The silence inside the penthouse was absolute. It was a dead, sterile quiet that felt fundamentally wrong. Kang moved with fluid, predatory grace, his weapon sweeping across the cavernous main room, clearing corners with years of ingrained training. Yoo-jin and Gyu-ri fanned out behind him, their eyes trying to pierce the oppressive darkness. The only light came from the city itself, a distant, glittering tapestry seen through the massive floor-to-ceiling windows.
The layout was exactly as the blueprints had shown, and just as Gyu-ri had predicted. It was less a home and more a high-tech command center. In the center of the massive living area, where a normal person would have sofas and a coffee table, stood racks upon racks of humming, high-end computer servers. Thick bundles of neatly managed cables snaked across the floor, connecting workstations, monitors, and networking hardware. The place smelled of cooling fans and static electricity. It was the lair of a digital dragon.
But the dragon wasn't home.
Kang's voice, a low whisper in their earpieces, confirmed what they already felt in their bones. "Clear! Master bedroom is empty. Kitchen is clear. No one's here."
His team, having ascended the stairs, did a final, swift sweep of the upper level of the duplex penthouse. The result was the same. "Rooftop team reports the balcony and terrace are clear. The entire residence is empty."
Yoo-jin felt a cold, sinking dread in the pit of his stomach. This was wrong. All of it. The elaborate plan, the high-stakes infiltration, the silent, empty rooms. They hadn't cornered their enemy. They had walked onto a stage that had been set for them.
Nam Gyu-ri let out a soft, almost inaudible sound. It was a chuckle of pure, grudging admiration. He walked past Yoo-jin, his gaze sweeping over the racks of powerful servers. "The bastard…" he muttered, a slow shake of his head. "He knew we were coming. Of course, he knew. This was never his base of operations. It was just his theater."
In the center of the vast, dark room, on a single, starkly modern desk, sat one object: an open laptop. Its screen glowed with a soft white light, a solitary beacon in the darkness. It was the only thing in the room that felt personal, the only thing that didn't feel like part of a cold, technological array. It was an invitation.
Gyu-ri was the first to approach it, his earlier bravado replaced by the cautious respect of one grandmaster approaching another's final, brilliant move on the chessboard. "He wanted us to get this far," Gyu-ri said quietly. "He needed us to be here, in this room, for his final performance."
On the laptop screen was a clean, minimalist desktop. In the center was a single video file. The icon was labeled, simply: FOR YOO-JIN. PLAY ME.
Yoo-jin felt a chill crawl up his spine. This was the real trap. Not a bomb, not an ambush, but a message. Against every instinct for self-preservation, against Kang's silent, cautionary glance, he stepped forward and clicked the file.
The video opened, filling the screen. Ryu appeared. He was not in the penthouse. He was in a small, completely white, anonymous room. There were no distinguishing features, no clues to his location. He was seated, looking directly into the camera, a calm, almost pitying smile on his face. He looked relaxed, like a professor about to deliver a lecture he was particularly proud of.
"Hello, Han Yoo-jin," Ryu began, his voice smooth and maddeningly reasonable. "If you are watching this, it means your clever, multi-layered little plan worked perfectly. Congratulations. You found my nest. Or, at least, the one I built for you to find."
He paused, letting the words sink in. "You must be wondering why. Why all this theater? Why the dead girl, the ruined actor, the public humiliation? You probably think this has been about revenge for OmniCorp. For my career. That was always Nam Gyu-ri's pathetic motivation, wasn't it?" He glanced to the side as if he could see Gyu-ri standing right there in the room with them. "No. My motivation is, and always has been, far simpler. This was never about business. It was about you. And your… unique ability."
Yoo-jin's blood turned to ice.
The screen behind Ryu, which had been blank white, suddenly changed. It now showed a grainy, black-and-white security photo. A mangled car. The flashing lights of an ambulance. A hospital entrance. It was dated over a decade ago.
"You see," Ryu continued, his voice taking on the detached tone of a research scientist explaining his methodology, "my father was the lead software engineer on a top-secret government project called 'Prometheus.' A project designed to create a cognitive enhancement interface that could neurally link with a human brain to identify and quantify abstract concepts. Talent, potential, emotional resonance, even a person's propensity for scandal. It was deemed too dangerous, too unpredictable, and was officially scrapped. The program was terminated, and the sole working prototype was supposedly destroyed."
Ryu leaned forward slightly, his eyes holding Yoo-jin's through the screen. "But it wasn't destroyed. My father, fearing his life's work would be lost, took the prototype. A small, bio-integrated chip. And then, he was involved in a traffic accident. A terrible pile-up. An accident with a young, ambitious A&R manager who suffered a severe head trauma in the crash."
The world tilted on its axis. Yoo-jin could feel the blood draining from his face. The headaches. The flashes of light. The "awakening" after his accident. It wasn't a miracle. It wasn't a gift from the heavens.
"Your Producer's Eye isn't a miracle, Yoo-jin," Ryu said, confirming the horrifying truth. "It isn't a superpower granted by a benevolent god. It's a piece of stolen, experimental military technology that has been embedded in your cerebral cortex for the last ten years. And it has been slowly, systematically, rewriting your brain ever since."
He smiled again, that calm, terrifying smile. "My father passed away a few years ago. In his notes, he detailed what he had lost, and who it was likely lost to. I have been studying you ever since. I didn't want to destroy your company; that was just a necessary stimulus. I wanted to test the system. To push you, to see what the Prometheus interface was truly capable of when subjected to extreme, multi-faceted stress. This whole affair… it was all just the final, most glorious experiment. And you, my dear producer, have provided the most spectacular data."
Ryu's expression was one of pure, scientific triumph. "The experiment is now over. The data is collected. Thank you for your participation."
The video ended.
But as the screen went black, a final, embedded command in the video file executed. A line of red text flashed across the laptop screen: [SYSTEM DATA WIPE INITIATED. GOODBYE.]
At that exact instant, every single server, every monitor, every piece of humming equipment in the vast penthouse gave a collective sigh. The thousands of tiny blue and green indicator lights blinked out in unison. The cooling fans spun down into a final, deafening silence.
Yoo-jin stood frozen in the dark, silent penthouse, the echo of Ryu's words shattering his entire reality. His power. His identity. His success. His genius. It was all a lie. A side effect of a technology he had never understood. And the only man in the world who held all the answers had just vanished, taking all the evidence, all the data, with him. He was left alone, in the dark, in the wreckage of his own perceived reality, no longer a king, but merely a broken experiment.