Evelyn Reed received the email at 5:00 p.m., just as she was consolidating her notes for the day. The subject line, Inter-Departmental Q3 Efficiency Review, was bland, corporate, and exactly the kind of thing she usually ignored. But the sender, Leo Zhang, made her pause. He was her primary target, the anomaly, the man whose meteoric rise was a statistical improbability. For him to send her a report directly was either an act of supreme arrogance or supreme confidence.
She opened the file.
For the next fifteen minutes, the only sound in her silent, spartan office was the soft, rhythmic tapping of her finger on the desk as she read. Her face, a mask of professional neutrality, did not change. But her mind, a finely-honed instrument for finding the truth, was working at a furious pace.
She was not reading a report. She was reading a declaration of war, but a war fought on her terms.
The data was clean. The sources were impeccable, all drawn from TitanCorp's own internal servers. The conclusions were not speculative; they were mathematical certainties. She, better than anyone, knew the stench of fabricated data, of manipulated variables and skewed charts. This report had none of it. It was pure, unadulterated, and weaponized fact.
She had spent the last two weeks preparing a surgical strike on Leo's dubious PMO project, sharpening her questions, looking for the cracks in his fiction. And in one move, he had rendered her entire investigation moot. He had pivoted. He had abandoned the flimsy shield of his 'innovation' and had instead forged a sword from the very material she championed: truth.
He had not only audited his rivals with a level of brutal efficiency she had to respect, but he had also sent her the results. It was a move of such audacious transparency that it bordered on an insult. He wasn't just showing her their weakness; he was showing her his strength. He was demonstrating that while she was busy auditing his single project, he was capable of auditing the entire division.
A slow, cold smile—an expression so rare for her that it felt foreign—touched her lips. This was no longer a simple audit. This was a game. And her opponent was far more interesting than she had anticipated.
She pulled up a fresh screen and began to type. She ran her own independent queries, her fingers a blur as she pulled the raw server logs Ben and Anna had used. She cross-referenced the project codes and the budget allocations. She spent two hours stress-testing every single claim in Leo's five-page report.
At 7:30 p.m., she leaned back, a flicker of something new in her eyes. Respect.
Every number was correct. Every conclusion was sound. He hadn't just found the truth; he had presented it in the most lethal way possible.
This changed the parameters of her mission. To continue her investigation into the PMO project now would seem petty, a retaliatory move against the man who had just done her job for her, but better. To ignore this report would be a violation of her own core principles.
Leo Zhang had put her in checkmate.
Her phone buzzed. It was a single, automated email from the corporate system. Eleanor Vance had just filed a formal HR complaint against Leo Zhang for "creating a hostile and uncollaborative work environment." A moment later, another one came through from Mark Jennings, citing "unprofessional data targeting."
It was the death rattle of cornered animals. Pathetic, predictable, and ultimately, a waste of time.
Evelyn deleted the HR notifications without reading them. She closed her files, stood up, and looked out the window at the glittering lights of the rival tower where Leo's office was.
She had been sent to investigate a lie. Instead, she had found a man who wielded the truth more effectively than anyone she had ever met. He wasn't the problem she had been sent to solve. He was the solution to a much larger one.
She returned to her desk and typed a short, direct message to a single recipient: Leo Zhang.
Subject: Efficiency
Your report is accurate. Their response is inefficient. The current KPI Death Match is a suboptimal method for identifying leadership. We need to talk.