The hours that followed were a unique form of torture. The adrenaline of the act drained away, leaving behind a jittery, caffeine-fueled anxiety. The sun began to rise, casting long, pale fingers of light across the city, and the team in the Aura conference room felt like a coven of vampires dreading the dawn. They were bleary-eyed, subsisting on stale coffee and the nervous energy crackling between them. Their war room had become a viewing station, the team huddled around the main monitor where Min-ji, a conductor of digital chaos, had assembled her orchestra.
A dozen windows tiled the screen: live, high-definition traffic cams showing the sleek, modern facade of the Innovate Dynamics convention center; social media monitoring software scrolling through endless feeds, tracking keywords and hashtags; and direct links to the 'Lost Stars' forum and several indie music message boards. They were watching their experiment, waiting for a sign of life.
At first, there was nothing. The streets were clean, the morning traffic flowing normally. Sleek black town cars with tinted windows began to pull up to the curb, depositing men and women in expensive suits who strode into the building with an air of unshakeable importance. The team's collective anxiety tightened into a knot of fear. Had it failed? Had their carefully crafted messages simply dissipated into the vast noise of the internet? Was their grand, desperate gambit nothing more than a whisper in a hurricane?
"Anything?" Yoo-jin asked, his voice rough from exhaustion and tension.
"Server logs show the messages were delivered and opened by the target admins," Min-ji reported, her eyes scanning lines of code. "Propagation is… slow. Slower than my models predicted."
The silence stretched, each tick of the clock amplifying their sense of failure.
Then, Min-ji pointed a finger at one of the smaller windows. "Wait. Here."
Her screen showed a real-time tracking of social media trends. The hashtag #JusticeForEclipse, which had been dormant for months, had just flickered. One mention. Then three. Then ten.
"It's starting," she whispered.
Another window, a live feed from a public camera across the street, showed the first sign. Two teenage girls, looking nervous but determined, stood on the sidewalk, tentatively unfurling a hastily made banner scrawled on a bedsheet. From this distance, the words were illegible, but the intent was clear. A security guard in a sharp suit noticed them and spoke into his wrist, his expression one of mild annoyance rather than alarm. He likely assumed they were fans of some celebrity attending the event, a common nuisance.
But then, another photo appeared on Min-ji's feed. A different angle, a grainy cellphone shot from down the block, showed a group of five people walking toward the venue. Then a group of ten. They were like individual streams of water trickling down a mountainside, seemingly insignificant on their own, but all heading toward the same point.
The main traffic cam view began to change. The trickle was becoming a steady flow. The small group of two had swelled to twenty, then fifty. They were mostly young, clutching idol light sticks and hand-drawn signs. The OmniCorp security detail, clearly prepped for corporate spies in suits, not teenagers with picket signs, began to look confused, then genuinely concerned. Their calm, professional demeanors were cracking. They formed a line in front of the glass doors, a woefully inadequate barrier against a rising tide.
"Secondary vector is live," Min-ji announced, her voice gaining excitement. She pulled up another feed. A different hashtag, #AuraFightsBack, was now gaining traction on different platforms. The narrative Da-eun had seeded in the indie music forums was taking hold. And now, a different type of protester began to arrive. They were older, dressed in worn band t-shirts and ripped jeans, carrying professionally printed placards. One read, 'OMNICORP BULLIES SMALL BUSINESS.' Another, more pointedly, 'YOUR CHAMPAGNE IS PAID FOR BY AHN JAE-HO'S FAMILY.'
A remarkable thing happened on the street below. The two disparate groups, the heartbroken idol fans and the anti-corporate indie activists, began to merge. A young girl holding a glowing light stick offered a bottle of water to a man with a punk rock jacket and a sign decrying corporate greed. They were a chaotic, unlikely, but suddenly powerful alliance, united by a common enemy they had only just discovered they shared.
The crowd swelled from dozens to hundreds, spilling from the sidewalk into the street and blocking the flow of traffic. The sound began to register on the live feed's microphone—a low chant that grew steadily in volume and confidence. "JUSTICE FOR ECLIPSE! JUSTICE FOR ECLIPSE!" Then, another chant would rise up to meet it. "SHAME ON OMNICORP! SHAME ON OMNICORP!"
The real prize appeared moments later. The unmistakable satellite van of a major news network rounded the corner, its camera operator already leaning out the window to film the scene. It was followed by another, then a third. The private, exclusive party was now the lead story on the city's evening news.
Inside the glass-walled atrium of the convention center, the team could see the beautifully dressed executives, their champagne flutes frozen halfway to their lips. They were staring out at the chaotic scene, their expressions of triumphant celebration curdling into shock and horror. Their fortress had been besieged. Nam Gyu-ri, wherever she was inside, was trapped in her own victory party, besieged by a roar of public outrage she could not control, a narrative that was now completely out of her hands.
The Aura conference room erupted. Da-eun let out a whoop of pure, cathartic joy. Ji-won was actually smiling, a wide, genuine grin of disbelief. Jin stared at the screen, a complex mixture of awe and trepidation on his face. It had worked. Their insane, desperate plan had actually worked.
In the midst of their celebration, Chae-rin's phone buzzed with the now-familiar, dreaded notification from the encrypted app. She froze, the cheer dying in her throat. Her face went pale as she read the new message. She grabbed Yoo-jin's arm, her eyes wide with urgency.
He followed her gaze to the screen. The new message from Ryu was short, direct, and packed with tactical dynamite.
"They're panicking. Moving Gyu-ri out now. Back entrance, service tunnel B. She's alone with her driver."
The message detonated in the celebratory atmosphere. While the chaos they had created raged at the front door, the queen of the castle was trying to slip out the back, vulnerable and exposed.