"If not him, who?"

"I don't know. It was probably him. But if it wasn't, we'll waste however much time and planning on something that won't even actually help. We should not be jumping to conclusions."

"Si-yeon, do you think you could track down who did this? You must have contacts. The person who actually shot her, I mean."

"...I don't know how I'd even begin looking for them," he says, except that's not true at all because he's having some ideas already. "Maybe."

"It'll be someone who has the kind of heavy-duty illusion powers that would let them go into a dungeon undetected like that despite the multiple news cameras and witnesses."

"Well, that's easy, all they have to have is the kind of illusion powers that actually physically causes light to pass through them."

"They're immune to heat sensors and radars, too. All A-rank dungeons have scanners on standby for those to detect suspicious movement that may not be detectable normally."

"That'd be, what, A-rank? S-rank?"

"They're almost certainly international, and it's not like people rank criminals anyway. But what I meant is that it wouldn't be hard to find someone that has powers that could've been enough for this, the hard part is knowing who specifically it was, and tracking down whoever paid them for it. And people like that don't share who their clients are, that'd be bad for business."

"I assume the way to track these people down would be psychic espers, like mindreaders or postcogs."

"Yeah. We'd need a postcog who can additionally pierce through whatever this illusionist had up, or who sidesteps it somehow."

"Sidesteps it?"

"Someone who doesn't perceive things directly with, like, eyes and stuff, but more like, causal nexuses and what-have-you."

"...you have someone in mind, don't you."

"Maybe. I'm not sure. I'll need to dig up some contacts. It's a lot harder now that the dungeon's closed..."

"But you think you can do it."

"I said maybe."

"So we should come up with more plans, then?"

"Yeah. Definitely."

"Should we leave long-shot planning like that for when we have everyone around and try to focus on immediate practicalities for how they can survive the next couple of days?"

"Yeah, maybe. Probably, even."

"Well, they're not doing dungeons tomorrow, so if we could push it forward and meet everyone tomorrow then..."

Hana takes off from Nightmare duty earlier than usual. She's obviously allowed, there aren't set hours to her work, it's just - inconveniencing a lot of people, and causing people trauma, and maybe getting people killed, and she's anxious about it and hates it so much because she likes being dependable, but.

She has other priorities, too.

Woo-young gets a notice that she's done with work for today, and a request for siloing, please.

The most important part is that Hye-jin's alive. Everything else is secondary; she's alive and she's stable and now they're going to be spending an hour in an ICU snuggling and doing nothing else and it's fine. Not that he thought she wouldn't be fine, necessarily; Tae-gun would fuck Hye-jin's cooling unconscious body if necessary to kick her regen in, and it's very unlikely she'd die in the process, but having her be in a hospital is very relieving.

Woo-young would be lying if he said he wasn't having thoughts of forbidding either of them from ever entering a dungeon again, though. That's twice over a single confluence.

He's ruminating over those thoughts in their silo when he gets the request and accepts immediately.

Then here is his partner, tall and hard to read and a little awkward.

"Hi. Um." She fidgets. She doesn't ask if he's okay. "How can I support you?"