"Sounds like a plan," he says, getting his giggling under control. He's not sure why he found it so funny. Maybe it was the juxtaposition of the controlled destruction and against the twisty smile? He's not sure, and isn't questioning it much.

(Also maybe the tiny amounts of backlash he's already started to accumulate are taking that shape, today. Unclear.)

"Lead the way."

Onwards, then! While burning a path through the grass to avoid having to go through something that could contain dangers. Conveniently, this also means that the path back will be extremely straightforward, even if they somehow lost mapping support. She doesn't expect they will, but it's the sort of thing you prepare for, just in case.

She methodically stops every twenty meters or so, repeats the circle of fire, and adjusts her heading accordingly to follow the side which is most spatially distorted. They should reach the area the dungeon is trying to keep everything away from without too much trouble, unless the not-deer decide to interfere early.

They do eventually start approaching, but Tae-gun thinks he might be the one best-suited for those: thin, incredibly sharp and dense needles going right through their brains. The precision and sharpness and denseness all increase the energy cost, but given the not deer's relatively low numbers and large sizes, cooking them would probably be very energy-inefficient for Hye-jin. He can also melee some of the birds from his ice hoverboard, which is another way he has found to save on power: since the only expenditure is in summoning his swords in the first place and then the hovering itself, which is cheap, he can get a lot of bang for his buck.

In order not to interfere with Kim Hye-jin's own bird roasting he stays reasonably high in the air, though, correctly expecting the flying monsters to aggro on him.

After enough twists and turns through nonsensical landscapes that they actually can't see Tae-gun's landmark anymore they find the monster containing the core of the dungeon: a chimera of sorts, two wolf heads and antlers and wings and... molerat teeth? Huh. Apparently Hye-jin has been inadvertently cooking molerat monsters underground too fast for them to actually show up.

Anyway the chimera is three times the size of the huge deer and its skin is armoured to boot, not to mention the regenerative properties it gets from hosting the core.

...this is going to be fun.

Oh, it is.

So, both she and her partner can get through its armor on their own, but it's really most efficient if they work together at it. After all, rapid temperature changes make many materials very, very brittle. Plus, Hye-jin can soften up key bits of the beastie to give Tae-gun an opening to slice through. He's more mobile than she is, but she's not immobile, and can in a pinch propel herself various directions with her own fire, but it's expensive, backlash-wise, so she tries to avoid it. Their strategy is therefore going to be 'he spins the chimera in circles from above, she steadily burns away at key locations until they break, and then Tae-gun swoops in for the kill'. Barring any weirdness, which: weirdness might occur. Weirdness might always occur, it's a dungeon.

But hopefully this thing will go down without too much trouble or trickery.

It does, in fact, go down without too much trouble or trickery. It does, in fact, lower the total backlash either of them would've caught from soloing this by more than half. This isn't one of the smarter kinds of monsters, which is again typical of newer dungeons, and they soon enough hack enough flesh away from the creature that its regeneration can't quite keep up and once they find the physical core of the dungeon Tae-gun—

—doesn't immediately destroy it. Instead, he hacks it off the monster and brings it to his hand. "The dungeon collapse will probably affect the geometry," he explains, "so we shouldn't destroy the core until we're back in the caves."

Very reasonable! She nods. Much better to start the dramatic dungeon collapse when they’re closer to the exit, to avoid having it collapse on their heads. It’s not clear what happens to people that are in dungeons when they close, but they haven’t been heard from again. Best to be avoided.

“Sounds good. Detour for the various antlers, see if anyone in research and development goes, ‘oooo’ over them? Maybe make us something pretty?” ‘Pretty’ is really not the thing that matters here, but it’s kind of hard to predict what sort of weird properties (either magical, or material) things found in dungeons will have. If this dungeon had something more obviously valuable in, say, the walls or foliage, then it might be worth the trouble of declawing and dragging in a full resource collection team. But it’s just a handful of strange antlers, so. This dungeon’s not worth the risk and is going to get summarily closed.

Definitely worth dragging notable stuff from it outside, though, if they can. The easier dungeons they’d been practicing with didn’t even have this much.

"Yeah. Starting with these..." Boss monster materials are often more valuable than regular monsters', too, so it's always good to check. Tae-gun will be carrying the antlers hooked onto a pole that he'll be flying with, for maximum power efficiency.

These antlers are... really hard to cut through.

Hm. So they are.

“Burn through the soft tissue, take the whole skull?” she offers.

"...yeah, that might be a better idea. R&D will definitely be interested."

This is kind of gross, but hey! She does this for a living. Well, technically this part is extra credit, and no one would be mad at them if they didn’t bring back strange bits of things they’ve killed, but still. This is her job, and her job saves lives, and if sometimes this means she has to burn through the viscera holding this chimera’s skull on its body, well. That’s just how it goes.

(She makes sure to burn out the skull cavity, as well. For the practicality of keeping it from being too heavy.)

Now can they carry it off?

Yup! Time to go back along the burnt breadcrumb trail.

Collecting more skulls as they go! This would make for a very demented fairytale. As it is, it’ll just be awkward to explain to the media. She wonders if there will be another meme about this. Probably not, you can’t really beat the ‘I’m really enjoying Korea’ one. It’s admittedly pretty hilarious.

Korea himself has left plenty of dungeons carrying loot of various kinds, but he has to admit that the skulls are kind of creepy. He'll hide them in a hollow ice box when they're about to come out so the media and the public don't die of shock.

Awwww, but casually dragging out skulls would be funny!

Fine, fine. Responsible espers who are very media friendly, that’s them. Siiiiigh. (This sigh is not very serious.)

Due to the dungeons being harder and thus taking longer to complete, they "only" have four of them scheduled for today, with two-hour-estimated breaks between them for post-mortems and preparation. Since they already studied and prepared for the dungeons the previous night, it's mostly the former.

And over the course of the day, Kim Hye-jin will get a better feel for Tae-gun's backlash-reduction strategies, since now they actually matter.

In addition to often going melee against foes, Tae-gun tends to do a lot of battlefield control so that he can align monsters for taking out with few, precision shots. He's also got his power expenditure calculated to hair-thin precision, like how occasionally his ice spikes are hollow but only when the reduced mass is enough to compensate for the added complexity cost. Everything he does involves very careful management of his resources, always keeping a wide margin of safety for the possibility that things go worse than expected and for his ability to manage himself until he gets to his silo.

His tactics also all assume he's going to be working solo. His last partner didn't usually go to dungeons with him because they were specced so differently, so he's actually got over half a decade of practice with this. It also explains why even for larger dungeons that he clears with a group he tends to solo entire sections; accommodating other people, especially people he's not going to be working with long term, is usually just not worth the time and effort.

She gets a very good picture of his backlash-reduction strategies, all right. They almost all come at great personal risk. Going into melee that often?? Without any kind of armor or shielding or esper support?? Why is he like this!! His method of avoiding killing himself via backlash is to kill himself via ever screwing up even a little! It's like his life is a logic problem. Not allowed to directly kill yourself? Let the monsters do it for you by getting up close and personal!

The careful battlefield control she's fine with, though. Even without a lot of practice with each other in higher-stakes scenarios, their powersets and skills dovetail well, and her finesse of her fire means that it doesn't need to originate from her person. As long as she's got a good vantage point she can absolutely set him up for precise shots. She also practices what she preaches when it comes to melee; if something gets close to her, her primary goal is to regain distance, and has lots of sneaky strategies for escape via application of fire and force. This has the obvious downside of needing space to properly work in, and being kind of weak in close quarters. Which means... she sometimes needs him to swoop into melee to save support her. She finds this very irritating.

"How are you still alive," she says mournfully, in their final post-mortem of the day. Dungeon four involved a lot of close quarters and there was a lot of necessity for swooping into melee. It was definitely better for her presence for more than just backlash reduction reasons, but augh.

He summons a sharp-looking knife and wordlessly slashes his palm in a quick, hard motion. It leaves his skin slightly reddened.

"I know my limits." Mostly. He's clearly under a lot of backlash now and waiting for the other shoe to drop. He thinks he can get it to not go the sexual direction but he's not sure what direction it'll go instead, and he'll need to keep an eye on that. "I've never gotten injured on duty."

She stares at him.

"Does 'injured' only count if you need to go to a healer about it," she says, having worked with him enough to understand the way he will fit technical definitions but avoid the spirit of them.

He'd already been not looking at her so it's unmarked that he keeps doing that. "I've never broken skin," he clarifies. He may have gotten a bruise or a dislocated something once or twice but he can set dislocations on his own and create his own casts and his healing is fast. Never bruised his face, though, that wouldn't do when he has to be seen in public.