The silence in the conference room was no longer sober or strategic; it was a brittle, fragile thing, shattered by the two sentences glowing on Chae-rin's phone. Ryu's message. They know. It's a trap. The words echoed in the sudden vacuum, a phantom voice from a buried past, and with them, the triumphant, unified spirit of Aura Management evaporated like a mirage.
Yoo-jin stared at the screen, his mind, which moments before had been calculating vectors of attack, now frantically back-pedaling, processing a catastrophic strategic failure. His plan wasn't just compromised; it had been anticipated. He had been so focused on the internal emotional architecture of his team, so pleased with his successful repair job, that he had failed to see the much larger, simpler trap waiting outside. Nam Gyu-ri hadn't just predicted his move; she had set the board for it.
The first crack in their newly forged unity came from Da-eun. Her initial shock curdled into sharp, immediate suspicion. Her protective instincts, which had been aimed outward at OmniCorp, now swiveled to the most immediate, unbelievable variable in the room.
"Ryu?" she scoffed, her voice laced with disbelief. "How is that even possible? He works for them. He's one of them. This has to be another trick. Just another one of her games to make us panic and tear each other apart." Her gaze, hot and accusatory, landed directly on Chae-rin. The memory of Ryu's deception was still a raw wound for the entire team, and its point of entry had been Chae-rin's compassion. "How do you even have his number?" Da-eun demanded, her voice sharper than she intended. "Why is he contacting you again?"
Chae-rin physically recoiled as if struck. The trust she had just regained felt like it was dissolving under the heat of Da-eun's glare. "I don't know!" she stammered, her voice thin and defensive. "I blocked him. I deleted everything. This is a different number, an encrypted app. I don't know how he did it."
Jin, ever the analyst, intervened before the fissure could widen into a chasm. He held up a hand, not to calm them, but to direct their thinking. "Let's analyze this logically," he said, his voice a blade of cold steel that cut through the emotional haze. "Forget who it's from for a moment and consider the message itself. What does he gain by lying to us? If he lies and we still go, we walk into their trap. If he lies and we don't go, their trap fails, but they gain nothing from the lie itself. There's no advantage."
He paused, letting the logic sink in. "Now, what does he gain by telling us the truth? Scenario one: He's a defector seeking revenge on his former employers. Scenario two: He's a double agent, and the warning itself is the true attack. The goal isn't to save us, but to sow chaos and mistrust among us just when we thought we were united." His eyes flicked between Da-eun's fiery suspicion and Chae-rin's wounded panic. "If that's the goal, it seems to be working."
Kang Ji-won let out a short, bitter laugh from his corner of the room. He leaned forward, his elbows on the table, his expression deeply cynical. "A viper doesn't shed its skin and suddenly grow wings. This is Nam Gyu-ri's real psychological attack. It's brilliant, I'll give her that. She couldn't break our trust with her whispers and her anonymous emails, so now she's using this ghost—Chae-rin's ghost—to do it for her. She wants us fighting each other over the meaning of a shadow."
The room had splintered. Just minutes ago, they were a phalanx, shields locked, ready to march on the enemy. Now they were a fractured, bickering unit, debating the motives of a spy and casting suspicious glances at one another. The beautiful, unified front had been a mirror, and Nam Gyu-ri had just thrown a rock through it.
Yoo-jin felt the discord like a physical illness. Out of sheer desperation, he activated his Producer's Eye, praying for a clear path, for some data point that would show him the way out of this new maze. The information that flooded his vision was a cascade of system alerts and falling metrics.
[Team Synergy Analysis: Aura Core]
[Cohesion Level: 65% (Rapidly Decreasing)]
[Trust Index: Fluctuating between A-Rank and B-Rank]
[Active Debuff Applied: Paranoia (Source: External Manipulation)]
[Description: The team's trust, forged in a controlled environment of shared secrets, is proving highly vulnerable to unpredictable external shocks. Internal fissures, previously sealed, are showing signs of stress fractures.]
[SYSTEM WARNING: The 'Unshakeable Bond' trait is currently suppressed by the 'Paranoia' debuff. Team effectiveness reduced by 35%.]
His heart sank. The SSS-Rank trust, the unshakeable bond—it wasn't a permanent upgrade. It was a conditional buff, and the conditions had just been violated. He had been so proud of his work, of fixing his family, that he'd mistaken a temporary state of grace for an invulnerable fortress. He had been a fool.
He had to regain control. Now.
He slammed his open palm down on the conference table. The sharp, percussive crack was like a gunshot, shocking the room into instant silence. The rising arguments died in their throats.
"Stop," Yoo-jin said. His voice was quiet, dangerously calm, but it carried an absolute authority that sliced through the panic.
He waited a beat, forcing each of them to meet his gaze. "It doesn't matter if he's lying. It doesn't matter if he's telling the truth. It doesn't matter if he's a vengeful ghost or a puppet on Nam Gyu-ri's strings."
He straightened up, his posture that of a commander making an irrevocable field decision. "The possibility that he is telling the truth is enough. The risk of walking into a prepared trap where our greatest secret is already known is not acceptable. It is a suicide mission."
He looked directly at Chae-rin, then at Da-eun, then Jin, and finally Ji-won. "Therefore, we will operate under a single, simple assumption: he is telling the truth. The showcase is a trap. The mission to infiltrate the event is cancelled. No one from Aura Management is going anywhere near that building. Is that clear?"
His command was a blunt instrument, not a scalpel. It didn't solve their internal friction or answer any of the terrifying questions hanging in the air. But it did one crucial thing: it stopped the bleeding. It rendered the internal debate moot by removing the object of contention. They were no longer arguing about whether or not to trust the ghost, because the mission itself was dead.
A heavy silence descended upon the room once more, but this time it was the silence of defeat. The fire was gone, replaced by the cold, damp ashes of a failed plan. They were back to square one, with no leverage, no offensive strategy, and an enemy who, by all accounts, knew their most valuable, most dangerous secret. They weren't just on the defensive. They were exposed, powerless, and waiting for the next blow to fall.