intoxicated by the urge | Glowfic Constellation

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"Hey. It's going to be fine. Lee Tae-gun is there, isn't he?"

"I know, I know, but..." She glances out the airport windows which open to the lanes and planes themselves and looks at the pitch-black circle floating above the floor there, its edges glowing red and swaying and crackling ominously. "It's still scary. This is an international airport. Can you think of a worse place for that thing to have opened up?"

"How are people reacting over there?"

She looks around, then back at her shoes. "They all seem pretty chill, actually... Just watching and taking pics and stuff. Guess I'm the only one who's freaking out. But I mean, what if something goes wrong? We're like sitting ducks here, right next to—"

"Hey. Hey. Relax. No need to panic, okay? Lee Tae-gun will handle it. He's a machine, he's got a hundred percent clearance rate. He hasn't failed once."

"Yeah, but still—"

"Hold on," her sister says. Then, "Yes! Look out the window!"

She does, and her chin drops while she watches the edges of the portal slowly turn green. "He did it?"

"Yes! Look!"

"I'm the one who's here, how come you saw it before me," she grumbles.

"Well, I'm watching the live broadcast and knowing you you weren't even looking."

She can't really argue. While she thinks of something to say, though, the edges of the portal finish turning completely green and it starts emitting a loud vmmmming sound and getting brighter and brighter. "What's that noise—"

"That's normal, don't worry! When a dungeon—" The sound stops, then, and the black surface of the portal starts to ripple. "Hey, look. Here comes Lee Tae-gun."

The woman tries to watch closer and—

Online forums are abuzz with activity, that one fraction of a second of a change in facial expression of Lee Tae-gun's fuelling all sorts of discussion and speculation. For him to do something as reckless as racing through dungeons and then look like that at the end, well... Kim Hye-jin must be something really special, right? Lee Tae-gun never lost his composure like that in public before, not even when he had other partners (and there's heated discussion about which of his prior partners should've been the most likely to cause a reaction, with Kang Jaeha being the most popular one).

Of course this results in the Korean public—or the part of the Korean public that's really into espers, at least—to really start digging into Kim Hye-jin. It is unanymously believed that Tae-gun is a step up from Hye-jin's Japanese partner, but there's a growing contingent of people who think that she is also a step up from Kang Jaeha, despite both of them being A-rank espers. There just isn't really much that can compete with the kind of bullshit they just pulled, and it makes people speculate that maybe Hye-jin should be promoted to S-rank, too.

Tae-gun's official social media pages just don't engage with the thirsty masses begging for any more scraps of information, and the official traditional media outlets run a very flattering story in parallel to Park Eun-ji's blog post: the two espers wanted to challenge themselves, test their backlashes, and bond; it got a bit out of hand, but they knew what they were doing and took many reasonable precautions; other espers are cautioned against trying something like this and encouraged to seek their Guilds or other support structures for guidance and care. Neither Kim Hye-jin nor Lee Tae-gun give official interviews, and their words as relayed by Quasar (with both of their consent) reinforce that message.

...but, really, the overall tone of all outlets, official and non, is that Korea has probably managed to score an incredible new asset in their struggle against dungeons. Everyone is rooting for Kim Hye-jin.