Oh no, her partner's very cute.

Hye-jin spent her day off leveraging the resources offered to her! By throwing money at them! She will have a realtor to go house hunting for her, and is figuring out which of the available independent companies for esper support she wants to go with. It's kind of difficult and not the work of a single day, but by the end of it she has a realtor that will be paring down possible houses, and a short list of companies to negotiate with. It's not done, but it's really satisfying progress that makes her feel a lot more in control of her own life.

She's down to meet and discuss their updated schedule! Where would he like to meet up?

...great question! For some reason he thought they'd go to her silo but, uh, it's her silo, they don't share it, and he doesn't want them to share it. Too much under her control.

Wherever works for you.

In the grand tradition of deflectors all over the world, he passes the ball to her.

Is my silo okay for you, then?

Yes, that should be fine.

May I teleport?

...? Yeah of course?

I wasn't there myself, I just teleported in. It's not where I'm staying, just isolating in.

Right. He knew that.

He requests a teleport and is there in a few seconds. His backlash feels... about the same as it did last time they saw each other, which suggests he didn't go looking for any trouble on his own.

Also, he forgot what it felt like to be around her. It sucks that his backlash keeps trying to make him lose control of himself and that being around someone compatible like this separately feels great, his powers are doing their best to mind control him into spending more time with her.

"Good evening, Kim Hye-jin."

"Good evening!" she says, sounding downright chipper. "I haven't had time to form tactical opinions about the schedule, do you have any to start us off with?"

"Yes." He summons his commscreen and sends her a request to share it but starts talking before checking whether she's accepted it.

"The first one isn't like the ones we've done together so far," he says, pulling up an incomplete map. "B-rank, technically, but borderline, and field reassessment may deem it A-rank." Which in theory would mean that it should be at the very edge of Kim Hye-jin's ability to handle solo, but... well, ranks are bullshit anyway, she's better than the stats think she is. "Very little monster activity, no kidnappings that anyone's aware of, but, here." He zooms into an area of the map that has a big question mark on top. "Lucid Guild's sensor couldn't figure anything out about what's there, even though the surroundings are open-air. There's no reason sensing should break here, and I suspect that's because the dungeon's geometry goes non-Euclidean." That would be exactly the kind of thing that might upgrade it to A-rank, if true. "Maybe not, but if you look here..."

He's not, quite, blabbing, the way he was yesterday. He's talking more than usual, but in a purposeful, logical way, trying to go over his reasoning for his analysis and bringing up comparisons to other similar past dungeons he's faced, graphs, energy assessments, and the like. It turns out he has saved tactical maps of every dungeon he's ever cleared, organised in an easy-to-search format. He's clearly not used to laying his thoughts out to others like this, and despite trying his best there are points at which he skips over steps or assumes things without explaining them.

But he doesn't just infodump. He asks her for her input, asks her to check his reasoning, marks the spots where he's less certain of his conclusions and requests her thoughts and intuitions. If you read between the lines, he sounds almost excited to have someone to bounce off of, and if she doesn't push him away he will spend a long time on this analysis.

She accepts it immediately, and.

And.

... He is a really good partner and she appreciates him very much. That she kind of wants to kiss him over it is clearly some kind of weird mental holdover from how things went with Hideyoshi. She vaguely remembers kissing him when she was pleased with how he was making an effort instead of coasting entirely on his amazing esper power. Instead of analyzing that urge too much, she's going to ignore it in favor of gleefully joining him in tactical talk.

So, he is more experienced than she is, but she has ever had a B-rank dungeon turn into an A-rank. The sensors in Japan are different - she takes a minute to ask clarifying questions about what the local ones do, and how they work, and then agrees that it's probably non-Euclidean geometry that's doing it. But there are some other holes she knows about, as Japan is bigger than South Korea and thus had more of a pool of dungeons to draw experience from, and offers some other (less likely) options for what could be going on instead. The most dangerous that she knows of would be a localized time slide effect - not because it'd necessarily hurt them, but because it might make them unavailable for other dungeon clears. The localizing effect of whatever-breaks-the-sensor does imply that it's probably what's holding the dungeon's core, or whatever creature contains the core, so she expects it'll be their problem.

She continues to respond to his analyses and conclusions even in places she's inexperienced, asks insightful questions, and offers tactical options where they'd be appropriate. There is no reading between the lines, Hye-jin is just obviously excited to talk about tactics with her partner and, furthermore, is delighted with all of his neatly organized data!!! Oh, it makes her so happy, can she get copies of all of these to review in her own time?

Stop smiling at him.

...of course she can. He's not sure how readable they are to other people, he's compressed them a lot, but he'd be happy perfectly willing to help her to through it. 

Anyway, this is almost certainly overthinking because even if this dungeon gets upgraded it's still the sort of dungeon either of them could clear on their own. The main risk point is the one unknown area, and they are both of them the kind of person who would be able to tell on the fly if they've misjudged the situation and it's actually a lot harder than it looked, and otherwise they've got enough firepower to curbstomp it. Even so, it's a sufficient step up from what they've been doing that it's probably going to be good practice.

Agreed! Both on that they're probably overthinking this and that this will actually be good practice. But she does consider this tactical talk to be part of the practice, and they've got a gap of experience to close. Also, she's having fun.

So is he he agrees that it's part of the practice. 

Now, for dungeon two...

Tae-gun stretches, more out of habit than because it actually provides any comfort or relief from the chronic pain, and finally looks up at Kim Hye-jin after hours of staring at the commscreen and talking. "I'm sending you my collection of past dungeon data, if you want to go through it later," he says, and she gets an information packet with it. It's very large and extensive, but it's accessible online so she doesn't need to download it unless she wants access to it offline. 

"Then I will see you tomorrow?"

"Yeah!" she agrees, beaming.

Then she pauses and looks at her commscreen mournfully. "I... am probably going to need to ban myself from reading this tonight because I should sleep."

...when she smiles at him, reality crashes onto him like a collapsing dungeon, trapping him and suffocating him under its weight. He hates that smile. He hates the way she's looking at him. It makes him feel like he's just drunk several glasses of molten lead that are slowly settling in the pit of his stomach.

"Yes," he says, distantly, trying to fight the way he was suddenly overtaken by a fight-or-flight instinct—mostly flight. This isn't safe. His whole body is screaming at him that it's not safe, not safe, he needs to go, needs to get as far away as possible, and it's all he can do to not break into a cold sweat and teleport immediately.

She... notices his reaction. It's obvious if you've spent a week working with him, and then several hours gleefully going through tactics.

The smile he hates being pointed at him disappears, and instead she's looking at him with concern.

"Is... everything all right?" she asks, hesitantly.

"Fine. Are we done?"

"Y...es?" she confirms, confused by how quickly he went from - cheerful companionship and teamwork to... this. Whatever this is. It worries her, but she suspects pushing further is just going to make things worse. He has boundaries, she's pretty sure he's had some kind of bad experience to make him twitchy, and so she will be very very dutiful about respecting his boundaries. Which means: yep, time to go, right now.

"Yes," she repeats, with more actual certainty. But more gently, she adds: "Have a good night," before she teleports away without waiting for his answer.

Oh good. He lets a breath out and also teleports back to his silo, then goes to one of his ensuite bathrooms, locks the door behind himself, gets in the bathtub, draws the curtains around it, turns the shower water on, and finally sits down and hugs his knees, not bothering to take his clothes off. He focuses on the water splashing him, on the thermal shock of the cold droplets against his warm skin, on the bright white light getting reflected off the tiles.

He's safe. He's safe, now. He is. He's fine.

It had been such a nice week even despite the easy dungeons, the minimal amounts of guiding he'd been getting and the relief from the backlash, he'd felt so nice that he nearly forgot. He forgot that it always feels nice, that it feeling nice is the bait of the trap, that his backlash is the bait of the trap. It's not just that it's insidious, it's that it's true, it's not a fake kind of feeling nice, it's his body demanding and healing. But it's not safe. Nowhere but here is safe. Nowhere but his own silo, its location a guarded secret, where if someone tries to come in uninvited—someone other than Woo-young—then if he impales them no one else will know.

But he can't even trust that it's Woo-young, can he, actually, thinking about it. If Woo-young shows up it could be anyone—

—no. He's safe. He is. He cannot be found here, and if someone finds him, it is Woo-young, because no one else knows, and he has to trust Woo-young, he has to. If he doesn't trust Woo-young then he can't trust anyone, not even himself, and since he can't live in that world, he has to trust Woo-young. So he does.

And he's safe. He's safe. He won't think about why he thought he wouldn't be, he will not think about the last few hours at all, because he doesn't want to associate the memory with the feelings. He's safe. He's safe.

He's safe.

He calls Woo-young.

He picks up after three rings. "Sunbae? What's up—" He pauses. "Are you in your bathtub?"

Tae-gun doesn't reply.

"...right." He hangs up and then appears in Tae-gun's bathtub, wearing only PJ trousers and a loose T-shirt that he clearly just threw on. He doesn't complain about the cold water, he knew what was happening the moment he heard the sound of splashing coming through the call. "Sunbae? What do you need?"