Ring! Ring! Ring!

6:00 AM. For who knows how many times, the moldy ceiling of the boarding room became the first sight to greet Arif's eyes. Yet there was no room left for doubt within him. The failure in the previous loop—where his bluff was ruthlessly shattered by Pak Malik's cunning—had taught him a vital lesson: facing an old fox meant he couldn't rely on bluffs without solid preparation. Negotiation was a performance art, and Arif needed a flawless script.

The Frost Circle ring on his finger shimmered faintly, radiating a chill that now felt perfectly synchronized with his mindset. Arif no longer viewed these time loops as a prison, but rather as his personal laboratory to test hundreds of psychological probabilities.

Thus began the most exhausting yet crucial phase of experimentation in Arif's journey: designing the Perfect Scenario.

For dozens of subsequent loops, Arif dedicated his life to studying the dynamics of human emotional control. In each new loop, he tested various word combinations, altered his vocal intonations, and read Pak Malik's body language.

On the 45th loop, Arif tried using an aggressive tone and slamming his desk right at the start inside the HR room. The result? Pak Malik immediately shut down, grew defensive, and instantly called the security team. That scenario failed; aggression only triggered an equally fierce resistance.

On the 50th loop, Arif tried the exact opposite approach. He adopted a pleading tone, playing the victimized underdog while slipping in the corruption intel as if he merely wanted a cut of the pie. The result was even worse; Pak Malik looked at him with sheer disgust, treating Arif like a low-level cockroach that could be bought off with loose change.

Arif logged every failure deep within his mind. He realized that Pak Malik possessed a narcissistic-authoritarian personality type. A man like this would never bow to anger, nor would he yield to submission. He would only bend to the fear of losing control over his reputation and power. Arif had to position himself not as a hostile attacker, but as an inescapable destiny.

"I have to become like ice water," Arif muttered inside his boarding room on the 58th loop. "Calm, unyielding, yet capable of freezing the opponent slowly."

That morning, on the 59th loop, Arif woke up with a crystallized plan.

His first step began precisely at 6:30 AM. Instead of heading straight to work, he visited a small electronics shop near the station that always opened early. Using his remaining cash, he purchased a high-quality mini voice recorder sensitive to low frequencies and a small, easily concealable pocket camera.

Arriving at the office by 7:45 AM, when the logistics division was still deserted save for a couple of cleaning staff, Arif executed his pre-negotiation phase. Using the computer password tactic he had memorized back in Chapter 6, Arif slipped into Pak Malik's office seamlessly.

This time, he didn't just look at the wet-stamped document in the lower-right desk drawer. Arif took out his pocket camera, photographing the original sheets of the forged manifest and the bogus authority handover letter from various angles with clear lighting. He made sure the document serial numbers and the 10,000-rupiah stamp duty wet ink seals were captured in sharp resolution. Once done, he returned the documents to their exact original positions, locked the drawer, and slipped out without leaving a single trace.

Afterward, Arif strapped the mini voice recorder behind his inner shirt pocket, right near the collar, ensuring it was active and unobstructed by thick fabric. His physical weapons were now complete: visual evidence stored in the camera's memory, and a voice recorder primed to capture an instantaneous confession.

8:02 AM. The intercom buzzed at his cubicle. "Arif, to my office. Now."

Arif stood up. He took a deep breath, letting the chill of the Frost Circle ring creep up his spine, steadying his pulse to a remarkably stable frequency. He stepped into Pak Malik's dark glass office. The greatest theatrical performance of his life was about to begin.

Pak Malik tossed the white envelope containing the termination letter onto the desk. "Sit down, Arif. The company is restructuring..."

Arif sat calmly. He let Pak Malik finish his entire firing speech without interrupting a single word. This was a strategy he had learned from dozens of prior loops: let the opponent drain their ego and verbal ammunition until they reached a peak of false security.

When Pak Malik finished speaking and shoved a pen forward with a dismissive smirk, Arif didn't argue about labor laws. He simply remained silent for a full five seconds—a deliberate pause of silence engineered to build psychological tension.

"Pak Malik," Arif spoke. His voice sounded extremely low, flat, devoid of emotion, yet articulated with crystal-clear precision. "I am not going to debate your decision. I only want to ensure that the four point two billion rupiah you funneled to PT Garuda Nusantara Logistik has been thoroughly scrubbed of tax tracing."

Pak Malik let out a cynical laugh, exactly as predicted. "Still clinging to the same fairy tale, Arif? I told you yesterday, you have no proof."

Arif didn't reply with harsh words. With slow, graceful movements, he reached into his trouser pocket, pulled out the small pocket camera, and switched on the screen. He turned the digital display toward Pak Malik. Glowing right there was a photograph of the wet-stamped document from his desk drawer, complete with the hyper-specific serial numbers known only to Pak Malik.

Pak Malik's eyes widened. His arrogant grin vanished in a heartbeat. Reflexively, he checked his desk drawer, found it still locked, then stared at Arif with an expression of sheer disbelief mixed with sudden, boiling rage. "You... how the hell did you take this photo?!"

"How I took it doesn't matter, sir," Arif cut in, his tone remaining ice-cold. "What matters is that these photos, alongside complete copies of the shipping manifests for the 25 dummy electronics units per week, are already set to transmit automatically to the main board of commissioners and the external audit division at precisely 12:00 PM today. If you don't halt this wrongful termination and grant me what is rightfully mine, your career is finished, and your wife gets to join you in wearing an orange jumpsuit."

Pak Malik shook. His face flushed deep crimson, his fists clenching over the desk. "You're threatening me, you little cockroach?! Do you think the board of commissioners will instantly believe a low-level staffer like you?!"

This was the trap's core. Arif had deliberately baited Pak Malik into exploding and unleashing his criminal ego.

"Of course they'll believe it," Arif answered casually, touching the chest of his shirt. "Especially when that visual documentation is backed up by live audio recordings of you right now, admitting that you intentionally framed me as the northern logistics scapegoat."

Pak Malik gasped. He stared at Arif's shirt pocket, realizing the presence of the hidden microphone nestled there. Every single word of his rage, his panic, and his implicit confession regarding the document photos had just been captured in full.

The old fox had finally walked right into a trap engineered across thousands of hours of repetitions. Pak Malik slowly slumped back into his leather chair, his breathing ragged, realizing that in this morning's game of chess, the junior staffer he had always trampled upon had just shouted Checkmate.