No.

No.

He doesn't have Hye-jin to protect anymore. Only himself. And the enemy is just two measly dragons each the size of a building, several golems that will explode upon death, and lava geysers.

He can take them.

He summons an icicle as tall as he is directly in front of himself and hugs it so that he can use it to redirect his momentum from vertical to horizontal, aiming directly at the closest dragon's head.

It opens its mouth to unleash inferno on him—

He lets go of the icicle so that it continues along its trajectory while a second one appears to push him down away from the fire and then a third one to become his new hoverboard.

While dragon #1 is still spitting fire at the projectile that was coming at its head, Tae-gun summons an ice spear directly under and a flat ice disc directly above dragon #2, then uses the latter to press it into the former. He makes both of those things happen much more quickly than the dragon can maneuver.

As may have been his intention, the weight and speed of the ice disc mean that the dragon dies just as it gets close enough to the ground that its explosion also triggers a chain reaction of explosions of all the golems on the ground.

(This is not a survivable rate of backlash accumulation, says a part of his brain. Shut up, says the rest of his brain.)

This has happened far, far too fast for dragon #1 to have any time to react, and Tae-gun by himself is fast and manoeuvrable enough that he can dodge the geysers and escape the explosion at the same time as he brings the two swords he's just summoned directly in contact with its neck.

It's cut clean through.

Yeah. He knows.

It's really a very very short battle, once Tae-gun has decided that he no longer cares how much backlash debt he's willing to rack up for it. That's usually how it goes, with very powerful espers. Ask and ye shall receive, so long as you're willing to pay the price.

The crater left by the compounding explosionsis quickly being filled with lava, and there's no sign of Hye-jin, with the rock that had temporarily come alive to swallow her inert already.

The sky is starting to become black with the ash of the volcanic explosion, and fire is starting to rain and flow down, faster than it oughts by right to.

Tae-gun... is not sure why he just did that.

Hye-jin isn't immune to fire that she didn't produce, herself. She is most certainly not immune to lava. She is not immune to being eaten by a dragon golem and then swallowed into the earth.

He just got a lot of backlash. An amount of backlash that might, actually, kill him. It will at least take him out of commission for the remaining duration of this confluence.

He is...

...angry.

So, there are some nuances about her own powers that Hye-jin hasn't had the opportunity to test.

See, she's not immune to her own fire. Or, she's not any more immune to her own fire than she is to regular fire. She's just as resistant to either, which is ultimately a bit above the average A-rank esper. But with her backlash comes hypothermia, and with hypothermia comes a loss of feeling. When using her own fire, she's numb enough that she really doesn't feel it. And then she checks after, and her clothes are various flavors of wrecked, but she herself is fine. With ordinary fire, she doesn't have this luxury, and accordingly feels pain. But the temperature changes absolutely nothing; it hurts her the same either way, it's just a matter of feeling it or not.

Esper powers are eclectic and often more based on aesthetics than sense. It doesn't logically follow, that Lee Tae-gun's powers of summoning ice come with letting him reinforce himself. Those are very different things. But really, it's actually the other way around, and looking at his backlash provides a clue at what the underlying core concept is. He is the image of the ice king, always in perfect control, never wavering, always solid, and always cold. Impenetrable and untouchable. This is why he can reinforce himself; he is in perfect control of himself, and he declines to be injured. Of course, no sane person would try to bet their life on this kind of crazy and unreliable half-logic. It's the sort of thing that an esper finds out when it's tested, when they try to push their powers at themselves.

Like Lee Tae-gun is a statue of ice, Kim Hye-jin is an unsmotherable flame. Which is to say: with her bullshit, nonsensical combustion powers, she also has some bullshit nonsensical regeneration to go with it.

Tae-gun might notice that there's still something pulling at his backlash. It wouldn't, if she weren't rapidly accumulating backlash at a speed that might make his blush, and it definitely wouldn't if she were dead.

She's not dead.

Wait, what?

where

Down.

Beneath the crust of earth, in the lava below.

There's really only one possible proportionate response here. 

He hugs another icicle and shoots into the lava like a missile.

Navigating by the subtle pull that's tugging away at his backlash seems like it'd be tricky, especially without visibility. But to someone who is dancing with death as closely as Lee Tae-gun is at this moment, the feeling of easing at his backlash is in many ways the only thing that matters.

He eventually breaks through an obsidian barrier, into what was once the inside of one of those lava-swimming dragons.

There isn't any light, but he can still feel the woman on the ground.

Well lava glows and she's, she's still alive, she must be, if she's not he's taking this entire dungeon down, but he's, he can feel her, please, "Hye-jin?"

"Mmmnhh?" she whimpers, shifting a little to look at him.

The lava certainly glows, but not for long. It brightens white, showing the awful burns along her body, before dimming back to darkness as his partner snuffs out its light.

"Hi Tae-gun," she then mumbles.

"...how are you alive," he breathes, the same question she's asked him so, so many times, walking over to her and falling to his knees before her. He wants to, wants to touch her, but he can't see and, and those burns looked really bad and, and.

"Iunno."

There's a flicker of orange to light up the dark - this time created by Hye-jin, and he has long enough to see that her burns seem to be shrinking - and then she's in his arms.

Her clothes did not survive the swim in the lava.

Yeah, neither did his. Neither did his and, and he really, really wishes his backlash were different, because he is still hard. He is still hard, and his skin is extremely sensitive, and this is the first time they've had so much skin contact, and he's just gotten more concentrated acute backlash than he's ever done before, and so despite how absolutely wretchedly disrespectful and incongruous it is as soon as she hugs him his body spasms and he comes.