The atmosphere in the command center had transformed. The frantic, desperate energy of the last two days had dissipated, replaced by the tense, focused calm of a predator closing in on its prey. The immediate crisis had been averted. Kwon Ji-hyuk's bombshell confession had thrown the media and the legal system into chaos, buying them precious time. Now, the second phase of the war could begin: the hunt.
Nam Gyu-ri's face was on the main monitor, no longer broadcasting from the squalid billiards hall. In the background behind him was a clean, minimalist, and completely anonymous office space, identical to the one Yoo-jin's team occupied. He had been moved to a secure location, a new lair funded by Aura's coffers. He had also been given a new wardrobe. The disgraced tracksuit was gone, replaced by a sharp, dark, and expensive-looking suit. He had shaved. He had styled his hair. He looked, terrifyingly, like his old self, but the arrogant confidence in his eyes now had a harder, more dangerous edge. He had been reanimated by the promise of revenge.
He leaned back in his new leather chair, a satisfied, proprietary smirk on his face as he watched the news reports of Ryu's wanted status play out on a side screen.
"See, Yoo-jin?" he said, his voice dripping with condescending satisfaction. "I told you. You don't fight a wildfire with a bucket of water. You start a bigger, back-burning fire and let them consume each other. Now Ryu isn't a ghost anymore. He's a target. The entire country is looking for him. He's been flushed out of the shadows and into the open."
Yoo-jin, standing before the monitor, was in no mood for celebration. "He's been flushed out, but he hasn't been caught. Where will he run? Gyu-ri, you know him better than anyone on this planet. How will he react to this?"
This was the moment Yoo-jin was paying for, the expertise that had cost him so much to acquire. Gyu-ri's smirk faded, replaced by a look of intense, analytical concentration. He was no longer the preening rival; he was a master profiler dissecting his most fascinating subject.
"First, understand his emotional state," Gyu-ri began, his voice taking on a clinical, detached tone. "He will be incandescent with rage. But not because he's a wanted man. He doesn't care about the police; he sees them as incompetent insects. He will be furious because we ruined his art. He had constructed a perfect, elegant narrative designed to psychologically dismantle you. We took his masterpiece and scribbled all over it with a crayon. He will see this not as a strategic move, but as an act of profound, unforgivable disrespect."
"So he'll go to ground? Disappear?" Min-ji asked from her station, her voice clipped, still refusing to show Gyu-ri any deference.
Gyu-ri let out a short, sharp laugh. "Absolutely not. That's what a normal criminal would do. Ryu has never considered himself to be normal. He sees himself as a superior intellect, a player in a game no one else is smart enough to understand. He will see this not as a defeat, but as a challenge. An escalation. He won't run. He won't hide. He will double down."
Yoo-jin paced the room. "And where does a man like that double down? Where does he feel safe?"
"Ryu is a creature of absolute comfort and aesthetic control," Gyu-ri explained, painting a vivid portrait of his former subordinate. "He despises filth, chaos, and inefficiency. That billiards hall I was rotting in? He would rather set himself on fire than set foot in a place like that. He surrounds himself with clean lines, bleeding-edge technology, and sterile, laboratory-like environments. He finds comfort in order and data. So, he's not hiding in some rundown slum or an anonymous motel. He's hiding in plain sight. In a place that feels like home. A high-tech, high-end, minimalist apartment or officetel. A place that looks and feels like a laboratory for his experiments."
Gyu-ri's profile was a revelation. It gave Min-ji a completely new, refined set of parameters for her search. She was no longer looking for a ghost anywhere in a city of ten million people. She was now looking for a very specific type of needle in a much smaller haystack.
Her fingers flew across her keyboard, her previous frustration gone, replaced by the thrill of a new hunt. "Okay," she said, thinking aloud as she worked. "Filtering all residential and commercial properties in Seoul. I'm eliminating anything older than five years. Focusing on new-builds with high-tech amenities."
The list on her screen, once impossibly long, shrank dramatically.
"Now, let's narrow it down," Gyu-ri's voice guided her, the two of them falling into an uneasy but brutally effective rhythm. "Look for buildings with state-of-the-art fiber optic infrastructure, gigabit-plus speeds. He would prioritize digital access above all else. But cross-reference that with their physical security systems. He's arrogant. He would see human guards as unreliable, fallible. Look for buildings that have advanced digital security—keycards, remote access—but older or less robust on-site personnel."
Min-ji's fingers kept moving, adding new filters, her search algorithm growing more complex and more precise with every suggestion Gyu-ri made. "Adding a filter for proximity to major data hubs and internet exchange points… Cross-referencing short-term lease agreements from the last three months…"
"Now for the final piece," Gyu-ri said. "Payment. He wouldn't use a credit card or a bank transfer. Filter for properties where the lease was paid entirely upfront, six months or more, through an untraceable method. An offshore shell corporation, or a direct transfer from a high-volume cryptocurrency tumbler."
The search results, which had numbered in the thousands just minutes before, collapsed. The list on Min-ji's screen now showed less than twenty buildings. Twenty possible lairs scattered across the city.
"I have a list," Min-ji announced, a note of grim triumph in her voice.
"Good," Yoo-jin said, stopping his pacing. "Start with the one at the top. I want everything you can find on it. Blueprints, tenant lists, security protocols. Everything."
The hunt was on. The uneasy alliance was bearing its first, dangerous fruit. Min-ji was providing the raw, unstoppable data-crunching power. But it was Nam Gyu-ri, the disgraced serpent, who had provided the twisted, intuitive insight to aim her weapon. They were no longer searching blindly in the dark. They now had a map to the heart of the enemy's territory.