Back in the war room, the emotional wounds of the team were being packed with the gauze of a new, urgent mission. Yoo-jin, Da-eun, and Min-ji were present, the atmosphere grim but intensely focused. The shared trauma of the last twelve hours had burned away any lingering sentimentality. All that remained was a cold, hard resolve.
Yoo-jin stood before the whiteboard. The sprawling, complex diagrams of the enemy's deception had been wiped clean. In their place was a single, stark question written in bold, black letters: WHAT DO THEY REALLY WANT?
"We cannot answer that question with any of the information we currently possess," Yoo-jin stated, his voice flat and clinical. "Everything we think we know about their motives, their plans, their resources—it has all come from them. It's been filtered, curated, and fed to us as part of their grand deception. It is all poisoned fruit from a poisoned tree."
He paced in front of the board, his steps measured. "We need a clean source. A stream of intelligence that is untainted by Nam Gyu-ri or Ryu. We have been playing defense with faulty information. It's time we built our own offense, and that starts with getting our own asset."
Da-eun, leaning against the far wall with her arms crossed, let out a short, skeptical sound. "And where are we supposed to find one of those? After everything that's happened, who can we possibly trust?"
"We can't trust anyone to be on our side," Yoo-jin countered, a subtle but important distinction. "But there is one person we can trust to be consistently, reliably on his own side. Director Yoon at Stellar Entertainment."
Da-eun frowned. "Yoon? He's a coward. He only helps us when he thinks it benefits him or when he's scared."
"Exactly," Yoo-jin said, a flicker of his old, predatory cunning returning to his eyes. "He's not an ally. He's a weather vane. He shows us which way the wind is blowing inside Stellar. And more importantly, he is our only entry point into the place where our enemies have their most valuable, most trusted source: the mole."
The words hung in the air. The mole. The faceless traitor inside Stellar who had given Nam Gyu-ri the ammunition to attack Da-eun's family and to plant the Prime Dispatch story.
The mole hunt had officially begun.
Min-ji, who had been silently working at her laptop, swiveled her chair around. "The profile of the mole is specific," she began, her analytical mind already piecing together the clues. "They fed Nam Gyu-ri information about Director Ahn's past business dealings, which would have come from old Stellar personnel files, likely from when Da-eun first signed with them years ago. Then, they fed her the narrative for the Prime Dispatch article, which concerned Aura's current strategy and contracts. This person has access to both legacy HR data and current, high-level strategic conversations. That narrows the list of potential suspects at Stellar from hundreds of employees to maybe a dozen senior-level managers and executives."
"A dozen is still too many to investigate from the outside," Da-eun noted.
"Precisely," Yoo-jin agreed. "We can't ask Yoon to find the mole for us. He wouldn't risk exposing himself, and frankly, I don't trust him not to bungle it and tip them off. So, we don't ask him to find the mole. We force the mole to reveal themselves to us."
He turned back to the whiteboard, picking up a marker. "We need bait. And the bait has to be irresistible. Something Nam Gyu-ri, in her new, unleashed state, would see as a kill shot she couldn't possibly pass up."
He began to brainstorm with the team, sketching out possibilities.
"Another attack on Da-eun's family?" Da-eun suggested, her voice laced with venom.
Yoo-jin shook his head. "No. She's expecting us to be focused there. It's too predictable. We need to present a new, unexpected vulnerability. Something personal, something that strikes at the core of Aura's foundation." He paused, his gaze drifting for a moment. He thought of Jin and Chae-rin, of their raw, exposed wounds. He wouldn't use them. Not for this. His eyes then landed on an imaginary spot in the room, thinking of their reclusive composer. "Ji-won."
A slow, devious plan began to form in his mind. "The bait will be Kang Ji-won," he declared. "I'm going to call Director Yoon. I'm going to sound panicked, desperate. I'm going to confide in him, telling him that Ji-won, rattled by all the recent chaos and feeling creatively exploited, has secretly engaged his own lawyer to explore a loophole in his exclusive contract. The lie will be that Ji-won is claiming he was signed under duress during a moment of personal crisis, and that he's threatening to walk."
The beauty of the lie was its multi-layered appeal to Nam Gyu-ri. It suggested a crack in Aura's most crucial artist relationship. It hinted at internal dissent. And best of all, it presented a legal challenge to the very foundation of Aura's contracts, giving her a new angle of attack. It was a perfect piece of poisoned bait.
"Okay," Da-eun said, following his logic. "So we plant the lie with Yoon. He'll gossip. The mole overhears it and passes it to Nam Gyu-ri. She'll jump on it immediately. But how does that help us? How do we trace the leak back to the specific source among those dozen suspects?"
Min-ji offered a faint, thin-lipped smile. It was her time to shine. "That," she said, her fingers dancing across her keyboard, "is my part."
She turned her laptop screen for them to see. "Before you make the call, CEO-nim, I will prepare a small, encrypted data file. It will be disguised as a 'Confidential Legal Analysis of Kang Ji-won's Contractual Obligations,' supposedly prepared by our lawyers. You will attach it to an email and send it to Director Yoon during your panicked phone call, asking for his 'unofficial opinion' as an industry veteran."
"A file?" Yoo-jin asked, intrigued.
"This file," Min-ji explained, her eyes gleaming with pride, "will contain a digital canary. A piece of custom tracking code I wrote myself. It's embedded deep within the file's metadata. The moment that file is downloaded and opened by anyone using a device not connected to Stellar Entertainment's secure internal network, the canary sings. It will ping my server, sending me the user's IP address, their machine's hardware ID, their operating system, everything. We won't just know that the mole has taken the bait. We will know their name, their department, and the exact location of the computer they used to open the file."
A heavy silence fell over the room. The plan was elegant, ruthless, and just as technologically sophisticated as anything OmniCorp could devise. It was a perfect trap. And it was a clear, undeniable step into the world of espionage they had once condemned.
Yoo-jin looked from Min-ji's confident smile to Da-eun's grimly impressed nod. There was no hesitation. The lines had already been blurred. They were no longer just music producers; they were counter-intelligence agents in a war for their own survival.
He picked up his phone, his thumb hovering over Director Yoon's contact information. He was about to set a trap that would, with any luck, finally give them a weapon of their own.