Leo's victory on the first leaderboard was not a cause for celebration; it was a declaration of war. By placing himself so far ahead with a metric no one else could compete with, he had made himself the sole target. He had cornered his rivals, and he knew, with the cold certainty of his Strategic Patience, that they would lash out.
He didn't have to wait long. The first attack was clumsy, born of desperation. He received a notification from his Corporate Espionage skill—a digital tripwire had been triggered. Someone using Mark Jennings's login credentials had attempted to access the raw data feeds for the PMO project from a remote server. It was a classic, amateurish attempt at sabotage.
Leo smiled. The file Mark had tried to access was a canary trap, a beautifully crafted piece of bait. It was a dummy file, designed to look like a critical data set, but its only function was to log the identity of anyone who touched it. Mark had just signed his confession. Leo did nothing. He saved the log file in his Receipts folder and let Mark think he had gotten away with it. There was no value in exposing him now; a cornered rat was more predictable.
The second front was more complex. Eleanor Vance was a woman of principle, but her team was not. They were burning out, producing mountains of data that were being ignored in favor of Leo's "strategic innovation." They pressured her, begged her to fight fire with fire. Leo, monitoring internal communications, watched her resistance crumble. She finally authorized her team to "explore alternative data-gathering methods." It was a quiet, desperate surrender to the new, dirty rules of the game.
But the true threat emerged from a direction he hadn't anticipated. There was a third manager in the death match, one he had dismissed as irrelevant: Evelyn Reed, the head of Competitive Intelligence.
Evelyn was different. She was in her late thirties, with a sharp, analytical gaze and a reputation for being ruthlessly ethical. She produced very few reports, but when she did, they were flawless, undeniable, and often devastating. She didn't play political games, and she viewed data not as a tool for persuasion, but as a weapon of pure, unadulterated truth.
On Friday, she made her first move. She released a single, two-page report to the executive board. It was a masterpiece of surgical precision. It contained no new data. Instead, it was an analysis of the data being produced by the other departments.
With chilling accuracy, she exposed a critical flaw in the market assumptions used by both Eleanor's and Mark's recent reports, proving their projections were off by as much as 15%. She used their own data to dismantle their conclusions, revealing their work as rushed and sloppy.
Most tellingly, her report did not mention Leo or his PMO project at all.
By ignoring him, she had done more damage than any direct attack. She had subtly framed the entire competition as a chaotic scrum between three flawed managers, while positioning herself as the only objective, reliable voice in the room. She was demonstrating her value not by producing volume or innovation, but by being the ultimate arbiter of truth.
Leo's System flared with a high-level alert, the first he'd seen in months.
[CRITICAL THREAT DETECTED: The Inquisitor] [Subject: Evelyn Reed. Primary Skills: Truth Seeker (S+), Analytical Integrity (S), Reputational Shield (A+)] [Analysis: This unit is a new archetype. She does not compete on the established metrics. Her strategy is to become the System's auditor. She is immune to Data Mirage because her primary weapon is exposing the flaws in all data, real or fabricated.]
Leo stared across the office floor toward Evelyn's department. She was standing by a window, looking out at the city, calm and composed. She was not a rat to be trapped or a politician to be outmaneuvered. She was a different kind of player altogether.
She was a hunter. And she was hunting lies.
He looked at his own empire, built on a beautiful, intricate, and completely fraudulent foundation. For the first time since the Death Match began, Leo Zhang felt a flicker of genuine, professional concern. The game had just become infinitely more dangerous.