The red recording light on the broadcast console stared at Yoo-jin like an unblinking mechanical eye.
He didn't have time to admire his own reflection on the dozens of monitors surrounding him. The heavy steel door of the broadcast room suddenly groaned. A lone Ministry guard had bypassed the retinal scanner and kicked the door open.
The soldier raised his assault rifle, his laser sight painting a bright red dot directly over Yoo-jin's heart.
"Cancel the broadcast!" Dr. Oh's voice shrieked through the stolen earpiece. "Shoot him in the leg! Show him we own the set!"
The guard didn't hesitate. The silenced rifle coughed.
A sharp, searing heat tore through Yoo-jin's left shoulder. The physical impact threw him back against the mixing board. Warm blood immediately soaked through his stolen jacket, dripping heavily onto the pristine glass of the control panel.
He didn't scream. His amnesiac brain registered the pain not as fear, but as a continuity error.
"You missed your mark," Yoo-jin whispered into his microphone.
His bloody fingers flew across the master keyboard. He had already linked the room's biometric environmental sensors to the bunker's main power grid. As his blood pressure spiked and his heart rate elevated from the gunshot, the system registered the trauma.
The massive underground facility reacted violently to its master key taking damage.
Every light in the bunker flickered and died. A heavy, suffocating darkness swallowed the complex. A second later, the emergency strobe lights engaged, washing the walls in a violent, pulsing crimson. Automated blast doors slammed shut across the facility, locking down entire sectors randomly.
"What did you do?" Dr. Oh gasped over the comms, his voice trembling with genuine terror. "Sector 4 just went offline!"
"I told you the script," Yoo-jin said, his voice terrifyingly calm as he pressed a hand against his bleeding shoulder. "My vitals drop, your franchise gets deleted. Do you really want to order another take?"
Silence stretched over the earpiece, broken only by the doctor's ragged breathing.
"Stand down," Dr. Oh finally whispered to the guard. "Do not engage Subject 734. Fall back immediately."
The confused soldier lowered his weapon and backed out of the room. The steel doors slid shut, sealing Yoo-jin alone in his newly acquired director's booth.
He ripped a piece of fabric from his shirt and tied it tightly around his bleeding shoulder. He felt completely hollow inside. He couldn't remember his own childhood, his favorite food, or the names of the people he was supposedly fighting for.
Yet, looking at the massive wall of security monitors, his hands stopped shaking. The phantom muscle memory of a veteran producer took total control.
He dragged the master CCTV grid across the main screens. The bunker was a sprawling, multi-level stage, and he now had a front-row seat to every angle.
One of the corner monitors displayed a hacked external news feed. The real world above them was in absolute chaos. News tickers flashed across the bottom of the screen in bold red letters. The public had seen his face glitching alongside Subject 735 on national television.
Stock graphs for Zenith Agency were free-falling. Pundits were screaming into microphones about human rights and bio-terrorism.
Yoo-jin clicked the mouse and minimized the news feed. He didn't care about the audience's reviews right now. He only cared about his cast.
His eyes darted across the security feeds, scanning the red-lit corridors for familiar faces. He finally spotted them on Camera 4B.
Kai and Min-ji.
They were zip-tied and bruised, being pushed down a narrow maintenance hallway by a four-man tactical squad. Min-ji was limping, her expression tight with suppressed rage. Kai was walking slightly ahead of her, deliberately blocking the guards from shoving her too hard.
Yoo-jin stared at the screen. His heart gave a strange, painful flutter that he didn't understand. He didn't know their names, but his instincts screamed that these two actors were indispensable to the production.
He leaned forward, his bloody fingers flying across the digital audio-routing board. He mapped the PA speakers in Sector 4 directly to his microphone.
"Your posture is terrible," Yoo-jin's voice echoed from the ceiling speakers above Kai and Min-ji.
On the monitor, Kai violently jerked his head up. Min-ji gasped, her eyes wide as she searched the empty corners of the hallway. The four Ministry guards immediately raised their rifles, sweeping the narrow corridor in a panic.
"Yoo-jin?" Kai shouted at the ceiling. "Where are you?"
"I'm in the control booth," Yoo-jin replied smoothly. "And you two look like uncredited extras. We need to fix your blocking."
His voice lacked the warmth they were used to. It was cold, analytical, and completely devoid of sentiment. It was the voice of a man who only saw moving pieces on a chessboard.
"Listen closely," Yoo-jin commanded. "Duck on the downbeat."
He slammed his fist onto the lighting control panel. The emergency red strobes in their hallway instantly blacked out. The corridor plunged into absolute, pitch-black darkness.
The guards began shouting in confusion, their night-vision goggles useless against the sudden sensory deprivation.
"Three. Two. One. Downbeat."
Kai and Min-ji dropped to their knees in perfect synchronization.
Yoo-jin hammered the master override for the fire suppression system. High-pressure water cannons erupted from the ceiling, blasting the blinded guards with freezing foam.
"Step left," Yoo-jin instructed over the chaotic noise.
Kai rolled to his left, kicking the legs out from under a slipping guard. The soldier hit the wet floor hard. Kai twisted his zip-tied wrists, bringing them over the guard's dropped rifle, and snapped the plastic bindings against the sharp metal sight.
"Good improvisation," Yoo-jin noted clinically from the monitors. "Min-ji. Two steps back. Low sweep."
Min-ji didn't hesitate. Despite the confusing coldness in his tone, she trusted the timing implicitly. She slid backward on the wet floor and kicked upwards. Her boot connected cleanly with a guard's jaw, sending him crashing into the wall.
Kai grabbed a dropped combat knife and sliced Min-ji's bindings. Within seconds, the two idols had disarmed the remaining guards, leaving them groaning on the soaked concrete.
The emergency strobes flickered back to life, painting the victorious duo in pulsing red light.
Kai looked up at the nearest security camera, panting heavily. "Are you okay? We saw the broadcast. Your memories..."
"My status is irrelevant to the current scene," Yoo-jin cut him off coldly. "Pick up their weapons. Check the magazines. You have a two-minute window before the next patrol hits your stage."
Min-ji flinched at the speaker. She exchanged a heartbroken look with Kai. The genius producer they loved was gone, replaced by a ruthless, unfeeling director.
"Where are we going?" Kai asked, gripping a stolen rifle tightly.
"Take the service elevator at the end of the hall. It leads directly to the broadcast wing," Yoo-jin instructed. "Stay out of the center frame. The camera angles here favor the snipers."
He muted the microphone, cutting off their replies.
Yoo-jin leaned back in the plush leather chair, ignoring the throbbing pain in his shoulder. The show was finally getting back on schedule. He had secured two lead actors. Now he just needed to find a way to break them all out of the theater.
He reached for the keyboard to map an escape route, but a sudden flash of movement caught his eye.
On monitor 7C, a figure was walking down a deserted corridor. It wasn't a Ministry guard.
It was a man wearing a crisp white dress shirt and dark slacks. He held a stolen assault rifle loosely in one hand. The man slowly turned his face toward the security camera.
Yoo-jin stared at his own identical reflection.
Subject 735 hadn't evacuated with the rest of the terrified staff. The understudy's face was bruised from their earlier fight, and his eyes burned with a chaotic, unscripted hatred. He raised the rifle and fired a single shot into the camera lens.
Monitor 7C dissolved into violent static.
Yoo-jin's pulse quickened. The clone wasn't following Dr. Oh's retreat orders. He was heading straight toward the broadcast room.
The understudy had decided to write his own ending.