And the safest place to be in a dungeon is outside of it, but somebody's got to go in there or it'll get much worse. The winning move is to melt his brain inside his skull.

She doesn't say that. She instead quietly burns up the ambient smoke he's blowing out, to clear the air, and thinks.

"He can change anything I or anyone else in the moment can perceive. But he can't change things he doesn't know about, and he affects minds, not - everything else. Okay. Okay." Something hardens in her gaze, and she gives a firm nod to herself.

"Do you know Nightmare?"

"... Only little snippets about it, but not in much detail." Enough that she can see where this is going, though.

"It's an S-rank dungeon that's been cropping up for years that no one's been able to close. It doesn't have any monsters, and doesn't directly kill you. When it kidnaps you, you just—vanish. It likes doing that at night, to targets who are asleep, but not always. You're gone from your bedroom, just like that, and inside the dungeon.

"Its space is worse than non-Euclidean, it's dreamlike. There are no sensor espers on record that are able to map it farther than about earshot from wherever they are, and I can't find people to teleport them. All of our comms fail at unpredictable and usually very bad times.

"Inside it, you relive your worst nightmares, over and over and over. If you were in an accident, it happens again and again. If you lost someone precious to you, you witness their death again and again. It never stops. And it happens physically, to you; other people near you will see the nightmare happening to you, it's not just in your head.

"The dungeon doesn't kill you, but after kidnapping enough people it seals itself with very little advance warning, and everyone in it is gone forever. Then, years later, it appears again somewhere else.

"The way it works is that it marks you the moment you enter it, and it uses that mark to access your thoughts and memories. Many mind espers can shield you, and in doing so, prevent it from showing you your nightmares and let you be able to find your way out, for as long as the shield is up. Once you're out, the mark's gone.

"Kang Jaeha can permanently remove the dungeon's mark from you. He is the only esper on record that can do that."

"... Are you saying he's too valuable to ever lose because of Nightmare?"

"I'm not saying that. But—" Drag in and puff out. "But it's something that needs to be considered. I—when I found out about—everything he did—I wanted to kill him. I wanted to teleport him into an active caldera. ...sunbae asked me to not do that." Drag in, puff out. "And it's—something other people would consider. When I said that people might be too terrified to let him stay active if they found out about his powers—that's what I was thinking. That they might be, but they might be more terrified of Nightmare.

"To this day, Nightmare is known to have successfully kidnapped at least twenty-three thousand, five hundred and ninety-two people, including one hundred and nine espers. There have probably been more.

"Other mind espers can still help. No one can do what he can do, but Nightmare has been around longer than he has, and he is not irreplaceable.

"That's... that's all. I think." Drag in, puff out, his nerves are mostly settled now but this is still an extremely stressful conversation to have.

Nod.

The problem with teleporting him into an active caldera is of course that people would figure out Woo-young did it. There aren't many teleporters. It'd be a great way to kill him, of course, he just wouldn't be able to get away with it.

The way to do it would be in a dungeon, where he could have plausibly died from something unrelated, anyway.

"Okay. Just something to be aware of." She nods again, this time firmer. "Okay. Yeah, I'll take that offer of a hug now, if you're still willing."

"Yeah." He—doesn't have an ashtray, actually, didn't think of that, so he just pinches the burning end of his cigarette then teleports it into the ashtray he does have at his place, then yeah hug.

Snort, then hug. She could have just incinerated that for him, but sure.

She takes a deep breath, then,

Switches to her game face.

"It'll be okay. Don't worry." She smiles the same terrifying smile she pointed at Quasar's legal department. Merciless and sharp and downright hungry.

"It's my job to kill monsters."

That startles a laugh out of him.

But then he gets more serious again. "I... don't know what to tell sunbae. It feels wrong to not say anything but... I don't know what it'd do to him. Especially when Kang Jaeha hasn't done anything direct and overt beyond—talking to you. And—Kang Jaeha hasn't done anything since then. He has a partner, as far as we've been able to determine their relationship is okay, his partner shows none of the—signs of abuse—that sunbae did, we thought he'd—given up, grown up, moved on. It's been over five years. But if he's still—

"—it could be idle curiosity. Even if he—lied about bumping into you. ...there's no way it could be just idle curiosity. I don't know what to think. Thinking that he's been hung up on this for this long also seems impossible."

"Yeah. I... don't know. I can tell him if you'd like me to, but he would probably not prefer that.

"I do think he's hung up, though, because who could get over losing Korea's S-rank, and also for... so it was his guild that scoped me out first, actually? Like, a week or two ago. I got an email from them before, uh..." She checks her phone and digs up the email. "Almost a month ago. They were one of the first guilds to try poaching me. Um. How high up is he in his guild?" Is it basically his guild, is what she's asking.

"Sunbae's other partners seem over it," he grumbles, then sighs. "He's... reasonably high up. Lucid—ah—Quasar doesn't do that and I'm not sure how it was at White Star Guild but most guilds here in Korea have a pretty strict internal hierarchy depending on espers' ranks and he's the cream of the crop of A-rankers there."

"So it's basically the Kang Jaeha guild. Okay. Thought so. Then... he's probably been sniffing after me for about a month? That doesn't seem like idle curiosity to me, that seems like - careful premeditation. And he went with this because the normal ways of getting in contact with me didn't work."

"But if it's careful premeditation then—why show his hand now, two months after you and sunbae started working together? Why show his hand at all? What's his goal? To separate you from sunbae? How would any of this help."

“I… don’t know. Those are very good questions.” She makes a face. “Ugh. Well, in a direct practical sense, I think… I should set up some kind of remote monitoring system on myself that I can review later in privacy, in a place not my house,” she’s really mad about this, actually, she just got that house, “and sunbae needs to know what’s going on, and. We monitor Kang Jaeha and Lucid from afar?? See if they’re obviously planning something long term?”

"For what it's worth I don't think Lucid would be—in on any of this. Maybe I'm wrong but I expect him to not want to rope other people in and I—Lucid's president has her faults but I would be shocked to learn that she was enabling him on this kind of thing."

"Okay. So... do you think it would get us anywhere if I sent their president and guild an official 'please you and your guild leave me alone,' notice? Through a lawyer."

"Yes. Though if Kang Jaeha—or whatever character he was playing—said that Lucid wouldn't contact you anymore, I'd give good odds on that being true. Not that you oughtn't contact them with that, to be clear, but..."

"Yeah. I just want something formally in legal terms for them to back off, because then he's... handicapped. At least a little. ... I should ask the bookstore he bumped into me at for camera footage, oh that would be great..."

He nods.

"...by the way, uh, sorry about the way I—reacted at the start. I was—out of sorts, I hadn't thought about him in—"

"I... thank you. Apology accepted. I just, um. It's - very something, for me, to be told 'I can't help you for legal reasons'? It's. Exactly the excuse I have always been given for not getting help. Or other reasons that are just." She looks away and shrugs. "You get the idea. I know you didn't mean it that way."

"No, I didn't really—mean it in any way. I was kind of on automatic and, ah, trying to avoid... panicking. But it was an unhelpful reaction."

Nod. "Thank you," she repeats. "I'm sorry for - dumping it on you and demanding a combat esper level of 'I need this answer right now.' Just, um. Yeah, skip platitudes with me, I have had bad experiences."