The words hung in the air, heavy and poisonous. "She just sacrificed her queen."
The team stood frozen, grappling with the mind-bending gravity of Yoo-jin's new theory. The photo of Nam Gyu-ri and Ryu together remained on the main screen, no longer a simple piece of intelligence but a triumphant portrait of their own masterful manipulation. The entire war they thought they were fighting had been a lie, a grand piece of theater orchestrated by their enemies, and they had been the lead actors, playing their parts to perfection without ever seeing the script.
The initial shock gave way to a cold, simmering fury. Yoo-jin, however, seemed to draw a strange energy from the intellectual challenge of the revelation. The deception was so vast, so elegant in its cruelty, that a part of his strategist's mind couldn't help but respect it, even as the rest of him recoiled in horror. He strode to the whiteboard, his exhaustion burned away by a new, grim purpose.
"Let's map it out," he said, his voice hard as stone. He picked up a marker. "We have to throw out every assumption we've made. We need to re-examine every move they've made, from the very beginning, through this new lens. Assume their goal was never just to destroy Aura for OmniCorp. Assume their real goal, all along, was to get Nam Gyu-ri off OmniCorp's leash and set her up as a deniable, well-funded free agent of chaos. With that as the endpoint, let's see how the pieces fit."
He drew a timeline on the board, a long, stark line that represented the past few agonizing months.
"Phase One: The Setup," he wrote, underlining the words twice. He looked directly at Chae-rin, his gaze not accusatory, but clinical. "It begins with Ryu. We thought his mission was simply to seduce you, to plant a plagiarism charge, and to create a scandal. We were wrong. That was only the surface objective."
He continued, his voice weaving the disparate events into a single, terrifying narrative. "His real mission was to establish himself as a known, and more importantly, a burnable OmniCorp asset. They needed a direct, provable link between their company and ours. They needed to give us an enemy we thought we understood. Chae-rin, your kindness, your empathy… it wasn't just a target of opportunity. It was the perfect key they needed to plant their agent deep inside our emotional territory."
He moved down the timeline. "Phase Two: The Mutually Assured Destruction." He wrote the letters 'M.A.D.' on the board and circled them. "This is where we thought we gained the upper hand. Our 'Honey Trap,'" he said, the words dripping with self-mocking irony. "We were so proud of ourselves, getting that recording of the recruiter. We thought we had our trump card. But what if they wanted us to get it? What if Hana's success was part of their design?"
He tapped the circle on the board. "Think about what that recording did. It created a perfect stalemate. It gave us a weapon so powerful we could never use it without destroying ourselves. It locked us in a secret war of whispers and shadows, preventing us from ever going to the public, from ever exposing OmniCorp's business model. It isolated us completely, forcing us to fight on their terms, in the dark."
The team listened, their faces pale. Each memory of a small victory, a clever maneuver, was being recast as another step into a cage they hadn't seen.
"Which brings us to Phase Three," Yoo-jin said, his voice grim as he drew a large box at the end of the timeline. "The Showcase."
"He warns us of a trap," he recited, mapping their own reactions. "So we react predictably. We panic. We cancel our own mission. But we are now armed with this righteous anger and a sense of being wronged. So what do we do? We launch our own chaotic, public counter-attack. The protest. It was the only move we had left, and they knew it. They herded us toward it. That protest gave OmniCorp's board the public spectacle, the international embarrassment they needed to finally censure Nam Gyu-ri, to put her on a final, desperate leash."
He capped the marker and threw it onto the tray with a clatter. "Her 'failure' gives her the freedom she needs to operate without oversight. It's perfect. It's a flawless, three-act structure. Every step was designed to manipulate our reactions, to push us into doing exactly what they wanted, all while making us think we were being clever and winning."
The full, horrifying anatomy of the deception was laid bare. The silence in the room was profound, weighted with the bitterness of their own foolishness.
It was Kang Ji-won who spoke first, his voice rough with a new, deeper level of violation. "So the song…" he began, his gaze distant. "The demo CD. The melody that drove me insane, that made me question my own creativity, my own sanity… it was all just a prop? A piece of bait dangled in front of me to make the plagiarism charge feel real?" The idea that his art, the most sacred part of his identity, had been nothing more than a stage prop in their elaborate play was a wound far deeper than any accusation of theft.
Chae-rin felt a cold wave of nausea. The violation was absolute. "So he… he never felt guilty?" she whispered, the question directed at no one and everyone. "All those conversations we had about art, about feeling lost in the industry… it was all an act? From the very first day?" The confirmation that she had been so completely, so thoroughly deceived didn't just shatter her trust in others; it shattered her trust in her own core ability to see and understand people.
Da-eun's simmering anger finally found a new, more accurate target. It was no longer aimed at a faceless corporation. It was aimed at two individuals. "So they're not just corporate monsters," she said, her voice a low growl. "They're terrorists. They use chaos and fear and emotional manipulation as their primary weapons. This was never about business."
Yoo-jin walked back to the whiteboard and, with a single, furious swipe of an eraser, wiped the entire timeline away. The slate was clean.
"Exactly," he said, turning back to his team. "Everything we thought we knew about this war, every piece of intelligence we gathered, was a lie fed to us by the enemy. We haven't been generals in a war room. We have been puppets in their dollhouse. From this moment on, that stops."
His eyes, burning with a new, cold fire, swept across the faces of his shattered team. "We are no longer reacting. We are no longer playing their game. Our first and only priority is to answer a single question." He picked up the marker again and wrote the question in large, block letters in the center of the clean white space.
WHAT DO THEY REALLY WANT?
"If this isn't just about destroying Aura for OmniCorp," he said, his voice a vow, "then what is their endgame? What is the real prize they're after?"