Tae-gun... is a lot less sure that they can actually win this. He's still going to try, of course, but more than the actual stuff the dungeon is directly throwing at them right now, the fact that it chose to change when it did, and that it cut their comms, is...

"Assume the dungeon is pulling its punches and trying to get us to drop our guard," he says as soon as they have some space to breathe. "There's no reason it'd stop at tricking us once. And we need to find the entrance pronto; destroying the core might get us trapped." Smart dungeons suck.

The fact that he never feels more alive than when he is in one is proof that he also does.

Hye-jin nods. She'd argue if he were calling for a full retreat, but he's not. He wants to know where the exit is before they light the proverbial fuse on this monstrosity, which is just smart.

"Yeah," she agrees. "I do think we're still near the core, though - and that it might be bluffing with how much it's changed. Redoing the entire algorithm that it rearranges itself by sounds too out of bounds for it, just that everything is also now sludge. But obviously let's verify first."

"This is probably the confluence starting," he says, though he's sure she already knows it; it's just procedure to always lay out your reasoning out loud in these situations because miscommunications cost lives. "I don't want to say anything is too out of bounds. I've had very nasty surprises before.

"...I agree that it's unlikely, though."

"Agreed that it's the confluence, just. I don't think it's broken into S-rank yet, and... this feels like a bluff to me, if that makes sense? There were too many things at once, without enough solid, concrete gains."

"You're not wrong." He's probably just anxious. It'll probably be fine. It'll hopefully be fine.

But, well, exit first.

Indeed! Exit first.

They don't have any landmarks to navigate by, anymore, but they've long worked out a way to systematically use their powers to judge direction and distance. The comms are down, but their computers are not, and so they can calculate the trajectory back to the exit, if the exit were where it would have been before the dungeon turned to sludge, and -

"- Ha!" says Hye-jin, a little smugly.

...he needs to wipe that smirk off her face.

Ack, that's backlash, he'll turn that into a laugh that's only a little bit forced. "Point to you."

Then serious again. "We should step outside to communicate the changes to the team before trying to take it out, but it seems like it should still be doable with just the two of us."

Nod!

"Yeah. We don't want them sending anyone in after us if we don't need them."

The esper resources are now at a precious premium. Best to work to avoid wasting them.

So he floats them outside to find—

—pandaemonium. The support team is is reorganising itself so that 3/4 of it can be send elsewhere because dungeons are spawning everywhere, and from the way some authorities have been called to try to get the crowd of onlookers to safety they may be able to guess that a different dungeon appeared somewhere nearby, one that's probably started spewing monsters. Their comms reconnect and they get confirmation of same, plus official warning that the guilds have agreed that confluence has started.

It's not chaos, though, because they've been preparing for months; rather, it's the business and stress associated with putting a complicated and important plan into motion. And as it's literally only just started, this is just the opening salvo, which is typically followed by a short lull before a gradual but rapid ramp up.

Tae-gun types a shorthand report and sends it through, then looks at Hye-jin to check whether there's anything more she wants to do outside before they go back in.

Nope, she's good. Her own brief report has been sent, and they're free to head back inside and try to wrap this up quickly.

If less quickly than they otherwise would. This probably merits them going a bit more all-out than they'd planned to, though, especially given that the rest of today's schedule is definitely all thrown to hell.

Yeah. Though, for the record, they're still following the habit of burning her backlash before his when they can; with his backlog whatever she manages to acrue will disappear without too much trouble, and take out more of his in so doing. As long as it doesn't kill her, anyway.

But they're not going to even get close to that possibility.

She was totally right, though, about being able to win. They do still take out the core. No S-rank sludge dungeon for the next confluence, she's sure all of the espers in the world are heartbroken.

Once they're properly out, the remaining crew is just a couple of people—now is not the time to pretend their star players need any more support than they actually do—and their schedule has been cleared for the day. Quasar will also be holding an all-hands in about three hours, when every on-duty esper who isn't taking care of any emergencies is projected to be done with their current dungeons. Barring said emergencies, attendance is mandatory; all Korean guilds are doing the same thing, but staggered, so that they can all cover for each other.

...and, well, Hye-jin's attendance isn't mandatory, given her relationship with the guild, but it's... strongly advised. Otherwise, her only way to stay on the loop will be the semi-public comms all espers in the country have access to. Which aren't nothing! But the Korean esper scene is very guild-reliant, so.

Yeah, yeah, she'll show up, she's not going to be screwing over herself and Korea with her petty pride. And she's less mad at Quasar itself, and more mad at the guild president. Anyway, lives are on the line, of course she's showing up, people die (or get snatched away into dungeons forever) if she doesn't do her job well enough.

If you need to hold my hand outside of the split silo, I'm fine with it. Feel free to grab it if you need to, okay?

Confluences are bad and all.

I should be fine.

He's handled much, much worse without a partner at all. This really doesn't even compare.

Yeah. But pre-negotiated consent and all.

Bad idea for us to get in an emergency and for you to not think of options that are there.

Fair enough.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Not everyone is attending in-person, and even the people who are are spread between a handful of auditoriums with the address being made virtually, but Lee Tae-gun is of course invited to be in the main auditorium, where he can be reassuringly there for everyone.

"Good afternoon, everyone! I don't want to take up too much of your time. I know this will be some of you guys' first confluence, though, so I will go over the basics, and then cover some operational and logistical concerns.

"Confluences happen about two to three times a decade, and just like no one really understands where dungeons come from or why they happen, no one understands why confluences happen either. The short version is that they are a period lasting between one and six months during which the frequency and power of the dungeons that crop up all over the world reaches critical levels. A few of the big, named S-rank dungeons that no one's been able to seal yet only appear during confluences, while others always appear during confluences even if they also appear at other times. Additionally, several new dungeons appear to, and please don't read too much into this phrasing, opportunistically make use of the time when we're all busy dealing with their bigger siblings to become bigger, themselves.

"I don't want to overstate the danger, but I don't want to understate it either. We've managed to create some very good systems to deal with confluences when they happen, but they are taxing our system and they are very difficult to deal with. Both espers and non-espers will be spread thin, and everyone's workload will be necessarily increased. During confluences, you should consider every other esper your ally, and forget about guilds or what-have-you. We're all working together, here, for the good of Korea and the world, and cross-organisational teams will be the rule rather than the exception. You'll be seeing many new faces and we'll be expecting you all to be showing your best faces. Misunderstandings are always risky, but when working with people you've never worked with before they can be deadly. Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you emit, to copy a certain saying. Everyone will be extremely stressed out, backlash levels will be much higher on average, and exhaustion and frayed tempers are to be expected.

"Your comms system has numerous functionalities that will be invaluable. It's usually not worth the bandwidth cost, but for the duration of confluences, you will all have access to live maps of dungeons all over the world. It's usually best for people to stay local, of course, for familiarity and specialisation reasons, but any espers that have more niche or specific powers may find themselves being called much farther afield than they are used to.

"You all have access to information packets elaborating on all of this, and to anyone doing their very first confluence, I urge you to read it all in detail. I'm going to go over some of the most important points, here, though, to make sure we're all on the same page..."

Hye-jin would kind of rather read about it than listen to this person tell her mostly stuff she already knows, but. She'll be good. No commscreen just yet, look at how professional and reassuring she is.

Anyway, this is all stuff she knows already. By her estimation she's more likely to be on call than her last confluence. She was fairly new at it, then, and working under with a partner that was ultimately dragging her down. Now she's been at this for years, and displaying competence left and right, and is partnered with Lee Tae-gun. As two highly powered combat specialists that are partnered to each other, they're going to be very busy, and probably together on most of their assignments.

Not as busy as the poor sensors (and her heart aches a little for Yun Minseo in particular, sense deprivation!) will be, but. They'll also be the ones directly risking their lives more. Sensors are generally worked very hard, but also guarded like the irreplaceable treasures they are.

Combat espers? Eh. Good luck, we'll give you the best we can, try not to die.

Tae-gun's presence really is very much for show, there, anyway, but it's also meant to rally people together and help them feel a bit less scared and uncertain, especially when they might not run into each other for a while due to the hecticness. In any event, he will be Confident and Reassuring while in public.

It's not that long an all-hands, just half an hour all told, and then people are dispatched to their missions with updated schedules.

Tae-gun gets a text personally from the guild president, though:

I'm going to do my best to get Lucid out of your hair like usual but...

this is exactly the kind of chaotic situation that can give someone openings they wouldn't otherwise have

Be careful, Tae-gun

Aaaaand there goes his mood.

...?

She notices his mood drop, and gives him an inquisitive look.

Rather than say anything he just turns his commscreen so she can read it. It's not that he didn't think about this exactly, but...

If anything in that vein happens I will teleport you out ASAP

Argh.

That's... probably for the best.

Tae-gun's last confluence was with him. They didn't work the same dungeons, but...

...and it happened before everything went bad, too, which makes those memories very bittersweet. And now Tae-gun's spent years hoping to never run into him again, but this confluence is definitely one of the most likely situations for them to run into each other and, and, and...

Fuck. Tae-gun really, really wishes his feelings were simpler. He really, really wishes he could uncomplicatedly claim that he doesn't want to run into him. But instead that claim is very complicated, and has thorns, and sticky edges, and...

"It seems like only one S-rank's popped up so far, in Indonesia, and there's already a team onsite," he says aloud, closing the chat app and opening the world map to share it with Hye-jin. "We've got standing guidelines that we should not engage any A-ranks that mess with comms because we might need to be pulled from them to get any surprise S-ranks that pop up." He opens their proposed schedules for the next twenty-four hours side-by-side. One schedule has them covering a couple of big dungeons together, another has them soloing a series of smaller opportunistic dungeons and meeting up for guiding. Last confluence he went for something like the latter because he and Ka- because he and his partner didn't really do dungeons together, but it's different now.

Talking about work always makes him feel better. Fortunately, talking about work makes her feel better, too! What good partners they make. She is so supportive of switching to tactics talk.

"I lean staying together, we magnify each other enough that it's worth the breadth cost for the extra power. We are up against the big ones. But I don't need to be glued to your side if it'd be inefficient, just. We fill the same esper niche."

It's kind of funny, actually, that these schedules are both still lighter than they would be on the regular, just to leave as many openings as they can for the inevitable S-ranks that are going to appear at unpredictable intervals.

"That sounds good to me, too," he says, pressing "Accept" on the proposed schedule with Hye-jin. "Let's go over the next dungeon and then... Hm. There are a few named S-ranks that are likely to appear and, if they do, are likely to need us. We should probably go over those, too, before that happens." They have an hour and a half before their only assignment for the evening, and then a break for sleeping.

I should mention I am also comfortable combining backlash and sleep times.

If you are, anyway

My backlash basically just knocks me out anyway, so.

Another option if you want it.

He reads the messages and then... tilts his head at her. But replies in messages, too.

Yes, that seems plausibly called-for, here.

Both things, that is.

look it felt weird to ask you 'hey do you want to sleep together' so I needed text for it.

Why... would it be...

...wait.

Did you mean something other than going to sleep in our split silo holding hands?

Because he might spontaneously combust if she says yes.

(And also have a lot of trouble refusing it.)

That option is also fine!

But, um.

Do you think we could reliably keep our hands touching in the split silo while sleeping?

Without literally tying our hands together or something

Which I don't see how we'd manage, considering.

Ah.

Yyyyyep, spontaneously combusting.

Yep. Yep yep yep.

"Anyway we don't have to go there I'm just stating my comfort levels in advance because pre-negotiated consent!" she blurts in a rush, out loud. Fortunately they're not in public anymore, or, well, in front of Quasar anymore; she'd be making a fool out of both of them.

Why is she so embarrassed about literally just sleeping together? Well that's easy, because she has by now figured out a lot about his backlash, and has notions. Clearly there is NO REASON AT ALL, so she should STOP BEING EMBARRASSED.

"I... think I would prefer not, then," he manages to say with his actual mouth, past both the hurdle of "he is getting horny thinking about it" and the hurdle of "whenever he thinks about being in bed with someone it's Kan- him and if Tae-gun looks too closely at that he's going to have a panic attack".

Nodnodnodnodnod!

"Totally fine! Sounds good! Sorry to bother you with it!"

"It's fine." Here's the tac map for the dungeon, how about.

Sounds good to her! Tactical map! Talking about likely S-rank dungeons they might be called in for! Ahahahahahahaha she didn't do anything embarrassing at all, hush, it's fine.

The next few days are an extremely unpleasant and stressful combination of dungeons and down time. The breaks between dungeons are too long, and the dungeons themselves are sufficiently challenging that they're both straining with backlash after every one of them. And it really doesn't help that Tae-gun... can't do better than handholding. He's sorry, but he just... can't. They can figure out a sleeping handholding solution but he can't do better than that. 

And then, four days after the confluence starts, Tae-gun and Hye-jin get summoned for an emergency S-rank dungeon in Mexico. One of the named ones, which Tae-gun told Hye-jin about. 

It's called Volcanic Range.

Tanking her backlash with only handholding is kind of awful, but she does have a silo that's specifically outfitted to make sure she won't die from it, so. Just the aches and pains in her joints and uncomfortable stiffness. And the headaches. And the low core body temperature that she needs to constantly keep bringing up what feels like every five minutes. It's not as bad as what Tae-gun suffered for the past five years, and her backlash is better than most on the 'able to be countered' front. She will bear this discomfort with grace and dignity and absolutely no puppy eyes at Tae-gun. (Even though she now really misses snuggles.) Sleep handholding is fine. She is fine.

Volcanic Range is... not one of the S-rank dungeons she's likely to be very useful in. It's in the name, see. A fire esper is not going to be great at burning something that is already molten rock. She knows why she's here, and it's to be Tae-gun's partner. Which stings more than it should, really, because logically speaking the fact that she's allowed to go in at all is a serious compliment to her abilities and competence, and her major goal is absolutely to save as many lives as possible, not assuage her ego, but. ... It still stings. Not that she's going to display this complicated feeling where literally anyone can see. She is perfectly professional and just a teensy bit tired and backlashed. It's fine. She's fine.

(This is still ultimately better than waiting for the confluence to start, even if this is more actively uncomfortable.)

By now Tae-gun knows her well enough, though, that even without her showing it he... he gets it. There are many ways in which the two of them are similar, and in her shoes he'd be feeling wretched to be there only to be some other esper's arm candy. He can squeeze her hands (they've taken to handholding as much as they can, even outside their silo, provided there aren't cameras directly pointed at them) and offer her as reassuring a smile as he can.

"Ready?" he asks, commscreen open in front of him with the teleport destination marked on the map. They're about to be stared at by international media, which Tae-gun is already used to but Hye-jin is not—well, at least not this degree of international, Korea and Japan are next-door neighbours but Mexico is very much not—so he wants to make sure she's prepared for it.

"Ready," she says, giving his hands a squeeze in return, then releasing them. Mostly on his account; she's of the opinion that if anyone reads into esper handholding that's their problem.

Hye-jin actually suspects she's going to like international media more than either the Korean or Japanese media, on account of how nobody here is aware that she speaks some English. In order to ask her any questions they'd have to ask her in a language most people on this continent don't speak! That doesn't mean people won't drag translators in to try it, but the barrier of entry is higher. Instead they'll just be judging her by her looks and the way she carries herself, and: she's used to that, really.

On the bright side, amongst the suite of bullshit tech espers have access to is incredibly good simultaneous translation, so that they can communicate across language barriers like the one they're about to face. Of course, with languages whose structure is as different from each other as Spanish and English are from Korean and Japanese, "simultaneous" is relative, and there's still always some delay and awkwardness. Thankfully, they're all professionals, and short, to-the-point, unambiguous communication is a skill they've all had drilled in.

Also, Tae-gun himself goes abroad often enough that people know him and know he speaks perfect English. Hye-jin is about to be scrutinised.

He's sorry.

vworp

Dungeons that get more powerful and dangerous also get bigger portals, for some reason. For a named dungeon like Volcanic Range, the diameter is about three times Tae-gun's height, and it's floating five meters above a large intersection in Mexico City. A very wide area around it has been cleared and cordoned off, and there are six separate canopy tents and a grand total of fifteen support staff plus a medical team of ten.

Tae-gun and Hye-jin will be part of a team of five esper pairs, and out of the other four, two are already there.

Hye-jin will give them a courteous and excessively Japanese bow and otherwise attempt to leave it at that. Talking is how the media gets you. She will avoid doing that outside of the dungeon if possible, thanks.

The other espers disagree. One, in particular, a Mexican woman with pure white hair and golden irises, walks confidently towards Tae-gun. "Mr. Lee, good to see you again," she says in English, offering him a hand to shake.

"Likewise, Ms. Rodriguez," he replies in the same language, shaking her hand firmly. He then turns to look at Hye-jin and switches back to Korean. "Ana Marta Rodriguez is a Mexican S-rank esper with telekinesis powers. She has a lot of experience and working with her has always been a pleasure." Then to Rodriguez: "This is my partner, Kim Hye-jin. She is an A-rank esper with fire powers, and one of the most competent people I have ever met."

She has her translator up and, after a couple of seconds for it to finish rendering the Spanish translation of those sentences, says, "It is an honour to meet you, Ms. Kim." She extends her hand to shake, too.

Haaaaandshaaaaakes, she hates them.

She will nonetheless participate in this dreaded ritual. "The honor is mine."

They're... actually pretty compatible? Not, like, wildly so, but above-average for sure.

"Are you going to be leading our group, Ms. Rodriguez?"

"I will, yes. The remaining members of our group should be arriving shortly, and then we'll brief." Flash of light, another pair teleporting in. "And we're almost all here. Excuse me," she says, walking over to the new arrivals to greet them.

Tae-gun always finds it really goddamn strange how Westerners call him by his family name. He just can't get used to it, no matter how many times it happens.

... huh. Weird to meet someone she's compatible with out here in the proverbial wild. With her extremely obvious and publicly known backlash, she's accustomed to only relying on arranged (potential) partnerships.

Anyway, not important. She will be paying attention to the briefing, and attempt to be any comforting to Tae-gun with her presence. (She can tell he doesn't like the social rules changing on him. She'd hold his hand about it, but there are now cameras.)

And once the last pair arrives a couple of minutes later, Rodriguez gathers them all up to introduce them all to each other (including their respective ranks and powers, and of course they're all As and Ss here) and then start the briefing.

Volcanic Range is not one of the oldest dungeons on record, but in the years it's been around for it's gotten quite a fearsome reputation—and, really, the fearsomeness to back it, too. It's one of the somewhat rare dungeons that doesn't even try to kidnap people at all, opting instead to send out monsters to find people and bake them alive. And of course, people under these monsters' ministrations take a lot longer to die than they would if they were exposed to these amounts of heat from any other sources, as dungeons always try to keep their victims alive for as long as possible. For this dungeon in particular, the survival rates of people who escape the monsters is abysmal, since once outside their zone of influence the tissue damage will often be sufficient to be lethal, so it is paramount to not let monsters escape at all.

The inside of the dungeon is open air: there is a sky, and an expansive horizon. But the place is blazingly hot, decorated by crisscrossing rivers of lava, burning forests, and active volcanoes. The sky is perpetually a deep dark red that reflects the fires, and burnt and burning ashes fly in the scorching wind. What's more, the dungeon is old enough that it has in fact expanded to cover a lot of its horizon, and at least some of the forests and volcanoes visible in the horizon are actually real and visitable. The terrain is rocky, dry, and uneven, with the mirages helping it conceal numerous tripping hazards lying in wait to get you to fall on your face and suffer a third-degree burn or worse.

If that were all it was, though, it would not be an S-rank, even with some reasonably scary monsters.

First, it kills comms and electronics. They're all advised to just leave phones and other gadgets behind, because they just won't be useful in there. They'll need to navigate using their regular senses, no tech assistance available. Not just that, but sensors have a range limit enforced upon them, when they're not entirely noped by the dungeon, so they can't even compile a very good map of the dungeon in any way other than literally going out and seeing.

Second, you can't stay anywhere for too long, as the rock that makes up the ground will literally start animating itself into golems anywhere there's anyone, and the place's got lava just below the surface everywhere (and if that's not realistic: fuck you, the dungeon does not care about realism, it wants you to burn) so that continually destabilises the terrain. That also means that they can't do the normal thing of having a medical team stationed inside right next to the portal that they can do with other dungeons as they would probably all be killed and the entrance area would be made impassable.

Third, the place is huge. That's it, that's the third item, it's just had so long to grow and searching it for the core is really difficult.

Fourth, there are dragons, some larger than mammoths, all with scales tougher than steel and capable of breathing fire that melts rock.

Fifth, every monster it produces explodes on death, Balrog style. The dragons' explosions are enormous, while the golems' get larger depending on how long it's been since they spawned (so you want to kill them quickly) (and so, of course, if a golem does break past the dungeon portal that is an emergency as killing it in an area with civilians will cause unacceptable levels of collateral damage).

And finally, sixth, like many other S-rank dungeons it produces numerous identical decoy "cores" that all monsters will protect with their lives and which, if destroyed don't do anything. ...well, besides exploding.

In summary, no one actually has any ideas for how to permanently close this dungeon. Whenever it appears they try to systematically explore it, get attacked by monsters, occasionally find a core-alike, draw a specialist sensor in to verify whether it's the real core, it never is, they try destroying it anyway, it explodes, the dungeon remains. So the best they can do, really, is keep the monsters at bay until the dungeon decides to leave. Typically, this is done by sending a team in, staying in for two to six hours, and then being replaced by a new team later, rinse and repeat.

This is not to say, of course, that they're not going to be trying. Two of the five pairs—Tae-gun and Hye-jin being one, Rodriguez and her partner Montenegro being the other—have long-range exploration as their duty. They'll be going in opposite directions and trying to find something, anything that might prove to be the real core. They're chosen for their extreme mobility, of course, with Rodriguez being able to fly herself and her partner using her telekinesis and Tae-gun being able to do the same with his ice constructs, but now that Tae-gun has a partner who can help with his backlash he is also a damage-dealing powerhouse himself, which will allow him a lot more flexibility in his job.

High damage-dealing, mobility, and defensive capabilities: you need at least two out of those three to be of meaningful use, here. Tae-gun, with Hye-jin, now has all three. Hye-jin has two.

The one she's missing is the defensive capabilities, but she's somewhat more fireproof than other comparable espers, even when her actual immunity is to her own fire. So, uh. Two and a half? Two and one quarter? She will be treating it as nonexistent regardless, but it's still better than most people get. She is, objectively speaking, extremely fortunate.

At least she has something to do; her role here (besides being arm candy) is going to be navigator for their duo. Tae-gun, as the one with an esper power that actually counters this place, and furthermore also primarily responsible for transporting them, will be kind of too busy to stop and do any calculations to make sure they're actually checking a new area that hasn't already been covered by another shift. Electronics don't work, ordinary paper doesn't survive the ambient heat, but guess what? Certain kinds of paper made from dungeon materials can handle this. Guess who put a lot of resources and research into trying to counter this dungeon? That's right, anyone with any sense, because the Volcanic Range sucks and it could show up anywhere! So she's got a compass, an extremely fire resistant pen, graph (dungeon) paper, what's already been partially mapped by other teams, and hopefully enough quick and dirty cartography training to not completely bungle their scouting duties. Her work is not only to get things right, but also check everyone else's work in the search pattern they're working from, and waste as little of the sensor's time as possible on map cleanup and verification that they're exploring new ground.

Anyway. Ready as she'll ever be. She actually feels better about this now that she's here and she has a definite and useful job.

They're not the first group in, so even though dungeons get stronger every time they appear, there probably won't be any surprises. That's just a "probably", though; these dungeons are smart, and not beyond lulling people with a false sense of security by hiding their aces in their sleeves. This isn't theoretical, either, every confluence there are multiple dungeons that do this exact thing, so they really should not let their guard down.

That said... in they go, the esper with the overpowered shield powers going first to survive any potential ambushes waiting for them.

Hye-jin and Tae-gun don't wait to go in before being on his ice hoverboards, and as soon as they're through Tae-gun immediately takes to the air, looking up to make sure there aren't any dragons overhead waiting for them to get too busy with whatever might've been waiting on the ground.

That was all, as expected, an excess of zeal; the area surrounding the portal is clear of monsters.

Good. Okay; brief pause for everyone to verify the available landmarks and get an accurate heading, and then they're off. Tae-gun is entirely welcome to do his usual cool guy surfing on ice hoverboards, but Hye-jin will be sitting and furthermore demands a desk. A tiny ice desk. She keeps an arm looped around his ankle, carefully entwined between trousers and socks, but with enough skin contact to be equivalent to handholding. It's, uh, not her favorite position, and the media is absolutely going to have opinions about the way this looks, but they both need their hands free, and skin contact is kind of important. So. This is what they're doing, even if she kind of does look like the little arm candy nerd hanging on the back of Tae-gun's somewhat literal ice coattails. It's fine. She has a job, and that's what matters.

She will of course also be keeping an eye out and be available for support, but, like. It's fire versus lava. She doesn't expect to be able to do as much as he will. His turn to do the brunt of the work and for her to cover his gaps! Oh how the tables have turned.

They, like, discussed this in advance, so it's not fair to say it was a surprise, and objectively speaking it's not even really that much skin contact. However, there's just something about her lifting his trousers up to touch him that just feels... it feels...

It's fine. He's fine. He's done entire dungeons with an erection before. He's not unused to it. He's even done it around her before—arguably, that was one of his first experiences of running a dungeon with her. And the guideline of "go see a doctor if your erection lasts longer than four hours" doesn't apply to him anyway; if he did that, he just wouldn't ever leave the hospital, and he is demonstrably fine.

It's fine.

No, genuinely, he is fine, and outside the electrical shock caused in the immediate aftermath of the touch, going directly from his ankle to his nether regions, he can focus perfectly confidently. Once they're properly inside and clear that there's no immediate danger he gives Rodriguez and Montenegro a nod, and then off they go to their designated exploration area.

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 fuel being burned through, not like superheated rock that's being heated up more. She's melted rock before, and this feels different - this is more like she's burning through gasoline, or maybe some sort of liquid coal. Something that keeps itself hot, and which probably ignites with oxygen, which neatly explains why everything her explodes, doesn't it. The monsters lose cohesion, more of their insides ignite, the whole thing goes boom.

Why do firebreaks work? Well, because they starve the fire of fuel to burn. 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 limiting 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.

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 source 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.

That's fine, Hye-jin's just going to cling to him for a while, thanks. He can do whatever he wants.

He sucks. He sucks he sucks he sucks. He's awful. He hates himself. Hates hates hates. Hates himself, hates his backlash, hates it hates it hates it.

"Ah, ah, h-how are you—feeling," he manages to get out despite the physiological response he hates hates hates. "I'm s-sorry. I t-took so l-long."

"Mm-mm. You came." ... Then she pauses and gives a little snort. "To get me, I mean. Thanks. I feel warm."

He does, too. In a completely, completely different way.

They might die here.

He's never felt this nice hugging someone before. Not even with Kang Jaeha.

They're probably going to die here.

He can't let go of the hug.

They're going to die here.

...he's still hard.

Even with full body touch, the amount of backlash they've both racked up...

(The way she's still accumulating more by setting everything that dares come too close to them very extremely on fire...)

They might die here even now that they're together.

As they are, anyway.

"... Don't think we can stick to just snuggles," she murmurs. She makes another (tiny) mote of fire and pulls back to look at his face.

Yeah.

So she kisses him.

fuck

He comes again, from the kiss, and he kisses back, and then he's gone. There's no more Lee Tae-gun. There isn't a person in there anymore. There's only need, five years of accumulated need and over three months of potentiated want, and—

—and suddenly he's on top of her, pressing her against the ground, kissing her and moaning desperately, thinking about all of the times she smiled at him and he wanted to kiss her, all of the times she smirked at him and he wanted to kiss her, all of the times she said something smart and he wanted to kiss her, all of the times she was competent and terrifying and he wanted to kiss her. They're a blur in his head, and the only two words he can breathe out when he's coming up for breath are please and Hye-jin.

Don't worry, she's there. She is not at the same level of out-of-her-mind horny as he is, but - she's in that general neighborhood, somewhere. He is the only warm thing in a world that feels cold cold cold, and he dived into magic lava after her even though that was insane, and she should be dead and she doesn't know how she's alive, and he's in her arms and wants her with an intensity that is both hot and frightening, and he's been so sweet and cute and such a lovely competent partner and it feels incorrect that she would have given this to Hideyoshi and not Tae-gun.

(Also, she's still racking up more backlash, because she wants this dungeon dead, and even now is putting in effort to make that happen. She has discovered that her power makes this thing hurt, and actually being eaten by a dragon pissed her off, so. Fuck you, dungeon, eat fire.)

She's also fuzzy headed and tired and emotionally exhausted and she just, just wants everything else to go away for a little while. Does this make sense as a thing to want while she's also causing fiery destruction around them? Possibly not, but everybody here is in life threatening backlash. Those looking for rational thinking will have to look elsewhere for a while.

So. Really the practical thing to do is to open her legs and squirm into position and - no please required, the answer is yes.

He can't see the fiery destruction she's wreaking, because they're still in darkness, and it's far outside. He doesn't even know it's happening, and the part of him that isn't completely gone is alarmed that her backlash is still increasing but with the way she's moving and positioning herself under him all parts of him are in agreement on what to do next. One of his hands is behind her head, fingers intertwined with her hair and pulling her in, but the other quickly reaches down so that he can adjust himself properly, press his tip against her entrance and—

—push—

Oh he's so large. There's so much. The size and the suddenness and the compatibility and a little bit of the pain - not really much in comparison to being literally burned alive, just enough to make her feel alive - is all just. It's so much. Not that she's complaining.

Whimper.

But it's definitely a whimper of need and desire, and even if it weren't, her legs are now around him and she's moving against him in a decidedly helpful way and compatible esper sex is amazing why weren't they doing this before!

Tae-gun—or whatever's currently possessing his body—has no idea.

He doesn't come a third time as soon as he enters her, specifically because he already came twice. Not that it would matter that much, because in this state while fucking her he just is not going to go down in the foreseeable future. Nor is he going to want to, because it's the other thoughts that are dominating his mind now: all of the times he's wanted her, the times he's imagined her naked and pleading (he can't see her body right now) (he can feel it) (but he wants to see) (he can imagine it) (and he's sure he'll be able to see it in the future), all of the times he's pictured her whimpering like this—it's so cute and so sexy, it's somehow simultaneously exactly and not at all what he'd expected, it makes him giggle and moan to hear her voice like that—and all of the times she's smirked and he's wanted to get her mouth doing something else instead, wanted to fuck her silly, fuck her nonverbal.

He's getting that now. Not all of it—there's still so much he's imagined, so much he wants to go through—but he's inside her, and he's moving almost on instinct, and his tongue is inside her and his cock is inside her and he's got her in a vine grip to never let go. "Hye-jin... Kim Hye-jin... You're so hot, I want you so much, I've wanted you for so long—"

Yeah, she's super nonverbal, and her tongue is kind of busy doing other things right now, but she does hum with pleasure at his words. She is so happy for him to continue, and will make soft little encouraging sounds and - squeeze him in time with - oh huh she can also time the fiery destruction she's committing outside to slightly up the backlash relief on his end. Nice. Clearly this means she's winning at sex. But maybe there are new and exciting ways to win at sex, why doesn't she try and find out empirically.

... They're going to be here a while. Nothing is in any position to interrupt them, least of all themselves.

It'll take him coming inside her twice before he has enough possession to think of doing anything other than this, before it occurs to him that there's more to sex than kissing and licking and pumping—that he can use his hands more places, squeeze and pinch and grab and rub, that he can use his mouth more places, kiss and bite and suck and, and, and he wants to see, he wants to see her and he has no idea how to see her and he wants to beg to see her face and it feels mortifying but for some reason feeling mortified is turning him on even more and—

"Hye-jin, Hye-jin, Hye-jin," he says her name over and over like a prayer, like a pious man worshipping at the altar of his goddess beseeching for her favour. "I want to see you. Please let me see you."

Mmmmm okay this is a service she can provide, here is a little light. New way to win at sex! See your partner! Amazing. They have the technology. Well, the magic.

"Hi," she murmurs inanely, beaming at him.

"Hi."

Giggle! Kiss.

"I'm burning the dungeon down," she informs him, when she comes up for air.

...oh, that'll explain why her backlash has been flipflopping so much. 

"That's so hot."

"Please don't let me interrupt you," he says, using this newly available light to better explore her and find more places for his mouth and hands to pleasure. He wants to taste her—all of her.

That's going to make it very hard to continue burning the dungeon down, but she likes a challenge!

You know what else she likes? Him. She likes him. She'll tell him so with nibbles. And kisses. And carefully timed accumulation of backlash. And...

Suffice to say, she's happy to experiment, and is downright playful.

If you're insane, and can either tank absurd amounts of backlash or burn it all off by fucking someone you have off-the-charts compatibility with on the go, there's really very little upper bound to how powerful you can get. Such an insane person could, perhaps, completely outburn a volcanic dungeon, in increasingly wide circles from the single point they're at. They could reach really, really far. 

As far as the dungeon's core, which has always been hiding in the lava, as pretty much everyone knew it would be. It wasn't worth planning for, you see, because if it's in lava, there's nothing anyone could do until and unless someone manifested powers that would allow them to survive swimming in lava for an extended period of time while being assailed from all sides by monsters. It wasn't worth planning for, so all plans rested on the assumption that it wasn't true, in case it wasn't. 

What is currently happening is strictly more absurd than a lava swimming power, but the dungeon core gets destroyed just as much. 

And the entire place trembles.

—oh that was hot, how'd he move to feel like that? He wants to try to make it happen again.

Ooooo it was, can they -?

Knock knock.

Still busy, go away higher thought processing.

Yeah, so, no.

Because the higher thought processing thinks that, actually, that side project of burning the dungeon down?

Yeah, it worked.

"Tae-gun," murmurs Hye-jin, "I think - ah! - I think we might've gotten the core. Of the dungeon."

?

Core. Dungeon. They got it...

Oh.

Right.

He summons an ice cocoon around them, shaped like a teardrop with a sharp point above, and then they shoot up.

(oh that felt good, he should mess with acceleration more often)

There isn't lava, anymore, just solid rock, so even if Tae-gun's ice weren't up to the task of dealing with the heat (it is) he'd have no trouble with it.

And then he reduces the cocoon to a flying platform and lifts his head up to look around curiously.

(The only reason he even has this much ability to think is the number of times he's come, already. It's starting to push the ludicrous even for him.)

There are still some volcanoes in the distance. It's unclear if they're real, though, because the parts that very definitely are real are...

...it's not a thermonuclear wasteland, but that's the image that might be conjured. The place has been nearly flattened, the lava rivers dried up, the monsters turned to rubble or worse. There are ashy impressions here and there shaped like dragons, near their exit point—clearly the dungeon was trying to congregate its forces on them, and just as clearly Hye-jin was perfectly capable of dealing with those—while the corpses of foes more distant than these are merely molten or charred, not literally reduced to dust.

And it's all crumbling down and falling apart before their eyes. There are cracks forming along the ground, but the more impressive ones are the cracks in the very air, the dimensional stability of the dungeon shattered with its core. They need to leave very quickly if they don't want to find out what happens to people who stay inside after a dungeon is destroyed.

Um.

Okay, that's a mood killer if there ever was one. The combination of the thermonuclear wasteland (at her hands, apparently!!!) and the fact that they really need to leave right this instant. She gives Tae-gun an apologetic kiss to his cheek, then disentangles herself from him and begins muttering to herself. Hey, navigator, which way is out?

"We were, um... south... east or was it west? ... The group before us was the first to start using quadrants this round, they started north-east and south-west, we're the second - we're south east. Which would mean that the exit is..." The landmarks are somewhat toast right now, but there's a shell of a volcano that looks like it was once their stand in for north. "... that way. Exit's that way." She points.

He lets out a pitiful whine when she pulls away but, but, but fine he'll nyoom.

(Also: more light outside! Still kind of reddish and not the best to see by but better than Hye-jin's flames in their cocoon of darkness and he can appreciate her body more.)

Good, good, then she just has to hope she didn't forget everything related to navigation and cartography in the, uh, however long they were.... doing what they were doing for.

Absently, eyes watching the horizon to pick out further landmarks to judge the accuracy of their chosen heading, she pets him. What? He's stressed and unhappy and right there, there's no reason not to pet him.

She doesn't have much trouble; the portal on this side is just as big as the one on the other side, and once they're close enough it's easy to see.

The danger was in being so far away that any even mildly incorrect heading would send them off on the wrong angle and they'd completely miss the portal. But this is no longer a concern! Hooray! They are going to be able to leave the dungeon and live!

....... Aaaaaand be immediately seen by international media. In. Their current state of dress. Which is absolutely nothing. Um.

"............ Tae-gun honey can you make us some ice pants or something," she says, suddenly confronted with something that is in fact even more of a mood killer than a thermonuclear wasteland.

Bwuh?

...ah, right.

.................well, for Tae-gun's current mood it's not a mood killer at all, he's never really been an exhibitionist but when he's in this state he's everything.

But, well, he doesn't want Hye-jin to be sad, so, she can have an ice bikini and he can have some ice speedos, why not. It'll mostly be a blurring effect, it's not like ice is fully opaque, but they can be sufficiently thick for it to be a good blurring effect, how about?

That'll. That'll have to do. Death is not literally better, but it's sure looking tempting. Couldn't they have just stayed in the obsidian cocoon forever, they were having a great time in there. This would have ended in their deaths.

Then she takes him by the hand and tugs him through the portal after her to have a fate that is, objectively speaking, not actually worse than death. It'll just feel like it.

Hiiiiiiii media, they're not dead, can they have blankets or something please.

Smiiiiiiiile.

Holy shit??????

So the scene that's awaiting them on the other side is several very confused espers and support staff. Given the way Tae-gun and Hye-jin didn't run into anyone on their way out, either Hye-jin accidentally killed everyone or, more likely, they evacuated. The team waiting for them is much larger—twenty-five espers all told, most but not all A- or S-ranks—but the mood is one compatible with it having been assembled to try to go in and figure out wtf and then having seen the portal's edges turn green just before they were meant to do so. Now that Tae-gun and Hye-jin are stepping out of the dungeon they know—or have an idea of—what the fuck even happened, even if they're fuzzy on the detiails.

This is actually the level of surprising that does make the support staff take a little bit to get back on their game, but they're all trained for this shit and yeah Tae-gun and Hye-jin can have some blankets.

Oh good!!! Blankets!!! Her dignity can be somewhat preserved!! And also this ice is fucking cold!!!

Also they would like to be squirreled away to a place without media reporters, and maybe get checked over by medical professionals, please and thank you.

Furthermore, they are not fielding questions at this time. The dungeon is dead. That is what matters most.

Yeah no absolutely do they want their phones back to they want to be teleported somewhere actually they should be teleported somewhere are they alright here this tent canopy is having its tent walls all pulled down so they can get out of the eyes of the media—

(The cold actually feels kinda nice... tingly...)

...okay despite Lee Tae-gun's whole everything that is happening right there it seems that health-wise they're, like, backlashing badly but not in immediate risk of death, and probably the thing they need right now is, uh. To keep using the standard backlash reduction techniques.

Do they want a teleport to their silo?

"Oh. Yes. I have special coordinates."

That's right!! When he's backlashing and horny like this he goes to his silo!!! That's so that he can be locked in and not make any...

...decisions...

He does not say the coordinates out loud because that habit is too deeply ingrained; he'll just type them into a terminal, making sure no one's looking, and get Hye-jin to come with him.

Wait she thought this was going to be the split silo, not, um. This seems to be his house.

"I, um," she begins, blushing furiously.

See, the problem here is that after fucking for hours he isn't backlashing anywhere near as hard as he was. He is now perfectly capable of holding on to reason once more.

And he really, truly wishes he weren't.

And Lee Tae-gun's house? Is nice. Its architectural style is contemporary, square and two stories tall, its large windows overlooking the hill it's set on, far from any other signs of civilisation. The outside of the ground floor has a pool on the back, and the first floor has a nice expansive balcony. The inside is just as nice, once Tae-gun opens the door to let her in. There's a large living room with comfortable sofas, a flat screen TV on the wall, and some plants and sculptures here and there. To the right there is a dining room/kitchen combo, and straight ahead there's a closed door that probably leads into a restroom and a staircase leading up.

It's also perfectly clean. There isn't any mess, there's very little of Tae-gun's personality, maybe it's different upstairs but at least the ground floor looks like a picture perfect model of a house a realtor might want to show off. It does not, really, look like anyone lives here.

Okay, well. She's going to reach out and take his hand before anything else. Because.... because. They're both still backlashing, anyway, physical touch is kind of super important right now.

"Do... you want me to be here...?" she offers hesitantly, aware that she's kind of intruding on his safe space.

Man, she's already here, at this point this ship has sailed.

"Yes," he says. And... he might want to think about things in the future but now?

Now, more won't be worse. Better, actually.

He looks up at her face again. "Kiss me," he says—pleads—begs. "Please?"

Well, how can she say no to that?

She stands on her toes to reach him, and carefully and deliberately kisses him again.

Tae-gun is still backlashing. He may have gotten the worst of it over with but he's still backlashing. He's always backlashing. And what he's going to do is get rid of the ice protecting their modesty and instead summon something that will take them upstairs, to his biggest bedroom, the one with the biggest bed. And there he'll kiss her again, and he'll be more patient this time, and more attentive, and no less desperate for her but with more thought and feeling.

He wants her. He wants her so much. He has wanted her for so, so long.

(Her ice covering was already gone; the blanket that was actually protecting her has been discarded on his floor.)

She wants him, too. Not the same, not quite as hungrily or as needfully, but he is warm and cozy and sweet and hot and she's felt so alone lately, burdened with backlash she's not accustomed to carrying and away from her family and, oh yeah, on constant watch for a mind warping ex that could swoop in at any time. And then the house and trying to make an underground bunker and trying to push for an entirely new esper support system in Korea and, and. It's a lot. There's a lot. She wants to be away from it, and just be here. With him.

Anyway, suffice to say that she's happy for him to have her as long as he wants.

MODERATOR ANNOUNCEMENT: This chat has been locked by a moderator; regular users cannot send messages until the lock is removed.

🚫do-not-jin: I'm not going to actually preemptively lock the chat but i am going to enable slowmode
🚫do-not-jin: if i catch a whiff of disrespect you're going to get a 24h mute
🚫do-not-jin: 48h if i'm feeling cranky
🚫do-not-jin: and i reserve the right to lock it if i feel like it
🚫do-not-jin: that is all

MODERATOR ANNOUNCEMENT: This chat is no longer locked; members may freely send messages again.

MODERATOR ANNOUNCEMENT: Slowmode has been enabled in this chat; members cannot send more than one message every 10 seconds.

yoo-min-max: also if anyone is disrespectful about it i am going to personally yeet them into the sun

taegun fan no. 1183: yeah

yoo-min-max: i was grieving them, this company was grieving them, the entire goddamn country was grieving them

ha-djinn: and unlike lee tae-gun and kim hye-jin if you're yote into the sun you will probably not survive it

🍸nomu?: god, what the fuck even was that

A few seconds later (before the enforced slowmode break ends) she edits her message to:

🍸nomu?: god, what the fuck even was that, like, did we know they could do that? did anyone know they could do that? i don't think i knew they could do that

🍵Tconoisseur: badass. it was badass.

kitkatcat: got confirmation from Mexico that their backlash levels are recoverable, they were checked out by medical professionals before they went into isolation. they'll be okay.

🛡️discountraidcaptain: Can someone please check to make sure @youngwoo hears the news if he hasn't already? I don't think he's been looking at chat or news or anything lately.

💤Zzzzgirl: I'm so glad they're both okay. so so so so glad.

yoo-min-max: he was in a dungeon, I think he still is

🦔gangnag: ...please tell me that was the most in bad taste joke ever told by a human. please tell me he did not go into a dungeon.

🍵Tconnoisseur: he's in the one in Ansan. straightforward rescue with Taurus, they'll take good care of him.

🦔gangnag: but

🍸nomu?: yeah. but is right.

🦔gangnag: well someone better tell him as soon as he steps out

yoo-min-max: @SenSoJoo and I are on it, we're siloing for another couple of hours barring emergencies and we're keeping an eye on it

taegun fan no. 1183: god. i'm so, so happy they're okay, but. god.

💤Zzzzgirl: yeah. yeah. and this is the first week of the confluence. my heart's going to explode if it keeps at it like this.

yoo-min-max: yeah

...but he thinks that's enough chatting for now. He sends the commscreen away and sighs.

"Hyung..."

"What wouldn't I do to be in their silo right now, though, like, you know that espers are fit and all but seeing both of them, like that? And Tae-gun's not even just fit, he's hung, too. That guy's truly got it all."

"Hy—" He starts but then cuts himself off when he sees Yoo-min's face. "Hyung..."

Yoo-min closes his eyes and squeezes Seungjoo against his body, tightly. "Please don't leave me, Seungjoo. Please don't ever leave me. I don't know what I'd do without you. I'd, I don't, I—"

"I'm not going to leave you. I'm here. I'll always be here."

With Hye-jin no longer actively destroying an S-rank dungeon, they manage to get her backlash under better control after a couple more hours, by which point Tae-gun himself is pretty much fully in control again—to the extent he can ever be, with his omnipresent oceans of backlash while touching his partner. It's still not enough to completely negate the debt Hye-jin's incurred, but she's no longer at risk, even if she's not fully comfortable yet. They'll... probably need to do this again, and more, but for now they're just resting in his bed. It's been over eight hours since they've entered the dungeon, and they're exhausted.

"I lose my cool," Tae-gun says, still snuggling her for the guiding. "I lose control and it's, it's. Anger, impulsivity, loss of filter, this. It's the opposite of cold. I—" He pauses, and sighs. "I get a little bit of steering power, if I think to do it before it gets really bad, and I usually aim for this, because it's... If I'm like this I'm too, too far gone to make mistakes. I lock myself here, and the security systems don't let me out, and they're not difficult to get around, I'm just too, too... that... to have the higher faculties necessary to do so. Less so when I'm angry, and the most powerful man in Korea should not backlash into anger. And I... the other things...

"Well, you know most of the things I didn't want to tell you, by now. You can ruin me, if you want to. I'm truly in your hands."

Hye-jin at least tries to pretend to be a sensible person, and has insisted on getting them some goddamned water. She nearly spits hers out at his statement, though.

"... You dove into magic dungeon lava to save me. Why the fuck would I ruin you?" Sigh. "Don't answer that, just. Just. I won't, okay?" Huff. "No need to be so damned dramatic, you know. I'd guessed what your backlash was in the first week we partnered. You'll notice I haven't told a soul."

"...you... guessed it?"

"Yes! I would have phrased it as - loss of emotional regulation and self control, and wouldn't have managed to figure out it was only thematically hot emotions without seeing it more in action, but. I did see you backlashing, multiple times, before we got the split silo set up. I wasn't trying to figure it out, actually I was actively trying not to, but. ... Look it seems obvious when I see how much your power is about control?"

"...I guess." Pause. "Then—did you—you knew that that—the face I made at you. The. Korea. One."

"I - I mean, sort of? It's not weird for partners to be attracted to each other? And I always hated when people read into every little thing I ever did, looking for ways to neaten and pare down my life to fit in their cute little dollhouses. I didn't want to do that to you."

He buries his face in her shoulder.

Hug. And pet, he likes being pet.

"I'm also not going to, to. I-if you want to do this sort of thing again, I am," and she looks away and he can hear the embarrassment in her voice, "um, supportive of that decision. If you'd like to call this level of guiding a one time emergency thing that we should avoid ever doing again, that is also fine, and I'd support that, too. You haven't... ruined anything with me, or something? We still get to say what we want our partnership to be."

"So you don't think it's... awful? That I'm. Not there. When I'm backlashing...?"

Honestly, she'd argue that he is in fact still there when he's backlashing, that the emotions that are being magnified are still his, it's just he's so hung up on his 'self' equating to 'control' that it feels like he's absent. But he wouldn't agree, and furthermore that is not an argument she particularly wants to start, especially not right now.

"No? Why would I hold your backlash against you, ever?"

"Not... holding it against me. I just mean... You know, people usually want to have sex with, um. Other people."

"... You're going to have to expand on that train of thought a bit more? Do you mean like, you're afraid my vagina is now magically sealed by pact to only accept one penis and feel weird about it being yours, or...?"

"....what?"

"Your sentence was confusing first! Are you asking if I'm going to want to sleep around, because right now the answer is probably not? I don't know how to pick up people at bars or, or, whatever it is people do, my dating and romantic life is incoherent screaming and hiding under the bed. Maybe eventually? But I've got like half a decade of Japanese celebrity good girl deprogramming to do."

"—oh. No, not that. I mean that, uh, if. I mean if I'm backlashing. I mean that you'd—you might want to have sex with me but that's not the same as having sex with. That."

"???? 'That'?? You mean you when you're backlashing? ... Empirically yes????"

"Well, I. I mean. I. I suppose." Though she was also backlashing badly at the time and it was literally saving both of their lives so he wasn't inclined to take that as indicative of any long term preferences.

"I. Did go and say I support the decision of 'we do this again,'" she points out, still a little shyly, not looking at him.

"Y-yeah. You d-did. So, I, I mean, then I'm a-also—"

Woo-young video calls Tae-gun.

That startles him out of his stammery blush.

...video? Why the hell, what's up—Tae-gun grabs his phone, turns it away from Hye-jin so that the camera will only show him shoulders-up, then accepts the call. "Woo-young-ah?"

For the fraction of a second he's onscreen he looks dreadful.

Then he hangs up and appears directly on top of Tae-gun.

Squeak.

And now he's pulling both of them into a hug, his glasses are crooked on his face and he's crying all over them, heart-wrenching breathless sobs and blubbering and hiccupping and completely, completely breaking down.

She's still not wearing any clothes, and so will be taking the blanket with her into this hug, because eep, but, but, um. Yeah the world probably thought they were dead for... a while. This would have effects. (Shit she needs to call her parents!)

Despite the circumstances, she will still hug him back and begin applying pats immediately. While wishing very desperately she had on clothes.

...what... happened...

.....Tae-gun is very slightly compatible with Woo-young and. And he can tell that. Woo-young's doing bad, backlash-wise, right now.

He pulls Woo-young's glasses off his face to place them on his bedside table then returns to the hug. "Woo-young-ah?"

"Ah," hiccup, "ah," hiccup, "you're ah, alive, ah," sob. "You're alive. You're alive. Ah." He's having trouble breathing, he's sobbing too much and hiccupping too much and it's making him dizzy but they're alive alive alive they're alive he has no idea how this happened he doesn't understand he doesn't need to they're alive they're alive—

"We are, we're okay, sorry for scaring you we absolutely did not plan to be that monumentally stupid, we're okay..."

Apply pats directly to the Woo-young. It is required.

"Woo-young-ah, what's wrong, why is your backlash so bad, why aren't you with Tae-hwan—"

At Tae-hwan's name he wails, and it's actually not possible for him to cry any harder than he's crying but he can cry louder and he's doing that now and he can't say words anymore he can't say words or think thoughts or, or anything, he can't can't can't they're alive that's all that matters they're alive—

...oh. Oh. Oh no.

Oh.

Backlashing badly and wailing at Tae-hwan's name is. Very indicative. And she doesn't currently remember what Tae-hwan's power is, but she does remember he specialized more in protection and that this is... naturally on the upper end of danger for esper jobs...

Fuck.

"... We're okay, we're here," she murmurs, gently, squeezing him in the hug.

Yeah.

Fuck.

He's not going to think, he's not going to think about how he only lost one person he loved today rather than three, he's not going to, he's not, he can't, he can't, it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts so much he can't he can't he can't—

"Woo-young-ah, I'm..." Fuck. Fuck.

Yeah, this seems like it is not a talking time, to be honest. It is a petting and holding him time. Hye-jin can provide this service. (She really wishes she were wearing some clothes.)

Honestly she could've turned green and acquired two more arms and he wouldn't have noticed or cared, that's just, just. They're alive. They're alive, they're here, in flesh and blood, it's not a dream, they're real. That's. That's all that matters.

Yeah. He can just... be here, for Woo-young. That's the least he can do, even if he doesn't know how to do any better than that, Tae-gun can be here for him. He's always done the same for Tae-gun, after all.

He takes a long, long time to cry himself out but eventually he does manage to reacquire some semblance of calm. "I'm sorry. For, for just—showing up."

"It's," she desperately wishes to be wearing clothes right now and it is doing everyone a disservice if she glosses that as 'fine.' "extenuating circumstances, you know? It's okay." There. That was honest and empathetic. She doesn't unhug and will instead offer more petting.

"I—"

Lee Tae-gun has a moment of inspiration, or perhaps realisation. He suddenly, from one moment to the next, has acquired understanding of an emotion Woo-young has around him very, very often.

"Woo-young-ah, are you about to say something you would be mad at me for saying in your shoes?"

He stops, then covers his mouth. "Oh... I was."

"Why don't we move to a more comfortable position and location than 'piled up on my bed' and talk?" he asks, gently. He's not sure where all of this inspiration is coming from but he is certain that that is the sort of thing Woo-young would've said, here.

"And probably acquire food," points out Hye-jin, who is still gamely attempting practicality.

"And, um." She should save on teleports, considering. "... Tae-gun can I borrow some of your clothes."

"Oh, I, I'm sorry." He covers his eyes, now.

"Sure." Here's an ice knife to float over to one of his closets and pull it open for her. Tae-gun's wardrobe is... white, and black, and white, and black, and occasionally dark grey, and occasionally somewhat less dark grey, and white, and black, and this one expensive-looking navy blue suit.

"You have seen nothing that the international media hasn't gotten a good long shot of, really."

Wow. Uh. She'll. Take a dark grey shirt???? It is incredibly oversized for her and there's no way she can possibly fit into his pants but, you know what, it's better than nothing. She'll take it.

"I'm, uh, slightly more decent," she says when it's on. "Food options? I'm assuming secret not-actually-underground lair doesn't get takeout delivery."

"It's... stocked with some instant stuff. Maybe eggs," he says, pulling himself up to a seated position. "Woo-young-ah, how much can you move?"

"Ah, I can... move my arms and my head. And I think that's it."

...damn it, Woo-young. Well, Tae-gun will—

—catch a glimpse of Hye-jin in his T-shirt—

—focus.

He'll get Woo-young an ice hoverchair, pad it with pillows and blankets (he can make the ice temperature-neutral, but there's no reason to be increasing his backlash, so he's not going all the way with that), then he helps pull Woo-young onto said chair.

Hye-jin therefore considers it her job to sort out food options! She will be raiding Tae-gun's pantry with neither decency nor shame. A rice cooker is located and then put to work almost immediately.

"I think I can manage some slightly bland omurice," she muses as she hands Woo-young a cup of water. The man has been crying, after all. "Does that work for you two?"

"Sure."

"Yeah." He accepts the water and drinks it slowly.

Nod! Okay! She can-!

Tae-gun is still stark naked.

Not important! Doesn't matter! She's fine! She has a job and it is MAKING FOOD.

Woo-young notices her reaction, looks up at Tae-gun, then laughs. It's not a very warm laugh but he's trying. 

"Hyung, I think you're scandalising your partner."

"What? Oh. ...why?"

"It's fine! I'm fine! It's perfectly fine for him to be naked in his own home if he wants to be!" she blurts, distracting herself by attempting to find something that will add flavor to fried rice.

"People don't usually receive guests naked."

"...both of you have seen me naked. Hye-jin and I had sex."

Oh wait shit thinking about that makes him blush.

"You did?" he asks in delight. Or something that passes for it, if you're not paying attention. "Finally."

"I, that, you, but, it." Nevermind, her words aren't working. She will instead be INDUSTRIOUSLY doing more pantry raiding. Look! A chicken stock bouillon! Amazing.

"We were snuggling in bed naked, why are you surprised anyway," he grumbles.

"I wasn't really thinking, back there, on account of all of the crying."

...no, making light of it didn't work, fuck his breath is hitching again.

...yeah.

"Do you want to... hold my hand?"

"Hyung, with the tiny amount of compatibility we have we would actually need to fuck for it to be at all useful."

...it's still not working. 

"And I'm, I'm not ready for that. Yet. Not with... anyone else."

Nod.

Yeah, that's. Yeah.

She's particularly concerned about him getting dumped with someone new within the next week. It's probably going to happen no matter what any of them do. Confluence, and all. Quasar really, really, really relies on Woo-young's teleportation in particular. There's going to be a lot of pressure to get his powers fully functional again. Which sucks so, so, so much. He should be allowed to mourn before being hawked off to someone else for the good of Korea.

Anyway she's making food, she doesn't have to voice her opinions here. Well, okay, she will anyway, for practical reasons: "Probably cuddling is better than nothing, if you're okay with that?"

...maybe...?

Yeah. He can quickly assemble a pillow pile in the dining room using his knives to fetch the pillows so that they don't leave Hye-jin all alone in the kitchen and then he can move Woo-young there and put an arm around his shoulders.

Oh.

Okay. 

He might cry again actually.

"Can I have a smoke?"

"Of course."

Light. Drag. Puff.

Yeah.

"Do you want space, or - I don't know, weird dungeon minutiae to distract you?" she wonders, since she can both prepare food and offer her typical brand of nerdery at the same time.

"I, part of me wants to know how you're alive and part of me wants to talk about him so I don't forget anything about him ever and part of me wants to get distracted and to forget and I don't know."

Nod.

"Well, the minutiae can come with an explanation of how we're alive, and then once there's food in you you can decide if you want to talk about him or not?" Because that will probably involve lots of crying. He should have calories for crying. (Her stomach grumbles. Yes, thank you, she knows. She will feed you, too.)

"Yeah. Okay. Sounds like a plan."

He gives Woo-young's shoulder a squeeze.

"So - Volcanic Range. I was expecting to be, well, glorified arm candy for sunbae? With important navigational duties, but, like, we all knew why I was there. How could I help much. Who expects fire to counter lava, you know? It goes against all video game logic. Except, I don't think it was lava? I'm not sure what it was instead, one of those bullshit dungeon substances that could probably be leveraged into making something fantastic, I'd guess that the lava-alike would be great for some kind of fuel - anyway. But my point is that it didn't burn like lava. It burned like kindling, and then that was it, it was used up."

...it feels like he should show interest now. Not that he's not interested, he is, but it feels like now there'd be a little part of him figuring out a thing to say that would also signal that interest aloud. He's having trouble with it. 

"In what way do you mean?" There, he tried.