"Right, right, and there's nothing she could possibly know that would ever lead back to you, now that all of those people are looking for who hired her."

"That she knows? Obviously not. She got a hit contract, that's all. She's taken several of those before." He doesn't have a guarantee but she claimed that she had another esper erase most of the memories of individual hits after each of them so that she'd be able to truthfully claim to not know to have been responsible for a given hit. Obviously that's not sufficient if she ever actually got caught because postcogs exist, but still.

"Exactly! And I bet you've set things up to pin this whole mess on one of her previous employers. Get exonerated as you send someone else to - hm, it'd be prosecuted in Korea, right? Think they'd break out the death penalty for that? Tae-gun-ah will love that."

"Do you think he's not filled with murderous rage over this? I've met him. He is."

"Oh, no, I meant the part where you got another person killed. By pinning it on them."

"Whoever it was also deserved it."

"'Whoever it was'? You don't even know? How can you say they deserved it, then? How will you explain yourself to Tae-gun-ah?"

"They hired a hit on someone. Of course they deserved it."

"I'm sure your love will agree with you. Just as soon as you explain everything to him. Or were you planning to lie to him for the rest of your life?"

"I'm obviously not planning to lie to him for the rest of my life, are you stupid?"

"No, I just have to act like it in order to walk you through the knots you've tied in your head. What's going to happen, dearest Jaeha-oppa, if all of the backlash falls away and you tell your beloved everything?"

"I'm going to die. Obviously."

"Really? That's your brilliant, master plan?"

"It's not a plan, it's a prediction."

"Oh, come on, it can't end like that! That's - that's - that's so stupid."

"Do you have a fucking alternative? Yeah it's fucking stupid, I, I, I made a mistake somewhere and I don't. I just. I don't have a plan anymore."

"Fine! Then let's - let's workshop alternatives, okay, I'll help you, I bet there's a way I can pull someone's strings to fix this -"

"What the fuck?"

"You can't just fucking die! Especially not like that! We've - look I know we haven't always gotten along but we've been together for years - !"

"Dropping kayfabe? That's a first."

What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck???

"You're - you're the closest fucking thing I have to a friend, you prick! You're the only human that's anything like me and if you go off to die in a corner like a pathetic little worm where I can't even see -!"

The false Hye-jin in front of him fades away, and the environment starts... shifting. Alarmingly.

Like it wants to trap Jaeha (and also the humans that are with him, but mostly Jaeha) inside.

...Nightmare just called him a friend.

Nightmare. The dungeon. Just called him a friend???????

He drops the control over the others' senses so they'll perceive this, too.

"We need to move. Something's happening. We need to get out."

The esper with the tracking power freezes. "What—"

    The esper with the movement power doesn't. "Get ready to go in three seconds."

"NO," growls a disembodied voice, and the dark alley environment that had been simulated from the victim they were tracking falls away to total darkness, "stop him, he's going to - !"