The conference room felt like a command bunker in the final hours of a losing war. The walls seemed to be closing in, the air thick with the dust of their collapsed strategies. The Prime Dispatch bombshell was the final volley in a perfectly coordinated barrage, and it had shattered their morale completely. They were no longer soldiers; they were survivors, shell-shocked and disoriented, waiting for the inevitable end.
"So that's her strategy," Min-ji said, her voice a detached, clinical monotone that was somehow more chilling than panic. Her fingers, a blur across her keyboard, were the only things moving in the room. She was processing data, running threat assessments, her mind working to quantify the disaster. "It's a classic denial-of-service attack, but for strategy. She's not trying to win on one front. She's launching multiple, resource-intensive attacks simultaneously to overwhelm our decision-making capacity. Legal, intelligence, public relations… we can't effectively fight all of them at once. One of our defenses is designed to collapse under the strain."
Da-eun, who had been sitting in stunned silence, finally broke. She shot to her feet and slammed her fist on the table, the sharp impact making everyone flinch. "So we just sit here and take it?" she demanded, her voice trembling with a furious, helpless rage. "We let them call you a predator after you saved those artists? We let them destroy my father's life with their lies? We just let them win?"
"What else can we do?" Kang Ji-won countered, his cynicism curdling into despair. "Our secret weapon is known to the enemy. Our public image is about to be torched. Our artist's family is being financially strangled. We've been checkmated on three different boards at the same time."
"No," Yoo-jin said. The word was quiet, almost a whisper. He had been standing motionless, staring at the whiteboard, at the crossed-out diagrams and erased plans that represented their failed hopes. He looked like a defeated general surveying a battlefield of his own dead soldiers.
But then, something shifted in his eyes. The vacant, beaten look was replaced by a flicker of something else—not confidence, not hope, but a wild, desperate, cornered-animal cunning.
"No," he repeated, his voice louder this time, infused with a strange new energy. He began to pace, not with the controlled authority of before, but with a restless, prowling intensity. "Min-ji is right. This is an overwhelm strategy. She expects us to triage. To panic. To throw all our resources into fighting the Prime Dispatch story, to pour money we don't have into the legal fight, to abandon any thought of the showcase. She is trying to control our attention, to force us to look away from the main event."
He stopped pacing abruptly and stabbed a finger toward the whiteboard, toward the ghost of their cancelled mission. "The showcase is still the nexus. It's the eye of the storm. It's where OmniCorp's executives, their investors, and Nam Gyu-ri herself will all be in one room, toasting their own brilliance. They've built a trap, yes. A quiet, elegant trap designed to catch a single spy. They're listening for a whisper. A shadow. A mouse sneaking through the walls."
Yoo-jin's gaze swiveled, locking onto Jin. The question he asked was so out of left field it seemed to come from another conversation entirely.
"Your old group, Eclipse," he said, his voice intense. "After Stellar disbanded you, after the Kai project was revealed… what happened to your fanbase?"
Jin looked thrown by the sudden non-sequitur. "What? They were angry. They still are. There are entire online communities dedicated to it. They call themselves the 'Lost Stars.' Tens of thousands of them. They feel betrayed by Stellar, by the industry, by the machine that chewed you up and spat you out. They would do anything for a chance to voice that anger. Why?"
A slow, dangerous smile spread across Yoo-jin's face. It wasn't a smile of warmth or victory. It was the feral grin of a man who had been pushed past all conventional limits, a man with absolutely nothing left to lose.
"Nam Gyu-ri has built a beautiful, intricate, high-tech cage designed to catch a single mouse," Yoo-jin said, his voice dropping to a low, thrilling pitch. "I think it's time we sent her a stampede of elephants instead."
The team stared at him, their expressions a mixture of confusion and dawning shock.
"We can't go into the showcase," Yoo-jin clarified, his plan spilling out of him, chaotic and brilliant. "But the showcase is still the primary target. They've built a fortress and are watching the hallways. They expect an attack from within." He pointed a finger directly at Jin. "So we attack from the outside. You are going to take the invitation Hana gave us—the location, the time, the details of the event. And you are going to anonymously leak it to the administrator of the largest 'Lost Stars' fan community."
He paused, letting the implication sink in. "You will not tell them to protest. You will not ask them to do anything. You will simply give them the time and place where the corporation that helped destroy Eclipse, the company profiting from their stolen art, will be celebrating its victory. You will give them a target for all their righteous anger."
Before they could fully process that, he turned to Da-eun. "And you will do the same. You will leak the same information to a few trusted, influential indie music forums and activist journalists. You will frame it as the location where the soulless conglomerate that is currently trying to sue a small, family-run restaurant into bankruptcy is hosting a lavish, private party for its wealthy investors."
The sheer, anarchic audacity of the plan began to dawn on them. They were abandoning espionage for psychological warfare.
"They've built a trap for a spy," Yoo-jin said, his eyes blazing with a gambler's light. "They won't be expecting a flash mob. A protest. A full-blown fan riot right at their front door. They're so proud of their soundproof walls and their high-tech security, but that won't do them any good when live news helicopters are circling overhead. They want to control the narrative with a planted article? Let's see how they spin live footage of hundreds of angry fans with signs and light sticks, screaming about artistic theft and corporate bullying, drowning out their keynote speaker."
This new plan was insane. It was completely uncontrollable. It could backfire in a dozen spectacular ways, potentially leading to arrests or violence. It wasn't a surgical strike; it was a lit match thrown into a munitions depot. It was an act of pure, desperate chaos.
And for a team that had been systematically stripped of all other options, it was the most beautiful thing they had ever heard.