"Ohhhh yeah. People are flipping their shit."

"Official word is that you're still in the hospital—a private Quasar-owned one."

"Well, the last word is that you went to one, but Quasar is known to have a healer on staff, so, you know, if you wanna get back in action before it would make sense for you to."

"The media's having a field day with all of this and guilds all over the country—world, really—are freaking out and putting out public announcements and shit."

Nod. "Right. Ji-woo-sunbae specifically had me come see her for - that reason. Covering my tracks. And the official stance on how I made it out alive is I cauterized my own wounds to avoid bleeding out. ... Everybody freaking out is. Probably good, though? Even if, fucking hell. During a confluence." Pause. "Um. Any idea on how likely finding the... assassin is going to be? With, uh. Everything?"

"Right! There's the good news! So I don't know if you knew but I am sort of kind of a secret agent."

"Hyung has worked on non-dungeon missions like finding rogue espers and things like that."

"He's like Tom Cruise."

"That's the actor's name, Hyun-jae-ya."

"...Tom Cruise's character in Mission: Impossible."

"I've got some experience dealing with this shit is the point. Anyway I got a postcog to—"

"—uh, Tae-gun said you weren't comfortable talking about, uh..."

"I - think I'm okay talking about it tactically, but the whole... what went on in the video, is. I kind of don't want to know, you know?"

"Alright. Well, I got a postcog to look into everything—the video was helpful, by the way, but for the postcog the bullet was more. Their power doesn't let them see things, conventionally, but that also means that they weren't fooled by the assassin's powers. They look at—it's complicated. They call them 'causal lines', like, the ways things could go versus the way they did and do go, and they can trace those back and forward and sideways, sort of? Anyway it's not straightforward to literally just chase down a single thread like that because the backlash accumulation balloons but they're used to working with their power in efficient ways and the upshot of it all is that we've got leads to hunt down."

"Nice. Okay. Thank you." She feels like she should be saying some sort of strong tactical something or other, but mostly she just wants to hide under the covers a little. Can. Can she let other people take point. Would that be okay??

"Yeah, no prob, we're gonna nail that fucker." He grabs a rice ball and pops it into his mouth. "—Tae-gun, you never told me you knew how to cook!" he says with his mouth full.

"Hye-jin helped. It wasn't just me."

"Kim Hye-jin you don't have to let him get away with pretending he helped, you know."

"I helped!!"

"He did help! By being the one in charge of cooking. I was his beautiful assistant."

"Uh huh."

"Anyway you guys came here for a reason."

"So we did. What are the items on the agenda?"

"What to do about Kang Jaeha in terms of protecting ourselves from him, what to do in terms of getting rid of him, what to do about the shooting..."

"What to do about Kim Hye-jin's public image."