Director Oh stared at Han Yoo-jin, her fury momentarily frozen. The cogs in her sharp, cynical mind turned, processing the brutal elegance of his command. Leaking the video to the press would create a public circus, a chaotic storm that Aura might survive, but would still be caught in. It was a messy, unpredictable solution.
But leaking it to Chairman Choi… that was different. That was a targeted execution.
She understood the gambit instantly. Chairman Choi was not a man who tolerated scandals that threatened his empire. He was a king who ruled with an iron fist, and his first priority was always the preservation of his throne. He would not allow a tawdry affair involving his right-hand man to drag Stellar Entertainment through the mud, especially not with Aura waiting in the wings to capitalize on the chaos. He would not try to weather this storm. He would prevent it from ever forming.
"He'll bury him," Director Oh whispered, her anger slowly transmuting into a kind of horrified respect. "He'll bury his own man."
"Chairman Choi always cleans up his own mess," Yoo-jin said, his voice as cold and sterile as a surgeon's scalpel. "It's what he does best. He will neutralize his executive—a quiet dismissal, a sudden 'health issue,' a transfer to a non-existent branch in a foreign country. Then he will use his considerable influence with the police and the prosecutor's office to ensure that any investigation into Park Eun-sol's death stalls indefinitely. An open investigation now leads directly to his company's front door. He can't allow that."
He looked at his small, shaken team. "It gets Kwon Ji-hyuk out of the fire without our fingerprints appearing anywhere near the crime scene. We don't have to get our hands dirty."
It was a cold, ruthless, and utterly brilliant move. It used the enemy's own corruption against them, turning their rotten internal politics into a shield for Aura.
Oh Min-ji nodded, her face grim but resolute. She had her orders. She turned to her laptop, her fingers hovering over the keyboard as she prepared the secure data packet. But then she stopped. Her brow furrowed in concentration as she stared at the screen.
"CEO-nim… wait," she said, her voice tight with a new, unwelcome discovery. "There's something else. On the video file itself. It's not in the visible footage. It's a digital watermark. Almost invisible, embedded in the raw data stream."
"A watermark?" Yoo-jin asked, a fresh wave of unease washing over him. "From the phone's camera?"
"No," Min-ji said, shaking her head as she ran a complex diagnostic program. A progress bar crawled across her screen. "This is custom. It's a complex string of code, a signature. It was injected into the file upon creation." The program finished its analysis. A string of alphanumeric code appeared.
Min-ji's eyes went wide. "I've been running algorithms all night, trying to find a match for the signature on the burner laptop that paid Park Eun-sol fifty million won. I couldn't find one. It was a dead end. But this… this watermark on the blackmail video…" She ran another search, this time comparing the two signatures.
A loud, definitive PING echoed in the silent room. A single word flashed on her screen in bright green letters: MATCH.
The room, which had just begun to breathe again, was plunged back into a vacuum of shock. This changed everything. This twisted the entire narrative into a horrifying new shape.
"What does that mean?" Go Min-young asked, her voice trembling.
Min-ji's face was ashen. She looked up from her laptop, her gaze finding Yoo-jin's. "It means the person who paid Park Eun-sol to die is the same person who gave her the software to record these blackmail videos in the first place."
Her words fell like stones into a deep, dark well.
"They didn't just find a desperate girl and use her as a pawn," Min-ji continued, spelling out the monstrous implication. "They created her. They found her, identified her weakness, and then they armed her. They gave her the weapon to point at the Stellar executive, coached her on how to use it, and waited. Then, once she had served her purpose as bait, they paid her to go die at Ji-hyuk's feet. It was never two separate plans. It was one single, cohesive operation designed to destroy two targets at once: a key executive at Stellar, and Aura's rising star."
The sheer, psychopathic complexity of the plan was suffocating. This wasn't about corporate competition anymore. This was the work of a puppet master who delighted in setting the stage for human misery. This was deeply, terrifyingly personal.
"Nam Gyu-ri," Yoo-jin said, the name tasting like poison on his tongue. But even as he said it, he knew it didn't fit. Gyu-ri was arrogant, driven by ego and a desire for public victory. This was different. This was the patient, silent work of a predator who enjoyed the hunt more than the prize.
Min-ji shook her head. "I cross-referenced the signature against every known hacker and black ops agent in our files, including all of Gyu-ri's known associates. No match." She paused, her expression growing darker. "So I widened the search. I stopped looking for known agents and started looking for anyone at OmniCorp who had full administrative access to Nam Gyu-ri's entire black ops toolkit during the development of Kai. His deputies, his senior project managers… the people who built the weapons for him."
She brought up a final profile on the war room's main monitor. It wasn't a flashy headshot. It was a simple corporate ID photo of a man with an unremarkable face, nondescript glasses, and a quiet, blank expression. He was the man who had always been standing in Nam Gyu-ri's shadow during presentations, the one who never spoke, the one who just watched and listened.
Ryu. Nam Gyu-ri's former senior analyst. The one who had vanished without a trace after OmniCorp's fall.
Yoo-jin's blood ran cold. He had completely underestimated him. He had dismissed him as a simple, albeit brilliant, technician. A follower. He was wrong. Gyu-ri had been the loud, snarling guard dog. Ryu… Ryu was the silent, venomous snake hiding in the grass. And he was now operating with no corporate leash, a personal vendetta, and the most dangerous digital espionage toolkit in the country.
He wasn't fighting a corporation. He wasn't fighting a ghost from the past. He was being hunted by a brilliant sociopath.
As this soul-crushing realization settled over the room, a sharp buzz cut through the silence. It was Yoo-jin's personal, secure phone. He pulled it from his pocket. A text message from a blocked, unknown number. His thumb trembled slightly as he opened it.
It wasn't words. It was a single, high-resolution photograph.
The image was of Ahn Da-eun.
She wasn't on a stage, bathed in lights, or in a studio surrounded by her bandmates. She was sitting alone at a small, outdoor café, a book resting in her lap, a small, peaceful smile on her face as she looked at something out of frame. Her hair was tied back casually. She was completely at ease, wrapped in a moment of private tranquility.
But the photo was chillingly intimate. It was clearly taken from a great distance, through a powerful telephoto lens, the background blurred into an unrecognizable swirl of color. It was a stalker's picture. A predator's trophy.
Below the photograph, a single line of text appeared. A message that erased any doubt about who was behind this, and what their ultimate goal was.
"The actor was just business. A messy but necessary move to get your attention. But the queen of your castle? She will be for pleasure. Your move."