He still doesn't say anything.

"...alright. I'll just stay here, then. Let me know if you need anything."

He buries his face in his knees and nods.

We still on for our planned dungeon runs today?

Yes.

Okay. See you then!

Yeah.

He's already there when she arrives, and he doesn't seem to be behaving noticeably differently. Still keeping the same distance as before, still mostly quiet. "Ready to go?" he asks, summoning a palm-sized ice knife and twirling it in his hands in a nervous tick she'll be used to by now.

"Ready," she agrees, and in they can go.

"So, after I went home, an idea occurred to me on how to deal with that without going in," she says, outside of it. "How about, I burn the ever-living shit out of that mess of unreality with as much fire as I can manage until the whole nonsensical thing collapses into slag. Because it looks like thermodynamics seem to work fine in here."

He hums.

"The main risk with that would be in case there are people who got trapped there that we didn't catch, but in principle it should probably be doable. I also worry about the possibility that something like that could disconnect areas of the dungeon but I am not sure how well-founded that worry is, it might not even be something it makes sense to think. I don't know enough about the physics of dungeons to tell."

"Yeah. There's that. It probably equates to safer to us, but riskier to others. We don't want this thing to seal itself, go dormant, and reform a year or two later with better fireproofing or something. Especially not with us inside. Not to mention, we’ve got more dungeons scheduled for after this, and there's the risk of me burning myself out early so we can't do the ones later, even if it works. But, um." She motions to him. "I - would really rather take the brunt of backlash for big things on a purely practical level. More backlash to me, as long as it doesn't kill me, will relieve yours faster."

At the rate they're going it'll only take about two years to work through his backlog it's fine if it does. So long as she doesn't accumulate a ton, herself. 

"You shouldn't endanger yourself overmuch on account of me. I've held on this long, there is no reason to rush."

".... Yes there is??" she says, a little incredulously. "You're - no, we shouldn't have this talk in here. Sorry. You've convinced me that long range firepower is a bad solution to this problem. I guess we're going in, then."

...okay. In they go.

The area leading to the bizarro stairs was a very classic dungeon: natural caves and galleries linking together before opening up to an enormous grotto with holes in its ceiling hinting at the sky and open air above. The twisted passage is actually fairly hidden, an unassuming nook amongst several other unassuming books, the kind of place that would be very easy to overlook if you didn't know it was there and didn't have a lot of experience looking for such. But once inside, the scenery changes to manmade, the architecture decidedly medieval. They would be nearly guaranteed to get lost in this space, if it was just the two of them and nothing more.

Thankfully, they have modern tech to help. While it is impossible to connect to the outside network while in a dungeon, they still carry their own pocket devices that give them access to a reduced form of their commscreens, including something that keeps track of how far they've travelled in what direction and which generates a dynamic map of their surroundings as they go. There are dungeons that mess with electronics like that, too, and ones that do both that and non-Euclidean fuckery definitely climb very quickly to an S-rank classification, but are proportionally rarer. And this particular one doesn't even rearrange itself, so it is comparatively speaking a walk in the park for experienced espers.

The stairs lead up out of a hole in the ground, and once they're out the sight that awaits them is nothing short of breathtaking: green as far as the eye can see, lush hills and glades and a pine forest in the distance, a cool soft breeze carrying a sweet citrus smell like oranges, fluffy clouds lazily taking turns hiding the early afternoon sun. It's beautiful.

It's also deadly. Despite the openness, they can't help but feel a sense of wrongness that quickly resolves itself into the understanding that the non-Euclidean fuckery didn't stop at the stairs. Paying too much attention to any one part of the scenery is enough to notice that it's not all quite continuous, that occasionally there are more (or fewer) trees than should've been where they're looking, that those clouds that should be bumping into each other aren't. The hole in the ground leading back to the caves is also easily lost in the tall grass, to compound the issue. And of course, there are the monsters: not all that many of them, all things considered, and they look almost like regular animals, birds that happen to have two heads and wolves that are a little bit too large and have three eyes and deer the size of elephants with antlers the size of small trees. They're spread out, and seem to be mostly minding their own business, not having noticed the two espers, but it's almost certainly a matter of time.

...hm. Unclear if this will be upgraded to A-rank on the report, but still doable.

A three-stories-tall icicle emerges from the ground behind the hole to serve as a landmark, and he jumps onto a floating ice skate he summons out of thin air. "Interesting," he says, clinically. "Those antlers might be worth collecting."

Augh, these sorts of dungeons are always unpleasant to deal with. The scenic part of the dungeon is at least a nice change of pace, if filled with lies and death that will trap them the second it gets an opening. She is just about to remark that they should mark the exit when, of course, Tae-gun does. Good tactically, but, c'mon, Tae-gun. That's not going to help your backlash.

"Yeah, maybe. You okay if I burn the grass? I don't like leaving this much space for things to hide in."

"—yeah, good call." He rises up farther in the air because he is not immune to her fire and starts looking out at the monsters that will inevitably be drawn to the displays of power. He doesn't do anything yet, though, and just waits, because there's no point wasting power sniping stuff that Kim Hye-jin might well be able to one-shot with a single burst.

Tralalalala burn it all to the ground tralalala~

The slowly expanding ring of fire she causes is very deliberate and leaves little smoke; this is exactly the sort of situation that would cause the whole thing to go up in flames if she's not careful, so. She is. She's still clearly enjoying herself.

Okay, who's going to be mad at her for doing this.

The not-birds and the not-wolves are the ones that are immediately agitated by her, and the former are the more mobile of the lot by a long shot. Their screams sound surprisingly deep for their size, and harmonise and amplify each other in ways that regular physics would struggle to explain.

This dungeon is new, so probably the implied vastness is fake, but it can grow into it, if it kidnaps people. Tae-gun suspects the only reason it hasn't been actively doing that is that it doesn't have a handle on properly protecting its core—the way it's perfectly Euclidean until it suddenly isn't suggests it's experimenting with configurations and kind of confused.

(Does it make sense to think of dungeons as learning like that? He hasn't given it much thought. It is in fact the case that dungeons mutate over time, and if they aren't destroyed fast enough they vanish and reappear elsewhere later more powerful and deadly, so there's definitely some kind of updating process, even if it's not driven by a conscious mind.)

Which is all to say it's not super likely that the core will be hard to find, except that...

...he doesn't know how to coordinate this with Kim Hye-jin. If he were on his own, he'd be doing wide range exploration of the area from the air, leaving smaller icicles behind like breadcrumbs to complement his comm's tracking, and find the core that way, but there must be some way that being paired with her here should make this more efficient.

Fucked if he knows what, though.

Well, she does neatly crisp the not-birds into fried not-chicken, followed by the wolves, and having all of the grass burned to nothingness sure does make it very obvious where the exit is, and if anything is coming towards them.

Then she considers the circle she burned around them critically, turning slowly in place, then points, "I think the core's that way. See the way my circle is - wonky and lopsided? I burned the same distance around myself, but that side being squished means that the distance is longer in that direction. So." She smiles. "Probably that way."

...okay that is a way. He's going to want to do a postmortem analysis with her later so that they can figure out the most efficient things they could possibly have done but that's absolutely going to save them a lot of time, if she can reliably map out the non-Euclidean twists like that.

.......also she looks so weird from up here. The light is clearly getting fucked with too and it makes her look a little bit like she's reflected off a funhouse mirror and once he notices that he bursts out laughing.

"Hm?" She looks up at him, then snorts. He's similarly distorted. "Ha. That's ridiculous. Kind of disconcerting, but ridiculous. Onwards, plan to grab the deer-things on the way out if they'll let us, so we don't have to carry antlers for too long?"