"Ch-Chairman. The market's been in free fall since the opening bell."

Lee Nam-gyu, the finance team leader, looked up from the stock monitors to make his report.

"I don't want to hear it!"

Chairman Oh Seung-hyeok's roar went off like a bomb.

"What the hell is this? You all just going to sit there tongue-tied? You've been stuffing your faces on easy paychecks all this time—so come up with a plan! A plan!"

The chairman's private conference room at Ana Group headquarters was thick with tension.

The group's key presidents and office heads had been called in first thing that morning.

The mood was murderous.

Foreign investment firms had been short selling Ana indiscriminately for a while now, and the group's share price had been cut in half from its peak.

Day after day, the TV news hammered the chairman's family for having no morals.

Money had been spread around, but a few outlets still wouldn't budge.

With Ana shaken, the other groups smelled blood and came charging in.

Worst of all were the outlets in bed with rival groups; they had the Ana Group in their sights.

They knew by instinct that the Ana Group was in deep trouble.

When a group breaks apart, there's a feast.

And when it's a dinosaur from the top ten, the spread is that much bigger.

The press and the politicians might already have done their math.

Chairman Oh Seung-hyeok knew all that too well, and he was burning up inside.

How the hell did it all get so tangled?!

He'd taken over as chairman in his thirties and grown the group several times over.

He was a gambler who'd gone from strength to strength, and nothing had ever stood in his way.

Swallow Daeung Shipbuilding, and the Ana Group would be the ninth-largest group in Korea, in name and in fact.

Once you were in the top ten, moving up even one rung was brutally hard.

Now, out of nowhere, he'd tripped. A crisis he hadn't seen coming.

And it had gone from bad to worse. (TL Note: The Korean phrase is…