#### **Chapter 15: Heart of the Shadow**
Miles away, a young woman in a school uniform and glasses walked into a W.A.O. mobile command post set up in a nearby van. She was crying, holding a lost cat flyer.
"Excuse me," she whimpered to the guard. "Have you seen my kitty? His name is Mochi."
The guard, annoyed, was about to send her away when the operations commander, a man named Harris, stepped out. He was stressed, overseeing the most important operation of his career.
"What is it?" he snapped.
The girl—Hikari—looked up at him, her amber eyes wide with fear and grief. "My cat… I think he ran into that scary building."
Harris's heart rate spiked from 80 to 95. His pupils dilated. A micro-expression of pity, warring with professional frustration, flashed across his face. Hikari saw it all. She saw the stress lines, the exhaustion, the deep-seated desire to be a good person trapped in a violent job. She had her hook.
Over the next two minutes, she didn't just talk to him. She dismantled his psychological defenses. She mirrored his posture, pitched her voice to a soothing frequency, and feigned a small panic attack that triggered his protective instincts. She told him a fabricated story about the cat being a gift from her dying mother.
"Please, sir," she begged, tears streaming down her face. "Can't you just turn off the loud noise for a second? Just so I can call his name?"
Harris, his professionalism completely shattered by a master of emotional manipulation, made a fatal mistake. "Just for ten seconds," he muttered, and keyed his mic. "Kill the audio emitters. Stand by."
Inside the warehouse, the screeching noise abruptly stopped.
The sudden silence was all the opening Kyro needed. The Warden, momentarily thrown by the change, hesitated. Kyro's ICC, no longer fighting a sensory war, saw the path. He exploded forward, not with force, but with impossible speed. He disarmed The Warden, broke his wrist, and finished the fight with three rapid, precise strikes to the man's nerve clusters, leaving him paralyzed and gasping on the concrete floor.
The fight was over. The wild card had won the game.