The war room was no longer a command center. It had become a confessional, a place of sickening revelation. The air was heavy and still. Only four people remained: Yoo-jin, Director Oh, Go Min-young, who had just returned from the victim's apartment, and Oh Min-ji, who sat staring at her laptop screen as if it were a portal to hell.
Min-ji had briefed them on her discovery: the encrypted folder in Park Eun-sol's cloud storage, unlocked with the password 'Bori,' the name of a childhood pet. A heartbreakingly naive key to a deeply cynical vault.
"The folder is full of video files," Min-ji explained, her voice stripped of its usual youthful confidence. "All created within the last three months. They're large. High-definition."
"Play one," Yoo-jin commanded, his voice flat.
Min-ji's fingers hesitated over the keyboard. She clicked on the most recent file. A video player bloomed on the large monitor, filling the room with its silent, damning images.
The scene was a luxurious hotel suite, the kind that cost more per night than Park Eun-sol probably made in a month. The lighting was dim, intimate. The video was shaky, filmed from a low angle, the tell-tale sign of a phone propped up and hidden on a nightstand or coffee table.
Park Eun-sol entered the frame. She was wearing an elegant black dress, but her smile was brittle, her movements stiff with anxiety. She was not alone. A man followed her into the frame. He was much older, in his late fifties, with a portly build and a face that radiated an easy, predatory confidence. As he turned to pour a drink from the mini-bar, his face became perfectly, horrifyingly clear.
A collective gasp went through the room. Go Min-young covered her mouth with her hand. Even Director Oh's stony facade cracked, her eyes widening in disbelief.
Yoo-jin felt a jolt of ice water in his veins. He knew that man. Everyone in the industry knew that man. It was Executive Director Moon Ji-tae, one of the most senior figures at Stellar Entertainment. He was Chairman Choi's attack dog, his right-hand man, the one who handled the company's dirtiest work. And he was not just talking to Park Eun-sol. The scene that unfolded was explicitly, graphically sexual. It was raw and deeply uncomfortable to watch.
"My God," Min-young whispered, turning away from the screen.
"There's more," Min-ji said, her voice barely audible. She clicked away from the video, opening another file. It was a screen recording of a text message conversation between Park Eun-sol and Executive Director Moon. The texts were a brutal, transactional timeline of exploitation and desperation.
The first messages were from Moon, filled with vague promises. 'You have a unique charm. With the right training, you could go far.'
Then came Eun-sol's increasingly desperate pleas. 'Executive Director-nim, you promised you would help me debut. I've done everything you asked.'
Moon's replies grew colder, more dismissive. 'These things take time. Be patient. Don't be needy, it's not an attractive quality.'
The final exchange, from just one week ago, showed Eun-sol's desperation finally turning into a weapon. 'I'm tired of being patient. I have videos. Dozens of them. Pay me 500 million won, or my next audition will be with a reporter from Dispatch.'
Moon's final, chilling reply was a single word. 'Fine.'
The ugly truth hung in the silent room, poisoning the air. Park Eun-sol hadn't just been a victim. In her final days, she had tried to become a predator herself, blackmailing one of the most powerful and ruthless men in the entertainment industry. The fifty million won she'd received wasn't a sponsor's gift. It was almost certainly the first installment of her blackmail payment.
The revelation shattered the funereal quiet, igniting a ferocious moral debate.
Director Oh, the hard-bitten pragmatist, spoke first. Her eyes were fixed on the screen, not with horror, but with the cold, calculating gaze of a general who had just been handed the enemy's battle plans.
"This is it," she said, her voice hard as nails. "This is our way out. Our miracle."
"What are you talking about?" Min-young asked, her face a mask of confusion and disgust.
"We leak this," Director Oh stated, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "Anonymously. We send the worst of the videos to every reporter in Seoul. The story instantly changes. It's no longer about our actor. It becomes 'Stellar Entertainment Executive's Blackmail Victim Dies of Mysterious Overdose.' The media will devour him alive. Chairman Choi will be forced to cut him loose to save the company. Kwon Ji-hyuk becomes a footnote, a tragic bystander in a much bigger, dirtier scandal. It saves the series. It saves the company. It saves everything."
Go Min-young recoiled as if she'd been struck. Her initial shock morphed into a hot, righteous anger. "Leak it?" she cried, her voice trembling with disbelief. "Director, have you lost your mind? She is dead. That man is scum, a monster, but she was his victim, too! We cannot use a recording of her sexual assault, her ultimate humiliation, as a PR tool to protect our investment! What does that make us? Have we become so monstrous that we would use a dead girl's body to shield ourselves?"
Director Oh turned on her, her face contorted with a bitter fury born from a lifetime of fighting in the industry's trenches. "Monstrous?" she spat, her voice laced with the venom of a woman who had been chewed up and spit out by the very system she was describing. "This is the industry! It's a pit of vipers and crocodiles! You don't survive by being a gentle dove; you survive by having the sharpest fangs and the deadliest poison! That girl knew the game she was playing when she hit record. It was a dangerous game, and she lost. We either use the weapon she left behind, or we stand here on our moral high ground and watch our own people burn for a crime they didn't commit!"
The two women stood on opposite sides of a vast moral chasm, their glares locked. Both of them turned to the only person who could break the stalemate. They turned to Yoo-jin.
He was their judge, their king, the architect of their company's soul. The choice was brutal, a journey into a moral abyss with no good exit.
Path A was Director Oh's way. The cold, logical, ruthlessly efficient path to survival. Save the company, save Ji-hyuk, save hundreds of billions of won. The cost? To desecrate a dead girl's memory, to become the very thing he claimed to despise. It was, according to the cold calculus of his Producer's Eye, the optimal path.
Path B was Go Min-young's way. The path of the heart. Uphold their morals, refuse to use the tape, and maintain their integrity. The cost? The almost certain destruction of Aura Pictures, the imprisonment of his star actor, and the ruin of everything he had built.
Yoo-jin was silent for a long, agonizing moment. His ability was useless here. No data could resolve a question of morality. He looked at Min-young's passionate, pleading face, the embodiment of the hopeful ideals upon which he'd founded Aura. Then he looked at Director Oh's hardened, cynical eyes, which reflected the brutal reality of the world they lived in. Was his dream of building a better kind of company just a naive fantasy?
He finally drew a slow breath and spoke, his voice heavy with the weight of the decision.
"We don't leak it."
Go Min-young sagged with relief, a quiet sob escaping her lips. Director Oh stared at him, her expression shifting from tension to pure, unadulterated fury.
"Are you insane?" she seethed, taking a step toward him. "You would sacrifice all of us? The careers of hundreds of people? For what? A feeling?"
"No," Yoo-jin said, his gaze shifting from moral arbiter to cunning strategist. The warmth left his eyes, replaced by a familiar, calculating coldness. "We don't leak it to the press."
He turned to the stunned Oh Min-ji.
"Send one of the videos. The most damning one. Use a multi-layered, untraceable channel. Send it directly, and only, to Chairman Choi."