The opening teams used a spiral search pattern to try and fortify the portal as much as possible. Of course, after a large enough spiral, that became inefficient, so by now the teams have transitioned to a quadrant based line search, centered on the exit portal. In order to avoid being in any one place for too long, or teams accidentally setting off defenses that will hit other teams, the 'active' quadrants are diagonal to each other. Theirs is south-east, Rodriguez and Montenegro have north-west. Well, there's not really a north or a south in here, magnet compasses also don't work (yes, someone checked, like a decade ago) but they have chosen an arbitrary volcano to treat as their 'north' to work from. By the time they're done, the quadrant system will have been transitioned to octants, what with how the space to search is getting larger the further they get from the portal, but that is only Hye-jin's problem in the sense that she's a consummate professional and wants to leave good data for the next team to work on.

Which is all to say that Hye-jin has kind of gotten into this? She's, well, this is a bit too important and high stakes to be glossed as 'having fun,' but. This is a fulfilling job!

Tae-gun's gotta say, his half of the job is also pretty fulfilling. Like, look, when you're really good at something, it feels great to do that something a lot and well, and you know what Tae-gun is really good at? That's right, it's summoning icy wrath to skewer evil monsters with!

He will of course not be going melee, here, but he's constantly surrounded by several ice blades of varying sizes swirling in irregular patterns, and while they occasionally shoot out in the direction of foes before returning to him they're mostly a defensive threat in case anything decides that getting close is a good idea. The threats this won't work on are the dragons, but those are fewer and farther between than the fire razorbeaks that are getting thoroughly trounced at their own game. The other kind of threat he has to deal with occasionally is the golems throwing rocks or balls of magma at him, but it's easy enough to deflect those, especially when he can go more ham on it than he normally would've, courtesy of Hye-jin's presence. 

And then there's going on the offensive, because they do actually need to destroy the monsters even while searching for the core; otherwise, they'll escape, and that's a disaster. For that he has ice pillars and spears, precisely targeted nearly unbreakable ice needles at joints and pressure points to disrupt the structure of the constructs as they form, and on occasion dropping a humongous ice boulder on a pack.

It's really satisfying, dropping a humongous ice boulder on a pack.

She likes seeing him in his element. It makes him, well, the closest he gets to happy, and they make a good team, even when she is sidelined. Things go as well as can be expected for an S-rank dungeon, which is to say they're untouched, but Tae-gun's been taking on a Hell of a lot of backlash. He can handle these numbers, but he's really not specialized for it; that's more her job, and he's having to work to make up the difference. The absence is stark. He's doing fine, because he's himself, obviously, but Hye-jin can feel the way his backlash is building, and she doesn't like it. This really isn't efficient, and the confluence is a marathon more than a sprint. Yes, they can handle this dungeon okay, but what about the next one? Unacceptable with how they're only taking care of backlash with handholding. Something needs to change.

When it is reasonably safe and out of the way, she gives him a heads up and then assists in mopping up a pack of golems on the ground. The backbone of them had been crushed by an exploding ice boulder; she's just going to see how well she can clean up the dregs.

It.... goes better than she would have expected. The joints that she reached for to overheat flare bright white instead of the dull orange-red they were before, then... darken to black. The golem in question cracks and then falls to pieces, inert.

"... wait, what?" she says, blinking at this.

He stops the flying midair, just hovering there for a few seconds. He doesn't say "Wait, what?" because she just did but. 

Wait, what?

Yeah, seriously, what the fuck, was that some kind of fluke?

She reaches out to experiment with less caution - what happens if she burns more of them, do they all do that?

... They do. She has to push a bit, and it's easier at the joints than the center, but the same phenomenon occurs. They flare bright, then... die. Like the fuel they were using has been burned out.

Why do firebreaks work? Well, because they starve the fire of fuel. Hye-jin's fire doesn't operate via fuel consumption; this is the same reason she can incinerate paperwork without leaving ash or setting off smoke detectors. She can burn through its fuel before it can. And then without fuel, it - well, okay, it probably should take longer to go black, but apparently the fragile magical something-or-other is disrupted, which means actually, in this case, fire is super effective against lava.

"I think it's -" she begins, but she's interrupted.

Because Tae-gun has to suddenly swerve to dodge a dragon that comes out of the ground directly under them to try to take a bite off them.

...a dragon that literally breaks through the literal ground to come after them what the actual fuck.

See, this? This? This kinda shit? This is what he means when he says that these fucking S-ranks keep stuff in reserve until they lower their guard. Dragons swimming in underground lava was not a thing that was meant to happen! What the fuck!!!!!

But wait! There's more!

What fresh hell is about to be inflicted on them for their sins, pray tell. Not that Tae-gun is going to stay still to find out, mind, but "his partner just discovered a way to kill the monsters without them self-detonating at the end" sounds like exactly the kind of thing that might, perhaps, piss a dungeon off.

"Kill them," he says, without specifying who the "them" are. He's sure his brain will have enough time to process that after he's done acting on full-automatic reflex mode.

The dragon that came from underground was relatively undersized, as they go. Only about as big as a deer.

The three in the horizon? Markedly above average.

Also there's a volcano erupting. The one that's closest to them. So that's nice.

"Yep!" agrees Hye-jin, a little faintly. "Burning the lava too, to prevent more surprises."

She gets to killing the closest dragon as quickly as possible! The others are out of her comfortable range, but, uh, she'll get them as soon as they come close, and lava first. No more dragons out of the ground, please, fuck that, actually!!!

Now it's Tae-gun's turn to know what it feels like to have a partner rapidly racketing backlash debt—

(by literally outburning a volcano-themed dungeon)

—shut UP libido no one asked you.

What else? What've they got?

Dragons are tough! The fire inside this relatively tiny dragon is fighting her!

...she's still winning!

It's literally the backlash but could his dick please go down. Please.

From a distance, they can see that the other teams are being similarly harassed, though there's a distinct flavour to the harassment that it's trying to block Tae-gun and Hye-jin off from escaping or getting reinforcements. And the three dragons are about to be upon them, being able to fly as fast as Tae-gun himself is.

Nothing more comes out of the underground lava, nor of the hole leftover by the dragon Hye-jin's just killed, but the ground is starting to very angrily form into more and bigger golems.

The next closest dragon dies. The little one was instructive, she understands how to take them out more efficiently now. Then - uh -

- they're about to be overwhelmed -

"... Turn us around, I'm going to blast us to go faster," she says, because she's nicely situated in this ice hoverboard, there's no reason not to capitalize on that to turn it into an ice rocket.

"—understood," and then yep it's time to fly—

Several things happen in quick succession.

One is that the ground hurls three boulders in Tae-gun's direction. Not their direction; Tae-gun's specifically.

The second is that geysers of lava erupt right next to them substantially Tae-gun's choices of where to fly to.

The third is that the ground itself forms into a golem shaped like a dragon's head and aims for Hye-jin.

Lee Tae-gun has amazing reflexes. He can escape this unscathed, on his own.

...he can't escape unscathed with Hye-jin.

Lee Tae-gun has amazing reflexes, and he turns on his self-enhancement powers a fraction of a second before he fails to dodge the third boulder and is hit by it square in the chest and knocked clean off his hoverboard.

Hye-jin could maybe have dodged this if she were prepared for it, but between blasting everything within range, lava beneath the ground and golems atop and the fucking geysers popping up and trying to calculate escape trajectories they could take to make it to some assistance, and literally sitting down half strapped into the ice hoverboard, well. Both her ability to grasp the need to dodge, and her dodging options, are rather limited.

She is summarily eaten by the dragon's head.

The dragon golem's head sinks back into the ground faster than Tae-gun's descent speed, swallowing her with it.

No.