“Sorry. Just, uh. That is my actual worst case scenario. Being used as a murder weapon and causing massive destruction and pain. I am the one with the most power to prevent that scenario, and trust me, I. Am extremely aware.”

"Yeah. I getchu. 'S all good."

Woo-young gets his commscreen out and stretches it large into a blackboard-like surface behind himself to write into. He creates a two-by-three table with "attack vector" rows (mental and physical) and "target" columns (Tae-gun, Hye-jin, and himself), and starts filling it in. For the physical row, he leaves his own cell blank, writes "immune" to Tae-gun's, and "resistant w/ Tae-gun" to Hye-jin's; for the mental row, he writes "easy to escape" to his own cell and "body cam" to Tae-gun and Hye-jin's, then "high mobility" to Tae-gun's cell and "high firepower" to Hye-jin's.

"Let's focus on the mental vector because it's what we have most trouble with. Having people monitoring Kang Jaeha hasn't actually helped much since he can give us the slip very easily and the bullshit dungeon tech that enables our commscreen is still as far as anyone knows impossible to hack. We're pretty sure his partner Kim Insoo isn't getting the same treatment Tae-gun did, but that's all we got. And Hye-jin is right that adding more monitoring to her and Tae-gun's lives isn't—well, it's costly, and we should treat it as such."

Nod.

“… honestly, I think he’s a shitty tactician,” she muses, as she looks at this.

"Say more?"

“So, his actual counter is your teleportation, and how mobile we all are because of you. You’re why we can always escape him. But he hasn’t done anything to you. He went after me, the woman who could very definitely make him be dead, if I didn’t mind the gigantic body count and massive destruction I’d cause to do it. I obviously didn’t, but I could have. That’s a stupid risk to take. My point is that… This is not a man who is thinking tactically about how best to outplay his foes, I don’t think. That’s not to say he’s not clever, or incapable of hiring professionals - I really don’t think the person who shot me was anything other than a pro - but it’s. I dunno, it seems like he’s being… I want to say ruled by his darkest desires, not logically thinking what actions will get me to my goal. But I don’t know what to do with that, and in many ways it makes him more dangerous.”

"...I think... it might actually just be that he knows Tae-gun would be sad without me?"

"I'd be sad without Hye-jin, too."

“Send him an email saying that,” says Hye-jin, seriously.

...that sounds like it couldn't possibly work but "I can try doing that." It's not like it's costly.

"But the thing is that when—well, assuming he was the one who tried what happened yesterday—from your perspective it would've looked like a tragedy but not his fault. If it had worked."

"He could get rid of you in a way that looks like it's not his fault, too."

"But he didn't have a reason to. Or, kind of, my power, but... Imagine a world in which everyone who cares about hyung suddenly dies. There's no way hyung wouldn't be suspicious as hell, and my model here is that Kang Jaeha wants hyung to love him again. He doesn't want to trap hyung in a basement forever, he wants—something else."

Nod.

“…….. do you think he was working to scare off Tae-gun-ah’s potential partners, then? Since they would be getting in the way, and taking out his backlash. Not overtly, like with me, but. Like with,” and she motions to Juheon and Si-yeon.

"...you mean, over the years? Oh, shit, that would make sense, wouldn't it?"

"...it would?"

"We've had... more than one person we looked into about being your partner have one reason or another come up why they couldn't follow through and all of the reasons were plausible on the surface but in fucking retrospect—"

"...that's vile." It's one thing for Tae-gun to not want partners but if there were potential ones that could have worked and didn't because of Kang Jaeha...

"I didn't know that."

"Prez didn't want to tell you until it was more of a known deal. We did get—some people, right, that you rejected, but the most promising ones..."

“Mysteriously had something come up. Fuck. And I was a surprise imported from Japan, almost certainly out of his range.”

"Wow this guy's been, like, high-key obsessed. Like, not just in an 'oh shit he got this hot new partner' way?"

"If that was the case it's more points for the theory that he was trying to get Tae-gun-hyung to come crawling back when he was at the very end of his rope, making sure he'd definitely not get a partner at all ever."

...he can't muster the outrage everyone else is feeling about it but that might also be some rose-coloured glasses because the place his mind goes to is "well at least this way I got to meet Hye-jin".

He's hopeless.

“Brrr. Thanks, I hate it.”