The Scandal-Proof Producer

The conference room at Aura Management was once again a war room, the air thick with a tense, expectant silence. Yoo-jin, Oh Min-ji, and Go Min-young were waiting, the remnants of untouched coffee cups testifying to the anxiety of the last hour. The door opened and Chae-rin walked in. She was pale, her shoulders tight with residual stress, but her eyes were clear and steady. There was a new, hard-won stillness about her.

She walked to the head of the table and placed the clean phone and the silver locket down with deliberate care.

"It didn't vibrate," she announced, her voice quiet but firm. "The room was clean."

A collective, inaudible sigh of relief seemed to pass through the room. Yoo-jin gave a single, sharp nod of approval.

"Report," he said, his tone that of a commander addressing a trusted soldier, not a fragile artist. The respect in that single word was worth more to Chae-rin than any praise.

But before she could speak, Min-ji, ever the pragmatist, reached for the phone. "The recording first. The verbal report can be colored by perception. The data is pure."

She plugged the phone into her tablet. A few keystrokes later, the audio from the museum cafe began to play through the conference room's high-fidelity speakers. The recording was crystal clear. They heard the faint clink of porcelain, the distant murmur of other patrons, and then, the smooth, confident voice of Dr. Elias Thorne.

The team listened in rapt silence. They heard Chae-rin's performance—the slight, believable nervousness in her voice, the soft-spoken questions that so cleverly flipped the conversation. It was a masterful portrayal of the shy artist, a role she now knew how to wear like a costume.

Then they heard him. They listened to Thorne's eloquent, condescending lectures, his voice dripping with academic authority as he spoke of the human soul in the cold, detached language of a technician. He used their words—art, creativity, inspiration—but he hollowed them out, refilling them with his own meaning. Art became a "high-amplitude data stream." Inspiration was a "neuro-chemical event to be optimized." Love was an "evolutionary bonding algorithm."

Go Min-young, the team's emotional barometer, flinched with every clinical phrase. Her pen was still, her face a mask of horrified disbelief. This was a man who looked at a beautiful painting and saw only a collection of color codes and geometric patterns.

The recording reached its climax: Thorne's final, chilling offer to help Chae-rin "silence her roar."

"...We could, in essence, give your echo the power to silence her roar."

When the recorded words filled the room, Min-young physically recoiled, a soft gasp escaping her lips. It was the casual cruelty of it, the way he offered to destroy a relationship and weaponize an artist's insecurity as if he were suggesting a software upgrade.

Oh Min-ji, however, merely nodded, a flicker of what could almost be described as professional respect in her cold eyes. "He's good," she stated flatly, as if analyzing a rival's strategy in a chess match. "He correctly identified a perceived emotional vulnerability—her imposter syndrome—and offered a technical, power-granting solution as the cure. It's classic recruitment methodology. Textbook, even."

The recording ended. The silence that followed was heavy with the weight of what they had just heard.

"Your report," Yoo-jin repeated, his gaze now fixed on Chae-rin.

This time, she was ready. Speaking with a newfound confidence that surprised even herself, she delivered her analysis. "He never mentioned OmniCorp. He never lied about who he worked for, not directly. He hid in plain sight behind the Eidolon Initiative." She leaned forward, her thoughts clear and organized. "But his entire philosophy… it's about breaking everything down. He doesn't see artists; he sees 'organic signal generators.' He looks at a song not as a piece of art, but as a puzzle to be solved. He's not trying to help people. He's trying to collect data to perfect his machine."

Her insight was sharp, cutting to the very heart of the threat. She hadn't just recorded the conversation; she had understood it on a fundamental level.

In that moment, the dynamic in the room underwent a profound and permanent shift. Chae-rin was no longer the girl they had to shield. She was a vital part of their defense, a perceptive agent who had walked into the lion's den and emerged with a blueprint of its teeth.

Yoo-jin gave her a look of deep, genuine pride. "Well done, Chae-rin," he said simply. He then turned to Min-young. "Ask Da-eun to come in."

Ahn Da-eun had been pacing in the lounge, a bundle of nervous energy. She entered the conference room, her eyes immediately finding Chae-rin, searching her face for any sign of distress. "What happened? Are you okay?"

Yoo-jin decided on transparency. There could be no more secrets within these walls. "OmniCorp's agent, Dr. Thorne, tried to recruit Chae-rin," he explained in a calm, even tone. "His strategy was to turn you two against each other. He offered Chae-rin a technical way to 'beat' you in the duet."

Da-eun's jaw went slack with shock. Her gaze darted from Yoo-jin to Chae-rin.

"She knew it was a trap," Yoo-jin continued. "She went to the meeting as part of our plan. She recorded the entire conversation for us."

The sequence of emotions on Da-eun's face was a storm. Shock gave way to confusion, then to dawning comprehension, and finally, it settled into a cold, hard fury. But the anger wasn't directed at Chae-rin. It was a fierce, protective rage for her.

"That son of a bitch," she growled, her hands clenching into fists. She looked at Chae-rin, at her pale face and the steady resolve in her eyes, and finally understood the full weight of what the younger girl had just done. "He tried to use me to get to you. To turn us against each other."

She walked over to Chae-rin's chair and put a hand on her shoulder, the gesture solid and reassuring. The rivalry, the awkwardness, the misunderstanding—it all evaporated in that single moment of shared fury against a common enemy. They were no longer just colleagues or reluctant duet partners. They were soldiers in the same trench, watching each other's backs.

"He's waiting for something," Yoo-jin said, his voice drawing their attention. "Chae-rin baited the hook perfectly."

It was Min-ji who outlined the next phase, her voice cutting through the emotional aftermath with icy precision. "He's waiting for a 'clean recording of Ms. Ahn's voice.' This is our opening. Our chance to move from defense to offense."

She looked around the table, her eyes glinting with a dangerous intelligence. "We will provide it to him. The audio file he receives will be a Trojan horse. I'll embed a custom-written worm into the file's metadata. It will be dormant and passive, designed to bypass their initial security scans, which will be looking for active attacks. When he loads the file into their proprietary analysis software, the worm will activate. It won't steal data; that would be too noisy and easily detected. It will do something much simpler. It will map the internal architecture of their network—their servers, their security protocols, their data pathways—and it will send a single, tiny, encrypted packet back to us with the blueprint."

She leaned back, a faint, chilling smile on her lips. "He wanted to analyze our art. So we'll let him. And while he's busy looking at the data, we'll be looking at the architecture of his entire machine."