Woo-young looks at the caller ID on his phone, sighs, and picks up. "What's up, prez?"

"Can you get your man under control?"

"...Tae-hwan? What'd he do?"

"Tae-gun!"

"Oh." Pause, long-suffering sigh. "What did he do?"

"Didn't you check the news?"

"I was on assignment and then I was getting froyo, I did not check the news."

"Well, do that."

He summons a commscreen and pokes around until he figures out what it is prez is talking about. "...they had a race? —was that all of the dungeons they were meant to clear together today?"

"Yes."

Woo-young sporfles.

Yeonho will be patient about this because it is, admittedly, kind of hilarious.

"Oh, that's amazing, I love it. Guess they got real impatient with the easy stuff you guys got them, huh?"

"I guess! But I can't get a hold of Tae-gun and Kim Hye-jin is off-limits."

"Well what's the problem, though? This looks like great optics, especially the fact that she won."

"There are several problems! They gave almost no advance warning to our people and the media definitely picked up on how confused our on-sites were by the whole affair, the amount of backlash that caused was enough that—here, look at this." He sends Woo-young a link.

It's a close-up of Tae-gun's face as he was stepping out of the last dungeon, when he was making a particular face.

"...oh my. Is it just me or did it get hot in here? I might need to check the A/C."

"Some people want to run the angle that he looked really angry and some other people want to run the angle that he looked really horny—"

"It's both."

"I know it's both! That's also a problem!"

Woo-young laughs again.

"And it's not like we can't work with that, but the image hunny gunny himself wants to project is perfect and invincible and I have no idea how I'm going to hold onto it after that."

"Well, he and Kim Hye-jin both took down three dungeons apiece in less than two hours all told, solo, if that's not invincible I don't know what is."

"And that's not all! There are people who are saying it was staged for Kim Hye-jin's sake, to make her look badass. There are people who are saying it wasn't staged by us but it was staged by Tae-gun to make her look badass, like a gentleman. There are people who think he was genuinely mad at her for winning. There are people who are mad that we'd assigned two powerful espers such easy dungeons that they could clear them like that when we could've instead assigned them actually dangerous ones that actually need their powers."