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were the peak of my heyday
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"...that was a joke. That's literally impossible."

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"So is conjuring and telekinetically controlling ice but you don't see me raining on your parade about it."

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"—no, you don't understand—"

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"You should meet up with your tracker, Tae-gun. It's not good manners to wait until you're inside to introduce yourself."

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...ugh. He should.

"You're right," he says with a defeated sigh.

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"There there, sunbae."

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"There there, sunbae."

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Grumble grumble fine he'll go do that.

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The tracker Tae-gun will be working with has a minor precognitive power coupled with superspeed. It allows them to guess where they could run to that would achieve their goals, and they can use it in bursts to give directions for immediate places to run.

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Useful.

Meanwhile Tae-gun can keep up a cloud of ice crystals some distance around his body, effectively giving him extra disposable limbs he can track that will inform him of whether going in a given direction will be a problem. He can also conjure extremely dense ice that's effectively unbreakable for as long as it's in his range and merely very hard to break when outside it, stuck to the ground, to serve as breadcrumbs. Coupled with his high combat capabilities makes him one of the safest people to be around in this dungeon.

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The field espers are also given numerous relays and repeaters to leave places so that the comms don't get cut off by too many unexpected corners. Those are small drones with limited vision and AI meant to try to keep them safely out of reach of monsters.

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Woo-young meanwhile is getting a crash course on how to understand non-Euclidean dungeons, hard mode. He's absolutely certain every other such dungeon will be a walk in the park after this bullshit.

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But it's in any event not really a very stressful dungeon. They go out, they find people, they give them teleport tags, Woo-young or some other teleporter gets them out. Tae-gun is glad to be useful but he doesn't feel very useful, which itself of course makes him feel terribly guilty. It's better not worse when dungeons aren't horribly dangerous to everyone!

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Since there's no expectation of clearing the dungeon at all, they're just meant to spend some time in it and then leave, as their backlashes are the constraining factor.

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Tae-gun's backlash control and tolerance are both exceptional so he's still feeling fine by then but the tracker coming with him clearly isn't so back to the portal they go. 

(They didn't even get to kill any monsters.)

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When they arrive back at the portal, though, there's quite a lot of commotion.

"Sunbae," calls Woo-young, looking a bit panicked. "We've lost contact with Ha Si-yeon and Kim Chun-hee."

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...what.

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"When? How? What were the last comms we got from them?"

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The team lead takes over. "Ten minutes ago the string of water Kim Chun-hee was using as their breadcrumb trail suddenly lost coherence and fell to the floor," she says, gesturing at where it did. Kim Chun-hee is an A-rank hydrokinetic with unbounded range so the water she'd been holding onto really shouldn't have been let go of like that—unless she got taken out of commission somehow.

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"Alright. Get me a tracker, ten minutes is far too long, we need to find them." He's not going to worry about hurting the feelings of the tracker that came in with him, he knows that they will not be enough for this. "Min Woo-young, do you have enough on their last location to teleport us there or do we need to go the long way?"

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"—I think so." He's had his head buried in this insane map for hours now while making out with his temporary partner and it's almost starting to make sense, a sure sign that he's going insane.

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"You'll go after them?" the team lead asks Tae-gun. "Do you need any more support?"

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"No, just someone who can catch their scent."

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"I'll have someone in two minutes," she says, stepping out through the portal.

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Why had no one told him before that this had happened. Ten whole minutes??? That's fucking insane.

Well, nothing to it. He'll figure it out.

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