Park Yoo-min's guess that the incorporeal monsters would be vulnerable to diffuse attacks like heat and electricity was correct, and so Hye-jin is extremely useful against those. Tae-gun could've figured it out, could've managed something with ice dust and insulation, and if he'd been alone that's what he'd have done, but... that'd be pretty inefficient, and he's got a partner who can cover for his weaknesses, so he tries not to dwell too much on it. At least he's pretty good with the skeletons, their joints are practically made to be torn apart by careful applications of flying ice blades.

Hye-jin... mostly doesn't leave him openings to display this, though she does leave some. She circles back around to catch all incorporeal monsters, and only leaves him skeletons and zombies and the like when it would be time or power inefficient to bother. Mostly, though, everything here is not immune to being burned (debatably) alive. Skeletons are the most immune, and they're not very; she has to go extra hot with them, but they fracture apart into impotent shards under her attention.

The people to rescue are a bit harder for her, of course.

"Tae-gun, on your left," comes Minseo's voice, through the comm. "Civilian inside the second coffin from the bottom, third row after the gargoyle."

In the deep alcove and through the thick stone coffin, it's hard to make out screaming, even with an esper's senses. But it's there.

...ah.

He waits until Kim Hye-jin is done with what she can safely kill away from the civilian, deals with the couple of remaining monsters that were too close, then goes over to the relevant coffin. "Can you hear me?" he calls in a calm, firm, and loud voice. "I'm here. You'll be alright. Hang in there, we'll get you out."

The screaming stops.

(The person inside is sobbing with relief instead.)

"Please hang in there!"

Now, to actually rescue them... There's coffins above this one so he can't straightforwardly open it. Unfortunate, but not impossible to deal with.

Being S-rank isn't just about effort and skill—there's an unfair component in what powers exactly people get, and how strong they are—and Tae-gun's deck is really stacked in his favour. Amongst his suite of unfair and strong powers is a somewhat less-advertised one: when he told Kim Hye-jin that he'd never been hurt, it was in large part due to a body reinforcement power, which he has running at a low level all the time and properly activates almost subconsciously whenever he's at risk. His best guess as to how it relates to the rest of his powers has to do with the "solidness" of ice (after all, powers (and their backlashes) don't always follow clear patterns that perfectly match human categories) but in practice what this means is that if he punches the solid rock of the hollow coffin above the one with the person a few times it breaks through enough to give him space to work with, and his knuckles aren't even very scuffed.

Once that's done, he can use both the ice and his hands to dig into the gap of the coffin lid and heave it up.

Here is a terrified looking woman, blinking up at him. Her fingers are raw, but not yet bloody, from clawing at the inside of the coffin, and her mascara has run from her tears.

"Ohthankyou, pleasepleaseplease get me out of here...!!!!"

Heeeeeave ho and the lid is pushed up and off enough for the woman to step out. "Be careful when stepping out," he says in a soft but firm voice.

Nodnodnodnod out she comes, very carefully and shakily. She looks like she desperately wishes to cling to him but has realized that, perhaps, that is a bad idea and she should instead not.

No it's fine, he can hug her for a bit, he knows this would be reassuring. "It's fine, you'll be fine. You're safe now. You'll be alright." The smile he offers her... might be the most honest and genuine smile Kim Hye-jin has ever seen on his face. It's not too different from his media smile, except for how it's more subdued and crinkles the corner of his eyes more. It's not trying to look pretty for cameras, it's just trying to... smile.

OKAY GOOD THEN IT'S CLING TIME. AND SOB. CLING AND SOB TIME.

(Hye-jin is of course covering him and the civilian. And clearing out the way to the next two they need to save, but she's keeping half an eye on the two of them to make sure nothing incorporeal pops out of the walls or something. She's doing this from rather far away, because fire is scary.

... It's nice to see Tae-gun smile for real, though.)

"Shh... you'll be alright, it's alright," he repeats, quietly. He's got this "be reassuring" thing down to an art. The trick is to actually empathise with people and care about them, which doesn't come naturally to him but he's managed to cultivate it. "Was there anyone else with you when it happened, or do you know anyone else who got kidnapped?" It doesn't happen every time but sometimes people are kidnapped in groups or one after another and it helps to tell them that they'll find their loved ones—or that they already have, as the case may be.

"My - my brother, I don't know where he is though..." Sniffle.

He nods. "We'll find him. We have someone who can find everyone in the dungeon, so we'll get everyone out." He sends Yun Minseo-sunbae a quick text message asking if she knows anything about this woman's brother, if Park Yoo-min-sunbae has already found him or something. "In the meantime, I'm going to ask you to stick with us for a little bit while we get a couple more people so that my hoobae can teleport everyone out to safety. We'll keep you safe, and if anything threatening happens we'll teleport you out immediately. Does that sound alright?"

Nod nod. Giving him space so he can do the saving thing. She'll just, uh, be here. Being terrified and shivering like a leaf.

Tae-gun's reply is over comms instead of by text: "Da-eun's handling identities and the missing persons count, talk to her if you want specifics. One of the two you're set to grab is male, though. Pink shirt, some English phrase?"

She doesn't say I'm busy enough as is, but it is nonetheless heard.

"Yes! Yes, um - that's. Yes." Nodnodnodnod let's go save her brother yes please!!!

"Can do." The first few times he did this he used to offer people rides on his ice hoverboards but he's since learned that they usually feel really powerless in situations like this and being carried around by powerful espers often exacerbates that, while letting them walk under their own power makes them feel more in control, even if it slows them down. So they'll protect her, and go look for her brother and the other person that's in the same section they're in. Which is lucky, really, since the dungeon's about to get reconfigured and they wouldn't want to have to go looking elsewhere.

Onwards. She's just the first, they've still got a long way ahead of themselves.

Onwards! Hye-jin has mostly cleared out the path ahead, and they are on something of a timetable.

They find and rescue the other two people in this section, without much more trouble than they had with the first. Tae-gun continues to be soothing and reassuring and to project an aura of confidence and certainty that inevitably puts people, if not entirely at ease, at least much more so than they'd otherwise be. It's a similar effect to the one where if people see you walking confidently somewhere they just assume you have the right to go there and don't actually check without specific reason to do so; human brains are wired to believe and mimic people who look like they know what they're doing, especially if they demonstrate competence, and they easily slide into "everything will be fine, because I've got Lee Tae-gun protecting me".

It's no wonder Korea loves him so much, between how powerful he is and the reports from everyone he rescues of how safe they feel with him.

He's a bit of a traumatized, self-destructive fuckup, with the communication skills of a particularly stoic turnip, but. He's really good at his job, and his job is saving people. She's proud to be working with him, and it's genuinely an honor and privilege.

Hye-jin isn't bad at reassuring and comforting scared civilians front, but presently she is being very much on fire and destroying all of their enemies, so. She's happy to let him do that side of the work, and stick to the occasional calm and reassuring "Don't worry, we'll get you out of here," in between bouts of destroying the aforementioned enemies. But mostly her job is destruction, and she's fine with that. They will get these people out safely, and that's what matters most.

With Yun Minseo's lead they can make reasonably quick work of the dungeon. The reason for the emergency call was urgency—the dungeon had appeared yesterday and kidnapped a lot of people in a short interval—but not really difficulty. It's somewhere in the border between B-rank and A-rank, so the two S-rankers (one actual, the other de facto if not de jure) don't have a lot of trouble. Park Yoo-min and Choi Seungjoo are both B-rankers, so they're not as quick, but Seungjoo's power lends itself somewhat better to the actual task of rescuing people: he can redirect and enhance momentum, and the way that power expresses itself allows him to move and open the heavy stone coffins without having to actively damage them very much.

Everyone is, of course, alive—dungeons refrain from killing people as a general rule, until they're close to sealing themselves and going away, sometimes even to the point of magically ensuring they don't die if they otherwise would. There's some debate about why that'd be; one theory is that they feed on their victims' emotional state or something along those lines, and another is that they feed on conceptual narratives in a certain sense. There are actually some dungeon monsters that are friendly to humans (including some that are intelligent/self-aware), and there's active research on them to try to figure out as much as they can about their origins.