The sight of Vex with Silas was a final, crushing blow.
The arena was no longer a place of brutal but simple contest; it was a recruitment ground for a shadow army.
The docks were controlled by corrupt foremen.
The streets were prowled by thugs who were either independent predators or Vanguard foot soldiers.
Ryu's world had become a prison with invisible walls.
He needed to escape. Not just from the Vanguard, but from himself, from the constant, grinding reality of his own inadequacy.
He found himself drawn to one of the deepest, most forgotten corners of the Outer Sector: the abandoned Municipal Data Archive.
Decades ago, before data was stored on crystalline matrices in the Core, it was housed here, in towering racks of magnetic servers.
The place had been decommissioned after a series of solar flares wiped most of the data, and it was now a ghost-filled cathedral of forgotten information.
Most people avoided it, spooked by the silence and the strange, intermittent hums of dying machinery. For Ryu, that silence was a sanctuary.
He found a small, dry maintenance closet on a high level, overlooking rows upon rows of dead server racks. It was his haven.
He would spend hours there, surrounded by the ghosts of a forgotten age, feeling a strange sense of peace. The world of clans, ChainForce, and Vanguards couldn't reach him here.
One day, while exploring a section he'd never visited before, he stumbled upon a small, offline terminal. It was an old-fashioned, physical console, likely used by a technician.
Most of the archive was powered down, but this terminal seemed to be running on a tiny, residual energy source, its screen faintly glowing. Out of sheer boredom, he began to press the keys, expecting nothing.
To his surprise, a single file flickered onto the screen. It was corrupted, fragmented, but partially readable. The title was simple: 'Basic Combat Postures and Energy Flow. A Primer for Academy Rejects.'
It was a training manual. Not for clan warriors, but for those who had failed to get into the official security academies.
It was a guide for the powerless. It spoke of things Ryu had never considered: leverage, balance, center of gravity, and breathing techniques.
It didn't mention ChainForce. Instead, it talked about 'internal energy,' about focusing one's will and breath to achieve a state of peak physical and mental clarity.
It described simple exercises, stances, and movements designed to maximize the efficiency of a normal, un-enhanced human body.
The text was dry, technical, but to Ryu, it was a revelation. For his entire life, power had been an external, mystical force—something you were either born with or not.
This manual suggested something different. It suggested that a small measure of power could be built, cultivated, from within. It was a pathetic, microscopic fraction of what a clan warrior possessed, but it was something. It was his.
He began to practice. In the dusty silence of the archive, surrounded by the dead husks of old technology,
Ryu started with the first exercise: a simple breathing pattern. Inhale for four counts, hold for four, exhale for four.
He stood in the first posture described, 'The Rooted Stance,' his feet planted firmly on the ground, his knees slightly bent.
His bruised body protested, his mind, accustomed to failure, screamed that this was pointless.
But he persisted. He ignored the aches, the doubts. He focused on the simple act of breathing, of feeling the ground beneath his feet.
The manual said, 'The first step to controlling your world is to control your own space.'
For the first time in his life, Ryu felt like he might be able to do just that. The space was only a few square feet in a forgotten archive, but it was a start.
He wasn't learning to fight an opponent; he was learning to fight his own despair.