D-Day for the Heist
The executive office at Flame Entertainment.
Cheon Yoo-ah sat on the sofa with her legs crossed, letting out a quiet sigh as she pressed a hand to her forehead.
This was not what she'd had in mind when she handed over the Free Pass.
Of all people, it had to be that woman.
She'd sensed something rubbing her the wrong way from the very beginning, and sure enough, an incident had blown up in her face.
"Representative Ju."
"Yes, Madam."
"What do you think happens if Moon Soo-yeon joins Flame Entertainment? Would it actually benefit the company?"
"I would have to say yes, by any measure."
"Is that so?"
Her head seemed to be aching; she kept pressing at her temples as she questioned him. Unable to divine the precise intent behind the question, Representative Ju decided it was safest to answer honestly with his own view.
"People have forgotten over the past four years, with all her insistence on dance titles, but her greatest strengths have always been self-producing and her singular sensibility. Once she starts releasing her own compositions and leaning into what she's actually good at, she'll become something else entirely."
"I see."
"And as you've witnessed yourself, Madam, she's no slouch as an actress either—"
"Yes, quite capable. Her career isn't long, so the rough edges show now and then, but hand her the right role and she'll soar."
"Then there's your answer."
"That's what I mean."
By any logic, she was a winning lottery ticket—take her if you possibly could—but something about it kept nagging at Cheon Yoo-ah anyway.
The truth was, she couldn't get a clean read on it.
Whether this would turn out to be gain or loss.
"There's a reason every agency with any real clout has been circling her. It seems Mun Entertainment is starting to feel the pressure as well."
"So they've been assuming all along the renewal was a foregone conclusion, and now they're panicking."
"Even with whatever leverage they think they have, in a situation like this they can't help but worry. Lately it seems they've forbidden her from going out at all."
"Blocking her from any contact with other companies?"
"That's the most reasonable guess."
What a squalid little place.
And Moon Soo-yeon, with her nose firmly ringed, was a genuinely pitiable figure too.
"But didn't you already promise, Madam?"
"I... did promise."
"Then it seems right to prepare for the worst."
"The worst?"
At Representative Ju's advice—if the future can't be known, at least avoid the worst-case scenario—Cheon Yoo-ah's mind began spinning rapidly.
The question was: what was the worst possible outcome here?
"The worst would be... Si-woo leaving the company building."
"Exactly. And the nightmare still hasn't yielded a single clue."
Baek Si-woo's barely concealed attentiveness toward Moon Soo-yeon was, in itself, out of character. A man who showed little interest in anything else was behaving differently around her, and for Cheon Yoo-ah—who wanted to maintain the current state of affairs for the time being—that made him impossible not to guard against.
Even if Moon Soo-yeon stayed with Mun Entertainment, or moved to another agency entirely, were she and Baek Si-woo to become lovers, the odds of him leaving the company building would rise sharply.
An actor with a romantic partner has little reason to keep hovering around his agency's doorstep, after all.
For Cheon Yoo-ah, who had not yet fully escaped her nightmares, this was precisely the thing she most needed to fear.
"If we're planning around the worst case... then bringing her into the company is the right call, isn't it."
Of course, she had no way of knowing whether Baek Si-woo's interest in Moon Soo-yeon was truly that kind of interest. But if the goal was simply to avoid the worst, then accepting her into the agency first was the correct move.
"Ha. Honestly, does it really have to come to this? The world an underling lives in is a cruel one indeed."
Something about it felt tremendously unfair.
Still, it seemed wiser to keep her close and contained somehow, rather than simply leave things alone.
And so Cheon Yoo-ah resolved to bring Moon Soo-yeon into the company first, and worry about the rest afterward.
"I should pass along to Si-woo everything we've dug up so far. It looks better coming from him than from me, given the circumstances."
Throwing in the intelligence they'd gathered on Moon Soo-yeon and Mun Entertainment—handing all of it over to Baek Si-woo as well.
She had made a promise to see this through to the best of her ability, and her conclusion was that whatever happened, it was better to tether the woman inside the company's walls first.
In truth, she'd only had them investigate because she couldn't fathom what kind of company behaved this derangedly—never imagining the findings would end up put to use like this.
"But will it even be possible?"
"Hard to say. Something is clearly tangled up over there. The other agencies can't get so much as a conversation with her, can they? We're the only ones who can, so Si-woo is on-site—he'll manage somehow."
Even now, Cheon Yoo-ah wasn't entirely convinced that taking in Moon Soo-yeon was truly the right decision.
The matter was simply too personal, too emotional, to be settled by cool, rational analysis and a tidy conclusion.
I genuinely have no idea anymore, thought Cheon Yoo-ah, and gave up on the profit-and-loss calculation altogether.
Not long after Cheon Yoo-ah promised to recruit Luna, a rather substantial file landed in my hands.
Intelligence on her—and on her agency, Mun Entertainment.
Typical of Flame Entertainment's meticulous work; apparently they'd compiled a separate dossier on Mun Entertainment as well.
Considering Luna was a singer, this didn't look like material gathered in preparation for F.A. Given how prickly Mun Entertainment had been, it read more like a probe—a search for some soft spot to slip a blade into.
Which meant they'd started investigating before my rumors had even begun to spread. Truly, a magnificent predatory instinct.
"Well, well..."
Luna had originally been entirely alone in the world, without a single living relative. The one who'd taken in Moon Soo-yeon from the childcare facility was the former CEO of Mun Entertainment, a man named Moon Young-woo.
He never formally adopted her, though.
Their shared surname was nothing more than coincidence.
And yet, by all accounts, he chose to embrace that coincidence as if it were fate.
As her guardian, he cared for her with a devotion that outdid most parents doting on their own children.
Those two kindred spirits, joined by Moon Young-woo's acquaintances, became the founding of Mun Entertainment.
The "Mun" in Mun Entertainment was Moon Soo-yeon's name—and Moon Young-woo's.
In its earliest days, Mun Entertainment was, frankly, a feeble little company.
Both Moon Young-woo and Moon Soo-yeon were the sort to prize musicality and self-fulfillment over popular appeal, captivated by a somewhat antiquated conviction that if you just kept singing good songs, recognition would come someday.
But perhaps success really does find those destined for it—starting in Moon Soo-yeon's second year after debut, offers began trickling in, and by her third she'd secured the conditions for a proper career.
The trouble at Mun Entertainment began when its CEO, Moon Young-woo, died without warning.
When Moon Young-woo—who had owned the company's shares outright—passed away, his sole heir, his younger brother, the current CEO of Mun Entertainment, one Moon Young-joo, seized control.
Moon Young-joo, who had long griped about how the company was run, remade singer-songwriter Luna into dance-pop Luna, and from that point on rode an unbroken streak of blockbusters straight through to today.
So in the end, she couldn't bring herself to cut the cord. Neither the former CEO's brother, nor Mun Entertainment itself. And on top of that, there are all the old employees who stayed behind to think about...
This particular dynamic was, truthfully, painfully familiar to me.
Because back in Murim, her circumstances had been much the same.
Back then it had been the organization called Haomun, and the other members of Haomun who were held over her head—used and exploited until, at last, she took her own life.
Looks like this woman was a fool, a pushover, and a sucker there just as she is here.
"And looking at it, the parallels are uncanny. Cheon Yoo-ah, Nam Hyunho—and her, too."
S&M, the vast multinational, and the Sin Sect. Changcheon, one of Korea's great conglomerates, and the Namgung clan. Mun Entertainment, a one-trick agency built entirely on Luna, and Haomun.
Somehow it all felt drearily alike.
"Did her heart waver, at least? She hasn't renewed yet, after all. But in the end it'll amount to nothing more than throwing a tantrum. That's the kind of woman she's always been."
It is rare for an entertainer to see out the full term of an existing contract.
Opening negotiations with plenty of time left on the clock, then renewing or re-signing—that was the industry's unwritten rule.
That her renewal hadn't been completed meant, if you thought about it plainly, that she was in the middle of one very solid sulk.
Of course, left as it was, it was painfully obvious she'd eventually crawl back to Mun Entertainment.
"She's always botched her own endings anyway. So this time, I'll just shove her straight over the edge."
Only this time, I truly hoped the ending would be a beautiful one.
Back on set.
Luna, filming alongside me again today, greeted me with a smile that had all but become routine.
Only a handful of days had passed, but meeting each other like clockwork every day had gradually worn the awkwardness away.
It had all started with that seven-string zither shoot on the very first day.
A musician through and through, she'd shown a real interest in the guqin, and said she liked the melody I played—asked if she might borrow part of it for her own album.
I naturally said yes.
From there the conversation opened up, and we cemented our rapport with a promise that someday, when the chance arose, I would play the guqin for her myself.
"Ah, this drama? The moment I read the script, I thought Wol-hee was simply made for me. You might not know this, but I have a self-composed song called 'Falling Moon.'"
"Yes, I've heard of it. It's a lovely song. Writer Yang actually created Wol-hee after listening to it, you know."
"I heard that story too. That's why I wanted this role all the more."
We didn't talk only about music.
Why she had pushed so hard to force her way into this production in the first place.
"Writer Yang is a truly eccentric woman. She submitted the script to the company, got zero response, so she planted herself outside our building and just... stayed there, apparently."
"Really?"
"Staked the place out, ran into me by pure chance, and handed the script over in person. My manager nearly died on the spot."
And then there was the war story of how Yang Yuri had punched straight through the company's ironclad defenses to deliver the script with her own hands.
We exchanged quite a few stories like that.
Keeping pace with Luna, whose moods so closely mirrored her old self's, was hardly difficult for me.
By this point, I judged we'd reached the level where a somewhat personal conversation was permissible.
"There's something oddly comfortable about you, Si-woo. What is that, I wonder?"
Lately our exchanges had drifted into a loose mix of casual speech.
Wol-yeon—the Haomun chief from my Murim days—had talked in exactly that tone, so it came more naturally to me anyway.
She was younger than me, yet always insisted on acting like my senior.
Her antics were endearing enough that I simply let it slide.
Watching Luna talk like that stirred up a quiet, unexpected nostalgia too.
Even when the internet erupted over the school-bullying controversy, filming continued without a hitch.
The manager sent from Mun Entertainment did start angling for openings, but with the sheer volume of personnel this production had fielded, he couldn't accomplish anything of note.
Sabotaging the set too openly was an option even the other side couldn't afford.
The drama was simply too big—if they were ever made to shoulder even a sliver of the blame, they'd be the ones left in ruins.
And Flame was famously the kind of company that never shied from a lawsuit or a courtroom under any circumstances, which must have weighed on them in the back of their minds.
So they confined themselves to underhanded schemes that could never be traced back to them.
In any case, several days slipped by that way, and we got a great deal of footage in the can.
The Wol-hee scenes shot on the late-Joseon period sets were, by and large, drawing to a close.
From Wol-hee's languid dates with Lee Myeong, to the Japanese spies' disguised ambush on her, to her performing before the assembled high officials—all the quiet, contemplative scenes were, more or less, finished.
"It's been noisy around you lately, hasn't it, Si-woo. This... is it a Flame production?"
"Well. Yes, it is."
Luna, who had focused solely on filming and never once breathed a word about my rumors, bringing this up today meant she'd apparently caught wind—rightly or wrongly—that our side had been driving this whole affair.
Or maybe, having dropped me the hints that let filming interference get swept away so cleanly, she was simply curious how things had turned out.
I was rather glad for her to learn just how thorough my company could be, so I gave her a rough account of how we'd handled the matter.
"What kind of company resolves things like that?"
"An ordinary one, for us. We prefer the cleanest method available. Well? Do you approve?"
"...It's impressive, I'll admit. To clean up a rumor like that."
"Right? A senior artist deserves at least this level of care."
"...."
At the faintly dropped hint about joining the company, Luna clammed up instantly.
The sucker of a woman still hadn't come to her senses, it seemed.
"So in the end, you're telling me I have no choice but to use today's shoot. That's a burden on my end too, you know."
Over the past few days, Luna's face had grown noticeably worn.
She'd been juggling album preparations and filming simultaneously, and the fatigue had kept piling up.
Once today's shoot wrapped, there would be no more Wol-hee scenes for a while.
And before the next shoot, she would throw herself into the busiest stretch of her schedule—the comeback.
Today's shoot just happened to be Wol-hee's death scene, and the Wol-hee hollowed out by inner turmoil matched today's Luna so perfectly that the set was actually reaping a windfall from it.
But what state she'd be in when she returned after grinding through her comeback schedule was beyond imagining.
From where I stood, the conclusion was obvious: I wanted to pull her out of there as fast as possible and crush that shitty comeback before it ever happened.
So I had marked today as the D-Day for winning her over.
The scene, as it happened, was perfect—making today the ideal day to steal her away.