretense of subtlety.
He declared Charon and his followers to be traitors to the Vanguard's true cause, heretics who had forgotten their sacred mission.
His Praetorian guards became his personal inquisitors, hunting down and executing anyone with even a whisper of loyalty to Charon.
The shadow war had come into the light, and it was uglier and more brutal than anyone could have imagined.
Vex's fury was not limited to his own organization.
He knew, with a terrifying certainty, who was responsible for his ruin.
The 'anomaly' and his disgraced Dragon warrior protector.
He had underestimated them. He had seen them as a prize to be captured, a resource to be exploited.
He now saw them as a mortal threat, a rival power that had to be exterminated at all costs. He unleashed his entire network, every remaining informant, every enhanced soldier, every corrupt official, with a single, simple directive: find them.
The city, already on a knife's edge from the inter-clan tensions, became a massive hunting ground.
From their deep-level bunker, Kiera's team could only watch and wait.
They were trapped, caught between the hammer of Vex's fury and the anvil of Tarik's machinations.
The General was using the chaos to his full advantage.
With the other clans distracted by Vex's purges and their own internal witch hunts, Tarik's Sunstone Jaguars moved with a quiet, ruthless efficiency.
Key political figures, now known to be Vanguard assets thanks to Kiera's data, suffered a series of 'unfortunate accidents.' Strategic resources were quietly nationalized under Jaguar control.
Tarik was consolidating his power, preparing for the final move that would make him the city's undisputed ruler.
He was allowing the Vanguard civil war to rage, letting his enemies weaken each other, waiting for the perfect moment to step in and crush them both.
For Kiera, Ryu, and Joric, it was a period of intense, suffocating tension. They were ghosts, hidden from the world, their only connection to the outside the torrent of data that Ryu and Joric sifted through day and night.
They trained, they planned, they waited for Tarik's signal, all the while knowing that a single mistake, a single slip-up, would bring Vex's full, apocalyptic wrath down upon them.
During this time, Ryu's power continued to grow in strange and unexpected ways.
The inheritance from Jax was not just a passive sense; it was an active intelligence. He found he could not just read data, but influence it.
He could subtly alter the routing of a Vanguard patrol by feeding them false sensory data.
He could create 'ghost' signals that would draw Vex's hunters into traps set by Charon's loyalists, escalating their conflict without ever revealing his own hand.
He was becoming a true digital phantom, his power a scalpel in the shadow war. But this new power came with a heavy psychological cost.
He was so deeply immersed in the world of secrets and deception that the lines began to blur.
He felt the paranoia of Vex's hunted agents, the cold pragmatism of Charon's spies, the brutal ambition of Tarik.
He was a nerve ending for the entire city's pain and corruption.
The link with Kiera was his only anchor. She could feel his mental strain, the weight of the secrets he carried.
In turn, he could feel her own buried grief, her anger, her struggle with the compromises they were forced to make.
They were two halves of a single, damaged soul, keeping each other sane in a world gone mad. They were waiting for a signal, for a chance to strike the final blow.
They knew it was coming. The only question was whether they would survive it.