The massive digital projection on the concrete wall suddenly blinked from warning red to a dead, hollow black.
Yoo-jin's chest burned with an agonizing, consuming fire. Every shallow breath scraped against his shattered ribs like broken glass. He pressed his bloody thumb harder against the fake detonator.
The tiny green light blinked on the cheap plastic casing. It was an entirely useless prop.
Six flawless, identical supersoldiers stood completely frozen in a tight circle around him. They looked like expensive mannequins trapped in a dusty warehouse. Their bio-engineered brains were caught in a violent loop of contradictory code.
Yoo-jin tasted hot, metallic blood on his tongue. He swallowed it down, refusing to break eye contact with the monsters.
He simply needed sixty seconds. Just one minute for Kai and Sae-ri to plant the stolen Ministry explosives and blow the heavy steel doors at the top of the surface stairwell. He had absolute faith in his cast.
Eden stood quietly directly beside him. The towering android's ruined chassis sparked wildly in the cold air. Half of his synthetic face was completely torn away, exposing the glowing blue optical sensor and intricate metallic skull underneath.
Neither of them moved a single inch. The cavernous, blood-slicked loading dock was suffocatingly silent.
Then, a sharp burst of frantic static violently pierced Yoo-jin's right earpiece.
"Hyung!" David screamed through the secure frequency. The young hacker sounded utterly terrified. "Hyung, something is terribly wrong!"
Yoo-jin didn't flinch. "Keep the comms clear, David. Maintain the biometric projection on the wall."
"I'm not doing it!" David yelled back, the rapid clacking of his keyboard echoing loudly over the mic. "Someone else just brute-forced their way into the mainframe!"
Yoo-jin stiffened instantly. His cold, calculating producer instincts violently flared to life.
The heavy industrial spotlight acting as their makeshift projector flickered wildly above them. The massive red numbers displaying Yoo-jin's failing heart rate completely vanished from the concrete wall.
The wall went perfectly, pitch black.
A new line of text slowly crawled across the dark concrete in massive font. It glowed with a harsh, blinding white light.
AUTHORIZATION_OVERRIDE: M.GOLD
Yoo-jin stared blankly at the stark white letters. A freezing chill violently crashed through his battered body, momentarily numbing the burning pain in his wounded shoulder.
Mason Gold was a catatonic vegetable lying helplessly in a hospital bed miles away. The brutal Zenith CEO had lost his mind to the Violet Signal. But the monstrous executive had never left his entertainment agency entirely unprotected.
He had buried an automated dark-web contingency failsafe deep inside the underground servers.
The paradox was officially, catastrophically broken.
Mason Gold's shadow protocol just manually severed the database deletion command from the clones' core prime directive. They no longer needed to protect the server at all costs. The master database was securely locked down from the outside.
Yoo-jin's life instantly lost all its tactical bargaining value. He was no longer the DRM Master Key holding the agency hostage.
He was just a canceled extra standing uselessly on the stage.
"Hyung, they're aggressively disconnecting the local feed!" David frantically typed over the comms. "It's locking me out of the sub-basement controls! I can't stop the override from Incheon!"
"Drop the connection entirely, David," Yoo-jin ordered coldly.
"But the clones are going to—"
"I said drop it!" Yoo-jin snapped sharply.
He didn't panic. He didn't waste precious seconds cursing Mason Gold's terrifying, posthumous foresight. His recently restored human emotions were burning fiercely in his chest, but his ruthless, objective muscle memory firmly kept him in the director's chair.
The script had simply changed. He needed to severely edit the scene immediately.
The six frozen clones blinked in perfect, terrifying unison.
The catastrophic logic error instantly cleared from their advanced neural networks. Their dead, emotionless eyes snapped violently away from the blank wall. They locked directly onto Yoo-jin's pale, bleeding face.
They were entirely awake.
Yoo-jin slowly opened his bloody right hand. He let the crude remote detonator slip casually from his trembling fingers.
The small plastic box hit the concrete floor and shattered into dozens of useless pieces.
The clones didn't hesitate. They didn't gloat or posture for the cameras.
They simultaneously reached to their belts and gripped their heavy, serrated tactical knives. The perfectly synchronized scrape of thick steel sliding out of leather holsters echoed loudly in the silent room. The sound was absolutely deafening.
They stepped forward as one cohesive unit. The massive circle around Yoo-jin instantly tightened, cutting off any possible escape route.
Yoo-jin couldn't lift his wounded left arm. His legs were completely numb from massive blood loss. If a physical melee fight broke out now, he would be carved into bloody pieces in less than two seconds.
He didn't bother looking at the deadly assassins rapidly closing in on him. He turned his head squarely toward his heavily damaged stage manager.
"Eden," Yoo-jin barked sharply.
The android's glowing blue eye whirred loudly, locking intensely onto Yoo-jin's face. "Awaiting final direction, Producer."
Yoo-jin pointed his bloody finger at the massive, gray metal breaker box securely mounted on the far wall. It controlled the heavy industrial power grid for the entire subterranean Ministry facility.
"Kill the main grid," Yoo-jin ordered without a trace of hesitation.
He didn't sugarcoat the deadly command. He didn't apologize for asking a machine to willingly destroy itself for him again. He treated the android exactly like the indispensable, brilliant partner he was.
Eden didn't calculate the massive physical risk to his own damaged hardware. He simply executed the brutal cue.
The towering android violently lunged past the advancing clones. His heavy, metallic boots cracked the pristine concrete tiles with terrifying force.
Two of the supersoldiers instantly pivoted, slashing their heavy knives directly toward Eden's exposed neck wiring. The thick steel blades sparked violently against his reinforced synthetic shoulder, tearing away large chunks of faux human flesh.
Eden completely ignored the massive physical damage.
He crashed heavily into the concrete wall directly in front of the massive breaker box. He raised his bare, sparking synthetic right hand high into the air. He didn't try to safely pry open the heavy metal latch.
Eden violently plunged his metallic fist straight through the thick steel casing.
The horrific crunch of rending metal echoed loudly through the loading dock. Eden's synthetic fingers dug directly into the live, high-voltage master cables pumping raw electricity into the secret bunker.
Yoo-jin squeezed his eyes tightly shut and threw his uninjured arm over his face. He felt a sharp, violent pang of profound human guilt aggressively tear through his chest.
He buried the devastating feeling instantly. Brutal survival demanded complete, unfeeling objectivity.
A massive, deafening explosion of raw blue electricity violently erupted from the torn wall.
The sheer, terrifying voltage violently arced straight through Eden's metallic chassis. The android's massive frame jerked wildly as thousands of volts aggressively surged into his localized core. A blinding, localized lightning storm completely engulfed his broken body, instantly overloading the bunker's central power relays.
Every single light in the cavernous loading dock violently exploded simultaneously.
The massive overhead industrial spotlight shattered into a thousand pieces of burning glass that rained heavily down on the concrete. The emergency backup bulbs on the walls popped loudly in rapid, terrifying succession.
The subterranean room was instantly plunged into absolute, suffocating pitch blackness.
The sudden, violent sensory deprivation hit the six bio-engineered clones like a physical brick wall. Their hyper-sensitive, genetically modified eyes, previously adjusted to the blinding white spotlight, were completely overwhelmed by the violent transition.
They froze in the absolute darkness, their perfect, deadly coordination temporarily shattered.
Yoo-jin dropped violently to his knees in the pitch black. The jagged, tearing pain in his broken ribs nearly made him pass out on the spot. He crawled blindly backward on the cold, slick concrete, desperately putting physical distance between himself and the deadly blades.
"Eden," Yoo-jin gasped into the dark, his voice barely a rasping whisper.
There was no mechanical response. The heavy, choking scent of raw ozone and melting synthetic rubber rapidly filled the dark, stagnant air.
Yoo-jin bit his bloody lip hard enough to taste fresh copper. He had sacrificed his best co-star to buy a massive window of tactical opportunity. He absolutely refused to let the bloody scene go to waste.
He reached up with a trembling hand and tapped his secure earpiece.
"Kai," Yoo-jin choked out, violently spitting more dark blood onto the floor. "Cue the pyrotechnics right now."
He didn't wait for a verbal confirmation from his action star.
Three agonizing seconds later, the heavy concrete ceiling directly above them shook with terrifying, earth-shattering violence.
The massive, reinforced steel bunker doors aggressively blocking the stairwell to the surface were entirely obliterated. A deafening, concussive roar ripped completely through the dark loading dock, vibrating violently through the thick concrete floor beneath Yoo-jin's knees.
A massive shower of pulverized gray rock, twisted rebar, and burning hot metal rained heavily down into the pitch-black darkness.
The sheer concussive force of the massive explosion threw the blinded clones violently off their feet.
A blinding, razor-sharp beam of afternoon sunlight violently sliced through the thick smoke, illuminating the terrifying stage.