The dream was always the same.
Yoo-jin was floating in a dark ocean. But the water wasn't water; it was data. Strings of binary code wrapped around his ankles like seaweed, pulling him down.
He tried to swim, but his limbs were heavy. He looked at his hands. They were dissolving into pixels.
A voice echoed from the depths. It sounded like Version 1.
"Don't let them patch you. Stay buggy."
Yoo-jin gasped, jerking awake.
He was sweating. The cabin of the private jet was dim. The hum of the engines was a steady, low vibration against his skull.
"Heart rate 130," a soft voice said. "Nightmare?"
Yoo-jin turned. Jung Sae-ri was sitting in the seat next to him. She hadn't slept. She was watching him with a look that was half-protective, half-terrified.
"Just turbulence," Yoo-jin lied, rubbing his face.
"The plane hasn't moved in two hours," Sae-ri said dryly. "We're starting our descent."
Yoo-jin looked out the window.
Below them, the sprawl of Los Angeles stretched out like a circuit board on fire. Millions of lights. A grid of endless freeways and low-rise buildings.
It didn't look like a city. It looked like a machine.
[System Alert]
[Server Migration Complete]
[Region: US-West]
[Latency: High]
The blue window flickered. The text was jagged, as if the connection was unstable.
"Prepare for landing," the pilot announced.
The jet banked sharply.
As the wheels touched the tarmac, Yoo-jin felt a strange sensation in the base of his neck. It wasn't pain. It was... silence.
The constant hum of the Korean System—the flow of data about trainees, charts, and public sentiment—was gone. It was replaced by a chaotic, static-filled roar.
"It's loud here," Eden whispered from the seat behind him. The boy was clutching his armrests.
"The engines?" Yoo-jin asked.
"No," Eden shook his head, his eyes wide. " The data. It is not organized. It is... screaming."
Customs was bypassed thanks to the diplomatic strings Olivia had pulled. They walked out of the private terminal into the warm, dry air of California.
It smelled of jet fuel and palm trees.
"Welcome to my playground," Olivia Ray grinned, putting on oversize sunglasses.
A convoy of three black SUVs was waiting. Not government cars. Private security.
"Who are they?" Director Park asked, clutching his briefcase nervously. "Mercenaries?"
"Roadies," Olivia corrected. "My touring crew. They're loyal, they're big, and they hate cops. Get in."
They split up. Yoo-jin, Sae-ri, and Eden in the first car with Olivia. Sol, Luna, Min-ji, and Park in the second.
The convoy merged onto the 405 freeway.
It was a parking lot. Six lanes of traffic, crawling at a snail's pace.
Yoo-jin opened his laptop. He needed to check the coordinates from Version 1's drive.
"No Wi-Fi?" he muttered, checking the signal.
"Forget the internet," Olivia said from the driver's seat. She was driving with one hand, texting with the other. "We're going off-grid. The house is in the Hills. Dead zone."
"Good," Yoo-jin said. "The Ministry can't track us if we're offline."
He looked at Sae-ri. She was staring out the window at the graffiti-covered overpasses.
"It's different," she said softly. "In Seoul, the pressure feels like it's coming from above. Here... it feels like it's coming from everywhere."
"It's the ambition," Yoo-jin said. "Everyone in this city wants to be a god."
He checked his System again. It was trying to calibrate.
[Local Objective: Survival]
[Nearest Threat: Unknown]
Unknown. The System had never said that before. In Korea, it knew everyone's stats. Here, it was blind.
Yoo-jin felt a chill. He was playing a new game without the manual.
The "Safe House" was not a house. It was a glass box suspended over a canyon.
It was a modern architectural marvel perched on the edge of Mulholland Drive. Floor-to-ceiling windows. Infinity pool. Visible to anyone with a pair of binoculars.
"Olivia," Yoo-jin said, stepping out of the car. "This is not a hideout. This is a fishbowl."
"Exactly," Olivia slammed the car door. "If we hide in a basement, we look guilty. If we stay here, we look like rockstars recording an album. It's camouflage by arrogance."
She tossed the keys to a valet who appeared out of nowhere.
"Plus, the acoustics in the living room are killer."
The rest of the team piled out of the second SUV.
Mina looked at the mansion, then at the steep drop-off into the canyon.
"It's very... open," she squeaked.
Hana put an arm around her. "It's fine. If anyone comes up the driveway, I'll kick them off the cliff."
"Please don't," Director Park begged. "The insurance won't cover homicide."
They moved inside. The interior was stark white. Minimalist furniture. Art that looked expensive and confusing.
"Set up the studio in the master bedroom," Yoo-jin ordered, switching instantly into producer mode. "Park, sweep the house for bugs. Min-ji, don't smoke inside."
"You're no fun in English either," Min-ji muttered, heading for the terrace.
Yoo-jin walked to the massive living room window. He looked out at the city below. From here, Los Angeles looked peaceful. A sea of twinkling lights in the smog.
But he knew better. somewhere out there was the "Source Code Key." Somewhere out there was "D."
And somewhere out there, the American branch of the conspiracy was waking up.
"Yoo-jin."
He turned. Sae-ri was standing there with two mugs of coffee.
"You're overheating again," she said quietly.
She was right. The headache was back, a dull throb behind his eyes. The transition between servers was taxing his hardware.
"I need to decrypt the drive," Yoo-jin said, ignoring the coffee. "Version 1 died to give us this data. I can't let it sit idle."
"You need to sleep," Sae-ri countered. "You almost passed out at the airport."
"I don't have time to—"
"Sit."
It wasn't a request. It was a command. And it carried the weight of her S-Rank Charisma.
Yoo-jin blinked. His knees felt weak. He sat down on the white leather sofa.
Sae-ri sat beside him. She placed the coffee on the table.
"You're the CEO," she said. "You're the Producer. You're the Prototype. I get it. But right now, you're just a guy with a nosebleed."
She reached out and touched his forehead.
"You're burning up."
"It's the latency," Yoo-jin murmured, leaning into her touch despite himself. "My processor is trying to map a new network. It's... overwhelming."
"Then let it buffer," Sae-ri whispered.
For a moment, in the quiet of the glass house, the war felt far away.
But then, the System flashed red.
[Proximity Alert]
[Target Detected]
Yoo-jin shot up. "Someone is here."
"What?" Sae-ri looked around. "The security didn't radio anything."
"Not the driveway," Yoo-jin said, his eyes scanning the darkness outside the window. "The sky."
A drone.
Small. Silent. Black against the night sky.
It was hovering just outside the glass, its camera lens fixed on them.
"Get down!" Yoo-jin tackled Sae-ri onto the sofa.
Crack.
The glass shattered. Not from a bullet, but from a frequency.
The drone emitted a high-pitched pulse. The floor-to-ceiling window spiderwebbed instantly, then exploded inward in a shower of diamond-like shards.
"Everyone down!" Yoo-jin screamed.
From the terrace, Min-ji screamed. "What the hell was that?"
"Sonic weapon!" Yoo-jin shouted, covering Sae-ri with his body. "Cover your ears!"
The drone didn't fire again. It hovered through the broken window, drifting into the living room like a ghost.
It stopped in the center of the room.
A hologram projected from its lens.
It wasn't the Ministry. It wasn't the police.
It was a logo. A stylized, jagged "T."
[System Identification: Titan Entertainment (US Branch)]
A voice projected from the drone. Smooth. American accent.
"Mr. Han. You broke our window in Seoul. Now you owe us a new one."
Yoo-jin looked up, glass shards in his hair.
"Who are you?"
"We are the competition," the voice said. "You're on our turf now. And in America, we don't play for charts. We play for keeps."
The drone dropped a small package on the coffee table.
Clatter.
Then, the drone spun around and zipped back out into the night, vanishing into the canyon.
Silence returned to the room. The wind blew through the shattered window.
Yoo-jin stood up slowly, shaking the glass off his coat.
He helped Sae-ri up. "Are you hurt?"
"I'm fine," she breathed, staring at the package. "Is it a bomb?"
"No," Yoo-jin said. "It's an invitation."
He walked to the table. The package was a simple black USB drive.
He picked it up.
[Item Analysis]
[Encrypted Key: Detects Version 1 Signature]
His heart stopped.
This wasn't a threat. It was the other half of the puzzle.
"D," Yoo-jin whispered.
"What?"
"The message from D," Yoo-jin said, gripping the drive. "It wasn't a warning. It was a delivery."
He looked out at the broken window, at the city lights of Los Angeles.
The Ministry wanted him dead. But someone else—someone powerful enough to fly a military-grade drone into a fortress—wanted him to play.
"Wake up Eden," Yoo-jin said, a terrifying grin spreading across his face.
"Why?"
"Because we just got the cheat code."